Alien and Fears of Unnatural Pregnancies
A red stain.
Then a smear of blood blossoms on his chest.
The fabric of his shirt is ripped apart.
A small head the size of a man's fist pushes out.
The crew shouts in panic.
Leap back from the table.
The cat spits, bolts away.
The tiny head lunges forward.
Comes spurting out of Kane's chest trailing a thick body.
Splatters fluids and blood in its wake.
Lands in the middle of the dishes and food.
Wriggles away while the crew scatters.
Then the Alien being disappears from sight.
Kane lies slumped in his chair.
Very dead.
A huge hole in his chest.
By all accounts: explicitly scripted, as seen above; visually, as the audience watches his chest explode with all the viscera of a violent, traumatic death; and narratively, as the gestating creature growing inside his body bursts forth, chomping through bony rib cage, sinewy muscle and delicate skin to explore the new world it intends to terrorise, Kane, our ill fated protagonist, has given birth. An unnatural birth. An alien birth.
Alien (1979), simply and clearly titled as it is, may set itself in the cold, unforgiving vacuum of interstellar space, concerning a creature entirely extraterrestrial to our home planet, but the ultimate locus of its horror is entirely centred within our real Earth and the distressing capabilities of the humans that populate it - albeit, a real horror that has been masked by the gorgeously fantastical aesthetic of the science-fiction genre. Exploring the fears of a shared public consciousness through the lens of the fictional, the narrative of Alien can be read as a panicked response to the very thing that allows for the variety of technological creations scattered throughout its fictional story - an overwhelming sense of dread pointed towards the quick-moving developments of (then) modern day science. Certainly, almost all of science-fiction and horror concerns itself with our issues of the modern day, allegorising them through creatures, critters and characters, as a method of excising our shared fears through perfectly encapsulated stories of containment - in these stories, the “good guys'' win and the societal status-quo that the allegorical monster disrupts (whether that be political, social, technological or otherwise) is comfortably returned to. The concerns of Alien are entirely contemporary, and surprisingly unsubtle.
Alien was released on 6th September, 1979. A year earlier, on 25 July, 1978, Louise Brown was born. Only, she wasn’t a baby delivered as a result of normal conception, pregnancy and birthing procedures - Louise was born of science, her mother artificially inseminated through a brand new process called “in vitro fertilisation” (IVF). The first of her kind, but certainly not the last. The modern world was changing rapidly, and suddenly, natural conception was no longer the only way to procreate. Public outcry to this new change boasted a variety of responses: certainly, many were happy to have the opportunity to finally give birth - a large collection of people suffering across the globe with various infertile complications immediately had pathways open to them that were previously entirely unavailable; sadly, on the other side of responses, ethical queries and confusions were abound, sparking angered debates around who should even be permitted to give birth when previously scientifically unable (including the legal restrictions of the time that resulted in a variety of bigoted responses, that sadly continue to this day); and, on the extreme, not looking to debate or argue, within the religious sect, there were the inevitable outcries of blasphemy and satanic evil, with the Catholic Church still, to this day, opposing its use, on the claim that the method of scientific insemination only works to separate the purely procreative goal of marital sex apart from the goal of uniting married couples - in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI even dramatically stated that it is opposed because it ‘replaces love between a husband and wife’ (Medical News Today) entirely. The basis of these beliefs are, of course, not founded in any form of logic, but the anxieties manifested and metastasized nonetheless.
Looking to exploit this public fear, and excise similar thoughts troubling their own worried mind, the anxieties of Dan O'Bannon poured onto a paper screenplay page (DailyScript). All throughout its narrative exploration, Alien is filled with allusions to unnatural pregnancies, the dangers of non-natural conceptions and the “horrors” that can be birthed as a result of this unholy union: utilising X-Rays to enhance the horror of a ‘spreading dark blot in the chest cavity’ as though it were an sombre ultrasound foreshadowing the impending doom; the umbilical nature of the Facehugger’s ‘long tube down his mouth and throat’, simultaneously providing life to Kane with its necessary stream of oxygen, all whilst killing him, as it impregnates his tender insides with the deadly, growing Xenomorph; the finite number of egg-like pods, held within the alien ship’s hold, all boasting the potential for another hellish offspring to be spawned; and the ‘small alien that bursts out of the body of its human host’, slick with blood and assorted fluids, that ‘holds more than a faint echo of the birth trauma’ (Hirsch, p. 191) shared by all pregnant mothers.
