Related Papers
PAAKAT: Revista de Tecnología y Sociedad
Alien as arena of cultural dispute: Technology, Capitalism and Otherness
2022 •
PAAKAT Revista de Tecnología y Sociedad
This paper analyzes different interpretations of the Alien franchise and how they divide the world regarding issues such as economic exploitation, technology and Otherness are analyzed. Cultural sociology allows us to understand how the interpretations are articulated through binary sets that see the franchise at the same time as a critique and an apology for: a) colonial and technological capitalist rationalism, b) the exclusion of the Other and the monstrous; and c) feminism, sexual and gender identity. The interpretations are analyzed as condensations of hopes and fears regarding contemporary social processes. The dispute over control of the meaning of Alien allows us to understand how fears and hopes are articulated about economic and technological rationality and gender relations.
Eugen Pfister
Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology
Alien and Storytelling in the Anthropocene: Evolutionism, Creationism and Pseudoarchaeology in Science Fiction
2021 •
Sonja Zakula
This paper analyses the change in the metanarrative of the Alien franchise initiated by the movie Alien (1979), directed by Ridley Scott, and continued with a series of three sequels. The franchise was revived in 2012 with the prequel Prometheus. The story of the first four movies is set at the end of the anthropocene, and it deals with the horror of alien life forms, offering an evolutionist approach to the development of the human species. However, the revival of the franchise with the movie Prometheus changed the metanarrative from evolutionism to a creationist and pseudo-archaeological metanarrative with Biblical motifs. This paper points to the dangers of popularizing creationist and pseudo-archaeological narratives in science fiction. Responsibility for life on Earth and in outer space, lacking evidence to the contrary, remains in the hands of humans collectively and not alien Others.
Matić, Uroš and Žakula, Sonja. 2021. Alien and Storytelling in the Anthropocene: Evolutionism, Creationism and Pseudoarchaeology in Science Fiction. Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology
Uroš Matić, Sonja Zakula
This paper analyses the change in the metanarrative of the Alien franchise initiated by the movie Alien (1979), directed by Ridley Scott, and continued with a series of three sequels. The franchise was revived in 2012 with the prequel Prometheus. The story of the first four movies is set at the end of the anthropocene, and it deals with the horror of alien life forms, offering an evolutionist approach to the development of the human species. However, the revival of the franchise with the movie Prometheus changed the metanarrative from evolutionism to a creationist and pseudo-archaeological metanarrative with Biblical motifs. This paper points to the dangers of popularizing creationist and pseudo-archaeological narratives in science fiction. Responsibility for life on Earth and in outer space, lacking evidence to the contrary, remains in the hands of humans collectively and not alien Others.
Monstrosities made in the interface: the ideological ramifications of 'playing' with our demons
2020 •
Jesse Warren
Monsters, Marines, and Feminism in the 1980s: A Look at Ellen Ripley from Aliens
2019 •
Summer Reardon
Caaaaaaan Youuuuuu Dig Iiiiiit: The Black Gang Leader in Dystopian Film
Tim Jones
Sleeping Beauties and Xenomorphs: Monstrous Motherhood in "Aliens" and Two Sleeping Beauty Tales
Sarah Noel
The motif of the competition between the monstrous mother and the young maiden appear both in early European variants of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ fairy tale as well as in the late 20th-century science fiction movies Alien and Aliens. However, both the fairy tale and the science fiction movies complicate the binary between the good and bad women, and by deconstructing this binary we can see how the evil mothers and the alien queens can be sympathetic while Ripley and Sleeping Beauty also have their monstrous sides.
Caietele Echinox
Replicant Theologies of the Early Robocene or The Covenant of Procreating Replicants, Cybernetic Fertility and Divine Androids
2018 •
Doru Pop
Callaloo
"Space, That Bottomless Pit: Planetary Exile and Metaphors of Belonging in American Afrofuturist Cinema."
Ramzi Fawaz
In his utopian 1974 film, Space is the Place, the avant-garde musician Sun Ra would claim to a group of disaffected African American youth, “Everything you desire upon this planet and never have received will be yours in outerspace.” Ra’s vision of racial uplift based on a fantasy of the black race’s willful relocation to another planet explicitly repurposed the meanings attached to outerspace as a site of white colonial expansion, linking the physical disorientations of space to a figurative disorientation of traditional social hierarchies. This article tracks the evolution of the trope of “planetary exile” in a series of Afrofuturist and science fiction films in the late 20th century to argue that the depiction of outerspace as a material and discursive haven for black communities simultaneously worked to articulate the experience of blackness to other previously ignored marginalized identities, namely the categories of “woman” and “queer.” Through close readings of Sun Ra’s Space is the Place, John Sayle’s The Brother from Another Planet (1984), and David Fincher’s Alien3 (1992), I show how Afrofuturist film conceptually attached the social experience of “blackness” to the category of “queerness,” or non-normative gender or sexual identity, in order to argue the real-world necessity of acknowledging the shared social interests of African Americans, women, and the LGBT community in the post-Civil Rights era. In so doing, Afrofuturist films increasingly abandoned a narrow ideology of racial uplift that accompanied Civil Rights rhetoric, celebrating instead a collective rejection of “upward mobility” and a conceptual embrace of outerspace as a directionless void where previously unimaginable alliances across difference could be forged.
