“Here, Kitty, Kitty” and the Toothy Vagina: Ellen Ripley
The following is one chapter from a book I wrote, Tough Gynes: Violent Women in Film as Honorary Men, published by Wipf and Stock in 2019. It is a gender-and-violence reflection on the film, Alien (1979), directed by Ridley Scott and featuring Sigourney Weaver as the protagonist, Ellen Ripley. There will be references to other chapters, covering eight other films: Star Wars (1977), Silence of the Lambs (1991), GI Jane (1997), 28 Days Later (2002), Michael Clayton (2007), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), the Hunger Games trilogy (2012), and Jane Got a Gun (2015). Hope you like it.
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In 1979, the prolific director-producer Ridley Scott won the Saturn Award for best Director and best Science Fiction drama for his breakthrough movie Alien. Alien was not an homage piece like the original Star Wars—a PG story of interstellar wild West Samurai.
Most of us know the story itself. Fast forwarding through it . . . cargo space-freighter diverts to planetoid to check out strange signal . . . a recon team checks out a bizarre-looking structure . . . one member of the team is facially impregnated with an alien being that is brought on board to terrorize the crew . . . crew fights briefly and ineffectually against killer alien until one crew member — second mate Ellen Ripley — becomes the lone survivor . . . well, along with a cat . . . Ripley sets the main ship to nuclear self-destruct, boards the “life raft” shuttle . . . escapes . . . final plot twist, the alien has slipped on board the “life raft,” and Ripley finally — in one last tense scene — has to kill it. Boom. The end
Alien was an R-rated sci-fi movie that opened, contra Star Wars, with the volume turned way down. It begins with a languid wake-up sequence, followed by a casual breakfast scene, and only after this low-key opening does the tense orchestra music background the action as an unscheduled landing encounters trouble. The crew finds itself in a damaged craft on a howling, stormy, dark planet resembling a Hieronymus Bosch nocturne. Damage to the landing craft is not catastrophic, but they will be stuck on this inhospitable planet for seventeen hours to do repairs before they can return to the mother ship, who they call . . . well, “Mother.” Remember this when we come back to the psychoanalytic manipulations of this film.
Meanwhile, let’s go check out this strange signal.
The recon party enters an apparently crashed craft, whereupon Executive Officer Kane has an exoskeletal-scorpionic-crab-thing leap up and attach itself to his face through his space helmet. So the action begins. Thirty-five minutes into the movie, which in movie years can cover a decade. As I said, Scott takes his time in the build-up. From there, of course, it quickly ascends to the violent climax, resolution, and dénouement.
Sigourney Weaver plays Ripley, the lead. Warrant Officer Ripley — at first a minor character — begins to emerge with a humorous remark to a colleague to “fuck off,” which posthaste carries Ripley far, far from Princess Leia territory and establishes her as a truly “modern” earth woman.
The recon team returns with Captain Dallas, Navigator Lambert, and the injured Kane. Ripley, now the senior person on board, comes into her own as a character by refusing entry to the angry Captain Dallas and to Lambert (the film’s other woman character), who have hauled the unconscious and thing-colonized Kane back to the shuttle. So, yeah, Ripley is capable of making the tough decisions under pressure. This is the point at which many viewers begin to see Ripley as a potential badass.
Though she screams at least three times (I’d scream if confronted by that thing), she also demonstrates courage in the battle with the alien monster and decisiveness in working through tactics to get away. Ripley ends up traipsing through the set, steely-eyed and sweat-streaked, with a flaming gun in her hand. In the final confrontation, she gets hold of something like a spear gun (what it’s for on a space ship we can’t say — stopping off in Belize for a dive on the way home?), with which she dispatches the monster and (in her androgynous idiom) “blows it to fuck out into space.” Stern, tough-talking, decisive, willing to kick ass, and carrying phallic weapons. Feminist, right?
Ridley Scott is not now and has never been feminist in any meaningful sense of the term, though he knows how to profitably ride cultural waves. He is a filmmaker. He knows how to build dramatic tension. In this film, he also knows how to run a kind of psychoanalytic subtext that captures the audience’s sexual subconscious at the same time they are cognitively fixed on the mechanics of the plot. This film is positively brimming with post-Freudian, quasi-Lacanian sexual symbolism that speaks not to women’s emancipation, but to male disorientation in a high period of the feminist movement, with the trope of Monstrous Female alongside a heaping helping of manipulative, intentionally disorienting, sexual confusion.
