Technocultures

Last Updated August 12, 2024.

SOURCE: Freccero, Carla. “Technocultures.” In Popular Culture: An Introduction, pp. 99-129. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Freccero contrasts the representations of technology-driven societies in Neuromancer and the Alien film series.]

A. TECHNOCULTURES AND POSTMODERNISM

In this chapter I would like to explore cultural productions that ambivalently represent postindustrial society's romance and disillusionment with advanced technological developments. The representations examined here present technoculture as an important dimension of both the present and the future, and construct a variety of responses, both utopian and dystopian, to that culture. Technology is the defining mark of late-twentieth-century First World existence in the popular imagination, and thus it is a particularly fruitful terrain for social and political analysis.

The texts I am discussing, in their disillusionment with the promises of industrial society and better living through advanced technology, engage in some form or another with the question of the postmodern. Postmodernism suffers from a surfeit of definition, and my characterization here simplifies the range of meanings the concept encompasses. For the purposes of this survey of technocultural fantasies, the postmodern can be thought of as a historical designator, referring temporally to the period following World War II in Northwestern Europe and the United States. In the wake of the Holocaust, Enlightenment notions of the power of rationality to achieve social good are seen to have failed utterly; this includes the realization that not only can reason not save us from self-destruction and evil, but that reason itself can be harnessed in the service of diabolical goals. Added to this sense of the failure of reason and the triumph of destructive irrationality are fears of a nuclear apocalypse, so that the threat of imminent self-destruction becomes part of the failure of Enlightenment ideals to save the world.

The postmodern also refers to the postindustrial, the turn away from industrial optimism and visions of infinite prosperity through production, to the industrial decay of late capitalist urban centers. The confrontation with ecological disaster also contributes to the atmosphere of postmodernism. “Next to high-tech, its waste,” writes Giuliana Bruno of the postmodern Los Angeles city landscape represented in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982).¹ Postmodernism also refers to an aesthetic, one that has to do in part with reactions to this deeply pessimistic, nearly apocalyptic and dystopian vision of the postindustrial world.

MTV is often cited as an illustration of postmodernist aesthetics: fragmented images (pastiche) and a sense of disjuncture in time and space (time is no longer linear, it jumps around between past, present, and future, it speeds up, slows down).² The present does not follow the past; rather, everything is on one flat simultaneous plane, and past, present, and future all appear in the present as a collection of images. There is no sense of history as that which came before; instead, history is treated as a set of images, a collection of representations without context. Thus, for example, Frederic Jameson and others use “schizophrenia” to characterize postmodern consciousness.³ Bruno adds, “The industrial machine was one of production, the postindustrial machine, one of reproduction. A major shift occurs: the alienation of the subject is replaced by the fragmentation of the subject, its dispersal in representation” (69).

The postmodern aesthetic involves the dominance of the notion of representation. The visual predominates in a society of the spectacle.⁴ The postmodern dismantles the notion of a real behind the copy; it is the age of the copy, or what is called the simulacrum, a copy that has no real as its referent, no real as that from which it originated. It is simulation. Scott's film Blade Runner features the Replicants, the better-than-people copies of people who never existed, copies that do not originate in the real but are pure and perfect reproductions, without a past, without a history, without a future, existing in a schizophrenic present (Bruno, 68).⁵

Another way to think about postmodernism, which I simplify here, is as the projection of symptomatic anxieties on the part of Western intellectuals. These are anxieties about the waning role of the postindustrial West in the future narrative of the earth, especially if the role was once conceived as that of the bearer of civilization, improvement, and progress. Postmodernism reflects the sense that what the West contributes to the future is destruction and decay, and that history, as a process of positive transformation, will no longer be in Western hands.⁶ The response to such disillusionment with the promises of postindustrial culture is a kind of despair, a withdrawal into the self-contemplation of self-destruction. This is the dystopic aspect of postmodern cultural production. The replacement of history and narrative with representation, fragments of images all in the present; the reveling in the accumulation of commodities and representations without trying to connect them to stories of production or histories of how they got there may be thought of as aspects of the denial involved in the West's postmodern consciousness.

However, in this postmodern aesthetic of denial or despair there hovers the trace of “real” history and the reluctant acknowledgment that a future that may have nothing to do with us exists out there, accompanied by a powerful nostalgia for the way things used to be. In William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, as we shall see, this takes the form of the occasional nostalgia for nature that is linked to woman, to sexual difference, and to desire.⁷ In Blade Runner history is all-important, for history is what ultimately distinguishes human from replicant.

In Neuromancer the recognition of the future as taking place “elsewhere” is figured by the release of the AI (Artificial Intelligence). The AI returns to the protagonist, Case, at the end of the novel to say, “I'm not Wintermute now. I'm the matrix” (269); it has merged with and talks to other AIs in the net. In Neuromancer, then, the future, even the future of the virtual no-place that is cyberspace, does not lie in the hands of “meat” (the term used to refer to human beings) at all, but in the minds of artificial intelligences, that is, in personality, and in mind without body. Blade Runner, on the other hand, seems to question the very notion of what constitutes the human and suggests, through the romance between the protagonist (a human) and the beautiful replicant Rachel, that the future may involve a hybridization of the biological and the technological. In this respect, Blade Runner shares the more optimistic vision of the future described by Butler's trilogy; humans have indeed exhausted their time, but that does not mean that humanity will disappear. Instead, what is understood to constitute humanity will change, adapt, and transform itself. These narratives might be said to be posthumanist in their visions of the future and, as posthumanist, they find a way beyond the impasses of postmodern despair and denial.

One of the predominant themes in this discussion of technocultures will be the relationship between technoculture and feminist thinking. Technology has been and is viewed as a predominantly masculine domain, indeed, as defining late-twentieth-century advanced capitalist Western masculinity. Yet much of the commentary about technology and its social consequences is coming from feminist camps, and many popular cultural representations of technoculture involve some attempt to talk about women and technology, or women and science. This can be in part attributed to two factors. First, as Zoë Sofia argues in her essay “Exterminating Fetuses,” technoculture constructs itself in relation to the world according to the dichotomy “culture-man/nature-woman.”⁸ The second factor is that some of the most consistent critiques of technoculture and organized protests against it have come from women's movements. The antinuclear and peace movements have been articulated in feminist terms, and ecological movements have privileged a feminine, if not feminist, relationship to the world: love your mother. Accepting, in part, the dichotomies set up by technoculture—perhaps for strategic purposes—women's movements have promoted what is viewed as a distinctly “female” relationship to life, involving nurturance; respect for life; caring; symbiosis rather than conquest; peace rather than war; emotional warmth rather than cold rationality; heart over mind. A whole series of values associated with the feminine and the maternal are enlisted to argue for the preservation of the earth. The degree to which some of the discourse of ecological responsibility relies on stereotypical notions of the relation between woman and nature suggests, even more strongly, how “woman” becomes inevitably entangled with discourses of technology in our culture.

Sofia outlines the influential paradigm of technoculture that is set up in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. She understands current popular fantasies about technology in representation as masculine appropriations of (women's) biological capacity to reproduce, and connects these to the myth of Zeus devouring the Titan Methis. Methis is pregnant at the time; Zeus, after devouring her, gives birth to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and technology, through his head (she is his brainchild). The myth thus enacts a displacement, in the domain of reproduction, from the female uterus to the male belly to the paternal brain (“Exterminating Fetuses,” 51); technological birthing then replaces biological birthing. Sofia invokes the “sexo-semiotics” of technology to describe a representational system where all technology is reproductive technology. Technology, she argues, is about reproduction. As such, and as the product of a specifically masculine technology of reproduction, technoculture also carries within it a certain ambivalence: an awareness of its appropriative gesture and a fear that nature will seek revenge (48-49).

