A. ROBIN HOFFMAN
Despite the many aspects of style, narrative, and of course chronology that distinguish Rosemary's Baby from Alien , these films share an interest in humans' potential to incubate, literally, their own destruction. Perhaps more importantly, in both cases curiosity about latent/fetal power manifests itself partly through cinematic interrogation of the limits of human vision. Thus, when at the conclusion of Rosemary's Baby (1968) Rosemary cries out at the sight of her eponymous offspring “What have you done to its eyes?” the viewer is not granted access to what Rosemary sees; the camera remains trained on the mother rather than revealing the bassinet's contents. This conspicuous denial results in frustration mixed with relief: we want to see whether her fetus was physiognomically doomed or redeemed, but we also want to avoid the shock of seeing marks of evil in the flesh. 1
A similarly suspenseful approach to gestation, with corresponding pressure on the visual, also characterizes Ridley Scott's science fiction film Alien (1979). However, in Alien , we are in unfamiliar territory (even more so than was the case with the ominously labyrinthine New York City apartment building where the drama of Rosemary's Baby unfolds) as we are floating in outer space with inhabitants of the future who approach intergalactic errands with casual boredom. Such dislocations allow science fiction to probe the logical limits and potential disasters of ever-more-complex technology. And with its exploration of dark human interiors, both physical and emotional, Alien anticipates films like Innerspace (1987), which not-so-subtly implied that the human body is the real “final frontier.” In this metaphor of outer/inner space, the fetus becomes the potentially hostile new life for humanity to encounter (Cobbs 201). Alien simply represents this real-life threat analogically, with a literal alien rather than a pregnant human who might compare her experience to alien invasion.
Stimulated by America's need to confront the fraught effect of visual access on the social power of fetuses in the 1960s and 1970s, these two horror films counter the rhetorical and technological triumphs of medical imaging with warnings about the irrevocable consequences of revealing what lies hidden. Before fiber optics, this human “innerspace” would have been destroyed by the dissection necessary to make it visible, but by the 1960s and 1970s the womb could be illuminated intact by photographers like Lennart Nilsson and by ultrasound. In less than fifteen years, fetuses went from being invisible, both literally and politically, to practically unavoidable. 2 Literal or symbolic fetuses began appearing in horror films, and their shocking appearances—by which I mean both their mere presence and their visual characteristics—register what must have been done to viewers' eyes by the process of gaining access to fetuses in utero .
Many post-mid-century American horror movies have featured terrifying offspring, and although individual films have attracted a significant amount of attention from scholars, the phenomenon as a whole remains understudied. 3 Furthermore, the films themselves tend to gloss over gestation and forge ahead to the appearance of the demon-child. The Bad Seed (1956), It's Alive! (1973), The Omen (1976), and other films mining the demon-child vein follow this course. However, while films about specifically fetal threats are comparatively rare, those that do exist have achieved high profiles according to both critical and commercial indicators: Rosemary's Baby was one of the first of the “evil offspring” films to garner the level of acclaim suggested by its recognition at the Academy Awards, while Alien 's staying power was demonstrated by its 2003 theatrical re-release and profitable sequels. 4 Perhaps more importantly, threatening and powerful images of fetuses, along with fetuses in general, have received an impressive amount of attention, especially from feminist critics. The many studies on representations of the human fetus published in recent years—spurred primarily by legal debates over civil rights and the increasingly medicalized experience of pregnancy—describe the ways in which fetal imagery has been used to “humanize” fetuses and grant them subjectivity, often with corollary threats to women's rights. For instance, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky's landmark analysis of “The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction” notes that for antiabortion activists, “a picture of a dead fetus is worth a thousand words” (263). Meanwhile, some feminist critics of film have also noticed the appearance of benign fetal characters in movies like Look Who's Talking , released in 1989 (Mehaffy 178).
Uniting film criticism and a feminist view of cultural history, I follow the path suggested by Ernest Larsen, who rightly notes that “Hollywood horror narratives in which women give birth to monsters” would naturally lead to films dealing with the horror of “fetality” itself because “every fetus ” is “a potential monster” (italics in original, 240–41). 5 It is my contention that both Rosemary's Baby and Alien are social documents of the growing horror of pregnancy experienced by both women and sympathetic men from the 1960s up to the 1980s, as reproductive technology and legal actions colluded to empower the fetus at the expense of the previously sacrosanct pregnant woman. I thus align myself with film scholars like Paul Wells who claim that we cannot understand what is horrifying about a horror movie without understanding the contemporaneous fears and concerns that penetrated both its production and the viewing public who first screened it, however unconscious the correspondence. 6 The release of Rosemary's Baby in 1968, not long after the publication of Nilsson's famous in vitro photography series “Drama of Life Before Birth” in Life in 1965, obviously coincides with widespread and various forms of social upheaval that dominated the 1960s (including civil rights and women's movements) as well as with the new and increasing availability of ultrasound technology. 7 Likewise, Roe v. Wade (1973) and the birth of Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube baby, on July 25, 1978, were closely followed by the release of Ridley Scott's Alien in 1979.
It was also at this point in time that the fetus began to separate from the pregnant woman carrying it; in 1970, the state of California first added the word “fetus” to its Penal Code's description of potential murder victims. This paved the way for fetuses to acquire a perhaps disproportionate level of agency, as we have been subject to what Susan Squier describes as “the growing presence of a hypostatized fetal voice, speaking to us from the margins within” (17). 8 At the very least, women's authority over their own pregnancies has been erased in favor of laboratory tests, and physicians “know” that a woman is pregnant before she does (Farquhar 163). It is no coincidence that both of the films I discuss feature representatives of the medical industry who are belatedly exposed as villains, controlling—and thus capable of thwarting—individuals' efforts to monitor their own condition. The “other” side of the legal debates about fetuses naturally revolves around the rights of the pregnant woman/nascent mother, but the physical difficulty of choosing sides in this situation effectively demonstrates the potentially tangled character of social, emotional, and political concerns. Related trends have continued into the 1990s and beyond so that, “increasingly, the maternal, or more precisely the potentially maternal, body is no longer conceived of as a discrete entity under the control of the mother.… Rather, it is seen as a being that colonizes another marginal and oppressed being, the fetus” (Squier 17). The name of the National Right to Life Committee, founded in Detroit in 1973, concisely evokes the stance that developed during a time of heightened awareness about the fraught legal status of fetuses. The “Right to Life” perspective has since been adopted by many Americans and remains a potent means of framing political discussion about how to apportion rights to both maternal and fetal bodies.
