Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s theory of sexuality, in an essay titled ‘The Monstrous-Feminine’ Barbara Creed applies psychoanalytic theory to the horror film genre, observing the relationship between femininity and monstrosity. In her rejection of the widespread evaluation of the female role in horror as one of pure victimisation, she argues that there is a subconscious link between monstrosity and the female body, manifesting in representations of the vilification of femininity — what she terms the monstrous-feminine — in horror cinema, using Ridley Scott’s Alien to exemplify her argument.1 While Freud argued that dreams are an indication of the subject’s repressed desires, Todd McGowan notes that like dreams, the cinema equally represents the subconscious mind as it, too, “marginalizes conscious will and privileges unconscious desire” meaning what is represented in cinema through the filmmaker are the latent wishes of the spectators.2 Working on the basis of the parallel between dreams and films as the place where repressed wishes are fulfilled, Creed posits that these representations of the monstrous-feminine thus embody the spectator’s latent fear, discomfort and perhaps antipathy towards the female body.
Creed argues that horror films construct the binary of desirable and undesirable bodies and that the maternal body in particular is marginalised and presented as something requiring expulsion. In the essay ‘Powers of Horror’ from which Creed draws much of her theory, Julia Kristeva explores the link between the maternal body and the horrific, arguing that abjection is most realised in the maternal body. The abject — that which “disturbs identity, system and order”— is so because it forces us to confront our bodily reality, meaning it disturbs us because it serves as a reminder of the precarity of our human existence.3 Therefore the maternal body, (and its visual manifestations) simultaneously fascinates and disgusts because it is the border separating our fully-formed adult selves from the selves that have yet to be realised. Creed suggests that as the source of all life, the maternal body subconsciously carries the threat of deindividuation, infringing on the ultimate patriarchal value of autonomy. Thus, in the horror genre the female body becomes a castrating figure and any depiction of the female capacity for reproduction, particularly childbirth itself, elicits horror in spectators for this reason.
This horror at the reproductive capabilities of the female body is demonstrated by the iconic ‘birthing’ scene in which the Alien violently bursts from Kane’s body, also killing him. By becoming the ‘source’ of the monstrous being, Kane assumes the maternal role which emasculates him. This conflation of the maternal body and the erosion of phallic potency positions the female body as a castrating tool, furthered by the blood and gore of the scene. In her analysis of the role of bodily fluids in horror, Creed argues that “images of blood, vomit, pus, shit etc… signify a split between two orders: the maternal authority and the law of the father”, concluding that they horrify because they threaten our sense of self by taking us back to a time in which our play with them was indulged before the paternal act of learning about their impurity. 4
As what makes bodily fluids so disturbing to us is their association with a state of pre-socialisation enabled by the mother , that the result of this abjection lingers on a female face, shown by the prolonged shot of blood splattered on Lambert, suggests the spectators’ subconscious desire to vicariously partake in the subordination of the ‘castrating female’ who is both the source and hindrance to male individuation. As the maternal body is abject because she threatens male authority, this birthing of the Alien by Kane is horrific both for its subversion of biological gender roles, with his assumption of the mothering role a form of castration, and for its depiction of the “primal scene”, reminding us of our dependence on the maternal female figure. Therefore in the visceral depiction of the gore of childbirth, exacerbated by being shown through the male body and the result being a monster instead of a child, Scott constructs the birthing process and the maternal body as monstrous.
McGowan argues that the “various formal decisions that occur during the making of a film to constitute the narrative reveal the spectator’s desire”.5 One way this is evident in Alien is through Scott’s camerawork which constructs Ripley as the villainous female set on castrating the male by undermining his authority. For example, in the scene following Dallas’ order to “give Kane to Ash”, the combination of music, lighting and camera angles portrays Ripley as the aggressor. The scene begins with a slow panning of the room towards Ash in near silence with the recently dead Kane behind, creating suspense. Ripley’s sudden and notably faceless arrival is therefore threatening as it disturbs the stillness of the scene in two ways: by breaking the silence and the established angle. By beginning the shot with the camera positioned behind Ash’s exposed back, marking his vulnerability, then introducing Ripley only after this exposition, her entering the scene becomes predatory, aligning her with the Alien whose modus operandi is confronting unknowing victims. The fact that she enters with her voice only is significant as through this we are able to place her as a female character but our inability to identify her visually creates discomfort by maintaining the established power imbalance between her and Ash. Withholding her face also creates the suggestion that the talking antagonising head could be either Ripley or Lambert, meaning what is most significant in the interaction is her femininity. Through these directorial choices, Scott represents the audience’s skepticism towards women, supporting Creed’s theory of the monstrous-feminine.