Most critiques, academic and otherwise, ultimately conclude that Alien is a feminist film because of its representation of the workplace as a home to equality and a place where traditional gender roles have been obliterated. But there’s something else lingering under the surface: fear. Not the fear of the devouring Alien, but a fear and anxiety of a future where the equalizing of the sexes might lead to the blending of sexual biology as well. What is ultimately revealed by Alien is the anxiety of men. (Haggstrom, “Reassessing Alien.”)
Even that single-word title, evocative of disorientation: Alien. Let’s go back and watch this movie now from the beginning.
Barbara Creed’s essay, “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine,” begins with a little quote from the classic Hitchcock horror film Psycho: Norman Bates, saying simply, “Mother’s not herself today.” It’s always Mother, isn’t it? In Creed’s book, entitled The Monstrous Feminine, she describes the ways in which men have historically projected their weirdest fears onto women, how this projected fear has been expressed in male myths, and how those male myths, as well as their assimilation by males in societies up to the present, have been reworked as psychoanalytic theory . . . which has also been assimilated and, as an effect of its assimilation, then become self-fulfilling. (European bourgeois) Man constructs psychoanalysis; (male) psychoanalysis constructs man (and woman).
In short, men have blamed women for everything wrong for quite some time. Blame has been incorporated into our symbolic grammar and thereby into our precognitive consciousness. Creed relates her analysis of a number of horror films (Alien included in that genre) to the notion of abjection, developed by Julia Kristeva, a European psychoanalyst and philosopher. Abjection, not to wear readers out with the deeper exploration of this subtle and arcane idea, is anything that disturbs our symbolic boundaries, especially the boundaries between subject and object (and therein “male” and “female”).
With Freud, Lacan, and other Western male psychoanalysts, the person/patient is the subject and everything outside it, including people, are objects for one thing or another, especially for the satisfaction of (often unrecognized) desires. Abjection throws us off, disorients us. Poo-poo and corpses and blood and such have this effect. Women and mothers are ripe for this, especially among squeamish men, because . . . well, (whispers) menstruation. And childbirth. And changing shitty diapers. And nursing. And the conflicted feelings people all have about Mom, because in six thousand years of male-dominated society, every relation to Mom between her and her kids is a set-up for psychological confusion. So we both love and blame Mom, and we have all these conflicted feelings . . . especially boys. Because as soon as possible, we push boys to reject anything girl, and to dis-identify with the one person upon whom we’ve depended in the very first and formative years of our lives. Alien pounced on this male insecurity like a cat on a cockroach.
Birth, as any of us know who have given it or been there while others do, might be surrounded by the shiny white aseptic walls and stainless steel of hospital chic, but the process itself is a wet, grunting, crying, sweaty, squirming, blood-watery mess. Miraculous and awe-imspiringly, breathtakingly humbling, in my view, but not tidy or linear. And yet Alien’s opening scene is a birth scene, but an aseptic, bloodless, quiet birth scene. The spaceship is named “Mother,” remember?
Seven nearly naked people, wearing only snowy-white diapers, lay in Snow White cells, arranged like flower petals, deep in the “womb” of the ship after we’ve been carried by the steady-cam down a long (fallopian?) tube. A flicker. The lights go on. Psshhhhhh, the glass covers on the cells rise, Kane is the first to awaken, slowly, blinking at the light, rising languidly, feeling his limbs. Mother brings the crew to life (birth!). It’s not just the boundary between male and female that will be abjected in this film. Again and again, it is the boundary between organic and technological.
Suddenly, we are all sitting around a communal breakfast table, in what was for the 1979 audience a company break room. People are eating, joking, smoking cigarettes. One of the maintenance crew is lobbying for more money when they deliver their payload of ore. We even have a minor labor dispute, settled by quoting the contract. Four men, two women, somewhat gender-neutralized by everyone using last names. One of the mechanics tosses a sexual crack about what he “wants to eat” at one of the women, Lambert, who grins demurely, simultaneously embarrassed and amused; but men and women are working together, so there is some kind of equality . . . right?
Creed reminds us of our psychoanalysis. The female body, the mother’s body, is “both life and abyss.” “Mother” has re-birthed the crew, and now issued an order (to go into another abyss, which also turns out to be a giant womb). That’s why suspended animation was suspended eleven months from home. “Go to this nearby small planet and check out an unknown signal.” When they follow Mother’s order, the shuttle craft is released from the mother ship by an attachment called “the umbilicus.” No kidding.