B. WILLIAM GIBSON'S NEUROMANCER

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of William Gibson's Neuromancer, both for the history of imaginings of cyberspace and VR (virtual reality) research, and for the SF genre of cyberpunk. As both Allucquere Stone and Peter Fitting note, Gibson's work represents crossover science fiction, that is, work that circulates outside the traditional science fiction readership and introduces a much larger constituency of readers to the genre.⁹ Stone argues that Gibson's importance for “epoch four” of virtual communities, the one she calls virtual space and cyberpunk, is that he crystallized a new community through the publication of his book. Neuromancer constructs or creates a subculture, including a slang appropriate to that subculture, a style, a stance, a mode of relating to and rebelling against the dominant culture. How does Neuromancer work to set up recognition codes for its constituency? How would we go about describing the subculture that it creates?

In “The Lessons of Cyberpunk,” Fitting argues that cyberpunk's defiance lies in its reaction against science fiction's increasing commercial success and the repetitive reliance on profitable formulas. But he also points out that “the very rejection of the mainstream has been converted into a merchandising label that suggests a trendy, on-the-edge lifestyle.” “It is not punk,” he says, “but an image of punk, a fashion emptied of any oppositional content that has become a signifier to be used in a countertrend marketing strategy. The outlaw stance of some of cyberpunk's early champions corresponds primarily to images of rebellion as mediated by MTV” (297). This characterization points to an important cautionary perspective for students of cultural studies: rebellion and defiance do not necessarily signal subversion or revolution. Resistance is not necessarily progressive in its oppositional stance. I want to use Gibson's Neuromancer as a way of meditating on the problematic politics of “resistive” subcultural communities as they are imagined by technoculture.

Stone raises the question of community in relation to electronic communication and makes the observation that

Many of the engineers currently debating the form and nature of cyberspace are the young turks of computer engineering, men in their late teens and twenties, and they are preoccupied with the things with which postpubescent men have always been preoccupied. This rather steamy group will generate the codes and descriptors by which bodies in cyberspace are represented.

(103-4)

The developers of cyberspace and the cyberpunk readership may be said to constitute a kind of “cyberfraternity,” a fraternity of adolescent and postadolescent boys in virtual space. Such communities might be said to resemble, in some ways, the more familiar community of the college campus fraternity. The convergences between the two communities suggest a rethinking of the masculine vision of the cyberworld as represented by Neuromancer. What are the implications for our socially lived future in virtual communities, given what Stone says about the ways real-life young men in the industry are envisioning and fashioning the social world of cyberspace and the bodily world of the agents and surrogates of “the meat”?

One might want to think about this in the psychoanalytic terms of oedipal rebellion, the rebellion of sons against their fathers. Fraternities, in a certain way, represent the defiance of sons against the authority of fathers. Paternal authority is represented by the institution of the school, the university, the rules and regulations of sober, severe, paternal, and responsible conduct dictated to the university community. Campus fraternities rebel against these by consciously or semiconsciously enacting a “bad boy, I-don't-wanna-grow-up-and-be-responsible” answer to the responsibilities of patriarchal culture that they will have to assume in their turn. Paternal authority and paternal calls to duty are oppressive; they are, in fact, the law. Thus fraternities celebrate fraternal bonding rather than patriarchal bonding; they celebrate communities of male peers rather than communities defined by the patriarchal household. They also celebrate a defiance of the law, through illegal or excessive intoxication, rowdiness, and other forms of socially proscribed behavior. So far, this is what Andrew Ross calls the “protopolitical” potential of any subcultural formation, that is, a subculture's potential to resist the dominant social order and its imposed ideology.¹⁰

However, in fraternities this resistive energy does not, it seems, get translated into a progressive political program, a community that organizes itself to transform the social order by harnessing those resistive energies and channeling them into analyses and visions of social change. Psychoanalytically and politically described, we might say that fraternities serve a containment function for the potentially oppositional energies of adolescent males. Boys are permitted (by the patriarchy) to rebel (and this is why institutions often seem quite hypocritical in their simultaneous opposition to and sanction or approval of fraternity conduct), on the condition that after their four years of “letting off steam,” they will accept their symbolic castration (which means their obedience to paternal dictates and laws) and grow up to assume those responsible patriarchal functions that, in fact, paternal law is preparing them for. In other words, they grow up to become and replace the patriarchs, the very same patriarchs they were rebelling against in college; thus their oppositional energy has been contained. One of the ways the patriarchy guarantees its reproduction and replacement, even from within the resistive and oppositional moment of fraternal bonding, is through a certain relation to women, the female body, and femininity.

The exercise of privilege over women, in the form of sexual violence, degradation, parody, and selective exclusion, guarantees an important mediation between and among the men, a mediation that will keep them from turning toward and loving each other, a mediation that will prevent homoeroticism and produce homosociality instead. Homosociality guarantees the control of social space by men only, while it also ensures that the fiction of a competitive structure (men competing for women) will persist and eventually take over once the men themselves become patriarchs.¹¹

Hierarchy among men is necessary because without it, the fable goes, we would have anarchy; or, to put it differently, without hierarchy, patriarchy would not have a leg to stand on, because patriarchy depends on respect for paternal law, leaders, and commanders. This is one of the important and explicit reasons that the military persists in its proscription of homosexuals. According to the military, to permit homosexuality would undermine the chain of command, because the bonds of love between and among men would disregard the hierarchical arrangement, the “necessity” for some men to learn to command and others to learn to obey, even when obedience goes against any reasonable calculation of self-interest or survival (in other words, even when one knows that to obey means to be killed). The bonds of love between and among men would also mean that men would reject the philosophy of dying for the patriarchy (for the nation-state, the law of the land, the fathers who started the wars that the sons always have to fight and die for).

Another reason the abuse and/or degradation of women is necessary to the subcultural construction of fraternities is one that brings me back to the topic of technocultural science fiction. Stone writes,

In psychoanalytic terms, for the young male, unlimited power first suggests the mother. The experience of unlimited power is both gendered, and, for the male, fraught with the need for control, producing an unresolvable need for reconciliation with an always absent structure of personality. An absent structure of personality is also another way of describing the peculiarly seductive character of the computer … as a second self. Both also constitute a constellation of responses to the simulation that deeply engage fear, desire, pleasure, and the need for domination, subjugation, and control.

(108)

The technocultural world that cyberpunk and other recent science fiction narratives represent engages with the feminine in a peculiar way. There is the oedipalized relation to the mother as the first all-powerful female figure who dominates the infant boy (some examples include the computer in Alien [MU TH UR], the maternal drama in Aliens, and the matrix in Neuromancer). In the oedipal narrative, the mother is the boy's object of desire, an object of desire he is prevented from merging with by the law of the father, or by paternal interdiction. In the homosocial fraternal space of the fraternity, the delay between adolescence and adulthood involves a drama of the feminine; the mother haunts the space of fraternal bonding as the forbidden object of desire and also as the powerful force that once controlled the life of the boy. She is simultaneously desired and feared, feared not only because the father promises to punish the son for desiring the mother, but also because the mother once controlled the son. In the space of the fraternity, the forbidden figure of the mother is feminine difference, the feminine, women.

The feminine is constituted as a threat and an object of desire in the space of fraternal bonding; fraternal bonding in turn “eliminates” the woman as principle of division, by creating all-male peer bonding where the woman is the object (of conversation that goes on among men). On the other hand, because of the mother's perceived power over the son, she serves as the object of displacement for the patriarchal or paternal function; once again we have a situation where women, rather than fathers, patriarchy, or the state, are blamed for the young man's feelings of oppression. The mother, or the feminine, is blamed because she is what is different: there is not the same degree of identification with the mother as with the father. Further, to blame the father is dangerous because one might be harmed (“castrated,” in psychoanalytic terms, but more literally harmed if we think of the paternal as the state). To blame the father is also to refuse to be a man, according to the terms in which masculinity is constructed in our social order. The woman thus fulfills the function of scapegoat in the homosocial culture of the fraternity (and, one might argue, in the homosocial culture of patriarchy itself).

