Reconstruction 7.3 (2007)


Return to Contents»


"The Line Must be Drawn Here": The Body as the Final Frontier in Science Fiction Films of the 1990s / Markus Rheindorf

 

Abstract: This essay engages with the boundary concept of the "frontier" not in one of its concrete historical formations such as the American West, but with its articulation and embodiment in science fiction films of the 1990s. This essay is less interested in space than in the body as the final frontier, as the place where anxieties about the proper order of things erupt and are eventually "ideologically managed" (Balsamo 216). The approach taken here consequently deals with the boundary space of the body not as a given, but with its construction in popular culture. As such, the representation of the frontier hides two crucial displacements upon which it is based: the first constructs a homogeneous space of expansion or conflict, while the second posits a binary opposition between self and other in terms gender, ethnicity, or any other differential system of social stratification. The films used to illustrate these ideas are the Star Trek series and Alien sequence.

 

<1> The boundary space of the body in science fiction films of the 1990s is not a given, but construction of popular culture. As such, the representation of the frontier hides two crucial displacements upon which it is based: the first constructs a homogeneous space of expansion or conflict, while the second posits a binary opposition between self and other in terms gender, ethnicity, or any other differential system of social stratification. As such, the representation of the frontier hides two crucial displacements upon which it is based: the first constructs a homogeneous space of expansion or conflict, while the second posits a binary opposition between self and other in terms gender, ethnicity, or any other differential system of social stratification. Both operations are equally important and cannot be articulated independent from each other: the first displaces a cultural and social struggle (which may or not also have a psychological component) and its shifting and uncertain boundaries into an externalized struggle contained within a discrete space or body. This externalized frontier is moreover marginal in that it is placed at the periphery of a culture. The second operation posits opposing terms that are distinct, recognizable, and thus constitute a smooth boundary and clear dividing line. The function of the self vis-à-vis the other can be assumed by various terms - always bearing in mind that the relational concept of "self", as used in the pairing of "self" and "other", should not be confused with identity. In fact, many aspects of identity formation can assume the salient position of self vis-à-vis the other in a given situation. In the context of mainstream science fiction, the self is predominantly constituted as a white male body in crisis (Balsamo 1995).

<2> This privileged position of the body allows science fiction as a genre not only to display existing body constructions with the shock of defamiliarization, but also to offer speculative representations of alternative modes of embodiment such as the cyborg. Taking an initial detour through cultural theory, this paper focuses on a close reading of two films of the 1990ies, Star Trek: First Contact and Alien: Resurrection, but complements this reading by taking into account both films' ties to their respective antecedents. In doing so, it adopts a contextualist perspective, viewing the struggles of, between, and over bodies as articulations of unresolved cultural conflicts. As imaginary solutions to real contradictions, these embodied struggles nevertheless preserve the contradiction as a textual artifact or residue. Tracing these residues to their historical and cultural context(s) as their conditions of possibility offers a way of understanding the significance of contemporary science fiction's almost compulsive re-enactment of the body as a threatened, violated, and ultimately reaffirmed site of conflict. Compared to articulations of the human body itself, the "other" that has threatened and continues to threaten the bodies of much popular science fiction is a characteristically and necessarily unstable entity, embodying fears of various cultural others such as the female, the homosexual, the technological, and the pathogenic. In its many forms and guises, this "alien other" has nevertheless displayed several characteristics with remarkable consistency, traits which strongly associate it with the grotesque and horror as conceptualized by Julia Kristeva.

 

Texts and contexts: articulations of conditions of possibility

<3> Since the socio-cultural context in which Star Trek and Alien have to be understood has undergone considerable changes, it is necessary to adopt the contextualist perspective in order to trace the lines of effectivity between these texts and their conditions of possibility. In studying the contextual meaning and specificity of articulations of the boundary between self and (abject) other the task is ultimately less that of interpreting texts and audiences than of "describing vectors, distances and densities, intersections and interruptions" (Grossberg 312). The articulation of any meaning is thus seen as the ongoing construction of unstable (to varying degrees) relations between practices and structures, texts and contexts. Effectively fracturing the transcendental claim of the sign's function (i.e., the stability of a pre-constituted meaning), this position posits a notion of the sign as effective precisely insofar as it contextually produces meaning.

<4> Given that the relation between a text and its context is one of articulation, it follows that "[t]he difference between a text and its context, or a practice and a structure, is only a product of the level of abstraction at which one is operating" (Grossberg 221). At another level, the relation between text and practice thus parallels that between effects and conditions of possibilities, because "cultural practices [are] places where multiple trajectories of effects and investment are articulated, as the point of intersection and negotiation of radically different kinds of vectors of determination - including material, affective, libidinal, semiotic, semantic, and so on" (Grossberg 22). Regarding the levels of analysis involved in this paper, the individual media events considered here are located on the textual level, while the production processes, technical and narrative conventions, and related social phenomena are located at the level of social practices. The stratum of social practices thus mediates, as it were, between textual products and socio-cultural contexts, which it is both a part of and non-identical with. This commitment to specificity dictates that one can only deal with, and from within, specific contexts, "for it is only there that identities and relations exist effectively" (Grossberg 242).

<5> Bearing all this in mind, this investigation of science fiction film begins with the recognition that Hollywood cinema as a social practice has to a significant degree assumed the role of myths in contemporary U.S. society. It therefore seems possible to apply Lévi-Strauss' theories of the social function of myth to mainstream science fiction as a genre. His assumption that a society starts telling itself myths when, as a culture, it is faced with contradictory experiences which it cannot make conscious to itself, is another way of saying that there will be "effects" or "residues" of these contradictions on a textual level. Since myth, as part of its social function and ideological work, effectively preserves the contradiction at the same time as it "resolves" it in another medium and through another modality, Lévi-Strauss also spoke of myths as the imaginary resolution to real contradictions. At the surface structure of the text, an other is thus positioned in opposition to the self and made to stand in for specific socio-cultural and historical others. As a consequence, the characters and elements of any fictional world - whatever their motivations in the diegesis - are always also engaged at the symbolic or cultural level, as effects of their conditions of possibility.

 

The body as frontier and science fiction's others

<6> Following Edward Said, the other is understood here as the precondition of the self as much as the self is the precondition of the other. In popular science fiction, this relation between self and other is characteristically portrayed as one of conflict or struggle. Equally characteristically, this struggle is articulated not as figurative but as actual, physical conflict over life and death. One of the most significant features of this conflict is that it is not simply a physical, but a bodily struggle, a conflict not only with and between bodies, but over and within bodies. Thus, my account of the body as a boundary space in science fiction film takes a view of the body as a "battlefield" for cultural forces, a "site" where meaning is discursively negotiated and em-bodied.

<7> As such, the socio-cultural authority of the white male body inheres precisely in its lack of embodiment, or else its abstraction: "The white, male body is the relay to legitimization, but even more than that, the power to suppress that body, to cover its tracks and its traces, is the sign of real authority" (Berlant 113). And while the male body of the contemporary action hero, for instance, works out the crisis of white male authority at the level of spectacle, performing a masquerade of hyper-masculinity on the surface of his body, he simultaneously disguises his divided and troubled masculine identity. The body thus becomes the site of masculine masquerade and masculine trauma in the same instance - the moments of action are expressions of male emotionality transferred into violence and, at the same time, enact the performance of the masquerade (Tasker 9). Different from the action hero, the white male protagonists of popular science fiction film sometimes perform a masquerade by means of a "technofetishization" of the white male body. Such models of cybermasculinity counteract the electronic digital technology which has feminized the "technoerotic imagery" of some texts of popular culture (Springer 8f).

