Maternal Ferocity
How one movie changed my views on motherhood
Some people pattern their life on what they know, on their familiar surroundings. Some people pattern life after moral teachings and spiritual lessons found in their scripture. Others, myself included, pattern a life built on scraps of stories found through culture — both timeless and pop.
Television and movies aren’t kind to mothers, often portraying them as long-suffering babysitters or shrill control freaks. Yet I’d argue one of the best examples of how to mother comes from the most unlikely source. James Cameron has never been heralded as a champion of feminism, yet he helmed what I’d argue is the truest female-driven film. Alien had already set up Ripley as a character who could handle herself better than any man on the Nostromo. But somehow Aliens manages to further flip expectations. Here, Ripley is still the hero bravely prevailing in the face of immense danger. But this time, Ripley takes all her ferocity and channels it towards the most daunting task: motherhood.
I knew my baby was a girl. Everyone knew. But my knowing was different, because I didn’t want to believe it. Through everyone’s guessing, I held out for a boy, hoped for the easiness of the male sex. What do I know about girls? My entire history, particularly those years in the public school system, proves my feminine knowledge stacked up to a puff of air, a grand freeze in the headlights of emotional manipulation.
If I knew so little about girls, how could I possibly be expected to raise one in society? To teach her to be strong, to have friends, to succeed against crushing expectations? All I saw when I looked down her future road was misery, hard work, constant struggle in every facet of life. Yes, I wanted a boy. It seemed easier.
So I knew. Even before I went in to the medical office to see the alien form of my very own gestating creature. From the first moment I saw her ghost-gray legs and spine, before the ultrasound technician pointed out those three lines that changed the future, I’d already resignedly accepted I was growing a girl child. Two hours later I sat alone on the curb outside an Original Pancake House and sobbed.
All I had learned about womanhood was gleaned from that love of TV, movies, and the example of a mother who was decidedly uninterested in engaging with worldly conceptions of femininity (or females as a whole). Pop culture trained me to look anywhere but other women for role models. My aspirations were closer to Indiana Jones and Zorro than any of their female companions. It worked for a while, the threadbare bandage granting me strength while alienating me from the girls who only looked as far as where MTV told them to look. I knew I wanted my daughter to not just adjust to or flout society around her, but demand more. I wanted her to see that she could do these things and still be a woman.
I met Ripley when I was 23. My first reactions had more to do with the incredible world and story of this universe, Scott’s thick tension in the void of space and Cameron’s action acumen. Only through reexamining Aliens would I realize a mothering instinct could exist without negating the woman into a simpering pile of bland.
Motherhood is ferocious. Motherhood instigates courage. Motherhood fosters caring and protectiveness, all the impressive heroic feats of any action star, but with an admirable selflessness that makes those traits more meaningful. With Ripley, fights became something more than a vehicle for personal glory or a nebulous method of saving the world. It becomes a fierce, yet not overbearing, expression of how it feels to care for another human being.
At the core, Ripley’s vendetta against the aliens isn’t just spurred by her own traumatic experiences — although being forced to survive against an alien only to wake in a world completely changed is horrifying on its own, and would be enough story to fuel her rage. No, Aliens intelligently layers on her role as a mother in a way that ups the ante without being too shallow. We know that Ripley was on the Nostromo to provide for her daughter back on Earth. And we know that when Ripley returns, 57 years later, that daughter is dead.
Finding Newt, a small girl in the shambles of terraforming colony Hadley’s Hope, gives Ripley a natural chance at saving a child. Newt exists not just to make up for Ripley’s own lost daughter, but to exhibit a continuation of the desire to care for something beyond one’s self. Even though her child is gone, Ripley’s overwhelming capacity to love doesn’t shut down. As much as she could have retreated from engaging with the world, she chooses the optimism of love over the isolation of fear, culminating in a showdown that outdoes any OK Corral scene.
Ripley vs. the Alien Queen is more than the ultimate cat-fight. The Alien Queen perverts motherhood, taking the pure instincts to create goodness and swapping it for the selfishness of domination, a master race of aliens that destroys all in their path. In the urge to preserve and protect autonomy (in the form of Newt’s childhood limitless potential), Ripley stands against any form of domination. The corruption of the controlling mother is literally crushed in an iron grasp and expelled into nothingness. The mothering ideal — altruistic caring for another — prevails.
It took a while for the genius of Ripley to sink in. A week after that first ultrasound, I rewatched Aliens, and everything was starkly clear. Love, in whatever language it’s expressed, is what I can pass on to my daughter. The capacity to genuinely want good for another human being can transcend gender and societal expectations. She can learn that at the core of any hero journey, she can learn that from Ripley, and hopefully she can learn that from me.
