Women in Alien 3

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Women in Alien 3

This morning I was struck by the realization that I've beengoing to movies for fifty years now; starting when I was eighteenmonths old, my mother would take me on a streetcar every 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 usually find something enjoyable even about bad ones.I can hardly 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 fiction and horror films are my least favoritegenres. I don't enjoy being frightened in the movies, as somepeople clearly do. Nonetheless, knowing that nearly every memberof the women's community in Tallahassee where I lived at the timewas wildly enthusiastic about Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, I didbring myself to see "Aliens" the second film in this series, and Ihave to admit, I too, was entertained and pleased by the sight ofthis powerful female hero doing her Rambo number against whatfeminist theorist Lynda Zwinger called "the uncanny alien bugmother." Since Ripley's ongoing battles against this monster and againstthe greedy machinations of "the Company" back home, which wants tocapture the monster and use it as a biological warfare weapon, havebecome sort of feminist cult films, I figured I'd better be amongthe first to check out "Aliens 3" and see what happened to Ripleyand Newt (the little girl she rescued from the monster at the endof "Aliens"). Well, they've fallen on hard 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 thathasn't done a thing to temper their rampant misogyny.

Everyoneelse on the space capsule bringing the sleeping survivors of theNostromo back to earth has died except Ripley. She's been asleepfor 50 years or so and has been shaken up in the crash, so she'slooking a little the worse for wear with a black eye and deathlypallor. Furthermore in this latter day version of a medievaldungeon she's landed they dress her in convict gray and shave herhead which makes her fit right in with the inmates.

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