Kissing Becky: Masculine Fears and Misogynist Moments in Science Fiction Films

Abstract

����� ers (1956), Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982)—are all marked by a common element: the presence of at least one moment of startling misogyny. These moments are startling in part because they involve either a narrative digression or superfluity, a stylistic deviation, or a violation of their films' prior encodings of the female. More importantly, each of them expresses an unanticipated level of male fear of or violence towaid women, in response to a threat to men's powers of representation and control. What follows attempts to read in these moments of textual excess both the instability of male identity and the vulnerability of male hegemony. This reading is part of the stream of response to Laura Mulvey's watershed essay on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, with its crucial analysis of Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look. Since Mulvey, a good deal of writing on film and gender has focused on trying to undermine the seemingly monolithic structure of the classic pattiatchal Hollywood system, and paiticulatly on theorizing relation—and opposition—to a cinema that seems systematically to exclude them as subjects. Hence critics have taken up such matters as the return of the gaze on the part of the female image/object, the problem of women's cinema, and the positions of actual female spectatots, in vatious histotical moments, as they watch classic Hollywood