Culture Slut: Alien, Aliens and the Legacy of Lieutenant Ripley

Words: Misha MN

A few years ago, in 2019, my ex boyfriend convinced me to go to a 40 year anniversary screening of Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece Alien. I didn’t know much about it, other than it was a star-making vehicle for the extremely singular Sigourney Weaver, and it was a sci-fi classic. Why on earth would I want to see that? I thought to myself, I hate sci-fi. Give me anything else, give me smart melodramas, classic noirs, european character studies that move at glacial pace. Give me exploitation trash, camp legacy pieces, horror schlock, anything but spaceships and ray guns. “But Alien is a horror, it’s a classic monster slasher that just happens to be in space!” came the protesting argument.

Fine, I thought to myself, Sigourney is an interesting actor - she was a scene stealer as an agoraphobic criminal profiler in one of my favourite 90s serial killer films; Copycat (1995), that was fun, I’ll give it a go. From the moment it started, I was captivated. This wasn’t the clean cardboard sets of TV alien shows, or the sleek post modern retro-futurism of overly slick 00s movies, or even the theatrical, dry ice and steam jets of 80s disaster fantasies. This wasn’t Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who or any other beloved blockbusting franchise that I couldn’t ever bear to engage with. This was an industrial gothic mansion floating through space, full of as much suspense and inescapable dread as an Edgar Allen Poe novel. It might be cliche to focus on Alien’s horror credentials over its sci-fi standing, but it definitely helped me step through that portal.

The story is simple; a group of space waste collectors encounter a parasitical alien that sneaks back on board their ship with them, uses one of their bodies to incubate itself so it can grow into a giant terrifying monster and picks off the rest of the crew one by one. The design of the alien by H.R. Giger is superb, the right level of mechanical and reptilian, but the other triumph of this film is the cast. These aren’t american cowboys with ray guns facing off against posturing british actors with evil accents and ridiculous names, they aren’t in naff space fashion, tinfoil or green face paint; they are real personalities, lowlifes, hard workers, normal people who happen to work in space. The characters are diverse, in both gender and race, a trait that reappears in every subsequent instalment of the franchise but doesn’t feel laboured or done to make a point. The workers are only referred to by their last names, leaving the rest of their individual histories to be created by the actor. Sigourney’s Ripley is a stand out from the beginning; human, relatable, conflicted, but still imbued with her own unique brand of star quality.
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Spoiler alert, Ripley is the sole survivor, not only of the first film, but of every film (at least until they started adding prequels and mythology expansions), reappearing in wilder and wilder guises. In the first Alien, she is just another worker, but one with the right level of competence and gumption to make it out alive. In Aliens, she is a hardened warrior, jumping back into the fray to fight the aliens again and rescue the people who need it. In the third film, Ripley is a martyr, a shaven headed Jeanne d’Arc trapped in a burning space prison, who casts herself into the flames to finally defeat the neverending evil. In the fourth, she is resurrected from the ashes, a clone of her original self that has fused with the alien queen and bears the fate of the universe within her womb. Ripley’s female body is intrinsically linked with the horror of alien violence. She is always the key, it is her physical body that prevents total annihilation, the bridge between the familiar and the strange.

Mystical Pregnancy has been a literary device used since stories began, from ancient Egyptian gods, to Jesus Christ, and more recently in horror and sci-fi narratives. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is a commentary on the lack of power women can have over their own bodies, the anxiety of something alien growing inside you. Ripley is different. Ripley becomes emblematic of The Mother. She protects a young girl in the second film, blasting away an advancing alien and shouting the iconic line “Get away from her you bitch!” before taking the girl with her into a cryogenic sleep, a living Madonna and Child statue. In the third film, she is one of the only women that these religious male prisoners have ever encountered, she is a vision of the goddess, the eternal mother who must face off against the mother of all aliens who has set up a breeding chamber in the bowels of the planet. In the final Ripley film, she literally becomes the Alien Mother. She slips beneath the metal floors of the spaceship into a writhing mass of alien bodies and tentacles. She is Anima Sola, the lone soul engulfed in the flames, she is the spec of humanity fusing with the unknown. She is the Mother of the House. Birth, death, protection and destruction are all parts of her narrative.

“She’s as strong as the boys, if not stronger, just as competent, tall, powerful, but undeniably a woman.”

I can only think of one other Sci-Fi heroine who’s female body is as intrinsic to her story as Ripley’s and that is Jane Fonda as Barbarella. Before I saw Alien, The only Sci-Fi film I would happily watch was Roger Vadim’s 1968 film Barbarella, a psychedelic, sex-infused space romp that ascended to unforetold heights of kitsch and magic. A perfectly pert and coiffed Fonda plays a highly decorated space agent representing Earth as she explores a distant planet system looking for the missing scientist Duran Duran (yes, the original name then used by the band) and doing battle with The Great Tyrant, played by a vixenish Anita Pallenberg in an eye patch. Barbarella starts off as a highly competent but sexually naive woman, but as she encounters different beings throughout her journey that desire her physically, she realises the carnal powers she possesses. She uses her magic sex to give an angel back his flight. The sex she has with a resistance soldier leads to a full scale rebellion against a corrupt government. When the final villain tries to kill her by putting her in a machine that will literally sex her to death, the power of her natural orgasm destroys the instrument and she emerges victorious. Just as Ripley functions as Mother, Barbarella functions as Sex Goddess. It all comes back to the male writers' fascination with feminine archetypes. Ripley is the Madonna. Barbarella is the Whore. No other female character gets enough screen time to really be anything.

I love Ripley in all her galactic guises. I love how she looks, how she acts, how she survives. I love the characters around her, from the exploding John Hurt in Alien, to the hot butch lesbian in Aliens, to the weirdly sexy-ish, young-ish Charles Dance in Alien 3, to the perfect new millennium robot Winona Ryder in Alien Resurrection, a veritable Island of Misfit Toys. Ripley’s physicality transforms throughout her journey, starting off understated and realistic, and ending up completely stylised by the fourth film, scantily clad and over six feet tall, reminiscent of the primitive cave girl played by Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. She is every genre-movie heroine that has come before her. This Ripley is not just a resurrection of her old body, she is a resurrection of every male-female power fantasy trope in Sci-Fi. She’s as strong as the boys, if not stronger, just as competent, tall, powerful, but undeniably a woman. She’s sexy, especially when compared to the gamine ingenue Winona. She possesses ancient wisdom, born of her body. She IS her body. She remembers all of her past lives, the knowledge women pass down through generations all belongs to Ripley. She knows everything the scientists guess at because she has been present for the eternity of the alien. Ripley can do anything, save anyone, destroy anything. Ripley is Mother. And in the end, just like the xenomorph, Ripley ate.