Different forms of visual access to horrifying fetuses in these two films—suppressed in Rosemary's Baby and technologically invasive in Alien —suggest that pregnancy offers a particularly visceral way of figuring ambivalent power relationships mediated by the possibility of visual contact. Together, the two films manifest the rising anxiety about fetal personhood generated by fetuses' increasing visibility; independently, each confirms that whether a particular fetus is visible or not at a given moment is ultimately less important (or threatening) than the status all fetuses gained in the mid-1960s as potentially visible. Even more specifically, these films emphasize the crucial role that the possibility of visual access played in bringing fetal threats into individual and social consciousness. The hostile, monstrous fetus in horror is a powerful figurative backlash against the inundation of purportedly helpless fetuses and the potentially oppressive ripple effects of their “silent screams.” 9 As such, it provides viewers with a narrative, lexical, and visual framework in which their fears about physical colonization and the medical industry's invasion of reproductive processes can be articulated.
In her feminist history of pregnancy, Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi describes the experience as “much like a socially constructed initiation rite,” during which women gradually assimilate motherhood into their identities (54). Participants and observers of the American version of that “initiation rite” during the latter half of the twentieth century noted the ways in which women experienced pregnancy as being at times horrifying, even when the child was wanted. In her classic commentary on the experience of motherhood, Of Woman Born (first published in 1976), Adrienne Rich admitted that “without doubt, in certain situations the child in one's body can only feel like a foreign body introduced from without: an alien” (64). In a similar rhetorical move made two years later, Sheila Kitzinger compared pregnancy to “possession” or “being taken over by an unknown and even hostile stranger” (78). Myra Leifer's study of the psychology of pregnancy, conducted toward the end of the 1970s, found that many women were cataloguing the possible deformities of their unborn children (47). One mid-1980s pregnancy manual urged women to “be free of fear and full of confidence,” presumably because that state may not have come naturally (Curtis and Caroles 4). Feminist accounts of pregnancy in the last quarter of the twentieth century thus countered the insistently upbeat approaches of parent and pregnancy guides by admitting that denial may be a woman's first response, particularly if she does not want to become pregnant (Rabuzzi 55). She may experience ongoing ambivalence about the fetus, granting it subjectivity and withdrawing it as her comfort level permits (Rabuzzi 59). Most important for my purposes is what Rabuzzi describes as “the sometimes terrifying, sometimes exhilarating play of the imagination” during pregnancy, when fears about monstrous and dead fetuses often are expressed as nightmares (62-63). These documented experiences of gestational horror powerfully testify to a real-world resonance embedded in their cinematic representation.
For the women who helped form the original audiences of Rosemary's Baby and Alien , such visceral fears could be exacerbated by more abstract yet extremely pressing legal concerns. Increasingly sophisticated technologies granted doctors, lawyers, judges, and people in general—although not pregnant women, whose access to their fetuses is presumably already as intimate as possible—greater access to fetuses and a stronger sense of their potential personhood, with sometimes oppressive effects for pregnant women. We may, as Robyn Rowland does, recognize a correlation between the feminist movement of the late 1960s and the increasing pressure on women to hand over care of their fetuses to external agents:
It is no accident of history that the emphasis on the fetus as a patient with “rights” comes at the time when women are demanding more control over pregnancy and birth, many of them moving outside the Western medical tradition to home birth and to women's health centres. The technologies developed to monitor, save, “improve” or discard the fetus endanger this control. All the technologies affect the mother, yet the fetus is named as the central character. By giving the fetus rights, medicine ends up giving it greater rights than a woman. (122) 10
In Nilsson's pictures and similar ones disseminated by right-to-life groups, the fetus is most often portrayed as a smaller, redder, and strangely luminescent newborn; in fact, the fetus's resemblance to a fully formed baby often is insisted upon where it may not be apparent (Farquhar 165). 11 In this way, such groups implicitly respond to or undermine pro-abortionists who would pre-empt a fetal claim to civil rights by denying human ones. But in all cases, the fetus's vulnerability and reliance upon external assistance must remain unquestioned in order for there to be a debate about how much power it should be granted. Fetuses actually offer a logical extension or amplification of an affective mechanism described by Sabine Büssing, who suggests that unusual powers of intellect or strength are part of the recipe for “horrific children.” 12 If powerful children are horrifying and unnatural because they defy expectations of helplessness and dependency, then fetuses in possession of personal agency would constitute an even more horrifying contrast.
Many critics have relied on a psychoanalytic approach when discussing cinematic representations of horror, including the specific evil fetuses of Rosemary's Baby and Alien . As, for instance, when Barbara Creed brings Julia Kristeva's abject mother to bear on her exploration of the “monstrous-feminine” in Alien , these perspectives are primarily concerned with relationships between mothers and children, and usually in a way that demonizes the mother. The demonization of the mother may be encouraged by the medium of film itself; E. Ann Kaplan suggests that “film is perhaps more guilty than other art forms of literalizing and reducing Freudian motherhood theory” (128). The primary drawback of the psychoanalytic approach is that even the phenomenon of birth trauma fails to recognize the full experience of pregnant women and their relationships with their unborn offspring by focusing on the postpartum human. Kristeva's allusions to the horrors of “a border” (9) or what Creed interprets as “the undifferentiated” (48) thus far have failed to be identified with the fetus's literally undifferentiated cells. I list these shortcomings primarily to bolster my effort, inspired by Kaplan, to keep the “historical” and the “psychic” mother separate (138). I also wish to maintain some distinction, however fuzzy, between a pregnant woman and a mother, as well as between the social and personal experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. Although psychoanalytical approaches undoubtedly tap into the subconscious reactions of a viewing audience, they dismiss more literal readings of the ways in which horror films like Alien and Rosemary's Baby utilize a highly visual medium in order to explore, enact, and even exploit real fears predicated by visual representations of fetuses circulated widely in contemporary media.
