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Abstract
Alien Resurrection (1997) heightens the movements across dark humor and horror, and enables more pronounced and complex conjunctions across the three types of shadows put forward by Rushing/Frentz and Picart, particularly in the case of the monstrous female characters like Ripley and Call. These characters bisociate the realms of first shadow (female bodies), second shadow (products of technology), and third shadow (fearsome female freedom fighters). Nevertheless, both live—a rarity among Frankensteinian cinemyths. Alien Resurrection enables us to glimpse, through a glass darkly, other ways in which the gendered and raced complexities of the Frankenstein cinematic myth may be traced.
Notes
Caroline (Kay) Picart is a philosopher and former molecular embryologist educated in the Philippines, England, and the US. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Courtesy Associate Professor of Law at Florida State University. Correspondence to: Caroline Picart, Florida State University, 227 Williams Building, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA. Email: [email protected]. Caroline Picart wishes to thank the editor, Robert Ivie, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. David Frank, Davis Houck, Michelle Commander, Tami Tomasello, and Terry Williams have provided invaluable assistance in getting this article into final form.
Barbara Creed, The Monstrous‐Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993), 30.
For more background, refer to Janice Rushing and Thomas Frentz, Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) as well as their article “The Frankenstein Myth in Contemporary Cinema,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (1989): 61–80.
For more background, refer to Caroline Joan S. Picart, The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001) as well as her article “James Whale's (Mis)reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 12 (1998): 40–68.
I draw this argument partially from Sarah Kofman, “Baubo: Theological Perversion and Fetishism” in Nietzsche's New Seas, ed. Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 175–202. Kofman states: “In the Eleusinian mysteries, the female sexual organ is exalted as the symbol of fertility and a guarantee of the regeneration and eternal return of all things.” Kaufman's position, that “Baubo can appear as a female double of Dionysus,” effectively locates Baubo and Dionysus as masks for life as eternally self‐generating and protean. Yet, if I were to carry the implications of her genealogy even further, it appears that Baubo is more than Dionysus' twin. As someone who nurses a goddess of fertility back into health, and as the woman upon whose belly the image of Iaachos‐Dionysus (i.e., Dionysus as an infant) is etched, she seems more powerful than he is. The twin competing myths of Dionysus and Baubo therefore represent the struggle between patriarchal and matriarchal myths—a struggle that continues today in contemporary cinemyths. See also Picart, Cinematic Rebirths, and Picart, “James Whale's.”
Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 10.
Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up (London: Hutchinson, 1978), 112–13. Koestler's notion of “bisociation” is a condition that compels us to interpret the situation in “two self‐consistent but incompatible frames of reference at the same time; it makes us function simultaneously on two different wave‐lengths.” Bisociation is an analogue to the dynamics I describe in hybrid genres. The tension caused by bisociation is purged through laughter, scientific fusion, or artistic confrontation—a tension that is particularly evident in hybrid genres with their liminal figures. Other works that elaborate on similar themes are Koestler, Insight and Outlook: An Inquiry into the Common Foundations of Science, Art and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1949) and Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque (New York: Routledge, 1995), 278.
John O'Connell, “The Fourth Man,” Time Out Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) Clipping (1997, 19–26 November); Simon Fanshawe, “Believe It or Not,” The Sunday Times (London) AMPAS Clipping, 16 November 1997, 11.
Peter Rainer, “Send in the Clones,” New Times L.A., 27 November 1997, 34.
O'Connell, AMPAS Clipping (1997, November 19–26).
For a different model of spectatorship, in which the male viewer moves between sadistic and masochistic postures, refer to Carol J. Clover's Men, Women and Chain Saws (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Linda Williams' Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). See also Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997) for an examination of the ambivalent pleasures of horror and the female spectator. Furthermore, it is important to note that even the term “classic horror” is problematic. It normally refers to films produced during a certain period, most notably black and white films produced in the 1930s and 1940s. However, a film like Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935), though it falls in that temporal designation and general description, radically undermines many of the genre expectations of classic horror, and sets up a campy, aesthetically composed portrait of the queer perspective as monstrous. Harry Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Oxford: Manchester University Press, 1997) makes a compelling case for how many classic (heterosexual) horror films often ambivalently express a fascination with queerness.
