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Feminism in Alien
In this essay, I will be giving a critical analysis of the theories of feminism in Ridley Scott’s science fiction film Alien (1979 114 minutes). ...
To begin with, what I knew about Alien in relation to feminism. Before I began to research this subject, I believed Alien to be a film hailed by feminists and critics alike as one of the first films to incorporate a very strong female character in a role that would have usually been taken by a male lead (and in this case, specifically written for a man). ...
Researching Alien, the deeper I dove into critical readings and theories of the film, I found that many theories hold contradictory elements to each other. I have seen Alien described as “utopian” as well as “dystopian”. ...
Judith Newton has described Alien as a “utopia”; she sees it as a fantasy because it expresses that white, middle class women, at their “liberated best,” can be “harmoniously integrated into the late-capitalist world of work”. Also, once the woman has entered this world, she will save us from our “worst excesses” (symbolised by the alien itself) and specifically from dehumanization”. ... Personally though, I see Alien as a future dystopia, run by the capitalist ‘Company’ in which human lives are expendable for the chance of profit. ...
One of the sections in Alien that I have specifically focused on is the impregnation of John Hurt’s character, Kane, leading to the eventual birth of the alien from his stomach. ... There is an extreme long shot of the huge alien spaceship which theorists, such as Barbara Creed, claim are “up stretched ‘legs’”. ... Once the seed is fertilised, the face hugger dies and eventually so does Kane, in agony, as the birth of the alien (or as one New York movie house “denizen” crudely put it, “little-dick-with-teeth”) occurs from the inside of Kane’s stomach.
Approximate Word count = 1414
Approximate Pages = 5.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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