Like Barbara Duden, I favor a historicist reading of the coincidence of reproductive monitoring technologies, civil rights for fetuses, and women's increasing personal autonomy. Duden insists that the fetus “as conceptualized today, is not a creature of God or a natural fact, but an engineered construct of modern society” (4). Technology's gradual absorption of the fetus separates it from its mother, lends it an aura of subjectivity and, in a number of cases, the right to an attorney, and can plunge women into (perhaps unwanted) sensations of motherhood or place the “diagnosis” of motherhood in medically licensed hands (Duden 28). Such technologies offer the promise of early diagnosis, better prenatal care, and even “bonding” between the fetus and the world outside the womb. But Petchesky convincingly has likened the fascination with fetal images to a “fetishization” that eclipses their purported medical functions and almost inevitably fosters women's subjugation to the fetuses they carry (277). 13
Thus, during a period of heightened anxiety about the corollaries of fetal personhood, we find cinematic representations of fetuses that register their disproportionate—and increasing—power as a form of monstrosity. More importantly, the films share a thematic preoccupation with vision that I will explore in greater detail below and which plays out in what the characters can or cannot see (especially regarding the visual marks of fetal monstrosity) and whether or not they can trust what they do see. These cinematic power struggles dramatize the real-world consequences of visual access. At the moment when fetuses suddenly became visible, politically relevant, and even capable of indirect legal compulsion, they also became candidates for horror villainy. Rosemary's Baby and Alien cast the hostile fetus in a narrative struggle between good and evil, corralling the audience's unfocused fears into moral parameters that validate them. Indeed, in the case of Alien , we encounter a symbolic fetus in the form of the titular creature, rather than a literally pregnant human, which allows the filmmakers to more clearly mark hostility through monstrous physiognomy. Ultimately, the fetus's status as a potential threat becomes downright self-evident when translated to contemporary reality by way of such cinematic representations.
I begin with Rosemary's Baby , directed by Roman Polanski, primarily because the hostile fetus is not only central to the plot but—with Rosemary's swelling belly serving as a proxy—frequently in the visual center of each shot as well. The relationship between the camera and audience perspective introduces a significant variable for interrogating the status of the unborn as it relates to visibility. Closely based on the novel of the same title by Ira Levin, the film's basic narrative survives adaptation: through the collusion of her husband Guy and the well-meaning Satanists next door, Minnie and Roman Castevet, Rosemary is apparently raped by Satan during a drug-induced half-dream. When she becomes pregnant, those closest to her conclude that she is bearing Satan's offspring, but Rosemary only gradually becomes aware of her status as the prospective mother of the Antichrist. Her ignorance is overshadowed by both a physically trying pregnancy and a growing sense of betrayal and deception. However, the film differs significantly from the novel in its refusal to confirm or deny the infant's status as the Antichrist. As I suggested at the outset, the ambivalence of the film's concluding scene is anchored in the visual. Although Rosemary herself must spend the film untangling the truth of her experience (with the viewers following her through the process), Rosemary's Baby is misleading in an important respect from the very beginning: it promises a film about a baby and then does not provide a single frame in which a baby appears. 14 We never receive direct visual confirmation of the child's moral status. But the evocation of ominous potential was certainly effective; in the years since its release, the film's title has come to serve as a flexible cultural reference for fetuses or other gestating human “conceptions” with perverted origins and potentially disastrous destinies.
Since the future mother is not nearly as warped as the fetus threatens to be, nor is she actually a mother until the film's concluding scene, frequent slippage between motherhood and its prologue—at least nominally—is a surprising thread running through critical discussions of Rosemary's Baby . Büssing, for instance, insists that “it is the perversion of motherhood which evokes the ultimate impression of horror within the spectator” (149). But this language implies that the enactment of motherhood is warped in this film; that is, that Rosemary is a horrifying, or at least unorthodox, mother. Quite the opposite is true, in fact, as it is Rosemary's desire for a baby and concern for her unborn child that lands her in the trap set by Guy and the Castevets. As Lucy Fischer points out, many of Rosemary's anxieties would likely encourage audience identification or sympathy since they are common among women pregnant with normal fetuses (422-23). Rosemary's selfless concern for her child prompts her to reject her husband, set out alone on a dangerous escape, and finally venture into a roomful of apparently sincere Satanists and threaten them physically; her terrified yet determined resistance provides the dramatic thrust of the film. Even though she suspects her child to be condemned (either to damnation or to a life irrevocably damaged by early trauma), Rosemary wants to care for him rather than abandon him to people who would not only care for but worship him. Rosemary's final choice to stay and mother the (devil's?) child is presumably the “perversion of motherhood” to which Büssing refers, and yet it occupies a small fraction of the film. Rhona Berenstein comes closer to the mark when she suggests that Rosemary's Baby is “centrally concerned with motherhood” (59). But in so doing, she implicitly conflates pregnancy with motherhood and collapses distinctions between the already-born and the not-yet-born. This is the same logic underlying the notion of “fetal personhood” that emerged partly from images like Nilsson's, which routinely frame fetuses as entities independent of the women carrying them (Petchesky 268). By maintaining a crucial distinction between pregnancy and parenthood, we can recognize that Rosemary's Baby horrifies us with the potential perversion of the unborn rather than the visible “perversion of motherhood.”
Fischer more helpfully describes the film as “a skewed ‘documentary’ of the societal and personal turmoil that has regularly attended female reproduction” (412). By “turmoil” Fischer presumably means that a woman's announcement of pregnancy tends to demand her submission to the attentions of well-meaning friends, relatives, and the medical community. As the fetus's needs augment and even potentially compete with the pregnant woman's, these attentions are just as often, if not more, focused on the former. Though Sharon Marcus refers to the novel, her suggestion that Rosemary's Baby “construes pregnancy as a hyperbolic invasion of Rosemary's privacy—the result of a rape, the pretext for constant surveillance by her husband, neighbors, and doctor, and an ongoing invasion of her body by a predatory, parasitical fetus,” holds true for the movie as well (131). The key word here is “hyperbolic” though, since feeling the mother's stomach or drawing her blood were routine “invasions of privacy” committed by doctors in the 1960s in the name of fetal surveillance. Furthermore, all of these invasions are, at least on some level or at some point in the film, welcome: Rosemary explicitly and audibly wishes for children, she is glad to receive special attention from the highly regarded obstetrician Dr. Sapirstein, and she initially (and accurately) takes the Castevets' proffered nutritious drinks and solicitous attention as an indication of concern for her health and that of her prospective baby. Such behavior is clearly perceived by Rosemary to be unassailably normal. The abnormality lies entirely within Rosemary's body in the form of a purported demon-fetus and her constant, debilitating pain. Thus, she must accept the burden of suffering or adopt the (socially untenable) position that the fetus itself is part of the invasion.
