The Nostromo is a labyrinthine spaceship, a hulking ore refinery run on a sophisticated computer operating system and manned by a crew of seven. But somehow it’s not the most impressive piece of technology in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien. That distinction belongs to the title character, an organism with blood of acid and two sets of jaws, highly-evolved, adaptable to any climate. Its scientific mission, if you will, is to fulfill a basic biological imperative: to become a parent. Fitting, then, that it chooses to prey on a ship controlled by its own problematic Mother. Just what kind of existential threat does this techno-sexual organism pose to a man-made and sterile future? And how does one woman manage to defeat it? Wes & Erin analyze.
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Transcript
0:11 Erin: The Nostromo is a labyrinthine spaceship, a hulking ore refinery run on a sophisticated computer operating system and manned by a crew of seven. But somehow it's not the most impressive piece of technology. In Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien. That distinction belongs to the title character and an organism with blood of acid and two sets of Jaws. Highly evolved, adaptable to any climate. Its scientific mission, if you will, is to fulfill a basic biological to become a parent. Fitting then that it chooses to prey on a ship controlled by its own problematic mother. Just what kind of existential threat does this techno sexual organism pose to a man made and sterile future? And how does one woman manage to defeat it? These are the topics for today's discussion. This is Erin O'Luanaigh and this is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext. So Wes, I don't know where I first heard this. It's a story that Sigourney Weaver has told at some point in like a making of featurette or maybe it was an interview, but I remember seeing it a few years ago where she talks about how her parents came to visit her on the set of Alien and it was really her first major movie. As we mentioned in our Annie hall episode, she did appear in the. The last bit of Annie Hall. I think she was on screen for like six seconds in that wide shot. She was Alvy's date to the movie at the end of the film anyway, so this is really properly her first film. And her parents came to visit on set one of the days that they were shooting inside that Alien spaceship. And I guess she sort of took them on a tour and through the sort of tunnels and her parents were looking a little puzzled and a little uncomfortable. And finally they were like, what kind of movie is this? Exactly. Certainly the art production in this film emphasizes certain elements of human anatomy, shall we say? I think that's an important theme in the film.
2:11 Wes: Yeah, we've both seen the Beast within, the making of Alien. I love the title of that because I don't think Alien has anything to do with the beast Within. But anyway, we'll get to that. I've seen it more recently than you have, although I know you rewatched at least a little bit of it. But there's a lot the film about one of the artists for the film. This really creepy. Is he German or Austrian? I forget.
2:37 Erin: I think he's Swiss.
2:38 Wes: Oh, is he Swiss? Okay. Hans Giger. And I don't know if he's the one who does the interior of the spaceship. I know. He's the one who does the famous space jockey and the interior of what they call the derelict ship, the one they find on the planetoid. He explicitly is interested in kind of combining technology and sexuality or biological forms. But, yeah, a lot of it very obviously sexual. So his work often looks like it's. It's like someone's combining human anatomy with automobile parts or something like that. And it's really fabulous. It's an incredible set in the derelict spaceship that I think the studios. Right. They didn't want Ridley Scott to actually even build it because it was so expensive. And it's just for one scene in the movie.
3:30 Wes: But, yeah, as you point out, there's this very interesting crossover between technology and sexuality and also being a mother. And that's the really, really. The interesting way the film begins is this very, very explicit connection between technology and a kind of artificial womb. Right. So everyone's in hibernation to begin with in the movie. And they're all going to wake up. To me, it looks like they're wearing diapers, right. They're all going to wake up in their cribs. And the computer that runs the mothership is called Mother. And one of the wonderful things about the film is just the way it opens on an empty ship. Empty except for. Well, there's the. There's corridors, there's the empty bridge. There's some sort of like, moving helmet at some point in the distance. And then you see a computer boot up at the very beginning. And it's. And it's cool reflection in a. In a helmet and corridor lights coming on. So you get the sense that things are. The ship is empty but highly automated and also an environment that can sustain life. So it's an interesting contradiction, right, this sterility of the ship and the sterility of technology in general. The unfeeling quality of the technological, but also the fact that it can be life sustaining. And there's a great touch which I think really kind of succinctly captures this idea, which is the drinking birds, right. Which, you know, in the scenes in the beginning, you just see them in the distance and it's hard to make them out in what they are if you don't already know what they are. I think they are probably a more popular, like, toy in the 70s and 80s or something. But they weren't immediately recognizable to me until later in the film when you see them more clearly. So in the beginning, you just get this very, very long shot of a ship in which there's largely no activity except for these birds that are kind of like they're not perpetual motion machines, but they're. It's like they're almost Right. The way they work involves, like, pressure and temperature in a way where they can seem to indefinitely rock back and forth and look like they're drinking out of a cup. So life versus not life, automation versus what is life sustaining and maternal. All that stuff is really nicely set up in the very beginning.
6:03 Erin: Yeah, it's sterile and yet oddly not sterile at the same time. Right. Some parts of the ship with the white padding and the sort of gestational area for hypersleep that looks really future. That looks more like 2001. But other parts of the film. I know Ridley Scott uses this famous term of like truck drivers in space.
6:26 Erin: Other parts of the film look more like, you know, the Millennium Falcon. The, like, hunk of junk type spacecraft that's really degraded and shows that this is a ship that's been used and is. It's also just bizarre looking. And I guess, like, my first thought when we see the whole thing is that it looks like a floating 19th century factory or something like that. It doesn't look particularly like a clean place.
6:50 Wes: Well, it's towing the ship itself is towing a big refinery.
6:54 Erin: Right, right. And I guess spaceships don't have to be aerodynamic. It just doesn't. It doesn't have any sleekness to it. Quite the opposite. But also about that shot in the beginning, it's very strange because the camera is usually following the perspective of a character. You know, usually a camera's movement is motivated by. Not necessarily in a master shot, but if it's sort of gliding down a hallway, it's following the perspective of a particular character who's walking down the hallway. So here we have the camera gliding down a hallway not motivated by any particular character's perspective because they're all, it turns out, in hypersleep. But it seems to be turning and looking. The doors even open for it. When it goes into the hypersleep chamber, the lights come up, which could be because, you know, the ship is also waking them up at the same moment. But there's this sense of uneasiness right from the beginning because of that unmotivated camera action. So in other words, the camera is the alien, or it's another alien. Right. That's coming in to the womb. It's the invader in the womb.
8:03 Erin: Which really also highlights, I think, the Vulnerability of the crew from the very beginning, outside of the fact that they're all half naked in these sort of quasi diapers.
8:12 Wes: Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean, you know, as usual, any commentary on the role of technology here can be taken as a meta commentary on film and even the arts in some sense. You're reminding me that the camera is actually following the boot up in a way. Like the reason why those doors open on the hibernators is because everything's booting up, you know, apparently. And so you could say you could motivate the opening of the doors by the fact that it's part of this boot up process, the lights in the corridor coming on. But I was also thinking that if you're watching the film for the first time, the beginning, you're seeing an empty ship and you don't know, there's a lot of confusion. You don't know exactly what's happening. You don't know if this is the aftermath of something horrible that's happened. Right. There's no people around or if it's a lost in space situation. And when I say I don't know what's going on, I still don't even know what that vibrating helmet is supposed to be. I think in the screenplay it's somehow communicating with the other helmet. It's involved in the triggering a computer to boot up or something like that. But I still don't quite understand it. Getting back to what you said about the hunk of junk quality versus more of a sterile 2001 quality to certain parts of the ship. And I was thinking, before you said it, I was thinking truckers in space.