Does Neuromancer adopt this mythology of masculinity or does it subvert it? One might argue that this question is important to answer if, as Stone claims, it is primarily young men who are configuring the social space of VR and the bodies of the future communities of cyberspace (103-4). If, as she argues, “Cyberspace can be viewed as a tool kit for refiguring consciousness in order to permit things to go on in much the same way” (110); and if cyberspace and virtual communities are “flexible, lively, and practical adaptations to the real circumstances that confront persons seeking community—part of the range of innovative solutions to the drive for sociality … complex and ingenious strategies for survival” (110-11), then it seems that it would be important to determine whether the virtual communities that will structure the future will indeed be a projection and/or realization of adolescent masculine visions of fraternal community. Will this be a community that enacts its ambivalence about the feminine and, in practice, tends on the one hand to idealize the feminine (Ripley from the Alien films) and, on the other, to demonize her (the alien, the computer)? In either case, will the cyberspace community of the future include feminine or female subjectivity at all? Will there be room for sexualities and beings that do not adhere to Freudian family romances? Will there be room for revolutionary ways of interacting socially and bodily not only between men and women but also among men and among women?

Gibson's depiction of the relationship between Case, the protagonist, and Molly, the “razor girl,” does offer hope for a progressive vision of the relationship between the sexes. Molly's femininity, like that of Ripley in the Alien films, is unusual. She is a killer, and she is stronger than Case; her body is described as machine-like, perfect in its musculature and functionality. She is tough and heroic, like Ripley. At a certain point in the novel, Case is forced to “inhabit” her through the simstim (simulated stimulation). He takes on the feeling of her physical being and her consciousness, but there inside her, he is powerless to control either her thoughts, her body, or her actions.

This might be an illustration of what Stone means when she says, “To become the cyborg, to put on the seductive and dangerous cybernetic space like a garment, is to put on the female” (109), and it also suggests the feminization of the male in relation to technocultures, that is, the observation that the new technocultural man is feminized by his relation to the prosthetic device. In Neuromancer this feminization is positively, not negatively, valorized. Thus we have what seems to be a progressive reimagining of the feminine in this world; masculine and feminine are brought into closer contact.¹² However, might we not also ask whether these female characters bear any relation to “women” at all, or do they enact precisely a masculine feminization, which would make of them, instead, men in disguise? Would this then constitute a progressive vision?

Relative to the question of a progressive vision, Gibson demystifies adolescent masculinity to a certain extent, and thus opens it up to the possibility of change. This occurs when it is revealed that Case's energy, his risk-taking, his thrill, and finally what gives him the power to break through the final “ice” is self-hatred. “You gotta hate somebody before this is over,” the Finn's voice says (261). Case keeps trying on different kinds of hatred, but when it comes to the final moment, the motivation is self-hatred (262). This is one of the cynical and profound truths of adolescent philosophy: the way self-hatred motivates thought, feeling, and action. This self-hatred, suggests Gibson, can be used to do great things. It can be harnessed for the purposes of liberation; it is, in other words, protopolitical, if and only if it is recognized as such and channeled in a certain way.

And yet certain aspects of the text entrench it within old ideologies of nature, culture, and the body in ways that seem unable to offer an alternative to the binarisms that structure Western thought. There is a persistent nostalgia in Neuromancer for nature and the natural, even as the body is that which is spurned and rejected as mere “meat.” This nostalgia surfaces, as I noted above, in relation to romantic love and in relation to sexual difference, not vis-à-vis Molly, but in relation to Linda, the lost and mourned love object of the novel. This is not surprising if we think of Neuromancer as a cultural map of the new, computer-literate, adolescent masculine psychic formation. But what does this nostalgia do? Does it keep “woman” in the realm of nature? Does it promise salvation or redemption? Does it fatally idealize and pedestalize the feminine?

Stone makes the point that cyberspace expresses a desire for “freedom from the body, freedom from the sense of loss of control that accompanies adolescent male embodiment. Cyberspace is surely also a concretization of the psychoanalytically framed desire of the male to achieve freedom” (107). She warns about the danger of forgetting about the body, and its implications for the rest of us in the virtual reality future (113). However, it is clear that cyberpunk does not eliminate the body from its representations; even the presence of being in cyberspace is marked by “icons,” which stand in for bodies. Transactions, negotiations, and communication take place between and among various representatives of bodies, however differently configured they might be from what we know as the biological body.

Furthermore, Neuromancer figures racialization, as it does gender to a certain extent and sexuality, in ways that do not depart radically from the entrenched dichotomies of present-day social relations. Asian-ness, in the novel, is configured in terms of U.S. popular cultural fantasies of orientalism in relation to Japan. Finally, the only consistent political and theological philosophy expressed in the book is represented by the Rastafarian community (note the names: Maelcom, and his tugboat, the Marcus Garvey). The Rastafarians reject the company and industrial technology and adopt Case and Molly as the beings who will go into Babylon, liberate it, and usher in the new Zion. Here we see that what is Black, or “African,” comes to be idealized and exoticized as that which is natural, authentic, and true, much as, Frith argues, Africa and African music function in the domain of (white) rock to lend exoticism and authenticity to its aesthetic energies.¹³ Thus the rejection of the technocultural and the longing for the natural also come to be “embodied” in the most traditional (white) symbol of the natural, the primitive, and the body in Western culture.

C. THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE ALIEN FILMS

ALIEN

Alien, directed by Ridley Scott (1979); Aliens, directed by James Cameron and produced by Gale Ann Hurd, his wife (1986); and Alien³, directed by David Fincher and coproduced by Sigourney Weaver (1992), can be called trickle-up horror/science fiction movies, films that have high production value, have garnered an expansive market, and thus have been treated as less disreputable than (what are called) grade B or exploitation horror movies.¹⁴ Their hybrid genre, both horror and science fiction, makes them particularly sensitive registers of the psychic and the sociopolitical. The horror genre typically deals with (more or less unconscious) nightmares involving sexuality (specifically, sexual undifferentiation), where, as Robin Wood puts it, “normality [defined as conformity to the dominant social norms] is threatened by the Monster.”¹⁵ Horror films thus invite psychoanalytic interpretations that explore unconscious desires and fantasy. Science fiction most explicitly addresses the political, representing political fantasies through the imagining of alternative worlds, and thus invites the reading of ideologemes, or ideological critique.¹⁶

The film titles indicate an encounter with the other in its most generic form, less readily visible in films where the name of the other is “thing” or “fly.” The titles also invoke nationalism: “alien” is the term used to designate those on the other side of national borders. These films, then, one might assume, deal in overt ways with questions of sexual alterity and nationalism. Furthermore, as a series that extends over thirteen years, each installment appearing in a different decade (1979, 1986, 1992), the first three Alien films permit a contextual as well as intertextual political/sexual reading, whereby ideologemes specific to a historical moment become more readable for being variations of the “same” story. Finally, these films have been variously taken up by feminists and queers as emblems of progressive political representation, and thus have functioned ideologically as symptoms of some of the liberal democratic dilemmas I have been exploring.

Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) refers to 2001 as the paradigmatic science fiction film emerging in the context of nuclear panic, and the concomitant fear that technology carries with it a moralized promise of extermination. I say “moralized” because there has always been a sense in Western cultures that the technological is fascinating, useful, helpful, and dangerous (the story of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods comes to mind). A residual guilt persists concerning the conquest of nature, as in the aphorism “It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!” or Laurie Anderson's song (and the fable from which the song's title is taken) “The Monkey's Paw,” where she mockingly admonishes, “Nature's got rules and nature's got laws, and if you go too far it's the monkey's paws.”¹⁷ Is this guilt about “man's” mistreatment of Mother Nature guilt about the son's incestuous rape of Mother Nature? Given the metaphor of reproduction, one might speculate that the conquest of nature is likened to a sexual act—perhaps violent—that engenders technology. The very act of naming the computer in Alien “mother” (MU TH UR) suggests the displacement of birth through the need to reconstruct the mother as a product of men's brains. This imagined, artificial male birth functions to mitigate, in some sense, fears about the hostility (revenge) of the mother (Mother Nature).

