Alien Resurrection and Becoming-Cyborg: "1 is Too Few"
I'd like to engage in a meditation on the film Alien Resurrection (1997) in a way that uses specific scenes from the film as exemplars of specific quotes from, and thoughts on, contemporary posthuman theory. By intercutting these short clips with text, the role of reader and viewer becomes intertwined, revealing how arts education can use cinema to flex the creativity of production, and the production of creativity, as a mode of thought and embodiment.
To claim that such a pedagogical strategy would fall under the heading of the currently trendy label of "visual studies" would be both misleading and erroneous, for cinema surpasses – crucially – the visual as a means of communication and transfer through its additional mechanisms of audio, time/duration, movement and proximity; another label I do not have, other than to adhere to the rather purist yet encompassing term "cinema". In this regard, I am using cinema here as a way to open up discussion about critical theories, philosophy, imagination itself as a practice, and thinking as creativity. As I enact this processing of the idea of the posthuman here on these pages, it can also be enacted in such a way with high school level students as a way to address and allow space for the problematics of identity and the insecurities they face about themselves in the world they live in.
I'm going to use the film Alien Resurrection (Joss Whedon - Writer, Jean-Pierre Jeunet - Director) to illustrate two offshoots of the concept of the posthuman: Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari's concept of Becoming, and Donna Haraway's concept of the Cyborg. Both strands of thought intertwine with the posthuman in very productive, creative and positive ways, as opposed to the apocalyptic image of the posthuman as a state in which technology dominates or eradicates the organic.
BEGINNINGS AND ALTERNATE BEGINNINGS:
Haraway writes in her Cyborg Manifesto (1991): "The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion" (Haraway, 2004, p. 8). Alien Resurrection is generally studied within the context of the posthuman as a cultural commentary on issues of eugenics, race, gender and technology (http://tbics.wordpress.com/syllabus/) but in using Delueze/Guattari and Haraway, I am instead addressing the posthuman here as an imagining that explores the liminal spaces between these categories as a way to resist the constraints of identity politics, as Haraway would have us do as "oppositional Cyborgs" (Haraway, p. 30). It is the borderline that I'm interested in, the border that in the alternate opening title sequence is manifested as a pane of glass between the safety of the spaceship interior and the threat of the outer space beyond, the first of many borderlines that are, by the end of the film, very much transgressed.
Haraway writes of a "Border War", the border being "between organism and machine" in the tradition of "Western science and politics.. of racist, male-dominant capitalism... of progress... of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture... the stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination" (p. 8), which is one of the reasons why, as an arts educator, I feel it crucial to explore cinema as a processing of imagination.
Alien Resurrection is the fourth film in the Alien series, within which the ongoing character of Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, who killed herself in the previous film because she had an Alien growing inside of her, is "resurrected" via genetic technologies by the military in order for them to be able to breed warrior Aliens for their own use. The new Ripley is thus both machine and animal, thus Cyborg. She meets Call, played by Winona Ryder, who is an outlawed brand of android capable of empathy and sacrifice, and who experiences abject shame in not being human. She is on a self-proclaimed undercover mission to stop the genetic experiments because she wants to keep the Aliens from being bred and from destroying humanity. It is my contention that the meeting of these two female others is the pivotal site of both Becoming and Cyborg.
In Deleuzian thought, we can think of sociopolitical forces as occurring on either the molar or molecular level, with the molecular being the site for radical transformation and the molar being too large to directly influence; Becomings happen at the level of the molecular and through accumulative force may influence the larger picture.
Both of these versions of the opening credit sequence for the film illuminate the movement from the molecular to the molar in their completely different visualizations. The first seen in the clip is the one that was not used for the theatrical release: we start with what appears to be the threatening razor-like teeth of an Alien, only to be shown that it is a microscopic point-of-view- of the mouth of a fly (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051622/) As the camera continues to zoom out a wider and larger view is revealed until we eventually end up in outer space looking, not only at the vastness of its darkness, but at the imposing military ship which will become the site of the film. What starts at the biological molecular level of the fly is subsumed by this military and technological might at the level of the molar, and destroyed by the spurious and seemingly trivial act of the human soldier whose hand the fly is crawling on as he smashes it with hand and then blows what is left of it – its meat – onto the pane of glass, perhaps forgetting that the border is there, that the dead fly will not end up far away from him and at a safe distance.