9:38 Wes: So that contrast reflects an interesting conflict that arises. So right in 2001, it's a scientific mission, Right. In search of artificial intelligence, or how does it all work?
9:53 Erin: I don't remember.
9:55 Wes: I've forgotten. Even though I read the novel a long time ago, I've seen the movie. So there's a, you know, these are scientists in 2001, I think, on a knowledge seeking expedition. But in this case, the truckers and space aspect of this, they're just a commercial ship bringing back ore. It's a towboat basically connected to a huge refinery, bringing back ore. The motivations are pretty much commercial. And yet they get sidelined by what is basically a scientific expedition for which they're really not, except for the Android Ash, they're really not qualified. And so that conflict becomes a big part of the movie.
10:34 Erin: Yeah. And what I Remember best about 2001 is just first of all, the cleanliness and also the scale. I remember that huge floating Howard Johnson's. I don't know if you remember that.
10:47 Erin: One of the things I noticed about that helmet is that it has that airport over the mouth, the emergency helmet that in shadow. It makes the helmet look almost like a pig snout. I thought of at the beginning. Or of course it could be a gag. Right. It made me think about the fact that 2001 and the cleanliness and sort of open spaces and the largeness, the scale of everything in that film is turned on its head here. So they're very, very narrow hallways which are extremely intestinal looking. And it's an odd contrast because they're in space. Right. So space is lim. And yet everything that they are in is extremely enclosed and claustrophobic. The helmets that you're on, you know, it's an irony that when you're out in space, you know, you're sort of trapped in this glass helmet with just your own breathing. And in fact, over the soundtrack, very often in this film we just hear breathing of main characters who are either out in a spaceship or breathing heavily because they're running from the alien or scared or something. So of course a theme of the film is going to be, you know, the inability to breathe and the fact that the alien gestates in the lungs, which I think is an important distinction from the stomach in a lot of ways. But that closed off and that feeling of being gagged, it seems to symbolize the sort of the limits, the very closed off parameters of the mission in a certain way. And the sort of working class nature of the mission that they're undertaking and the fact that the company is probably trying to cut costs as much as possible and all of that. Whereas in 2001 it's sort of a more positive, at least in terms of the style of the spaceship, a more positive and open and perhaps wealthy view of space exploration.
12:39 Wes: Yeah, I think a lot of that is deliberate with the whole feeling that there's cost cutting going on. Right. So Ridley Scott wanted like a retro aspect to some of this where the. The computer looks really unsophisticated. Right. It looks like it's like DOS booting up.
12:55 Erin: And yet you can ask it idiomatic questions and it'll know the answer. If you say like, what's the issue, Mother?
13:02 Wes: Yeah. What's the story about this?
13:03 Erin: What's the story? Yeah, yeah.
13:05 Wes: So this is one of the interesting things about technology, which is that it can serve as a kind of artificial Womb in this circumstance, right. This is what is being conveyed to us very explicitly. And even though we're not on the spaceship, we can think of our own lives in the same way. So there's a sort of threat. The threat of technology is highlighted from the beginning. And it's a threat that applies to all of us, which is just that it can infantilize us, it can be a surrogate. We're all familiar because of our smartphones with the way in which it can kind of hijack and replace actual human interaction, actual human intimacy. There's the same sort of threat going on with the ship, but it's accentuated. And the threat is that everyone depends on Mother for their lives. They're in a artificial life sustaining environment, a kind of womb. And the question is whether the mother, their quote unquote technological mother, is a good mother, whether she is going to actually protect them. And of course she doesn't. Right. I love the line. Mothers interrupted the course of our journey near the very beginning. Right? So that's when, you know, Dallas goes and finds out what's going on. So Mother, instead of performing her protective role, she sidetracks them to do this dangerous mission which. Right. Runs against their commercial interest and runs against the, the imperative to simply be safe. It's more libidinal in a way, even though it's sublimated, it's more about the desire to explore and to investigate. And it's important that the, you know, the object of investigation here is intelligent alien life, specifically. That's the interesting clause, right, that the company has in its contract which says if there's indications of that, then you have to stop and investigate. And what I think is interesting about that is that there's kind of a relationship between that and motherhood in the sense that the search for intelligent life beyond Earth in a way is a search for our origins. What's so fascinating about it is we're really looking to find siblings, right? You know what's fascinating about that is because we want to compare and contrast on where they came from. And also what's the possible variability in form, right? Are they going to be humanoid? Are they going to look like one of those kind of Spielberg aliens with the big eyes, a kind of infant look? Are they going to be benevolent? Are they going to be evil? In this case, of course, you could go the other route and say they have this monstrous insect like form. But I think ultimately, and I don't know, let me know if you think this is right. I think ultimately this has Something to do with seeking out our origins. Right. Arguably, even the scientific impulse has something to do in general, I think, with seeking out one's origins, which is to say one's maternal origins, one's formative influences. But ultimately that has a lot to do with sex as well. Right. So sex is the. In one sense, the origin just is sex. So you have all those things tied together. And I think that, in a way, is part of the meaning of Mother's diversion of them. She prompts them into an investigation of the maternal in a way, or a direct confrontation with the maternal.
16:52 Erin: Yeah. And what you're saying is really illuminating Ash's particular interest in the alien, not just on a scientific level, but as a kind of search for his own origin, as I think is exactly common theme for Ridley Scott. Blade Runner, for instance, or the Android that is maybe embittered by the fact that he has no parentage.
17:12 Erin: Or that his parentage is a company and he's just a corporate shill.
17:17 Wes: That's a good way. I like that way of putting it. Yeah.
17:19 Erin: But I like what you say, too, about the search for siblings. Because one of the things that I've always known about this film is that originally the plan was that it was going to have a lot of graphic sex in it. Because there was a plotline at one point of first of all, of Dallas and Ripley having a relationship. There was also the idea that Ridley Scott wanted to put in that he was toying with, that it would be a sort of like post sex as a dirty thing or sex as a private thing kind of a world. So he envisioned that people would be having sex with each other very casually. I wouldn't like that personally, for reasons I've already explained in other. In other episodes. But I also. Because I'm a prude. Not really. But also I think that the squabbling siblings thing is happening on the ship. Right. They're all in the womb together. And I think the only one who wouldn't be on the sibling level per se is Dallas, in a way. Dallas is the ship, is the mother, Dallas is the father. Right. When he goes in for his special transmission that he's going to receive from Mother. It's like the parents having a conversation in the other room and the siblings are all squabbling with each other over upstairs, downstairs types of concerns. So it's almost like there are the favored children or the natural children and then the sort of two stepchildren who are of a lower order because they get lower pay and they're doing menial labor. And so the ways in which I think Dallas is a bad father stuck out to me this time. So he, like Mother, is also willing to risk his crew. We may think that he's doing that for the right reasons, but I think there's a pervading theme here of programming or following protocol as a means to save life and also disobeying it as a means to save life. And where exactly the film falls on that one side or the other, I'm not quite sure. There's something here about this. This mixture of parentage and protocol and how following Mother's designated protocol leads them to a lack of safety. But also when Dallas tries to actually save a crew member, his disobeying protocol also results in very, very bad effects for everybody.
