This essay discusses the ideological position of Ridley Scott's film Alien, arguing that the film is contradictory, inasmuch as it is both progressive and regressive in the way it interrogates and reproduces the values of science fiction and aspects of patriarchal and capitalist ideology. Inasmuch as science fiction is a diverse field, it suffices to acknowledge a general trend within science fiction as a departure point. During the first half of the twentieth century the increasing tendency towards global industrialization led to an increasing visibility of scientific and technological change during an individual life-span. This spurred great hopes, in some, that science and technology was an imminent cure-all for social inequality. The early science fiction texts certainly show some of this scientific optomism, but we can also see in them assumptions of technological determinism which led to speculative, even utopian, visualizations of a progressively more abundant and egalatarian future. This was usually founded on the assumption that what was human was universal and/or self-defining and that there was a natural relationship between humanity and science and technology. Science fiction assumed, then, that one of the functions of their writing was to prevent “future-shock” in the face of what was seen to be certain, progressive change. But science fiction soon found itself shocked by some of these changes. Historical developments such as the bombing of Hiroshima forced science to recognize some of its contradictions. How could science and technology be utopian if it allowed humans to cause such harm to one another? If science and technology were not consistent with humanity, what was the relationship between the two? This self-reflexivity filtered into some science fiction texts, which began to function not speculatively but heuristically to comment on present scientific and social organization. They thus provided what Darko Suvin calls cognitive estrangement, and worked to increase awareness of the ways in which culture mediated technology; this involved recognizing that science and technology had enabled the exploitative tendencies of our patriarchal, capitalist society to be more effectively and violently implemented. However while they interrogated traditional assumptions and were progressive in some of its central concerns, they often recuperated these traditional generic and ideological assumptioms in their closure. This, as I have already said, is the case with Alien .

Alien represents a vision of labour which is similar to capitalism in its present form: a labour of alienation in which many individuals work for a Company they do not know, understand, or deal with directly; a Company which considers them expendable in the face of material interests such as profit and increased power for defense and expansion. But the Company in Alien “represents capitalism in its most systemized, computerized, and dehumanizing form” (Newton 82). Its technology, “impressive but liable to malfunction,” is shown in opposition to the dynamic, self-reliant and lively activity of the Nostromo's crew, “who are given to making use of pens or cattle prods or their hands during real emergencies” (83). And, more specifically, the narrative hinges upon the realization that the crew are indeed the “nostro homo” their ship's name implies in “allusion . . . to Conrad's working-class hero, another company man, who dies understanding that he has been betrayed by ‘material interests'“ (82). We recognize that they are the narrative's protagonists, and that the Company, who forces the alien upon them, is an obstacle in their survival. There is thus anxiety over whether or not the human workers will survive the terms of their inhuman employers contract, or whether they will become statistics stored in a Company database, pure objects, or slaves, under its control. So, unlike in traditional science fiction, humans and technology are at odds in Alien , yet while technology is articulated as negative, the film foregrounds the attempt of the Company to dominate the alien. So the mediation of technology by the Company, by capitalism, is an underlying source of anxiety. Indeed the alien can be considered here as a metaphor for capitalist technology which alienates the crew as far from their labour as is possible by killing them. Alien thus doesn't speculate on the future; it estranges us from our present conditions by interpellating its viewers with Ripley and the rest of the (human) crew against the Company and the alien as representative of (science and technology under) capitalism.

But the coding of science and technology as negative - and of humanism as positive - is problematic. At the beginning of the film, Ash opens the hatch door to let Kane - who has been attacked by the alien - inside the Nostromo, despite Ripley's order. Ash's apparently humanitarian action is here juxtaposed with Ripley's focus on regulation. She is portrayed as unemotionally routine in the face of emotional pleas of the crew in the airlock. It doesn't matter that Ash is already under some suspicion of being non-human because his personality, except when he inexplicably sprints on the spot, is unsettlingly flat and reserved in comparison with the rest of the crew. The point is, we later realize that Ripley's concern for regulation involves concern for the rest of the crew, who suffer for Ash's action, which was motivated by the Company's desire for the alien. Then we discover that the Company which has put Ripley's regulation into place has sacrificed its crew for its own material interests. So that early scene can be read as an ironic moment which foregrounds the border between what is human and technological, spontaneously humanitarian-emotional and systematically-rational. We cannot really tell whether Ripley was being humanitarian or obeying orders because the two overlap at this point: to be humanitarian she had to follow regulations which were, ultimately, installed by a non-humanitarian system. That is, the regulations of the Company are humane only to keep its workers alive long enough for them to get what it wants. The fact that Ripley survives to sign off to the company - “Crew - and cargo - destroyed” - is thus highly suspect, especially when the alien codes survival negatively because its survival seems to necessitate that it kills humans. Ripley's survival is even more suspect when we consider the way the rest of the crew die. Parker, for example, “[t]he worker who would not be drafted for a rescue mission unless his contract was redrawn suddenly throws down his weapon for a suicidal hand-tohand combat with the alien, so as not to endanger the woman [Lambert] who cannot move from his line of fire.” He dies because he is too weak to “survive” the alien, but he risks his life voluntarily to prevent Lambert from being killed. He seems more human because he holds his own life lower than that of another human crew member. Ripley, on the other hand, can be read as less human because she does not sacrifice herself - indeed she only really risks here life for the cat, Jonesey, who is not human - and she survives to continue working with the Company. Indeed by going into cryogenic sleep she voluntarily hands over her life to the technology of the Company which has just killed the rest of her crew. She is the only person left to identify with as a hero, but this makes the question of whether she is a human hero or not problematic.

