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Idle Viewers: Feminist Film Club (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 5/18)

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I watched Alien two months ago, which is the perfect amount of time for me to not want to rewatch it and to not feel I have anything to add to the conversation, so I was gonna sit this particular film out.

 

BUT, one of the reasons I've bought two copies of the Alien Anthology (DVD & blu-ray) despite thinking that Alien is the only really good film in the series is that the making-of documentaries are really great. So I figured I could watch the making of documentary for Alien and bullet-point some relevant facts here as they happen, since the question of Ripley's history as a character keeps coming up.

 

  • The script originated from Dan O'Bannon's desire to do a horror version of Dark Star, a John Carpenter directed sci-fi/comedy that he wrote and starred in. The first treatment was just the first act leading to landing on the planet, and that remained largely unchanged in the final shooting script.
  • While O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett were working on the script for Alien, O'Bannon went to France for a while to work on Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune project. That's where he met H.R. Giger and Chris Foss, who would be concept artists for the film.
  • The idea of the alien impregnating one of the passengers came out of the need to get the alien onboard the ship in a way that would surprise people. It was Ronald Shusett's idea.
  • It was originally envisioned as a very low-budget Roger Corman movie. It was only days before they were to sign the contract with Corman that Walter Hill, director/producer of tough-guy movies like Hard Times, The Driver and The Warriors, saw the script and decided to buy it. He didn't think it was a good script but he thought the chest-burster scene was enough to sell it to Fox, which he did.
  • Thinking it was a bad script, Hill and his partner David Giler completely rewrote it several times. The character of Ash was invented by them, as well as the "truck drivers in space" feel of the characters.
  • After the success of Star Wars, Fox was eager to get another sci-fi movie out there so they green-lit Alien, despite the script not being finished.
  • Walter Hill was originally going to direct it before realizing he didn't have the patience for extensive special effects. Other directors it was shopped to were Robert Aldrich (Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? & The Dirty Dozen), Peter Yates (The Friends of Eddie Coyle & The Deep), and Jack Clayton (The Innocents & The Great Gatsby) before the producers saw The Duelists at Cannes and decided to go with Ridley Scott, who accepted the job immediately after reading the script.
  • Ridley Scott spent three weeks personally story-boarding the film and when he came back with the storyboards the producers were so excited they doubled the budget. He was inspired primarily by The Texas Chainsaw MassacreStar Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
  • Dan O'Bannon showed Giger's art to Ridley Scott and they all agreed the creature in the painting "Necronomicon" was the way to go, even though Fox thought it was far too gruesome and terrible. Scott was particularly inspired by the sexual connotations of Giger's work. Giger designed the Alien and everything to do with the Alien world, while another team of artists designed the Nostromo.
  • In O'Bannon and Shusset's original script all the characters were men but, in an effort to make the film as marketable as possible, their screenplay had an asterisk that noted "The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women". It was Hill and Giler's later drafts that made Ripley a woman, in an effort to win over Fox who were making a lot of "women's pictures" at that time, like Julia and The Turning Point. Giler admits now it was a very cynical business reason. They also felt that Ripley was kind of a boring character, and that it could make Ripley more interesting.
  • Sigourney Weaver showed up to the audition wearing (in her words) "big hooker boots" and impressed everyone with her height and intelligence (commented on in that order by two different people interviewed).
  • When Veronica Cartwright was cast she thought she was Ripley. It wasn't until she was being fitted for wardrobe that she learned she was Lambert. She wanted to pull out because she thought Lambert was too weak and weepy. The producers convinced her she represented the audience's fears and anxieties and she decided to stay on.
  • Ridley cast the film with actors who he knew wouldn't need much direction, so he could focus on the technical aspects of the shoot. As a result it was a grueling shoot for all the actors, both physically (very hot suits, grimey fog and glycerine sweat effects) and mentally (they didn't know what he thought of their performances, he would occasionally snap and scream at his actors). So the experience ended up creating a tension and nervousness that mirrored the film's plot. 
  • Sigourney Weaver felt especially singled out and alone during production. It was her first film and lot of the other actors thought she wasn't doing a good job, particularly Yaphet Kotto. In the scenes where Ripley and Parker butt heads he would improvise nasty, demeaning remarks about her character, including one time calling her a bitch.
  • Ridley Scott encouraged Veronica Cartwright to really hit Weaver in the scene where she confonts Ripley for not wanting to break quarantine. Veronica really hit her quite hard, which made Weaver burst into tears, which made her even more upset because she didn't think Ripley would cry.
  • Ridley Scott thought that Ash attacking Ripley would be more interesting if there was a sexual undercurrent because it raised the question of whether androids have sexual urges. He says in the documentary "What would be nice is that this is the closest he ever gets to a sexual relationship.". (His expression indicates a grim humor, not that he actually thought that attack was at all "nice".)