19:41 Wes: Yeah, well, there's an obvious representative of protocol and following the safeguarding quarantine, and that is Ripley. So she is the one who.
19:53 Erin: She's the hall monitor of the ship.
19:54 Wes: Yes. Yeah. And so. And Dallas should be that. Right? That would be. If he were really fulfilling his role as a father figure, he would be doing that. Instead, he's just a pushover, and he's not a real leader. She's the only one on the ship who turns out to be a real leader and in a way, a real individual, which we can discuss what that means later. So, yeah, when they try to bring in Cain, she's the one who tries to keep him out for quarantine purposes. And Ash ends up letting Cain in. And, you know, she has that great fight with Ash over all of that about protocol and Ash violating quarantine. And also about the fact that when Dallas and Kane are off the ship, she's the third officer, so she becomes the senior officer, tells him, you forgot the science division, basic quarantine law. And when Ash says, that's a risk I was willing to take to save Cain, she says, that's a pretty big risk for a science officer. It's not exactly out of the manual, is it? Is it? And then he has to say that he takes his responsibilities as seriously as she does. There's an irony to this, right? Which is he's the Android. You would think he would be the one kind of wedded to the rules and not able to kind of deviate. But he's doing all this perverse evasion of the rules because he has a fascination with, I think, as you pointed out, with origins. He has a very strong scientific instinct, and that kind of rationality I think we would associate with an Android. But it's not always obvious to us that that impulse to investigate could be, like I said, something motivated by a seeking of origins. It could be perverse, it could be a qu. A sexual quality to it. In this case, Ash is his origins are actually technological. So whereas the mothership and technology in general is sort of an artificial womb or an artificial life sustaining environment for people, that's all Ash has. There is no real mother for him. And his formation is direct and it's sudden. Right? So for most of us, we have, in the development of identities, we were born. Let's start from the beginning. We're born, we have a very close relationship to a mother who helps us build a mind, helps us build self consciousness. And part of the way she does that is through what psychologists call mirroring through interactions with an infant which allow the infant to recognize itself in the mother and the fact that it has a mind through the mother and to develop a theory of mind and the ability to use language and all that stuff. And we go on to develop identifications with others. We become who we are by identification with the other, which is to say the alien. And by returning to ourselves out of that identification, there's a return trip which hopefully is not interrupted in the way the return trip of the, of the Nostromo is interrupted in this movie. So yeah, in other words, you know, we're subjected, we grow up, we're raised up, we're subjected to all these sorts of influences. But there's still some sense that there is a kind of relatedness to our origins without being swallowed up and destroyed by them and robbed of any individuality and autonomy by them. And that's something that Ash just does not have. He's programmed. Right? And that's the predicament. If your origins are simply to be programmed, to be created by fiat, instead of the kind of dynamic dialectical development of one's own identity in relationship to the other. I think that that's the predicament and that's the kind of really fascinating compulsion for him, right. To solve that predicament by seeking out this alien, come what may, no matter how much it endangers the ship, it's a risk he's willing to take because there's no risk that's too great to take for someone who's basically an orphan if you want to find a parent.
24:14 Erin: Right. What I was trying to say before I sort of sidetracked myself, is that if we can view all these people in the womb as siblings, with Dallas being maybe the exception, as the father figure. All of that casual sex would be kind of disturbing and problematic on a sort of thematic level, but also it would, I think, undercut the intrusion of the sex of the sexual.
24:36 Erin: Which is represented on, on the one hand, by the alien, but on the other hand, I think by Ash. He also represents this kind of sexual intrusion because of his preoccupation with origins, as you say. So he is also, I think, an exception to this sibling rule. Right, because he's an orphan.
24:54 Wes: Yeah, he's. He's pervers because he. To be perverse is to ignore the rules to some extent or to play around with them. There's some sense of titillation. He has that quality as a character, even though he's an Android. And there's some relationship between his scientific curiosity and his interest in origins and his perversity, but. Sorry, go ahead.
25:13 Erin: Yeah. One of the things that people do think is maybe unnecessarily titillating or something that did make it into the movie is Ripley in her underwear at the end of the film. But based on what you're saying about this idea of the individual having a return journey, it makes sense to me anyway. Maybe some of the camera work is a little bit exploitative, but it makes sense that since you are arguing that Ripley is the only individual, that she would be the one who successfully navigates the return journey and would end up where the film begins. Right. In her underwear, going back into the womb. Am I getting that right?
25:46 Wes: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think I haven't thought a lot about the whole underwear thing at the end. I think in the other films. Right. That just becomes a self referential trope. Right. Where she's constantly in her underwear. Do I remember that right?
25:58 Erin: It's very different, I think, in Aliens because at the end she's going into hypersleep and there's also the little girl that she's like, sort of comforting. So it's very different in the end of this film. I think it is more sexualized because we're seeing her from the perspective of the alien.
26:16 Wes: But isn't she running around in her underwear in the Aliens film?
26:19 Erin: No, no, not that I remember. I don't think so.
26:22 Wes: All right, well, it's just my imagination. Yeah.
26:25 Erin: Just being transplanted. I just wonder how she could do anything in the underwear she wears at the end of Alien, or is apparently wearing the whole time if it's underneath her clothes. Because that is just the worst fitting pair of panties I have ever seen.
26:38 Wes: I know, I was about to say that it is pretty ill. Ill fitting,'70s style panties. Yeah, well, so I see Ripley as actually the real mother in all of this. She plays a maternal role. Could say she might be father as well, but she does what mother is supposed to do, which is she protects everyone and she takes charge. She has a plan. She wants to follow protocol, she wants to follow the rules. In contrast to Ash's perversity because it's safer. She wants to establish boundaries and all that stuff. And she's surrounded by people who are very passive. You know, I thought Dallas is kind of a mama's boy in a way, and Ash is kind of a mama's boy. And then everyone else in their own way, is a pretty passive figure. Lambert is the worst. Right? Just constantly crying and bitching.
27:32 Erin: That's the thankless part.
27:34 Wes: What's the name of the.
27:35 Erin: Veronica Cartwright.
27:38 Wes: Yeah, she didn't want to take that role because she did not like the character. And Ridley Scott convinced her to take it by saying, you are. You represent the audience. You're the audience's fears. But, you know, really none of the other characters other than Ripley comes across very well. Parker and Brett are acquisitive and they are in the role of, you know, as you pointed out, the lower class. And they belong to the lower levels of the ship in the engine room, and they don't get paid as much. And they want their. They want to advocate for full shares. So there's a level of self interest there and impulsivity. And then you have Dallas, who's not much of a leader and too passive. Lambert, who's just hysterical all the time. I don't know. We'll have to talk about what you do with Cain. And then, of course, Ash is a whole other story, in a way, is just an outsider. I would call him a step sibling, except that I'm not sure how that's gonna fit with my other comparison, which is that I. I wanna say that mother, in a way is like a stepmother or a witch. So she's not the real mother. And in a way, witches or stepmothers and fairy tales are. They're a variation on mother. They're the bad mother. So I think, yeah, the mother, the mothership mother is kind of plays that role as stepmother and witch. And, you know, you could think of the ship members as Hansel and Gretel, in a way, lost and getting diverted into a situation in which they are going to be devoured by the mother, so to speak. We can talk about why I would take the alien is to some extent, the representative not just of sex, but of the mother. What do you think about that comparison of mother to the stepmother or witch? Because in a way, that's what. Right. The technology as mother. There's a magical element to that. And it's not a real mother, it's stepmother. It's technology.
