Films/DVD Asylum

Movies from comedy to drama to your favorite Hollyweird Star.

Use this form to submit comments directly to the Asylum moderators for this forum. We're particularly interested in truly outstanding posts that might be added to our FAQs.
You may also use this form to provide feedback or to call attention to messages that may be in violation of our content rules.

You must login to use this feature.

Inmate Login

By default, logging in will set a session cookie that disappears when you close your browser. Clicking on the 'Remember my Moniker & Password' below will cause a permanent 'Login Cookie' to be set.

Moniker/Username: The Name that you picked or by default, your email. Forgot Moniker?	Examples "Rapper", "Bob W", "joe@aol.com".
Password:	Forgot Password?
	Remember my Moniker & Password ( What's this?)

If you don't have an Asylum Account, you can create one by clicking Here.

Our privacy policy can be reviewed by clicking Here.

Inmate Comments

From:
Your Email:
Subject:

Message Comments

Original Message

Gotta disagree with you there. Much thought went into Alien

Posted by Jazz Inmate on March 17, 2011 at 15:08:05:
Alien explores "the other" on multiple levels, including gender, race and species--not just extraterrestrial. It features some of the strongest symbolic imagery of any movie ever produced, derived more from reproductive and sex organ anatomic imagery than anything else. It also hammered the theme of a corporate entity, e.g., mother or nostradamus, that was programmed to force unfavorable interactions with "the other". This could be interpreted on multiple levels throughout the film. One of the images even involved the robot Ash cramming a pornographic magazine and ship manual down Ripley's throat. I'd think that kind of symbolism of authoritarian and paternal force would be right up your alley.
The alien that emerges from the egg is arachnoid. The alien that emerges from the man is phallic. The multiple mouths of the alien suggest labia. The large alien structure bearing thousands of eggs that the ship's party investigates looks from a distance like fallopian tubes. The imagery of Dallas encountering mucosal secretions in a tunnel just before the alien literally "embraces" him is highly suggestive. I could go on but others do it far better than I could.
Alien was the subject of a fascinating dissertation written by a PhD candidate of professor Hayden White who taught my History of Consciousness class at UCSC and Stanford. Anyway, there was a lot of thought put into Alien. The subsequent films in the franchise were crap.