The second version seen in this clip visually revels in the meat of a morphing creature, both human and Alien. For Deleuze and Guattari, to Become-Animal is the epitome of their concept of Becoming, it is a strategy of challenging dualistic thinking by creating assemblages that involve the most historically prevalant other that has been thought of outside of "human": the animal... the "beast".
Bodies are not stable units, but become elements in assemblage, fluid and mutable, constituting life through becoming (Kennedy, 2002, p. 5).
Setting the stage for the narrative to come, literally showing us the blurring of species boundaries at the level of the molecular, here too we see a transition to the molar space of the ship from the radicalized distance of the molar. Both versions herald the shifting from the molecular to the molar that is to come; what is done at the genetic level in this film's narrative becomes the starting point for transformations that upset and generate:
Becoming involves a series of movements and processes resistant to the fixicity of any molar 'grand narrative'.
These processes function at a molecular level, at a level of material production, but "bodies are not stable units, but elements in assemblage, fluid and mutable, constituting life through becoming" (p. 4), and through the crossing of borderlines, whether fly or human, Alien or android.
NEW RIPLEY:
According to Haraway bodies are also maps of power and identity (p. 38). This new body of Ripley's, like Haraway's Cyborg, was not born in a garden; there is no origin myth at play here, although the title of Alien Resurrection alludes to one – Ripley was dead, and she is now alien.
The cyborg skips the step of original unity (p. 9).
This is the blasphemy that Haraway writes of as being her "ironic faith"; "blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously" (p. 7). Ripley's resurrection – her new beginning – is blasphemic in terms of scientists playing god, and in the view that god is not needed for creation to occur.
TAKING THE ALIEN OUT OF RIPLEY:
Cyborgs are not reverent, although the scientists and military in this film certainly are; they revere their domination and control; the ship itself is called "Father" and its interface, as we shall see in the Chapel Scene, is located in what appears to be a Christian chapel with a bible to plug into and a cross to sit beneath.
RIPLEY REBELS:
The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism... but illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential (p. 10).
RIPLEY'S AFFECT:
"Deleuze's conception of Becoming is predicated upon a materialist aesthetic" based on affect – not the same as emotion – rather a purely a physical response to something, a sensual response, and a result of the thinking that the brain and the mind are one; "affect exists in the materiality of the brain/body consilience at a molecular level" (Kennedy, 2002, p. 6). With cinema we have the mechanisms of time, movement, sound and proximity to transfer affect from the screen to the viewer. Ripley is being tested and taught language through the prompts of still images. When she is shown a drawing of a little girl her response is pure affect, purely visual, and conflict is played out on her face as memories of her surrogate daughter Newt (Aliens, 1986; Alien,3 1992). The conflict regarding who she is, who she was, and who she wants to be surfaces as her subjectivity begins to become.
CALL MEETS RIPLEY:
As per Deleuze and Guattari, a cognitive dissonance results from a sudden or dramatic domain crossings, or the sense of something being not-quite-right, the result of established boundaries being crossed, boundaries that exist within Ripley between Alien and Ripley/Human. This Ripley is multiple and anomalous, as is Call, who we observe in this scene meeting Ripley unexpectedly, as all she set out to do was assassinate her because she is a tool being used to create the military's Warrior Aliens.