29:38 Erin: And it also implies the loss of the original mother. And one of the things that is so curious and I think great about this film is that the characters have no backstory. So it's as if they're born into a situation in which they have a stepmother. And, I mean, in the case of Ash, really, he's the only one whose backstory is kind of implied in a way. Right. Or whose backstory we can guess more readily than others by being a creature of the company.
30:05 Wes: I wrote down in my notes that I got a little bit of the vibe of Thelma and Louise.
30:10 Wes: Yeah. In the sense that, as I put it on our Thelma and Louise episode I kind of thought that, strangely enough, the FBI and the police were really in the role of orphans and Thelma and Louise, in a way, in the role of surrogate parents. And that same, you know, the search that they're doing, in a way, is a similar journey to what Ash is on. That's a curiosity about finding something that has to do with the maternal. But at some point I thought, yeah, it feels like everyone but Ripley is kind of an orphan and Ripley is the one that ends up being the real mother figure trying to protect them from the monster.
30:52 Erin: That's really good. I never thought of that. How can we then tie in the fact that the orphaned police officers are then killed off one by one?
31:01 Wes: Yeah, I don't know how to keep going with that comparison, except describe the feeling there. There's something very Ridley Scott about it. You know, he's not just telling stories about strong women. There's something else going on that's more interesting. How about I get in trouble with that?
31:16 Erin: But, yeah, I meant it kind of not. Not being able to make a comparison. But also, in a way, you know, Thelma and Louise, by killing themselves at the end kind of also kill everybody else that's been pursuing them or mean to them or whatever. You know, by foreclosing other possibilities. So in a way, sort of a similar thing happens. Either they all die or the female heroine dies. I really love the shots too. And this kind of bolsters our children idea of Lambert, Kane and Dallas on the. Did you call it a planetoid? Is it a smaller Planet. It's like a moon.
31:50 Wes: I'm calling it that, I think, because that's what it's called in the script.
31:53 Erin: Maybe it's a cooler word than just planet. I like it when they're going onto the platform with the space jockey and they're dwarfed by the giant space jockey. They look like little kids. And I know they, in fact, had children in those suits for some of the long shots.
32:11 Erin: And the kids kept passing out and the actors kept passing out because it was so hot.
32:17 Wes: Yeah. Eventually they got a way to get air into those suits. But, yeah, people kept passing out and then they're super hot and no air.
32:25 Erin: It's hilarious.
32:26 Wes: That is something, though, the space jockey doesn't. It's quite original in a way. He seems so huge. He's kind of welded into the chair. And it's hard to, even in the beginning, tell exactly what it is for me. Like, what is that? This is Hans Giger's, you know, probably his biggest contribution to the film.
32:43 Erin: Yeah. And it's 26ft tall as Amazon Prime. Those little video trivia in video trivia things tells me, and I know that this was used as the shot in the film that made people know this wasn't just a B movie. This is a movie with, like, vision and imagination and a large budget.
33:04 Erin: I like the fact that this is so big. And of course, I'm. You know, it's so incredible looking. I'm glad it made its way into the film and the studio agreed to budget for it. But you do get this sense maybe that the now they've sort of broken out of the womb, in a way. And so the architecture of the ship, as I talked about being, you know, very enclosed and confining, is sort of extended, as I said, into these space suits. So you get them touching down on this planetoid and you get sometimes just their own transmissions to Ash, which keep cutting out, which, again, is kind of like almost like they're being gagged in a different kind of way because they can't get their message across. Ash can't hear them speaking, and we hear their breathing in the soundtrack. But then they go into this place that does seem more like proper space. You know, like limitless space, cavernous and open.
33:56 Wes: And this is a very different concept for what a spaceship could be.
34:00 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And this is the place where there's another kind of gestation going on. There are all these eggs. And so I think there's also something to this idea of the sexuality that the alien represents. Is this open, limitless, sort of terrifying space that then invades the closed off human space. But then at the same time it causes this gagged quality, right, this choking quality as a result of using the humans for the gestation of its own species. I haven't quite worked that out yet, but it seems like it's an important sort of doubling.
34:36 Wes: Yeah, that's very good. It took me a while to cobble together a theory of how this all fits together with mother and then the alien as sex or whatever it is. But I think a good place to begin is just the fact that the writers were really excited by this idea, right? This is sort of the, the central idea of the film which they thought was, was innovative and would help get it made or really was something quite original. Was the. I think what they were looking for was it was kind of a technical problem of like how, how do you get the alien on the ship in an interesting way. And then this idea occurred having to do with basically male rape, I think is the way one of the writers puts it, and male impregnation. But that idea was, was exciting to them. This is the idea that. And it's also interesting, right, that it's the thing doing the impregnating comes out of an egg. And this isn't far fetched, right? So you, like, there are wasps who lay their eggs and you know, they'll paralyze a tarantula or some other organism and lay their eggs inside them. And the, the tarantula lives and is gradually eaten by the larvae even though it's alive. So this whole idea of impregnation, like a second impregnation that is kind of a form of parasitism to complete gestation, that's something that occurs in nature. But it's an interesting paradox in this case, right, because the egg impregnates. It's almost as if the offspring becomes the impregnator or as, or as if the mother, you know, you could even say indirectly that it's the mother who's doing the impregnating and in this case impregnating a male or you know, perhaps even the father, so to speak. So I want to pause here to talk about our sponsor, betterhelp.com that's H E L P. But I'm not podcasting. I actually work in mental health and I happen to be a therapist and I know how hard it is for people to find a good therapist and what a difficult process that is. And then how hard it is for people to actually get to appointments in the middle of their day. BetterHelp.com is a site that will match you with a licensed professional counselor, someone that you can connect with in a safe and private online environment. One of the nice things about BetterHelp is that you can start communicating with a therapist quickly in under 48 hours. That is not typically the case if you're trying to find a therapist by calling numbers for providers listed on your health insurance website. You can schedule weekly video or phone sessions. You can also message your counselor anytime and get timely and thoughtful responses from them. The site is designed to help find a good therapeutic match, so it's easy and free to change counselors if needed. It's also more affordable than traditional offline counseling. Financial aid is available and the service is available to clients worldwide. So if there's been something preventing you from achieving your goals or something interfering with your happiness, you can go to betterhelp.com subtext as a listener. You'll get 10% off your first month. Join over 1 million people who have taken charge of their mental health. Again, that's BetterHelp. H E L p.com subtext okay, back to the show.
37:48 Erin: Well, and the. The whole transmission that gets them there is interesting because I thought of it as being kind of a seduction. It's an SOS that gets them to come in, but then it's. It turns out that it's a warning. So maybe this doesn't really hold up, but it's kind of like Fatal Attraction. This egg, facehugger, Alien Planet, whole deal turns out to be like a very bad girlfriend. Let's get into this moment of the face hugger because I think it's this moment and the chest burster both bear close reading.
