Death Ovum Meets Space Sperm: From Alien Woman

And while I am having a mano-a-mano with Martin Landau and Space: 1999 this week, here is another relevant excerpt from the book Alien Woman: The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley by Ximena Gallardo C. and myself (Continuum 2004, pp. 7-9). The PDF is not the "final final" copy as printed, so there are few typos that were corrected in the print edition. We hope to replace this copy with the print-edition as published soon. These are not the exact same photos used in the book, but they are similar.

The book was the basis for the ideas in this blog and a lot of what I post here originated with conversations between Ximena and I. Clearly this part of the introduction fits the theme of the blog when we read "sex" as also meaning "gender".

The open-access PDF of the book is HERE. All notes and references are on the PDF. We just got the copyright back for the book, so it is free! Amazon still has some new/used hard-copies HERE through their external sellers. We'll probably use something like Lulu.com later on for those folks who still want a print copy.

A New Breed

"I expect Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man." —George Meredith

Since the exploration of space is pitted as a sexual enterprise (Man defining himself against the mysterious Feminine), it is not unusual for science fiction films to depict close encounters of any kind in sexual terms. The canonical 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968), for example, uses blatant reproductive metaphors to illustrate the evolution of humanity (represented by male scientists and astronauts) as it goes into the womb of space.

Early on in 2001, the viewer witnesses an extended docking sequence between a tiny phallic space shuttle and a gigantic, wheel-shaped space station: the entire sequence is staged as a cosmic dance to the tune of a waltz. This scene prefigures 2001’s climax, in which the pod that contains astronaut David Bowman flies into a psychedelic, vaginal space vortex that transports him to a stark white chamber where he dies and is reborn as a new organism, the Star Child. Death ovum meets space sperm: the sexploration of space.

Lest we think Kubrick’s film an isolated case, a decade later the space opera Star Wars (1977) staged the Rebel attack on the Empire’s Death Star as so many sperm assaulting an egg. In this case, the feminine form is depicted as lethal, for the Death Star, a spherical, dark gray battle station the size of a small moon, is capable of destroying entire planets with one fatal blow of its main laser. Flying a sleek X-wing starfighter, the Rebel hero Luke Skywalker must hit a small port on the Death Star’s surface with his proton torpedos to begin a chain reaction in the station’s central reactor—a fatal implantation that does not fertilize, but rather destroys the monstrous space egg.

Little wonder, then, that the image of the egg represents the extraterrestrial menace in Alien’s poster and trailers. Such a common image would seem silly if not for the fear of monstrous birth it evokes: the shell of the egg is cracked in a grotesque parody of the vaginal cleft or a cruel acidic grin. The Alien egg advertises, first and foremost, the evil ur-womb: it gives birth and men die. The creature that will spring from this egg is a nightmare vision of sex (eros) and death (thanatos). It subdues and opens the male body to make it pregnant and then explodes it in birth. In its adult form, the Alien strikes its victims with a rigid, phallic tongue that breaks through skin and bone. More than a phallus, however, its retractable tongue has its own set of snapping, metallic teeth that connects it to the castrating vagina dentata. The vagina dentata, a symbolic expression of the male fear that a woman’s genitals may eat or castrate her partner during intercourse is tied to the image of the phallic woman (i.e. a woman with a knife) and the monstrous generative mother, whose vagina threatens to devour and reincorporate her offspring.

Unlike most nightmarish creatures, then, the Alien is not only a killing machine, but also a relentless reproductive machine, seeking hosts to bring forth more of its species. It is the Alien reproductive drive and its consequences that both the characters in the series and the audience fear most—the impending moment when the dark creature will emerge from within. Inevitably, then, an Alien narrative engages a wide range of female body narratives such as rape, pregnancy, birth, and mothering, bringing the Otherness of the otherwise repressed and denied female body to the fore. That in the Alien series many of these traditionally female narratives can be acted out on the male body broadens the discursive space to address issues of sex, gender, and the body. As males are penetrated, impregnated, and give birth, the distinction between the male body and the female body, upon which our entire culture is based, begins to blur. This is the site of the Alien horror: faced with the Alien, we are all feminized.