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In Reply to: RE: What? Pinnacle of horror sci-fi, perhaps. 2001 and Solaris are the pinnacle of the genre. Alien is posted by tinear on March 17, 2011 at 13:31:41
Alien explores "the other" on multiple levels--gender, race, species and of course 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". 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 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.
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We must be the change we wish to see in the world. -Gandhi
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