The Trashing Of A Great Action Heroine, Part One

Anyone remember Ripley from the Alien Movies?   Pushed her down good, didn’t they?

No, not the aliens, although they were part of it.  I mean the guys who make movies. 

I don’t know of any other female character in cinema, horror or not, who was so heroic at the apex of her story arc and so pushed under at the end of it.  It’s the perfect example of what most audiences now just accept as a convention:  the girl is gonna be alright until she takes her clothes off.  (To most guys, she’s alright as soon as she starts taking them off).

Alien, starring Sigourney Weaver as Lt. Ripley, is enjoying a cable renaissance  in the wake of Prometheus (an Alien prequel that did modest box office and got a sequel, natch). 

In that first film, Weaver’s Lt. Ripley doesn’t make a strong impression at the outset; she seems soft and pliable, a space teddy without the lingerie, and, despite a moment of grit when she refuses to let a crew member onboard (he’s carrying an Alien in utero, so she was right about that), the commander of their ship the Nostromo overrides her.  

She’s there to be dominated (she did undress at the end). 

She turns out to be not only the strongest person on board, but also the sappiest.  We cheer when she outsmarts and outruns the beast; we hoot when, with only minutes to go before the ship vaporizes, she goes back into the bad place to retrieve her cat. 

So we’re feeling ambivalent about her when she shoves off, cat intact, and finds the alien hiding in her escape pod.  She’s already near-naked and weaponless; despite that, she finishes the thing off for good.  

Without realizing it, director Ridley Scott and Weaver as Ripley had established a horror film convention—the female (always a brunette) who is the sole survivor of the monstrous goings-on. 

So when James Cameron (the Avatar of action innovation) filmed Aliens, with dozens of the wriggling horrors going after a group of testosterone-laden marines, he upped Ripley’s machismo factor a hundred-fold.   The Marines perish; she doesn’t, a regular Rambolina. 

And she’s allowed the same sappiness near the end, which doesn’t seem sappy at all this time—she’s rescuing a darling little girl, sole survivor of a doomed colony, from the Mother Alien.  No hooting there—we’re cheering all the way.

There’s even a Battle of the Big Mamas at the film’s end, the most perfect clash of Lovecraftian organic horror with sleek American techno-ingenuity I’ve ever seen.   When Ripley tells the arch-mother/monster “Get away from her, you bitch!” we’ve in hero heaven.   

She defines kick-ass.   

Ripley as a character was at a cinematic and heroic peak seldom seen in cinema. 

That’s when she fell and fell big.  

More in part two, including the reason I'm writing about a franchise that began thirty-three years ago.