38:18 Wes: Yeah, the chest bursting was the other thing that excited the writers and I think probably got to the audience, you know. But yeah, the two things that really make it a classic.
38:27 Erin: Yeah, one of the things I noticed when, when Cain is lowered down into the cave with that blue mist on the bottom his. His head and the helmet with the light on it, it almost looks like an egg before we see the actual eggs. And so he gets down and the eggs are leathery, which is so wrong. So much about this is so wrong. He slips and falls into the egg pit. But still we really haven't seen the eggs. They're sort of shadowy and hard to make out. And then finally we get this light on one egg and the close up of this slimy opening, which is a really cool effect that Ridley Scott did where he Filmed it upside down, so the slime seems to be dripping up. And this is the moment where I hadn't seen this since college. And then about three years ago, I was watching with my younger siblings and with my sister, it was okay because she was older, but I was kind of hoping that, that my brother would just, you know, I just started to get embarrassed because the imagery in this, I was like, wow, this is way more sexual than I remembered. Anyway, it is very bizarre looking and there's. There's this organic bulbous, pulsating mass that's inside of the egg. And I think it's important that they used all organic animal material to compose these things.
39:45 Wes: Sheep innards and Ridley Scott's hands in there moving stuff around.
39:51 Erin: Yeah, yeah. It's perfect that the technology of this quote unquote, is even literally made, for the purposes of the film, out of organic material. So there's this clash between this sort of bulbous, pulsating organic material on the one hand and the ship and all of that sort of man made technology on the other hand. And then we get this, the facehugger bursting out, screeching onto Cain's helmet. And it actually smashes through the glass, of course, and attaches to his face. That I think is also really important symbolically that it breaks through the mechanism that's been keeping him enclosed and away from this large space that I've been talking about and literally punctures through the mechanism that keeps him enclosed in small scale space.
40:38 Wes: Yeah, that's very interesting. Part of the relationship of this to sex is, is just that. And the writers, they, they. I think this was explicitly intended, as far as I can tell from the making of documentary, you have these kind of vaginal orifices that produce phalluses. Right. In the case of both the egg with the face hugger, basically not only jumping onto the face, but inserting a tube down the throat or I guess into the lungs. I didn't know that. Is that right? And it's also an umbilical cord, of course. Right. So it feeds him, paralyzes him, puts him in a coma, feeds him oxygen, keeps him alive. And you know, you get the same sort of thing later on with the alien itself with a, you know, with a mouth within the mouth, something that, that is phallic and punches out. So, you know, you think of the mouth as an orifice and then the phallus coming out of that. So all of this speaks to me of the mother in the position of doing the impregnating and just to get it related back thematically, I think it has something to do with the idea that when formative influences go wrong, it can have something to do with the intrusiveness of the mother and the fact that the way our identities develop in relation to not just a mother, but to others. Right. Is one of being penetrated or created on the spot, like ashes. Right. As opposed to being, you know, undergoing a more natural development in which there's some distance, there's some boundary, at least eventually. Right. There's separation and individuation. So in other words, what I'm saying is the alien is just the overbearing mother. The alien and also the egg or the larval form within the egg is the maternal as something intrusive or what psychoanalysts might call the bad mother. So I'm not sure how is that related to what you're just saying. You were pointing to the fact that the closed space of the helmet and the other confined space of the ship and the artificial mother technology gets invaded by the open space, which has something to do with the organic, something to do with life. On one level, you could think of this not just as the revenge of the mother, but as the revenge of nature. Right. This Nostromo is an allusion to Conrad. And there's a speech that we'll talk about from Ash, which is something that sounds straight out of the Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now. It's kind of Ash's, Kurt's moment. But, yeah, it seems to be the idea that the invasion of technology into the natural, the way in which it compromises the natural, is something that's being punished by life.
43:20 Erin: I love the look of this face hugger, because with this sort of. What are the claws?
43:26 Erin: Yeah. It's literally like a hand over the mouth. So that kind of bears out your sort of mother, overbearing mother thing. Quieting a child or something like that.
43:36 Wes: Very good. I hadn't thought of that.
43:38 Erin: But also, this is where we first get this idea that the alien is a more advanced form of technology than the technology that they're on the spaceship. Because it's like a helmet, it becomes another helmet. It's a face mask that is able to sustain Kane and has this really advanced form of technology to be able to keep him in stasis. So in a kind of a.
43:58 Wes: It looks almost like a fighter pilot's mask in a way, too.
44:01 Erin: Yeah, it does. It does. And what's really interesting, too, is that while Dallas and Ash are tending to him, they're also Wearing masks, you know, to try and protect themselves. So they go into the infirmary with the masks on. And of course it's all just. You could read all of this. It's just a metaphor for everything that's been going on with COVID and quarantine and violations of quarantine. But it's funny because they have these sort of flimsy masks on. Fine. For the purposes of. They don't know what this is and they could catch something through the air. But of course, what we know about the alien is that a helmet couldn't keep it out. And so these, these masks and the sort of flimsy nature of them in comparison to the hand over the face, kind of a visual representation of the inability of this human technology to stand up to this more advanced alien technology.
44:47 Wes: Yeah, And I think that's, that's very good to relate the kind of the biology of the alien to something technological, which is part of the artistic concept. Right. I mean, even the moray eel inner jaw mouth thing kind of looks like it's got a chrome like finish to me at certain parts. And you wonder is this like a. Obviously can't be, you know, as I say, it seems like it is this kind of a hybrid of. Of machine and beast. Can't be. Right. Because it's grown up on the ship very rapidly. Unless it's eaten part of the ship, furnished itself, you know, unless that's part of the way it grows, you know, is to take in pieces of the ship. Yeah, it's interesting to think about that. Notably, it grows up entirely without having to eat anyone, so.
45:35 Erin: Oh, that's right. That's right.
45:36 Wes: Having to feed. Exactly.
45:37 Erin: So but it does, it does eat the ship. Right? Its blood eats the ship.
45:42 Wes: Right, right, good point. And there's something about it, you know, it's got that insect like quality which bad aliens often have. I wondered a little bit about what that means. Why do bad aliens look like bugs often? And I think there's something about the way in which death and life get scrambled up in that, you know, the bones are on the outside, like the exterior shell, as opposed to having bones on the inside. And evocation of parasitism and lack of individuality, social colonies of insects and sort of enhanced feeling of sociopathy that I think you get with the behavior of insects. So I say enhanced because your cat is a sociopath as well. Even though it's cuddly. But you get a sense in which there's a reduction of biology to something inanimate or something that is like an automaton. So I think there's a direct connection to technology and to what it is that acts. Ash is, you know, the alien, in a way, is his true sibling, his kindred spirit or mother, perhaps.
46:49 Erin: That's interesting. I never thought of that before. I think also with the insect thing, the exoskeleton, and also like slime, for instance, you know, sliminess as being a hallmark of sci fi are both insect hallmarks or slug. Slug type hallmarks, Mollusk hallmarks.
47:06 Wes: Apparently they went through an enormous amount of KY jelly.
47:09 Erin: Yes, I read that documentary.
47:11 Wes: Just slathering it on.
