Paranormal Pajama Party
Isn't it weird how often the horrors in our favourite scary stories tend to look a lot like, uh… ladies? Join me as I dig up the social and cultural contexts behind classic ghost stories and legends to challenge the often one-dimensional portrayal of women in horror.
Paranormal Pajama Party
“Aliens”: Game Over, Men – Game Over
In this thrilling conclusion to our two-part series on the “Alien” franchise, Paranormal Pajama Party dissects the 1986 classic sequel, "Aliens."
We’re talking about Ellen Ripley’s groundbreaking portrayal of a female action hero and feminist icon, considering the ethics of care in Ripley's decision-making, and contrasting it with traditional male action heroes like Arnold.
But Ripley’s not alone in the “Alien” universe, which is the best part. We’ll examine the other diverse female characters, including tough-as-nails Private Vasquez and little Newt, discussing how they challenge gender norms in different ways.
Finally, we’ll come face-to-face with the Xenomorph Queen, the ultimate embodiment of the monstrous-feminine, exploring how she represents primal female power and fertility, and comparing her to Ripley – another mother protecting her young.
Key moments
- 0:00 – Content warning
- 1:10 – An overly detailed synopsis of James Cameron's "Aliens"
- 23:06 – Ellen Ripley, feminist icon
- 34:39 – Corporal Hicks, a feminist ally
- 35:44 – PFC Vasquez shows us another kind of feminism
- 39:40 – Why is Newt a girl?
- 42:01 – All hail the Queen Xenomorph
- 47:09 – Monsters, mothers, and monster-mothers
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View all my sources for each episode and read the episode transcipt here.
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Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.
When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.
This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as descriptions of violence and gore, guns and other weapons, attempted murder, and a whole heap of sexism.
This is the last episode of season 2 of Paranormal Pajama Party. I’ll be back soon, but if you miss me too much between seasons, you can subscribe to the podcast I make for work – Monash University’s What Happens Next?. I produce and write all the episodes, although for some reason they always come out in an Australian accent. While they never let me talk about horror movies, they do let me talk about feminism, and last season we did a two-part series on influencer culture and its reliance on hidden gendered labour that I think is worth checking out. You can find What Happens Next on any podcast app.
The following is a synopsis of the movie Aliens, which came out in 1986 and was directed by James Cameron. Spoilers ahead.
It’s 2179, and a salvage crew operating in deep space has stumbled upon an abandoned shuttle. Inside, they’re dismayed to find a cryosleep pod containing two still-living occupants – Ellen Ripley and her loyal orange companion, Jonesy the tabby cat.
Ripley awakes, confused, in a medical facility, where her first visitor is Carter Burke, a young executive working for the Weyland-Yutani corporation, her employer from her time aboard the Nostromo. Burke clumsily informs her that she’s been in hypersleep for 57 years. Unsurprisingly, her experience aboard the Nostromo has left her tormented by PTSD, repeatedly dreaming that an alien is bursting from her chest.
She’s ordered to debrief a boardroom of corporate bigwigs, including Burke, who clearly did not see the first Alien movie, because they don’t believe anything she’s telling them about what happened to her crew. One of the chief reasons for their scepticism is that the planet she’s talking about – LV-426 – has been colonised by around 70 human families for the last 20 years, and not one of them has ever mentioned an invasive, violent lifeform.
Ripley angrily lashes out, and the execs respond by closing her case and revoking her flying licence. But a short time later, Burke shows up at her door, accompanied by Colonial Marine Lieutenant Gorman, to tell her that the company has lost contact with the colonists on LV-426. He asks her to return to the planet to help him investigate, protected by the Lieutenant’s trained Marines. She first refuses, but after another nightmare about chestbursters, agrees to go as long as the mission is to exterminate the aliens for good. She forbids Jonesy from joining and he makes his graceful exit from cinematic history.
Ripley, Burke, and the outfit of Colonial Marines wake from stasis aboard a ship bound for the planet. The Marines are rowdy, macho, and mostly male, although the three female Marines are just as full of bravado, especially smart-gunner Private Janette Vasquez. Also among the group is mouthy Private Hudson, the quieter Corporal Hicks, and Bishop, who Ripley is horrified to learn is an android (although he prefers to be called a synthetic human). Still traumatised and angry by the betrayal of Ash, the android aboard the Nostromo who was ready to sacrifice her crew to preserve the alien, Ripley furiously tells Bishop to stay away from her.
She’s not particularly impressed by the Marines after she overhears them making sexist jokes, and they’re not particularly impressed by her as a civilian, so they don’t listen to her warning about the danger ahead. They also not impressed by Lieutenant Gorman, who’s soon revealed to be a very green and ineffectual leader. After he orders them to be ready to ship out to the planet’s surface by the next morning, Ripley earns Hicks’ respect by asking to help and dextrously loading cargo by operating a robotic exosuit. I’m with Hicks – it’s pretty hot.
When the crew arrives on the surface of LV-426, the colony is a ghost town. There’s evidence of an alien attack and a failed last stand, but no survivors to be seen. The marines, with Vasquez at the front, clear the building to Gorman’s standards, which are notably not Ripley’s standards, but he ignores her. The two of them, along with Bishop and Burke, leave the ship to join the Marines in exploring the building more thoroughly.
