Since its theatrical release in 1979, the science fiction film Alien (directed by Ridley Scott) has instantly achieved "cult film" status. -movie” – the development which was followed by the film's inclusion in the list of the 100 greatest films ever made. Although film critics tend to offer differing explanations for the popularity of Scott's masterpiece, there is no doubt that Alien deserves to have a cult following. This appears to be the case for several reasons. First, the film's themes and motifs appeal to viewers on a subconscious level, which presupposes that Alien will continue to remain discursively relevant in the future. Second, there is a strongly defined humanist consonance to the film's plot, which means that Alien also has educational value. Third, the film in question promotes what can be considered a "post-feminist" vision of women's empowerment, consistent with the realities of life in the 21st century. As Kavanaugh points out: “Alien functions as a feminist statement on a symbolic level that avoids both the empiricist, trivialized condemnation of men and the puritanical condemnation of sexuality and sexual attraction” (95). In order to understand the range of possibilities for interpreting the film, this article will evaluate at length the validity of these three suggestions while asserting that, despite the film's affiliation with the science fiction genre, it resonates quite well with the ways of modernity. In the process, I will endeavor to highlight the often overlooked ideological messages conveyed by Alien. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay “Strange” Themes/Motifs As was implied in the introduction, the popularity of the film Alien reflects the fact that its themes and motifs come from the repressed workings of each person's unconscious psyche. To illustrate the validity of this suggestion, one can refer to the nightmarish appearance of the alien creature, which nevertheless possesses a clearly recognizable phallic quality. In this regard, Blackmore made the insightful observation: "Through grotesquely accentuated erectile images, the alien (in Scott's film) registers with psychosexual insistence as a menacing phallus: it unfurls with a seemingly inert into an imposing threat” (213). . This provides us with an important clue as to why Alien has become the classic of the science fiction genre: the subject of the film appeals to people's primal instincts. When exposed to it, viewers experience what Freud used to describe as the "feeling of the uncanny": "A strange experience occurs either when infantile complexes that have been repressed are repressed revived by an impression, i.e. when primitive beliefs which have been repressed are revived again by an impression. overcome seem once more confirmed” (Woodward 63). In this regard, we can refer to the strange motifs of pregnancy, birth, death and phallic penetration, featured prominently in Scott's film. These patterns trigger reactive responses in the limbic part of the brain, responsible for controlling the person's instinctive impulses. This is exactly why there can be virtually no neutral/indifferent reaction to Alien from the public. Regardless of one's personal opinion of the film, he or she will always find it utterly memorable. What also helps reinforce Alien's "strange" appeal is both the simplicity of the plot: "theAlien's narrative premise is eminently simple: the "monster attack" (Lev. 32) and the fact that the film exploits people's deep-seated fear of parasites. As the same author notes: “The alien creature in Alien does not just kill humans, it uses them as hosts for a reproductive process” (Lev. 32). Hence an interesting peculiarity about Alien - even viewers appalled by the film's graphically violent scenes, cannot help but feel a strong desire to continue watching the film. In turn, this has to do with the aforementioned functioning of the limbic part of the human brain – even though viewers are fully aware (consciously) that the alien monster seen in Scott's film is anything but real, their instincts say primitives. tell them that this monstrous creature is perfectly real and that it may be hiding in the room where the film is being viewed. After all, the aforementioned “primitive” part of the brain cannot differentiate between factual reality and cinematic reality. When a person watches Alien, their unconscious psyche transcribes the action on screen as one that conveys the message of “danger.” This helps explain why, even though many viewers find Alien rather disturbing, they remain strangely drawn to Scott's film: as people continue to follow the development of the plot, people learn more about the monster, which in turn is supposed to make it more likely that they can survive a possible encounter with it. Apparently, while making Alien, Scott never ceased to be acutely aware of the psychological mechanisms of how people perceive the surrounding reality. There is, however, even more to the film, in terms of its "uncanny" power: the fact that the film's main motifs correspond well to the survival anxieties of the spectators. After all, despite its gruesome appearance, the film's alien monster is there to illustrate what the notion of "evolutionary perfection" means: "Ash (the character) admires the Alien precisely as one would expect, because he does not is “not clouded by conscience, remorse or moral delusions” (225). Even though Ash is the film's antagonist, his admiration for the parasitic monster strikes a chord with viewers' latent wishes. After all, any organic life form has only one goal: to reproduce its genome. In this context, moral/ethical considerations have no place. Hence the horror of the film: as the plot unfolds, viewers realize that there is much more in common between the representatives of the Homo Sapiens species and the presented alien creature than they would be willing to admit. It is understood, of course, that this adds even more to the "strange" sound of the film - which is clearly a credit to the director. Societal Humanism It is common for “cult films” to have a certain absurd quality. For example, formally, the film Star Wars belongs to the genre of science fiction. However, it will make much more sense to examine the significance of this film's main themes (love, betrayal, courage, loyalty, spirituality) within the discursive context of a typical Norse saga. The film Alien constitutes another illustrative example in this regard. The rationale for this suggestion is as follows. One of the film's main features is that its settings evoke the notion of social withdrawal/alienation – all because most of Alien's action takes place aboard the spaceship Nostromo, whose confined innards resemble those of a submarine. As Lev rightly pointed out: “Alien…is about a spacerestricted. The main setting is the human spaceship, with a few minutes spent on an uninhabited planet