John Carpenter's
She’s a Man-Eater: Gender Politics in Alien and
The Thing
By Joel Chapman
“The
great horror movies,” notes Anne Billson in her comprehensive review of John
Carpenter’s The Thing, “are like Frankenstein’s monster – considerably more
than just the sum of their tacked-together body parts” (8). Key elements of
setting, story and conflict (those that make up the atmosphere of any film) make
way for broad debates and speculations about many topics, including sex, power,
technology, or, through a scope of vision that encompasses all these topics: the
politics of gender.
For
example, the event known as parthenogenesis, or male-birthing, blurs
traditionally-held gender roles. Mike Goode, in “Re-cutting Mary Shelley’s
Monster: Reading Frankenstein through Frankenstein Films,” argues that Kenneth
Branagh performs a gender inversion of James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein
with his own vision, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In this discussion,
Goode regards the creation sequence as a male-birthing event. Using
phallic-looking electric eels to stimulate the amniotic fluid (yonic
representation), a bare-chested (emphasizing a more natural process as opposed
to Colin Clive’s condom-looking lab coat)
creates the monster. “…Branagh’s sequence,” he writes, “foregrounds the
materiality of bodies and bodily fluids, the monster’s creation process
mirroring the physical exchanges in a heterosexual conception and birth” (5).
Since
Frankenstein, other horror films have blurred the lines of masculinity and
femininity. With substantial regard to further complicating the post-modern
filmgoer’s attitude towards Hollywood’s patriarchy (as discussed in Laura
Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”),
horror films especially use otherworldliness and unnaturalness as metaphors for
the breaking down of gender lines. As Caroline Joan S. Picart remarks in
Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film: Between Laughter and Horror,
“rather, what we occasionally glimpse are the outlines of the feminized/tortured
male body” (3).
Two films arbitrate Picart’s tortured male body. First is John Carpenter’s
The Thing, a 1982 sci-fi/thriller/horror film, in which a group of twelve
scientists discover an alien capable of imitating any life form. The film
incorporates sexuality to negotiate gender issues. The alien, to which Billson
gives female adjectives and traits, invades the isolated, all-male outpost and
begins to absorb its members in an act she describes as bearing a resemblance to
heterosexual intercourse. Second, Ridley Scott’s suspense-filled sci-fi/thriller
Alien continues the same themes of isolation and paranoia that The
Thing pioneers, but complicates matters by identifying the female character
Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) as the film’s protagonist halfway through the
narrative. Passing back and forth between elements of masculinity and
femininity, Ripley and the rest of the Nostromo crew witness the
gender-boundary-chaos as a result of the alien creature that stalks and
terrorizes their ship.
In Alien, the creature’s power as a menacing grotesque of danger to the
crew of the Nostromo parallels its threatening otherworldliness to the
viewer. The creature is a wonder to all the crewmembers, noted most obviously
during the chest-bursting sequence. According to Internet Movie Database,
the characters’ surprises are reflections of the actors’ surprises, as not all
were told about the specifics of the sequence (Veronica Cartwright (Lambert) did
not know blood was going to be sprayed on her face).
Picart
mixes theorists’ Rudolf Otto and Tzetvan Todorov’s notions of the “numinous”
(wholly other) and fantastic to articulate the Frankensteinian horror films,
such as Alien. She writes that both notions, “entail wonder,
astonishment, and awe (alongside fear, terror, and disgust), which can serve to
unfix commonsensical demarcations of gender, power, and humanness” (9).The
reactions of the crew differ quite extremely: Lambert becomes hyper-feminized
into a blubbering mess; Ripley takes on a masculinized leadership role, but
still retains the femininity (clad in underwear and a tank top near the film’s
conclusion) that keeps her sexually lurid.
Picart explores several themes, or ‘shadows’ of the human consciousness in order
to identify and categorize the newly-broken gender roles in Alien. She
appropriates her work from a psychological perspective, noting Jung, Rushing and
Frentz.
Together, they define ‘shadow’ as a term, “for that which is hated, feared, and
disowned, yet which is responded to with intense attraction and repulsion,
particularly as projected onto a scapegoat” (9). The first, or “inferior,” or
“femininized” shadow sets itself against the Other (“not I”). The second, or “technologized,”
or “hypermasculinized/demonized” shadow “sets for itself the mission of absolute
control of the Other” (Picart 15). Finally, Picart draws up a third shadow out
of her own studies: the third, or “female monsters, or the
feminine-as-monstrous” shadow, which resolves the tensions that exist between
the feminine and the monstrous that the Frankensteinian filmic narratives always
have (as a result of parthenogenesis) (15).
