One needn't read too widely to discover a recurring rape interpretation of Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi/horror classic Alien. We have said before that we consider Alien to be a companion film to Scott's Blade Runner, and taken together we can develop a pretty clear picture of just who is doing the raping. We would also add that the film makes an interesting comparison to Spielberg's Jaws: both have instinctual killers preying on isolated environments. The shark kills for food, the alien uses humans as incubators to reproduce--both kill to survive.
Recall that the first beast of Revelation 13 is a global dictatorship; the second beast is the "antichrist," world leader, or CEO. We see this world government being put into place right now, a collectivist global corporate state:
"A state based on the theory that the political community is composed of numerous economic and other functional groups whose importance in the life of the state and the individual is so overwhelming that they, rather than localities or individual suffrage, should form the basis for political representation." (The Norton Dictionary of Modern Thought)
The film begins on board the commercial towing starship Nostromo, running via automation as the seven crew members travel in stasis. The ship's name is an allusion to Joseph Conrad's novel of the same name--a novel which none of the NWOIB crew has read, so we won't comment on it. However, the escape ship is named the Narcissus, also a reference to a Conrad novel.
So rather than allusions to the novels themselves, these names are most likely alluding to Conrad himself; and you can't allude to Conrad without alluding to his masterwork Heart of Darkness (which our Lead Intel Analyst has read) and the themes of colonialism/imperialism. And one can't allude to Heart of Darkness without then alluding to Kutz's last words, "The horror, the horror."
Anyhoo, we'll be doing a write-up on Apocalypse Now soon if the apocalypse doesn't wipe us all out before we get a chance.
It is at this point, as the camera roams throughout the ship's cabin, that a message is received and the ship is woken up so to speak. It can't be seen in the picture above, but this is the first instance that we learn of the Weylan-Yutani Corporation (Weyland-Yutani in the sequal). This, like the Shimago-Dominguez Corp in Blade Runner, suggests the big multi-national corporation, the corporate golem-machine, that views humanity as merely expendable human resources --which is exactly what they are as we'll come to find.
After the order is received, we see lights come on in a corridor leading to the crew members. This is symbolic of a path of illumination: we're going to be shown something here.
Behind the door we find the seven crew members sleeping in pods. The order causes the ship's computer to wake the crew from stasis. To support the path of illumination symbolism, this represents an awakening process.
The viewer doesn't know it at this point, but the first crew member is Kane. The ship, by order of the Weylan-Yutani Corporation is raising Kane. The phrase "raising Cain" refers to raising hell, or causing trouble.
"Kane" is an obvious reference to the Biblical Cain, who killed his brother. The name Cain represents "possession," which, the viewer will come to learn suits Kane just fine as he is the one who brings the alien on board in his gut.
After the crew is awakened, Dallas, the ship's captain, goes to a special room to receive his orders from Mother. We notice the decor of Mother's room is in contrast to the rest of the ship; in here it is warm and soft, comfortable.
Here Dallas is receiving his instructions to retrieve a specimen from a nearby planetoid sending out a signal--distress or warning they do not know. When we do later learn the contents of this message, we will also learn that Dallas is one of those just following orders gutless drones who allows tyranny to flourish--but he gets his just desserts.
After landing on the planetoid, three of the crew members disembark, eventually discovering a craft.
Inside the craft they find a fossilized alien who appears to have had some kind of object exploded from its chest. The fact that this alien is identified as "fossilized" suggests that this predator is an ancient one.
Our guy Kane gets up close with an unidentified pod, which soon jumps out, burns through his face shield and attaches to his face.
Against the ship's quarantine protocol, Captain Dallas brings Kane with "face hugger" on board.
Later, the face hugger dies and falls off, leaving Kane seemingly unaffected.
But Kane soon begins choking and falls onto the table. He is, in fact, possessed. A small, phallic-shaped, alien bursts from his stomach and leaves him for dead. When Parker moves to kill the infant alien, medical officer Ash stops him, thus allowing the alien to escape into the recesses of the ship.