In this meeting Ripley gains more self-awareness about herself; her subjectivity emerges here in the interplay with Call that confronts her mortality and her self as threat. As she eases Call's knife through her hand, a rupture occurs of the representation that is supposedly "Ellen Ripley". The rim of her flesh, the boundary of her body, is penetrated by an exterior force both in the knife and in Call's acknowledgment of her in the statement that she is not Ellen Ripley, that she is a construct. For Deleuze and Guattari "the anomolous is neither an individual nor a species, it is a phenomenon, but a phenomenon of bordering" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 245). It is a phenomenon of rupture that sets in motion a propulsion of survival, as any Cyborg would do.
CALL REVEALED:
Ripley is not the only construct, as we learn of Call's own constructed state in her unexpected survival after being shot; her wound reveals not red blood but some sort of plasma and tubing. Ripley has found one of her own, another anomaly. In this scene we see the Cyborg's "leaky distinction" (Haraway, p. 10) between organism and machine as Call is revealed as not being human. Ripley enters Call as a Doubting Thomas with her probing hand and their affinity-as-other, as merging borderline sites, begins processing a new assemblage.
IN THE CHAPEL/IN THE MACHINE/INSIDE FATHER:
The miniaturization and mobility of new machines make them ubiquitous and invisible, a challenge to god-the-father in that their ethereal state can become spirit, "pure sunshine", as Haraway writes it. They are "more fluid than human beings" (Haraway; 12), which is why Call does not want to plug herself in, although she does in order to destroy the Aliens and to survive. Yet her affective hybridity and rebellious force becomes her skill to upset: "f[F]eminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control" (p. 33). In this scene we see Haraway's preferred ideological image of a network, "suggesting the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic" (p. 30) as Call takes over control of the ship's computer system.
"Fathers dead asshole"
For Deleuze and Guattari, "the body is perceived as a set of forces, intensities, processes, molecular and fibrous particles in connection with other forces and in consilience with the materiality of the brain... conceived in relation to other bodies, particles of other bodies or entities" (Kennedy, p. 5). Call-asmachine plugs into the machine of the ship and they become intertwined as her embodiment slides from flesh to the spirit of Father:
Why should our bodies end at the skin? (Haraway, p. 36)
ENDINGS:
This new assemblage – indeed, this multiplicity – of Call and Ripley has become liberatory, has become posthuman. As Haraway puts it: "liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension... and of possibility" (p. 8). There are two versions of the film's ending, this one shown here being the one that the studio producers deemed too dismal and bleak to show. Instead they used the parting-clouds, descending-from-heaven images and Ripley and Call together viewing the wondrous aerial images of continents and oceans passing beneath them. This was a safe choice, a preference for the molar view of dominance and lack of detail as to what these continents and oceans actually contain on the molecular level.
The alternate ending seen here has Ripley and Call on the edge of a ruined Paris, with a sky of red apocalypse. Yet, despite this scene of armageddon before them/us, their questions of what to do next – and their apparent intent to "get lost" and stay together as nomads – allow for more weight to be placed on possibility than a cliched image of a vast horizonless sky would because of what we now know has Become from their Becoming.
There is no saving humankind for the Cyborg: "[T]he cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history" – Haraway saw her Cyborg Manifesto as an effort to "imagine... a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end" (p. 8).
As for Deleuze and Guattari, their concept of a nomadic subject involves a subject empowering themselves to endure, to last, to continue in time by entering into sustainable interconnections with others, creating a web of a world that is flowing with possibilities.
Becoming is the affirmation of being… the one is the many… What is the being that is inseperable from Becoming? Return is the being of that which becomes. Return is the being of becoming itself, the being which is affirmed in Becoming (Deleuze, 1962, p. 24).
References:
Alien Resurrection: Collector's Edition. Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997. DVD. Twentieth Century Fox, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, Donna (2004). The Haraway Reader. New York, NY: Routledge.
Kennedy, Barbara M. (2002). "Constituting Bodies: Constituting Life: From Subjectivity to Affect and the 'Becoming-Woman' of the Cinematic." Retrieved online 02/04/2008 from http://members.optusnet.com.au/~robert2600/azimute/film/constituting_bodies.html.
