Alien Films Research Articles

Founding Violence in the Future: A Mnemonic Reading of Ridley Scott’s Alien

Founding Violence in the Future: A Mnemonic Reading of Ridley Scott’s Alien Travis Hay I believe that the representation of alien existence, that is to say, of the imagination of radical otherness, can be seen to have passed through several distinct stages on its way to the contemporary period (where the alien and the other has once again reverted to magic and to dragons). —Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (140) In this article, I offer a settler colonial reading of Sir Ridley Scott’s Alien films: Alien (1979), Prometheus (2012), and Alien: Covenant (2017). My purpose is to underscore the historical dimensions within Alien’s depiction of the future and to demonstrate that the film series is far more exercised with historicity than with futurity. Specifically, I argue that Scott’s metaphors, themes, and plots were intentionally evocative of the horrors of British imperial expansion within North America and function as a kind of mnemonic device that remember the violence of the settler colonial past. More broadly, I offer this analysis because, like many other scholars, I view the science fiction and horror genres, between which we can locate Alien, as remarkably provocative and productive. Such non-realist depictions of monsters, zombies, ghosts, alien invasions, or the human colonization of outer space contain archives of historical feeling that can be accessed through what Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd called a “mnemonic reading” praxis. In The Transit of Empire, Byrd explains that a mnemonic reading seeks to “connect the violences and genocides of colonization to cultural productions […] in order to disrupt the elisions of multicultural liberal democracy that seek to rationalize the originary historical traumas that birthed settler colonialism through inclusion” (xii-xiii). In reading Scott’s film series mnemonically as a larger story invested with settler colonial genocide and preoccupied with foreclosures of human futurity, I add to a considerable body of scholarly literature on Alien that has [End Page 188] shaped my reading of the series as well as my approach to the horror and science fiction genres as cathected with coloniality. For readers unfamiliar with Alien, it will suffice to describe it here as a popular series of films, graphic novels, comic books, video games, and other cultural productions that stage violent and horrific conflicts between human beings and a particular species of “Alien” that wreaks havoc upon the crews of spaceships attempting to explore, settle, or mine a futuristic galactic frontier. The titular “Alien,” whose fully-developed form is called the Xenomorph, is monstrous and has acidic blood. It also has a second set of jaws that protrude from a tongue-like appendage extending from the monster’s mouth, though this is not its most grotesque or defining feature. The Xenomorph is able to use human bodies for its own sexual reproduction cycle and attacks its hosts with a gestational implant that later bursts from the chest of the victim in what has become a signature body horror sequence in any Alien cultural production. In addition to the fact that Alien films have women as protagonists, this recurring body horror motif wherein human beings are fatally impregnated by the Xenomorph has made the series particularly interesting to feminist scholars, who (at least in my view) have generated the most productive conversations on the franchise since the first film debuted in 1979 (Bell-Mettreau; Creed; Jeffords; Rushing; Torry; Vaughn). In many such readings, Alien is a science fiction and horror fusion that contained several complex themes associated with motherhood as well as many gendered horror movie tropes, such as “the final girl,” which Carol J. Cleaver theorized in Men, Women, and Chainsaws as the heroine who survives the violent ordeal and is able to kill the villain of a horror film; some examples include Jamie Lee Curtis’s character in Halloween or Betsy Palmer’s character in Friday the 13th. In my reading, Alien’s body horror and staging of reproductive violence on the galactic frontier remains remarkably gendered; however, I read Alien mnemonically to demonstrate that this gendered dimension intersects with what is, after all, a fundamentally colonial metaphor wherein the futuristic galactic frontier is haunted by the horror of what was done to Indigenous peoples...

Survivor, Warrior, Mother, Savior

The late Cold War saw the advent of a new paradigm of woman as hero in apocalyptic English-language science fiction film at its intersection with the horror and action sub-genres. In contrast to the helpless, villainous, and overly sexualized female characters before them, the Alien films’ Ellen Ripley and the Terminator franchise’s Sarah Connor represented practical, courageous women who saved humanity through their actions. These ostensibly secular narratives were rich with religious themes such as incarnation, kenosis, resurrection, faith seeking understanding, messianic expectation, virgin birth, free will, fate, evil, prophetic forewarning, and salvation. They were foundational in establishing, in effect, a humanistic mythos.

Alien Invasions and Identity Crisis: Steven Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds (2005)

The idea of national identity as threatened by foreign invasions has been at the centre of many popular Science Fiction (SF) films in the United States of America. In alien invasion films, aggressive colonisers stand for collective anxieties and can be read “as metaphors for a range of perceived threats to humanity, or particular groups, ranging from 1950s communism to the AIDS virus and contemporary ‘illegal aliens’ of human origin” (King and Krzywinska, 2000: 31-2). Such films can effectively tell historical and cultural specificities, including gender concerns. In them, the characters’ sense of belonging to a nation is destabilised in a number of ways, resulting in identity crisis in most cases. A fervent need to defend the nation from the malevolent strangers is combined with an alienation of the self in the search of individual salvation or survival.The present analysis will attempt to illustrate how threats to configurations of power are employed in a contemporary alien invasion film: The War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005). Specifically, the film takes the narrative of destruction to suggest the destabilisation of US national power within the context of post September 11, together with a subtle disruption of the gender and sexual status quo. Indeed, new ways of understanding masculinity and fatherhood assault both the public and the private spaces of its white male heterosexual protagonist, Ray, performed by popular actor Tom Cruise. Ambiguous patriotism, identity crises and selfishness are at the core of this contemporary version of H.G. Wells’s landmark novel.