Rosemary has difficulty sorting her friends from her enemies because she is preoccupied with the fetus's health—she laments at one point, “I'm afraid the baby's going to die”—and because her enemies-in-disguise channel their efforts through her fear. But Rosemary's vision is clouded also by the fact that her fetus was conceived during a half-waking nightmare. After swallowing some of the “chocolate mouse” presented by Minnie Castevet, Rosemary falls into a drugged stupor that mixes her own guilt about her lapsed Catholicism with an apparent experience of being raped by Satan himself. One of the more horrifying moments of the film is when she cries out in fear and pain, “This is no dream! This is really happening!” The conception scene significantly relies on alternating visual perspectives and their unstable relationship with reality to frame Rosemary's fetus as a potential threat. While Rosemary must reach some conclusion about whether to trust her vision of Satan or not, the viewer must choose whether to trust the camera: when it presents Satan's face from Rosemary's perspective, it could be showing the film's reality or Rosemary's skewed perception. Dr. Hill later diagnoses Rosemary with hysteria, but the viewer's initial, visual access to her interior world makes it difficult to share his benevolent disregard for her anxiety. As Wells points out, “Rosemary's Baby playfully engages with empathy and identification in the sense that we are offered Rosemary's perspective” (83), in multiple senses. That is to say, the camera adopts Rosemary's viewpoint at crucial moments in the film: during the nightmare/rape, when Rosemary rearranges the Scrabble tiles to reveal Roman's true identity, and when Rosemary, knife in hand, invades the Castevets' apartment. As a result, her concern for her baby becomes the audience's concern, and we also struggle, reluctantly, to accept the reality of both Satanists and conspiracy within the film.
Proceeding from this significant engagement with audience perspective, I concur with Fischer, Berenstein, and others who perceive a strong affect generated by how Rosemary's Baby portrays a pregnant woman as susceptible to manipulation by not just medical personnel, but also friends and family. As Berenstein suggests, Rosemary's lack of control over her pregnancy is a significant contributor to the film's nightmare-like effects (59) and may have prompted one contemporary reviewer to describe the viewing experience as being “like having someone else's nightmare” (Sweeney 6). Having witnessed her dreams and shared their destabilizing effect, the audience also experiences Rosemary's pregnant vulnerability, including the ways in which it silences her. She is even made vulnerable by her desire to become pregnant since her husband uses it as leverage to make a Faustian deal with the Castevets, to mask her drugging with a romantic evening, and then to explain away the injuries from her rape. As a result, we may be inclined to see the Satan-worshippers as “enemies.” But Rosemary also is represented as carrying the monstrous fetus that plagues pregnant women's nightmares, so our sympathies are conflicted. Focusing entirely on Rosemary's experience would suggest that women alone are the target of this film's warning against empowered fetuses when in fact, this fetus's nominal destiny is to subjugate the entire world to Satan, whose “power is stronger than stronger” and whose “might shall last longer than longer,” according to the Satanists' leader. If we cheer for Rosemary to survive and/or escape, we also potentially cheer for the survival of the hostile fetus. Its tremendous evil potential poses the widest threat in Rosemary's Baby .
Significantly, the film presents this dilemma against a cultural backdrop of developing medical imaging technology and imminent visual access to the womb. Images of fetuses had circulated widely in mainstream media at the time of the film's release, and the film draws on the emotional power of the visual that undergirds emerging notions of fetal personhood. But the technology for imaging fetuses in utero was far too rare and/or expensive to be a diagnostic tool. Cruelly, Rosemary cannot exploit any imaging technology that would reveal her fetus's true nature, though the prospect of visual confirmation hovers tantalizingly over Rosemary's belly: her own body either protecting the Antichrist or casting suspicion on an innocent and much-desired human fetus. The viewer is left with the sense that Rosemary is paralyzed by her condition and her ignorance about it. If only she knew the truth about her fetus, she would surely take steps to neutralize a confirmed threat, as did the Castevets' first victim, the suicidal Terry Gionoffrio. (We get the sense that Terry was aware of the plot when Rosemary overhears Minnie telling Roman, “I told you not to tell her in advance. I told you she wouldn't be open-minded.”) But Rosemary is chronically reliant upon others for information about her own body, which reinforces her subordination to the contents of her womb: she needs Guy to inform her that her period is late; she needs doctors to confirm her pregnancy and assess her condition; and she needs friends to tell her that her constant pain is a health hazard. This scenario is undoubtedly familiar to many women who endure highly medicalized but normal pregnancies, particularly first-timers experiencing brand-new sensations. Rosemary's ignorance of her complicity with a malevolent plot is ensured by her ignorance about pregnancy, which leads her to surrender herself to Dr. Sapirstein. When he tells her, “Don't read books. Don't listen to your friends, either,” Rosemary takes his advice and largely isolates herself with the enemy. The profound vulnerability of a pregnant woman is most painfully apparent when Rosemary seeks the aid of her first doctor, Dr. Hill, only to be delivered by him back into the hands of her enemies. The medical industry controls and then thwarts her efforts to learn more about her condition and the fetus within, even though it had previously promised diagnosis and information, albeit via blood tests instead of visual access.
Behind the interventions from “friends” and doctors, however, the being to whom (or to which) Rosemary is most vulnerable, and to whom we watch her submit herself, is the fetus she carries. The movie focuses on an embattled rather than a mothering Rosemary because the image of her bulging abdomen, pregnant with both potential evil and potential child, emphasizes her subordination to her unseen fetus and its external agents. Everyone who sees her comments on her wasted appearance, which suggests that the fetus really is a parasite that is consuming her—or as Karyn Valerius suggests, that the fetus has been cast into “the role of vampire, the traditional parasite of literary and cinematic horror” (131). The delivery scene reiterates Rosemary's subjugation to her fetus as well, a horrifying aspect overlooked by Fischer's consideration of “Parturition and Horror in Rosemary's Baby .” Fischer describes how the delivery scene “subjectively replicates woman's experience of traditional hospital birth—of being physically restrained, anesthetized, and summarily separated from her baby” (424). However, focusing on how the film demonizes the medical industry in this scene deflects attention from this particular pregnant woman's demanding and potentially demonic fetus, to which she has already ascribed personhood by naming it. That anticipatory act of identification subtly reveals that despite the suspicions Rosemary has been harboring about her neighbors, doctors, and husband, she has already submitted to incredible social pressure to acknowledge her fetus as a separate entity, with needs and even perhaps a will of its own. As Rosemary is tied down for delivery, she calls for help and then fades into unconsciousness with the words, “Oh Andy, Andy or Jenny, I'm sorry my little darling. Forgive me!” This begging for forgiveness echoes her earlier dream-state request for absolution from the Pope, whose authority has apparently been surmounted, or at least equaled, by that of the fetus. Rosemary's change in allegiance, from the Pope to the fetus, significantly widens the threat posed by a purported fetal Antichrist. If she has indeed switched moral sides at that level, Rosemary herself is just the launching pad for a much larger campaign of destruction. At any rate, Rosemary seems to feel that she has failed to meet the fetus's demands. By the very end of the film, Rosemary's involuntary submission to its needs, predicated by its presence in her body and her ignorance about its nature, has been transformed into voluntary alliance with the destiny assigned to it by a Satanic cult. This choice is new to her precisely because the conditions of her pregnancy rendered her utterly dependent on the medical community but incapable of communicating with its members.