In a lab, they find several facehuggers floating in specimen jars, one of which lurches at Burke’s face. Bishop confirms that two are still alive, and takes one to examine, which Ripley finds distasteful. That’s exactly what the evil android at her last job did.
Thanks to the facehuggers and the bad vibes, the Marines are on edge, and when they sense movement in a hallway, one of them shoots. Luckily, Hicks blocks his shot because it’s not an alien, it’s a seven-year-old girl – the colony’s sole survivor. Feral with fear, she runs from the Marines. Ripley dives after her and discovers that the girl has been hiding in a small, defensible space since the colony was massacred.
Gorman tries to force the little girl to tell him what happened to the colony, but she stays silent. Ripley takes over, bringing the girl hot chocolate, cleaning her up a little, and speaking to her gently. The girl finally tells Ripley she goes by the name Newt and that her family has been killed. She refuses to believe that the Marines can keep her safe.
Meanwhile, the Marines have picked up signals from microchips implanted in each colonist, which begs some follow-up questions that the movie doesn’t answer. The signals are coming from just beneath the colony’s fusion-powered atmosphere processing station, so Gorman sends the Marines to find them while he and the civilians, along with Newt and Bishop, stay behind in the tank they brought to the planet with them to watch the action from the soldiers’ helmet camera feed.
As the team approaches the source, the hallways begin to look more organic and… buggy. Based on their location, Ripley realises that their bullets could damage the station’s fusion system, killing them all instantly. She tries to tell Gorman, but he doesn’t listen until Burke confirms that she’s right. When he finally orders the Marines to give up their ammunition, Vasquez, distrustful of his inexperience, secretly passes backup ammo to her fellow gunner.
The Marines find the colonists – but they’ve been cocooned into the walls, and almost all of them are dead. Gaping chest wounds and the desiccated facehuggers at their feet reveal that they were used to incubate new aliens, and the team has walked straight into an entire hive. When Ripley begs Gorman to get his people out, he panics and repeatedly yells at her to shut up.
The Marines kill a chestburster that emerges from the body of the only still-living colonist with flamethrowers, and the activity rouses the aliens, who close in on the humans from all sides. The team is picked off one by one, and Vasquez and her partner begin shooting. Gorman freezes completely and Ripley takes charge, buckling Newt in and then driving the tank directly into the centre of the hive to rescue the surviving Marines. Only Hicks, Vasquez and Hudson make it out alive. Gorman hits his head and is knocked out, which is a relief for everyone.
Finally understanding the extent of the threat and traumatised by what just happened, the survivors try to decide what happens next. Ripley votes to return to the mothership and nuke the entire area from orbit, but Burke, the company man, won’t allow it – the colony is worth a lot of money to the corporation. Ripley points out that this is a military operation so Hicks is actually the only one who can make the call. He agrees with her – they have to nuke it from orbit. They call the dropship to come pick them up, nuke the whole thing from orbit according to plan, and the movie ends with only a few deaths, which is nice.
No, I’m just kidding. An alien sneaks onto the dropship and kills the pilot just as the ship has appeared over the horizon. It crashes to the surface, nearly killing the little group of survivors and damaging the station’s fusion system after all.
The Marines, now very freaked out, salvage the weapons and supplies they can from the dropship’s wreckage and take stock back in the shelter of the colony. The news is bad – Hicks admits that no one will come looking for them for at least 17 days, and Hudson, hysterical, points out that in their current state, they won’t last 17 hours. Ripley points out that Newt survived longer than that on her own, and once again steps up to make a plan.
Following her orders, the group devises a way to hunker down. Bishop tries to update her about the biology of the alien organism, but she’s concerned about survival and doesn’t much care, beyond wondering aloud who it is that’s laying all the eggs.
[Dramatic musical sting]
Steph: Gorman, now awake, tries to apologise to Ripley, but she also doesn’t have time for him and moves on. Impressed again by her competence, Hicks gives her a wrist tracker so he can find her anywhere in the colony.
Ripley puts Newt to bed in the lab, and when the girl gets nervous about her leaving while she sleeps, she gives her the tracker, promising to always keep her safe.
Once Newt is asleep, Ripley confronts Burke. She realised that after her deposition, he sent the colonists to survey the crashed ship, resulting in an alien attack that wiped out almost 200 people. He tries to get her on his side by telling her that they will both be well-rewarded by the company if they return with an alien specimen. Outraged, Ripley assures him that she will ensure justice is done when they’re back home.
Before she can tell everyone what a snake Burke is, Bishop alerts them that they have even less time than they thought – the damaged fusion system will explode in just a few hours. Aanother dropship aboard the mothership can be operated remotely, but the only way to summon it is for someone to go outside and use the transmitter on the other side of the colony. Bishop volunteers, and although Ripley is still sceptical of his trustworthiness, it’s their only option, so she agrees to the plan.