Much like the gestations of the Xenomorph, deadly within Kane’s body, we can read the Nostromo (the mammillary spaceship, adorned with globular, breast-like attachments upon its underside) as a living, birthing being of its own - its human crew are even (re)born at the beginning of the film as they awaken, pure in the bright, antiseptic white light of the rounded sleeping chamber. Venturing out of the safety of the mothership, they are inevitably reprimanded for their exploration, and the fatal consequences force them to skulk around the ventricle-like hallways of their once-haven, the industrial passages routinely separated by yonic, valve-like doorways that the Xenomorph charges through, picking off the terrified inhabitants like a determined phagocyte eliminating all hostile foreign bodies from within its host. This living concept is mirrored visually - the vehicle’s design is inherently organic, with an outward appendage that releases the craft, referred to in the film as an “umbilicus”, the shutters that block off the ventilation shafts slowly winking as they shut and close, iris-like and a weak defence from the forceful, alien antagonist. The crew even openly acknowledges the craft’s supposed sentience, accepting its role as supposed-protector by referring to the ship as “Mother” and willingly following its imperative commands, demanding, destructive, and progressively disregarding of their human welfare, until the offspring fights back and destroys their only safe home.
Enhancing the reciprocal nature of the alien biology contrasted with the humans, the Nostromo is similarly perfectly complemented by the design of the Xenomorph ship. Its hallways are unflinchingly biological, their interiors ribbed and ever-dripping unmarked fluids, providing (un)safe passage to its invading human bodies as they inch closer to the womb-like hold, entering through the ‘vaginal opening’ in its decidedly un-aerodynamic (and therefore, not traditionally-phallic shape) ‘like a horseshoe, its curved sides like two long legs spread apart at the entrance’ (Creed, p. 19). And, here, the unnatural eggs remain within, lying in wait for the crucial ingredient - the human sacrifice. In an unnatural reversal of logical biological function, the male spermatozoic victim is instead inseminated by the female-alien egg in order to continue the lineage of the species. Nature is upset. Biology is broken.
This calculated fusion between the organic and technological, the twisting of normal biological function, makes explicit the perversion of the natural world that, when taken to its extreme, most anxious exaggeration, in vitro fertilisation suggests to the horrified mind. The writer, O’Bannon, also credited as the film’s visual design consultant, was conscious of the need to make this subtlety most explicit, and pointed director Ridley Scott to the work of H.R Giger - a wonderful, deviant Swiss painter famous for his biomechanical fusions of (hu)man and machine. Alien’s fantastic, non-human production design is drenched in the Giger aesthetic, bringing attention to O’Bannon’s narrative focus on warped reproductive systems by littering the visual style with collections of phallic and yonic imagery, perverting the subtlety of the sexual organs imprinted throughout. Scott shoots no small variety of allusive pictures onto the silver celluloid, subconsciously unsettling the audience by displaying these “wrong” genital images with varying levels of explicity - the Xenomorph’s overly-phallic head and tail, the yonic mouth of the Facehugger calling to mind the dangerous myth of the ‘vagina dentata - the castrating female organ that the male wishes to disavow’ (Creed, p. 116), the aforementioned mammillary “breasts'' hanging underside the Nostromo, the slick, veiny pods, opening with four, unnatural “lips” to entice Kane closer to his doom - even his death is inherently phallicized, the Xenomorph bursting through his chest and remaining erect until he finishes twitching his last breath, the climax of his life “cumming” to an inevitable conclusion.
Of course, with all these phallic and yonic shapes to note throughout, we can understand the film as inherently Freudian. Kane’s impregnation and subsequent birth of the Xenomorph, a creature openly referred to within the film as “Kane’s Son”, speaks to what Barbara Creed (p. 17) refers to as a ‘reworking of the primal scene, the scene of birth, in relation to the representation of other forms of copulation and procreation’ - the births here are made unnatural and horrific simply by their deviations from the natural way of conception. This is not the only unnatural birth to be found within the film - Dervin (p. 102) argues that the ejection of ‘smaller crafts or bodies’ from the mother-ship into outer space, attached as they are by some ‘long lifeline or umbilical cord’ are another reworking of the primal scene - the ejection and sending off of “Mother’s” children into the world where they will choose to return or to stay away. To pick the conclusive example, if we can understand Ripley’s escape as a form of this rebirth, ejecting from the Nostromo before its final, fatal explosion, we can draw a parallel to Kane’s own primal, unnatural birthing process - just as the physical host of the Xenomorph is killed, the parasite rejecting the body’s weakness and inherent hostility, so too does the Nostromo explode when its inhabitants have rejected its own similar hostility. In the world of Alien, the biological and the mechanical are intrinsically linked, forced into the same cycles of destruction and rebirth, irrelevant of gender, sentience and motivation.