Rosemary's voice is restored by parturition, however, and she delivers our first clue to the baby's monstrous appearance when she wails, “What have you done to its eyes?” The heretofore-deferred authority of vision is reiterated by Minnie, who offers to show off his hands and feet, which are also presumably deformed. Rosemary finally, literally, sees how the inchoate fetus has resolved into the truth of her baby's situation. Then, as the Satanists stand aside, Rosemary chooses to mother rather than being forced to do so. However, the mere fact that she can choose is more important than the choice made. The novelty of options contrasts sharply with the previous lack of them since both Rosemary and the Satanists—she unwittingly and involuntarily, they by choice—were subjugated so intensely by this tiny, apparently helpless but (potentially) awesomely powerful baby while it was still in the womb. We in the audience are denied more than Rosemary's perspective—we are also left to ponder the moral valence of a choice based on visual access.
David J. Skal comments that “[a]fter Rosemary had her baby, virtually all births in the popular media would be monstrous or demonic” (294) and identifies Ridley Scott's Alien as an heir to this tradition of exploiting “reproductive anxieties” (301). In the eleven years between the two films, reproductive technology developed quickly and produced correspondingly dramatic shifts in perceptions of fetal personhood and the cinematic resonance of represented fetuses. By the late 1970s, medical imaging technology had become accessible enough to lessen the awe originally associated with images of fetuses. But the result of these technological advances was a kind of media saturation, so that visible fetuses retreated from the realm of art into the less glorious and more ominous realm of the medical.
In Alien , the conspicuous visual lacunae of Rosemary's Baby are replaced by an insistence on the potential dangers of visual contact and a warning against pursuing access to fetal environments. Multiple scholars have recognized “the film's pervasive gynecological imagery,” as John Cobbs put it, and he has even suggested that “the nature of the life-threatening, interior ‘other’ in Alien is of a particular sort: it is fetal” (201). I would like to reiterate the ways in which the film carefully characterizes the threat as specifically fetal, but I also would like to draw attention to the significance of transferring that threat to a future time and place. During a long-distance haul, the crew members of the spaceship Nostromo are sidetracked by unexplored territory, and their obligatory investigation of the new planet includes a disastrous encounter with alien eggs. Over the protests of Officer Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver), the medical officer Ash allows crewmember Kane, smothering beneath a large “face-hugger” parasite expelled by one of the eggs, to reboard the ship. This breach in protocol sets in motion a horrifying chain of events—including the famous scene in which a larvae-like alien “bursts” from Kane's chest—as the alien grows with supernatural speed and kills nearly every human who crosses its path. Ripley emerges as the sole survivor after she initiates the Nostromo 's self-destruct mechanism via a central computer ironically nicknamed “Mother”; in the dramatic final confrontation, she manages to expel the huge creature from her escape pod by daring to open the airlock. While Cobbs quite explicitly characterizes Alien as an “Abortion Parable,“ 15 I would suggest that the film presents a fetal threat in ways that connote not only the abortion debate—nominally “resolved” by Roe v. Wade a mere six years prior to the film's release—but also the experiences of reproductive monitoring technology that so heavily influenced it.
This insistence upon a historicist reading is, I realize, an implicit rejection of the psychoanalytic readings that have dominated much analysis of horror in general and Alien in particular. A large part of my reluctance to employ a psychoanalytic approach to Alien is simply that I see no need to replicate the work that many have already accomplished, particularly that achieved by Creed in her landmark essay, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: an Imaginary Abjection.” Even there, however, direct references to the fetus-as-subject are limited to Creed's connection between Kane's invasion of the alien nest and “Freud's reference to an extreme primal scene fantasy where the subject imagines traveling back inside the womb to watch his/her parents having sexual intercourse, perhaps to watch her/himself being conceived” (57). I am motivated even more by the sheer confusion of fetal imagery offered by Alien , which—as many conflicting critical opinions would suggest—resists dissection and categorization. There is simply too much going on in terms of (“)mothers(”), gestation, wombs, and fetuses to extract a one-to-one allegorical correspondence to any discussion of Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis without resorting to either distortion (of theory or of the film) or self-contradiction. At the very least, as Catherine Constable has pointed out, in Alien “the use of the womb as a key reference point clearly provides a break from the Freudian system in which the mother is encoded in relation to a phallic standard” (177). This is not to say that psychoanalytical approaches are not without considerable value; to the contrary, they surely offer as much insight into the film as they do into the minds of the viewing audience. The confusion of imagery in Alien seems, however, to reflect underlying social confusion and fear about gestation and fetuses, as well as an inability to articulate these concerns in conventional terms of sex and gender.
