Justin Phillip Reed
AWAITING ACKNOWLEDGMENT: ALIEN 3 (1992)
My problem is, for all my wet-hot sniffing after existence as a different creature, I’m still some kind of man. I expect life-altering phenomena to present as brief explosions of epiphany, violent outbursts of correction, righteous killer instinct erupting from my chest. Revolution, not just now but immediately and impermanently. Acts of rebellion as gory assassinations of politicians, plutocrats held for ransom. Here is Dillon’s grimace, going, Nobody never gave me nothin!—just as American as it wants to be, as I am, not wishing to admit that everything I imagine was imagined for me.
My dread should be similarly ejaculatory: exhausting and removable. Therefore I don’t know what to make of this music, of the one swollen note held and mutating Twentieth Century Fox’s regal fanfare into elastic hopelessness. As Alien 3 opens, dread declares the rolling hills of its sovereignty, its stamina of suck. Shots of blood, fire, and digitally scanned body violation bisect the masthead of men whose names, mounted in deep space, need punctual credit for their creativity: SCREENPLAY BY DAVID GILER AND WALTER HILL AND LARRY FERGUSON. DIRECTED BY DAVID FINCHER. In case it wasn’t clear, let the onboard computer be the first to tell me, STASIS INTERRUPTED.
I come into this thinking I know everything. I know how a quadrant of planet convinces me of its innocence when a terrible vessel breaks across its luminous curvature. I know that the jettisoned, crash-landed pod contains one live human adult, one dead human child, one defective android, one dead human adult, two xenomorph embryos, and hitherto all of my narrative attachments. I know that Lieutenant Ellen Ripley—twice a Final Girl by now; what, in the eighties, Carol Clover determined “a male surrogate in all things oedipal, a homoerotic stand-in, the audience incorporate” (Clover 213)—is a gender trouble. And as the audience, I think I know Ripley’s story: she fights, survives, and loses a child, then fights, survives, and loses a child and, by the end of this film, dies giving birth to the parasitic offspring of her nemesis, her predator and prey, her erotic counterpart. It appears to be this way with nemeses. With narrative. With the Moirai and their yarns. With white men’s authoring white women and some protrusion in/of the dark. With Black people and the prison industrial complex. It would appear.
When Clemens, a stoic and lipless but sensitive medical officer, lifts Ripley Lois-Lane-style from the wreckage, the residue of work saturates her. And why shouldn’t even she—“[science fiction] cinema’s paradigmatic protofeminist” (Nama 110)—look like the levels of hell into which she descends? She’s fallen a long way from the bright white cotton of the first film, its single alien, the gulps of vacuum-sealed shuttle air between her goosebumps and its crevice-packing salivation; what simple, timeless threat. Now, in underwear the color of mourning and ineradicable creatures and space, she awakens to penetration: Clemens’s needle.
Ripley, hitherto physically invulnerable, has a fucked-up left eye. Hitherto impermeable, she unknowingly and without her consent incubates an alien queen—her negation, the reversal of all her previous duress—and fucks Clemens, officially abdicating, by horror law, her Final Girl status. I hate to be repetitious about such a sensitive subject, says Clemens. Sex with Ripley isn’t merely transactional; it damns him, too. There is a dark, evasive fatality slipping through the tubes, again. There are incarcerated men who have been reborn in the bosom of God and not since tempted by a weakness of the flesh. Clemens’s allegiance would have been more to Ripley’s person than to her body, which must be allied to the alien and in service to the queen. For the sake of tension and stamina, he’s the kind of company she can’t keep. The inmates are a company kept to itself, a stasis interrupted by Ripley’s coming. The Company proper, Ripley’s abusive, obsessive former employer, keeps coming back.
Horror, like pornography, wants vicarity. Previous films in the franchise ask, Don’t you, too, viewer, feel both isolated and targeted? But this film follows every living being in the vicinity except the head lice. It says, viewer, your vulnerability is as tenable as these zealous, oily, convicted rapists and murderers are relatable given two scenes of vapid characterization—a world of empathy entirely different from what Aliens demanded for the un-convicted rapists and murderers of the U.S. Colonial Marines. Viewer, part of me always resents Aliens for that.