Exhausted, she returns to the lab, where she finds Newt asleep under the bed and crawls down with her to sleep with the little girl safe in her arms. Soon, however, something wakes her. Someone has sabotaged the specimen jars and she realises that the living facehuggers are now loose in the room with them. Her gun is not where she left it, and when she wakes Newt to escape, they find that the door to the soundproof lab is locked.
They attempt to get the Marines’ attention through the security camera, but Burke turns the screen off before anyone can see. Unable to break the lab’s windows, Ripley uses her lighter to set off the lab’s smoke alarm. This alerts the Marines, who shoot through the glass and kill both facehuggers in time.
Ripley reveals that Burke was the saboteur and explains that he planned to let the facehuggers impregnate Ripley and Newt and smuggle the alien specimens back to Earth inside their bodies, kept in stasis in hypersleep. He would have killed the surviving Marines to keep them from talking by interfering with their cryosleep pods and jettisoning their bodies into space.
As Ripley is trying to convince Vasquez not to kill Burke on the spot so he can face justice, the power goes out and their motion detectors pick up a group of alien hunters moving towards them. They quickly weld the doors closed and prepare for the attack, but the detectors are somehow showing that the aliens are already in the room – and gaining on them. Ripley looks up and realises they’re in the ceiling. The Marines start shooting and in the confusion, Burke escapes through the only door, locking everyone else inside.
For all his whining, Hudson goes down heroically and takes a few aliens out with him, while Ripley scrambles to open the locked door behind Burke. The corporate creep retreats deeper into the station, locking himself off only to discover that he has shut himself in with a hissing alien. Bye, Burke.
When the rest of the survivors finally open the door, Newt guides them into a vent and leads the way to the platform where the second dropship will land. Bishop has successfully made it to the other side of the complex and reports via radio that the ship is only a few minutes away.
Inside the vents, the aliens are hot on their heels. Vasquez brings up the rear, defensively shooting at their pursuers, but a dying alien’s acid blood hits her leg and immobilises her. Realising she’s down, Gorman crawls back to fend off the oncoming aliens by her side. When he runs out of ammo, he pulls out a grenade. Vasquez, understanding that he means to blow them both up and take the aliens out, too, finally respects him. They trigger the grenade together.
Hicks, Ripley, and Newt, the last survivors, are almost to the ship platform when Newt slips and falls out of Ripley’s grasp and down a deep shaft. They rush after her and find that she’s landed in a small room that’s flooded waist-deep in water, trapped below the grated metal floor. Hicks hurries to cut through the floor to get to her, aware the whole time that their motion detectors are picking up more aliens approaching, but then an alien rises out of the water behind Newt and carries her away, screaming.
Hicks manages to get the devastated Ripley into the elevator going up to the ship’s platform just as an alien rushes them. He shoots it, but its acid blood splashes his body armour and eats its way through to his skin before they can remove his chest plate. Bishop and the second dropship are on the platform, and Ripley half drags the injured Hicks onboard before duct-taping a gun and a flamethrower together and heading back into the colony to find Newt. The entire area is going to explode in less than half an hour.
Ripley follows the signal from Newt’s tracker deep below the landing platform and into the belly of the hive. She finds the tracker on the floor, but no Newt. Then she hears screams nearby. Lucky for the cocooned Newt, her assigned facehugger is taking its sweet time to hatch. Ripley runs to her and kills the facehugger in the nick of time.
She pulls Newt from the cocoon, but their return route is blocked by an alien. They turn down a different tunnel in the hive only to find themselves in an enormous room full of alien eggs. But someone else is there, too, busily making more eggs to grow her own personal nightmare army – the Xenomorph Queen.
While Ripley and the Queen assess each other in a tense stand-off, more aliens emerge from other tunnels. Realising that an attack on Ripley will kill some of her offspring, the Queen somehow calls off the other aliens. Ripley and Newt back away slowly. They’re just about safe when one of the eggs begins to hatch and a facehugger flies towards Ripley. She kills it, the Queen begins to shriek, and Ripley swings her flamethrower across the entire room, frying every egg she can, then throwing her remaining ammunition into the fire to create an explosion.
Newt in her arms, Ripley races back along the corridors of the hive while the station’s countdown timer warns that total destruction is just four minutes away. The universe’s slowest elevator still hasn’t arrived when Ripley turns to see that the vengeful Queen has followed them. With no time to spare, the elevator doors open and she and Newt ride painfully slowly up to the platform, precious seconds ticking away.
But when they get there, the platform is empty. Bishop has betrayed Ripley the way she knew he would, flying to safety without them. The station collapses in fire around them, and she sees that the elevator is making its way back up the shaft towards them – this time with the Queen on board. Ripley hugs Newt close and tells her to close her eyes. The door slides open and the Queen’s crowned head and skeletal limbs slowly emerge from the blackness within.
And that’s when Bishop finally arrives, having had to take off from the unstable platform to attempt to rescue Ripley and Newt without landing. Ripley shoves Newt onboard and scrambles up behind her. Flying as fast as they can, they escape the nuclear destruction of the colony with seconds to spare.