Alien also quotes 2001 directly, in the embryonic birth scenes of the ship's crew, in the chamber music that plays inside the command room, in the look of the ship's computer, and especially in the scenes of Ripley's hallucinogenic orgasm as she watches Nostromo blow up, with the colors and shapes that are reflected on her helmet. How then, does Alien change the terms of 2001?

Alien is born at an interesting moment in the United States: 1979. It is the peak, climax, or end of the second wave of the women's movement. It is also the period of the oil crisis in the United States, the beginning of the realization that the high-tech, land of plenty empire that is the United States is ruining its resources and is fatally flawed in its radical dependence on oil that is not controlled by the United States but by OPEC in the Middle East. Thus the ship is called Nostromo (the title of Conrad's novel that signals the dream of empire and also the decline of imperialist and colonialist Great Britain), and the ship is a refinery that transports or tows mineral ore from interplanetary space back to earth.¹⁸ It even looks like an offshore oil rig: dirty, dark, greasy, dank, its metal oily and rusted. The ambivalence about technological progress is expressed in this image of the commercial and messy business of acquiring our most used and needed resource for the maintenance of our glossy, high-tech existence.

Sofia discusses this ambivalent representation of technology by referring to the “bad slimy by-product” that is always a consequence of our shiny new objects. (This is repressed or suppressed in cyberspace science fiction, which retreats from this view of technology, taking refuge in the high-tech, clean, and glossy planes of the inner technological space of the computer; although there too there is the return of the repressed in the form of chaotic behavior within cyberspace.) The film interestingly figures our culture's fears about technology and the nature/culture ambivalence at the heart of the discourse of better living through technology. Several figures in the movie connect its anxieties historically to the question of the oil shortage and the consequent reevaluation of U.S. economic dependence on “foreign” supplies: (1) the creature changes organic matter into inorganic matter: it transforms human blood into a kind of silicon plastic that makes a perfect protective case of the human body for the new creatures to gestate in; (2) when the crew go into the abandoned ship on the planet, they see the captain of that ship fused to the ship, and they say that he has been fossilized. The linkage of fossilization of an organic body to high tech transformations alludes to oil (the detritus of organic matter compressed into petroleum), which is then used to construct technologically advanced civilizations. Both of these images or figurations of the anxiety about technology express an ambivalent attitude toward that technology and its relationship to the human body, organic matter, or nature. Oil is, of course, the perfect metaphor for the expression of such disease, because it brings together the organic and the inorganic, nature and technology.

The beginning of the film portrays humans as weak and helpless as they emerge from their womblike and dormant state inside the ship's uterine capsules. They complain. At the same time, the complaints of the mechanics of the ship, who point to the inequity of wage distribution and threaten to strike, produce a discourse about the failure of manufacturing. The movie conveys a certain despair and cynicism about industrial America and its failures to make a shiny sleek machine that works perfectly: the workers, the mechanical keys to the functioning of the entire military-industrial complex, will not cooperate (note that the film adopts the popular ideological stance that labor is to blame for the failure of industry in the United States). The humans are imperfect because, in part, they impede the smooth operation of technological efficiency and industrial growth. But the technology is imperfect too. When members of the crew go into the abandoned spaceship, the video monitor fails; MU TH UR cannot decode the warning signal; and voices speaking over the intercom sound deeply distorted.

The alien, on the other hand, is a powerful figure of the natural; and it is no accident that praise for the alien comes from a being who is an imperfect welding of the human and the technological: the cyborg Ash (“dust to dust, ashes to ashes”), who admires its perfection. “I admire its purity,” he says (and we might wonder about the racial subtext here). It has a perfect defense system, it is flawless, and it is untroubled by human emotions, which always clutter up the project of rational technological progress. The alien is thus the revenge of nature: the perfect killing machine that is not a machine, the perfect organism that can make even inorganic substances become part of itself. It is both a parasite and a carnivore (we learn primarily about its reproductive functioning, another instance of Sofia's point that fantasies about technology are reproductive fantasies). And what it really excels at is reproducing itself using human bodies. Alien is thus a nightmare fantasy about biological reproduction, which culminates in the bizarre cesarean birth of the alien from the chest cavity of Cain (Abel's brother, and thus a scapegoat, Cain is the most “feminine” man of the crew, and he speaks with a British accent).

Ultimately Alien, unlike its successors, can be read as a kind of parable about the revenge of Mother Nature against mankind's audacious claim to conquer her through technological perfection, although the ending nevertheless celebrates the triumph of humanism over the alienness of nature, albeit after demonstrating technocracy's failure to do so through scientific means. The humanism that triumphs is no longer the heroic male technocrat, but a woman.

Science fiction often repeats medieval romance quest motifs—the story of the lone, heroic (but flawed) individual protagonist who must test himself against supernatural or magical natural forces that are malignant, evil, and dangerous and emerge triumphant into the world once again. Here that heroic individual is Sigourney Weaver's Ripley (note the pun on the director's name, Ridley Scott, in the character of the protagonist Ripley). Alien thus inscribes the women's movement into its medieval plot about the hero's conquest of the monstrous dragon.

How does this film engage the question of feminism? One could argue that Ripley is the hero for commercial reasons, that the movie industry is marketing to the “new woman” consumer, a middle-class liberal feminist professional woman. She may represent the triumph of humanistic values in the film—a feat that requires overcompensating gestures, since the film takes such delight in its antihumanistic technology: the alien and the cyborg. Furthermore, because Ripley has to be a hero, we also see the film overcompensating in its attempt to feminize her. For example, her anger and aggression are staged as a typically feminine “catfight” in the scene where she calls MU TH UR a bitch. Ash's attack on Ripley also feminizes her in that it resembles an attempted rape, and this fight brings into play the medieval motif that signals the presence of the lady—blood drops on the snow—with a twist: the blood is Ripley's and the snow is the “milk” of Ash's android-sustaining substance. The presence of Jones, Ripley's cat, as sidekick also works to feminize the heroine: there is a silent pun on “pussy,” while Ripley's concern for Jones demonstrates her maternal feelings. At the same time, however, the film also pokes fun at these values, by making Ripley's attempts to save the cat border on the absurd. Finally, the confrontation between Ripley and the alien also genders her as feminine by awkwardly invoking the traditional “tits and ass” stuff of movies (she is in her underwear), likening the scene once again to a near-rape. Alien thus simultaneously acknowledges the appeal of the tough female/feminist heroine and feels some unease about it by making overcompensating gestures to return her to her “proper” gender.

ALIENS

By 1986 things have changed. Hollywood films in the eighties seem to conduct a steady retreat from social commentary. In the seventies, most films commented on the social, usually in ominous tones. Nuclear destruction, vanishing resources, increasing surveillance of civilian life, multinational corporations' greed and power—such was the stuff of many films, even when the subject matter appeared to be unrelated.

In the eighties, however, the personal, the private, the individual took over with a vengeance. In some ways this development parallels the ideology or ethos Andrew Ross refers to in his discussion of New Age technocultures and New Age philosophies as voluntarist individualism, exemplified in statements like “We are participating, however unconsciously, in the process of disease,” and “We can choose health instead.”¹⁹ In the eighties social disorders are likened to illnesses brought on in part by the victims of those illnesses themselves. According to Ross,

When personal consciousness is the single determining factor in social change, then all social problems, including the specters raised by racism, imperialism, sexism, and homophobia, are seen as the result of personal failures and shortcomings. Individual consciousness becomes the source, rather than a major site of socially oppressive structures, and opportunities for a radical humanism are lost.