Our modern term "rape" comes from the Latin rapere, which means seize, take by force, or abduct, but was generally without the sexual connotation in early usage. This is the type of rape in Alien, non-sexual possession, a human resource seized and forced to perform a function. This is a raping of humanity. It's a possession and manipulation for selfish purposes, ultimately resulting in destruction.
This scenario also reminds us again of Genesis 6:
"And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose."
It's strange how many movies reflect the Genesis 6 accounts; we have a theory that the descendants of the Nephilim, the "men of renown" are now occupying various positions of status in fields such as entertainment and leadership and have built themselves up as idols and receive a form of worship that they desire.
The storyline of a corporate dictatorship working to bring an ancient race of foreign beings back to earth is one that can only be told in science fiction.
Above we see the engineer Brett wearing a jacket with a triangular patch near the shoulder. Inside the triangle is a circular design, reminiscent of the pyramid and eye of the "Illuminati."
Brett is killed shortly thereafter by the now fully-grown alien who thrusts an penetrating jaw-within-a-jaw into his chest. Brett isn't left for dead though, he is carried away.
Ripley goes into Mother, the computer room, and accesses the message that woke them from stasis and diverted their mission. She learns that the Welan-Yutani Corporation wants a sample of the organism returned at all cost. The crew, she finds, is expendable. This is why Ash, the medical officer, broke quarantine protocol and and later allowed the alien to escape.
Ash then attacks Ripley in a rather unusual fashion: he rolls a pornographic magazine and attempts to choke her with it, a death not unlike the face-hugger alien, and obviously symbolic of rape. So why is Ash being symbolically linked to the alien?
Well, it turns out that Ash is an android, a golem--a bit of information the crew is unaware of. (It's interesting to note here that Ash dies in the same spastic manner as the replicant Priss in Blade Runner.)
Here the android Ash provides us with the nature of the alien: "You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility."
Lambert: "You admire it."
Ash: "I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality."
Compare Ash's assessment of the alien with the horrors of combat Colonel Kurtz witnessed in Vietnam (from Apocalypse Now):
"I remember when I was with Special Forces... Seems a thousand centuries ago... We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile... A pile of little arms."
"And I remember...I...I...I cried... I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... Like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead... And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure."
"And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters... These were men... trained cadres... these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly."
These are adequate descriptions of the soul-less, yet efficient, Corporate-Golem killing machine, a legally personified entity operating outside the framework or normal human decency, thus responsible for nothing, accountable to no one. As Kurtz tells Willard, "You have the right to kill me, but you have no right to judge me." Kurtz has rejected so-called civilized society along with their standards of morality.
Ripley, the lone surviving crew member, set the Nostromo for self-destruction, then escapes in the Narcissus.
However, the alien has snuck aboard and Ripley must face it for a final showdown. This monster cannot be defeated by running away from it; it must be dealt with.
Having sucked the alien out the door, Ripley finally feels safe and is able to sleep. The film began with an awakening--in both senses of the word--and ends with sleep, symbolic of a false sense of security. Ripley has won the battle, but the war is far from over; only one alien was killed, there remain hundreds of face-hugger pods back on the planetoid LV-426, and the W-Y Corporation will continue to retrieve a specimen for weapons development.
One could weave a simple analogy here to our political election process: two sock puppets put up for public consumption, both connected to the same puppet-master--the corporate-golem killing machine. Things get bad, people demand change, they get a new puppet; the public--or many of them, anyway--then falls back asleep thinking their job well done.
Finally, consider these points:
1) In the collectivist corporate state, the beast, economic factors outweigh sovereignty or individual rights.
2) The Book of Revelation tells us the significant trait of the mark of the beast, 666, is an economic one: no man will buy or sell without it.
3) The upcoming Copenhagen climate conference will attempt to establish a "carbon economy."
4) Carbon 12, the most abundant form of carbon, has 6 protons, 6 electrons, 6 neutrons.
5) A corporation is a legal person.
