As Suzette Chan (2003, p.1) claims, the Alien quadrilogy, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (1998), explicitly, merely by title alone, “exploit our fear of the Other”. What they also exploit, indeed combine, confuse and disrupt, are our understandings of gender, motherness and human reproduction. An analysis of the first film, considered by Pimley (2003, p. 10) as the vanguard of a “new wave” of science fiction film, indicates the film’s gendered representations of Ripley, the alien, in short the entire mise-en-scene may have considerable significance in terms of science fiction representations of alien menace generally.

Though, as Butler (2006, p. 1) points out, Alien “has been widely interpreted as a feminist text”, the confusion of genders makes such an interpretation somewhat tenuous, or at least open to debate. Creed (cited in Roberts 2000, p. 103) argues that “virtually all aspects of the mise-en-scene are designed to signify the female”, which, she continues, has led to the woman’s body signifying “the unknown, the terrifying, the monstrous”. Although Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the hero(ine) throughout the series, by the final instalment she becomes the alien, or at least its mother, investing her offspring with the ultimate physiological aspect of femininity – the womb. As O’Brien (2006, p.2) argues:

…to feminise the monster, the alien and the “Other”, is a move that calls femininity into question, representing this as not the norm, and not a state of being to be either desired or celebrated (emphasis in the original).

Perhaps the most blatant feminisation of the alien, the ‘Other’, in Alien is the scene where three of the crew from the Nostromo approach and enter the derelict alien spaceship. Though one of the trio is actually a woman, they are all dressed in white space-suits appearing, as Kavanagh (cited in Pimley 2003, p. 21) states, like “three clumsy spermlike figures entering the vaginal opening between…upstretched legs”. Once inside the ship, one of them, Kane (John Hurt), is, as Pimley (2003, p. 22) claims, the “successful sperm” reaching into a cavernous, womb-like chamber filled with alien eggs. But in a reversal of gender roles, it is Kane who is penetrated as the alien ‘new-born’ attaches itself to his face inserting its own ‘penis’ down his throat to plant the seed for its next stage of life – a penis-like creature that eventually bursts out of Kane’s chest. But before this violent birth, which Schwartzman (2002, p. 7) suggests recalls “the familiar image of the woman as childbearing receptacle who dies in childbirth”, the ‘face-hugger’, having fertilised Kane, has separated from its ‘man-wife’ and died. Now devoid of its penetrator, it is like a vagina being poked and prodded by the science officer, Ash (Ian Holm). This phallic probing by Ash is replicated later, when, during a fight with Ripley, he, or as is revealed, it, having no phallus of its own, resorts to a rolled-up magazine which it tries to ram into her mouth in a symbolic rape of the woman. This act is also reminiscent of the oral penetration of Kane. Ash too is alien, a consideration which reflects on his position as a representative of the ‘company’ (another masculine entity in a patriarchal capitalist society), which has ordered him to bring back the alien.

Meanwhile, that alien has grown into a creature whose gender, as Pimley (2003, p. 16) agrees, is difficult to determine. Its phallic-shaped head and inner jaw, which it uses to penetrate its victims, would suggest a representation of the male. However, Taubin (cited in Pimley 2003, p. 16) considers the inner and outer jaws to represent the female labia. Creed (2000, p. 133) also codes it as a “toothed vagina”. If it is to be assigned feminine attributes, then it is indeed, as Creed (2000, p. 122) has coined it, the “monstrous-feminine”. According to Creed (2000, p. 133), the alien signifies “the monstrousness of woman’s desire to have the phallus”. There can be no denying this creature certainly has the phallus, and it is monstrous in its ability to use it in the most invasive and horrific manner. But Ripley, as well, has access to the phallus, and it is with this, in the form of a spear-gun, that she is finally able to destroy the alien.

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