Guest Writer Wednesday: ‘Prometheus’ and the ‘Alien’ Movies: Feminism and Anti-Feminism

Guest post written by Rhea Daniel. Cross-posted from her blog Short Stories with permission.
Warning: Some images NSFW and links below lead to some NSFW images.
Long after I had seen and re-seen the Alien movie series, I was shocked to learn that they possess intense anti-feminist themes, articulated in the brilliant essay by Michael Davis and in the psychoanalytical study of horror movie tropes by Barbara Creed. The underlying themes in the Alien series reflect humanity’s intense fear of penetration and childbirth, with alien spawn tearing its way out of the womb (chest cavity, call it what you will) well in rhythm with Giger’sown biomecha art and his surreal visual concoctions of birth, death and human sexuality.
Victory V (Satan), HR Giger, 1983

Both Giger and the movies reflect our ancient patriarchal religious fears of the monstrous feminine1combined with our modern germophobic clinical distaste for the disease-spreading organic and the abject: secretions, menstrual blood, placenta, amniotic fluid, seriously drippy mucosa, include semen if you will. For Giger the womb is not a place where a child is nurtured and childbirth something that has to be embraced, forget that tired old eco-feminist claptrap, it is a claustrophobic deathtrap that has to be survived, even if it results in the death of the parent2
Biomechanoid, HR Giger,1976

However my reading of what the critics had to say did not diminish my enthusiasm to see Prometheus. I remember clearly the days sitting together, thoroughly enjoying any movie with my family while ripping it to bits at the same time. The job of the critic is to analyze what they see, and the fact that the Alien movies have more to them than I first thought only makes them more interesting.

***(Be wary for there are several references to human whatnots about to follow)***
 
Prometheus pushes this notion of the ‘death of the parent’ when David lightheartedly addresses Dr. Elizabeth Shaw after her frightful operation, but that’s not all Prometheusis riding on. If anyone noticed, all the Engineers seem to be dudes, and in addition to the myth of Prometheus, this brings up the story of the Goddess Athena emerging perfectly formed from Zeus’s head3, and I allude to this because the scientifically advanced Engineers seemed to have created, cleanly, without the need for the crude, organic, stifling enclosure of the womb, an entire race in ‘Their’ likeness*,read identical DNA, eliminating the need for the female, which is what the existence of an all-male race proposes. The design of the clone-like marble sculpted super-bodies of the Engineers further substantiates the Greek mythological reference.

Hermes, Engineer

Prometheus simplifies what Alien proposed, it interchanges between penile and vaginal imagery: creature with knob-like head that flowers into a vagina, gigantic vagina dentata scene, penis-probe emerges, both male and female genitalia are likely villains. In the proud tradition of a design that’s been rumoured to be inspired by human body bits, skeletons and BMW car parts, it’s all perfectly justifiable.

The eco-feminist opinion of the medicalization of childbirth is that it alienates the child from the mother and vice versa, the mother has to be delivered from her baby, the child has to be saved from its mother’s stifling uterine constrictions, and now I refer quite obviously to Elizabeth’s self-inflicted caesarean. Okay, fine, she didn’t do to herself literally, she got the reluctant machine to do it for her, to get that twisting, bulging, rapidly expanding alien body out of herself. I got an intense feeling of déjà vu during that scene: seriously, get the damned thing out quickly. More painkillers please. The scene has been hailed as a pro-choice metaphor, an assertion of reproductive rights, a claim to ownership of the female body by the female herself, the machine being calibrated for the male body hindering Elizabeth’s attempt to save herself a reference to the ongoing battle for reproductive freedom in the United States, but it is also a modern feminist embrace of medical technology. I agree with the movie’s usage of the term ‘caesarean’; ‘abortion’ would imply a vaginal expulsion of the thing, after killing it within the womb, considerably more invasive and terrifying. Eco-feminism not only gets the boot in that scene with the embrace of mechanistic, but also because Elizabeth, as opposed to cloned Ripley in Alien Resurrection4, isn’t keen to claim any part of the alien growing inside herself as her own.

Prometheus is gorgeous but sports little of the multi-layered psychological profundity of its predecessor (I can barely think of Prometheus as a prequel to Alien, so let’s just say it tried to ride on its predecessor’s glory and it partly succeeded. It has its niggling flaws, like I don’t know why a biologist would approach an entirely new alien species in a ‘here kittykittykitty’ manner, or why with all that fantastic technology the geologist and biologist got lost in the first place. It’s okay, they’re expendable. Elizabeth Shaw however is important and impressive, she’s softer and smaller than the androgynous, tough warrior that is Ripley, however no less formidable as a heroine.

I’m all geared up for a sequel now and want to know how the Engineers are going to react when a female version of themselves lands up at the door with an android’s head in a duffle bag, questioning them about an experiment gone awry.

Notes:

1 Barbara Creed “The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis”, Routledge, 1993

2 Stanislav Grof “HR Giger and the Soul of the Twentieth Century”, HR Giger, Taschen 2002

3 Jane Caputi, “Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture”

4 “I’m the monster’s mother”, Ripley, Alien Resurrection (1997)

*Edit 27/6–This is what I assumed the DNA scene from the movie was suggesting. I’m not sciencey enough to know what kind of life forms exist out there or how they come about. When and where the female human is supposed to have come into the picture I can only guess. It was a pretty scene though.

**Edit 4/7–It just occurred to me that this whole thing might be orchestrated by a Queen. Is Ridley going to spring a surprise on us??

Rhea Daniel got to see a lot of movies as a kid because her family members were obsessive movie-watchers. She frequently finds herself in a bind between her love for art and her feminist conscience. Meanwhile she is trying to be a better writer and artist and you can find her at http://rheadaniel.blogspot.com/.