Hannah Wimberley, Blog 2

Hannah Wimberley

Dr. Blake

Our Monsters, Ourselves

4/10/19

Blog #2

In the 1986 sequel to Alien, Aliens, Ripley is an excellent pawn of the industry to both represent female empowerment and advertise against the rape culture notions continuing to grow in American film. Throughout the movie, Ripley displays some of the most poignant features of the feminine aesthetic while being a pillar of leadership and strength which are usually associated with the male experience in mainstream, canonical media. Such displays demonstrate both the push for the empowerment of women but also the masculine fears associated with such power and presence.

The badass-ness of both the female protagonist and antagonist in this film is tied to their character development and physical traits, respectively. Ripley is “tough” in all of the right ways to keep her feminine but not week. She is strong like a woman but displays certain masculine characteristics that build on her leadership position later in the film after the death of some of her male counterparts. Ripley’s stamina and ardent drive push her into to both maternity and modernity. This maternity is not a weakness or a fault but rather a driving force that pushes the male-dominated world of the film out of the way to allow for a strange, yet fitting commentary on rape culture. Viewers are used to monstrous creatures with sharp teeth, and acid anything just being there for characters to run away from. Here they are representative of rape and male domination of both the female reproductive system and the legislation that is in place to further control the rights to operate within one’s own physical control. In modern society, we view sex as something intimate and pleasurable to be shared between consenting adults where the possibility for new life is not one of terror, but of hope, pride, and joy. The bug-like hatchlings that impregnate human hosts appear to signal a dominance-based phobia-philia variety of sex. This paired with the oddly fitting Freudian phallicness of the monster and the trading of life resemble the castrating vagina, or vagina dentata, thrust fear of emasculation by a “shero” on the male protagonists just as rapists (represented here by the bug-like hatchlings) thrust themselves on victims. Burke’s attempt at the impregnation of Ripley and Newt is the film’s most obvious example of this.

The power dynamics between the monstrous alien monarch and Ripley is dictated by the “othering” scale on which all the film’s characters can be found. The main difference in distance between the two female leaders positions on this scale is their humanity. Ripley is shifted only slightly out into the field whereas the alien is flung so far from human rationale and understanding that there is no way to see her motives and actions as anything short of completely monstrous. Even though Ripley fits well into the “final girl” trope of modern horror, she did not get there by chance or with any dose of undeserved aide. Her character is layered so that her maternity, fighting nature, and leading action enable her to save the day, and assumably mankind without being a martyr. The films explicit choice to pair Ripley and Newt is not a pedantic maternal oversight but rather a important choice in setting Ripley apart from both the other woman and men, but also from the alien she so deftly defeats while still ensuring the safety of her newly adopted daughter (who mirrors the child she lost while in hypersleep even though that child did indeed live a full life, Ripley missed it and she needs to preserve the sanctity to mankind kind to keep Newt as her child).

Conceptually, Ripley is still under the patriarchal thumb of the company running both the terraforming operation and this military intervention regardless of her eventually savior status and respect from those around her that put her above the conceived oppression. Despite this, Ellen Ripley is a brilliant feminist representation of maternal power and the strength one can derive from it.