Critically discuss in relation to Alien Resurrection.

Science fiction and horror have always been used as a vehicle with which deconstruct notions of the body and its place in the process of Othering (Badley, 1995; Linton, 1999 etc.). From Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) to the Terminator films, these genres have constantly made use of what Derrida in Of Grammatology (1997) termed La Brisure (Derrida, 1997: 65) or the hinge through which a discourse enfolds and becomes internally unstable. Frankenstein’s creation, for instance, allows deconstruction of the logocentric binary of life and death, existing as it does as dead flesh imbued with an artificial life and the Terminator films offer us similar tools with which to examine the notion of the human and the machine.

The Alien tetralogy continues this deconstructive process. By its very cinematic nature, it allows questioning of the binary of presence/absence but there are also layer upon layer of imagistic and thematic brisure displayed in the films that allow us to look at notions of female/male, human/inhuman, biology/technology and many others besides.

In this essay I will look at three such pivotal constructs in the 1997 film Alien Resurrection and asses the ways in which they allow us to view the changing place of the human body within both scientific and psychosocial discourse. Firstly, I will examine the notion of the ownership of the body, especially as it is affected through technology; then I will move on to look at leitmotifs of motherhood as it relates to the binary of inner and outer biological space, what Julia Kristeva encapsulated in her concept of the abject before finally looking at how this fits in with the films treatment of Othering in the form of the deconstruction of the human/alien binary.

In her essay “Horror and the Archaic Mother: Alien” (1993), Barbara Creed describes the opening of the very first Alien film:

“Awakened by the computer, affectionately called Mother, the crew members complain about the cold, their low salaries, and the fact that only good on board is the coffee.” (Creed, 1993: 16)

And it is this same sense that begins Alien Resurrection; again, the film opens with scenes that Creed sees as being primal in nature. However this time Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is created rather than awakened, her cloned body is literally formed in a test tube, more a product than a life . She is the host to the alien inside her and is referred to as such, she then becomes a mere curiosity, her body the by product of the real birth, the birth of the alien.

The scenes in which Ripley is subjected to the inspection and intrusion of the scientists remind us of Foucault’s assertions in The Birth of the Clinic (2003) and his questioning of exactly who owns the medical object that is the human body:

“At the beginning of the nineteenth century, doctors described what for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and the expressible … they had begun to perceive once again, or that they listened to reason rather than to imagination; it meant that the relation between the visible and invisible—which is necessary to all concrete knowledge—changed its structure, revealing through gaze” (Foucault, 2003: xxii)

For Foucault, the ‘gaze’ of the surgeon both traps and creates the patient and, like the madman in psychiatry or the criminal in the legal system, it is the doctor, or in the case of Ripley, the scientist who owns the enunciative statements and so the body itself. Ripley’s body, in the beginning of the film at least, is owned not by her but by the scientists that both created and use it. This, of course, raises questions about the place of any body trapped within the gaze of the medico-scientific discourse; the usual binary of the inner biological space and the outer space being broken down through technology’s ability to regenerate the biological artificially.

This is, of course, the basis for Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg in her “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (2001). For Haraway, the cyborg challenges logocentric discourses by providing a brisure, a hinge that exposes internal fissures and flaws in the foundational logic. The cyborg, like Ripley, is created rather than born and therefore has no primal myth and no genetic history:

“The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-Oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor (sic), or other seducations to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all powers of all parts into a higher unity.” (Haraway, 2001: 2270)

Upon entering the earth’s atmosphere, Ripley acknowledges the fact that she is without history by declaring “I am a stranger here myself”, distancing herself from the earthly and the human.

Of course, ownership of the body also extends to the many images and references to motherhood in the film. Kristeva’s notions of the archaic mother chora, once again evokes the deconstruction of binaries. It is the image of the pregnant mother, asserts Kristeva (1997: 35-36), that destabilizes notions of selfhood and autonomy; the pregnant body being two consciousness existing in the same space; a point highlighted by Linda Badley in her book Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic (1995):

“Like the ghost, Alien's monster produced a gap in the symbolic order. It took liminality to new levels, transgressing lines between the natural and supernatural, the biological and the mechanical, male and female, sex and death -- all the while dripping viscous, corrosive goo.” (Badley, 1995: 44)

Once again we are faced here with the question of body ownership, who owns the body – the mother or the child?

The resurrection in the title of the film refers, of course, to both Ripley and the alien and, as Ripley is a cyborg so too is the alien and her offspring. Of course, the latter here is arguably more human than Ripley being as she is a product of a ‘natural’ biological birth . The queen alien is both mother and father to her child and this point, as Creed points out, is highlighted by her possession of both phallus and vagina dentata.

She is also both the object of maternal signification and the castrating force and, because of this offers the audience a particular kind of horror. It is the horror of the cannibalistic mother, the body that both comforts and kills; that broaches maternal and paternal boundaries. As Barbara Creed suggests this goes to the very heart of Oedipal fears and the foundations of what is to be human and biological.

