Women in Alien 3 :: essays papers

Women in Alien 3 This morning I was struck by the realization that Ive beengoing to movies for fifty years now offset when I was eighteenmonths old, my mother would take me on a streetcar all(prenominal) Thursday togo shopping, have lunch, and go to a matinee and stage show at thePantages or the Orpheum in downtown Los Angeles. Clearly I likemovies and I normally find something enjoyable even ab come forward bad ones.I can just now remember a time when I have seriously consideredwalking out of a film. But I considered it yesterday afternoon asI was watching Aliens 3 I was thinking it was the mostunremittingly unpleasant film viewing experience I could remember. This reaction has to be seen in the context of my own tastes andbiases. Science allegory and horror films are my least favoritegenres. I dont enjoy being scared in the movies, as somepeople clearly do. Nonetheless, knowing that nearly every memberof the womens partnership in Tallahassee where I lived at the timewas w ildly enthusiastic some Sigourney Weavers Ripley, I didbring myself to see Aliens the second film in this series, and Ihave to admit, I too, was amused and pleased by the sight ofthis powerful female hero doing her Rambo good turn against whatfeminist theorist Lynda Zwinger called the uncanny alien bugmother. Since Ripleys ongoing battles against this monster and againstthe greedy machinations of the beau monde back home, which wants tocapture the monster and use it as a biological state of war weapon, havebecome sort of feminist cult films, I figured Id better be amongthe first to check out Aliens 3 and see what happened to Ripleyand Newt (the diminished girl she rescued from the monster at the endof Aliens). Well, theyve fallen on badly times. They crash landnear an island used as a prison for 25 of the hardest corecriminals on earth--murderers, rapists, etc.--all of whom havebecome members of a kind of Christian fundamentalist cult thathasnt done a thing to temper their ra mpant misogyny. Everyoneelse on the space capsule pitch the sleeping survivors of theNostromo back to earth has died except Ripley. Shes been asleepfor 50 years or so and has been shaken up in the crash, so sheslooking a modest the worse for wear with a black eye and deathlypallor. Furthermore in this latter day version of a medievaldungeon shes landed they dress her in convict gray and shave herhead which makes her fit right in with the inmates.