Reconstruction 5.4 (Fall 2005)

Return to Contents»

Ximena Gallardo C and C. Jason Smith. Alien Woman: The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley. New York: Continuum, 2004. $ 19.95 241 pp. Softcover. $19.95. ISBN: 0826415709

<1> A study of the first action/science-fiction female protagonist was long overdue, but the subject matter brings an inherent difficulty: the four male directors of said female lead. Gallardo and Smith skillfully navigate through the four celluloid texts and provide a close critical reading of each Ripley saga, and an investigation into the overriding narrative that the four manifestations of Ripley demonstrate. The franchise moves from the standard fare of Hollywood directorial vision to the blockbuster sequel, then to a dark version of horror auteur cinema and finally to the self-ironic pastiche (or spoof, depending on how one views the director's attempt) while Gallardo and Smith provide a psychoanalytic and political examination of gender roles and female (in) space: the Alien, woman, and the alien-ness of woman for the male "makers" of Lt. Ripley are thematic concerns encapsulated in the study's title.

<2> The chapter on Alien is both a step-by-step invitation to retrace the steps of the male directorial gaze and to deconstruct the gaze's hold on the film's meaning-producing mechanisms. The images of the female (body, voice, and function) that surface in the ship, the android, the planet, and the infected crew members are juxtaposed with the more expected images of the female in the horror genre, as when the camera offers semi-pornographic takes of Ripley. Gallardo and Smith show the film's ambivalence toward the grand narratives of gender as the various images seek to affirm and contradict the dichotomies which are burst apart when the penis-like alien jumps out of a female body, raping and forcing the male into labor since "the Alien species disregards the sexual difference that is so essential to our definition of what it is to be human"(42).

<3> As the seventies fade into the neo-conservative eighties, the study's focus shifts to examining the sequel's subordination to politics of the era and the birth of Rambo-Ripley, who is tough but also motherly—an über "compassionate conservative" who serves "to explore America's fears during the early Reagan years" (63). The chapter brings forth the parallel between gender politics (or the call to the apolitical stance) of the times and the film's call to see Ripley as a mother and not as another action movie lead. Even the monster turns into Ripley's "dark twin" (103), an Alien mother, transforming the clash from human/Alien, to a jungle-like survival of the fittest battle between opposing progenitors.

<4>The main challenge of such a book is to write on four disparate films and yet keep a coherent theme; Gallardo and Smith have found this theme in the Pygmalion-like aspirations of each director, who turns Ripley into his cinematic Eliza Doolittle—James Cameron begets tough Ripley just as David Fincher begets his ascetic Ripley (even Christ-like, as some imagery hints). Ironically, the least successful (critically and commercially) of all Alien movies is also the one that solidifies the series' obsession and the study's concerns with the interactions of woman and Alien: "By collapsing the dichotomy between Ripley and the Alien, Alien3 is the first of the Alien films to openly address the abject status of women covertly posited in Alien and Aliens" (121). As Ripley finds herself on an all-male prison planet and pregnant with an alien baby, she also finds herself, Gallardo and Smith point out, in a personal agony rather than an Alien horror flick. The book includes in its examination the commercial promotion of the movies by the studio, a narrative in itself that leads powerful credibility to the writers' assertion about Ripley and her treatment by directors, studios, and utterly the audience—such as the trailer's proclamation for Alien3 that "the bitch is back," a puzzling statement since as Gallardo and Smith note, the Alien in that film is not the Queen.

<5> By the fourth film, Alien Resurrection, "the Ripley clone becomes the living critique of what constitutes the human and what the monstrous" (162), as woman and Alien have merged into one. The full circle of the four movies may be a reflection of cultural trends on cinematic production, or a product of directorial commentary upon previous films of the saga or the way of conceptualizing the films that Gallardo and Smith offer (most likely all of the above), but at the end the study satisfies vital needs of any critical examination in answering many of the gender and genre questions it poses, while offering further points of departure for reflection and examination.

Luke Vassiliou

ISSN: 1547-4348. All material contained within this site is copyrighted by the identified author. If no author is identified in relation to content, that content is © Reconstruction, 2002-2016.