Back in the docking bay of the mother ship, Bishop apologises for his delay. Ripley reassures him that he did well and he smiles. And then a deadly spiked tale impales him through the chest. The Xenomorph Queen unfolds her spindly body from the exterior of the dropship and lifts Bishop into the air like a doll, tearing him in two.
Having eliminated one threat, she turns her attention to Newt, who hasn’t left Ripley’s side. Ripley desperately waves her arms and yells to get the Queen’s attention and give Newt a chance to scurry away into a small space beneath the grated floor. Ripley does her best to lure the monster away, then disappears into an adjoining room and slams the door shut behind her. The Queen keeps hunting Newt, tearing the floor’s grates away with her huge claws and screaming at her.
But then the doors reopen, and there’s Ripley, wearing the enormous yellow exosuit loading machine. She looks straight at the Queen and she says – say it with me, gang – “Get away from her, you bitch.” And then she comes for the alien Queen like the avenging mother she is.
Thanks to the loader, the two foes are more evenly matched. Eventually, Ripley manages to wrestle the Queen into the airlock, although the Queen pulls her down with her, still in the suit.
Ripley manages to climb out of the suit and open the door while clinging to a ladder, hoping to use the vacuum of space to suck the Xenomorph out of the ship the same way she did the first time. But space doesn’t discriminate, so everything in the bay is pulled towards the open door, including Newt. Just before she slips away to certain death, Bishop’s legless torso manages to grab onto her and hold her tight.
Finally, physics and Ripley’s impossibly strong shoulder muscles prove too much for the Queen and she’s pulled, screaming in rage, out the external door and to her doom.
Safe at last –for real this time – Newt cries, “Mommy!” and runs to Ripley, who holds her close.
In the final scene, Ripley ensures that Bishop, who has earned her trust and then some, is shut down and secured, and that Hicks, who listened to her when no one else would, is comfortably in stasis. Then she tucks Newt into her own cryopod.
“Can I dream?” asks Newt.
“Yes, honey, I think we both can,” says Ripley.
[MUSIC]
Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
Welcome to the last Paranormal Pajama Party of season two of the podcast, and a special welcome in particular to my returning guest, the Xenomorph Queen.
[Hissing and growling]
Steph: I know, I couldn’t believe you found a sitter for the night! Lucky you!
In the last episode, the Queen was joining us remotely because I was all, like, concerned for the future of humanity and its vulnerability in the face of a merciless killing machine. But since then, I’ve met a guy from this – well, I guess he works for the company, but he’s really an ok guy – and had a long talk with an AI system about it, and… look, I’ve made the decision to open the door and let her into the party. Think of how much we can learn! What could possibly go wrong?
I promised that this week’s episode would focus on the Queen here as the big bad of Aliens, the second movie in the Alien franchise, released in 1986. And I solemnly swear to keep that promise – cross my heart and hope to die – but one of the best parts about Aliens is that there are multiple notable female characters driving the storyline in this movie. That almost never happens outside of like… family dramas about sisters or The Golden Girls. It’s especially rare in action movies unless maybe we count the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park who are genetically designed to be all female until life, uh, finds a way.
So to really be able to talk about the Xenomorph Queen in all her majesty, first I’m gonna need to talk about some other ladies. And obviously, I’m going to start with the greatest female action hero of all time, and not just because she’s another example of a powerful woman with a cat – Ellen Ripley.
I mentioned this quickly in the last episode, but I cannot emphasise what an incredible bait and switch the first Alien movie pulls off in setting up our expectations that Dallas, the captain of the Nostromo, is going to be the guy to save us all from the monsters. He’s giving the orders to land, leading the exploratory party off the ship, and breaking rules to keep his crew members safe. Classic good-guy stuff. Plus, he has a beard. Now that’s facial hair you can trust. Ripley doesn’t really do anything that sets her apart from the other members of the crew until she refuses to let the alien-infected officer Kane back onto the ship, and even then, it’s not like anyone listens to her.
Remember when Ned Stark got executed at the end of the first season of Game of Thrones and we were all like, “...But? He’s the main guy? He’s the…?” and it kind of broke our collective brain? That’s basically what happened when Dallas got alien’d by the alien in Alien. (I tried to fit one more alien in that sentence but it stopped making sense.) Only when Ripley stepped up to lead and became the ultimate survivor, it was even crazier in 1979 than it seems now. Let me set the scene.
As we talked about a bit in our series on The Fall of the House of Usher, feminism’s second wave kicked off in the early 1960s, led in part by the publication of Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, which challenged the widespread post-war cultural norms that encouraged women to be housewives and mothers to little nuclear families.
The Feminine Mystique was released in 1963, and Alien came out 16 years later. To put that into perspective, 16 years ago, it was 2008. It’s the first Obama campaign, we’re all watching Tina Fey dress up as Sarah Palin on SNL, Breaking Bad premieres on TV. You know, 2008. It just happened.
So imagine that it’s 2008, which you remember because it just happened, but your life looks like the world of Mad Men (which came out in 2007, by the way, if you want to keep feeling old). Most of the women you know are housewives, or, if they work out of the house, teachers, secretaries or nurses, and most of those working women are really only waiting until they have families of their own to settle down with. Most of the Western world is like this! This is normal, this is what women do.