(“New Age Technoculture,” 546)

This description of New Age philosophies could apply in many ways to the mainstream descriptions we hear about phenomena such as racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, and violence, and illustrates how much New Age thinking has become part of the mainstream social outlook of the eighties.

Films of the eighties, by and large, subscribe to these forms of individualism and voluntarism. Whereas Alien was centrally and anxiously about technophilia, the destruction wrought on the world by corporate greed and unrestrained technofetishism, and the unlikelihood of a redemptive humanism that would restore the ecosystem, Aliens is untroubled by earthly pollution or the power of technology's reign. Instead there is an adoration of technology at work and a more thorough recognition that the boundaries between nature and technology, between biology and technology, have been definitively blurred (in the way that both Haraway and Ross talk about).²⁰ Like Gibson's Neuromancer, Aliens recognizes that there is no going back and that it is ultimately impossible to separate the technological from the humanistic or the natural.

Alien was horrified by the blurring of the boundaries between nature and technology, further suggesting that nature might actually win out in the end in revenge for humanity's audacity at having dreamed that technology would bring transcendence. Alien constructed an opposition between the technological and the biological, the technological and the natural. Aliens, instead, revels in the technological and in the cyborg mix of human and machine. As spectators of the film, we often look through video monitors (with the names of the “bio beings” displayed in the lower left-hand corner of the screen). Whereas in the first film we witnessed the failure of the monitors when the crew entered the alien spacecraft where the creature was living, here there are glitches (as when Drake has to adjust his monitor, and when it temporarily stops working inside the incubation room), but for the most part, technology works beautifully. In addition, we learn that the marines are dead when their monitors stop working and display television “snow” (a reconception of death as a blank [but turned on] TV screen); thus technology becomes the primary—and reliable—source of knowledge. This use of video must also be commenting on the medium of film itself, here no longer ambivalently regarded as a technology that threatens the human director's supremacy over his product. In Aliens, it would seem, director and camera meld into one smooth and invisible visual field, uninterrupted by quirky shots that draw attention to the virtuosity of a director/“artiste” behind the scene.

This use of video monitoring also says something about the perfection of technological surveillance mechanisms in the eighties. Whereas Alien was anxious about surveillance tactics, Aliens assumes their existence and, indeed, sides with the technological optimism of the military. Paul Virilio observes that Aliens celebrates high-tech military weaponry; indeed, after the Gulf War, this film resembles nothing so much as a proleptic television commercial for the war (including what could be called the new gender equality of the military; this film even looks forward to the time when it will be acceptable for gays to be in the military).²¹

Technophilia abounds in Aliens: the android, Bishop, is a good guy; the cargoloader, Ripley's metallic armature, is a good thing; the marines are armed with state-of-the-art weapons that function efficiently. The spaceship is brighter and cleaner; it has everything, and even though the crew still complains about the food, it is clear that this is a more comfortable ride than the Nostromo. What causes damage to people is not so much the malfunctioning of the machines as the deliberate corruption of the CIA-like company, whose disregard for human life has reached new heights of diabolical intensity. There are some technological failures, of course, and these primarily concern the eighties' recognition of nuclear power plants as faulty technology (yet there is still an optimism that they can be fixed): the plant as a whole has problems that will result in a nuclear reaction, but Bishop (the android) and the others can solve them. There is a final meltdown of the plant, recalling once again the ultimate threat of nuclear power plants, but the film reworks its significance so that the meltdown turns out to be beneficial rather than harmful.

I said that Aliens, like many films of the eighties, moves away from social commentary into the realm of the personal, the private, the individual. This is a story about a domestic quarrel, not between husband and wife or parent and child, but between two women, two mothers. The motivating force of the film now comes from Ripley's single-minded rage against the aliens and her desire to destroy them. The fiction used to personalize this rage is the fiction of maternal ferocity, the fabled notion that a mother will do anything and everything to protect her young. Indeed, there are moments in the film where Ripley's disregard for the lives and safety of the crew members is striking in comparison with her obsessive and single-minded concern for her adoptive “daughter,” Newt. Rather than a kind of protofeminist humanism, as was displayed in Alien, what characterizes Ripley in Aliens is a private, personal, and selfish concern for one being: the girl. Aliens thus becomes a story about maternal jealousy. There is a link between the maternal feminine—or the virile feminine as maternal—portrayed here and the discourse of nationalism, for in the discourse of nationalism, women are primarily and positively constructed as ferocious and protective mothers.

It is precisely around questions of nationalism and imperialism that the film's ideological confusion seems most apparent and works to enshrine political denial. What is the political situation on the planet where Ripley, Burke, Bishop, and the marines go to inspect the colony? We learn that a colony of “terraformers” has settled there; earth has colonized this planet, and, in an apt metaphor, is proceeding to transform its “hostile” atmosphere into one that will be terra-friendly. The colonists tame the wilderness, transforming the “uninhabitable” land into one that will host its terraform settlers with ease and comfort. In the interrogation scene where Ripley is asked to report to the company about what she knows of the planet, the female scientist says to Ripley, “You're telling us that there is this indigenous alien life form there that has been totally unrecorded and unnoticed?” Ripley, at this point, hyperbolically stresses that the life form is not indigenous; in fact, she ridicules the woman for her stupidity (notice that there are many hostile exchanges between Ripley and other women in this movie, and that these hostile exchanges are always at the expense of the other woman in the encounter, another indication that this movie is replete with backlash). The aliens arrived, supposedly, in an alien spaceship; that is where they were originally found. This alien spaceship, which, in the first movie, looked like the ruins of some kind of ancient civilization, arrived on the planet before the terraformers settled their colony there, and thus the aliens are not indigenous to the planet, which is terribly important in Ripley's view.

This argument sounds like nothing so much as the self-justifying rhetoric of imperialist or colonial ventures. There is both an argument about who has the right to settle on land and a defensive argument about how no one is indigenous to that land. No one has a prior, more compelling claim, and therefore the colonists have a right to colonize it and to settle there. (Here the motif of cannibalism associated with the aliens is probably more tightly linked to the political unconscious of the film text than it was in the first film, in the sense that the rhetoric of the film evokes arguments for the colonization of the Americas as well.) This argument conceals what might otherwise seem obvious in this film: that the aliens have destroyed the human terraformers who invaded their planet and restored it to its “rightful” occupants, the aliens, who were there first.

This is the structural situation that persists throughout the movie and is also continually denied: the alien is fighting for survival against an enemy, humanity, that wants to destroy it and its offspring. Ripley and the marines (is the use of the marines a sign of bad conscience about Vietnam, Grenada, or Nicaragua?) are involved in a genocidal campaign against these aliens, who fight back in order to survive as a species. And how does one fight back? Kill the mother! Ripley is the one who starts the war to decide whose offspring dies, when she maliciously—we see the glint in her eye—torches the mother alien's eggs and then her eggsac. It is only after this offensive maneuver that the mother alien goes after Ripley and also after Ripley's adoptive daughter. Geopolitics is translated into a drama about two mothers fighting over the respective lives of their offspring. The future of the globe is transformed into a deadly battle between two women, two mothers duking it out over whose kids get to live. This is what I mean by the personalization of the social, the individualizing of the political in the eighties.