When we first land, Ash the Science Officer reads out the atmosphere from his instruments. “Almost primordial,” he says. There is that word, now sent along through the audience’s pre-cognitive pathways, primordial. Mother. Umbilicus. Primordial. And so the members of the reconnaissance team — Captain Dallas, navigator Joan Lambert (whose character is emerging with the personality of a cigarette-sucking surly teen), and Executive Officer Kane — don their protective suits and venture out into a literal howling void. As they approach the source of the mysterious signal (mythical sirens?), we see what appears to be the canted tail of a crashed craft, raised and separated against the night sky like two opened legs. Before you say I’m reading into it, wait. The recon team approaches, and where do they enter the craft? Precisely at the crotch, and through an opening that appears uncannily like a vaginal orifice (two side-by-side vaginas, actually). Primordial . . . cue the spooky music.
Inside, there are structures, fractal and strangely indeterminate. Are they machine-like or organic? The space is engulfingly enormous, the Great Consuming Womb, within which our little space people with large round heads look — from a distance — okay, a lot like spermatozoa. The audience is entranced by the strangeness of it, unaware of how the creators are tapping those little pre-cognitive, mytho-psychoanalytic tuning forks. Our team encounters a vertical surface, just over head high. They climb over, and there it is . . . what is that? Again, a strangely mechanical, strangely organic structure that they somehow determine immediately to be a dead life form. The camera pulls back. Up close, it looked a bit like skeletons copulating in heating ducts; but as we see the whole thing, it is a fifteen-foot phallus, ribbed, erect, and aiming thirty degrees above level. A penis completely enveloped by a cathedral-sized womb? Sexual confusion, anyone?
The artwork that inspired the set in Alien was adapted directly from that of H. R. Giger, at Scott’s request. Giger specialized in sexually confusing artwork that was an intentional organic-mechanical mashup. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon stated explicitly that Alien was designed to make men in the audience “cross their legs” with sexual insecurity, not in order to promote feminism but to heighten the horror-effect. And he and Scott agreed that Giger’s highly sexualized bio-mechanical style was perfect for bringing this to life on the big screen.
David Dietle, who researched the making of Alien, wrote, “None of the sexual imagery in Alien is unintentional. For example, in the picture above the human crew members are ‘invading’ the alien ship, so in effect those are man sized sperm crawling through it. From here, John Hurt’s character, Kane, plumbs the depths of the ship’s ‘womb’ to find an endless landscape of eggs.” The men who made it were telling a symbolic story of male anxiety in the face of an increasingly influential feminist movement.
Kane is taken back to the shuttle craft, and the egg he has fertilized as a sperm has now become a phallus rammed down his own throat (impregnating him, as it turns out). The shuttle craft returns to the orbiting Mother. The thing appears to die and fall off, but at breakfast again the recovering Kane, in one of the most memorable scenes in the film, gives birth. That is, a little monstrosity that looks like a penis with a fanged vagina at its tip, tears bloodily out of his abdomen, killing him.
During the hunt to kill the alien who has absconded to somewhere within the craft, the thing manages to grow to the size of well-fed, adult-boar polar bear, with a head that looks like a stainless steel inverted penis (pointing rearward) with a wetly dripping fanged vagina on the face, out of which can emerge another phallus with another fanged vagina, also dripping viscous fluids from the tip.
(Just two years after Alien, Scott released Blade Runner. His protagonist Rick, played by Harrison Ford, falls for a hyper-femme female cyborg, who he warms up for sex by slapping her around. And it really turns her on. This is Ridley Scott, the “feminist.”)
As the old Haitian proverb goes, “beyond the fanged vagina is a fanged vagina.” (just kidding)
First, Captain Dallas goes looking, then disappears suddenly from their tracking device. Now Ripley is in charge, and she becomes really assertive. During the continuing search for the homicidal alien, mechanical engineer Brett goes searching for the ship’s mascot-cat named Jones, calling “Here, kitty kitty.” He is ambushed by the alien, and we get our first close look at that retractable pecker with the biting labia on the tip. Holy castration complex, boys!
“Alien reveals a frighteningly voracious sexuality,” writes Rebecca Bell-Metereau.
Later, Ripley will likewise be calling for Jones the cat, “Here, kitty kitty,” whereupon she will also be confronted by the monster. Here kitty kitty echoes over, under, around, and through the combination of sexual disorientation and terror of the fanged vagina. The pussy has teeth.