<8> The white male body of Star Trek, on the other hand, struggles against the kind of deconstructed cybermasculinity described by Springer, seeking to restore the humanist ideal of the white male body as self-evident and, above all, as unitary and whole, rather than multiple and divided. As such, it depends even more heavily than other articulations of the white male body on its opposition to an other, abject body. Michel de Certeau's account of the other in Western thought is helpful here as it recognizes that the other has always been thematized as a threat, as a "potential same-to-be, a yet-not-same" (4). This always already implicit need of assimilating the other follows from the fact that any autonomous order is, in fact, founded upon what it eliminates. In this process of elimination, however, any order also produces a "residue" condemned to be forgotten or repressed. But what was excluded "re-infiltrates the place of its origin [...] it resurfaces, it troubles [...] it lurks - this 'wild,' this 'ob-scene,' this 'filth'" (4). The relationship between self and other is thus one of repression and subsequent infiltration on the one hand, and of a necessarily unfulfilled longing to (re-)assimilate the repressed on the other hand.

<9> By way of elaborating de Certeau's synopsis of the struggle between self and other, it could be added that the "realm of the known" seems to coincide, in Kristeva's post-Lacanian terms, with the realm of the father, the law, and the symbolic. From this perspective, the "alien domain" referred to by de Certeau, the "realm of otherness", coincides with the realm of the mother and the semiotic, which, in its repressed state, poses a threat to the integrity and stability of the self. [1] Juxtaposing these theoretical trajectories in this manner accounts for the fact that the "alien other" in science fiction is typcially articulated together with the abject, creating an uneasy but highly conventionalized equation between the two.

<10> De Certeau furthermore emphasizes - well beyond the connection between the other and the abject already established - the role of the body for discourses about the other. Describing the difficulties of providing textual proof of the other, de Certeau posits that "the probability of an eyewitness is not enough. It is necessary for the body to be written by the other, engraved, pierced" (162). The text, in other words, can only be the body of the self, wounded and traumatized by its encounter with the other, since "[i]t is necessary for the outline of the unreadable signifier [the other] to be traced in it" (162). Beginning with the Franciscan stigmata, de Certeau traces the tradition of inscription on the body as tattooing and torture, which fulfills the function of proof more than it makes sense: "The inscription remains an unknown graph (though it is known by its unknown author)" (162).

<11> There is a striking affinity between de Certeau's account of the writing of the other and Kristeva's theory of abjection, as both emphasize the significance of the body as text. In this operation "a writing of loss progressing toward the point where death becomes a 'fortunate shipwreck'" (de Certeau 162). Thus, death is articulated as merciful insofar as it saves the body from being written by the other, a frequent theme in science fiction films such as Star Trek: First Contact or Aliens. Significantly, de Certeau also makes clear that the proof provided by the inscription of the other is proportional to the wound it leaves. This important qualification partly explains the ever more outrageous and ever more horrifying forms of the abject in contemporary science fiction film.

 

The Kristevan abject

<12> As has already been indicated, it is possible to exploit a certain affinity between de Certeau's account of the other and Kristeva's theory of abjection in mapping bodily articulations of the other vis-à-vis the body of the self. While the former describes the place and significance of the other in discourse, and while both assign special significance to the body, the latter focuses on the powers of horror in discourses about the body. As such, Kristeva's theory is well suited to explaining science fiction's continuing obsession with bodily forms of horror. Kristeva also emphasizes that the grotesque is "a signifier, but also a signified", since it can be the subject or the means of representation in a text, or both. The grotesque, in other words, can work its effects in textual images, plot, or language itself, and is therefore not unique to the medium of literature studied by Kristeva. [2]

<13>The apparent association of the grotesque with the feminine is particularly pertinent to the present discussion. If grotesque images are indeed, as Bakhtin claims, associated predominantly with "copulation, pregnancy, birth, growth" (25), then they seem to be closer to the feminine than to the masculine. [3] And while Bakhtin himself claimed that the grotesque is gender free rather than gendered, Kristeva's post-Lacanian notion of the abject is based upon the gendered distinction between the maternal (semiotic) and the paternal (symbolic). In his own terms, Bakhtin originally conceived of the grotesque as in opposition to what he terms "the classical" rather than "the masculine". The grotesque is thus distinguished from "classical" aesthetics which are associated with "the ready-made [...] the finished, completed man, cleansed, as it were, of all the scoriae of birth and development" (Bakhtin 25). In terms of this binary opposition, the classical body is "isolated, alone, fenced off from all other bodies" (Bakhtin 28), while the grotesque or abject body is continuously transgressed, crossed, and merged. Returning to the presumably dominant construction of the self as body, one can observe in much of Western culture a convergence between the classical body and the white male body vis-à-vis the grotesque female body as its other.

 

The grotesque as the horrifying other

<14> Since, according to Kristeva's analysis of Western culture, it is the mother who educates the child in the ways of the symbolic through social codes of cleanliness and bodily boundaries, it follows that the maternal should be rejected along with the abject. Any confrontation with the maternal abject can thus provoke a lapse from the symbolic domain and cast the subject back into the unmeaning of the semiotic, causing anxiety, neurosis or even psychosis. What is more, the subject's position in the symbolic realm is only precariously maintained at any time, and thus the threat of the semiotic is accompanied by sensations of dread and, even more prominently, disgust or revulsion. This sense of pollution does not necessarily have anything to do with literal poisoning; in most cases, the threat to the subject is metaphorical, and takes place on the level of signification. " The potency of pollution", as Kristeva puts it, is moreover not an inherent one, "it is proportional to the potency of the prohibition that founds it" and is therefore "not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, psychological or social, are clearly defined" (69). Abjection is thus related not so much to a lack of cleanliness but to that which disturbs identity and disrespects borders, positions, and rules: "The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (4). When encountering the abject - that which has been "abjected" (from the Latin, ab-jectere: literally that which has been cast out) - the subject is debased, "thrown down" towards a boundary its existence in the symbolic is premised on forgetting. In terms of phenomena that cause such abjection in the subject, Kristeva is interested in several distinct categories beside the maternal, with which most of them overlap in one way or the other: the margins of the body, the edible, death and dismemberment, and the text.

<15> Of eating and drinking Kristeva observes that "food loathing" is "perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection", because in the act of nourishment the open, unfinished nature of the body and its interactions with the world are revealed "most fully and concretely" (2f). Her famous example of the revulsion the skin on the surface of milk provokes in her is, however, also an instance of a transgression of the margins of the body - not simply because the milk is introjected, but because its skin forms the boundary between two elements and two different forms: the liquid and the solid. The effects on the subject are disgusting - that is, potentially disruptive - because its existence depends on the illusion of absolute and inviolable bodily margins. As in Bakhtin, the grotesque in terms of bodily margins is thus "that which protrudes from the body, all that seeks to go out beyond the body's confines [...] the shoots and branches, [...] all that prolongs the body and links it to other bodies or to the world outside" (317).

<16> The internal battle between the grotesque and the classical (white male) body in its dominant representation is waged primarily in terms of bodily margins and also contributes to the neo-Platonic mind-body schism in contemporary Western thought. The grotesque, according to Bakhtin, draws the confines between "the body and the world and between separate bodies" quite differently from "classical and naturalist images" (315). For the subject to maintain the mind-body distinction, it is vital to avoid the grotesque permeability described by Bakhtin when he argues that "the artistic logic of the grotesque image ignores the closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface of the body and retains only its excrescences (sprouts, buds) and orifices" (318). Precisely these qualities of the body as capable of transgressing its own boundaries, mixing up inner and outer realms, constitute the abject.