Refer to Amy Taubin, “The ‘Alien’ Trilogy: From Feminism to AIDS” in Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Pam Cook and Phillip Dodd (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993) and Thomas Vaughn, “Voices of Sexual Distortion: Rape, Birth, and Self‐annihilation Metaphors in the Alien Trilogy” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 423–36 for additional detailing of the film's affinities with avant‐garde film and social myths.
Taubin, 96.
See Clover for more details.
See Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990) and his “Ethnicity, Race, and Monstrosity: The Rhetorics of Horror and Humor,” in Beauty Matters, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 35–56 for more details.
See Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984) for more details.
See Steven Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 164–200 for more details.
Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 218.
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist‐Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 180.
Andrew Murdoch and Rachel Aberly, The Making of Alien Resurrection (New York: Harper Prism, 1997), 6.
Rushing and Frentz.
See Joss Whedon, Alien Resurrection Final Draft Script (1999) [On‐line] (Was available at: www.dataforce.net:8004/∼viking/scripts/A4SCRIPT.TXT) for more details.
Murdock and Aberly, 11.
Murdock and Aberly, 11.
Since the action in the script is fairly linear, Nigel Phelps decided to design his sets, starting off with “cleanish” greens, blues, and grays, moving gradually into oranges and golds, and culminating in reds to heighten the action. Darius Khondji, the cinematographic “Prince of Darkness,” used his signature chiaroscuro lighting and muted colors for Alien Resurrection; he also used smoke, which functioned as an additional filter and enhanced the suspense and foreboding ambiance of the film (Murdock and Aberly).
Whedon, 1.
Whedon, 6.
Whedon, 3.
Whedon, 28–29.
Fanshawe, 11.
These smugglers are composed of Elgyn (Michael Wincott), the leader; Hillard, his lover (Kim Flowers); Vriess, the crippled chief mechanic (Dominique Pinon); Analee Call, a female mechanic (Winona Ryder); Christie, who is described in some ways as similar to the Terminator—large and ruthless with guns (Gary Dourdon); and the unattractive and mean Johner (Ron Perlman).
Whedon, 26.
Murdock and Aberly, 36.
Joss Whedon, Alien Resurrection Scriptbook (New York: HarperPrism), 26.
Murdock and Aberly, 12.
Whedon, Alien Resurrection Scriptbook, 34.
See Berenstein, and Richard Dyer's White (New York: Routledge, 1997) for more details.
Whedon, Alien Resurrection Scriptbook, 102.
Whedon, Alien Resurrection Final Draft Script, 106.
Whedon, Alien Resurrection Scriptbook, 111.
Whedon, Alien Resurrection Final Draft Script, 46. It should be noted that in the online script, the grotesque spectacle of dying by being sucked through a tiny hole was reserved for General Perez, but the film instead substitutes the equally macabre (though darkly humorous) scene of the general being bitten in the back of his head, and then plucking out a piece of his own brain in disbelief.
In contrast, in the online script, Ripley has the last word when she says: “It's a cancer. You can't teach it tricks” (Whedon, Alien Resurrection Final Draft Script, 13).
Whedon, Alien Resurrection Scriptbook, 67.
Whedon, Alien Resurrection Scriptbook, 84.
Whedon, Alien Resurrection Scriptbook, 85.
Whedon, Alien Resurrection Scriptbook, 92–93.
“Alien Resurrection (Alien 4),” on Corona Coming Attractions by Corona [On‐line]. Available: http://www.corona.bc.ca/films/details/alien4.html (accessed 31 March 1999), 4.
O'Connell, 14.
O'Connell, 14.
Whedon, Alien Resurrection Scriptbook, 103.
Whedon, Alien Resurrection Scriptbook, 108.
John Calhoun, “New Tricks for an Old Alien,” TCI 18 AMPAS Clipping (January 1998), 18.
Calhoun, 18.
Murdock and Aberly, 33.
The Newborn was a nine‐foot hydraulic and computerized puppet, with articulating arms and hands, a swiveling head, and an extremely “expressive” face. The Newborn's tremendous acting abilities can be attributed to the complicated software developed by Gillis and Woodruff, and the efforts of a troupe of talented puppeteers, whose expressions occasionally mimicked the creature's countenance (Murdock and Aberly).
For an in‐depth analysis of hybrid genres (horror comedies, science fiction horror, and science fiction horror films with comedic elements) in relation to humor, horror, power, and gender, refer to Caroline Joan S. Picart, Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film: Between Laughter and Horror (Albany: State University of New York, 2003).