Even when focused on representing the unavoidably (female) physical human experience of pregnancy, science fiction can exploit the flexibility of an unknown future in order to explore horrific fears about bodily integrity, invasion, and rape in a way that decouples biological sex from reproductive roles. The film's success in this endeavor is manifested by critics' continuing disagreement about how to read the representations of sex and gender in Alien . Creed expounds at length on the monstrous-feminine in the guise of the “oral-sadistic mother” and “the phallus of the negative mother” (138-39) while others insist upon the phallic qualities of the creature that inseminates Kane (Hermann 37), the chest-bursting infant alien (Hermann 39), and the alien's protruding and penetrating mouth (Cobbs 201). The alien is not assigned a sex during any phrase of its development, so its phallic imagery can be attributed to either a masculine or a feminine subject. A complementary bounty of womb-like spaces also have been identified by critics, with at least one male and several inorganic incubators further complicating the dynamic exchange between gender and embodiment. 16 The following chart not only summarizes some of the fetal and gestational imagery that previous commentators have identified in Alien , but provides a quick estimation of which impressions predominate:
| Mothers/Fetal carriers | Wombs/Pregnant bodies | Fetuses |
| Mother (Nostromo ) | Sleeping chambers | Crew |
| Mess Hall | Crew | |
| Nostromo as a whole | Crew, alien | |
| Ripley's escape pod | Ripley, alien | |
| Alien edifice | Nest/eggs | Aliens |
| Crewmember Kane | Self/torso | Alien |
In the midst of these wombs-within-wombs, we easily can see that the alien is being incubated most often—unwillingly and/or unwittingly—by a series of host bodies, and this fetal alien is the most threatening entity in the film, in the sense of being a representation of potential , rather than fully unleashed, aggression and hostility. This is in significant contrast with the sequels, which inevitably incorporate Ripley's concrete awareness of the alien's destructive powers and also are much less invested in representing gestation because the cultural context had shifted in the interim. 17
Precisely because she could not see her fetus and visually confirm its humanity, Rosemary was vulnerable to the machinations of medical professionals and neighbors channeled through her unborn child. In Alien , we see a similar imbalance of power registered by the female crewmembers' vulnerability to male crewmembers' curiosity about and authority over a dangerous alien fetus. In fact, the threat posed by embryonic inhabitants of the alien world is perceived by the female crewmembers first even though they do not serve as fetal carriers—Susan Jeffords points out that Lambert and Ripley are “the only crewmembers to show suspicion of the alien” as they “recognize before the men do the signs of reproduction” (77). The women intuitively react with resistance, exemplified by Lambert's repeatedly stated desire to “get out of here” while she and Kane explore the alien planet. Later, Ripley insists that the stricken Kane not be let aboard Nostromo without a regulation quarantine period; her command is overridden by the medical officer, who is actually a robot operating on behalf of their employers, a shadowy organization known simply as “The Company.” He has been charged with bringing back alien life-forms at any cost of human life. To accomplish this end, he has been planted in a privileged site: the infirmary, where the physically vulnerable seek aid and medical authority trumps all others. Just as Rosemary's doctor could summarily dismiss her pregnancy-related anxieties to support the Satanists' campaign, the Nostromo 's medical officer can insist on bringing the alien-bearing Kane on board under the cover of compassion. His pivotal power over the main computer, “Mother,” is similarly bound up in his role as her guardian. Mother had been surrendered to the care of Ash, the man of science, in much the same way that pregnant women routinely surrender themselves to their obstetricians. The computer can only blindly follow orders; after Ash's status as a Company “mole” is revealed and he is decommissioned, the computer is unable to resist Ripley's decision to initiate a self-destruction sequence. Ultimately, Mother merely serves as another example of how males, including a robotic medical professional literally made male by technology, consistently dictate access to the threatening entity.
Perhaps ironically, males' control over medical and imaging technology in Alien renders them more, not less, vulnerable. It is men who first literally see the alien/fetus, first when Kane invades the egg-strewn nest and then later when the medically trained crewmembers Ash and Dallas investigate the stricken Kane; this visual access is both a sign of and a channel for their power to unleash the fetal threat. Kane shines his headlamp onto a single egg to reveal pulsing movement within, and the shell refracts the light to make the incubating alien appear backlit, almost haloed. It is an act of visual penetration that bears an uncanny resemblance to those perpetrated by Nilsson and which also evokes the mixture of curious awe and vague unease associated with those first images of human fetuses in utero . The subsequent scene of Kane's “impregnation” clearly characterizes visual contact as a form of invasion or aggression in its own right, deserving of retaliation. Nor does he gain any informational power for his pains. In fact, imaging technology usually fails to augment human vision in Alien . When Ash and Dallas scan Kane with a futuristic x-ray, they cannot explain why Kane is still alive, much less use the visual information to deduce the creature's designs on his body. Later, Dallas succumbs to an alien attack when the crew's tracking device cannot register three-dimensional movement on a two-dimensional screen. Although Kane absorbs the most immediate counterattack, the entire human crew is implicitly punished for shining a light into a dark place of growth.
The ways in which the crewmembers actually “see” alien life, i.e., with the egg illuminated by Kane's headlamp, inside Kane's body via fluoroscope, and with motion-based sensing and tracking devices, strongly resembles the way in which people must rely on ultrasound to establish a (one-way) visual connection with a fetus that looks more amphibian than human. The crew's experiences with imaging technology encourage corresponding skepticism about the benefits of real-life counterparts, especially since sonograms and fetal photographs often present interpretive challenges as well. More simply, an “alien,” particularly one with the sleek armor-like skin and acidic blood of a machine, serves as an excellent metaphor for the real difficulties that humans have confronted when making judgments about personhood. Fetuses, unlike babies who have evolved to pander to our most basic biological weaknesses, have an alien quality to their appearance that has drawn forth compensatory rhetoric to frame their images. 18 The film's substitution of fetus-like alien for fetal human undermines the rhetoric conventionally used to rehabilitate alien-looking images of human fetuses and recasts visual strangeness as a kind of physiognomic warning about aggression. And the fetus-alien is horrifying in large part because it is an unclassifiable potential of destruction, without natural boundaries. The Company knows this and is no doubt courting hubris in their plan to harness that potential for their weapons division.
As if to confirm the infectious power of its hostility, the fetus-alien actually brings out the hostile-fetus quality of the crew, which turns on the alien, the Company's robot emissary, and finally Mother. The film encourages us to draw parallels between their behavior and that of the alien (as my chart above demonstrates) by alternately positioning the crewmembers as fetuses. At no point in the movie does the crew fully abandon the womb-like space(s). Nor does the death of one fetal carrier eliminate the threats posed by the fetus(es) it once carried (loosely defined). At the same time that the alien threatens the crew, standing as the most obvious “fetus-as-bogeyman” (Skal 301), the crewmembers occupy fetus-like positions and threaten each other. Eventually, fetal-Ripley proves to be a lethal threat to Mother. It is Mother who implicitly allows Ripley to destroy the Nostromo since it is through Mother that Ripley learns that the Company has prioritized the alien's return to Earth over the crew's and deputized Ash to guard their interests. Indeed, Mother is ultimately subject to the autonomy of the fetuses within; shifts in the balance of power between them neither liberate Mother nor introduce new forms of subjugation since Ripley merely initiates irreversible processes of auto-destruction that were already programmed. And once Ripley is the sole survivor aboard the Nostromo , she still takes refuge in a womb-like escape pod and unwittingly brings the fetal threat of the alien with her. She finally beds down again in a yet another womb-like sleeping pod, and James Cameron's Aliens continues the theme with Ripley's (literally) nightmarish realization that the alien eggs have been incubating the entire time.