<17> The "classical" fear of confusing food and body - as in Gargantua's delivery - is seen by Kristeva as linked to the subject's incorporation of a "devouring and intolerable mother" whose interior is associated with excremental decay (101f). Kristeva describes the aspects of the grotesque and the classical as coexisting synchronically within each individual subject, which must constantly negotiate between its existence in the symbolic order and the pull to semiotic chaos represented by the abject. Rabelais' account of Gargantua's delivery is read by Kristeva - as it was by Bakhtin before her - as a grotesque image that equates death and life because "[t]he caesarean operation kills the mother but delivers the child" (Bakthin 206). In his own reading of this image, Bakhtin focuses on the moment between the bodies of the old and the new, [4] the dying and the about-to-be-born which are "interwoven and begin to be fused in one grotesque image of a devoured and devouring world" (206).

<18> For Kristeva, this combination of death and birth is a potent moment of abjection as it confuses important boundaries. Accordingly, the image of Gargantua's delivery gives rise to the fear that the counterpart to the mother's life-giving abilities is the ability to take life away again. The mother is thus reconfigured as the "devouring" body of the world. While most waste products affirm the subject who has converted them into objects, in the case of the corpse a subject has itself become waste and been cast out. Refuse and corpses therefore show the subject what it permanently thrusts aside in order to live: "the corpse, most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything", it is "death infecting life" (3f).

<19> In all of these categories there is an element of the maternal or the womb as "the earthly element of terror". In Kristeva's psychoanalytic account of the constitution of Western construction of subjectivity, the symbolic, with its masculine construction of order supersedes, if imperfectly, the grotesquely oriented maternal in every individual. It is symbolic authority, then, which "shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows" (72). Thus, the margins of the human body are seen not as predetermined but "shaped" by the maternal voice with which they are ever after associated and therefore rendered potential sites of abjection. [5]

 

The abject text

<20> The text holds a place of special significance in Kristeva's theory, mainly because she sees textual forms as the principal site of abjection (5). When speaking of filmic texts on the one hand, and cinema as a social practice on the other, it is important to bear in mind that Kristeva names social institutions as the main agents responsible for maintaining the boundaries which, when crossed or negated, result in a psychotic crisis. These institutions fulfill their role through "rituals of defilement", which function "to ward off the subject's fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother" (63). Extending the argument to other discursive formations, one can thus begin to describe the work of science fiction films as similar to such rituals of defilement, which are at once ideological and psychological. My account of science fiction's articulation of the frontier as a boundary negotiated in the body therefore addresses not only its ideological relation to its historical context, but also its role in maintaining or reaffirming the dividing line between the symbolic and semiotic order. In fulfilling this role, many science fiction films visualize the abject only to reaffirm the symbolic order by ultimately repressing it.

 

Universal and specific, individual and social

<21>While Kristeva's universalist claims seem to conflict with an analytical commitment to contextualism and specificity, both are necessary to account for the remarkable continuity of the textual means of horror while also recognizing the effects of varying socio-cultural conditions. In fact, Kristeva also argued that abjection, in its social and discursive articulation of the symbolic order, is quite specific:

[A]bjection is coextensive with social and symbolic order, on the individual as well as on the collective level. By virtue of this, abjection, just like prohibition of incest, is a universal phenomenon; one encounters it as soon as the symbolic and/or social dimension of man is constituted, and this throughout the course of civilization. But abjection assumes specific shapes and different codings according to the various ‘symbolic systems'. (68)

Kristeva thus calls for the consideration of socio-historical contexts in order to "understand why that demarcating imperative, which is subjectively experienced as abjection, varies according to time and space, even though it is universal" (68). Since the visual codings of the abject have remained relatively stable in the course of the last two decades, one can assume that the abject in science fiction films fulfills a stable social function. By way of approaching this function, Tischleder guides us in reading abjection as one of the principal patterns of dis-embodiment (241f) and, as a consequence, regards the resurgence of the abject on a textual level as its necessary opposite: the embodiment of the frontier in an otherwise disembodied white male body. Such embodiment is necessary psychologically and socially because it allows the re-enactment of abjection in the form of narrative closure in which the abject other is cast out again, thus restoring the clean and proper body. As Kristeva puts it, "discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront the otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled" (6). The re-enacted process of abjection in film thus works for the subject as what Clare Hanson has called "an exorcism" by offering "a way of repassing through abjection and of distancing oneself once again from the power of the mother" (152).

<22> The abject in film can thus be read as a trace of the re-enacted process of ego-formation or, in Kristeva's terms, as the "symptom", "a language that gives up, a structure within the body, a non-assimilable alien, a monster, a tumor, a cancer that the listening devices of the unconscious do not hear" (11). The stable social function of these films - of which the abject is but a symptom - is to hem in that perverse interspace of abjection and at the same time reaffirm the boundaries between self and other.

 

A final frontier: the abject body of the alien other

<23> More than any other genre in Western culture, science fiction seems to articulate the body as a boundary space in which difference and otherness are negotiated. This is true of both literary and filmic articulations of the genre, but perhaps even more so in film, where a fetishistic gaze helps to turn the body into a battle ground for conflicting forces. In mainstream film, these forces are usually coded in the conventional dichotomies of good vs. evil, order vs. chaos, and light vs. darkness. As in most fiction, these are moreover combined with the binaries of gender (male vs. female), sexuality (chaste vs. promiscuous and heterosexual vs. homosexual), class (high vs. low) and race (white vs. colored). However, science fiction is able to articulate oppositions of ethnicity as ones of species (human vs. alien) and/or of nature (organic vs. machine). It is characteristic for mainstream science fiction (with the exception of cyberpunk and noir films such as Blade Runner) that the self is associated with most or all of the stereotypically "positive" aspects, whereas the other bears most or all of the "negative" ones. This already over-inscribed other is furthermore articulated as a bodily threat to a self which must defend itself (i.e. its body) by all possible means. The results are texts peopled by evil, anarchic, dark, female aliens or machines (or both) that threaten the bodies of good, lawful, usually white, male humans or organic beings. Needless to say, the vast range of texts that could be called "mainstream science fiction" provides exceptions to almost any of the categories mentioned here, whether it is the good machine (the machine that tries to be human), the anarchic rogue who fights for a good cause (an often traumatized outsider), or the good female (a typically de-sexualized character). The irony of these conventions is that science fiction as a genre with enormous potential for voicing social critique is largely the domain of repressive champions of the status quo.

<24> The conventional uses of mainstream or Hollywood film add to these general characteristics of science fiction a predilection towards the visual articulation of discursive elements. As the basis of this representational strategy, any internal struggle between self and other has to be projected onto a surface which makes it visible and it is the human body that most frequently serves as that reflective surface. But the body is not a blank and neutral surface. It is always already a social construct when it is introduced into the world of science fiction, itself a product of the socio-cultural context of the film's production. Thus, the bodies of the principal characters become the site for the metaphorical struggle between self and other: metaphorical, because filmic depictions of such conflicts are deeply connected to social anxieties about the other. Kristeva's theories are demonstratively literalized in science fiction cinema, with ideological implications -such as the possibility of a visual listing of body parts through camera and editing techniques.

