Alien, Prometheus, and the biggest fear of all
WARNING: SOME FOUL LANGUAGE. WE HAVE A COLD.
Dr. Shaw after her self-Caesarian section in Prometheus. It is a fact that women are physically strongest after giving birth. We’ve read that in some states, female athletes were impregnated prior to competitions so they would perform better. Though probably not 30 seconds after a Caesarian.
Reader cheezmiss raised some intriguing questions in our original post on Prometheus.
does the alien represent the masculine and the feminine psyche?
By way of an answer, recall that the biggest fear in the original Alien was not the fear of being killed by the creature. It was the fear of being impregnated by the Alien. Of being turned into a mother—a woman. The soldiers in Aliens preferred to blow themselves up than to be raped by the creature. Alien and Aliens are full of scary, slimy openings that looked like killer vagina.
Alien is a horror film about being a mother. You might say that the creature is one acid-bleeding motherfucker.
(Our Jedi master’s question after seeing Lord of the Rings: Why is Sauron a flaming vagina? Trivia: Ash the android in Alien was played by Sir Ian Holm, who also played Frodo Baggins in the BBC recording and Bilbo Baggins in the LOTR trilogy.)
was the movie about birth and death and birth again and death again…?
Maybe. We prefer to think of it as “Creationists, you’re screwed”. You find your Engineer, but who is the Engineer of your Engineer, and the Engineer of the Engineer of the…?
And they may not be as benign as you want to believe.
hasnt David been pissing on the entire mission the whole time?
Does an android/artificial human have free will? Interesting connection to Roy Batty in Blade Runner. We sort of understand David because Holloway was an asshole.
The creation mimics his creator. David is to the humans as the humans are to the engineers.
is the “operating” machine that took out that baby octopus alien sexist?
The medical pod was not programmed to deal with female issues. See “fear of women” above.
In all the discussion Prometheus has triggered we forgot to mention that the movie is GORGEOUS. The 3D is not a gimmick to charge moviegoers more, it is texture. Ridley Scott may not make the most intelligible movies around, but he knows beautiful.
P.S. One of Ridley Scott’s indelible contributions to the cinema: Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise.
FAQ for Prometheus at IMBD.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
June 9th, 2012 at 19:21
wow, thanks Jessica.
i was too young to watch or understand the first Alien when it came out & when I maybe did watch it either on TV or video later on – maybe because Michael Fassbender was too young to be in it – I didnt watch it in its entirety. I did watch Blade Runner when it was shown on channel 9 – maybe during the early 90s – because of Harrison Ford & I loved movies enough to remember not just him but also Ridley Scott’s name.
if Alien is about the fear of being pregnant/a mother, Prometheus is its perfect prequel.
It seems Prometheus was about a woman dealing with her “father issues” and her vision of THE “IDEAL” — whatever that ideal may be. As it turned out, `the ideal’ was all in her head – she was chasing her dream which in reality was otherwise. And her search took a lot of casualties, death and destruction all because she “chose to believe” something. Alas, she didnt even learn from this and stubbornly still chooses to believe she will be lead to her ideal via the talking robot head — blind hope much? thus Prometheus.
also, it seems the horror is about sex? with the way the alien enters the body and then the host screams, shakes until it explodes? i dont know.
“David Thomson in the intro to his first edition of “The Biographical Dictionary of Film:
What somebody notices, finds of interest, and chooses to write about can’t help but be determined by who they are and what they bring to the movie. It’s personal — but, as I always say, it has to be rooted in specific observations of the movie itself. Otherwise it’s like we’re all talking about our own dreams. Close observations of the movie give us common ground for discussion.”
(quote is from http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2012/05/continuing_to_argue_for_my_own.html – link was discovered thanks to Jessica Zafra’s post on the Dark Night)
June 10th, 2012 at 04:18
i read somewhere (in the internet) that the screenplay writer of the first alien movie wrote the script for a horror movie that failed. he then promised to write a script that would scare the s**t out of the movie watchers.
the idea behind the movie alien is male rape. it is not shown explicitly, but with the steel-like tongue of the alien that could jab its victims, the egg that is deposited in a human stomach (usually a man’s) that seems to impregnate the host, the v*g*na-like face-hugger and the different space crafts that are shaped like the male and female genitals, it is evident.
so people are scared, specially the men, sometimes not fully knowing why.
June 10th, 2012 at 08:35
Hey Jessica. Also did a bit of philosophical rumination over at my blog. Hope you take the time to read it (and hopefully share it).
http://wetalkaboutmovies.com/2012/06/08/ridley-scotts-theology-in-prometheus/
June 10th, 2012 at 09:07
It seemed to me that the two scientists had a romantic view of creation and their experience had them face that not all life is good and beautiful as they believed. The movie showed me that this is life–deal with it. You will die. You will become part of the cycle. It’s not good or bad. It is what it is. You are part of creation whether you become food or a host for something beautiful or horrific. Human beings fear the organic cycle. We fear the vagina, nature and we fear being part of this organic cycle. It will eat us up. There is no suffering if we accept our part in it, like the captain did. And if we do survive like Dr. Shaw, that’s the human ego at work–both its greatness and folly. It serves us well if we recognize the ego as part of nature, not something that makes us special and separate from all creation–whether by a God or not.