Aliens is replete with bad faith. Under the guise of feminism and multiculturalism, the film enacts intense backlash and antifeminism.²² First, it displaces geopolitics onto a catfight (interesting that Jones disappears in this film). The women are the problem in this story; they are the truly fierce ones of the species. However, Aliens seems feminist on the surface, and has become a cult film among feminists and lesbians. It seems to portray lesbians in quite a favorable light (the medic, Ferro, and Vasquez), although, of course, the marine Vasquez has to “be” a man (and a woman of color, who can thus be more easily masculinized in popular culture representations than a white woman). Some might argue that there is no explicit indication of lesbianism, but I think the film inserts recognition codes that signal to its subcultural audience that the women are lesbians. Recognition codes are, of course, stereotypical, and so you have the short hair, the musculature, the joke about being a man, and the bonding between Vasquez and Ferro.²³

Ripley is tougher in this film than she was in Alien (she has shorter hair; in Alien³ her head is shaved). She is a macho female hero, and her bonding with Hicks turns out to resemble more of a brotherhood than a marriage, though the nuclear family does, nevertheless, get reconstructed through mutual and equal admiration between “husband” and “wife”: there is the joke about the tracking bracelet that Hicks gives to Ripley as a mock gift, which seems to poke fun at heterosexual bonding arrangements. Ripley, in turn, gives the bracelet to Newt, thus cementing the familial bond. The director's restored version of the film seems anxious about the feminism and the lesbianism of the film, because scenes have been inserted that bring it into line with a kind of compulsory heterosexuality. Ripley is excessively maternalized and thus feminized: we find out that she had a biological daughter. (Being female in this film is primarily about motherhood; is this related to the abortion debate?) Meanwhile, a scene is inserted where Hicks and Ripley exchange first names, which also further genders Ripley—now Ellen—as feminine and “straight.”

On the surface, the film appears to be feminist, even as it seems to be anxious about that appearance. Elsewhere, however, the message moves in another direction. The bad guy is a woman too, and a mother. The scenes of hostile confrontation between Ripley and other women—culminating in the gratuitous “Get away from her, you bitch!”—seem to say that the only way one can have a feminist woman is if she is a lone individual heroine who explicitly does not bond with other women.

What are the racial politics of the film? Vasquez dies a noble death the way Parker did in Alien, invoking the theme of ultimate self-sacrifice as the mark of “good” people of color in the nation. One indicator that racial politics is indeed at issue in Aliens is the moment when Ferro says to Vasquez, “Hey, mira, who's Snow White?” Racialism and racial hostilities in this film also take place in the domain of the feminine; they are seen as hostilities between women. Here again we have the phenomenon of class conflict (or racial conflict) being figured as an attack on women of the upper class, a displacement of the problems of racial strife away from men and onto women.²⁴

The complex ideological contradictoriness of the film reveals itself on the terrain of race as well as gender. There is the admission that people of color, white women, and working-class white men are the ones who have to go into the military and perform on the front lines, place themselves in harm's way. As Sister Souljah puts it, this nation economically forces Black people to go into the military in order to go overseas and kill “other black people” for the United States; here the “aliens” are recruited to go out and destroy the alien (“she thought they said illegal aliens and signed up,” says Hudson, the “insensitive white guy,” of Vasquez). The compensation for being among those who have to die for the nation is the nation's recognition of Black patriotism. Economic necessity is reinterpreted as fervent loyalty and as the enlightened race politics of the Marine Corps. Perhaps the most pernicious, because “concealed,” race politics of the movie involves the use of “alien” to mean both xenomorph and “immigrant” (e.g., the comment about “illegal aliens”; the quips in Spanish, as when the sergeant calls the marines “tough hombres” and Vasquez's Spanish motto; the processing center, which is reminiscent of the U.S./Mexico border). In addition, the comparison between Ripley and the alien mother suggests a racialized discourse of motherhood that centers this time on the infamous ideological image of the “welfare queen”: the bad (black) alien mother lays tons of eggs, creates teeming masses of baby aliens that will take over the world by devouring the rest of us, while the good white mom has just one—adopted—child.

Finally, the android situation in this movie seems to comment on the perceived state of white masculinity in the culture. Why does the film wound the male hero and make the android Bishop the co-rescuer with Ripley? Bishop, the only truly good and competent man in the film, is not a man at all, but an artificial person (note that the film plays on political correctness with the scene where Bishop asks to be called an artificial person rather than an android). Aliens seems to suggest that the only good man, the only kind that can be counted on, is an android. This situation, and the staging of the drama of rival mothers, as well as the drama of the mother/daughter bond, are the signs that Aliens is trying in some deep ways to connect with the American middle-class female (and feminist) psyche, that is, to recognize and acknowledge her fears, concerns, and anxieties. In this sense the film caters to a female audience and shows the extent to which the cultural imagination has grasped some notions of women's discontent in America, although I think it is important to remember that discourses of nationalism (and this film is, I would argue, quite a rabid discourse of nationalism) always pass, both metaphorically and literally, through the figure and person of motherhood, mothers, and the maternal.

ALIEN³

After such a frightening and brilliant construction of the “illusion of a seamless reality” that indicates “the potential allure, power, invisibility of humanist ideological semes” (“even for the radical critic,” notes James Kavanaugh, 99), I can only rejoice that David Fincher ended up directing Alien³, with Sigourney Weaver as coproducer.²⁵ If Alien can be said to have interpellated (primarily) a straight male spectatorship, and Aliens extended that interpellation to include most markedly a straight female, feminist, and lesbian spectatorship, then Alien³, I would argue, reaches most markedly toward a gay male spectator. I want to conduct a tentative defense of this movie for several reasons: it was a box office flop, too depressing. The cheery eighties film-goers were unprepared to see the mood of the turn of the decade reflected before their eyes: economic disaster, AIDS, the end of the Reagan-Bush era, wars in Europe, the Gulf War, the Clarence Thomas hearings, and the approaching millennium. The beginning of 1992 was not a happy time. The film does not have a happy ending. It is, politically, an improvement. Furthermore, the film is directed by a video director, a relative outsider in the industry whose traffic in the more pedestrian, populist medium of video makes him the object of many film directors' scorn. And, finally, with its algorithmic marker as the third in the series, Alien³ critically suggests the infinite exponentiality of the othering we are capable of, while killing off this particular series of sequels by obliterating its protagonist.²⁶

Reviewers have pointed out that Alien³ is obviously about AIDS.²⁷ My students have remarked, however, that this is equally if not more true of the second film, and there the absolutely alien as contagion (from elsewhere) is horrifying, terrible, threatening to the rest of us, the good, innocent ones. In the second film, whether intentional or not, the discourse of AIDS proliferates in its most homophobic form. In Alien³, such is not the case. If AIDS is among us, it is among all of us, and what it produces as reaction is not so much horror as sorrow.

The film takes place on Fiorina (“Fury”) 161, a YY chromosome work correctional facility.²⁸ There are twenty-five male prisoners who remain there voluntarily, since Weyland-Yutani's mineral ore refinery no longer functions. They are bound together by an “apocalyptic millenarian Christian fundamentalism,” according to Clemens, the doctor, and they have taken a vow of celibacy (“and that includes women,” says one of the men). They all have shaved heads and wear punkish fatigues and boots. Clemens is an ex-junkie who still “fetishizes the ritual,” for we see him lovingly shoot up Ripley twice in the space of fifteen minutes. These, along with some lines of dialogue and what Amy Taubin points out is a relentless foregrounding and probing of the body, set up the AIDS discourse in the film.²⁹

There is a Foucauldian cast to the description of this social order. The YY also signals this discursive encoding, for a medicalized link has been made between identity (symbolized by the biological reference, YY) and criminal behavior. The planet is a bathhouse, a hospital, and a prison, a company prison at that, suggesting a total melding of state and capital in this new world order. The phrases initially used to describe the problem of contagion—“in the interest of public health,” “communicable infection,” and “unwelcome virus”—signal the discursive technologies of medicine and the state, while an autopsy performed on Newt early in the film visually reinforces those discursive technologies. Against this backdrop, the film introduces us to a group of outcasts: male criminals, an ex-junkie doctor, and a sole surviving flight officer who is also the only woman on the planet. The film also elaborates a discourse of resistance around these characters, a populist bricolage of religious fundamentalism and political analysis. Several lines in the movie signal this resistance as belonging to communities of activism such as ACT UP: “They think we're crud and they don't give a fuck about one friend of yours that's died!” says Ripley. Funeral rites are ceremonialized and turned into community rituals replete with significance. The film foregrounds community: the group is what counts, not the lone individual, for the nature of the problem is such that only the group members' commitment to each other will solve it.³⁰ There is no “proper” leader, either, for the doctor and the jailer (as the state's proxy) are killed off early on. Ripley becomes nominal leader, but only nominal, and Dillon (Charles Dutton), the spiritual leader of the group, firmly refuses the role.