I love the making-of docs on the Alien Anthology because enough time has passed for people to not be polite and complain about each other. I think Alien is a great argument against the concept of auteur theory because, like so many Hollywood films, it had so many different people contributing different things with different ideas about how the final film should be.

 

I wonder what you folks think of the ending with Ripley stripping down to get in her suit. That's always the one part of the film that felt very strongly of male gaze to me. But maybe the idea is more to ratchet up the tension by emphasizing vulnerability at that moment? 

 

I just found this article that goes into it that's rather interesting. It appears Sigourney certainly thought it wasn't the least bit exploitative, and even thought there was going to be much more nudity in the film. But it does sound like it's was Ridley Scott's request that her underwear be sexy and not strictly utilitarian, which was Weaver's idea. 

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Alien really had both a strong anti-cap and feminist vibe for this reason, to me. I also like that despite Ripley originally being written for a man, there's moments that show that that character was pulled away from that initial characterization a bit - she's both athletic and a bit stoic but there's moments of humanity like her saving Jonesy. One of the traps I feel writers get into when wanting to write a "strong female character" is they forget that yes, gender shouldn't be the sole tickybox of a character, but that writing a character irrespective of gender still throws women back into a very masculine place because a lot of male writers don't know how to write strong otherwise. Ripley defies this in some ways by being compassionate as well as smart. 

One thing about this, on the DVD there was the original script by Dan O'Bannon and I read the whole thing. It's very different from the final movie and the dialogue is all completely changed. There's no actual gender written into any of the characters and they are all so bland that it's impossible to discern. It's kind of a crap script actually, a cliche ridden mess meant for B movie status. All names were completely changed as well.

 

I'm not sure if the rewrite by Dave Glier had Ridley defined as a woman or not as I have not read it. Maybe someone else can enlighten this? It's probably in one of the special features, but I don't have time for that right now. EDIT: Nevermind answered.

 

Dan O'Bannon is angry as all hell about everything in the special features and gives off this vibe of how all of his ideas were so grand. In some ways I suppose the movie was stolen from him and that sucks, but seriously had the thing been filmed anything like the original script it would have been shit.

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I had a question about something that wasn't really clear to me as I was watching it; after Ripley starts the self-destruct countdown, and is being chased by the alien, she at one point decides she needs to cancel the self-destruct sequence, just before the cut-off point. Maybe it's just because I was quite tired, but I couldn't figure out why she changed her mind about this.

 

She tries to get to the shuttle, but is blocked by the Alien, so she tries to cancel the self-destruct because she now has no way off the ship.

 

Gwardinen, I noticed that stuff with Lambert too, although to defend her a bit, she, like Ripley, was one of the only characters with good ideas in the movie, although they're coded more as fear than as sound thinking. She wants to get out of the derelict as soon as the find the skeleton and once Dallas dies she's the first to suggest the shuttle. She does so because she's scared in both cases, but in both cases her idea was the right one.

 

Does anybody have any thoughts on Mother? It seems significant for this discussion, but I can't quite wrap my head on the implications.

 

On the final scene and the skivvies, this is just me, but it doesn't feel exploitative. It feels like somebody relaxing, trying to get rid of the burden on them. Her underwear may not be completely utilitarian, but it's not skintight either. The plumber's butt feels sloppy, in the way you are when you're taking off clothes just to get to bed. And, as mentioned, paired with the spacesuit, it really underlines the sexual assault (barely) metaphors going on - although that might not be a good thing. I don't know, I'm interested to hear more interpretations of that.

 

Agreed on the anti-capitalist themes too. The sequel (which I know we're not supposed to talk about in here) drives that home a lot further, but the fact that the first conversation is "when and how much are we getting paid" sets the tone pretty strongly here.

