Alien menace: Lt. Ripley is Hollywood's mythical woman - butch and ready to kill

National Review, Jan 26, 1998 by James Bowman

Mr. Bowman is the movie critic of The American Spectator.

EVERY civilization needs its self-justifying myths. And the most important of these myths are always those by which we rationalize our violent acts. Traditionally, myths of the heroic -- either for its own sake (Homer) or for the sake of nation-building (Virgil, the Bible) -- have attempted to give meaning to the grisly reality of squalid tribal warfare. America's great national myth of the settlement and taming of the frontier grew out of the slaughter of indigenous peoples, which it was meant to explain and palliate. This myth continued to resonate with Americans in movies and popular fiction long after the Indians had been defeated and well into a period in which America saw herself as having a similar civilizing mission to the world.

The advent of "multiculturalism" has put an end to this myth, with what consequences it is still too early to tell. But that does not mean that we have now learned to live without either heroes or myths. On the contrary, new myths are now being manufactured by Hollywood featuring the imagery of heroic feminism and designed to justify abortion as that form of violence made necessary by our hedonistic and unisex "lifestyle." An obvious example of this myth-making is to be found in the Alien series of films, whose most recent installment, Alien Resurrection, manages more strikingly than any of its predecessors to render an innocence at least as complete as that of the Noble Savage in the tones and tints of a terrible savagery.

Like most myths, this one has taken time, several redactions, and the collaboration of many talents to be brought to its present state of perfection. It is hard to remember now that in the original Alien (1979) Sigourney Weaver's archetypal character, Lt. Ripley, was wreathed in feminine curls, or that in the sequel, Aliens (1986), her chief concern was to mother a little girl (oddly called "Newt") and protect her from the horrible, dragon-like creatures that incubate inside human bodies and bring themselves to birth by bursting through the chest. By the time of Alien3 (1992), Lt. Ripley had become completely de-feminized, appearing in masculine attire and with shaved head, and living on terms of near-equality with a crew of "double-Y-chromosome" male convicts.

Yet the feminist subtext has been there from the beginning. Always Lt. Ripley has been a lone female (or nearly lone) in masculine company; always she has been the one among the space argonauts clear-sighted enough to see that the only good Alien is a dead Alien. It is she alone who protests against claims on behalf of the greater good by which a sinister masculine organization known as "the Company" foolishly attempts to nurture the monsters for the sake of its "weapons division." Now, in the fourth film in the series, we get a glimpse of the Company's research facilities and find that the toothy and ravenous creature familiar from the first three is only one among an appalling collection of quasi-fetal grotesques, preserved in giant tubes of formaldehyde.

AT this point Lt. Ripley -- or rather her clone, since the original took a fiery and self-sacrificial plunge into a lead smelter at the end of Alien3 in order to extinguish the Alien life within her -- is allowed one or two expressions of her residual femininity. A fetal creature laid out on an operating table croaks out a wish to die, and she obliges by incinerating it and all the other specimens with a flamethrower. Given the urgency of killing the flesh-eating fetuses, as opposed to the merely pathetic and helpless ones, the film's emblematic macho man, played by Ron Perlman, expresses bewilderment at the waste of ammunition and concludes that it "must be a chick thing."

Otherwise Lt. Ripley once again shows herself in the new film --directed by the brilliant Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet -- to be the take-charge guy, the cool one in a crisis, as most of her male comrades are gibbering with terror. In one particularly memorable scene she shows two male swaggerers who have made the mistake of regarding her as sexual prey that she is not only stronger than they (much stronger) but also a better basketball player. Ouch! That's hitting them in a sensitive place.

The Ripley clone has in this film illogically taken on some of the characteristics of the monster she has up until now been at pains to exterminate. We learn that her blood has the Alien characteristic of eating, acid-like, through any substance outside her skin. It is this quality which comes to the fore in the film's climactic scene, as she and an ostensibly feminine robot (Winona Ryder) take up a symbolic and nightmarish motherhood to a giant Alien fetus. Regarding Lt. Ripley as its mother, it has regretfully to be disposed of. She at first nuzzles the horrible thing with an apparently maternal show of feeling, but then flings a drop of her blood at the window of the spaceship, creating a small hole through which the creature is sucked in disgusting ribbons of flesh and blood. As it is cut to pieces and evacuated into space, Lt. Ripley whispers: "I'm sorry."