Ridley Scott’s Alien: the Monstrous-feminine

There are three metaphorical representations of birth in the film.  The first is the scene in which the crew wake up from hyper-sleep.  The hypersleep vault is clean, white and sterile.  The crew have been cryogenically frozen for the voyage back to Earth.  The ship’s computer wakes them up and in a sense gives life to them.  In fact, the computer is called Mother and has a female voice.  The crew are dressed in white surgical wear that resembles swaddling clothes.  The hypersleep vault is a uterine or womb-like space, but again it is thoroughly clinical and sanitised.  This suggests that in the future birth is managed by technology; it’s a controlled, clean and painless process.  There is no blood, trauma or terror.  It is significant that the ship’s computer is called Mother.  This is the computer’s nerve centre.  It forms another uterine space.  The computer is presented as a maternal entity. 

The second ‘birth’ scene is the discovery of the alien.  The crew discover the derelict craft.  This set was designed by H.R. Giger and it is full of sexual symbolism.   The crew enter through vaginal portals.  This implies they are inside the maternal body, inside the womb.  The interior is a huge, cavernous space.  It is dark, dank and humid.  Like a womb, it supports the germination of life because it is full of alien pods.  One embodiment of the monstrous-feminine is the concept of the archaic mother – the mother as the origin of all life.  This is a notion that has existed in mythology for thousands of years.  Many cultures have a legend of an ancient maternal being that gave birth to all life.  In Ancient Greece, for example, there was a mother Goddess called Gaia.  She was the original generative force, the parthenogenic mother that gives birth to all living things. 

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Alien follows this tradition by representing the mother as a primordial abyss or cavern.  The cave is a vast uterine space, but it has a skeletal framework, so it’s also a place of death.  The space-jockey is a corpse that has fossilised and fused with the chair.  The skeletal structure and the idea of fossilisation define the cave as ancient and archaic.  So the cave is the gigantic, malevolent womb of the archaic mother.

Kane discovers a leathery pod like a serpent’s egg and stares into it.  It is hideously visceral, with pulsating flesh.  this is like staring into the interior of the body.  A creature leaps out and attacks Kane; it forces a proboscis down his throat and implants an embryo or foetus in his chest cavity.  This is a coded representation of rape.  Kane is violated in an act of phallic penetration.  He is clearly feminised in the process: a man becomes the passive receptacle of the alien’s fertilising agent. 

The facehugger attaches itself to Kane’s face.  Again, the creature was designed by Giger.  It looks like an insect, but it also suggests skeletal human hands.  Some commentators have argued that it looks like a placenta with an umbilical cord.  Ultimately, the design is obscenely sexual because it is a reproductive organ.

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The third representation of birth is Kane’s death scene, which resembles a horrific birth.  The alien erupts out of his chest.  This explores male anxieties about childbirth.  Kane has been forcibly impregnated via a form of inter-species rape.  The alien eventually rips itself from the male ‘womb’ in a horrific scene of blood and gore.  The scene is a grotesque contrast to the clean birth of the opening sequence.  It is violent, visceral and disgustingly organic.  The chestburster, the infant stage in the alien’s lifecycle.  This is very phallic in form.  In psychoanalytical terms the alien is a phallus dentatus – a penis with teeth. 

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