As well as being presented as unsettling for its capacity to reproduce, the female body is also presented as unsettling through Scott’s characterisation of Ripley and Lambert. Kristeva additionally defines the abject as that “which does not respect borders, positions, rules” and this is embodied in Ripley and Lambert who in their behaviour and physique stray from the confines of traditional femininity, thus degrading patriarchal gender roles.6 Both women are positioned as indistinguishable from their male counterparts, demonstrated by the identical uniforms and identification by surname rather than gendered given names. What separates Ripley from Lambert, however, is her conviction and leadership, traditionally male attributes that further unsettle the traditional gender binary. The absence of that which visibly defines someone as female in her physical appearance, alongside her ‘male’ authoritative behaviour is ‘horrific’ not only for its degradation of an established social order, but also, and perhaps more importantly because it carries the suggestion of male redundancy through the ability to be both man and woman. The spectator’s discomfort with this androgyny, a distortion of “order”, is manifested in the constant undermining of her authority by Ash and it is therefore no coincidence that Ash’s method when attempting to kill her is to choke her with a rolled up pornographic magazine. The sexual connotations of this scene, facilitated by the phallic symbol of the magazine suggests that this particular choice is an attempt to subjugate her by forcing her into a position that differentiates her as female through sexual violence and is more comfortable for male spectators — that of female victimhood.
The scene of Ripley’s strip is pivotal in the discourse on the monstrous-feminine as her partial nudity is the nearest we get to confronting the reproductive female body. Whilst the shot is not necessarily sensual, in a film with no prior precedent of nudity, rather in fact consisting of conspicuously uniformed bodies, in its rarity Ripley’s nudity is striking, creating a sexualised gaze of her. Particularly in relation to the female body being a site of abjection for its symbolic castrating ability, Ripley’s standalone nudity indicates her individuation from her fully clothed crew members who are further homogenised through death. This is emphasised by the fact that this individuality in the form of the semi-nude female body is realised only and almost immediately after all the characters have died, creating the dichotomy whereby female success (in the form of nudity) is contingent on male failure which further constructs the female body as a threat to male prosperity. That she is the character through which the attempts of the ship’s mainframe MU-TH-UR 6000 (nicknamed Mother) to destroy humanity are focalised perhaps demonstrates a subconscious acknowledgement of the totalising ‘power’ of the female body, and the desire to expel it altogether. Ripley’s strip could therefore indicate this desire for the destruction of the female body as she is faced by the Alien at her most vulnerable. The only other character shown in this way is Lambert whose post-death scene shows her hanging with blood dripping down her bare leg. Thus in this case, nudity or partial nudity is a symbol of individuation, distinguishing the uniformed, suggestively disempowered men from the naked women and Scott’s choice to show only female nudity on-screen demonstrates the conflict between the desire for the female body and the desire for its destruction.
While Creed’s explanation of Kristeva’s theory of abjection in relation to the maternal body very comfortably applies to Alien, evidencing her theory of the monstrous-feminine, her focus on the female body obscures another crucial site of abjection: the non-human body. Equally prominent in Alien is the monstrosity of that which is non-human in isolation from femininity. The destruction of boundaries embodied by the Alien and the ship’s mainframe, Mother, suggests that perhaps what is more problematic for spectators is the non-human body rather than the female body. Through the attribution of vaginal and phallic imagery to the Alien and its inhabiting the internal and external body, the Alien is constructed as existing in-between established boundaries, also embodying the abject. Ash, the android and agent of Mother, says of the Alien:
…Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. I admire its purity… a survivor unclouded by conscious remorse or delusions of morality.
