For the output ofAlien : Romulus, Let's go back to the sex drive metaphorized in the first saga movie. From Lovecraft to Barbarella, passing invariably by Giger, back on sick sexuality depicted in this masterpiece of science fiction by Ridley Scott. What about sex in the horror and science fiction of the pre-Alien ? Why? Alien Did you manage to mark the spirits so much? Attempted answer with a (non-exhaustive) overview of the question...
Pornographic nightmar
Alink: the eighth passenger is a pornographic nightmare. It is at least an entire section of the work Alien: Xenography published FS News. Rape, domination, submission, phallic representations and other sexual violence, Alien is crossed by a whole (more or less) metaphorical dimension invoking a sick form of sexuality that strongly echoes the status of women in the western part of the late 1970s.
To understand how Alien has become a cultural marker capable of swarming all the pop culture that will follow and why the sexual metaphor is so important in this feature film, it is necessary to give a probe in the two main genres of Ridley Scott's film: horror and science fiction.
Gynephobia, lies and video
In an exciting article entitled The Horror of the Female, Portrait of a GynephobiaLoïc Darses draws a sketch of the image of the woman in the horrific cinema. And definitely, the painting is not very glamorous: « Real pack nightmare, scarring common wounds, the horror cinema, so projected on large screen evening after night, is so to speak the mirror of what terrifies modern society. »
A decisively dull image, where the screen serves as a receptacle for the primary fears of a predominantly white, heterosexual and resolutely patriarchal society. Thus, it is often the horror cinema that portrayed the woman as the very figure of the weak and dependent prey, or on the contrary the most vile and threatening monstrosity. Either a victim let go of pasture, or a hysterical madness, the shade was (is?) rarely of bet... Even the vulva and vagina do not escape redundant heavy representations of psychalytic hints...
In fact, unlike the penis, it is the sex of the woman that is represented as a threat by the myth of « Vagina dentata ». Drawn from ancient traces of folk legends, then conveyed by apologists supposed to preserve his reader from the dangers of sexuality, the fact that the threat is infused with the female gender speaks volumes about the vision of the woman and her sexuality at the time. Some films like the (mediocre) Teeth However, try to return this outdated imagery... If this is not confined only to bad horror films, it is indeed questionable to see how the image of the woman (by her psychological, adolescent, maternal and/or sexual traits) has been demonized by the cinema of fear. A reality in the pinnacle of which is a duo of horrific subgenres, rape and revenge and slasher.
The rape and revenge, if he gave birth to fantastic films (although sometimes received equivocally, as the She Verhoeven), also voyeuristic and complacent tripotes. A kind of Virginie Despentes analysis in a rather interesting way in his essay King Kong Theory :
« When men stage women's characters, it is rarely to try to understand what they live and feel as women. Rather, it is a way to stage their sensitivity as men, in a woman's body. So we can see how men would react to rape instead of women. Bloodbath, ruthless violence. The message they send us is clear: how come you don't defend yourself more brutally?»
Hard to separate the right grain from tares in such a creepy genre, fun to blur moral markers and multiply reading layers. However, not everything is clearly to be disposed of in the trash, especially since women directors tried to use the codes of the subgenus to subvert them from the inside. This is particularly the case for Revenge Coralie Fargeat, where the director is tracking her with a man's rifle... naked. It has the merit of at least overturning the codes... And to look forward to the upcoming release of The Substance, already chronicled on MaG during his presentation in Cannes.
The slasher (despite many exceptions again) also follows a logic well summarized by Loïc Darses in his article: « penetration of the body, often female, by a foreign object, mostly male ». A logic that the film solves through a final girl, who will find salvation by conforming to the societal and Puritan codes (not to say patriarchal) ambient. It must be said that the decades that gave birth to most of the films of this kind are also years when Puritanism was the norm in the US. In the 1970s (when the first slashers began to be pulsed), no less than 70% of Americans disapproved of prenup sex!
In an article entitled Slashers and Sex, Leina Hsu evokes a second track: after a first feminist wave corresponding to the struggle for fundamental rights such as the opening of the vote to women, a second feminist wave is unleashing in search of more justice regarding reproductive rights (in particular with the democratization of the contraceptive pill). What to instil is a reactionary tsunami in the very masculine milieu of the film industry.
Canonical example: Halloween of John Carpenter who lands in the halls one year before the first Alien. In a virtuoso opening in sequence, the first person follows Myers' walk in the corridors of a house where his sister's clothes are scattered, suggesting that she was occupied that evening other than playing Scrabble... When he ends up finding her, she's back, topless, brushing her hair. Myers stabs her, spans her bare body without even looking at the other protagonist of the scene, obviously male.
« The killing is oddly erotic, in some ways a visual translation of the male desire to exercise control over "sexually powered" women. Myers的 use of a phallic object as a weapon means sexual domination. [...] »
Far from nailing to the piloris the films mentioned or making a moral reading of them, this partial X-ray still indicates an intellectual and sociological atmosphere in which the cinema of fear seems to have been particularly diffuser. But what is the link between proposals as diverse as Jason, Halloween or The Source Bergman and Alien ? And why so long on the codes of this pre-Alien ? Before answering, it may be appropriate to probe the other major genre through Ridley Scott's masterpiece: science fiction.