And then a book comes out and strikes a chord and some social change happens. Let’s pretend it’s 2011 now, and a groundbreaking TV series set in space comes out. We’ll call it something like Planet Journey or, I don’t know, Star Trek. And it’s pretty exciting and cool, because it has a supporting character who’s not only a woman, but a Black woman. But she’s not really a central character and she still has to wear a minidress and mostly just answer the space phones while all the men wear pants and go on adventures, because that’s what women do.
But social change keeps happening. And suddenly, in 2024, there’s a major motion picture – also set in space – where not only is there a female character who wears practical work clothes for her traditionally masculine job, and disobeys men’s orders… but halfway through, she takes charge, picks up a flamethrower, blows a monster into deep space, and now it’s her adventure because that’s what women do.
Of course, Ripley could only come into being because of all the other work done by feminists in the real world to make those changes. Still, she’s an incredible symbol of huge strides in empowerment in a shockingly short period. It’s also important to note that this wasn’t some big, feminist statement – at least initially. Ripley’s character was initially conceived as a man and just called Ripley, but to his credit, Ridley Scott defied studio expectations by suggesting a female lead instead and casting then-unknown Sigourney Weaver, and that’s how we got Ellen.
And Ellen Ripley is the best final girl ever. Like. Ever. I was talking to my friend Min about this the other day. There is nothing more annoying than a horror movie with a dumb protagonist. My number-one complaint about Alien: Covenant, for example, is that it features two identical robots and one of them is evil. The second you find yourself in a situation with identical good and evil robots, you gotta teach the good one a secret handshake, or feed it a false piece of vital information so you can quiz it later, or shut it down so you can give it an incredibly small tattoo between its toes that only you know about because obviously the evil robot is going to capitalise on the situation. This is Evil Robot Defence 101. Does any character in Covenant do this? No. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, make the audience hate your stupid guts and cheer for the parasitic alien to get you.
Ripley survives not by being blonde or a virgin, like so many Final Girls before her, but by being intelligent, competent, proactive, and most importantly of all, guided by strong moral integrity centred on empathy. She knows when to follow protocol, but she also knows when to break it for the sake of doing what’s right.
What sets Ripley apart from most male action heroes, and certainly the male action heroes of the late ‘70s and ‘80s, is that her decisions align with a school of thought called the ethics of care. Rather than prioritising abstract ideas like justice or freedom, Ripley’s decision-making is focused around relationships, and what we owe to each other – or, in some cases, to the spaceship’s orange tabby cat.
We can stay within the Alien extended universe and compare her to Dutch, the lead from Predator, which came out the year after Aliens. Arnold Schwarzenegger – another classic final girl.
In Aliens, Ripley’s decisions are driven by empathy and a deep sense of responsibility toward others, especially toward the orphaned second-grader, Newt. She goes to tremendous lengths to protect her, risking her life multiple times. She is primarily concerned with the safety of everyone around her, and she’s willing to defy orders to do what she believes is right, particularly if that means protecting vulnerable lives.
When we look at Dutch’s decisions in Predator, we can see that they’re much more individualistic. He is a soldier, and his actions are based on combat skills and tactical decision-making to outsmart the Predator to save himself and his team. He does care for his team, but it’s definitely more out of military duty and as part of his leadership role than in the protector role that Ripley takes on. His primary concern is to lead his team out of danger, and when he can’t and they are killed off one by one – even Carl Weathers and his jaw-dropping biceps! – his focus shifts to defeating the Predator in a physical confrontation and surviving the ordeal.
Ripley’s heroism is born out of her empathy and moral clarity. She is a protector. Dutch’s heroism, meanwhile, is defined by his combat prowess, physical strength, and his ability to outfight his enemy and get to da choppa.
You will not be surprised to learn that the concept of ethics of care was developed by feminist philosophers. According to the peer-reviewed Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “These theorists call for a change in how we view morality and the virtues, shifting towards virtues exemplified by women, such as taking care of others, patience, the ability to nurture, self-sacrifice, etc. These virtues have been marginalised because society has not adequately valued the contributions of women.”
The last thing I want to say about Ripley before we move on is that she faces some challenges that I’m not sure male action heroes like Dutch, John McLane, or RoboCop ever have to face, which is that the men around her will not listen to her. To be clear, in most of the cases, I don’t think it’s because they’re sexist. On the surface, anyway. Most of the time, they are greedy, or cocky, or secretly malevolent androids.
But there’s no ignoring the fact that most of the authority figures she butts heads with in both Alien and Aliens are men – or shaped like men – and even though Ripley has shown repeatedly that she is competent, understands best practice, and, most importantly, is correct – those men repeatedly ignore her, gaslight her, or tell her she’s out of line. This is especially infuriating in Aliens, when she’s the only one who knows the true danger of the threat they’re up against. She’s basically told to put a sock in it by a boardroom of mainly white men, and then mocked by a mostly male team of space marines who are all hung up on out-macho-ing each other.
