The alien series: a deleuzian perspective

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Notes

Elizabeth Grosz, ‘A Thousand Tiny Sexes’, in Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 197–8.

At present there are four films in the Alien series: Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), Alien 3 (David Fincher, 1992) and Alien Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997).

The following are just a few examples: Barbara Creed, ‘Alien and the Monstrous Feminine’ and Judith Newton, ‘Feminism and Anxiety in Alien’, both in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, London: Verso, 1990; Robert Torry, ‘Awakening to the Other: Feminism and the Ego-Ideal in Alien’, Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 23/4, 1994, pp. 343–63; Ros Jennings, ‘Desire and Design: Ripley Undressed’, in Tamsin Wilton (ed.), Immortal, Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 193–206; Catherine Constable, ‘Becoming the Monster's Mother: Morphologies of Identity in the Alien Series’, in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zones II: The Spaces of Science Fiction in the Cinema, London: Verso, 1999, pp. 173–202.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. From the French by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [1983], trans. from the French by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986; Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image [1985], trans. from the French by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 31.

Grosz, ‘A Thousand Tiny Sexes’, p. 193.

While theories of the cinematic apparatus tend to understand spectator identification in unconscious and linguistic terms that produce a disembodied cinematic subject, feminist interventions into this system of vision lean towards the affective aspect of identification without addressing spectator embodiment directly. Here I am thinking of Linda Williams's work on melodrama as well as Mary Ann Doane's work on the woman's film; Linda Williams, ‘Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Oxford Readings in Feminism: Feminism and Film, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 479–504; Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Gatens discusses how Freud's early work on hysteria reveals the interrelatedness of the body and mind, and points out that Freud once described the phenomenon of hysteria as a ‘mysterious leap from the mind to the body’; Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 8. Grosz makes a similar point in her book, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, London: Routledge, 1990.

Moira Gatens, ‘Sex, Gender, Sexuality: Can Ethologists Practice Genealogy?’, Southern Journal of Philosophy 34, Supplement, 1996, pp. 1–20.

Gatens discusses the concepts of ethology, affect and the body extensively in both Imaginary Bodies and ‘Sex, Gender, Sexuality’.

Brian Massumi, ‘Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments’, in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. xvi.

Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 34.

Understanding the film as an assemblage also makes possible an exploration of the way it connects to institutions, discourses and bodies outside the viewing situation. This is particularly so when considering the way the films, from the moment they are conceived, seem to spill out and connect with so many other assemblages such as talk shows, movie shows, news events, magazine gossip, star systems, film posters, reviews, behind-the-scenes and the-making-of programmes, interviews, red carpet première events, Internet sites, academia, film festivals, politics, franchises, merchandise, book sales, fan clubs, video rentals and television viewing among others. In this essay, however, I limit the exploration of the cinematic assemblage to the film-viewing situation as a response to a dissatisfaction with theories of spectatorship based on psychoanalysis.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1987, p. 4.

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. For a clear summary of Crary's notions of modernist vision and ocular possession, see Linda Williams, ‘Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the “Carnal Density of Vision”’, in Patrice Petro (ed.), Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Whereas special effects are often used for the purpose of verisimilitude, such as dinosaurs that are made to look as real as possible, in this scene special effects are used to abstract the images shot making recognition very difficult.