Feature by Philippa Bradnock  The mother that I remember first from the Alien ‘quadrilogy’ is the alien queen from James Cameron’s contribution to the series: Aliens (1986), the second film. I remember her enormous crown-like head, the eggs she lays from that dripping ovipositor and her furious duel with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), strapped into the powerloader at the end. She is animalistic biological motherhood incarnate, all those hundreds of eggs, all that mucus and steam and her retaliation against our heroine when she blasts the alien progeny to kingdom come. She represents everything that the Sulaco and its crew are not. They are antiseptic, asexual. They dress alike, they act alike and there is no room for messy biology in the marine corps. In fact, in Aliens, unlike the other films, none of the marines die messy, bloody deaths, they are blown up or disappeared. Humankind has transcended the biological. But on the planet LV426 the alien nest literally engulfs the efficient industrial technology of the terraformers’ buildings. The threat to the humans is not just from the aliens’ violence, but from their phenomenal reproductive power, their sheer biological presence. The alien queen is the original, primordial mother, reproducing busily by herself, the queen bee in a nest of drones.
There is another alien queen, in foetal form in Alien 3 and then in full grown clone form in Alien Resurrection. This queen, Ripley’s ‘baby’, has forsaken the egg laying of previous generations and developed a womb, like a human mother. She gives birth to the monstrous alien with human skull and eyes which promptly rejects and kills her and turns instead with filial tenderness to Ripley. Unlike the first queen this one is flat on her back, at the mercy of her offspring. The legacy of her human womb is that she cannot get up to fight. By Alien Resurrection, Ripley has also become a mother many times, if not in the traditional human way. In Alien (1979, Ridley Scott), we watch her go back into the Nostromo where the first alien lurks in order to rescue the cat, Jones. Jones is her surrogate child, her anchor when all around is chaos and carnage. He follows her into the second film; Aliens starts with Ripley and Jones asleep in their cryotube. When Ripley is bribed on board the Sulaco to return to LV426 as a ‘consultant’, it is only Jones whom she leaves behind.  But she finds a replacement surrogate child in Newt, the girl who, like Ripley, has outlasted the rest of her group through the alien attacks. Ripley cleans her face, learns her name, feeds her, tucks her into bed and pries her out of alien-secreted resinous cocoons, all the things a real mother does (come on, your mother never pried you out of a cocoon?). By the end of Aliens, Ripley has equipped herself with an entire surrogate family: Newt as daughter, Hicks (albeit wounded) as husband, despite his protest that the tracking device he gives her ‘doesn’t mean we’re engaged or anything’. After all, he’s shown her his big gun.
Unfortunately, David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) has no time for this intriguing post nuclear nuclear family and kills off Newt and Hicks under the opening credits. But even in the bleakest and most testosterone awash spots, like Fury 161, the all male maximum security prison colony, Ripley becomes a pseudo-mother. She has been ‘impregnated’ by the facehugger and she begins to have stomach pains and sickness. Interestingly, this only happens after she has enjoyed a little R&R with Clemens, Charles Dance’s disgraced doctor. Her ‘baby’ is a queen, like in Aliens and the predatory alien on the loose won’t touch Ripley. In the final scenes Lance Henriksen’s Bishop look-a-like tries to coax Ripley into giving up her baby and she chooses self sacrifice instead. She stands tall on the platform in her grubby vest and combats, head shaved, as it moves away over the vat of boiling lead. This scene has the air of a woman having exercised her right to choose, her autonomy over her body. As she falls the alien is ‘born’ through her stomach and she holds it close, almost caressing it as if it were really her child.  Where Alien 3 dodged the question of Ripley as mother as much as possible Alien: Resurrection (1997), with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s characteristic emphasis on body horror, positively embraces it. 200 years on, Ripley is the eighth in a series of attempts to clone her from her DNA and extract the alien queen from her stomach. Having done this successfully, the scientists sew Ripley up, teach her to speak, make a couple of terrible mistakes and the wholesale slaughter begins again. Like Aliens, a crowd of marauding beasts is at large, unlike Aliens, we can’t be sure that Ripley isn’t one of them. Wires got crossed in the cloning and Ripley has alien DNA and has inherited a collective alien memory. She is human, but yearns for the aliens, culminating in a scene where she is sucked down into a mass of pulsating black flesh to watch the alien queen in the last throes of labour and to see her grand-alien born. She embraces ‘him’ (it seems somehow obvious that he is male) and when he follows her onto the Betty in which the humans are trying to escape she watches, agonised, as she is forced to sacrifice him. She is truly a mother now, even if the labour pains were someone else’s.
There are several interesting things about Ripley’s chain of escalating motherhood. Firstly, that after she meets the alien queen in the second film, the aliens reproduction is entirely attributable to her, the very character whose mission to wipe them out pushes forward the films’ narrative. Secondly, this chain of alien reproduction is entirely female. Men just don’t figure in the perpetuation of this species. The ‘male’ aliens do the rampaging and dismembering, but they seem to have no role in the reproductive process. So the biology which Aliens presents as so horrific is exclusively female. One question this raises is what Ripley represents. Is she a woman opposed to the limiting conception of her sex as ‘just’ mothers, ‘just’ biology or does she represent a patriarchal society which abhors female reproduction and biology and seeks to expunge it? Does she have the same type of role in each of the four films, even, or does it change? The third set of ‘mothers’ in the quadrilogy are those unfortunates who are ‘impregnated’ by the facehuggers: men and women in Alien and Alien Resurrection, women only in Aliens and a dog in Alien 3 (further evidence that the third installation fails to engage with the themes that make the other films interesting). Impregnation in this way is theoretically male or female, but in the films the victims are mostly women. Motherhood here is forced and fatal. The facehuggers reduce men and women to impregnate-able objects, mere passive recipients for the foetus that will kill them when it is born. This repulsive parody of motherhood and birth suggests a general horror of the process. Indeed, Ripley is so disgusted by the alien queen’s reproductive display in Aliens that she lets rip with the flame thrower even though it serves no purpose except to endanger her and Newt. The alien queen is set up as Ripley’s hideous alter ego: their jaws resemble each other, they turn their heads on one side the same way and they have a silent understanding that if Ripley leaves the eggs alone she is free to go. In the final fight, the alien queen hangs from Ripley’s foot like a giant shadow and it is only after she has been sucked out of the air lock that Newt calls Ripley ‘mommy’, as if she senses the successful slicing away of her terrifying biological mirror image.  This horror of female reproduction is partly corrected by Alien Resurrection, in which Ripley is fascinated and more at home with the aliens. It also presents a version of birth which is even more abhorrent than biological birth: the abortive cloning experiments of the scientists. The results of this distress Ripley so much when she discovers them that she gives them the same treatment as the nest in Aliens. If biological reproduction is repellent, scientific reproduction is even more so.
As Ripley’s motherhood moves from pet to adopted child to parasite to something cloned from her own DNA she transforms from the practical silent heroine of Alien to the gun toting marine leader of Aliens to the shaven headed sexual being of Alien 3 to the ambiguous not-quite-human loner of Alien Resurrection. She was never a giggly, girly heroine but along her journey to biological motherhood, even if it is cloned, she has become progressively less safe as a non-sexual lead character. After her explanation of his imminent death-by-birth of a monster to a terrified male host, he asks her, ‘who are you?’, ‘I’m the monster’s mother’ she replies, almost purring. She is not just the monster’s mother, in the Alien quadrilogy’s terms by virtue of her motherhood she is the monster. |