Science
From the first germs of science fiction, gender integrates issues related to sexuality. Yet, even during the pulp era and the early golden age of the SF, his representations remain timid and very generous. The American critic Gershon Legman sums up the connection between the SF then and sexual representation:
« The reason for this [aversion to sex] is neother due to oversight nor external censorship, but the fact that the broad percentage of the audience for pulp science fiction literature is composed of teen boys (who continues reading it even after they are grown up), who are terrified of women, sex, and public hair. »
It was only from the 1960s that science fiction began to integrate societal change into the work, notably through the sexual revolution and counter-culture movements. If the written SF thus digests new forms of domestic arrangements, imagines new sexual customs or opens up to other sexual orientations, the cinema struggles to integrate these changes within its productions and merely makes it appear as unmarried actresses rather than excavated characters and intrigue engines.
In 1968, Barbarella That's coming on the screens. Adapted from a series of eponymous comics signed by Jean-Claude Forest, the drawings represent an oversexualized heroine based on the already highly (h)erotic figure of Brigitte Bardot, and narrate his tribulations (often libriminators) in space. A praise for the strong and independent woman? This is at least what Forest claims, but it's not necessarily what one discovers in the feature film.
The film's "orgasmotron", if ready to smile, does not offer a very progressive view of the issue of rape. Barbarella (Jane Fonda) locked up by the film's antagonist – Dr Durand Durand, it doesn't make up – bring out any guillerette from the orgasm machine that held her captive and should have killed her. It was a different time...
And even when SF films venture to show strong women, it will have an unfortunate tendency to simmer in two film shots seen and reviewed. The first is Trinity syndrome, theorized by Tasha Robinson, which wants that even when a film depicts a strong woman, she quickly finds herself reduced to becoming the right arm of a male hero (cf. Trinity in Matrix Obviously). The second is the « Sexy born day », which consists of instilling the naive and innocent character of a child in the supersexualized body of a woman... Two concepts detailed in an article about sex in science fiction on the site SF says the present.
A cinema that has therefore (and sometimes continues to) cast women and the sexual issue in ultra stereotypical and outdated alveoli. Some rare pre-Alien offer a little more to the spectator, this is the case of the film that will follow...
Indeed, in Proteus Generation (alias Demon Seed In 1977, an artificial intelligence, called PROTEUS IV, was born which was supposed to revolutionize the world. The computer will (of course) take control until considering the wife of its creator as the ideal carrier for her child...
Adapted from a novel by Dean Koontz (The Seed of the DemonThus, two years before Alien, we find a form of sick sexuality which we would gladly draw closer to the work of Giger, lost between his multiple biomechanical sex scenes and his atomic babies. What makes this film dealing with many related subjects and displaying parallel-reference imagery was not the cinematic shock of the 1970s, and it took two more years before the revolution initiated by the Alien ? For the blow the answer is rather simple: if Proteus Generation is a series B friendly to watch, it is in no way a great film that would have marked the retina of millions of spectators...
The Alien Shock
But why therefore auscultate the forms of representation of sexuality in horror and science fiction, which are also the genres in which Alien ? And quite simply to understand why Alien with her new painting of feminine and genitality could blow such a wind of freshness and become so striking in the history of the seventh art.
The film landscape was indeed over-saturated with films of various qualities, but often conveying a truncated vision of sexuality and femininity. Openly conservative, sometimes a misogynous or outright embarrassing strand, genre films may or may not have been the vector of a retrograde ideology. The arrival of the character of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) transcends the norms of the female character of the era by bringing a strong femininity to the front of the scene, never dependent on a male bail. By failing to comply with the Puritan codes in the genre of the slasher and by disconnecting it from the genre habitus running in the cinema of the era, even if it rewrites part of the script (in particular the romance planned as the first link between Ripley and Dallas), Alien managed to stand out clearly from all the previous film production.
Better, her multiple sexual metaphors would betray a pre-Me too quite exciting, where the omnipresence of rape poses a serious threat to the entire feature film. A malaise that has to come out, literally, exactly like the Alien that comes out of Kane's chest in the feature film. If the suites gradually leveled their metaphorical dimensions to respond (we guess) to mercantile logics imposed by the studios, Prometheus again proposes a total rereading of the archetype dAlien Again crazy enough. But here we touch a whole different story... Then we have to wait a few more days to discover what Fede Alvarez reserves us with Alien : Romulus Hey! And that is little to say that we are eager (as much as fear) for the result.
Some reading suggestions that helped write this article
- With « Alien », « H. R. Giger added a sexual dimension to Lovecraftian imagination », interview with Marc Atallah for Le Monde.
- The horror to the feminine, Portrait of a gynephobiaby Loïc Darses
- Slashers and sexby Leina Hsu
- Gender and SF, on the site The SF says the present
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