 

Star Trek and the white male body of authority

<25> Of the many texts that qualify for a discussion of the body as boundary space, the Star Trek franchise merits special attention for two of its most prominent characteristics. The first is its long-standing and close connection with U.S. society; the second is its general setting on "the final frontier" of mankind. Star Trek, in other words, is all about territories, borders, and boundaries of every kind. To quote but one example pertinent to the issues at stake here, the Star Trek has a long tradition of addressing issues of multiculturalism, xenophobia, and racism through the composition of its crew, especially its bridge crew. Thus, the original series not only featured the Anglo-American Captain Kirk, but also the African-American communication officer Ms. Uhura, the Asian navigation officer Mr. Sulu, and, perhaps most outrageously at the time, the Russian armory officer Mr. Chekhov. In terms of self and other, then, Star Trek has always tried to include socio-cultural and historical others of U.S. society, be they racial, cultural, or political. While the Star Trek franchise has repeatedly incorporated the other for what may have been egalitarian motives, it has done so at the cost of assimilating it into the ship's collective or communal self. [6]

<26> This process of assimilation, however, always generates an empty space in the mutually constitutive structure of self and other. For this place to be filled and the self to be reconstituted, a fictional world must bring forth a new other. Naturally enough for the genre, the new other provided by the original Star Trek series was an alien species, the Klingons, a decidedly foreign looking species and culture, with dark skin and strong Mongolian features. To put it simply, the Klingons took the place of what the Soviet Union was to the U.S. American mind-set at that point in history: a cunning political and military foe that had to be rebuked time and again, but could never be entirely defeated. In the course of the Star Trek feature films, however, the boundaries to this new other began to be contested and eventually became blurred. This process finally assumed clear forms in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, in which the once uniformly evil Klingon Empire is ready to admit, if not inferiority and ultimate defeat, at least its need for the United Federation of Planet's assistance.

<27> This happened at roughly the same historical moment when the old enmities of the Cold War were beginning to thaw in the era of Glasnost, with the Klingon political elite exhibiting the same internal dividedness about this development as the leadership of the Soviet Union. These developments were taken up and gradually brought to something of a conclusion in the course of the television sequel to the original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, which followed the success of the first feature films. Equipped with a new crew and ship, the re-launched Star Trek franchise once again began the process of incorporating an other, only this time it was one seemingly internal to the Star Trek universe itself, an other that was already a displacement of the originally incorporated others of race, gender, and nationality. The new series painstakingly focused, time and again, on the difficulties of the Klingon other that had been brought into the collective self of the crew. Worf, the one character embodying these conflicts, effectively spends some 200 episodes half-resisting, half-assimilating to the communal and ultimately white male self of the Enterprise crew. [7]

<28> Of course, there were also old and new others on the Enterprise bridge besides Worf, most notably the android Mr. Data. The captain, however, was now an even more decidedly white, Anglo, and upper class male than ever before; with actor Patrick Steward playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the Enterprise crew was now in the hands of a very British character, fond of quoting Shakespeare and enjoying a cup of Earl Grey tea, hot. The other could thus be comfortably contained, even at those moments when it could not be entirely incorporated or assimilated. Again, with the old (Klingon) other gone, the self that U.S. society had given itself in the world of Star Trek had to be defined in relation to a new other, and again this other was to be an alien other. It was, however, also to be part machine. Accordingly, the name of this new other, the "Borg", is derived from the designation of what they are: cybernetic organisms. As the Borg are part organic and part machine, their bodies permanently transgress the dividing line between human and machine which, as Donna Haraway (1991) has argued, is crucial to the dominant conception of what it means to be human. Haraway reminds us that a cyborg is also a monster in the sense that it signifies as a "boundary creature". A hybrid composed of organism and machine, the cyborg challenges the myth of a uniquely human identity and disperses the sacred distinctions and dualisms that support the domination of nature, women, people of color - "of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self" (Braidotti 177). As Braidotti furthermore argues, the monstrous body is a "shifter", "a vehicle that constructs a web of interconnected and yet potentially contradictory discourses" in which "gender and race are primary operators" (150).

<29> The Borg were first introduced in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation as StarTrek's new other, an other that became the focus of several episodes and the eighth Star Trek feature film, First Contact, some ten years later. But the Borg are more than simply a replacement for the old ethnic other of the original series. By virtue of their ability to erase and to assimilate subjectivity, distinctiveness, and individuality into their collective "hive" mind, the Borg became the ultimate enemy of StarTrek's vision of humanity. While previously the body of the other had been marked mainly by ethnic properties, this new turn changed the terms of the relationship between self and other by making actual bodies the site of conflict. Because the Borg other is capable of assimilating StarTrek's human self only by implanting technology into the body - literally and physically penetrating, invading the body - the battle between self and alien other is fought not so much with starships but inside the body. While, in principle, every body is a potential site of this struggle, Star Trek reduces this epic struggle to a single white male body. As the pater familias of the Enterprise crew and simultaneously its white male embodiment, it is Captain Picard who is abducted by the Borg to be assimilated. The plot thus foregrounds the threat of the other to the white Anglo-American male self as Picard is made to stand in for all of "humanity".

<30> As has already been suggested, the violation of the self in Star Trek is portrayed as a transgression of bodily boundaries. It is primarily a violation of the self as body or body as self, and is mental or psychological within the narrative only indirectly through the cybernetic implants that remain, scar-like, part of Picard's body. The real violation, as Picard's later comments make clear, is that every trace of his (cultural) identity was erased in the process of the other's invasion of his body. As might be expected, there are strong sexual overtones to this violation and intrusion, and there is furthermore a strong sense of homophobia as there seem to be, at least at this point, no females in the Borg collective. In fact, in the initial skirmishes with the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation, they were represented as androgynous - though markedly masculine in appearance - while later encounters, specifically in First Contact and Star Trek: Voyager, deal with Borg as gendered individuals.

<31> Appropriately, Picard is rescued from the grasp of this male other by the efforts of two males belonging to the Enterprise crew, namely Riker and Data. Significantly, this becomes possible only after another gender conflict - this one between first officer William Riker and an up-and-coming female officer of the same rank - has been decided in Riker's favor. The role of the android Data in this episode deserves closer attention, as he is clearly a positive embodiment of the machine. More generally, Data's role in the series is that of a modern-day version of Pinocchio, the inorganic but somehow animate matter that strives to be human, to become "a real boy". Moreover, in the context of their struggle against the Borg other, Data and Picard form the pair that gives the episode its name: "The Best of Both Worlds". [8] But not only is "the best" of the world of the human and the world of the machine thus embodied by the two characters, the two worlds are furthermore reconciled when Data saves Picard by connecting to the machine part in him and restores his human self. This reconciliation, however, depends on a reaffirmation of the boundaries between the two "worlds", on keeping the human and the machine apart.

<32> In terms of the abject, it is predominantly bodily margins that define the self against a threatening other in the early struggles between the Enterprise and the Borg. Additionally, the maternal appears prominently in two related versions of the devouring mother: the ominous shape of the Borg ship on the one hand and the identity-erasing Borg collective on the other. Needless to say, not only is Picard freed from the latter when he is restored to his former bodily "self", but the threat of the other is itself destroyed when Data manages to hack into the "mind" of the Borg ship and puts it to sleep. While the Borg body is already repulsive in its internal transgression of the human/machine divide, it is not abject to the same degree as in its later portrayal, which employs a combination of bodily fluids, death and decay, which - together with their shambling gait and mindless facial expression - links the Borg to the undead figure of the zombie. It was only with their appearance on the big screen in First Contact that the Borg "evolved" (as they themselves put it) to include these forms of the abject, further emphasizing the forever repeated violation of the white male body by a technological other.

