Science Fiction and Females?

Gregg Rickman, ed., The Science Fiction Film Reader, 432 p., Limelight Editions, $22.95

"From now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life under the threat of not only individual death, which is certain, but of something almost unsupportable psychologically - collective incineration and extinction which could come at any time, virtually without warning."

A treatise on the age of terrorism? Superpower imperialism? The coming eco-reckoning? Well, yes ... and no. It's a snippet from a 1965 essay by Susan Sontag on "The Imagination of Disaster," a good summation of the fears that ran rife in pre-Space Odyssey/pre-Star Wars sci-fi films. Until those movies came along, "sf" was considered a dismissible B-movie genre - precisely the kind of "unofficial" cultural status that gave it permission to explore all the aforementioned end-of-world scenarios in a way most "mainstream" films could not.

But as science fiction has steadily produced the biggest box office films of all time, it is no longer considered dismissible.  Now coming fully into its own in the age of digital effects, it is, in many ways, the main game in town.

Thusly "recontextualized," as our lit crit pals like to say, Sontag's essay joins numerous others - of both the previously-published and the brand-new stripe - in a smart collection put together by editor Gregg Rickman, which traces the history of sf movies from the early special effects of Georges Melies in 1907 all the way through deliberations on Signs and the Matrix movies.

During this engaging journey, one of the key tropes that emerges are images of women in what had been - prior to equal numbers of gals dressing up as Star Trek/Star Wars characters at fan conventions - considered stories-for-boys; the flipside of the Western, if you will, with fancier guns. Why do you think Gene Rodenberry's legendary network pitch for Star Trek was to describe it as "Wagon Train in the stars?"

One of the best discussions of such imagery is in "Reproducing Ripley," by film theorist/horror film producer Carina Dielissen (her website at www.horrordiva.com is well worth a look), where she writes about perhaps the most iconic woman in sci-fi film history: the Ripley character in the Alien franchise, played in all four installments by Sigourney Weaver.

Dielissen starts her discussion with the "gimme" of the series' horror-fication of what is, biologically, the most essential female process of all: birth. "The Alien series is ripe with images of...reproduction, the ‘primal scene,' and female anatomy...Here, the crew enacts the primal scene by entering into the ship through vaginal openings. They then venture into the ‘womb' of the ship where Kane, played by John Hurt, becomes impregnated by the alien egg."

It's not just the deeply Freudian production design by HR Giger at issue here. Every "birth" in the series is a terrifying, bloody one. The Hurt character is but the first to learn that, in this world, everyone dies in childbirth.

But Dielissen has a bigger target than just framing the Alien flicks as examples of male gynophobia. She presses on past that starting point to a somewhat startling - and convincing - conclusion: that by the series' fourth film, Alien: Resurrection - by which point Ripley has lived, died, and been, yes, reborn ("resurrection," in most religions being, of course, a way for men to ascribe the birth process to themselves) - Ripley, and the Alien(s) are both on the same cosmic side, juxtaposed against the feudal corporate state that had been trying to militarize Alien reproductive processes since the beginning. "Two hundred years after Ripley's death in Alien 3, the Company (...aptly named ‘Father') uses a blood sample from the penal colony to clone Ripley, complete with the alien queen she was carrying."

Both Ripley, then, and the Alien queen, represent "natural" processes - however fiercely incompatible with each other, species-wise - and The Company represents the attempt to quantify, commodify, and ultimately reduce those processes to something that can either be sold or turned into a weapon. Or preferably both.

And while Dielissen's essay may deploy the occasional five-dollar word, like "phallologocentrism," it's still an enjoyable read and, like the whole book, harks back on a time when most writing about film seemed smart or, at least, impassioned.

This was because there was once a time when movies were considered smart and impassioned - another type of art (even the B movies so lovingly discussed here) that, as in Bernardo Bertolucci's film The Dreamers, helped us understand what it was to be human.

The other writings in this collection touch on this: a whole slew of essays on film adaptations of Philip K. Dick's work (Blade Runner, et al); Bob Stephens' "resurrection" here of the previously obscure early '50s nuclear Armageddon flick Five (where he notes the racial unease of liberals when it comes to the question of who gets to procreate, post-apocalypse); some great discussions of various iterations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, including an interview with Don Siegel done back in '76, in which Siegel - who directed the first one in the '50s - contends that we humans are more "pod"-like than ever before. This last is sobering because we, as a country and as a species, have become vastly more pod-like - in the homogenization of our consumer/media/political consumption - since that interview.

But what is science-fiction, if not prescience? There's even an essay by George F. Will, called "Well, I Don't Love You, E.T.," which, in its fussiness, comes close to self-parody. Will, back then, didn't like the movie's questioning of the grown-up world of science: "Hostility to science is the anti-intellectualism of the semi-intellectual." One wonders if Will uses this quote when his friends in the current administration dismiss the scientific facts behind global warming.