"Aliens" on again tonight--Evolution's a Bitch!

[DrBB]

Probably should've thought twice about posting this, but...

Aliens was on cable again tonight and God--I LOVE that movie. Every minute of it has something that extends out from the immediate literal situation into politics, gender, epistemology, sexual archetypes, no end...

Over-determined? You ain't kidding.

Where to start--every point you touch has something.

Hudson: "17 days?! We're not gonna last 17 hours! Those things are gonna come in here..."

RIpley: "This little girl has managed to stay alive for months!"

Hudson: "Whyn'tcha put HER in charge!"

Which, by the end, is exactly what they DO, of course. One gender reversal after another in this thing, all against the backdrop of the major SF memes, such as, particularly, the Darwinian vs the Humane, and what is the nature (or not) of spirit in a mechanistic, material universe.

We got the Aliens--ultimate predators produced by the harshest survival pressures in the universe. Darwinian to the max.

We got women--traditionally treated in SF as the anti-Darwin (when the monster approaches, the girl always trips). They are what Men are there to Protect. But here? Just wait...

We got an Android. Admires the Alien critters. "Isn't it magnificent?" he says, dissecting a larval-stage corpse. And we know from "Alien" that androids are not to be trusted, because in Alien they were on the side of...

The Company. Burke.

Burke orders Bishop not to kill the live larval-stage Aliens. Gotta bring 'em back for the Company. Will the machine--and hey, we're all machines, according to Dworkin/Darwinian evolution, machines for passing on our genes--side with the humans or with the Company? And to side with the Company is to side with the Aliens--social Darwinism--profit/survival rules; nothing else matters.

Ooh, and then let's just stir these elements and let 'em fizzle and shoot off sparks. Aliens aren't predominantly masculine OR feminine but a terrifying mixture of both.

At the larval stage, they kill by impregnation. A hideous kind of rape. No wonder the women are better at understanding what a threat they are and how to deal with 'em. "Back off and nuke 'em from orbit!" sez Ripley, and Burke: "Whoa, wait, hold on a minute!"

Yet in the ultimate form, they are the Mother Alien.

Ripley: "They come from these eggs, right?"

Bishop: "Right."

Ripley: "Well, who's laying the eggs?"

Ending up in the Epic Battle of the Moms: Darwinian to the hilt. Ripley dons the waldo-suit and battles it out, mommo y mommo, as it were. What is feminine, what is masculine, anyway? Ripley with weaponry, taking over command when Newt isn't leading the way; the Mother Alien with its ovipositor--mature version of the invasive organ that implants the seeds--a phallic, rapine birtth channel? And do ya know what the FX guys used for the Alien saliva and the visible tendons that show when the critter opens its horrible mouth (with the phallic thing that shoots out!)? Hmm? Condoms and KY jelly. Yup.

So Is that all there is? Survival struggle? Moms against Moms? Procreation just another form of killing, eradicating the old to make way for the new? Does consciousness matter, or are we only matter? Sure we're smart, but so are the Aliens. They seem quasi-intellegent, maybe more than quasi-conscious. The great moment of interspecies communication: Ripley with the flamethrower in the breeding chamber--they understand each other: communication comes down to our common Darwinian heritage: back off or I'll kill yer kids. Newt has a similar moment when Ripley says Newt's doll isn't afraid. Doll: inanimate projection of human imagine, desires, girlishness, vulnerability. Newt's response? "She doesn't have dreams. She's just a piece of plastic."

That's why it all hinges on...

BISHOP. The android. P K Dick pretty much invented the android, and was the must brilliant explorer of its ramifications. The question it raises is not, "what will happen if someday we invent machines that are just like us." No no no, not that at all. Because evolutionary biology tells us that we are ALREADY machines. WE are the androids. The question is not, "will there someday be a machine that will deserve to be treated as a human," but rather, "What is it about 'humans' that entitle them to be treated differently from machines?" That's what the Company wants, after all. Just units in a gigantic money machine--little ants crawling around in a planetary terraforming fusion machine. Do we have dreams, or are we just a piece of plastic? The question Bishop's name implies: what is our potential? Data, information, knowledge, wisdom... spirit?

As Ripley puts it with exquisite irony when she comes up out of the elevator to find the shuttle has vanished:

"Bishop! God damn you!"

That's why the thing resolves so satisfyingly, not on the mere defeat of the critter but the reconciliation of Ripley and the android. That's really the arc that gets completed from the first movie to this one. In Alien, the big shock is the discovery that the Science Officer is an Android. Here the big surprise is the discovery that the Android--as we knew he was all along--is a Human (in the PK Dickian sense of the term). Bishop rescues Newt from being blown out to space by grabbing her hand (nothingness, nihilism), at the same instant Ripley defeats the Alien by shaking it's hand off her foot and blowing it out into space.

"Not bad, for a... human..."

Great stuff.

All the other sequels sucked though. Never should've made 'em. The William Gibson screenplay was good, but they didn't use it....

</rant>

[roguevalley]

1. I actually saw the first one alone.

Ah! A sci fi movie! I'll go!

I thought I would die. :)

This is about the most realistic alien movie ever.
They weren't even close to anything we are, have or
will be. Their otherness and their attention to
their own agenda made this hair raising.

[hobbes159]

2. The neat thing was that they didn't try to copy the 1st film

Alien was a horror film -- Aliens was an action film. Sequels so often fail by trying to copy the original.

I remember seeing Aliens in the theater for the first time when it came out. I still remember the audience spontaneously bursting into applause when Burke opens the door and comes face to face with an alien.... :-)

You know that they've remastered the 1st film and it will be out again in theaters soon, right?

[FireHeart]

3. Loved that film.

My very favorite. There were so many fascinating elements to it, it kept your attention riveted from beginning to end.

Matching "Aliens" is going to be very, very difficult.