<33> Significantly, the representation of the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generationhas given rise to Anne Cranny-Francis' challenge to Haraway's influential model of the cyborg offered in her "Cyborg Manifesto". In particular, it is the vision of the cyborg as a deconstructive figure undermining the normative binary oppositions of Western metaphysics and thereby exercising a libratory function which Cranny-Francis contrasts with contemporary culture. To be sure, the invasion of Picard by the Borg represents the white male body of sociocultural authority in crisis, but the crisis in this case does not result in the dismantling or demystification of patriarchy and white privilege. On the contrary, the effect is just the opposite, as Picard's patriarchal legitimacy is reaffirmed and ultimately enhanced by new emotional depth and resonance, "invested with an erotics that invites participation and observation" (Cranny-Francis 153). Thus, the process of cyborgization temporarily blurs certain boundaries in order to finally reinforce the socio-cultural authority of the white male body. And yet, Cranny-Francis's argument does not discredit Haraway's vision as such, since the cyborg other remains a disruptive force that needs to be cast out in order to reinforce existing binarisms. [9]

 

Contexts of Star Trek's white male body

<34> As has already been suggested, the myths that U.S. society has been telling itself via the discursive practices of the Star Trek franchise have preserved the contradictions at the same time as they have "resolved" them in another medium and through another modality. In terms of the semiotic homologies of a Lévi-Straussian analyses of the Star Trek: TNG episodes that feature the Borg, one would arrive at the first term S1 invested with the semantic content /human/, which would result in S2 = /anti-human/, -S1 = /not-human/, and -S2 = /not-antihuman/. [10]

 

 

Since the oppositions retained by the text point to its socio-cultural context, the historical moment in which these episodes were articulated as imaginary resolutions to real contradictions can be recognized as a particular moment of crisis. Under the shadow of Reaganomics and recession, working class identity in the U.S. of the 1980s became acutely threatened by the devaluation of manufacture and manual labor through the rise of multinational corporations and their ability to shift production to low-wage countries, the influx of immigrant labor, and the increasing automatization and miniaturization of production processes. Thus, while the struggle against an other that is part human and part machine appears as a self-evident necessity to an audience focused on action and suspense, it is also an ideological maneuver that serves to reassert the values of patriarchy and white, Anglo-American supremacy during a period of acute economic and multicultural transformation. At the surface structure of the text, an other is invented as an external threat, which is then made to stand in for this historical threat to white male identity. Whatever the logical motivations in the diegetic world of the narrative, in going "where no man has gone before", the Enterprise crew is also very much engaged at the symbolic or cultural level, reaffirming rather than extending frontiers and margins of what it takes to be its self.

 

The monstrous feminine and the threat of the female cyborg

<35> As has already been indicated, the Borg and their role as StarTrek's other changes as one moves from the late 1980s to the mid and late 1990s, i.e. Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001). The former opens with a dream sequence in which Picard is back with the Borg (he is one of them, one with them in the womb of the Borg ship as the archaic mother), reliving the violation of his body. To be precise, the traumatic image re-seen is the memory of the Borg repeatedly penetrating his right eye with a cylindrical apparatus . In psychoanalytic terms, the flashback reveals an appropriated phallus traumatically invading a heterosexual white male body. However, the trauma Picard experiences is not only sexual in nature. Picard's coherence as an individual in humanist terms is thrown into flux since he is intimately linked to technology. His embodied subjectivity can no longer maintain the dichotomy between organic and technological that his humanist ontology as a white male relies upon.

<36> Picard wakes from his dream only to look on helplessly at his reflection in a mirror as he is, again, penetrated by the Borg, only this time from within by the implants he still carries like the scars of old wounds. His body thus functions like the body invoked by de Certeau: written by the other, carrying the wounds of his torment as the only viable proof of the other. Equally, his body can be read as a text in that it contains the Borg's cybernetic implants much like a Lévi-Straussian "residue" of the contradictions present in the film's conditions of possibility. Picard wakes a second time, this time for real, only to learn that the Borg have returned in force and are headed for Earth. The rest of the movie reiterates the encounter between self and other as a struggle over the body, but in doing so makes significant changes to the Borg story as originally told in the television series.

<37> After the Enterprise follows the Borg into the past to stop them from overwhelming a defenseless Earth, the Enterprise's shields drop for a moment, long enough for the Borg to beam over unnoticed before their own ship is destroyed. Again, there is an invasion of a body, this time that of the starship Enterprise, which the Borg immediately begin to assimilate, turning the ship itself into a larger version of the abject other. This transgression goes unnoticed for some time, long enough for the Enterprise crew to know, as soon as they realize the integrity of their ship has been compromised, that they are fighting a losing battle. In one of the skirmishes that ensue, the spectator gets a closer look at how the Borg assimilate human crew members. They do so not, as had previously been shown, by simply replacing parts of their bodies, but by punctuating, vampire-like, the victim's skin by means of two tentacle-like extensions of their body and injecting microscopic "nano-bots" into the victim's body. One of these victims is later shown in close-up - a white male body - begging Picard to "help" him by killing him before he becomes "one of them", his skin rapidly decaying, rotting away as his body is turned into the abject other. Apparently, death is a fate preferable to living with the other growing inside one's own body, re-writing it as a textual proof of the other. Needless to say, Picard mercifully saves the crewman in question from becoming the other that he himself has once been and, in part, remains.

<38> It is at roughly this point in the film that the android Data is captured by the Borg. He is subsequently strapped to a chair resembling a torture rack and comes face to face with an inconsistency in the portrayal of the Borg that neither he nor the film can make any sense of. [11] The Borg now appear to have a leader, a "Queen", who speaks for them, controls them, and is thus their Achilles' heel. She is also, however, a highly sexualized temptress. The first image of the Borg Queen immediately presents a challenge to traditional ideas of embodied gender (and embodiment per se): she appears as only half a torso and head with cybernetic implants and a metallic spine, suspended from thick black cables.  This fragment of a body is then lowered onto a corresponding headless body, with which it interconnects. As Robert Wilson has argued, a replacement of biological elements with cybernetic implants "evoke[s] a consciousness of dis-integration", implicitly challenging the coherence and borders of the human body (251). But the Borg Queen represents a more potent challenge than a simple implant or prosthesis would since her entire body is modularised and fragmented. Moreover, the Queen's lack of stability in terms of embodiment contrasts with the ostensibly coherent white male bodies of the "great men", Picard and Data. [12] The combination of the Borg Queen's fragmented body and overtly sexualised performance serve to code her as threatening in both her seductive and abject qualities.

<39> In the course of the film, the Queen writes ample proof of the other on Data's body, exposing him to all the temptations of the flesh and invading Data's body with two penetrative drills, a double phallus. Her strategy in this is twofold, and both aspects of it clearly pose a threat to Star Trek's white male self: the first enacts a transgression of the human/machine division as the Queen gives Data "flesh and blood" and thus brings him "closer to humanity". Data appears to acquiesce and his body is successively turned into an abject intermediate state, no longer either fully machine or fully human. Just like the Borg other, Data becomes a compound, an em-bodied transgression that visually and conceptually resembles Frankenstein's monster. Thus the Borg Queen's threat is neither exclusively technological nor organic, but rather derives from her explicit challenges to the normalized boundaries between technology and humanity.

<40> The second aspect of the Borg Queen's strategy takes the form of aggressive female sexuality and is, in effect, more intimidating, more threatening to Data than her other stratagem. First Contact thereby makes explicit on a textual level what was only implied by the television series: the identity threatened by the Borg other is not only white and male but also sexually inactive.[13] As such, it had been threatened in "Best of Both Worlds" by the ambitious, up-and-coming female commander whom Riker had to "snap back so hard she'd think she was a first year cadet again"; who, in other words, had to be relegated to her proper place in the male order. First Contact, on the other hand, more fully aligns the female (and potentially disruptive female sexuality) with the abject other, allowing Picard and Data to combat both the technological and the gendered other at the same time and in the same body.

