Today, as promised, we continue to compare and contrast the famous and influential film Alien with the less well-known but nonetheless celebrated short story “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler. In this essay, I will tease out some of the themes and concepts behind Alien.
For much of the content in today’s post and in subsequent posts, I am indebted to Xenopedia, the Alien vs. Predator wiki, where hardworking fans have compiled a lot of history and trivia, as well as an essay I read many years ago and have not (alas) been able to relocate.
It was this essay, of unknown title and authorship, that first made me aware of the sexual symbolism behind the creature designs and situations in the Alien movie. The premise of the essay was that Alien is ultimately about “fear of female sexuality” (that men are terrified of horny women is one of feminism’s most popular canards). Although exhaustively explaining the film’s imagery, the essay failed to make its case, and I came away from it with the opinion that Alien is a mishmash of sexual menace with no real point behind it—an opinion I still hold, and which I will ultimately defend.
History and Creature Design
Let us begin by discussing the most famous part of the Alien franchise, the creature itself, which is justifiably one of the most famous movie monsters because of its unique appearance.
The concept for Alien was the brainchild of Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who worked together on a story, with the working title of “Star Beast,” about a menacing alien that preys on the crew of a mining ship in space. Shusett, crediting a dream, suggested that “The monster screws one of them” to get the creature onto the ship.
Worth mentioning is that O’Bannon had previously worked on the ultra-low-budget film Dark Star, which became a cult classic. The movie is about a group of unhinged working stiffs on a multi-decade mission aboard a decrepit and malfunctioning spacecraft. This movie almost certainly forms part of the background of Alien, which also depicts, though with less comedy, a group of average, blue-collar working joes in space dealing with problems they’re ill-equipped for.
In any case, O’Bannon met H. R. Giger, the Swiss surrealist sculptor and painter, while he was working in France on an ill-fated adaptation of Dune.
Alien was originally planned as a low-budget movie, but the recent success of Star Wars convinced Fox to take a risk and dump money into it. O’Bannon convinced Ridley Scott to bring Giger onto the project to design the creature, and Scott agreed.
Giger offered to design the monster from the ground up, but Scott and O’Bannon insisted that his final design should be based on the painting Necronom IV, a work O’Bannon had previously seen and found both beautiful and disturbing:
Already, we can see the final making of Alien appearing: Apparently inspired by his associate’s comment, O’Bannon was intent on making the alien a kind of sexual menace, and H. R. Giger’s famous “biomechanical” artwork (a forerunner of cyberpunk, probably) is always both sexual and grotesque.
Giger’s design for the alien was tweaked before the movie’s debut, but his basic concepts are still present: He insisted that the alien should have no eyes, as that would make it more frightening, and he also gave it its proboscis-like “inner jaw,” which it can shoot out like a weapon.
We might also observe some other changes: The final design appears less overtly sexual. The elongated head of Necronom IV has a distinctly phallic appearance, whereas the final design of the alien does not. Although at least three features of the monster are apparently supposed to be phallic (the sharp tail, the inner jaw, and the long head), almost no one who isn’t a dedicated Freudian is likely to recognize that fact.
Giger made other important designs for the film: He created the famous “chestburster,” one of the phases of the alien’s life cycle (and which originally threatened the movie with an X rating), and he also designed the “Space Jockey” derelict where the ill-fated blue-collar space miners come upon the alien menace in the first place. We’ll discuss those in more detail in the future.
In the next post in this series, we’ll delve into the content of the film and describe how it uses the alien, and other elements, to bring out its themes of rape and sexual threat.