47:12 Erin: But yeah, Veronica Cartwright, if I remember correctly, gets hysterical over that. In a way. What you're describing is like the sick thing is that the outsides are inside and the insides are outside. So that's what the chestburster does. Right. It exposes the innards of Cain, as does Parker's hitting Ash expose his gross innards. I don't know what that means necessarily, but just the insides being outside is what makes things so horrible. And that could be in gore, with slasher films and seeing a lot of blood, or it could be this insect slime type thing. And I think maybe that has to do with seeing ourselves as creatures is disturbing. As biological organisms and things that are sustained by these skeletons and whatever. Slime, mucus, sorry. If people are eating blood, all of that is disturbing when we're confronted with it. So the fact that some animals wear that nakedly makes them more disturbing.
48:12 Wes: Yeah, that's an excellent point. You're making me think of the issue of boundaries again, because something like mucus, for instance, it's something that in a way is part of our bodies. Right. But it isn't. So it is kind of in this boundary violating position. This is something that the philosopher and psychoanalyst Kristeva writes about in her theory of the abject. This idea of what disgusts us is often this kind of boundary area between self and other. So mucus, for instance, or feces. Right. Something that was part of our body but isn't anymore. These are the sorts of things that we feel disgust towards because they are evocative of a lack of individuation, a lack of a real boundary between us and the environment, but ultimately between us and mother. Right. Because at some point we are just the same as mother. We are her body and gradually become distinct from her body and then separate through birth and then have to go undergo a. A rigorous course of psychological separation. This gets us back to the. The idea of an overwhelming phallic mother who doesn't let that individuation happen fully and compromises the child to some extent. And there's something incestuous about that, which is the other aspect here of what is disgusting or overly merging about that. And so I think this invasive and slime covered insecty alien really is evocative of all that, of the boundary violation thing.
49:54 Erin: Well, the fascination that Ash takes when he's looking through the MRI screens and scans of Kane, in fact, when he's watching those scans, in that moment when Ripley comes up behind him and asks him what he's doing. And Ripley does take an interest in everything that's going on on the ship. I love when Parker and Brett are complaining that none of the upstairs people ever come down. And then when Ripley comes down, they're like, what the hell is she doing here? Like, yeah, there's no pleasing them.
50:23 Wes: And then they're talking about their shares and she's like, you'll get what's coming to you.
50:27 Erin: Right, right, Dun, dun, dun. Yeah, yeah, I noted that line too.
50:32 Wes: I think she gets into an argument with everyone on the ship at some point, but we can get that, come back to that.
50:36 Erin: But yeah, yeah. Well, I wanted to also talk about just the level of aggression towards her. It's almost like she's the alien. I don't know know if you notice that, but when. Especially with Ash. So when Ripley comes up behind him, Ash jumps as he's looking at these MRI scans and it's almost like he's watching a dirty movie in the middle of the night or something. You know, he's been caught.
50:57 Erin: He looks in the microscope and he doesn't want her to look in the microscope. He seems very annoyed by her and he's the most annoyed and disturbed by her, which I think makes sense, but so is everyone else on the ship. It just really stuck out to me this time as never before how aggressive everyone is towards her. And I don't know if that's because she seems to be the only. I know in real life. She and Veronica Cartwright were the same age, but with Cartwright's haircut, she doesn't seem to be filling the role of this sort of nubile female that Ripley is supposed to be, I assume supposed to be filling and does fill. So I don't know if she's supposed to be this sexual competition for Lambert and if the other people on the ship have a certain aggression towards her as an attractive female. And of course specifically what that would mean for Ash, who is I think the most preoccupied, as we said, with origin and perhaps with sex. I don't know. I'm throwing a lot of things at the wall.
51:52 Wes: On my view, maybe this is, you know, stop me if I'm becoming too repetitive and simplistic about this, but I see her as the real mother in this situation. So she attracts testing behavior, infantile behavior, from people who are. Understand that she can contain their aggression and that she can do something with it. It's the same thing as being a leader, too. So she's naturally a leader. So I think that's, in a way, what motivates the aggression, which in children is an attempt to individuate. And what's going on, I think, is that the mothership, the technological surrogate mother, it's infantilizing. They're dependent on it. They're in a big womb, they're regressed. And she is kind of a maternal lightning rod in the sense that she's attracting her individuality, is attracting the attention of people who are. Who are looking for their own individuality through her or, you know, through her possible maternal interventions, which she is very good at every step of the way. I mean, it's funny, you know, you talk about all this aggression towards her. That's even. Even with Lambert at the very beginning. Ripley says, this is not our system. It's almost like Lambert gets irritated, like she's being told something that's obvious and that she knows. And she's like, I know, right? I don't know if you remember that. Very smartly done in the movie. They make sure that everyone gets into it with her at some point. The scene with Parker and Brett, the conflict with Dallas, you know, where she calls him out for letting Ash make the decision to bring the alien back with them, to bring it home, which he sees as reckless. And above all, of course, getting into it with Ash. You're talking about that great scene, and I call it the science room. I don't know exactly what it is, but laboratory. The laboratory. That's what a science room is, I think. She asks how Cain is, and he says he's holding. And she says, and your guess? Something like that. And he uses that wonderful phrase, you know, still collating.
53:59 Wes: Which is a nice clue to what he really is. I didn't know he was an Android. I knew there was an Android in Aliens, but I completely forgotten that he was an Android in the movie. And at that point I'm thinking, oh, wait a minute, is he an Android? So very good.
54:13 Erin: There's a Deleted scene where Lambert and Ripley discuss. I think Ripley asks Lambert whether or not she slept with Ash and if she noticed anything weird about him. Interesting, because Ripley, I guess, is. She's picking up on how the ways in which he is odd and not quite human, even before he sort of goes haywire, which we'll talk about.
54:31 Wes: Oh, no, nothing weird. Just. Except for the mechanical penis.
54:36 Erin: But she explicitly asked Lambert and Lambert says, yeah, I didn't think he was ever interested. And they both laugh about it. It's like this nervous laughter. Cause it's while the alien is on the ship and they're both nervous, so they kind of have this weird bonding moment. But I think that probably is a.
54:50 Wes: Ash is an incel. Oh God, poor Ash. He's just a big nerd, basically.
54:58 Erin: It's a relic, I think, of the whole everyone is sleeping with everyone concept. Or at least it admits that possibility,
55:05 Wes: which you're right, would have entirely messed up the movie because sex is part of the threat.
55:09 Erin: Right. So you're seeing Ripley as more of a mother? I'm seeing her as more of a sexual object for the crew. Which would align her with the alien, perhaps.
55:19 Wes: Well, Freud would say mother is the original sexual object.
55:22 Erin: Right, Right. Well, yeah. Ew.
55:26 Wes: In the broad sense of sexual.
55:27 Erin: But like, because she's abroad, I get it.
55:31 Wes: I don't think.
55:35 Erin: Okay, so I guess the two things aren't. Aren't.
55:38 Wes: Well, no, I think you are. You are bringing out a contrast. I mean. Yeah, I mean, it didn't strike me that she was much of a sexual object for the crew.