The film's representation of gender problematizes Ripley's coding as a human hero even more. For Alien makes the progressive gesture of having a female as the primary protagonist. And, as Butler notes, Ripley breaks with not only the tradition of male heroes, but the tradition of female heroism (84). She portrays positively valued characteristics usually seen as male - skilled qualifications, leadership, the ability to make hard decisions and show courageous ingenuity when faced with a potentially fatal opponent - but she is not specifically masculine. Indeed her sex, or gender, does not appear to be an issue when it comes to her authority and social position in general. For example when Parker, the black working-class crew man, says: “She better stay the fuck out of my way,” it is framed by Parker's resentment about going on a rescue mission which Ripley has, at a higher position of authority, agreed to. Parker does not want to perform any unpaid labour, which implies Ripley's authority is not being questioned on the basis of gender. In the same way it is important that her role in the film is not framed by the usual romance convention of “getting a man.” She does not move towards any marriage or marriage substitute in which she might occupy a traditionally female role as a housewife. All the relationships in the film are professional and/or communally social in nature, the latter largely depicted during meals where, beyond the professional boundaries, all individuals are capable of interacting freely and no one has to perform domestic labour. Indeed domestic space is eradicated, and Ripley enters the workplace with the freedom usually resticted to men. She thus offers us the fantasy of women gaining “equality, friendship, and collectivity between middle-class women and men” (84) in both the economic and social domain.

But Newton observes that Parker's hostility towards Ripley, while it is deflected onto “working-class” men and so disguised as labour oriented, still “allow[s gender] hostility to be ventilated and vicariously participated in, while protecting white, middle-class male viewers from having to identify with that ventilation” [as gender hostility] (85). This is more explicit with Ash, who “scores a series of hostile victories over Ripley” by disobeying her, refusing her a look through his microscope, being the only one able to access Special Order 937, and “simula[ing] rape by trying to shove a rolled-up girlie magazine down her throat” (85). He shows a patriarchal pathology of misogyny which male viewers can, again, vicariously experience. Not only this, his act associates this pathology with one of the crew's pornographic magazines - a sexual substitute. This allows us to relate his violence to sexual repression, especially because while sexuality oozes symbolically through the film, it is always inhuman and violent. A male viewer's most obvious conclusions here are that: i) the men are repressing their sexual desires; ii) Ripley is asexual, by virtue or repression; if she wasn't, the men would be unable to control themselves and this would cause professional problems. The film here implies that if sexual activity was present, gender relations would be problematized, and this means the film assumes that sexual difference is still an essential problem when it comes to women acting out traditionally male roles. Economically free women necessitate sexual repression, so a male viewer is positioned to resent Ripley's presence, and is given spaces in the text to vent this resentment.

But the anxiety over Ripley as a sexually repressive figure is dealt with in another way at the end of the film. Her search for the cat, the long scene of her undressing, the way she tucks away of the cat for cryogenic freezing as well as her own entry into the sleep pod, “assuming a virginal repose” (Creed 140), work - on one level - to recode Ripley as: i) a female who a male viewer has sexual power over (ie, she is a sleeping virgin, not an assertive androgyne); ii) a safe, maternal figure. The cat is especially interesting in this coding, for we can argue that since Ripley is unmarried, the film gives her the cat as a child substitute, a dependant she is responsible for. Since the film has killed off anyone she can order around, she is forced to take up the maternal role of looking after the cat; then she submits to the Company like any “good woman” acting faithful to the absent Father. On one level this suggests to the viewer that Ripley's previous assertive authority was part of a mother's role in protecting her young, in which case she suddenly conforms to the tradition of female heroism; on another level this suggests that Ripley has just ended her role-playing fantasy of power in the movie and reverted back to her “real” role. In any case, she suddenly signifies qualities which an active male viewer can quickly associate with traditional notions of femininity and so she ceases to be a site of anxiety.