The nightmarish quality of the movie's fetal imagery is reinforced by the fact that the narrative begins and ends with sleep (Creed 140). We first see the crew as they emerge from their sleeping pods, and the final shot is of Ripley peacefully sleeping. The implication is that it might all have been a terrible dream, specifically a dream about futuristic reproduction gone wrong. The claustrophobic and metallic environment of the Nostromo , in which a computer named “Mother” governs life-support systems, frames both the alien and the crewmembers as fetal cyborgs, suggesting that humans are being overwhelmed by technology from without and within. Contemporary technological interventions may have been seen as producing more babies than ever while simultaneously turning fetuses into lab experiments and pregnant women into incubators. 19 This delicate relationship with technology at the time of Alien 's release is informed further by the recent advent of in vitro fertilization, heralded by the birth of the first “test-tube” baby in 1978. While Berenstein believes that Alien is “about a contemporary patriarchal dilemma, i.e., no matter how hard patriarchal culture tries, it still can't reproduce without mothers” (60), I would suggest the opposite: Alien expresses the fears that technology is assisting the fetus in rapidly gaining far too much autonomy and that men may also eventually serve as mothers, fodder for an invasive fetus/parasite. 20 As its encore presentation of traitorous medical practice would suggest, Alien 's reliance on fetal imagery capitalizes on a pre-existing fear of physical invasion rather than creating one. Moreover, it insinuates that the threat of unnatural impregnation is not limited to women since the alien's first victim is a male host and the movie is riddled with contradictory sexual imagery and deviations or omissions from conventional gender roles. Neither Alien nor Rosemary's Baby rely entirely upon female audiences for their continuing success, nor do I think we can assume that men viewing these movies are horrified or stimulated only by gore, Satan worship, or Sigourney Weaver in her underwear. Rather, the fear of being inhabited, i.e., raped and/or impregnated, is surely accessible to men for very much the same reasons that it frightens women: a state of submission with an unfortunate resemblance to demonic possession, it is an unfamiliar experience that distorts one's body and produces pain. However, in the real world, the battle is necessarily fought within a woman's body, as she submits to or resists the medical intrusion of reproductive and imaging technology. The movie's popularization of figures like the fetus-as-alien or the womb-as-spaceship dovetails with an available narrative and lexicon for discussing pregnant women's situations while making it possible for males to imaginatively experience their social and physical liabilities as well. 21
As a number of horror films have profitably suggested, a child's potential to cause harm is limited apparently (if not actually) by its visible physical boundaries. Cinematic representations of fetuses, on the other hand, suggest that their physical outlines are vague enough to stymie a sense of proportional power. In Alien , this anxiety about undefined borders translates into an alien that is larger-than-human-sized and subject to constant surveillance—but can still sneak up on its victims. In Rosemary's Baby , the amorphous threat is a literal fetus stowed in Rosemary's burgeoning belly for ninety percent of the film—and from this position, it still manages to draw upon enough human resources to overwhelm Rosemary's resistance. The growing visibility of the fetus generates more horrifying sights for the audience instead of vicarious opportunities to reassert control. This blatant cinematic focus on the gestation of hostile fetuses dramatizes the very specific fears of pregnant women besieged by the oppressive “options” of reproductive technology and by the privileging of fetal civil rights over pregnant women's, crucially reinforced by timing. Emphasizing the important role that visual access to fetuses has played as an ambivalent fulcrum of power, these movies bring into view the potential horror of a pregnant woman's situation at this particular point in history. As Duden also concludes, a pregnant woman who wants to retain primary agency must confront “the series of powerful suggestions that stamp her as the reproducer of a life” (54). Even preliminary interactions with the medical community may be a form of submission because mere contact naturalizes “social responsibility for the future of the life within her,” and the momentum of “prenatal testing and the biotechnological care and management of her insides” inexorably guides pregnant women toward “the scientifically guided care of a modern infant” (Duden 54). Both films translate this empowerment of the fetus into settings that are somehow distanced from everyday reality: Alien propels us into the future and Rosemary's Baby invokes the supernatural. But rather than voiding the implied warning, these settings ground a dramatically resonant exaggeration of fetal agency. That is to say, by prioritizing the representation of emotion over realism, they can more vividly illustrate the consequences of empowering the unseen, critique the technology that renders it visible, and implicate all those who participate in such efforts.
We need not resort to psychoanalytic readings of sex and gender to concede that the most immediate threats, and the ones that remain unconquered, are those represented by fetuses throughout both films. Rosemary's fetus subjects her to demands from both inside and out, as the Castevets foreshadow the semi-voluntary intrusion of technology on pregnancy by invading Rosemary's personal space in all ways possible, feeding her chemicals and even dictating her medical care via Dr. Sapirstein. In Alien , the crew's clumsy invasion of the alien nest results in a reciprocal intrusion; they, too, invite a hostile fetus into their midst and provide its sustenance (unwittingly on all parts but that of Ash). By the ends of the respective films, Rosemary's baby has secured her devotion along with that of the coven, and although one alien has been banished, scores of them continue to incubate on the unknown planet. These films only nominally restore order at their conclusions by translating the fetus into a vulnerable and fully perceptible infant. The one time the alien can be clearly seen is when it clings desperately to an umbilical cord-like harpoon before being expelled into space. Similarly, Rosemary's baby is vulnerable to rejection only once it has been visibly exposed. But when framed by movies that acknowledge their visual slipperiness, hostile fetuses become identifiable threats to which women in the audience can cathartically respond. The films' portrayals of pregnant and typical adult bodies endangered by powerful fetuses and the responses to that threat—whether brave or submissive—are surely potent images for women who feel responsible for the fetuses they carry but also resent the ways in which social, political, and medical forces can turn their responsibility into servility.
Real horror stories abound in which courts have ordered women to submit their own bodies to the perceived health demands of their fetuses, for instance with coerced caesarian sections. 22 In her 1970 polemic The Dialectic of Sex , Shulamith Firestone called for “the freeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means available, and the diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole” (270). It was implied that technology would be one of these potential “means available,” which indeed has offered motherhood to some who struggle toward pregnancy and preserved lives that otherwise might have been lost. In addition to freeing women, however, it also has spawned a fetus that is, as Ash describes the alien, “a survivor … unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Advances in reproductive and imaging technology between 1965 and 1980 allowed for greater access to the fetus but also invited the projection of moral and legal debates into a space that had previously been relatively “unclouded.” Thus, Rosemary's Baby and Alien respond to the increasing pressures on women to heed the voice of the fetus and subordinate their own bodies to its demands by recasting the helpless unborn baby as a power-hungry, dangerous, and barely human force biding its time behind a shield of human flesh. In an environment where the invisible and insatiable fetus has more power than the body it inhabits, women may find pregnancy just as unnatural or invasive as men would, and the hostile fetus becomes a far more potent cinematic image. More importantly, it gives an accessible form to fears that might otherwise remain undefined and unchallenged. Like Ripley in Alien , we are reasonable to maintain skepticism about humanity's ability—even that of remorseless and deceptive Company executives—to harness the destructive power of the alien(s) to their own ends. The fact remains that the fetuses themselves have no apparent thought but for their own survival. Shining light into the womb brings the fetus into view but does not necessarily diffuse the darkness that surrounds it.