The year is 2179 C.E. Private prisons not only exist but also occupy derelict planets in the galaxy’s “outer veil.” The inmates of Fury 161 are what simmers in the soup of desolation, risk, and underpaid labor. Surely, their homosocial breeds misogyny, xenophobia, and extremism—which is too bad because Ripley goes everywhere in the universe alone, and this prison is no different. They consider “the presence of any outsider, especially a woman, a violation of the harmony.” They “forge lead sheets for toxic waste containers.” They are twenty-second-century society’s most abject discards, creating from one of its most toxic resources vessels to enclose its most abject discards. Who am I to refuse them their hate, their want to protect absolutely whatever delicate homeostasis still affords them individual character, familiarity to each other, someoneness among the twenty-five people that our capitalist descendants have marooned in the galactic fringe, far removed from any iota of liberal sentiment?
The trouble at the limits of these intersecting empathies is that I would have readily accepted a hate-fuck from 1992’s Holt McCallany. “The target is… our witnessing body,” writes Clover of the aim of horror cinema, of slashers in particular. “But what we witness is also the body, another’s body, in experience: the body in sex and the body in threat” (Clover 189). Between or beyond both of these, I think, is the body raped. What I’m supposed to feel, witnessing Ripley bent over a rail, jumpsuit-to-jumpsuit with McCallany’s Junior, is the opposite of want; something like angry disgust, which I do feel but feel toward myself, and not in equal amount. What I feel isn’t the limit of vicarious experience as a cinematic ambition, necessarily, but rather the inevitable “use of her as a vehicle for [my] own sadomasochistic fantasies…” (Clover 214). No, not a limit, but exactly the function of the informational circuit that media contracts with my flesh. Didn’t I ask for this? No other moment of the film so calls my body forward. Certainly not the Black man rushing forward to rescue Ripley from this particular destruction.
I don’t hate to be repetitious about instances of honesty from which I can shape no scepter of intellect to flourish. To put myself in her to put him in me—for most of thirty years I’ve had this ignoble knowledge of how to watch the movies. The dream of a wide-shouldered bedfellow that my pastor-aspirational aunt made me pray away took a mere six or seven years to ripen in mind; wasn’t the dream mine? Viewer, when you listened at the door as your mother loved her lover, where did you see yourself?
There are people who say such romantic things about vulnerability and beauty that let me know no one ever beat it out of them only to beat it out of them again on Tuesday and Wednesday. They, who would infantilize me—bless my heart—and my use of performance and secrecy to survive, think that the synonymy of performance and survival has phased out of function. Artifice gives their voracious cynicism nothing to savor, and they are sick of it. They’ve been through all they’ve been through in order to say whatever they wish about compassion, how I must lack it to think humanity is an archaic pejorative. My suffering is millennial and precedented, so I fail to surprise them by acknowledging this: once, it was decided that I was not a “well-rounded” child, and in their subsequent effort to correct my oblong deviation, people whom I trusted to accompany me in mutual desire for my life almost ended it. How maudlin is this.
I can tell these are the kind of people who believe in tough love and constant reflexive condescension because they can be forgiven for being flawed. They remind me of someone who tried, in many ways, to make revision the same as unconditional love for a young person and now prays every Sunday for redemption. I mean the paternalism looks knee-jerk on them. They cannot fathom that, in our fight forever and a day to be freely ourselves, some of us might be the casualties. A child as not even a sequel but a remake. No, their voices don’t break that way. Their necks cut through a room like it can’t be choked out. They aren’t gullible; they’ve never believed a word said about them.
Redemption comes, too, to Ripley’s attempted rapist, who baits the alien into a cell and, once the doors behind them seal, screams as the caged beast rips him to wet pieces. The fires outside the cell diminish in slow motion. A woman vocalizing, violins, swan song from an oboe. Dead, Junior is any man: he died doing a good, or merely died, and his evils evaporate in what aspires to be beautiful.
*
Works Cited
Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.”
Representations, No. 20, Special Issue: Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy
(Autumn, 1987), pp. 187-228.
Nama, Adilifu. Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2008.
JUSTIN PHILLIP REED is an American poet, essayist, and amateur bass guitarist. His preoccupations include horror cinema, poetic form, morphological transgressions, and uses of the grotesque. He is the author of two poetry collections, The Malevolent Volume and Indecency, both published by Coffee House Press.
