In storytelling, it is often the case that someone does something so well and it is so original and successful, that for the rest of time other storytellers attempt to harness this idea for their own and come up short. But they keep trying and saturating the zeitgeist with these poor imitations until even the original loses its brilliance and becomes nothing but a cliché, a shorthand joke for those in the know. One such example is the “kick-ass female lead”. If you take a woman and make her good at shooting bad guys with guns that must make her feminist, right? But these shallow rip-offs that saturate pop-culture should not diminish your respect for the one who started it all. Ellen Ripley. The subject of this month’s Character Study.
For clarity’s sake, I’ll only be discussing the Ripley of Alien and Aliens, the first two movies of the franchise. Those films are all-time classics; the rest of the franchise, let’s see how do I put this delicately… is a pile of steaming hot garbage. But that is a discussion for a future edition of The Franchise, this post is all about Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley at the height of her powers.
The first thing you notice about Ripley is that you’re almost thirty minutes into Alien before you even notice she’s there. Sigourney Weaver gets second billing behind Tom Skerrit for gods’ sake. For those who see this film knowing nothing going in (which is admittedly is hard to do forty years after the fact), you would spend the first half of this film thinking Captain Dallas is your protagonist. Then the movie turns, the body count begins to climb, and its Ripley who has to take command. But if you’re paying attention this is all foreshadowed. Throughout the first half of Alien, Ripley is shown to be a competent, clear-headed officer who is constantly being dismissed by her male colleagues. Most notably, it is Ripley who refuses to open the hatch for her contaminated crewmates, citing their need to undergo quarantine procedures to make sure they don’t bring anything harmful on board, but is overridden by her captain. It’s a little hard to say I told you so when everyone else is dead; but still, she did warn you.
Keep in mind this film released in 1979, so a hyper-competent woman who was not a sexpot, damsel-in-distress, or shrill buzzkill was not something audiences were used to seeing on screen. The reason for this ‘radical’ approach? The character of Ripley was originally written as a man and was only changed to a woman after director Ridley Scott suggested it would make for a better film. He was right, and because of it we get a refreshingly well-rounded character not bogged down with the traditional sexist tropes of Hollywood.
There is one classic trope that fits Ripley, that of the “Final Girl”. Alien may take place in space, but at its core, it’s a horror film. And the idea of a last woman standing is a staple of the genre. But even while adhering to the trope Ripley and Alien subvert it. In most horror films there is a moral shorthand for who lives and who dies. Sex and drugs equals getting gruesomely murdered, staying virtuous and virginal means staying alive. But a woman who forgoes sex and other indulgences is still submitting to the demands of a patriarchal, puritanical society and its views on how a woman should behave. To escape death, you must abstain from pleasure. This is not a victory for Feminism. But in Alien, Ripley’s fellow crew members die not for the vices but for their character flaws. It’s a subtle difference, but one that lets Ripley survive not because she is more moral than the rest but because she is smarter and more in control of her emotions than they are. In fact, she stays alive specifically by trusting her own instincts and smarts rather than relying on or submitting to the men around her, whether it be her irrational captain or the faceless corporation that employs her. Rather than reinforce the rules patriarchy, her status as a ‘Final Girl’ spits in its face.
Up to this point, I’ve mostly been discussing Ripley as seen in Alien, but let’s talk about her arc in the every bit as good as the original sequel, Aliens. Much of the success of Aliens is due to its commitment to not just rinse and repeat the same dramatic beats that made the original so successful. This is a different movie. Made by a different director. And that benefits the story. After surviving and subverting the “Final Girl” trope, Ripley finds herself in a world that she no longer recognizes (literally as she spends 57 years in stasis between films). She tells her story but like so many trauma survivors she is not believed. She loses her job and has severe PTSD. She is isolated and alone except for her cat. The opportunity arises to face her trauma head-on and, though initially reticent, she accepts the chance to face the monster that haunts her in an effort to kill it and her pain.
Again, she finds herself dismissed and demeaned until the casualties mount and people see for themselves that she was telling the truth. But this time she’s not the “Final Girl” she has a surrogate daughter to look after. Forced alien impregnation is about as on the nose as you can get for a rape metaphor, and Aliens deals with the aftermath of such intimate trauma. Many survivors wrestle with their paternal instincts and the ability to form romantic relationships. Here Ripley takes in and protects an orphan girl and forming an attachment to a corporal who is smart enough to listen to her advice and willing to let her take charge. By the end of the film she has formed a make-shift little family and killed her monster and becomes the “woman who has it all” but without sacrificing her agency or her integrity. Her trauma is still there, but she’s faced it down now, it doesn’t own her as it once did.
These are just a few of the reasons that Ellen Ripley is an icon of cinema and once of the greatest creations to grace our screens. I could go on for a full book about her depths and range (others have) but I’ll leave you with this closing thought. Over forty years later, we are still talking about female representation in film. And scripts are still being produced every year that try to capture the magic of the “kick-ass” heroine. Occasionally they succeed (Buffy and The Bride come to mind) but more often than not they fail. Ripley is just as much of a trailblazer now as she was forty years ago and while that does not say a lot for our society it does say a hell of a lot about this character.