06 May EVALUATE THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE VARIOUS POINTS
Alien
Read the above review carefully and analyze it, identifying its thesis, main argumentative points, and key lines of evidence. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the argument and consider how it helps you better understand Aliens.
Briefly introduce the film and introduce the general topic of the article
Explain the thesis or main purpose of the article
Summarize the main points in the critic’s argument
Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the various points
Discuss the degree to which you agree and/or disagree with various points
Conclude with a discussion of how this article helps you better understand the film.
AUTHOR: Tim Blackmore
TITLE: “Is this Going to be Another Bug-Hunt?”: S-F Tradition Versus Biology-asdestiny
in James Cameron’s Aliens(FN1)
SOURCE: Journal of Popular Culture v29 p211-26 Spr ’96
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with
permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.
If the critical world’s reaction to Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien was mixed, the academic
condemnation of James Cameron’s 1986 sequel, Aliens, has been uniform. Cameron,
a young Canadian filmmaker, writer-director of Terminator, The Abyss, Terminator 2,
and writer (with fellow Canadian David Morrell) of Rambo, fought hard in order to direct
the Alien sequel. “But,” Constance Penley writes, “this time there is a difference….
What we get finally is a conservative moral lesson about maternity … mothers will be
mothers, and they will always be women … here reduced to phallic motherhood” (73).
For Penley and her fellow critics Berenstein, Bundtzen, and Greenberg, Aliens is not
about feminism, female empowerment, motherhood, or even colonialism: rather, it is
about women who have been duped into serving the patriarchy. This paper uses the
sharpest criticisms of Cameron’s film as openings through which to reinterpret the text.
A closer reading demonstrates that Aliens is a war film about Vietnam (including a discussion
of friendly and unfriendly technology), and colonialism. There are many other
issues in the text: on this point I will address the propriety and power of critics in the
academic world who feel it is their job to save us from our porr cultural habits.
BUGGED BY CRITICS
Berenstein argues that “these [alien] monsters are intimately linked to reproduction,
or what can be termed ‘pregnancy anxiety’” (57). She rereads Swiss surrealist Hans
Rudi Giger’s infamous “chestburster” which so shocked the movie world in 1979, as a
womb-burster. Berenstein’s claim about pregnancy anxiety, one which Greenberg finds
farfetched, is weakened when we consider the “original” (and restored) version of
Aliens. Cameron told the fan press in the summer of 1986: “The first thing I did was
give Ripley a past, a life back on Earth … she was married … her career took her into
space, and she had a daughter” (McDonnell 18). The excised scenes about Amy,
Ripley’s daughter, were returned to the film when it aired on television in 1987. The
scenes also appeared in Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of the movie. By the fourth
scene in Aliens, a grief-stricken Ripley has discussed the fate of her daughter with
Company representative Carter Burke.
In light of Ripley’s shock about Amy’s death (“I promised I’d be back for her birthday.
Her eleventh birthday”), Bundtzen’s criticism that Ripley “Never expresses anguish
or even interest about her past on Earth, the people whom she might have cared for,
now dead and lost in the years of space sleep” (16), is ironic. The irony deepens when
Ripley and Newt have a discussion about children:
Newt: Did one of those things [a chestburster] grow inside her [Newt’s
mother]?
Ripley: I don’t know Newt. That’s the truth.
Newt: Isn’t that how babies come? People babies they grow inside you.
Ripley: No. Oh no! [laughter] That’s very different.
Newt: Did you ever have a baby?
Ripley: Yes I did. I had a little girl.
Newt: Where is she?
Ripley: She’s gone.
Newt: You mean dead.
Ripley: Yes.
Aliens 1987
1
Having had a child does not necessarily prevent Ripley from suffering pregnancy
anxiety; however, Bundtzen’s (and Berenstein’s) interpretation of the film as an underhanded
gynephobic text, is symptomatic of the slack quality of their close readings.
Cameron’s revised text is one they ignore: the restorations he made are significant (in
the British video release, Cameron added some twenty minutes of cut footage). Much
of the charge of gynephobia rests on the strangeness of H. R. Giger’s artwork. In
Bundtzen’s view, the marines don’t enter a hive, but rather the Alien “vagina, then her
womb … [and] with all their fire power and ejaculatory short bursts of guns, are the
ineffectual and insignificant male gametes” (14). Vietnam vet Ron Cobb, an industrial
designer for films including Star Wars, Alien, Conan, and The Last Starfighter, was
recalled to work on the Alien sequel. He notes that fellow designer “H. R. Giger’s
surreal vision combining the machine and the organic is a central concept to both pictures”
(McDonnell 24). The art in Giger’s collections, particularly Necronomicon and
Biomechanics, shows Giger’s terror of, and fascination with, the combination of human
and machine. A Freudian reading of Giger’s work, based on Giger’s loving depiction
of various orifices and protuberances, lessens the work. The work is not gynephobic:
it is more generally phobic, and if anything specific, mechanophobic.
There is further irony in Greenberg’s complaint that “Women are on an exactly
equal footing with men”: in both Scott’s and Cameron’s films there is equality “to the
point of androgyny; [women] wear no make up, use the same serviceable clothing as
their male counterparts…. Although not unattractive, both sexes evince little, if any
sexual interest” (97). Ripley’s lack of make-up is an issue with both Greenberg and
Berenstein. If Ripley wore make-up where the others did not, or were she to dress differently
from the others, surely the condemnation from these same critics would be
severe. Berenstein inveighs against the “uniformity of costumes in Aliens” which, she
contends, “provide an illusory sense of gender ‘equality’” (63). Berenstein’s comment
raises the notion of “uniforms” which heighten, rather than lessen, differences. “Uniforms”
which indicate different sexes are not uniforms at all.
When Ripley asks Sergeant Apone “Is there anything I can do?” and is answered,
“I don’t know. Is there anything you can do?”, she is prompted to take on the bluecollar
job of running the power-loader. But, according to Berenstein, Bundtzen, Greenberg
and Penley, Ripley’s proficiency with the “mechanical fork-lift” (the servomotor
enhanced power-loader) is a betrayal of her status as a woman. Berenstein sorts the
women in Cameron’s films into three categories: “dykes,” androgynes, and frigid,
asexual princesses (Vasquez, one of the grunts, refers to Ripley as “Snow White”).
Following Berenstein’s scheme, Ripley, with her “short hair, [lack] of make-up” and
habit of wearing, “t-shirts and pants,” has been co-opted by the patriarchy; Vasquez,
having become a total warrior, is no longer a woman; and the female executive early
in the film is of “stereotypically lesbian construction” (Berenstein 62-63). In Greenberg’s
view, Ripley serves the patriarchy when she “return[s] to the scene of emotional scarring
and mutat[es] into a phallic superwoman” (“Fembo” 170). Cameron’s film, damned
by Berenstein and her fellow critics because the only positions of power women are
offered are those defined by the patriarchy, now apparently lies in celluloid tatters: it
is those shreds I am interested in.
RETURNING TO THE HIVE
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