<41> In terms of the film's semiotic homology, the distribution of semes among individual characters is thus more complex than in the television series. Even the most rudimentary analysis of First Contact involves at least two layers of interdependent homologies. Picard is not only /human/ as in the structure underlying the television episodes, but also /male/ in the structure operating at a second level. This second homology is generated by the binary opposition of /male/ vs. /female/, with Picard and the Borg Queen as its most prominent embodiments. The complementary binary pair of this second homology presents itself in terms of sexuality: Picard is known for his restraint with women whereas the Borg Queen's aggressive sexuality is dangerous and tempting even to the android Data.

As becomes apparent in the attempt to locate Data in either homology, the struggle between the two positions - that of the self as /human/ and /male/ and that of the other as /not human/ and /female/ - seems to revolve around Data's ambiguous position in both fields of opposition. In terms of such an analysis, Data resists assignment to any of these positions: he clearly is /not human/ but is he also /anti-human/? Since he is /male/, is he also /sexually inactive/? Indeed, the film also reflects this underlying struggle at its surface level, as both self and other try to win over Data to their side.

<42> While the Borg Queen can also be read as allowing subversive readings that challenge traditional notions of gender roles and embodiment within the more conservative narrative of the film, Star Trek's male order is ultimately maintained at a narrative level when the Queen is not only defeated, but dies in a particularly gruesome manner as her skin and body are slowly ripped away by powerful corrosives. Data's ambiguous position in both homologies as the turning point of the entire film is motivated diegetically since he is the only character in possession of the encryption code that allows unrestricted access to the Enterprise's main computer. The film's element of suspense hinges upon the fact that Data (as a transgressed body) appears to be aligned with the other until the very end of the film, at which point he violently turns the tables on the Borg Queen. Even at this moment, however, his appropriation of the Borg tag-line "Resistance is futile" reveals his relative proximity to the other. Data then undergoes a form of purgatory when he plunges into the liquid plasma which burns away his newly given flesh and thus frees his body of the (textual) proof of the abject he has become: a transgression of the boundaries between human and machine which the film has to safeguard and reaffirm if it is to speak affectively to a mainstream audience.

<43> The liquid plasma also kills the Queen, but the defeat of her transgressive, female, abject body is complete only as Picard reasserts his masculinity in an exercise of explicit symbolism when he picks up her twitching metallic spine and head and snaps it in two, metaphorically destroying the appropriated phallus. What Leaver reads as the Queen's radical performativity is thus ideologically contained by the conservatism of the Star Trek franchise. Data, as the machine that tries to be human (in spirit, but not in body), can now be re-integrated into the communal self of the crew, as long as his failure is assured and inevitable. His body thus continually articulates an affirmation of the boundary between the white male body as the (human) self and the abject, feminine body as the (machine) other.

 

Transgressions of the body in the Alien saga

<44> Despite the presence of a female protagonist in all the Alien films, there are many parallel themes between the Star Trek franchise and the Alien saga, the problematic status of the machine as an abject body and its relation to the self being one of them. In both series of films, it is the figure of the android that em-bodies the fundamental contradiction between human and machine; with the exception of Winona Ryder's female cyborg Call in Alien: Resurrection, the android's white male body serves as the text on which the other is painfully written. The presence of the abject in the guise of the alien creature in the Alien films is another point of contact with StarTrek's Borg. [14] As a species, the alien creature is peculiarly multimorph in the course of its life-cycle, which is divided into distinct stages and equally distinct bodies. The parallels between the alien other and insect life - the films themselves name ants and bees as parallels - are further reinforced by the hive-like organization of the species and its habitat. Like StarTrek's Borg, the individual members of this alien other act in silent and efficient accord, while the drones are easily replaced and controlled by the "Queen".

<45> The spectacular body of the alien itself, which Creed defines as the "woman-as-monster" is "a complex representation of the monstrous-feminine as archaic mother" (65). [15] Approximating the maternal abject, Creed argues that the alien queen is an articulation of the mother who, by giving life and taking it away, represents the threat of the vagina dentata. However, the Alien films do not only rely on the maternal abject for the horror they evoke, but manage to orchestrate a remarkable convergence of all forms of the abject. It is thus possible to focus on a single scene from the first Alien film in dealing with the threat of this particular alien other to the white male body. In this single sequence, centering on the moment that the alien emerges from the chest of its first (white male) victim, Ridley Scott succeeds in visually combining a violation of bodily margins (the body has previously been invaded and is now violently ruptured), the maternal (the body has served as host, has nurtured and protected the alien, and now gives birth to it), the edible (the crew is gathered for a meal at this point, and John Hurt has just lifted a spoonful of food to his mouth), death (the human body dies at the same moment the alien other is born), and the text (the body and the wounds it receives are the only textual proof that the crew have of its existence).

<46> While the most salient forms of the abject in the Alien films are clearly connected to the body of the alien and its transgression of the human body, these are not its only articulations. Rather, they are echoed by a number of elements throughout the saga, most of which suggest a violation of bodies that serve as extensions of the human self and can therefore also become sites of the struggle between self and other. Kristeva observed that it is a "mistake [...] to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins" (69), because abjection is itself the founding of "a border", "the separation of inside/outside" (61), and as such "acknowledges [the subject founded with it] to be in perpetual danger" (9) regardless of the actual physical properties of the space thus divided. In all the films of the Alien saga, considerable emphasis is placed on objects and practices that delineate borders and margins: doors, hatches, and breaches of all kinds are constantly barricaded to defend the self from the other. The violation of some form of body associated with the human self - be it the spaceship Nostromo, a planetary colony, an isolated community, or actual human bodies - is thus characteristic of the moment of bodily crisis in all the Alien films.

<47> Once the alien other has overcome the initial obstacles mentioned above and invaded the structures associated with the self, it sets about penetrating actual human bodies, wresting from them first consciousness, control, and ultimately life. In the course of this process, the other's victims are turned into cocoons that serve as hosts for the growing alien young. In this abject state, they appear as versions of the living dead not unlike the Borg drones in Star Trek. Apparently, once the alien has violated the body of its victim, the human body is also changed from "one of us" into "one of them". Thus, whenever Ripley encounters victims in such a state of abjection, her reactions of disgust and resentment outweigh the desire to save them. The cocooned victims, already invaded by the other that now feeds on them, ask to be saved, beg to be killed just like the Borgs' victims do in First Contact. Death, in these science fictions, is obviously preferable to living with the other growing inside one's own body; it is the "fortunate shipwreck" that de Certeau describes as the body's only escape from being written by the other.

<48> Focusing on biological rather than technological threats, Alien 3 articulated, among other things, "whatever images surface on your dream screen when what's really terrifying you is AIDS" (Taubin 134) and thus anticipated the more recent The Astronaut's Wife (1999). The latter merits some attention here as it connects the alien other as viral infestation to issues of sexuality and procreation. Superficially, the film's plot seems familiar enough: an alien species wants to take over Earth by "snatching" human bodies from their proper owners, depriving them of control, intelligence, and ultimately life. The story begins when an astronaut returns from a failed mission and no one notices he has been infected. In the course of the next few months, he impregnates his wife and, since their offspring are also infected, the alien other threatens to begin to spread over the world. As the astronaut's wife slowly begins to realize what is happening, the contamination of her husband effectively disrupts their normal love-life and the trust they shared. By portraying (unguarded) sexual intercourse as the cause of infection, The Astronaut's Wife aligns the alien other even more directly with the HIV virus than does the Alien saga.

