The Mythic Cycle of Ellen Ripley, Part 2: The Two Persephones
RIPLEY’S FIRST DESCENT
Ripley’s mythic sequence begins while she sleeps in the void of space, between planets, between eras, over a lifetime — her daughter’s lifetime. Because this is the mythic Demeter cycle, it begins with loss and descent. Because this is a 20th-century vision of the future, and Ripley is confined to a space station on the verge between the underworld and Earth, it takes place in an artificial setting — a small orbiting garden, a virtual parkland, a video forest — hinting at Ripley’s nature and home but delivering only a semblance of it.
Dressed in the corporate uniform, Carter Burke, who seems to be Ripley’s caseworker for the Company, brings her word of her family’s fate. Ripley’s daughter, Amanda, died while Ripley was away.
Even though Amanda grew to adulthood, had a life of her own, and died on Earth, from Ripley’s perspective it feels as though Amanda has been taken from her. Or, more accurately, whether or not Amanda has been taken, Ripley has lost her. That loss is real. Unlike Demeter, Ripley has no one person to blame. She can blame the Company for her mission to Acheron but she cannot expect to seek out and find Amanda. She cannot get her back.
Note that Ripley never, in the text of the film, sets foot on Earth, where she might regain peace and power. Instead, Ripley descends into anger and despair, drudgery and tears. She argues with the Company, she takes on a job in the loading docks, she wakes up sweating from traumatic nightmares, but she never returns to Earth. She stays in orbit, smoking cigarettes in a tiny apartment on the edge of space, in the fringes of the underworld. She punishes herself.
When Burke comes to offer her an assignment for the Company, Ripley turns him down. She is still in the first stage of her mythic cycle: loss and descent.
When she finally hits bottom, she calls Burke, waking him up, and agrees to a voyage back through the underworld, to Acheron, a place of death. So begins the second stage of her cycle: the search.
Ripley may not know what exactly she’s searching for — peace, confidence, closure, battle — but as Demeter she intends to roam the land of the dead looking for what she lost: her daughter. Ripley’s search is short. After meeting the marines and exploring the aftermath of the alien attacks on the colony compound, Ripley makes a fateful discovery. She finds a daughter, Newt, who has lost her mother. Each plays the mythic role the other obviously needs. Ripley, the mother, has found a daughter to rescue from the underworld.
This relationship is a metaphorical shadow. Newt is not the ghost of Ripley’s daughter and Ripley is not really Newt’s mother. Rescuing Newt may help Ripley accept a return to Earth and fulfill her role as a mother but it cannot bring Amanda back from the dead.
Perhaps Ripley can ritually consecrate her adoption of Newt by enacting the Demeter myth again? Hades is happy to oblige.
RIPLEY’S SECOND DESCENT
Alien warriors, the soldiers of Hades, attack Ripley, Newt, and the surviving marines while Bishop is off summoning their flying mount. Newt is separated from Ripley in a fall and ends up in the lower reaches of the colony, in what may be a river of Hades. Ripley and Hicks rush to the rescue, torching their way toward Newt, but Hades’ shades are quick. Newt is carried off to Hades’ realm.
So Ripley begins her mythic sequence again, with a second loss and descent. This time, though, Ripley has a chance to take action and save her newfound daughter. (Not a big chance, because the atmosphere processor will soon detonate and lay a nuclear winter over a Nebraska-sized region of Acheron, but a chance.) With mortal Hicks incapacitated by an alien, Ripley must count on her mythic ally, Bishop, to help her in her quest.
According to the Homeric hymn to Demeter, the goddess searched “with flaming torches in her hands,” but Ripley brings a pulse rifle and a flamethrower, strapped together.
Ripley’s second descent takes her through lightning, smoke, and fire into Hades’ realm beneath the atmosphere processor. She descends down an elevator shaft while a disembodied voice — a chorus, perhaps — warns her that time is running out, that doom is nigh. Then the elevator doors open… and Ripley begins her second search.
Ripley follows Newt’s beacon deeper in the underworld, where Newt has been bound and chained before a pomegranate of Acheron. Ripley’s search succeeds — but with a twist. She pulls her adopted daughter out of Hades’ grip before she can eat (and be eaten by) the pomegranate seeds. This is a triumph denied to Demeter.
Before Ripley and Newt can begin stage three of their cycle, however, they stumble into the monsters’ lair, wherein dwells Demeter’s awful and grotesque counterpart, the Queen of Hades, imagined as a twisted materfamilias and a parody of Ripley’s motherhood. Here we see the first true demonstration of Ripley’s wrath, of the might granted to her when her divine power is restored: she puts the fields of Hades to flame.
Leaving the alien queen to die either amid her burning brood or in the colossal explosion coming from the atmosphere processor, Ripley and Newt enact the third stage of their mythic sequence and ascend back up the elevator shaft to a nigh-climactic rescue by winged Bishop in Hermes mode. The fleeing survivors take to the air and to orbit just as Hades’ castle explodes below.
But, of course, that’s not the end.
RIPLEY’S ASCENT: THE MOTHERS BATTLE
After a quick celebratory beat in which Ripley praises Bishop as an ally, we are reminded that our ascent is not yet complete. Hades spears the magic-robot Hecate before tearing him apart. We’re not out of the underworld yet.
And so we get a final battle between the mothers — Ripley and the Queen — above Acheron, on a ship floating in the void. They battle for final possession of Newt, who was promised to Hades and, in Earthly myth, is meant to divide her year between Demeter and Hades. Out here in the starry, eldritch depths beyond Earth, where myth has been contorted already, the fight could go either way.
This does a few things: it gives us a final, breathless action beat to mimic and magnify the finale of the previous film (part of Aliens’ duty as a sequel). It also demonstrates Ripley’s heightened power now that she has ritually enacted the Demeter myth to adopt Newt. Finally, it tells us that Ripley and Newt are not safe on this side of the Acheron — Hades can still reach them here. Demeter is not yet back to Earthly soil.
In this battle, Ripley uses a skill she learned in her grief, during her first descent, while working in the space station’s loading docks, to combat her nasty counterpart. Ripley wears her grief (you know, the power-loader) like armor, wields it like a hammer (and a torch), and takes on Hades in a hand-to-hand battle like warriors of old.
After a harrowing fight, Demeter is victorious and Hades is cast back out of the boat and into the underworld.
Ripley lays wounded Hicks and broken Bishop into their beds for stasis. Reunited as mother and daughter, Ripley and Newt put themselves into hypersleep for the long voyage back to Earth. Having confronted their monsters and broken the seasonal cycle that left Demeter heartsick on Earth, perhaps they can dream in peaceful sleep.
Except. Ripley achieved one ascent after the rescue of Newt but she descended twice. Her descent and search for Newt occurred partway through the mythic sequence that was playing out when Ripley discovered Newt the first time. That first mythic sequence remains incomplete; there’s been only one ascent.
Ripley’s escape from the underworld is still incomplete. She has fled (and destroyed) the deeper lair of Hades but she is still not out of the larger underworld. The interstellar reaches between Acheron and Earth are still unsafe. Yet she must brave hypersleep and its risks again.
When last Ripley traveled from the underworld back toward Earth, she lost her daughter while she slept. What happens when Ripley ventures in sleep toward Earth this time?
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