heroine, which brings up a feminist theme of the period: the demonstration
of a woman’s value and worth based on meeting the challenges of work and
everyday life. This is a central theme in such varied films of the year as The
China Syndrome, Norma Rae, and Gal Young’Un, and is definitely part of
Alien—except that fighting and defeating an alien monster cannot be con-
sidered an everyday event. However, Scott and the screenwriters so thor-
oughly embed the film’s action in ship routine and crew dynamics that we
do feel that Ripley is, to a large extent, simply doing her job. Like Mattie in
Gal Young’Un, she is a competent woman.
Alien also has elements of the socially critical cycle that was popular
earlier in the decade. The threats in Alien come not only from an alien crea-
ture but also from “The Company,” the organization that sent the crew out
on this voyage. The Company actually cares more about protecting the
alien, in whose strength, speed, and aggression it sees commercial value,
than in safeguarding the lives of the crew. The Company’s representatives—
the science officer Ash (Ian Holm), who turns out to be a robot, and the
ship’s computer, known as “Mother”—act accordingly, often working
against the interests of Ripley and the other crew members. This is an
impressive example of storytelling-as-social-commentary that critiques the
relationship between capital and labor. We may also note that the most
sympathetic members of the crew are Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett
(Harry Dean Stanton), proletarians who toil in the engine room, and Rip-
ley, who is a cynic and something of a rebel. Ripley’s anti-corporate cyni-
cism, which turns out to be entirely justified, bears at least some
resemblance to the cynicism of earlier seventies protagonists.
Another important dimension of Alien is its use of long-established
entertainment devices. For all the film’s sophistication, the core of its plot
is incredibly simple and direct—a monster is killing people. Alien’s narrative
tension relies on the monster’s attack and the human group’s attempts to
respond. This extremely simple problem and solution might be a way of not
thinking about all the messy social issues of the previous decade. Critic
David Thomson has identified two other traditional horror film devices in
Alien. First, terror increases when the film withholds “the horrific thing”
(17). For most of Alien we do not know the nature of the enemy, but see
only brief glimpses of the reptilian creature as it keeps changing in size and
appearance. Indeed, the viewer never does get a complete sense of the biol-
ogy of the creature. Second, the film plays a deductive game with the
viewer, challenging us to figure out who will be killed, in what order, and
who will survive. This game was much harder to figure out at the time than
it is today, because Sigourney Weaver was not a star and there was not yet
1979 — MOVIES AND THE END OF AN ERA 247