Originally Posted by spacehamster95
Originally Posted by Blackheifer
Ellen Ripley goes so far beyond anything like that she makes woke seem as superficial as it actually is.

-She was written as a man.
-She saves male characters from being raped
-She is choregraphed during the final fight seen (which uses pornographic lighting and imagery) as penetrating the alien with a phallus.

All of this is intentional. Nobody has taken subversion to this extreme since that movie. Its one of the reasons Alien is explored in Film Classes.

This is what happens when you take something and create Art for the sake of Art and not worry about metrics.

Ripley was written as her last name and that's that. But yeah, the assumed gender was male in the script. At the time, the actress (Sigourney Weaver) who played her was really excited about a character who was not defined by gender but by their humanity and agency first and foremost.

And yes, the cinematography of Alien did present Ripley as a male character, avoiding camera moves that would visually feminize her (one example, she was often portrayed having one side of her face in the shadows and the other illuminated, which a visual clue for deep contemplation and was previously not afforded for female movie characters).

I do think a lot of male creator should do this, assign gender as the last thing they do, maybe then we could leave behind this "strong female character" bullshit, the notion that writing a woman with any agency must have some sinister underlying purpose to it.

OMG, I agree 100%. Start with your character and motivations divested from gender and then come back and assign it after the fact. I think we would get such a better range of interesting characters from that process.

It reminds me of my favorite Sci-Fi writer (deceased) Iain M. Banks - he wrote a book called The Player of Games which is based on a far future utopian, post material society run by Ship Minds called The Culture. The society has its own synthetically created language called Marain which is distinct from most organic evolved languages in that it has only a single pronoun for sentients - male, female, AI, Minds, Drones. Banks contrasts Marain to English by pointing out the major flaw in our language is that it substitutes aggression for cooperation and sentimentality for compassion. Using any language forces you to adopt that languages underlying ethical framework. Marain solves this and frees users from those enforced frameworks.

Anyway, the main character (Gurgeh) from the Culture is heading to a more primitive society with an evolved language and the Minds have to explain to him what the words "the Dominant Sex" means. And I thought to myself, "when we get to the point that "dominant sex" has to be explained we will have become an equal society."

Anyway, loved your post and your deep dive into Alien. Its one of my favorite movies.

Blackheifer