<49> Generally speaking, the fourth film of the Alien saga, Alien: Resurrection (1997), is far more ambiguous in its portrayal of bodies than its precursors. Featuring a clone of Ripley, whose genes have been mixed up with alien DNA, the film's opening credits expose the spectator to the abject in its most extreme form: a pulsing mass of organic material that lacks all form, all shape, all the boundaries between self and other. In the course of the film, the alien aspect of Ripley's character is continually emphasized as she looks and acts in the manner of the other, sniffing around and fighting with animal strength. However, this seemingly positive (if never entirely innocent) portrayal of blurred boundaries between self and other within the body of the protagonist is completely reversed when Ripley literally encounters her self. As she enters one of the laboratories on board the ship on which she has been "resurrected", she is faced with the remains of the scientists' less fortunate attempts to create a clone. The corpses she sees preserved in formaldehyde are bodily composites of her self and the alien other, hideous and abject in their transgression of the bodily margins that ought to separate the two. They are texts, too, bodies written by the other. One of the bodies Ripley faces, though no less deformed than the others, is somehow still alive and well enough to beg the visually, physically intact Ripley to kill her. Ripley, whose self is clearly threatened by this confrontation with an abject self that is somehow also her own self, complies by setting fire to the entire laboratory. A cleansing fire engulfs the abject bodies and washes over the textual surface of the film until the only thing that survives is a self reaffirmed in its bodily margins, a self that carries the residues of the other as internal contradictions that do not visibly transfigure the body.

<50> Near its end and almost as an afterthought, the film introduces another instance in a long line of transgressions: a body that visibly, abjectedly transgresses all bodily margins and thus cannot be allowed to exist. After Ripley falls into the womb of the alien queen, lying embedded in a mass of alien limbs and phlegm that threaten to absorb her body, the queen gives birth to a new alien. Since this new creature has adapted some human features and is no longer entirely other, it too visibly em-bodies the contradictions that Ripley is able to contain and conceal within her body. Its destruction is thus unavoidable if the film is to offer an imaginary resolution to the real conflict between self and other.

 

Into the heart of darkness

<51> In terms of narrative closure, the ending of First Contact can be regarded as representative of many other science fiction films such as Aliens. In both films, the protagonist is given the opportunity to escape in safety while also being certain of the alien other's complete destruction, but chooses instead to remain behind because she or he knows a friend to be still in the hands (or tentacles, as it were) of the other. In fact, the protagonist must prove his or her humanity by venturing right into the heart of the darkness to save this friend, and in the process must also face the monstrous feminine as an embodiment of the other. The figure of the queen, however, is not simply an instance of the other, but encompasses the threat of the other in its entirety (even though its manifestations may be large in numbers). Her destruction, in other words, ensures the final repression of the other, just as the defeat of Picard or Ripley would equal the defeat of the collective human self. The hierarchical nature of the Star Trek universe and its tradition of symbolic deferrals (with the white male captain standing for the crew, the crew for the Enterprise, and the ship, in turn, for the entire United Federation of Planets) lends itself particularly well to embodied struggles of this kind. [16]

<52> Entering the domain of the other and the heart of its power, Picard and Ripley both pass from territory associated with the bodily self (the human-built colony and the starship Enterprise) into territory that has been assimilated by the other, as if the very notion of space needed to be complemented with a spatial other as well. In the case of Aliens, this is realized visually by means of organic "secretions" left behind by the alien creatures, hive-like structures of smooth, black, and slimy appearance, giving the impression that Ripley has entered the very body of the alien other. Immediately preceding the moment of narrative closure, this is also the point of ultimate danger and final crises for the self. For Picard in First Contact, the entrance into the realm of the other is visualized through the technologically assimilated surroundings of the Enterprise, itself an embodiment of the self of the crew as a whole. The change of the surrounding corridors thus already visualizes a violation of the self, much more so in First Contact than in Aliens, because of the long history connecting the ship and its crew.

<53>Both Picard and Ripley ultimately defeat the queen of their respective alien other in order to rescue the captive Data and Newt, respectively. Significantly, these victims are both in acute danger of being incorporated: that is to say, Newt into the life cycle of the alien, and Data into the Borg collective. In both cases, this takes the form of abject violations of the bodily margins of the self: a forced birth (equaling death) in the case of Newt and the transgression of the boundary between human (organic) and machine in the case of Data. The protagonist's final struggle to save the victim's life is thus also a struggle to preserve and safeguard the sanctity of these boundaries (or else to re-establish them, in the case of Data, whose false flesh is literally burned away, purging him of any sign of his transgression). This process of purification finds its corresponding element in the purging of the larger body of the self, whether colony or starship: by means of a nuclear explosion in the case of the former and the ship's reconstruction in case of the latter.

<54> It should be noted, however, that these are two of the most affirmative endings to be found in recent science fiction film. They do not contain the self-negating momentum of The Thing or the insidious paranoia of Invasion of theBodysnatchers. Instead, First Contact and Aliens emphasize individual agency by allowing the respective protagonists to defeat not only the alien other but also the rules of the genre. By daringly rescuing someone who, in the "normal" course of events and by the protagonist's own judgment, would have to be considered already doomed. Both films furthermore articulate a hope for the reestablishment of clear-cut boundaries (both visible and clean) between self and other, boundaries which they articulate as bodily margins. These are moreover boundaries which can only be re-established by disposing of (or exposing) those who have already become contaminated (infected, impregnated, or assimilated) by the other. Killing off those "other" parts of the self is also articulated as a necessary act of self-defense in the form of self-purification or self-mutilation. Hence the Borg Queen's taunts to Data, referring to the new flesh she has given him: "tear the skin from your limb as you would a defective circuit".

<55> Policing the abject, in particular the field of bodily margins, thus seems to be the most significant function of popular or mainstream science fiction films. In fact, notions of territory and every kind of reference to the marking or maintaining of boundaries are crucial to the psychological and perhaps ideological work of these films as their characters engage in and speak about walking perimeters, standing their ground, making a last stand, holding their position, or drawing the line. The more recent Alien: Resurrection, on the other hand, while taking the abject to new extremes, radically reconfigures the franchise's previous closures when the transgressive body of Ripley survives to return "home" to Earth. Still, Picard's words in First Contact are perhaps the most evocative instance of a tendency that was at its height in the 1980s and 1990s: "They invade our space, and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. The line must be drawn here. This far and no farther!" In a sense, then, these films are rally calls to stand the ground against the other, to police the self and make no concessions to otherness, but they are also fantasies about a binary world in which such a clear-cut distinction can ultimately be achieved.

 

Works Cited

Adlam, Carol. "Ethics of Difference: Bakhtin's Early Writings and Feminist Theories." Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West. Ed. Carol Adlam et al. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. 142-160.

Allen, Dennis. "Homosexuality and Narrative." Modern Fiction Studies 41/3-4 (1995): 609-634.

Bakhtin, Michael. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 1984.

Balsamo, Anne. "Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture." Ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. London: Sage, 1995. 215-37.

Berlant, Lauren. "National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life." Ed. Hortense Spillers. Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text. New York: Routledge, 1991. 110-140.

Braidotti, Rosi. "Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Difference." Ed. Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti. Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace. London: Zed Books, 1996. 135-152.

Certeau, Michel de. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Cranny-Francis, Anne. "The Erotics of the (cy)Borg: Authority and Gender in the Sociocultural Imaginary." Ed. Marleen Barr. Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism. New York & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993.

Fuchs, Cynthia J. "'Death is Irrelevant': Cyborgs, Reproduction, and the Future of Male Hysteria". Genders 19 (1994): 113-133.

Fulton, Valerie. "An Other Frontier: Voyaging West with Mark Twain and Star Trek's Imperial Subject". Postmodern Culture 4. 3 (1994): 3 September 2003 <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.594/fulton-v.594> .