Our introduction to Nostromo’s crew coincides with the disruption of
their cryo-sleep. Kane (John Hurt) awakens first, wearing only white boxer
shorts. Picart notes that although the purity of the white color, as well as my
note that his near-nudeness suggests a first shadow’s vulnerability, the
‘hospital gown’ worn after the facehugger has clung to his helmet implies more
femininity than before (83). Parker (Yaphet Kotto), an engineer and an
African-American, also appears as the feminized shadow: he’s a person of color
(which Picart states is a qualifying factor according to postmodernism (9)), and
he wants to ignore the unknown’s ship’s distress signal (the Other; in other
words, the unforeseen perils of such a task). During the argument over this
decision, his loud, low-octave voice overpowers his contemporaries (84). This
authoritative demeanor, in conjunction with Parker’s 6’3’’ size mark him as a
hypermasculinized male as well.
Finishing off the rest of the crew is Ash (Ian Holm, the science officer),
Dallas (Tom Skeritt, Captain), and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton, Engineering
Technician). Each man is Caucasian, which, according to Picart, is an immediate
signifier of who the audience will identify with and thus become protagonist.
However, as Act I commences, the audience soon discovers Brett to be the greedy
engineering sidekick of Parker and, when approached by Ripley over what to do
with the finds on the unexplored planet, is de-masculinized by her stiff
contention. As well, Ash’s genial and careful composure remains almost fragile
when in agitated conversation with Parker and it is in this eruption that Dallas
allows for Ash to speak, thus presenting himself as a captain who can mediate
but at the same time can pull more authority than Parker’s stature and strength
allows him (84).
The decision to remove Dallas from the narrative in the midst of the ‘alien
hunt’ is a momentous departure from traditional story structure that creates a
stressful rift with the audience, full of tension and uncertainty (Picart
compares this execution of moves to Psycho’s Janet Leigh having been
murdered in the first act). As it then happens, the weight of the remaining
crew’s survival (at this point, four live), shifts to Ripley, who’s
technologized second shadow allows her to crack through Mother’s defenses (the
central computerframe) to get at the very heart of this story: why was the crew
commissioned to explore the source of the signal? After a severely scary
altercation with a hypermasculinized Ash who nearly kills Ripley, Ash is
discovered to be an android, who is carrying out the company’s secret objective
of bringing an alien back to earth (Picart 88).
Ash’s comments regarding the nature of the alien open up a series of questions
about the alien itself, since his comments are some of the only spoken pieces of
exposition about the alien. Ash remarks: “I admire its purity. A
survivor…unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/
quotes). The word ‘survivor’ incurs thoughts of food, clothing, shelter, but the
alien’s predatory behavior suggests an appetite only for food and destruction.
However, the propagation of a species can also be clued in from the term, which
then opens a multitude of questions targeting the alien’s reproductive organs
and its gender.
A
source of contention among scholars and the Alien filmmakers is on
pinpointing the sexuality and gender of the alien in Alien. H.R. Giger,
who designed the first alien images, responded to a question about the alien
being feminine, “No, masculine, all masculine. [I see] alien as the man…Some
people think of the alien as the feminine. I don’t know why. It was a man
inside” (86). Yet Picart quotes Janet Rushing in side-stepping the alien’s
phallic being to, “explain several of the facts of his existence. He is both the
‘son’ of the mother (he emerges from her egg) and her ‘consort.’…He ‘dies’ after
fertilizing his victims, only to be ‘reborn’ in a scene that leaves no doubt as
to his victory over death” (as qtd in 85).
The gender of the alien organism in The Thing, according to Anne Billson,
needs no source of contention. The shape-shifting creature, which absorbs the
body of whatever it targets and then imitates its cells to near-perfection,
shares similarities to cinema’s “femme fatale”
character. Through the looking glass of John Carpenter’s sci-fi/horror text,
Billson defines the monster as an “unknowable creature of mystery composed of
all sorts of orifices in the most surprising places, soft gooey tissue where
normally there should be hard muscle, and a shape which changes in order to
assist propagation of her species” Taking the figure of speech ‘crawling under
my skin’ to physically invasive proportions, Carpenter’s gluttonous alien fits
in perfectly with Mulvey’s theory about the deterrent role of the female in all
films. The alien breaks up the monotony of the all-male camp and frequently
places their lives in danger (37).
Though the thing may be set as an “eternal female,” the men at the camp each
come equipped with their own shadows, which reveal themselves in a series of
ways throughout the narrative. For example, Bill Lancaster’s character
description in his script for the Thing reveals the occasional feminine shadow.
He describes Blair (Wilford Brimley) as “sensitive,” Palmer (David Clennon) as
having “slight sixties acid damage” and Norris (Charles Hallahan) as suffering
from, “an incipient heart condition” (http://home.online.no/~bhundlan/scripts/TheThing.txt).
These vulnerabilities, which accentuate the first shadow, prove later to be
detriments as the narrative’s elements become more dangerous.
In comparison, the character Childs (Keith David) is described in mostly
frightening physical adjectives: “Six-four. Two-fifty. Black. A mechanic. Can be
jolly. But don’t mess” (http://home.online.no/~bhundlan/scripts/TheThing.txt).