Speaking of conversations, did anybody notice that the dialogue is really hard to hear in a lot of places, often purposefully, like in the first medbay scene and when they're talking over the radios? That seems important to me, although maybe not for the feminist themes in particular.

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She tries to get to the shuttle, but is blocked by the Alien, so she tries to cancel the self-destruct because she now has no way off the ship.

 

Ah! So obvious.

 

Speaking of conversations, did anybody notice that the dialogue is really hard to hear in a lot of places, often purposefully, like in the first medbay scene and when they're talking over the radios? That seems important to me, although maybe not for the feminist themes in particular.

 

Yeah, I felt this as well. It's often mixed quietly and hard to make out over the music, or it's mumbled. There's also a specific line of Dallas' dialogue that I listened to over and over, and I can't for the life of me figure out what it is! It's at 50:50 in the Director's Cut, when he and Ash and Ripley are examining the dead facehugger, and Ash asks him to let him take it back with them. I'm pretty sure it starts with 'Well I'd assume it's not...' and ends with 'but you're the science officer and it's your decision Ash', but I can't make out the words in the middle.

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While I can see where you're coming from now, I didn't read Ripley this way at all while I was watching the film. The scene where Parker and Brett ignore her requests over the noise of steam came across as someone who often had to deal with not being respected, and dealt with it by being slightly abrasive back to them. But yeah, I think I was slightly off-base with this reading. I still find Ripley a sympathetic character, though, as she clearly has the best interests of the crew at heart, and her fastidiousness is borne out to be warranted, as things start to turn to shit. She comes across as more competent and level-headed than her male counterparts throughout, too, in a way that doesn't feel like an overt attempt at a 'strong female character', but as someone who is just good at her job, and wants to hold things together as they start to fall apart.

 

One thing that I wanted to discuss was the scene on the shuttle, after she puts Jonesy in a pod and strips to her underwear, before discovering the alien is on-board with her. At first it felt a little gratuitous to me, although not particularly leery (Though I feel like her knickers could have been a bit more substantial), but when the alien appears, this feels like the point at which the rape analogy is the most direct. So I guess it's justified? Or maybe it's just narratively more convenient that she's in her underwear, as she has to don the space-suit while she's in the closet.

 

My subsequent viewings have definitely made me more sympathetic to Ripley but still, I always feel like how she dealt with the animosity was by being the 'by the book' person as many women feel they have to be in when placed in positions of power. Likewise, I do feel that her character really struggles to empathise with her co-workers and that is exacerbated by them being total douches to her whenever they can (with Dallas trying to be the Patriarch that sees both sides) and her being more focused on people undermining her authority (for legitimate reasons you find out in the end) than trying to understand why it is that they don't like her.

 

The end sequence - from the interviews (thanks for the link that confirms this)  I remember Sigourney was down for doing this naked as a way of contrasting the metalic inhumanity of the Alien but I think it was shot down due to worries about ratings. It wasn't until my more recent viewing in HD did I realise how revealing the underwear she had on (on VHS they looked pretty standard). If the idea was to contrast the two forms then I am totally fine with it.

 

Man, thinking about Veronica Cartwright as Ripley... That could have worked.

 

EDIT: A lot of my initial reasoning for Ripley's by the books stoogeyness seemed to be reinforced in the second film in the way that she seemed to trust Burke almost immediately. She saw him as some one like her, a company person that followed the book but that meant well deep down.

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This is going off the rails slightly, but having just watched Aliens last night, I had the exact opposite reaction to Ripley's impression of Burke. She seems to dislike him right off the bat: a company man who's always looking to minimize and explain away the horrors she's faced.

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This is going off the rails slightly, but having just watched Aliens last night, I had the exact opposite reaction to Ripley's impression of Burke. She seems to dislike him right off the bat: a company man who's always looking to minimize and explain away the horrors she's faced.

 

Interesting. I need to rewatch this again. I do distinctly remember going 'that is why she trusted him' when she asks about whether they are going to destroy them not research them and he reassures her.

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I have to assume Ripley's stoicism has to be partially informed by that fact that she's basically a space miner (Supervisor? i'm not totally clear what a warrant officer does on a mining ship). It's odd to think how rare these types of explicit display of working class have become.