You’re a person, probably, so you understand how frustrating it is not to be heard. And if you’re not a male-presenting person, you know that this is not a problem specific to outer space in the 22nd century. According to the 2023 Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, 23% of women surveyed reported feeling like their judgment in their area of expertise is regularly questioned during normal business activities, compared to 17% of men. Those numbers get even higher when you just ask women with traditionally marginalised identities – women of colour, LGBTQ+ women, and especially women with disabilities. As a result, 31% of all women reported not speaking up at all anymore to share an opinion to avoid seeming difficult, compared to 22% of men. More women than men also reported feeling like they needed to tone down what they say so as not to be seen as unlikeable, and to perform perfectly all the time to be taken seriously.
It’s frustrating to see Ripley repeatedly try to warn or advise men and be ignored, laughed up, or explicitly told to shut up because it’s so easy to identify with. Her correct predictions inevitably come to pass and the result of ignoring her is always disastrous. And that’s why – for me as a woman, anyway – it’s cathartic when the men who don’t listen or actively undermine her meet their messy ends.
It should be said that there is a great example of a male ally in Aliens, though, and that’s Hicks. He’s the only one who listens to Ripley’s warning at the beginning, and then agrees with and supports her plan to take off into space and nuke the entire colony from orbit, which is, unfortunately, foiled. He ensures she has the same advantages as the rest of the survivors, giving her a tracker and teaching her how to use one of their guns, and he lets her know that he respects her strategising and self-sufficiency, but without coming on in a creepy way. They’re a little flirty, but it’s built out of mutual respect.
But my very favourite Hicks moment is when he casually lifts Newt onto the countertop to look at the blueprint and come up with a plan alongside all the adults in the room. He includes her in the planning and makes sure her voice is heard. He literally gives her a seat at the table, even though she’s only seven, because he respects her ingenuity and recognises that she is as important as any of the grown-ups. Be still, my beating heart.
Speaking of the adult survivors, one of the really amazing things about Aliens is that Ripley is not the only badass woman. There are three female space marines on the planet with her, and one we really need to discuss. We need to talk about Private Jenette Vasquez, a Latina gunner controversially played by a fair-skinned Jewish-American bodybuilder wearing fake tan and dark contacts. That’s all I’m gonna say about that, except to confirm that the brownface and fake accent – shockingly – didn’t age well.
When we first meet Vasquez, she’s doing pull-ups immediately after waking up from cryosleep. It seems to be really important to her to consistently demonstrate her strength and physical toughness – traditionally masculine traits – to her male peers. But that doesn’t mean they accept her, and they’re constantly questioning how tough she really is. She has one close male buddy who admires her strength she is, but when she finishes her pull-up set, Bill Paxton’s character, Hudson, asks her, “Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?”
“No. Have you?” she snarks back, which instantly cemented her as one of my favourites the first time I watched this movie. I mean, what a zinger.
But it also shows us that Vasquez is pretty defensive and has found that leaning into a very masculine gender performance helps her survive in the hyper-masculine environment of the Marines. I’m not saying she isn’t more comfortable that way – it’s clearly her preferred mode, she’s extremely good at her job, and more power to her. But she’s an interesting female character because she’s demonstrating another way for women to succeed in the Alien universe – adopting and performing masculinity.
I also think she’s a pretty good example of Judith Butler’s point that gender is a social construct, and not something innate or natural. Instead, it’s something we perform constantly through repeated actions, behaviours, and language – often unconsciously. These performances are based on societal expectations and norms, so in Vasquez’s case, she’s adopted – and seems to enjoy – more masculine-coded actions, behaviours, and language to fit in with her fellow Marines.
And her actions are big – she’s full of bravado, including during Ripley’s first speech to the Marines warning them about the dangers of the alien. “All I need to know is where they are” she says, pretending to shoot them. She’s a gunner carrying a smart gun that’s almost the same size as her, and that’s clearly an important part of her identity. She’s the first one through the doors of the abandoned colony and the first one into the alien hive that the Marines stumble on, proving again and again to the group that she is brave and strong.
She’s an interesting foil for Ripley, too. Ripley also has masculine-coded traits, which I talked more about in part one of this series. She’s also strong and competent, and a woman working in a male-dominated field. But rather than leaning into those masculine traits to assert her authority, the way Vasquez does, Ripley balances her toughness with traditionally feminine traits, especially empathy and maternal instincts.
They’re a fascinating duo from a feminist perspective because neither conforms to established gender roles but they’ve taken different paths. They are both strong and competent, and great examples of female agency, and neither is wrong. Ripley shows us you can have feminine traits and be heroic, but the cost of her femininity is that the men around her don’t listen, even when she’s right. Vasquez shows us the potential benefits of conforming to her group’s masculine ideal, but the cost to her is that she must constantly prove herself and is still never truly accepted.
Aliens has one more female character I’d like to talk about before we go buggy: Newt. I think it’s really interesting that the scriptwriters made the last survivor of the massacred colony a little girl.
In the extended version of the movie, there’s a scene after Ripley is awakened from hypersleep and told that she and Jonesy have been floating through space for 57 years. In this scene, we learn that Ripley left her 10-year-old daughter behind on Earth before shipping out on the Nostromo, promising her she’d be back in time for her birthday. As we know, her plans were foiled by a ruthless killing machine and she missed her kid’s birthday – and then every birthday after that. She learns her daughter died of old age shortly before the escape shuttle was discovered.
