The part if this weeks film Aliens by James Cameron that captivated me the most was the part when Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in attempting to save the character of Newt (Carrie Henn), stumbled into the queen bee’s hive, or in other words the mother Alien’s cave of eggs. It seemed to me that the Alien mother looked at Ripley, and understood (these Aliens seemed pretty smart, and this one was the largest, oldest and presumably the smartest) that she too was a mother, and so gave her a chance to escape. It seemed there was a truce between them at that moment, the queen bee noting Ripley’s need to save the child, and Ripley seeing that the mother wanted to protect her eggs. It felt as if Ripley broke the truce when she flame nuked the entirety of the queen bee’s eggs after walking to (relative) safety. After this the Alien mother did not hold back. It seemed the Alien mother was willing to go to any lengths to destroy Ripley; after all, Ripley had destroyed all her babies, her home and her world. What did she have left to loose? My sympathy was between Ripley and Newt and the Alien mother, and although I experienced an immense amount of relief when when the Alien mother was finally blown to outer space, It was mixed with a twinge of sadness.

The prescribed reading Monstrous Mothers Medusa, Grendel, and now Alien by Bundtzen (1987) had this to say about the scene “Initially Ripley reacts as if they have violated an animal mother’s lair, quietly and calmly step- ping backward, as if to say, “I won’t bother you and your eggs, if you won’t bother me and my child.” Indeed, a nonverbal agreement is struck between these two protective mothers. The truce is broken, however, when another egg opens up and Ripley burns it. The Alien Mama screeches in fury and charges, while simultaneously, Ripley appears to have lost all control, torching every Alien egg in sight.” While my sadness at the moment where the Alien is released into outter space seemed to stem from a personal sympathy with the Alien mother, Bundtzen(1987) was angered by the same scene for different reasons. She describes how the mother Alien represented the female biology. She writes ‘I want to ask why the female body must be represented with such primal terror, such intense repugnance, and why it needs to be so resoundingly defeated, sucked into the vacuum of space as if thrown back into whatever imaginative void could have germinated such horror. If the terrors of the film are, as I’ve tried to indicate, grounded in archetypal fears of woman’s otherness, her alien body and its natural functions, no amount of physical abuse, fire power, and nuclear explosions will provide an audience with psychological catharsis.’