Allied to her notion of chora, is the Kristevan notion of the abject. For Kristeva, the abject is the ejected body that creates the whole, experienced in the first instance by the excrement that denotes the Other:

“Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and much.” (Kristeva, 1997: 230)

The abject is that which is discarded in the process of becoming human, so the abject in Alien Resurrection becomes the alien itself, Ripley’s ‘grandchild’. After a generation of genetic transmutation the alien presence in the film becomes recognizably more human. For the first time, the alien has eyes that are distinctly human, that allow it to display emotion and elicit empathy and sympathy. Whereas, in the first three films, the alien presence was antithetical to humanity, transgressing no borders of Otherness, Ripley.s grandchild is a hybrid of her genes and its mother’s. In this it deconstructs, as does Frankenstein’s monster, the binary of human/inhuman.

However, also as in Frankenstein, in order to become human this brisure that forbids formation must be abjected . As Patricia Linton states in her essay “Aliens, (M)others, Cyborgs: The Emerging Ideology of Hybridity” (1999), both Frankenstein’s monster and the alien grandchild are ejected from the realm of the human:

“Before consigning the predatory baby to the emptiness of space, however, Ripley caresses her face in a lingering embrace…Ripley repeats Frankenstein’s abandonment of a monster who has no other parent, an abandonment that is in this case almost a literal abortion.” (Linton, 1999: 182)

By ejecting the alien child, Ripley symbolically ejects her abject, the part of her that is non-human and so, in the signification of the film, unclean. It is interesting also to note that the alien grandchild does the same earlier by killing its obviously alien mother.

The film, however, in its final scenes becomes a deconstruction of humanity and what it is to be human. The only surviving characters are a mish-mash of part and non-humans. Call (Winona Ryder) is an android, Ripley an alien/human hybrid, Vriess (Dominique Pinon) is obviously drawn as the human equivalent of a cyborg and Johner (Ron Pearlman) both physically and because of our introduction to him is highly simian. All of the obviously human and beautiful characters are killed by the castrating mother alien and only the hybrids, the mutants, survive.

This is the ‘body future’ that Badley talks of, the brisure that threatens the discourse of human biology; that destabilizes the sanctity of what it is to be human. It is also the point at which the human body is shown to be defective, weak and inadequate. The bloody deaths of the human beings in the film are surely examples of the fragility of flesh, the brittleness of bone; a situation that is obviated by technology and hybridity.

Alien Resurrection, then, does indeed concern itself with notions of the ‘body future’ but also, we could assert, suggests that it is also a ‘body present’; the process of destratification, of liminization is already occurring in fact might always have been the case. The images of motherhood, for instance, suggest that this process is as old as reproduction itself. As Kristeva suggests, through chora, the unsettling archaic mother has always been expelled in order to retain the status quo of the binary and the hierarchy.

All of the Alien films deal, to some extent with motherhood and the feminine body and feature, as Martin Flanagan states, strong female characters (1999). In Alien Resurrection, however, this becomes a central motif. The relationship between Call and Ripley, for instance, is a contrast to the relationship Ripley has with the alien; one recognizably human but in reality a cyborg, the other in-human in appearance but, arguably, genetically as human as Ripley herself.

Through evocation of discourses concerned with motherhood and the failure of Oedipal attachment, Alien Resurrection concerns itself as much with where the body has been as where the body is going. Notions of cloning, of cyborg hybridity and of alien insemination are, as we have seen, merely colourations of a debate that is as old as the human body itself.

References

Badley, Linda (1995), Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic, (London: Greenwood Press)

Shelley, Mary (1994), Frankenstein, (London: Penguin)

Brophy, P. (1986) 'Horrality - the Textuality of contemporary Horror films'Screen 27/1, Jan-feb.

Creed, Barbara (1993), The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, (London: Routledge)

Derrida, Jacques (1997), Of Grammatology, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press)

Flanagan, Marton (1999), “The Alien Series and Generic Hybridity”, published in Cartnell, Deborah et al (eds), Alien Identities: Exploring Differences in Film and Fiction, (London: Pluto)

Foucault, Michel (2003), The Birth of the Clinic, (London: Routledge)

Freeland, Cynthia (2000), The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror, (London: Westview)

Haraway, Donna (2001), “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, published in Leitch, vincet (ed), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, (London: Norton and Company)

Kristeva, Julia (1997), The Kristeva Reader, (New York: Columbia University Press)

Linton, Patricia (1999), “Aliens, (M)others, Cyborgs: The Emerging Ideology of Hybridity”, published in Cartnell et al.

Moylan, Tom (2000), Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia, (London: Westview Press)

Tinkcom, Matthew and Villarejo (2001), Keyframes: Popular Cinema And Cultural Studies, (London: Routledge)