and in the alien ship” (32). As a result, one would naturally be tempted to assume that the director's agenda was primarily aimed at ensuring the psychological plausibility of the relationships between the characters presented. Nevertheless, even though Scott managed to present the plot developments as entirely realistic, in the psychological sense of the term, his directorial aim appears to have been ideologically motivated. Given the film's subject matter, we can assume that in working on Alien, Scott aimed to do nothing less than expose the unsustainability of capitalism, as a form of socio-political government. The reason for this is quite obvious. The film's plot only makes sense within the discursive framework of the capitalist paradigm, which glorifies people's sense of irrational greed (while labeling it as "entrepreneurial work"), as something that allows business to continue. social, cultural and scientific. progress. However, as can be inferred from Alien, capitalism is doomed to prove counter-beneficial to the well-being of humanity in the long term – all because its proponents refer to capital (money) as such, which represents a completely objective value. Therefore, this creates the necessary objective conditions for capitalist society to appreciate the value of human life less and less. Hence the importance of the episode in which Lieutenant Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) reads special order 937, transmitted to the ship's computer by the Company: “Priority one. Ensure the return of the organism for analysis. All other considerations are secondary. Replaceable crew” (Alien 01.13.50). Apparently, the director wanted this episode to serve as a powerful indictment of capitalist “work.” In fact, he made a point of promoting the idea that the very functioning of capitalist society encourages the rich and powerful to become completely blinded by their greed for money – which has prevented leaders from the Company to realize that they could not benefit from it. a lot of bringing the alien monster to Earth by definition (the creature would destroy all other life on the planet). Therefore, despite being produced in 1979, Alien can best be characterized as thematically outdated. Of course, this is further proof that Scott's film deserves to be considered a cinematic masterpiece. prompting literary critics to refer to it as possibly the first post-feminist film (Nesbitt 21). Although there is no universally accepted definition of what "post-feminism" means, it is worth thinking about the concept as such, which opposes the classic feminist assumption that men and women women have rather incompatible life plans. . Due to the intricacies of the film's plot, "post-feminism" should also be defined as reflecting the idea that women are fully capable of affiliating themselves with traditionally "masculine" values ​​(when circumstances permit). demanding), without becoming less feminine. The mentioned character of Ellen Ripley illustrates the real-life connotations of this statement. After all, although she was a fragile woman, Ripley never ceased to emanate the authority of a born leader – in the film, she is shown capable of giving orders to the other members of the team by simply raising an eyebrow. Furthermore, almost every one of his decisions turned out to be perfectly logical and wise. And yet, after taking on the responsibilities of a leader, Ripley has not shown the slightest indication that she is getting anyemotional pleasure from realizing that she was able to tell others what to do. In turn, this is best explained in conjunction with the fact that being a woman, she did not aspire to domination as something with value of its own (unlike most men). This partly explains why some authors make a point of referring to the character in question in terms of a "feminist heroine": "The Alien/s films seem to present a feminist heroine who follows the path of a mythical journey feminine... Ripley becomes a warrior and embarks on a mythical journey. descent into female consciousness” (Mandziuk 156). However, there is nothing truly "mysterious" about Ripley's ability to exert authority over other characters in Alien - something that ties directly into the assertion made earlier that far from being a “feminist” (in the conventional sense of this word), she is, in fact, a “post-feminist”. . The reason why Ripley ended up being a very effective leader is that, unlike the rest of the crew (including the ship's captain), she was capable of engaging in systems-type reasoning (cause-effect ), which many people maintain. qualify as an “exclusively masculine virtue”. And, as can be deduced from the connotative context of the film, this ability of Ripley is explained by the fact that being a woman, she naturally tended to consider the ship's crew as a kind of spatially stable entity while being innately driven to “nurture” and “protect” it. Thus, Alien opposes both classical feminism, which claims that all men are inherently predisposed to oppress women, and male chauvinism, whose proponents continue to doubt women's ability to rely on their senses of reason to meet life's challenges. This once again underlines the overall progressive character of the film under discussion – due to the film's strongly defined "post-feminist" overtones, there can only be some doubt that Alien contains a number of analytical ideas on the formation of a person's gender identity. Final Thoughts What was said in the analytical section of the journal can be summarized as follows: The popularity of the 1979 film Alien stems from the director's decision to make a point of appealing to the consciously repressed instincts of the audience. More precisely, to people's deep fear of the unknown - especially if visual extrapolations of it evoke phallic/serpentine shapes. Because their fear has a strong unconscious dimension, the popularity and continued cult status of the film can be seen as further proof that, allegorically speaking, representatives of the species Homo Sapiens are, in fact, nothing more than “hairless apes” – something once again confirms the validity of the Darwinian theory of evolution. Although Alien exploits the viewer's gift with a number of different primal anxieties, the overall message of the film focuses on the director's intention to promote the idea that to be considered fully human, one must deploy a continuous effort to prevent these anxieties from taking control. of his conscious domain. In particular, Scott's film exposes the strongly antisocial essence of the private sector's obsession with trying to obtain more money and power, even if this can only be done at the cost of endangerment. of humanity from total extinction. this gives Alien the definite anti-capitalist sentiment. The director clearly wanted viewers to view the "corporate sharks" as no better than the alien monsters of, 1991.