Ripley confronts Ash, the Science Officer, after she tries to override the company command to bring the critter in for “their weapons program.” Ash attacks Ripley with super-human strength, and a suspiciously semen like sweat begins to ooze from his pores with the effort, telling the audience that he is himself not human (he’s an android — more bio-mechanical confusion). He knocks Ripley out, then — in a weird and completely gratuitous way — instead of throttling her with his super-human strength, or just using any of the nearby blunt instruments to bludgeon her, he decides to kill her by rolling a wank-magazine into a surrogate phallus (in this scene, tellingly, there are nude pin-up girls plastered on the wall in the background) and cramming it down her throat in a kind of forced and nearly-fatal fellatio. Ripley, the tough woman, we can be reminded now, is still a woman, still a sex object, still subject to sexual humiliation (or sexualized assassination).
If that’s not enough for us to figure it out, in a scene that is not even in the screenplay, Ripley, as lone survivor, has taken off in the shuttle and destroyed Mother (get it?). She then does a strip show for the boys in the audience, peeling off one after another layer until she is in a flimsy, nipple-accentuating tank top and bikini panties that have sagged enough to reveal the cleft of her buttocks. This is the Take-Off-Your-Clothes film trope, a specific accommodation to the male gaze. Here, it is Ripley killing the Mother then making herself available — via cinematography — to us males and our grasping gazes. Or rather, here it is Ridley making Ripley available — via cinematography — to us fellow males and our grasping gazes.
Wait, we’re not done yet. She discovers the alien is on board, apparently sleeping on a shelf. Penile-toothy-vaginal aliens get sleepy after they eat, too, it seems. The stripped down Ripley — no longer the tough leader, but a female body on display by Scott — backs into a closet with her space suit, and with the camera angled from below to aim directly at her crotch, we get the close-up of her mons as she slowly raises and opens one leg to give the audience the full view. Ripley is captured in the male gaze in a way that might remind us of an offensive “grabbing” remark made once by Donald Trump. Scott makes sure of it.
She dresses in the suit, buckles in with that speargun phallus thing in hand, and when the monster comes, she opens the hatch, whereupon the monster is sucked out the door. The alien catches itself in the doorway, holding on with tremendous strength.
This is the Not-Dead-Yet film trope, when the villain or monster comes back one last time to make the audience need a change of underwear before they leave the theater. Ripley has to do something phallic here or die. She aims the speargun at the monster and shoots it in the belly, knocking it out the door, tethered outside now where she can slam the door shut and roast the monster in rocket fuel.
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Ellen Ripley is not a woman-identified woman. In fact, she shares a mutual hostility with the only other female crew member. But more than that, in my own associations with feminist scholars and activists, one word that is off the table is “bitch.” Yet Ripley, in her frustration with Mother’s refusal to stop the activated auto-destruction sequence that Ripley herself initiated, screams at the ship, “You bitch!”
This phatic expression is in Ripley’s mouth again more than once in the sequels. As Kelsey Lueptow notes, the very commonly and casually used word bitch, apart from an actual reference to a female canine, has “hibernating connotations that can perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes.” Even when it’s a woman who uses it. A gendered term like bitch resonates with a whole cluster of patriarchal ideas about women-in-general. Some men casually refer to any and all women as bitches. And when used by women, it calls up that old social trope of women seeing the “other woman” as competition (for the approval, attention, or affection of men). The term used proudly by women as a kind of alternative identity? That’s emancipation? Because it means being bad-tempered and uncharitable (to others) and proud of it. Does this “identity” come at the expense, moreover, of other women, who are already scaled between (compliant) good-girl and bitch?
The term “plays up sexist stereotypes like menstrual maniacs, hyper-emotional incompetence, and female cattiness incurred by cultural messages that bombard media representations of women.” Bitch is specifically used for women, which ought to be problematic enough, but when it is applied to men, it is an insult that is saying, “You are like a woman,” and that is a very bad thing, something to fight about. Again, woman (bitch) is offensive, altogether negative.
Portraying it as realistic speech in films is all fine and well. We portray sexists and women who are broken by internalized oppression in films; but when the strong hero-woman uses it, the term is valorized in a decidedly non-woman-identified sense.
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Is Ripley a feminist icon because she kicks ass? We’ve already seen how Ridley Scott locked onto her genitals with the fetishizing male gaze. Is Ripley a woman emancipated or is she an honorary male/Hot Chick with a Gun?
Here is the surprise ending to this chapter. Ripley was originally written as a male. All Scott did was give the part to a female actor. “We really just had the secretary change ‘he’ to ‘she,’” said Producer David Giler.
If this is feminism, if this is emancipation for women, then it simply means women becoming like men. And men? We need not change at all. We are still the norm, “and we are no one’s bitch.”