So they may have made Newt’s character a girl to reflect Ripley’s past and give her a second chance. In that context, when the Marines find Newt hiding in a cranny of the colony and Ripley chases after her, it makes their discovery all the more poignant. It also might explain her motivation to consistently save the most vulnerable members of her crew at the potential cost of her own life.
I think it’s also important that because they share a gender, it’s easy for Ripley to see herself in Newt and vice-versa. They are both female and both the sole survivors of a brutal alien attack that they escaped using their intelligence. There’s something powerful, too, in the portrayal of women protecting and teaching other women, particularly younger generations.
But because I am deeply cynical, I kind of don’t think that feminist messaging was a conscious decision on the filmmakers’ part – or at least not a primary storytelling consideration. The horror genre loves to contrast innocent, defenceless little girls with hostile, deadly forces, and action heroes need a damsel in distress to rescue. Let us also remember that this was 1986, and cute kids in messy situations were having a pretty good box office run – think Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984 or Lex and Tim in Jurassic Park in ’93. Get a new gimmick, Spielberg.
Newt’s innocence is really underscored in the final act of Aliens, though, when this sweet, prepubescent young girl and her maternal protector come face-to-face with the disgustingly fertile mother of monstrous-femininity herself: the Queen Xenomorph.
[Hissing and growling]
Steph: Yeah, girl, [hisses back] is right!
OK, so once again, my number-one academic girl crush Barbara Creed – the actual mother of the concept of the monstrous-feminine – says that, because we live in a patriarchal culture, horror media is created with male audiences and what scares them in mind. And what scares men, more than anything in this whole world, is vaginas.
Some of the men listening right now will be like, “Wait a minute, I love vaginas”, and that is probably true. I 100% believe that you love them in a particular context. But Sigmund Freud and later scholars such as Julia Kristeva would say that in any other context, and also on a subconscious level, you do not love them. You are very, very afraid of them.
For example… what if they bite you? Or hold onto you and never let you go? Or suck you into some endless black void, just like death?
And what about what comes out of them? Sure, you need to be involved to make a baby, but only briefly and then the entire thing is out of your control – the entire creation of life itself, totally out of your hands and happening beyond your reach and influence. Because what if you really didn’t need to be involved? I mean, you play such a small part anyway. What if there was some aspect of femininity so powerful and so uncontrollable that it could create endless life – entirely without you – to build and populate an invincible and inescapable world of its own?
And don’t you remember, when you were very small and very helpless, being just a little bit afraid of your mommy?
The Xenomorph Queen is the ultimate form of the monstrous-feminine. She embodies uncontrolled, primal female fertility, and as a mother, she is both a nurturer and a destroyer.
She is also yet another female character in this movie who doesn’t conform to traditional patriarchal rules. She’s powerful, independent of any male, and violent. Her grotesque reproduction process, where she lays eggs that hatch into very vaginal-looking facehuggers, is a sickening inversion of our idealised vision of motherhood, turning something that we usually see as life-giving and hopeful into something deadly and terrifying.
And I gotta say, as a vagina-owning viewer, she’s still scary as shit. Horror movies can turn up the monstrous-feminine by exaggerating aspects of being female – like our ability to give birth – and make them gruesome, and the Xenomorph Queen takes that to an extreme. The first time we see her, there’s a slow pan with a lot of deep squelching along her birth canal, and even if you, yourself, have a birth canal, the distortion and repulsive visuals and noises are very disturbing.
There are a lot of layers we could unpack there if we wanted to get real Freudian – which I never do. I feel comfortable enough just pointing out that that scene is revolting on a sensory level, and that’s pretty horrific on its own.
But I do think that sometimes, the monstrous-feminine works on female audience members, too, because of our own internalised misogyny. For example, you could probably make the case that we feel afraid when the Queen explodes in rage after Ripley sets her eggs on fire because we subconsciously know that it’s not socially acceptable for women to react in anger, ever. We’re terrified of what uncontrolled female rage might look like because it’s unknown – we’ve never been allowed to see it at its peak form.
Worse, we identify with it – Ripley just killed her babies! So we also recognise a similar brand of rage in ourselves and know that we have the capacity for the same thing, and have at different times even wanted to unleash it, but we can’t. So our own internalised misogyny kicks in and tells us that this behaviour is monstrous and must be punished.
And all of this happens so deep in our brains that all we know is this buggy bitch has got to go, even though, if you think about it, she’s doing the exact same thing that Ripley is doing – protecting her vulnerable babies.
I feel really foolish because I didn’t realise this until I watched it again last night, but when the Queen Xenomorph chases Ripley and Newt and tries to enact her revenge, she doesn’t go after Ripley, the killer of her children. After she tears the synthetic human Bishop apart to neutralise him as a threat, she goes right for Newt – Ripley’s baby – knowing that that will be the thing that hurts Ripley the most. An eye for an eye, a facehugger for a second-grader. I assume this is how playground conflicts go when moms get involved, too.