I am grateful to Dr. Greg Semenza for feedback on an early version of this essay.
1. I would argue that this is the case regardless of whether the child has “his father's eyes” because his father is Satan or because the Satanists have disfigured a normal infant—the film prevents its audience from confirming either possibility by withholding visual access.
2. In this respect, my interrogation in many ways complements Karyn Valerius's sociohistorical approach to the representation of fetal personhood in Rosemary's Baby .
3. As the need for this collection on “Evil Children in Film and Literature” demonstrates, critical attention to the popular image of horrifying offspring has lagged behind public consumption. When Sabine Büssing's Aliens in the Home: The Child in Horror Fiction was published in 1987, it could rightly claim to be “the only study of its kind” in terms of both breadth and depth. Even though she relegates “The Child in the Horror Film” to an Appendix, Büssing offers a still-rare instance of commentary on the frequent appearance of children in horror movies. Robin Wood and Gary Hoppenstand are perhaps other notable exceptions, but Wood's discussion of “the Terrible Child” in horror films stalls with identification of the “recurrent motif” and links it to a “unifying master figure: The Family” (83), while Hoppenstand's “Exorcising the Devil Babies” is a single article.
4. Ray Narducy usefully has pointed out that Rosemary's Baby “was influential in causing the horror genre to focus on the child as evil” (402) since it predates a rash of films with a similar theme, but accounts for the film as merely “a cultural reaction to the radical, protesting ‘children’ of the 1960s” (402–03). As many others have noted, The Exorcist might be seen as the culmination of a trend in representations of evil offspring initiated by Rosemary's Baby .
5. Larsen also briefly notes that scientific imaging would contribute to “anxiety” about the potential monstrosity of fetuses but declines to pursue a historical reading of this phenomenon (241). For a more recent discussion of “fetal monstrosity” that is similarly tangential in its approach to the cinematic representation thereof, see Andrew Scahill, “Deviled Eggs: Teratogenesis and the Gynecological Gothic in the Cinema of Monstrous Birth.”
6. As Wells cogently points out, “The history of the horror film is essentially a history of anxiety in the twentieth century…. Arguably, more than any other genre, it has interrogated the deep-seated effects of change and responded to the newly determined grand narratives of social, scientific, and philosophical thought” (3).
7. Janelle Taylor's history The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram discusses the pivotal role played by medical imaging technology in motivating pro-life political campaigns.
8. The issue remains pertinent in the specific context of fetal homicide laws; the Unborn Victims of Violence Act was signed into law by President George W. Bush on April 1, 2004. Pro-choice advocates like the National Organization of Women have continued to voice concerns about the need to distinguish between legal abortion and fetal homicide, fearing that such laws may be used as leverage to overturn Roe v. Wade .
9. The Silent Scream (1984) presents a sonogram image reacting to its helpless position and obviously relies heavily upon both technological “insight” and its ability to grant the fetus subjectivity. I would argue that The Silent Scream capitalizes on a pre-existing and growing acceptance of such imagery at the same time that it furthers it.
10. See also Chapter 7, “Prenatal Technologies: Ultrasound and Amniocentesis” in Farquhar's The Other Machine , pp. 161–77, and Cheryl L. Meyer's The Wandering Uterus .
11. For more on the rhetorical strategies that work to promote fetal personhood, see Newman, pp. 7–27, and Hartouni, pp. 1–66.
12. See particularly Chapter 4, “The Evil Innocent,” especially “The Possessed Child,” pp. 101–05, and Chapter 5, “The Monster,” pp. 110–36.
13. Rabuzzi is particularly concerned with the unnatural quality of women's “prebirth visual encounter[s] with the fetus” via ultrasound: “Instead of the almost unconscious unity of the baby invisibly resting inside the body, this is a sudden dislocation. Now what has seemed part of one's self, albeit a new part, is suddenly ‘other,’ separate, before its natural time for separation” (65).
14. It is true that an extradiegetic projection of reptilian skin and yellow eyes appears onscreen. This image could be interpreted as a kind of “flashback” to her first glimpse of the baby. However, it could also be a flashback to her experience of conceiving the child, which included visions of Satan, and—in my opinion—does not settle the question either way. Instead, it reiterates our dependency on Rosemary's unreliable visual experience to draw such conclusions.
15. I would agree with his claim that the “final vacuum expulsion” of the alien strongly suggests a reference to abortion (201), but it seems to me that Cobbs stops short of acknowledging the ways that fetal threats loom throughout the film and broaden the scope of its social warning.
16. For example: “a womb-like chamber where the crew of seven are woken up from their protracted sleep” (Creed 129); “she expels the creature from the body of her spacepod” (Cobbs 201); “the gigantic womb-like chamber in which rows of eggs are hatching” (Creed 130); Nostromo as womb/mothership (Creed 130 and Skal 301); “the cozy womb-like atmosphere of the mess hall” (Bell-Metereau 15); “the dominant motif of [Nostromo ] is the interior of the human body—the windings and curvings of organs and glands” (Cobbs 201); Kane as womb (Bell-Metereau 15 and Cobbs 201).
17. I am indebted to Dr. Karen Renner for pointing this out to me.
18. For an excellent reading of Nilsson's Life photographs and the rhetorical strategy of their captions, see Newman, pp. 10–16.
19. See Rowland, Farquhar, and Gena Corea's The Mother Machine .
20. Skal suggests that “the chest-bursting scene … became the seventies' surpassing evocation of reproduction as unnatural parasitism” (301).
21. Rowland testified to the currency of outer space metaphors prior to Alien 's release with her characterization of “the [medicalized] treatment of the fetus as both person and patient”: “It is accompanied by the alienation of women, who now become merely the ‘capsule’ for the fetus, a container or spaceship to which the fetus is attached by a ‘maternal supply line’” (121).
22. For additional discussion of such conditions, see “Woman as a Dissolving Capsule: The Challenge of Fetal Personhood” in Rowland's Living Laboratories , pp. 118–55, and “Reproductive Interventions” in Meyer, pp. 164–91.
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