This description of the Alien confronts us with its status as an entirely unsocial being. If what distinguishes humans from other animals is the ability to reason then the Alien being “unclouded” by morals and regret symbolises the pre-socialised human in its purest form. This conception of the Alien makes it more monstrous as it exhibits only the unfavourable aspects of humanity, almost alien to us because of our status as fully realised, social beings. This, combined with the Alien’s almost indestructible nature signifies the threat posed by the castrating mother of being forced back into our source of life. Thus, much like the maternal body, the Alien is also a castrating figure and its ambiguity, encapsulated by its questionable origin and possession of characteristics of both male and female sexual organs makes it abject, demonstrating how its monstrosity is partially the consequence of its otherness as a non-human being.
Creed is successful in demonstrating Mother’s affiliation with her model of the Archaic Mother, the “point and origin of end”.7 As she is the mastermind of the whole operation, Mother’s employment of Ash to undermine the crew’s trip back to Earth further represents the all-encompassing nature of female power to create and destroy. Thus, Ripley’s destruction of Mother by blowing up the ship appeals to the desire to escape the tyranny of the maternal figure who wishes to suppress her child’s individuation. However, despite her feminisation, Mother is non-human first and female second, and our experience of horror at Mother is the culmination of the threat of not knowing the limits of technology, exacerbated by the prospect of this threat’s feminisation. Consequently, her monstrosity is rooted in her otherness as a foreign being of unrecognisable authority more so than in her ascribed femininity.
As well as suggesting a distrust towards the female body, the machine being affectionately nicknamed Mother whilst being the source of the crew’s hardship demonstrates the struggle to reconcile the idea of that which we view as an ‘inherently’ soothing, protective figure being presented as an antagonist. This idea is also represented by Ash who presents as human but is later revealed to be an android under Mother’s instruction, embodying the fear of not being able to distinguish between human and non-human. By appearing in a recognisably human form, we are able to place him as one of us which is comforting as it firmly separates the non-human Alien and spacecraft from the human crew members. However, once we are made aware of his true nature the sense of security that is created by his being recognisably human disintegrates, leaving us with an unsettling fear that nothing is as it seems.
The fact that this betrayal is by someone we identify with is more horrifying than the threat of the Alien as Ash becomes the personification of the threat from within. In this way, Ash and Mother are very much the inverse of each other with Ash representing the visibly human but structurally non-human being while Mother represents the visibly non-human with characteristically human (but importantly unmaternal) attributes. Therefore, when observing Ash and Mother, following Diane Chisholms’s definition of abjection as the dilemma of distinguishing the “‘me’ from the ‘not me’”, it is this incongruity of what we think is knowable and recognisable being the opposite, rather than gender, that is most unsettling and thus monstrous for the spectator.8
Barbara Creed’s theory of the monstrous-feminine, particularly her exploration of the abject, certainly helps to understand the depiction of femininity in Ridley Scott’s Alien, demonstrating how womanhood is subliminally constructed as horrifying. That vaginal imagery and connotations of female reproductive processes are displayed in relation to the sabotage of the crew’s expedition undoubtedly depicts femininity as threatening to the stability and prosperity of (male) human life. However, while the female body is vilified, so too is the non-human, genderless body, shown to be an equally abject concept through the Alien itself and the role of technology encapsulated by the duality of Mother and Ash. By examining the fears defeated in the film and what remains at the end, it becomes clear that while the two are certainly intertwined, gender is perhaps subordinate to non-humanness in the construction of monstrosity. In a film laden with subliminal messages about the destructiveness of femininity and the relentlessness of an unfamiliar authority, the final expulsion of a foreign body by a lone surviving female protagonist suggests that what we cannot identify with bodily is ultimately more monstrous than the female body. Despite this, the role of femininity cannot be understated and to understand the construction of monstrosity in Alien most effectively, the roles of both gender and the non-human must be examined intersectionally.
Bibliography:
Alien, dir. by Scott, Ridley (20th Century Studios, 1979)
Chisholm, Diane (1992) p.439
Creed, Barbara, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993) pp. 1-30
Kristeva, Julia, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) pp. 1-32
McGowan, Todd, Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Rules (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) pp. 1-13
- Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993)
↩︎ - Todd McGowan, Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Rules (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) p .8.
↩︎ - Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) p. 4.
↩︎ - Creed, p. 13.
↩︎ - McGowan, p. 11.
↩︎ - Kristeva, p. 4.
↩︎ - Creed, p. 17.
↩︎ - Diane Chisholm (1992), p. 439.
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