But the Queen makes a miscalculation here. She has to, because Aliens is secretly not a monster movie at all. It’s a film about motherhood. And when she goes after Ripley’s baby, she kicks Ripley’s protective maternal instincts – her strongest motivator – into high gear.
I’m not sure the monstrous-feminine always has to be negative, if that makes sense. The Xenomorph Queen embodies the monstrous-feminine in its most terrifying form, but Ripley reclaims some of the patriarchy-flustering aspects of femininity, too. She’s also a mother – in this case, not biological one but that never stops her – who is powerful, active, and heroic. And she saves Newt the same way she saved Jonesy, and her version of motherhood is life-affirming rather than life-destroying.
Ripley and the Queen have the same motivation – to protect their young. Ripley wants to save Newt out of love and the desire to protect life. At first, I thought the Queen mainly just wants to protect her progeny to continue to propagate her species.
The best evidence of this is the ruthless drive of the other aliens to capture humans to use as alien incubators and the fact that the Queen calls the grown aliens lurking at the edge of the nest off when she realises that Ripley could take out all her eggs unless she and Newt can get away safely.
And even in that extremely tense moment, I think Ripley sees a fellow mother, too. For a lady who wanted to nuke the whole colony from orbit just to be sure all the aliens were killed, she really does seem like she might leave the Queen and her eggs in peace in exchange for safe passage, right up until an egg at the very edge of the cluster starts to hatch. Chalk it up to Sigourney Weaver being amazing, maybe, but I read the expression she makes as sort of disgusted regret – she has to kill them all now, but she’s not taking any pleasure in it.
But after watching the movie again last night, I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that the Queen also loves her babies. We know the aliens are pretty advanced – they know how to cut the lights and the Queen herself can operate an elevator. And I think we know she can calculate human emotions because she came after Newt just to hurt Ripley the same way she was hurt.
If she was really only a vehicle to propagate the species, it would be more logical from an evolutionary perspective to stay where she was and just poop out some more eggs. But instead, she reacts with a huge amount of anger, and she wants revenge.
So she can feel rage, has a desire for vengeance, and accurately judges that the best way to achieve that vengeance would be to emotionally wound her opponent in the same way she was wounded. WHy would we assume she can’t feel love?
And I think it would be stupid of us, at the very end of the second movie of an incredibly feminist franchise, to objectify the Xenomorph Queen – the embodiment of female power – and think of her as just a passive portal for alien armies to enter the universe. She is Ripley’s perfect enemy because they are so similar.
In Alien, the android Ash tells Ripley that he admires the xenomorph onboard the ship. He says, “It’s a survivor. Unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” In Aliens, Ripley fights her alien counterpart and wins – again. Like every other man who tried to tell her what to do, Ash was wrong. True survivors are guided by their conscience. Their strong empathy means they experience deep heartbreak and remorse. And their moral compass is exactly what guides them – and the people they love – safely to the other side.
[Music]
Steph: You know what that sound means. I’d like to thank the Xenomorph Queen for joining us tonight, but that doesn’t mean I trust her not to try any funny business. So light’s out, flamethrowers on, gang.
To learn more about terrifying things like xenomorphs, the monstrous-feminine and sexist workplaces, please visit my shownotes. There’s a link in the episode description, or you can just go straight to paranormalpjparty.com. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram at @ParanormalPJParty.
A little bit of podcast business here at the end of the ep: This is the 13th episode of season two, so as usual, it’s the last of the season. This one has been a bit bumpier than the first one mainly because life lately feels like I’ve been navigating a giant cluster of alien eggs full of facehuggers that I need to keep dodging. Gah! There’s one now!
[Flamethrower sound]
Steph: So I’m going to need a bit of a break and a breather before Paranormal Pajama Party is back for season three. I’ve got a bunch of good ideas for it, though. It’s going to be… a monstrous-femininonomenon.
A what?
A monstrous-femininonomenon!
Also, these episodes take, like, a surprisingly long time to research, record, edit, and obsess over – and that’s without doing any marketing or promotion stuff on the side – so I’m pretty sure that next season I’m going to shift to a fortnightly schedule instead. Thanks for sticking with the podcast and for your understanding.
I also need to officially, on the record, admit that in the previous episode, I pronounced the name of Ripley’s spaceship wrong and then refused to believe my friend Min when he mentioned it. Sorry Min – you were right, I was wrong, and as penance, I will give a shout-out to his YouTube channel, Hit The Spot Travel, which features some very tasty food and tourism destinations, and his other channel, Puppet Noodles, in which a felt puppet version of Min reviews horror movies while sitting in a giant bowl of noodles. I think about Puppet Min and his interchangeable puppet eyebrows a lot. …Like. A lot.
Finally… should I email Barbara Creed and try to talk to her on the podcast? Is that crazy? We live in the same city! My friend Gary knows her! Is this too weird? Is it normal to fangirl over academics? I don’t know, I’m nervous! Please let me know if you have thoughts on this – you can text the podcast, get in touch through the website, send me a vibe on the astral plane, do whatever you need to do.
But in the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.
[Music fades out]
