Feminine Construction and the Alien Series

Feminine Construction and the Alien Series

Miniaci Performing Arts Center

The main objective of this essay is to demonstrate the regressive construction of female characters in mainstream cinema through the use of psychoanalysis. According to Laura Mulvey, mainstream cinema constructs female characters to please the male gaze. "Woman" in film is shaped and molded in such a way that her castration threat to the male viewer is diminished. In both the film diegesis as well as the discourse, the female image is contained and reduced within the symbolic system of patriarchy. Her ideas can be applied to the blockbuster Alien Series. The main protagonist of all three films, Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, is shaped and molded in accordance with the male spectator. She is either formulated as a hyper-masculine character, thus removing her femininity, associated with weakness and failure, or she is fueled by maternity to put her back into her proper place as woman within the ruling patriarchal ideology.

Also in the Alien series, the male paranoia of the feminine threat of castration is depicted through the construction of the alien species who embody the weakness possessed by the feminine characters. The Alien series submerses the spectator in regressive images which link feminine attributes, such asmaternity, with the evil protagonist central to the construction of horror films. This is made clear by observance of the alien creature’s mouth, which is dark, moist and hollow, symbolic of the vagina. One also notices that the Queen Alien, the central evil protagonist of James Cameron’sAliens, is an embodiment of feminine attributes. It is through her maternity, her ability to lay eggs, that the second film of the series is fueled.