June 10th, 2012 at 09:33
Oh one more thing. (This discussion got me going. :) ) David occurred to me like a child–full of wonder, no fear. Wala pang ego that clings on to beliefs of what is good and bad. He was not pissing on everyone in the mission. He just had this sense of “what would happen if I do this?”, without any awareness of what disastrous results might occur. Like a child, he had not yet developed a sense of caution, fear or guilt. He was still developing an ego, a sense identity as shown by his attempts to emulate Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. Identity is passed on even to androids. Dr. Shaw passes on a sense of belief when David keeps her cross. That is symbolic of the beliefs we cling to. It becomes part of identity.
June 10th, 2012 at 23:27
@jessicazafra
woah!!! Ridley Scott directed Thelma and Louise!!! how could i have not known that? I love that movie! and remember more that film’s writer Callie Khouri (she wrote that script while she was working as a secretary) and ye Brad Pitt too.
@ricky “He was still developing an ego, a sense identity as shown by his attempts to emulate Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. Identity is passed on even to androids. Dr. Shaw passes on a sense of belief when David keeps her cross. That is symbolic of the beliefs we cling to. It becomes part of identity.”
wow, yes, this makes a lot of sense now.
@ricky “David occurred to me like a child”
thats exactly how Damon Lindelof (one of the writers of Prometheus) saw David!
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/06/03/the-rest-of-our-prometheus-conversation-with-damon-lindelof/
“I looked at David in a couple different ways.
The first is through the prism of him being like a five year old. I have a five year old son. One of the things my son loves to do, is if he loves a movie, is just watch that one movie over and over and over again. I will say, “Hey honey, I know you love Toy Story but there are two more Toy Story films and there is Finding Nemo” and he’ll say “No, I like this!”
We have always seen robots that have read every book and seen every movie. But if David just likes Lawrence of Arabia, what if he just watches Lawrence of Arabia over and over and over again? Then, in the same way I put a case on my Iphone, I want to mod my iPhone so it looks different to your iPhone, if there are 10,000 Michael Fassbenders out there, wouldn’t they want their own, legitimate personality? So this one wants to dye his hair blonde so that he looks like Lawrence. And what does like mean to a robot?”
have added more questions about the film on my blog http://www.cheezmiss.com/2012/06/prometheus-questions-and-spoilers.html
June 11th, 2012 at 08:13
A strange thing, though, is why they chose to show the humans the location of their biological weapons planet/moon instead of their home planet. You’d think if it really was an invitation, they’d invite them to a location that’s more welcoming.
June 11th, 2012 at 11:41
Save them the trouble of going back to earth. There are many plot holes that we choose not to fall into.
June 12th, 2012 at 01:18
I am afraid of the vagina possibly also because I am a gay man. So afraid that I had to be delivered via caesarian. Ooh, perhaps I have alien DNA in me.
Curiosity is the human condition, and apparently David was built more human than anyone thought.
June 12th, 2012 at 16:39
Noelz: never thought of that but you are right. Maybe it was an invitation to see how to properly wage war? Kidding.
—
Regarding the medical chamber that may have seen sexist, it did say it was not calibrated for female patients. My assumption was that it could be calibrated for females (wasn’t it supposed to be for Vickers?) and it just hadn’t been calibrated, or else of the twelve such pods (Shaw did mention there were only twelve in existence), half were for men and half were for women?
So for that one, I didn’t really see the sexism, just a way to make give the scene suspense, tension, and general ickiness and horror.
June 12th, 2012 at 22:37
I thought it was a given that the pod was actually for Weyland’s use.
June 12th, 2012 at 23:01
The location of their “WMDs”–that’s if they really were wmds–seemed like temples to me. I am thinking they probably were meant to be like places of worship to the humanoids’ own gods (xenomorphs?). Thus the murals? Then again, I find myself running into ideas that probably will cancel this out later.
June 13th, 2012 at 00:36
@Ejia
“Curiosity is the human condition, and apparently David was built more human than anyone thought.”
I seriously think that my gadgets have feelings. Whenever I sell them or give them away, that’s when they start to breaking down. :)
June 18th, 2012 at 00:59
I watched the movie again, and I caught something.
The Engineers died, based on the carbon reader, about “2000 years ago, give or take.” They were thus preparing to annihilate the earth 2000 years ago with the WMDs they were manufacturing before things went awry for them.
Dr. Shaw kept on asking what humanity did for the Engineers to want to destroy us.
The film, through Dr. Shaw, is laden with themes around faith and religion.
Now… what could have happened approximately 2000 years ago that could have triggered this planned genocide?
Something that made me think.
June 18th, 2012 at 13:55
And with that Christian interpretation we are officially tired of discussing Prometheus.
They could’ve been distressed at the succession of Caligula or the rise of the Han Dynasty.
June 19th, 2012 at 09:22
Hmmm haha well they did keep hitting us on the head with Dr. Shaw’s attachment to her cross…