 

I don't have a ton to add (to the already good stuff), but I just wanted to say that Apple Cider has done a bang up job, and there are some great posts here! 

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I want to pushback against this idea that Ripley's interactions with the rest of the crew are directly informed by her gender. Her character is set up as the standard second-in-command bore who is killed before the movie ends. At its core, Alien is just a slasher movie in space. It came out on the heels of Carpenter's Halloween and definitely owes a lot to that movie. If Ripley had been played by a man, the character would be nothing more than an expandable sidekick. That's why it was such a shock in 1979, audiences were expecting Dallas to be the movie's big hero. Weaver's presences adds an unavoidable gender dynamic, but one that the audience puts on the movie, not what is actually present in the film. She's not a Final Girl and her femininity is never established beyond the mention of her daughter. This makes it easier to not read traditional gender dynamics in any of the scenes where Dallas or Ash or any other male crew member disagrees with her. It's also what helps make the underwear scene so much more visceral; for the first time the audience is really confronted with Ripley's femaleness and it makes us fear for her in a way that movie has never allowed us to up until that point.

 

Is it okay to call a movie feminist just because its main character is a competent woman? Ripley certainly is a great character, maybe in no small part because she is a woman and subverts standard horror movie expectations. Is that all we need for something to be considered feminist? I don't know if it's a failing of society or feminist theory, but labelling a movie as feminist has never sat right with me, mostly because I'm never quite sure what people mean by it.

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I usually just assume feminist movie to mean "easily read as a feminist text," or even just "encouraging of analysis from a feminist point of view." It's a kind of shorthand for a way to engage with the movie.

And it's worthwhile to separate the text from the reading, but I don't think it's possible to really do that wholesale. But that's a whole aesthetics conversation that might derail this so I'm not sure I should go into that.

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I'm not in the habit of marking things as "feminist XYZ" versus finding some value in a discussion about them with a feminist lens, so I'm sorry if that's the feeling you got from the thread (or my posts). Alien seemed like a good place to start. I think there's a lot of ways to read film in general, but we've gotten a lot of suggestions for different movies. (Although a lot of horror films, which doesn't surprise me too much.) I presume all of them were suggested because people wanted to pick them apart for various reasons. If a movie features a competent woman and it doesn't have some value in discussion, I would expect that to come up!

 

Even if Ripley is not supposed to be seen as a woman explicitly due to the mechanics of the script, I still read those scenes that way myself. It's hard for me to subtract her gender from those scenes because they remind me so much of my own life, even if it was unintentional. Authorial intent isn't the only factor here, at least in how I interpret things. 

 

Edit: My friend Maddy brought up while we were watching that Dallas (I believe) specifically calls Ripley "my dear" which I feel wouldn't be the case if he was talking to a guy.

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I've been interpreting the "feminist" label here as a lens as well, not necessarily a sticker to put on the DVD case.

 

I will say this though: there might be an argument about Ripley's gender being secondary to her interactions with the crew, but the violence in the film is unmistakably sexual. Kane dies because he was impregnated through his mouth. Ash tries to stuff a rolled magazine down RIpley's throat. The alien kills people with a phallic appendage that comes from its mouth (that is itself another mouth). I don't think I'm capable of making any deep reading of that imagery, but it's pretty clear to me what it's communicating.

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Yeah, and that sexualised violence is absolutely intentional, which is why I think it's interesting to look at Alien through a feminist lens. I think Argobot's critique applies better to Aliens, where there's much less there to be seen through a feminist lens.

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I definitely agree that this movie's sexual themes have an obvious feminist interpretation. Penetrating your characters with a phallic weapon (see: almost all horror movies) is pretty clear in its meaning. What I'm less convinced about is the idea that Alien is feminist because Ripley is a woman and men don't listen to her. Sexism and gender are not present enough in the film to support that argument, for me at least. All the gender issues are what we bring to the movie and I've never been a big supporter of Death to the Author.

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I am really truly sorry that I said that the movie gave me a "feminist vibe" since I think that's being conflated as saying it's a feminist movie when really all I wanted to do was talk about it from my perspective. 

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 Death to the Author.

 

I'm assuming this was a typo, but now I really want a movie about Roland Barthes as an action hero determined to kill all authors.

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Can't track down a legal copy of Hedwig so I am not going to be able to watch it for this week.

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