55:47 Erin: Well, that's just where I thought the aggression was coming from. Since she's the only likely candidate and they're all on this ship in the middle of nowhere. I kind of attributed the aggression to that. But I like the fact that you're actually saying that it's related to her being a mother and a leader. And therefore it's a kind of a boundary testing, which I think works really well.
56:07 Wes: Well, I think those two things can go together because it is a really odd feature of the movie. It's one thing to go to one extreme and say everyone is having sex with each other, but it's another to go to the other and sort of suck sex out of the atmosphere of the ship. Right. Which it is quite asexual. There's one scene where Parker makes some sexual joke and Lambert is really by that right before Cain has the chest bursting moment. But other than that, there's not a lot of. I can't think of Any explicit sexual tension or banter. So I would say her maternality has something to do with that, but also the mother. Mother in general, the effect of the technological, artificial mother on. On everyone. And then, yeah, aggression is the way whatever sexual desire there is for Ripley, which inevitably, of course, there is, is going to come out as aggression. It's just been kind of repressed and redirected.
57:09 Erin: I guess, for me, it was a question of whether or not it was. It was completely devoid of sex or if it was, you know, like. Like you say repressed and coming out as aggression. And I suppose I read the repression very strongly in Ash's behavior when he goes haywire. So his preoccupation with sex and then his aggression towards her in light of that sort of. Same type of alien, sort of metaphoric rape that he perpetrates against Ripley, I see that as building throughout the entire film, that moment, because of his incredible anger towards her.
57:44 Wes: Yeah. She again, wants to enforce quarantines and protocols and to do things by the book and keep things safe. And he wants what he wants, which is the alien, Whatever kind of mother that represents. Or sex. Maybe you can even read it as his being cut off from sexuality and needing to find it in some very, very basic concrete form or represented in a way. Right. With this thing that's covered in ky jelly, ultimately. But anyway, yeah, his interest in discovering his origins, and she is not about that. So, yeah, as you pointed out in the laboratory, he's already irritated with her. She's like, ripley is. What is that? I forget what she's saying that about. And he's like, please don't do that. Yeah, he's getting very irritated by her curiosity and by just her interference. And then. And then, of course, she does read him the riot act there, so. Right.
58:42 Erin: But he also. She's just very smart. She knows that he must be playing some kind of game and that he's too invested in this alien from the beginning. So, like the instance with a cattle prod and then the tracking device when they start the search for the alien and Ash has this tracking device and Ripley's like, whoa, what is it? Key off. And he very, like, he's so annoyed, and he says, micro changes in air density. You know, this is really. And she later kind of like rolls her eyes and says, like, oh, micro changes in air density. Like, she knows he's full of it. Or perhaps I'm reading that moment wrong. And maybe, you know, she just. She just knows, I think, that he doesn't have the right Motivations. And so she's. She's reading him correctly. And so maybe his aggression is particularly directed toward her. Not in this way that I'm thinking. Well, I think it's. Obviously we're saying that it could be all of these things together, all of these different readings, but also as the one who he is seen by for what he is, so he can't pass as a human somehow in front of her because she is too perceptive.
59:44 Wes: Yeah, that's good. She is onto him.
59:47 Erin: I don't know if you feel this way. And it could be because the initial shock of the look of the alien is lost on us because we didn't see it when it came out and it's been around for a while. But for me, the creepiest moment in the movie, and the actual scariest moment in the movie by far, is when Ash comes into the room with Ripley after she's read the true message from Mother, the classified for science officers, eyes Only. Which reveals that Mother doesn't care about the crew. They just want to get the alien back. She doesn't care. And Ash sort of leans forward.
1:00:25 Wes: Yeah, it is creepy.
1:00:27 Erin: That is. I'm actually getting. I have goosebumps right now just thinking about that. He is so creepy.
1:00:32 Wes: There's an explanation for this, right? Yeah, I'm sure you can do the English accent better.
1:00:38 Erin: Well, as she attacks him, he just, like, stares at her creepily. But something is already kind of broken in him. I mean, we see that bleeding or sweat, whatever it is, of milk that comes down his forehead. But prior to that, by showing up in that creepy way while she's reading this, he's already. His mind is turned or his programming has turned already, where he goes a little haywire before that. So I kind of wonder what triggers his sort of breakdown. And then this sort of. Oh, my gosh. I'm actually getting creeped out right now because there are weird sounds in my apartment that my. I can't even talk about this without getting scared. Can you hear it?
1:01:22 Erin: Okay, I'm sure it's just someone in the hallway that my thing is picking up, but for a second, I almost thought I was going to look next to me and see him. Oh, he's so creepy. Okay, I don't know. You take it away. I've got to take a second.
1:01:35 Wes: So Ripley takes command. This is towards the ends of Act 2, although I thought it might be the beginning of Act 3, but anyway, I always try to section it out into acts, but they're in the conference room. Dallas is dead and Ripley is trying to get them to follow her plan. And actually, this is something really interesting from the making of documentary is that I think there is a lot of friction between Sigourney Weaver and the guy who plays Parker. There's a lot of friction between the Parker guy and everyone. He's Yaphet Kotto, you know, he did a lot of improvising and he kept running roughshod over her, even though it wasn't in the script, trying to get her to be more aggressive. And then so finally in the final take, you see her telling him to shut up, which is great. And it seems real because it is. I mean, it's such an authentic moment. And so, yeah, I love that. I love that moment where she takes charge and sort of comes into her own. What's going on is she says, you know, we gotta kill it. We can't just escape in the shuttle. We can't do anything else. We gotta actually kill it. And then she says to Ash, are there any suggestions from you or Mother? And he says, no, we're still collating. He uses that word again. And she's like, what? Still collating? I find that hard to believe. In her very Sigourney Weaver way of saying that I find that hard to believe. But he's like, what do you want? What would you like me to do? And she's like, just what you've been doing. Nothing so great. And then she says, I've got access to Mother now and I'll get my own answers. And so I think what's going on is, you know, as Ripley will point out later, Ash is in this to protect the alien. That's the only thing he cares about. And the idea that she's going to kill him is the problem. He has to stop her.
1:03:25 Erin: Maybe this is the moment that turns his brain because his incel mind has melted from being yelled at by a strong woman.
1:03:34 Wes: Exactly. And then he goes postal, tries to. I love the scenes with Mother in that circular room with the lights, you know, with the yellow lights. And then we gather from her interaction with Mother that she gives her emergency command override of this top secret thing. She finds out that the mandate is to investigate the life form at all costs and that the crew is expendable. And it's not long after that that we get that great. After Ash has been defeated, which is also a very creepy scene where he gets his head knocked off. Apparently in one of the screenings, someone fainted at that.
1:04:14 Erin: Oh, my gosh, I love those stories. That's awesome.
1:04:16 Wes: Someone just an usher. An usher just dropped when Ash got his head knocked off and people were leaving and vomiting. That's so great. Really interesting, interesting. But after he's been taken out, and then now he's being dissected, you know, so it's in the same position that the alien was in at a certain point, or the larval. The hand. Yeah. They revive him. They get information out of him, and he tells him a special order is to bring back the life form. And all other priorities are rescinded. What about our lives? I repeat, all other priorities are rescinded. And then they ask him how to kill it. And he's like, you can't. And then he says, in this very kind of gleeful way, you don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? It's perfect organism. It's structural perfection matched only by its hostility. And then Lambert says, you admire it. And he says, I admire its purity, survival unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. And that's the Heart of Darkness.