At this point we can suggest that a major contradiction in Alien exists because it offers a utopian gesture, gender equality, in a dystopian future of exploded capitalism, and the two collapse as if they were naturally interdependant. In the future it seems that capitalism has grown out of control because women are liberated, or women are liberated because capitalism has grown out of control. Ripley's recoding as feminine is especially significant here because it occurs immediately before and after she kills the alien. The film has set up a situation in which Ripley and the alien can be directly opposed, and we naturally favour Ripley, because, if nothing else, we have just been shown that Ripley has a reassuringly human, female body while the alien has a monstrous and unfamiliar body. When Ripley kills the alien, we emotionally feel that she has defeated all that threatened humanity, and so alleviated all our anxieties. In terms of narrative expectation, whereby the human hero will conquer all that threatens “us” humans, this seems obvious: she is the only human left to be identified as a hero. But the opposition between Ripley and the alien functions as a symbolic, diversionary event which enables the film to end without us realizing that the larger conflict between female liberation and capitalist alienation hasn't been resolved. If we look closer, we can here argue that Ripley doesn't achieve the status of hero she appears to after killing the alien.

Firstly, Newton suggests that by killing the alien Ripley fulfills the fantasy that “white middle-class women, once integrated into the world of work, will somehow save us from its worst excesses and specifically from its dehumanization.” But this fantasy - founded in Victorian, bourgois myths about women who have remained pure since they are outsiders to production - is not really fulfilled because at an ecomonic level the alien is an extension of the Company, and while Ripley aborts the its mission to secure the alien, she does not defeat the Company itself, the underlying ideological force which the alien dramatizes. So as a human hero she doesn't challenge the Company, whose technological manifestation works to alienate humans; and as a male fantasy of a female (human) hero, she doesn't rejuvenate the work force. Secondly, when Ripley kills the alien, a binary opposition which doesn't exist at the symbolic level is constructed. For the alien can be read as “a potent expression of male terror at female sexuality and at castrating females in general” ( Newton 85), for its simultaneous vaginal and phallic coding, in a patriarchal ideology, make it reminiscent of the vagina dentata. The horror over Ripley's entry into the workforce is thus displaced onto the alien, and then Ripley is shown killing it: “an allocation of the responsibility which can be read . . . as an exasperated insistence that women clean up the mess they've made” (85). That is, Ripley creates anxiety by threatening male dominance, and this is manifested in the alien which she must remove; then Ripley is recoded as feminine to imply that when she killed the alien all the anxiety over her sex and gender was resolved. So as a feminist hero, she doesn't really challenge the militaristic and hierarchical Company which we come to recognize as patriarchal; she submits to it as a traditional female. Thus the film works to prove that women cannot redeem us as men have been able to in other films, as men thought women could, or as feminists hoped she would. While Alien breaks the convention by having a female hero and makes us emotionally identify with her as the hero, Ripley fails to be a “real” hero, which works to suggest that female heroes are - even when given all the opportunities (education, equality etc) - insufficient.

Annette Kuhn argues that the cinematic medium is perfect for science fiction, since its special effects - even if they go beyond the needs of the narrative - make us marvel at science and technology in general. In Alien , the suspense which the medium tries to maximize through its horrific representation of the alien makes us reactionary. We respond as much to the actual monstrous representation of the alien as to what the alien represents. So just as the alien camouflages itself so well against the setting of the ship, it functions here to camouflage the contradictions in the text as part of its own monstrosity. We need to keep this in mind when we consider Alien as a progressive text or Ripley as a progressive hero, for the kind of oppositional ideological projects which are truly progressive, or utopian, must not be reactionary if they are to avoid adding to the problem they are responding to.

Bibliography

Creed, Barbara. “ Alien and the Monstrous Feminine.” Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema . Ed. Annette Kuhn. London : Verso, 1990.

Kavanagh, James H. “Feminism, Humanism and Science in Alien .” Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. Ed. Annette Kuhn. London : Verso, 1990.

Kuhn, Annette. “Introduction: Cultural Theory and Science Fiction Cinema.” Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema . London : Verso, 1990.

Kumar, Krishan. “Utopia and Anti-Utopia in the Twentieth Century.” Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times . (Photocopy.)

Newton, Judith. “Feminism and Anxiety in Alien .” Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. Ed. Annette Kuhn. London : Verso, 1990.