I cannot recall the exact context for my first introduction to Alien. I do remember that I was about ten years old, and I’d come in at the very last third of the film; and I think I was probably at my Dad’s for the summer, because my mother would’ve sooner swallowed a lit road flare than let me watch such a thing. The movie was very likely showing in a bowdlerized version on the USA Network or some equally benign channel.
But none of this matters. What matters is that I was transfixed. I was delighted. I was changed. And it wasn’t the goofy gear, the awkward angles of the blue-collar future, or the Giger monster covered in sex lube.
It was Ellen Ripley.
Backing up for a moment to my (divorced) parents, it’s worth noting several things at this point.
(a). I mostly lived with my mother, who had a deep-seated hate-on for secular fiction of any kind; so the bulk of my pre-adolescent reading material was pretty boring. Mostly it was Heavy-Handed Morality Fables, Marginal Female Characters in the Bible, or Rugged Pioneer Homemakers Who Jesus Saves From Being Raped By The Indians.
(b). My dad kept a much looser rein on what pop culture I could consume, but he only had me for the summers; and he wouldn’t have let me watch Alien at quite such a tender age either, if he’d known about it. I’m pretty sure of this, because I remember begging him to rent the movie for me so I could see the whole thing, and he always had a very logical reason why this simply could not occur right then and there.
Ergo, (c). Until I was old enough to seek out my own pop cultural material, my narrative construct of the Things Girls Are Allowed To Do In Stories was excruciatingly limited. As far as I knew, girls are not allowed to have adventures because they are not smart enough or strong enough, and mostly they should sit around and pray for boys to come and rescue them. Or, sometimes they are Blessed By God … but, you know. Not me. Not any of the girls I knew, either. To the best of my knowledge I was unacquainted with any saints, and heaven knew I didn’t qualify for the position; so exciting times were pretty much off limits.
This chapped my hide eight ways from Sunday. Even when I was very young, I wanted to write adventure stories about girls like me — or women like I wanted to become — and I didn’t see any good reason why I couldn’t. Except that, well, as far as I knew nobody did. And you weren’t supposed to. Because let me be clear about what I learned from the things I saw and read: Girls do not get to save the day. That is not their job, unless God absolutely can’t get His hands on anybody with a penis right at that moment. And then, when all is said and done, God is going to take credit for any heroics because only a man can be a hero. A woman is just a vessel.
Even if you don’t buy into it, when you’re a kid, you’re pretty much stuck with it. And when you don’t have any icons to show you another way, you start to think that maybe there isn’t one.
But then one day while my dad wasn’t paying attention, the last third of Alien came on the tube.
At first, I didn’t know what to make of it. As far as I could tell, it was mostly just some woman running around in a space ship, trying not to get killed by a man in a rubber suit; but the longer I watched, the more it gripped me. And in the end, it gave me more to think about than any Aunt Sue and Uncle Dan tape.*
It blew my mind because it was a story about a woman surviving by the force of her own initiative.
It is no exaggeration to say that this completely changed the way I viewed the world. And keep in mind that I was a child at the time, but it gave me permission to think about things that had never occurred to me before. For my very first epiphany, I understood that you could tell an exciting story and you could put a girl in the lead role; and she could rescue her own goddamned self.
My second epiphany was that I could write a character like that because, believe it or not, there are women like that. You’d think this would be screamingly obvious, but it wasn’t for me. My mother and her sisters are the sort of women for whom any male over the age of 18 is an EMP; when faced with such a master creature, they collectively lose their ability to drive, to open doors, to choose restaurants, open jars, or change light bulbs. So you must understand, the prospect of meeting or even becoming the kind of woman who can blow up a space craft the size of a small city, kill a highly evolved homicidal alien, and save the ship’s cat while she’s at it … now that was novel.
Nay. It was glorious.
And this past Friday night at midnight, I went with Aric and Alex to go catch the director’s cut of Alien. It was showing at the Egyptian, a vintage theater on Capital Hill, a few blocks away from where we live; and I was so excited about it that a hipster couple at the concession stand openly mocked me, as if they couldn’t kiss my ass.
I WAS GONNA SEE RIPLEY ON THE BIG SCREEN.
And I DID.
So the question is, mythic remembrance aside, does it still hold up? I would argue that the answer is a resounding “yes.”
Alien did so many things right that I’m prepared to forgive it the Alien’s “jazz-hands” routine, the slower-than-Christmas opening sequence, and dated special effects. And yes, most of those right things still revolve around Ripley.
It’s noteworthy to me that she’s not the captain. She’s not a princess. She’s not a mutant, a witch, or a vampire — and though any given one of these things is fine and dandy, it resonates with me that she’s not anybody special. Third in a chain of command that numbers merely seven, Ripley is resented for what little authority she wields and ignored when it serves the purposes of other crew members. She isn’t a force of personality or innate power. She’s not anyone’s romantic partner. She’s just some woman who happens to be on board when the shit hits the fan.
And she’s no spontaneous ass-kicking warrior.
She screws up a lot.
She takes the wrong tunnels, makes some wrong guesses, and loses her shit more than once — but she pulls her shit together, that’s the important thing. It’s okay to make mistakes, teaches Ripley, as long as you don’t let your failures paralyze you. It’s okay to be a compassionate survivor, and go out of your way to save the ones you can even when it isn’t particularly practical. It is fair and reasonable to cut your losses when no good can come of trying to salvage them. Pray if you think it helps, but don’t bet on rescue; because when the sun comes up on the distant planetoid and there’s an acid-blooded killing machine stalking through your galley, the time has come to rescue your own goddamned self.
And you know what? You can. You don’t have to be a fairy queen or a superhero; you can be just some woman who’s there at the wrong place, in the wrong time — and it doesn’t have to be the end of the world.
So yes, Friday night/Saturday morning I fell in love with Alien all over again. And yes, part of my spectator bliss is no doubt indebted to that first early viewing nearly 25 years ago, but that makes it no less meaningful. I don’t mind admitting that I was honestly moved during some of the final scenes, when all is lost and doom is impending, and there goes Ripley — not finished yet. She’s got a flame thrower in one hand and a boxed-up cat in the other, and hell or high water she’s leaving this joint … blowing up the whole shebang behind her, if it comes to that.
[:: wipes away a little tear ::]
Hmm. Upon rereading this entry before hitting the “post” button, I realize that I have no earthly idea how to wind this down. Really, I just wanted to blather for a few paragraphs about how excited I was to see Alien on the big screen, and then it turned into this raging fangirl manifesto. Yes, well. These things happen, I suppose.
So how about this? I’ve done my pop culture icon love-rambling, now it’s your turn. Who pulled the chain to light the bulb in your head when you were a kid? Go on, tell me. I won’t make fun of you for it. Ripley made me cry a little bit when she chucked the ship’s cat into the escape shuttle for safe keeping. You can’t possibly confess anything sillier than that.
[Edit: Comment here or over here, as you like.]
*
Finger-wagging morality fables (in book, tape, and radio show format) aimed at SDA children. Most of them ended with a sentence like, “And he never disobeyed his mother again!” I very distinctly remember hearing these as a little kid and thinking, “Yeah. What a crock.”