Alien³ elaborates a discourse of AIDS, ACT UP resistance, and gay community that is queer-sympathetic, to a certain degree. The most powerful argument for the film's gay sympathies is suggested by Stephen Scobie, who argues that the deeply elegiac tone and mood of this film stem from its elaboration of the mourning produced by survivor's guilt.³¹ He reads the guilt as Ripley's, and the mourning as maternal and centered specifically on Newt, but it does not take much to extend the sense of this mourning so that it simultaneously speaks to the mourning of gay men for their friends and lovers, mothers for their sons, activist sisters for their brothers, and the survivor's guilt an entire community might share.

Unlike a discourse of nationalism, which would heroize the surviving mother's mourning for her war-destroyed sons, Alien³ reworks the image of pregnancy to signal, instead, incorporation, the failure of the mourner's introjection, which would assimilate the death of the loved one into the ongoing life of the mourner. Scobie, following Abraham and Torok, points out that “incorporation is at once more drastic and more paradoxical, in that the ‘other’ which is assimilated remains other” (88).³² This incorporation of a queen, another mother, and the suicide that will destroy both the mourner and the doppelgänger within shut off the future and condemn it. There is no redemption for Alien³. Death produces not future life (as we are told it does by the nation-states that send us to war and that attempt to console the rest of us for our losses), but the end of the story. The final scene in the film is deeply ironic: a roll call of the recorded voice of Ripley and text on the screen tell the viewer that the planet was sealed. Ripley's death is all the more ironic for being futile: she does not destroy the company. One of the reasons, then, that audiences found this film depressing is precisely this exposure of the production of death as cruel, involuntary, and senseless. As Taubin remarks, “More pessimistic and unsparing than Thelma and Louise, Fincher's Alien³ suggests that Ripley knows that the odds are against there being anyone left in the world for whom her myth will have meaning” (10).

But what of Dillon, the Parker-Vasquez sacrificial heroic Black character of this version of the alien allegory? Like Parker and Brett in Alien, he refuses the humanistic role offered him when Ripley tries to make friendly contact. He refuses, in other words, to be rescripted as sacrificial humanist by insisting, when questioned by Ripley, that he is “a murderer and a rapist of women.” The couple Dillon/Ripley in this film resembles, finally, the partnership Vasquez/Drake of Aliens: a heroic, ironic, unsentimentalized, nonsexual (but erotic) partnership of outcast comrades. We might, nevertheless, ask whether the narrative logic of the film ultimately appropriates Dillon for the humanist cause, because he too finally goes the way of Parker and Vasquez, a good Black man who heroically sacrifices himself for the community by keeping the alien penned where it can be killed off.³³

Ripley asks, in fact, that Dillon kill her, presuming him capable, given his former career. Another logic, more unsettling, appears in this moment of would-be heroic sacrifice. When Dillon and Ripley trap the alien—which, in this film, is lifted out of the discourse of anthropomorphic sexual difference by being born of a dog—in the lead mold, they argue about who will stay to die as the hot lead falls. Ripley says, “I'm staying—I want to die,” but Dillon says they made a deal that he would kill her later on. She climbs out of the mold but he remains there. She says, “What about me?” and he responds, “God'll take care of you now, sister,” thus breaking the promise he had just invoked to her in order to achieve his own jouissance in death-grappling with the other. Could this doubly negative gesture be doubly ironic, and thus critical of the sacrificial narrative set up in the previous two films? Rather than the redemption of the racial/sexual outcast through heroic self-sacrifice in the service of the preservation of the nation (figured as white womanhood), the scene mimes the sacrificial act but ironizes it by making it a refusal to “save” the woman. However, “saving” her also involves killing her, so the refusal is also a refusal of the typical (negative) role assigned to the racial outcast. A second irony involves the turning of “sacrifice” into narcissism, in that Dillon chooses his own desire over the wishes of Ripley. But that narcissism also involves suicide. Choosing himself means killing himself, just as choosing her would have meant killing her. Thus Dillon redeems himself from the taint of “rapist and murderer of women,” but not for the sake of another. The question, then, might be, is it possible to reconfigure the meaning of redemptive self-sacrifice such that it does not shore up the nation? This question becomes also a question about whether it is ever possible to valorize the death drive as oppositional resistance.³⁴

If we read this as a film about survivor's guilt, then indeed it is no wonder it did not bring audiences rushing to it, for how can one simply come to the conclusion that willed death, suicide, might be what the subject desires? Is this not then the film's humanist weakness as well, its existentialist solution to overwhelming odds? (Dillon's message to the reluctant prisoners is “You're all gonna die, the only question is how you're gonna check out. … Do you want it on your feet or on your knees, begging?”) Could one not imagine leaving the monster as legacy behind for the company to discover and deal with? Would this not constitute a means of fighting back? This would perhaps be the only message more horrifying to its audience than the spectacle of Ripley's demise. The deaths of the prisoners, however futile, confer upon them honor and dignity, and thus redeem them, if not the world. The eerie roll-call roster at the end of the film that reads like the names of the dead at the Names Project exhibitions does just this, and does what the Names recital does as well: heroizes the dead for those who have lost them and confers dignity and honor on their lives. The conferral of such dignity, and anger at the company that is the cause of all this slaughter, may thus elicit our humanist sympathies for a film whose message also includes an incitement to bash Japan, for the barrels in the basement of the facility are covered in Japanese writing, and the scientist who accompanies the company representative at the end of the film is Japanese.

And yet a metatextual moment governs this film, performs a mise-en-abîme via an ironic allusion to the genre of horror films. When she discovers that she is carrying an alien fetus, Ripley decides to go find the (adult) alien. The assistant warden asks her where it is; she says, “It's just down there, in the basement.” He replies, “This whole place is a basement,” to which Ripley responds, “It's a metaphor,” signaling the genre of horror as that which talks about “the thing in the basement.” But then she does descend to the basement, to the dream place, to the unconscious, and literally enacts the moment of misrecognition psychoanalysis accords to such confrontations. In what is the most moving, uncanny, and sexy speech of the entire film, she says to the alien, “Where are you when I need you?” and, picking up a pipe as she hunts it down, “Don't be afraid, I'm part of the family.” As she thinks she sees it cowering on the floor, she says, “You've been in my life so long, I can't remember anything else. Now do something for me. It's easy, just do what you do.” At this point she brings the pipe crashing down, only to discover that she has hit another pipe, and not the creature, who is hiding in the rafters.³⁵ Is Ripley here speaking to the alien, to herself? Is this Sigourney speaking to the alien, to us, her audience of thirteen years? And what is she saying? The seduction, the intimacy, the desire of this moment, its uncanny elegiac resonances seem to move it out of the absurd and rather ridiculous space of a woman talking to a creature that does not understand and may not even be there. Might the “you” be death itself? The death of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, principal character of the Alien trilogy? The signing-off not only of Ripley, last surviving officer of the Nostromo, but also of Weaver herself? And is the desire uncanny because, while we all know that the literal death is a metaphorical one, it also speaks to a desire for death as other, as alien, in the space of the basement, the topographical space of the unconscious?

The film thus explores the subject's death drive, explores desire as the desire to die. And it marks the subject's relation to the social (the company and the loss of others) as resistance and refusal: “no” is repeated several dramatic times toward the end. In the penultimate scene the sole survivor turns around, as he is being herded out, for one last look at the prison and begins to laugh. The company men shove him out and he retorts, “Fuck you.” What this film leaves its survivors (viewers) with is a space for mourning.