In the film, MacReady (Kurt Russell) can be seen from his shack, which is
secluded from the rest of the outpost by some yards. Even before the Thing has
arrived, MacReady has made himself an island to all the other men, displaying a
masculinized no-sensitivity-isolationism (Universal Pictures, 1982).
When the Thing arrives, however, the latent gender issues (as hinted in
Lancaster’s character description) become activated by the presence of the
“femme fatale.” Bennings (Peter Maloney), who until this point has been
described by Billson as, “something of a whiner and fusspot,” becomes the first
to mate with the Thing. Windows (Tom Waites) returns to the storage room to find
Bennings covered in blood and tentacles that writhe over his body. As Billson
notes, “the effect is shocking and slightly obscene, almost as though Windows is
a child who has unwittingly stumbled across a primal scene of two beings engaged
in a particularly sexual act” (57).
Norris’ heart condition proves to be an inescapable vulnerability and a scene of
true horror in The Thing. After a brief struggle in which Norris is
thrown off MacReady like a rag doll, Norris lets out a high-pitched whine and is
then moved to the medic lab where he will need his heart revived (previously,
Norris had also turned down the role of leader, which further effeminized him).
Upon shock of the defibrillators, the prostrate chest cavity of Norris collapses
to reveal large serrated teeth bordering its edges, which clamp down instantly
on the doctor’s wrists, separating them from his body. As Billson notes, “it’s a
classic image too, of the castrating vagina dentata, another instance of the
Thing’s femaleness cutting one of the men down to size” (73). The imagery
persists, however, when Norris’ head detaches from the body, sprouts spider-like
legs and eyes and begins to crawl away. His severed head represents another
symbol of castration, which calls upon the femme fatale’s lust for “that great
clot of seminal fluid” (as qtd in 75).
Billson describes the final encounter of the Thing with the only remaining
outposter, MacReady, as that of a sexual encounter. After the “Blair creature”
emerges from the ground in the basement of the camp, it lets out a horrific
scream. Mac’s reply, “Fuck you too!” is “an appropriately sexual taunt as he
launches his last (phallic-shaped) stick of dynamite at the creature.” After the
blast, Billson writes, Mac’s, “exhausted from having shot hit load…He settles
down, wrapped shivering in blankets” (84). Mac’s angry scorn towards the Thing,
coupled with his sexual ability to penetrate and invade the creature with the
dynamite, reaffirm Mac’s hypermasculinzed role, as well as dutifully remind the
viewer that he doesn’t like to lose.
Yet, as MacReady confirms our hopes that he is still the human protagonist,
characters who have at one time been the Thing have acted individually, to give
them more credibility as still human. MacReady even expounds on this during the
blood serum testing sequence, in which the audience discovers Palmer to be the
latest infected. “When a man bleeds,” he says, “it’ just tissue. But blood from
one of you things won’t obey” (http://home.online.no/~bhundlan/scripts/TheThing.txt).
Even Palmer was the first to point out Norris’ severed head as it scattered
away. Taken into account, MacReady may be the creature. John Kenneth Muir, in
The Films of John Carpenter, raises this point: “it is he…who is the beast,
but in the ultimate anonymity of the assimilation process, even the audience
doesn’t know it” (108).
Throughout the film, the audience has been allowed to detect the Thing when
outed by other outpost members, but here, the question of identity and
femininity/masculinity must be left to the realms of the unknown. If MacReady
was turned, does that change the gender politics that appear at least
superficially to have cemented the second shadow above the first and the
female-as-monstrous third shadow? Or in Alien, does the gender of the
alien ultimately matter, or should the audience interpret the blurring of the
gender boundaries, as also seen in The Thing, as an indicator of more
instability in the future. I believe that as long as the genres of science
fiction and horror continually bleed into each other, so will the genders
represented in them, and the more the blood, the better the film.
Works Cited
Alien. Dir.
Ridley Scott. Perf. Tom Skeritt, Sigourney Weaver. 20th Century Fox,
1979.
“Berg Publishers – Erotic Mentoring by Janice Hocker Rushing.” Berg. 29
Jun 2006. http://www.bergpublishers.com/uk/book_page.asp?BKTitle=Erotic%20Mentoring
Billson, Anne.
The Thing. British Film Institute Publishing. London: 1997
Goode, Mike. “Re-Cutting Mary Shelley’s Monster: Reading Frankenstein
through Frankenstein Films.” ETS Faculty Roundtable. 19 Apr 2006.
“Memorable Quotes from Alien.” IMDb. 29 Jun 2006. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/
quotes
Muir, John Kenneth. The Films of John Carpenter. McFarland & Company,
Inc. Jefferson, North Carolina: 2000
“Laura Mulvey.” Wikipedia. 29 Jun 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mulvey.
Picart, Caroline Joan S. Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film: Between
Laughter and Horror. State University of New York Press. Albany, NY: 2003
The Thing. Dir. John Carpenter. Perf. Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley.
Universal Pictures, 1982.
“The Thing Script.” 29 Jun 2006. http://home.online.no/~bhundlan/scripts/TheThing.txt.
|