Ginsburg, Ruth. "The Pregnant Text: Bakhtin's Ur-Chronotope: The Womb." Ed. David Shepard. Bakhtin, Carnival and Other Subjects. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. 166-176.

Hanson, Clare. "Stephen King: Powers of Horror." In: Docherty, Brian (ed.): American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen Kind. New York: St. Martin's, 1990.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181.

Kirkup, Gill et al, eds. The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror:An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Leaver, Tama. "'Your appeal to my humanity is pointless': The Borg and Radical Performativity in Star Trek". Outskirts 9, May/August (2002): 3 September 2003 <http://www.chloe.uwa.edu.au/outskirts/archive/VOL9/article2.html> .

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Press, 1978.

Sobchak, Vivian. "The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film". Ed. Anette Kuhn. Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. London: Verso, 1990.

Springer, Claudia. Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993.

Taubin, Amy. "The Alien Trilogy: From Feminism to AIDS." Ed. Pam Cook. Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. 93-100.

Tischleder, Baerbel. Body Trouble. Entkoerperlichung, Whiteness und das amerikanische Gegenwartskino. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld & Nexus, 2001.

Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester & New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1997.

Wilson, Robert Rawdon. "Cyber(body)parts: Prosthetic Consciousness". Ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. London: Sage Publications, 1995.

 

Television and Filmography

"The Best of Both Worlds I & II". Star Trek: The Next Generation, Paramount Pictures, 1991.

Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. 20th Century Fox & Brandywine Productions, 1979.

Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. 20th Dir. Century Fox & Brandywine Productions, 1986.

Alien 3. Dir. David Funcher. 20th Century Fox & Brandywine Productions, 1992.

Alien: Resurrection. Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet. 20th Century Fox & Brandywine Prod., 1997.

Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. Dir. Nicholas Meyer. Paramount Pictures, 1991.

Star Trek: First Contact. Dir. Jonathan Frakes. Paramount Pictures, 1996.

The Thing . Dir. John Carpenter. Universal Studios, 1982.

 

Notes

[1] The genre traditionally associated with the encounter between self and other is that of the quest narrative which is brought to an end only when the alien domain is brought within the hegemonic sway of the known world, with the result that "the other has been reduced to (more of) the same" (de Certeau xiii). The quest in each instance has to prove that the other is amenable to being reduced to the status of the same, for, de Certeau argues, "it is ideologically inconceivable that there should exist an otherness of the same ontological status as the same, without there being immediately mounted an effort at its appropriation" (xiii). [^]

[2] While Bakhtin originally saw the grotesque as a positive force of resistance, an expression of the explosive politics of the body, Kristeva gives Bakhtin's notions a different, psychoanalytical inflection. Unlike the Bakhtinian grotesque, which is a mode of performance or writing, a primarily textual phenomenon with links into an unproblematic and idealized past, the Kristevan abject is, in effect, part of her theory of the human subject, which at once distinguishes her approach from Bakhtin's humanist view. Opposing Bakhtin's valorization of the grotesque, Laura Mulvey has also pointed out that its tripartite structure - "from everyday norm to the license of disorder and back again" - actually makes it integrative and conservative, "providing a social safety-valve for the forces of disorder" (169). [^]

[3] See Vice for a detailed account of the problematic position of gender in Bakhtin's work. See also Adlam for a comprehensive overview of the relationship between Bakhtin's writing and feminist theory. [^]

[4] As Ruth Ginsburg puts it, Bakhtin thus follows Rabelais in seeing "the old as the mother and the new as the son" (173). Needless to say, it is the old that must inevitably die to make way for the new. [^]

[5] See the section on "Alien M/others" in Kirkup et al for a general discussion of the abject maternal in science fiction film. [^]

[6] In relation to this recursive process of assimilaiton, Star Trek has often been described as representing a latent ideology of "optimistic imperialism" in the guise of exploration and multiculturalism, completely in keeping with the dominant political and military discourses of the U.S. (Fuchs 113, see also Fulton). [^]

[7] It should furthermore be noted that Worf's otherness as an alien was emphasized by means of additional prosthetics so that his skin color would not be seen as a connection to African Americans, thus disavowing any relation between StarTrek's diegetic other and U.S. society's non-diegetic other. [^]

[8] As Cranny-Francis notes, this hugely popular two-part episode marked a watershed in the popular success of the series, and its popularity is not unrelated to its strong glorification of Picard as an image of white male authority in its best liberal-humanist version. [^]

[9] Cranny-Francis goes on to find the cyborg operating in similarly conservative ways in later installments of the Star Trek franchise that feature female cyborgs. Though the latter are not necessarily without some demystificatory potential, in the end they function as a reinscription of woman as the transgressive and absolutely evil temptress. Besides the Borg Queen discussed below, there is also Seven of Nine, the Borg stranded among humans in Star Trek: Voyager. Although a more complex character than the Borg Queen, she ultimately resolves into female infantilization and dependency. See Leaver for an attempt to reclaim the radical performativity of Seven of Nine's identity as a challenge to the dominant patriarchal hegemony. [^]

[10] See also Kavanagh (98) for the construction of a similar semiotic square for Ridley Scott's Alien. [^]

[11] When, in fact, Data confronts the Borg Queen with the logical conclusion that her existence is a contradiction, she responds coldly: "You are in chaos Data. You are the contradiction: a machine who wishes to be human". Of course, they are both, in a way, right about each other. [^]

[12] Another notable contrast between film versions of Star Trek and the television series is the focus on characters. Both First Contact and "Best of Both Worlds" focus on Picard and Data, suggesting a "natural" alliance between those two white males against the Borg other. [^]

[13] Vivian Sobchak has argued that the "virginity of astronauts" is constitutive for the genre of science fiction as a whole. Whereas the semiotic link between biological sexuality and women has been repressed or broken by the genre, a link between biological asexuality and men has been forged: "[T]hey have rejected their biology and sexuality - pushed it from their minds and bodies to concentrate on the technology required to penetrate and impregnate not a woman but the universe. The virginal astronauts of the science fiction film are a sign of penetration and impregnation without biology, without sex, and without the opposite, different, sex" (107f). [^]

[14] John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) features an alien that dwarfs Alien's and StarTrek's others in terms of both visual effects and the abject. This outrageous and unidentifiable "thing" sprouting tentacles, serpentine heads, razor-sharp teeth, and other amorphous extensions from what would seem to be normal bodies, spreads virus-like through the human community through physical contact. The film's "purely visual anxiety about homosexuality" thus combines deep-seated homophobia and anxieties about the spread of AIDS (Allen, 624). [^]

[15] It should also be mentioned in passing that the various shapes assumed by the alien other are highly suggestive of both phallic and vaginal properties. Partly for that reason, the years since the films release have seen a conjunction of psychoanalytic and feminist approaches producing numerous conflicting readings of the Alien films. These have dealt with several of the aspects considered here, even though the Kristevan abject has been conspicuously absent from most discussions so far. [^]

[16] The fact that Ripley is female, is of course significant in this respect. So is the fact that, unlike Picard, Ripley does not in the least represent the society she lives in - nominally or otherwise. In fact, though employed by the Corporation, she repeatedly opposes its authoritarian system. Her status as embodiment is thus much more complex than Picard's and has remained a moot point in the academic debate surrounding the Alien saga since the first film's release in the late seventies. I will retain the narrative of Aliens here for the sake of its extraordinary similarities to First Contact. As the example of Aliens shows, it is not always the white male body which labors to restore the boundaries between the self and its abject other. [^]

 

Return to Top»



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.