1:05:19 Erin: That's immediately what I thought of. I feel like everything we've been reading and watching since then has been Heart of Darkness related.
1:05:27 Wes: Yeah, yeah. It's in Heart of Darkness. It's in Apocalypse Now. It's in this movie. Very much lifted straight from the book.
1:05:33 Erin: It's perfect for sci fi.
1:05:35 Wes: Yeah. And puts Ash in the position of a Kurtz, I guess, in which he is, you know, what's going on here? He's an admirer of the primitive. In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz is supposed to kind of bring culture to the natives. And he's renowned for being a very intelligent, cultured person, and that's part of the whole colonial project, supposedly. And you get some parallel on Ash, Right, because he's an Android, a super intelligent, intelligent Android. You might think of him as just having a scientific curiosity about an intelligent alien life form. But instead, he goes native in a way, just like Kurtz. He instead of being the one to sort of conquer it through some sort of higher culture or through science, he's compromised by his admiration for it. And it seems like wants to, you know, wants to emulate it in a way, wants to become like it.
1:06:37 Erin: I feel like with each movie, it becomes more obvious that Ripley and the alien are like the same thing, or maybe they converge. But when Ash is able to attack Ripley, he shuts the door and traps her in the way that she trapped Dallas earlier in the film. It's almost as if he sees everything that goes On. On the ship. And he is learning. He's adapting behavior from the alien and he's also adapting behavior from Ripley or whoever else he might be watching. But we know that he repeats what the alien does and he repeats what Ripley does. Those are the only two.
1:07:07 Wes: And it's very poignant because you get the feeling that he, in a way, is a Pinocchio like figure who wants to become real, wants to become alive. And that as part of his affection for the alien as a representative of life, as the perfect organism, of course, he also admires the fact that it can't be destroyed, it seems like, or it's very hard to destroy it. The fact that there's a hostility to it, that it's remorseless, it has no conscience.
1:07:36 Erin: So he both wants life and he wants immortality is kind of what you're saying, too, or something artificially sustained. That was making me think, too, about the nature of technology and what technology actually means in regards to the organic and how the alien can be both sort of organic and highly technological. And in a way, I mean, the ultimate technology is or would be immortality, right? Or just sustaining life. And that's what the alien is so good at. You know, the fact that you can't kill it makes it, you know, it's like the cockroach that survives the nuclear apocalypse. You know, what is, what is the better organism? The human that dies immediately in the nuclear apocalypse or the cockroach that stays alive. And that seems to be a hallmark of what makes it so technologically sound is the way that it reproduces and sustains itself. So in a way, it's like the alien, by being technologically sound in that way, it's a bad mother. It's like a stepmother for the crew, but it's also a good mother in terms of. It's a good organism, it perpetuates itself and it's actual children, unlike the stepchildren of the crew members, it's actual children. Or in this case, the one child that we do see grow up is a well parented, I guess, little organism.
1:08:50 Wes: And I was thinking it doesn't need anything from the mother. It doesn't need any parenting right to be spawned. And then it can parasitically rely on its environment, which is important.
1:09:00 Erin: Yeah, I was thinking about the different expressions of sort of parentage in the film the Alien, as I just. We've already talked about Dallas as the poor father who lets in the invader the ship. Obviously, mother is not a very good mother. The company is like a poor parent. It's almost like.
1:09:16 Wes: Yeah, the company is the father.
1:09:17 Erin: It is. Yeah. And Dallas is a sort of poor surrogate father.
1:09:21 Erin: The company is almost like leaving the children to squabble over the inheritance. And then I wonder at the end when Ripley survives. It's like she's overcoming all of these bad parent figures to defeat evil. Like she's overcoming the bad mother. And in a way, she sort of like parents herself at the end because she sings that lullaby to soothe herself as she has the final showdown with the alien. I don't know if that's too much of a stretch.
1:09:44 Wes: Yeah. What is she singing?
1:09:46 Erin: Lucky star, you are my lucky star. It's not a lullaby quite. It's a song that a parent might sing to a child. It's like a sweet song. People who know Singin in the Rain will know the song that she sings to herself. So I don't know. Is that too much of a stretch? She reaches maturation, I suppose, when she becomes the leader of the ship.
1:10:04 Erin: Realizes her potential. But then in this final showdown, she's able to sort of. It's like she's Cinderella who's overcome the bad mother and is able to eject all of the sort of negative parental influences in a way, by being her own mother as a way of, you know, in the way that we all have part of our maturation.
1:10:22 Erin: To absorb that parental influence in our own thinking.
1:10:27 Wes: Exactly. Yeah. One of the things about her as a character is she is an individual from the very beginning of the film in the way the others aren't. She has not been. I think I see the others as compromised by technology ultimately as by the. The artificial mother that is technology, into being passive. And this is a very real, as I mentioned before, social issue with. With all of us. And it's becoming more and more. More and more of an acute issue. So they've been compromised and somehow she has not. She stands in a. You know, for technology to. For her is just a tool. And she's willing to have that confrontation with the mothership in the end. And even calls mother, you know, says, you bitch. I think because she can't stop the self destruct. Give herself a little more time.
1:11:12 Erin: Of course. An echo of the famous get away from her, you bitch. And aliens.
1:11:17 Wes: Yes. Where the whole mother thing becomes even more explicit.
1:11:22 Wes: So she's willing to take on this mother and the artificial womb environment and even destroy it. She's willing to destroy a kind of system that fosters dependency because she is an individual, even though she Does. I think, as you pointed out, she kind of grows and comes into her own and gets to a point where she essentially takes command of the ship. But she's assertive from the very beginning, willing to get into it with Parker and Red, willing to get into it with Ash with Dallas. She already has that quality. And at the very end, I think what's significant besides destroying Mother and the ship is that she is ready to complete that round trip, that return journey which I associate with individuation. Right. To go out to the other, to the alien. You know, our individuality is predicated on this relationship to the other and to the alien, which is to say it's one of identification is one of those processes where, especially in adolescence, right, we become individuals by creating these group identifications, ironically, outside of us, which might seem weird, right, because it's like we become individuals and particular people in part by becoming parts of different groups or internalizing them within us or internalizing the, you know, the maternal gaze earlier on, all of that stuff. But that's the round trip aspect of it. It's, you know, we have to, in some sense, to be individuals, return to ourselves out of those identifications, out of those interactions. And if we don't return, we don't become individuals. So I think there is a symbolic quality to her completing that trip. And yeah, you know, I hadn't thought about this, but her being able to soothe herself, right. She's got that internalized maternal function, being able to sing a lullaby to herself and take care of the cat and ultimately to survive. Right. Her ability to survive, it's not circumstantial, it's a product of her character.
1:13:33 Erin: And she does look like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White or whatever in that final shot of her sleeping peacefully in the pod. And then the dissolve to the stars is very in keeping with, I think, some of the points you're making.
1:13:45 Wes: Yep. All right, shall we leave her with the stars or do we want to cover anything else?
1:13:50 Erin: No, I think that's good.
1:13:51 Wes: All right, thank you, thank you. And thank you to everyone, everyone who listened to this episode. [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com Com.