Hollywood Post-9/11 Alien Films: Recontextualization of George. W. Bush's Discourse

The widely shocking attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 was interpreted differently by various institutions worldwide, ranging from America's legitimate motive to begin a 'war on terror' to defend her 'very freedom', to a pretext for Bush administration to pursue G. H. W. Bush's temptation for 'a new world order'. Various institutions, therefore, made use of their potentials to support a parallel ideology, including Hollywood as a most powerful center for producing, conveying, and supporting such an ideology worldwide. This study intends to reveal Hollywood film making companies' recontextualization of G. W. Bush's discourse used in his first speech broadcast on CNN after the attacks. A close examination of Bush's speech discloses a narrative sequence of five steps which were accordingly incorporated in alien films produced during the decade following 9111. Recontextualization of Bush's five-section speech could psychologically remind and legitimize the war.

Low frequency noise in the unstable contact region of Au-to-Au microcontact for microelectromechanical system switches

The noise behavior of Au-to-Au microcontact for microelectromechanical system switches has been experimentally studied in the unstable contact region. The results suggest that the electrical conduction remains nonmetallic at the initial stage during contact formation due to the existence of alien films, and traps in the alien layer located at the contact interface could play an important role in determining the conduction noise. The conduction fluctuation induced by electron trapping-detrapping associated with the hydrocarbon layer is found to be an intrinsic noise source contributing to the low frequency noise in the unstable contact region.

Representations of femininity in American genre cinema: the woman's film, film noir, and modern horror

Femininity and Film Genres Freud and the Death-Mother Transformations of the Woman's Film Modern Horror as the Concealed Woman's Film Medusa in the Mirror: Brian De Palma's Carrie Demeter and Persephone in Space: Transformation, Femininity, and Myth in the Alien Films The Finalizing Woman: Horror, Femininity, and Queer Monsters The Brave One

Instability of Contact Resistance in MEMS and NEMS DC Switches under Low Force: the Role of Alien Films on the Contact Surface

The metal contact is one of the most crucial parts in ohmic-contact microelectromechanical (MEMS) switches, as it determines the device performance and reliability. It has been observed that there is contact instability when the contact force is below a threshold value (minimum contact force). However, there has been very limited knowledge so far about the unstable electrical contact behavior under low contact force. In this work, the instability of Au-Au micro/nano-contact behavior during the initial stage of contact formation is comprehensively investigated for the first time. It has been found that the alien film on the contact surface plays a critical role in determining the contact behavior at the initial contact stage under low contact force. A strong correlation between contact resistance fluctuation at the initial contact stage and the presence of a hydrocarbon alien film on the contact surface is revealed. The enhancement of contact instability due to the alien film can be explained within a framework of trap-assisted tunneling.

Reproducing the Fin-de-siècle Gothic with Techno-Gothic Vampires

REPRODUCING THE FIN-DE-SIECLE GOTHIC WITH TECHNO-GOTHIC VAMPIRES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE ALIEN QUADRILOGY AND BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA'S EXILE AbstractMany critics have agreed on defining both the Dracula novel by Bram Stoker and the Alien series as horror narratives, with specific reference to the latter as a form of contemporary Gothic. Indeed, several collections of critical essays and scholarly volumes on the Gothic analyse both the work of Dracula and the Alien films. In this article, I intend to examine the similarities between Stoker's 1897 work and the four films of Alien, produced between 1979 and 1998. Specifically, I will examine the characteristics of the 1890s Gothic and refer them to the Alien films. These works can be associated to each other by comparing the scholarly work by the critics and particularly their focus on the sexual metaphors and contents present in these texts. Certainly, innumerable literary and...

What Can She Know, Where Can She Go? Extraterritoriality and the Symbolic Universe in the Alien Series

In this article I focus on the trajectory a female character undergoes from her status as constitutive outsider to a being that matters. I analyze the films of the Alien series, and suggest the features that confirm the woman's state as the outsider in the symbolic universe of the father, if taken within a new normative injunction, can in Judith Butler's sense, become the features that matter. The work of Slavoj Zizek is pertinent to the central theme of the article, although I ultimately side with Butler, who, with the help of Derrida's concepts, elaborates the possibility of breaking out of embedded categories and labeling practices. The way to insert the marginal or the excluded into the realm of the universal requires that the excluded be theorized as a signifier. In terms of the Alien films, the features such as ‘alien’, ‘monster’, or ‘synthetic humanoid’, matter precisely because they mark a deviance and a difference from ‘woman’ as a universal category. New universes can come into being to the extent that alternative signifiers are able to compete with the paternal signifier. The possibility I put forward is the universe governed by the Law‐of‐the‐Alien. This law engages our capacity to envision a different kind of male as well as female existence, and it is an occasion for alternative subjectivities to come into being.

In the Belly of the Mechanical Beast: Technological Environments in the Alien Films

In the Belly of the Mechanical Beast: Technological Environments in the Alien Films

(In)alienable Rights: Property, Feminism, and the Female Body from Ann Radcliffe to the Alien Films

(In)alienable Rights: Property, Feminism, and the Female Body from Ann Radcliffe to the Alien Films. Un article de la revue Romanticism on the Net (Romanticism and Science Fictions) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.