Date: Fri, 05 Dec 1997 17:57:34 -0500
From: Jacob Robertson <jacrob-AT-mindspring.com>
Subject: [Fwd: the pheromonal in Aliens:Ressurection]


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This reminds me of something I was thinking about in a movie I have recently seen.  Have you or anyone else on the list seen Aliens:Ressurection?  Did anyone get the feeling there was a lot going on in the movie with the sense of smell?  Especially with Ripley's character? The olfactory is played up of course because of the predator-prey schemas that the movie exploits, but smell,or some other form of molecular/pheromonal processing and perception, is used for more than just hunting.  Smell plays a mysterious role in those intimate scenes between Ripley and the queen alien, whom she refers to several times in the film sarcastically as her "baby."
    What did anyone think of the polysexual, hermaphroditic form of "motherhood," portrayed in the movie? (if you can consider it that)  Any thoughts on that unsettling detour from the plot line into the little shop of DNA splicing horrors?  Here Ripley's female body is not so much threatened by the rape/murder instincts of phallic-ly charged xenomorphs as it is subject to the trial and error experiments of a mad scientist trope rewritten in terms of fantastic cloning technologies wielded by power-hungry military-industrial corporatii.   Whether an intention of Jeunet and his crew or not, all of this seems to find purchase (for the shock value of sci-fi horror) in the very messy, wet, slimy, orifice-ridden realm of the biological/molecular, which the audience is exposed to in the films opening credits.  I have to admit my sense of wit was a bit tickled when Brad Dourif's character expressed glee and amazement when the imprisoned alien backed down from his stubborn assault on the super-glass at the first sign of Dourif's finger approaching the button which releases punishing freezing gases into the alien's cage.   All the same, it seems like a fascist dream of control taking the form of Pavlovian conditioning.
    But pushing aside the obvious links to H.R. Giger's breed of xeno-erotic necrofascisms, or whatever, what did anybody think about the "pheromonal" dynamics between Ripley and the other aliens, specifically the Queen and her hybrid offspring.  She says to Winona's character, "They're coming."  "How do you know?" "I can smell them."
    For anyone who's ever seen all the Alien movies, I think their story lines present the audience with a real dilemma of fear.  I don't know what I should be more frightened of: the company's blinded-by-profit, suicidal desire to possess/control the alien at all costs or the alien itself.  A while back I came across a caustic piece by Paul Virilio in Incorporations (Urzone, 1992) on Aliens, the 2nd movie.  While excitingly devoid of any one central argument, Virilio's piece deemed the movie a confused reiteration of the American war propaganda film.  He plugs it like this:
    "Exactly what type of alienation is James Cameron's Aliens all about? We are hell-bound once again, on a punitive expedition disguised as an interplanetary fiction: "colonial marines packing state-of-the-art firepower" sent to rescue "terraforming" colonists <I think Virilio was really trying to subscribe to the buried connotations of Westernizing arrogance in this last term> who have lost contact with their State-corporate sponsors.  The jungles of the Third world are transformed into a planet swarming with pestilential life, to be infiltrated by commandos on a search and destroy mission- or "bug hunt," to use their post-Vietnam Syndrome term that passes off xenophobia as grunt cynicism." (p. 446, Incorporations, 1992)
    But in this last Aliens movie I don't think First world nationalist insecurities compose the underlying paradigm.  While I'm sure some of that is still there, the more interesting thing about the movies is they weigh cultural/institutional law versus biological law in a futuristic setting.  They pit the agendas of institutional power structures, such as the company's capitalist behavior, versus the simple instincts of a sublime Other, whose stark image courts the viewer with its impressive physiology (an element which harks back to Giger's xeno-erotics). Ripley #8's equivocal genetic identity parallels her loner, independent attitude and places her as a kind of mediator in the movie.   I mean mediator in the way Deleuze does.  But she exudes not a static neutrality but a oscillating slurry of identifications with both alien and human.
    All this is definitely not meant to suggest Aliens:Ressurection is free of the cheesy lines, frustrating plots, and laughably absurd stunts so typical of Hollywood.