Viewing the ‘Alien’ Franchise Through a Feminist Theology Lens

WHEN AUTHOR AND film critic Sarah Welch-Larson was growing up, she wasn’t a horror movie fan. That started to change when, as a teenager, she had a fateful encounter with the James Cameron film Aliens on cable TV.

The movie’s hero, Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, “looked a lot like my mom and had a lot of the attitudes my mom has about some things,” Welch-Larson, who writes about faith and popular culture for the online publications Think Christian and Bright Wall/Dark Room, told Sojourners. “I was captivated by that character.” Two weeks later, Welch-Larson watched the first 1979 Alien movie, directed by Ridley Scott. It frightened her and she couldn’t get it out of her head.

Eventually Welch-Larson’s interest grew into a fascination with the series as a whole. Her new book, Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction’s Most Idiosyncratic Film Franchise, looks at recurring themes of evil, greed, and destruction in the Alien films through the lens of theologian Catherine Keller’s 2002 book, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, in which Keller examines the first two verses of Genesis.

“She writes a lot about God setting everything into relationship with each other. God’s saying there’s a relationship you have with the rest of the world and with other created beings around you,” Welch-Larson explains. “Once you start to deny those relationships, you’re saying they’re not as important as what God has created you to be, and Keller says that’s the source of evil.”

Welch-Larson says this idea—that sin stems from a denial of our emotional connection and responsibility to the world around us—is a perfect fit for the Alien films. “Once people start to deny the inner humanity of each other, that’s when things go wrong,” Welch-Larson says. “That’s why Weyland-Yutani [a fictional corporation central to the series] is willing to send these characters to their deaths in the first movie, and things spiral out of control from there.”

Alien and beyond

THE ALIEN SERIES consists of six movies in total. Four of them—Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien: Resurrection, often referred to as the Alien quadrilogy—focus on Ellen Ripley as she battles parasitic, acid-blooded space creatures sometimes called xenomorphs. The other two films are prequels on the aliens’ origins and the factors that set the first Alien film in motion.

Each of the quadrilogy movies is helmed by a different director and has a unique approach to the series’ central themes of corporate dehumanization and capitalist exploitation. Scott’s Alien is a paranoid science fiction horror story following Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo, a commercial towing spaceship, as they’re pulled from hypersleep to investigate a distress signal on a nearby moon.

The moon, LV-426, is home to eggs containing face-hugging aliens, one of which attaches itself to a crew member of the Nostromo and implants him with an alien spawn. The alien hatches, killing its host, and quickly grows into a full-fledged monster with dripping metallic jaws that kills off the crew one by one. Ripley escapes, but not before discovering that the company she works for, Weyland-Yutani, intended for the Nostromo crew to find and bring back the xenomorph (regardless of the cost to their lives) so that the company could examine the specimen.

Cameron takes over directing duties from Scott for Aliens, an action thriller set 57 years after Alien. Ripley’s escape pod, where she’s lying in stasis, is picked up by Weyland-Yutani. When the company loses contact with a terraforming colony located on LV-426, Ripley accompanies a corporate representative and a troop of colonial marines to investigate. The cause of the trouble is another alien, and it’s up to Ripley to keep it from killing everyone. Once more, it’s revealed that Weyland-Yutani wanted to save the alien for the purpose of military research.

David Fincher directs Alien 3, the bleakest of the quadrilogy. After Ripley and a small group of survivors destroy the xenomorph at the end of Aliens, their escape pod crash-lands on a prison planet. Ripley is the lone survivor of the crash, along with another alien organism. While the other films are notably less concerned with Ripley’s gender identity, Welch-Larson says Alien 3 is explicit in its feminist themes.

“It’s exploring the idea of what it’s like to be in a woman’s body in a world exclusively built for men, and seeing what traps of sin the men fall into because they’ve fallen for the lie that they’re no better than the sins they’ve committed,” Welch-Larson says.

Ripley dies at the end of Alien 3 but returns in clone form for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection, set 200 years after Alien 3. The military creates this version of Ripley, whose body also hosts an alien queen and shares DNA with the creature. The military removes the queen from Ripley’s body and uses it to breed additional aliens. After the aliens inevitably escape their enclosure, Ripley allies with a group of mercenaries to destroy the queen before the ship they’re on reaches Earth.

Alien: Resurrection, with its darkly comic tone, is the odd one out in the series. Welch-Larson admits that it was the film she was least looking forward to writing about. However, in revisiting it, she found a surprising amount of thematic weight. “I think it’s actually the longest chapter in the book, which shocked me,” Welch-Larson says. “That movie was the most challenging and also the most rewarding to write about, because it was so surprising to me that there was so much depth to this movie that I’d written off.”

In the prequels, Ridley Scott returns to the series he started, with new characters whose desire to push the boundaries of knowledge carries fatal consequences and leads to the events of Alien. Scott seemingly draws inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, particularly in the character of Michael Fassbender’s David, an android who carries over between the two prequels and whose experiments ultimately create the xenomorph.

Welch-Larson says writing about the films has encouraged her to reexamine her preconceived notions about other films that may have more to offer than she initially thought. “It’s made me wonder what other pieces of art we’ve discounted as a culture because they’re genre films or horror films or pop art, or didn’t do well at the box office,” she says. “What other pieces of art are saying similar or totally different truths, because we think they’re not worth anything?”