Recent psychoanalytic discussions of AIDS and “homo-sex” suggest that a rejection of the “culture of redemption” (Leo Bersani's phrase) and the valorization of the death drive might constitute an oppositional negativity that is not so much antihumanist as posthumanist in its critique.³⁶ Tim Dean has suggested that the theorization of the death drive as the (homosexual) jouissance of the Other—“that death itself is actually something one might, at some radical level, want—if not desire” (105)—makes possible the project of a “cure for sociosymbolic ills” (115) around the question of our culture's response to AIDS. Dean's bold if problematic formulation of his argument that “in a psychotic society we are all PWAs” (116) may have found a figure in this film.³⁷ I want to suggest that Alien³ may at least offer a way of imagining resistance (as absolute refusal) to a narrative of redemption that valorizes self-sacrifice for the good of the nation and that attempts to enlist outcast recruits for a national project of imperialism.³⁸

Notes

Bruno, “Ramble City,” 63.
Bruno, “Ramble City”:

Jameson suggests that the postmodern condition is characterized by a schizophrenic temporality and a spatial pastiche … schizophrenia is basically a breakdown of the relationship between signifiers, linked to the failure of access to the Symbolic. With pastiche there is an effacement of key boundaries and separations, a process of erosion of distinctions. Pastiche is intended as an aesthetic of quotations pushed to the limit; it is an incorporation of forms, an imitation of dead styles deprived of any satirical impulse.

(62)
See Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”: “The schizophrenic does not have our sense of temporal continuity but is condemned to live a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon” (119). See also Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”; Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication”; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.
Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.
See also Baudrillard, Simulations.
See, among others, Godzich, “Foreword: The Further Possibility of Knowledge.”
“It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read,” Neuromancer, 239.
Sofia, “Exterminating Fetuses.”
Fitting, “The Lessons of Cyberpunk”; Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?”
Ross, “Hacking Away at the Counterculture”:

Studies of youth subcultures … have taught us that the political meaning of certain forms of cultural “resistance” is notoriously difficult to read. … If cultural studies of this sort have proved anything, it is that the often symbolic, not wholly articulate, expressivity of a youth culture can seldom be translated directly into an articulate political philosophy. The significance of these cultures lies in their embryonic or protopolitical languages and technologies of opposition to dominant or parent systems of rules.

(122)
On homosociality, see Sedgwick, Between Men.
For another discussion of the potentially progressive aspects of a technocultural reconfiguration, see Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto.”
See Frith, “The Cultural Study of Popular Music.”
I treat the Alien films here as a trilogy because at the time, the fourth film had not yet appeared. At the same time, these three films mark themselves as a trilogy by the third film, which uses “to the third power” as a way of connecting itself to the other two. The fourth, Alien: Resurrection, announces itself as a belated arrival by the term “resurrection.” Nevertheless, its thematics also engage current popular and public meditations on reproduction, technology (including reproductive technology and genetic engineering), and the question of the in/human and posthuman futures for the world.
Wood, “Return of the Repressed,” 26. For issues involving generic hybridization, see Wood, “Cross Talk.”
See Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 76, 115-18.
Anderson, “Monkey's Paw,” from Strange Angels.
See Said, Culture and Imperialism:

if it is true that Conrad ironically sees the imperialism of the San Tomé silver mine's British and American owners as doomed by its own pretentious and impossible ambitions, it is also true that he writes as a man whose Western view of the non-Western world is so ingrained as to blind him to other histories, other cultures, other aspirations. All Conrad can see is a world totally dominated by the Atlantic West, in which every opposition to the West only confirms the West's wicked power.

(xviii-xix)

Since Conrad's Nostromo is located in Central America, it is perhaps no accident that the second film of the trilogy, Aliens, will pun incessantly on the question of illegal aliens through the marine Vasquez, her occasional exclamations in Spanish, and her locker room motto, El riesgo siempre vive. In Alien, Nostromo (our man/boatswain) is the cargo ship that ultimately and unwittingly becomes the dramatic vehicle where the battle of values between the female/feminist hero Ripley and the company/computer “MU TH UR” gets played out.
Ross, “New Age Technoculture,” 531.
See Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters”; and Ross, “New Age Technoculture.”
Virilio, “Aliens.”
Curiously, Aliens recognizes the changed identity formations of the United States and explicitly addresses feminism. These features of the film, argues Christine Holmlund, are typical of what she calls the New Cold War sequels of the eighties, where

economic fears become rewritten as sexual dilemmas, and white subcultures and racial minorities become subsumed within or behind the white middle class family. Yet the presence of strong female, non-white and/or counter-cultural characters does indicate that social change has occurred and is occurring. Like a thread that runs throughout their fictions, … [these] films depict a resurgent United States' posture of strength, yet the films also refer constantly to fear of weakness. Memories about both Vietnam and social protest coexist and collide as cinematic fictions use the past and future to shore up, disguise or replace the present.

(“Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Rocky IV, Aliens: New Cold War Sequels and Remakes,” 86)
On recognition codes, see Lewis, Gender Politics and MTV; also Fiske, Television Culture.
In this connection, see Kipnis, “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust.”
Kavanaugh, “‘Son of a Bitch’: Feminism, Humanism, and Science in Alien.”
At the time of this writing, the fourth Alien film was being prepared. Alien: Resurrection featured Ripley as a genetic mutant.
See, in particular, Dargis, “Alien³ and Its Metaphors”; and Taubin, “Invading Bodies,” 9-10.
The YY can function as a gay encoding device; it resembles more the drawing of two male symbols together, ubiquitous graffiti signifier of gay love.
Taubin, “Invading Bodies”: “AIDS is everywhere in the film. It's in the danger surrounding sex and drugs. It's in the metaphor of a mysterious deadly organism attacking an all-male community. It's in the iconography of shaven heads” (10).
I wish to thank Daniel Selden of UCSC for pointing out this aspect of the film to me, and for first suggesting to me that Alien³ had progressive political potential.
Scobie, “What's the Story, Mother?”
Scobie is citing Abraham and Torok's works The Wolfman's Magic Word and The Shell and the Kernel.
Perhaps this is a sign of continued unease with the meaning of “race” in a country that sends to state-sanctioned death a disproportionate number of specifically Black murderers and rapists. Surely the film distances Dillon from his murderer/rapist identity in order to elicit a middle-class and predominantly white empathy for his heroic, if useless, death.
Suicide does, in fact, have a history of oppositional valorization: examples include the Buddhist monks in Vietnam, whose self-immolation spoke in eloquent protest of the war, and numerous recent deployments of the hunger strike, where the consent to death is read as directly confrontational to the state. See also Malcolmsin, “Socialism or Death?”
This recalls another sexy moment in the film, so sexy it serves as its advertising trailer: when the alien slides up to Ripley after possessively killing off her sex partner, but does not touch her. We are puzzled then, but we later learn it is because she carries “its” child.
Bersani, The Culture of Redemption. I am thinking of Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic”; Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”; and Dean's remarkable article “The Psychoanalysis of AIDS,” which all suggest a rejection of the culture of redemption and a theorization of the death drive as the (homosexual) jouissance of the Other.
Diamanda Galas, for example, promotes a T-shirt that reads, “We are all HIV+.”
I also want to suggest that the use of nationalistic rhetoric for the queer cause, as in the Lesbian Avengers' motto, “Lesbian Avengers: We Recruit,” and in the term “Queer Nation,” though it is an example of what Foucault terms “counter-discourse,” becomes problematic in its parodic intent when it converges with the current debate on gays in the military and with the “gay menace” response. For a discussion that problematizes queer nationalism, see Kalin, “Slant: Tom Kalin on Queer Nation.”

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