When this organic reworking of normative birth is taking place ‘without the agency of the opposite sex’, Creed (p. 17) suggests that the offspring is subsequently born ‘primitive rather than civilised’, violent and looking for an outlet for its genetic anger. An exaggeration of in vitro fertilisation could suggest a lacking ‘agency’ in the participating parties, perhaps through the advent of sperm-bank donors or the simple lack of sexual intercourse. Kane’s unwilling participation in the birth of his own “Son”, implies the same effect. This telegraphs the ‘archaic parthenogenetic mother’ - that is, the mother who can ‘give birth without the help of a male counterpart’ (Pisters, p. 121) and is therefore villainous, a common archetype of the female-centric horror film - though, this concept doesn’t find explicit visualisation until the sequel, Aliens (1986), with the imposing and self-surviving Xenomorph Queen. Where, in Alien, Kane suffers the unwelcome thrust of parenthood and feels the negative effects in full force, the Xenomorph, born of this fear and rage, finds an outlet in its overwhelming appetite for murder and destruction.
But Kane’s lacking consent in the primary impregnation, and his subsequent unwilling hand in the procreation, speaks to another fear explored within the dark, dank depths of the Nostromo, that which Tim Jones (2017) suggests, outside of shared fears of in vitro fertilisation, is a primary intention of the filmmakers - to unsettle the (primarily) male audience with the same terrors that women can, and routinely do, experience. Indeed, ‘science fiction is often viewed as gendered territory, favouring the masculine’ (Laltha, p. 71), and in the world of the Alien films, they make certain to share these inherently-feminine fears of unnatural pregnancy with its then-modern male audience. Here, Alien is making sure that it is ‘not just women who endure the fear and anxiety that come from living in a rape‐culture‐like environment’ (Jones, p.184), left to deal with the consequences (consensual or otherwise) of an unwelcome conception - all members of the human race are affected, equally. By utilising so many unsettling images that impact upon both the male, and the female, the audience is forced to tackle this modern world where pregnancy is no longer a biological, autonomous process - the ‘privilege that protects men from experiencing this culture is taken away’, and everyone is left terrified.
Is this attitude insensitive? Perhaps it is just an unfortunate sign of the times. That science which once terrified us so, is almost always eventually safely integrated into our everyday society with little discomfort. Certainly, the approach of over-exaggerated fear pointed towards the new technology has more than proved to be a ridiculous, fictional sentiment. But, as Bob Dylan (1964) once declared - The Times They Are A-Changin'. Laltha’s (p. 74) assertion that Scott’s prequel Prometheus (2012), released three decades later, ‘projects a preference for birth aided by technology’, opting to work in tandem with science for a conception that is ‘avoiding the gore and death that accompanies the natural process’ as a forcefully-impregnated woman performs an emergency C-section to avoid full alien procreation, implies a moving forward of the time - an acceptance of the once-fears and a welcome turn to the use of modern technological science in the birthing process. What was once alien, is now a regular part of our daily lives. It was never really that frightening to begin with - humanity is ultimately afraid of that which is unknown, and in the large expanse of the universe, that which is unknown is ultimately infinite.
But, of course, if you have been impregnated with this terrible, unknowing fear, and find yourself a participant in an unnatural conception, the consequence of this horror birthed from your anxiety in the the mysterious wilds of interstellar space, nobody can hear you scream anyway.
Filmography
Alien, 1979. [Film]. Directed by Ridley Scott. US: 20th Century Studios.
Aliens, 1986. [Film]. Directed by James Cameron. US: 20th Century Studios.
Prometheus, 2012. [Film]. Directed by Ridley Scott. US: 20th Century Studios.
Bibliography
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/38686.php, Pope Benedict XVI Declares Embryos Developed For In Vitro Fertilisation Have Right To Life. [Accessed 20 April 2024].
https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/alien_shooting.html, Alien Script. [Accessed 20 April 2024].
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Hirsch, A. (2023) HR Giger. 40th Ed. Berlin: TASCHEN.
Dervin, D. (1980) ‘Primal conditions and conventions: the genres of comedy and science
fiction’, Filmi Psychology Review, 4, pp. 115 - 147.
Jones, T. (2017) ‘Alien Violation: Male Bodily Integrity in an Equal Opportunity Rape Culture’ in Ewing, J. (ed.) and Decker, K.S (ed.), Alien and Philosophy: I Infest, Therefore I Am. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, pp. 178 - 185.
Pisters, P. (2020) New Blood in Contemporary Cinema: Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Laltha, S. (2018) ‘Gazing upon the mother giving birth: anxieties and aliens in Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012)’, School of Arts, Pietermaritzburg Campus, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa,
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