Seth M. Walker
The ship is overrun with terrifying extraterrestrial killers, slowly picking off the remaining crew and passengers one at a time. Your group is heading to a docked craft, trying to stay ahead of the horde so you can escape, and something catches your eye. A door. Discreet and not particularly inviting. But, there’s something curious about it—or at least what it has on the other side. Your companions urge you to leave it alone and keep going, but you just can’t. The door opens. You slowly survey the room, taking in container after container of grotesque and deformed human–Xenomorph hybrids, horrifyingly preserved and left on display. These are the mess‐ups, you quickly realize. Strolling through the crowded vessels of carnivalesque freaks, you make your way to a table in the back of the room. Sprawled out, mutated, and noticeably in great pain, an all‐too‐familiar face pleads for you to end her suffering: “Kill me.” You’ve known for most of your short, accelerated life that you started out in this room, too. But it didn’t quite sink in until now—now that you’ve come face to face with the previous, failed attempts. You respond with a wash from a flamethrower, granting her wish, and destroy the remaining, disgusting trophies, enveloping the room in explosive flames. These…things. These creations. You’re one of them. But, standing before the torturous ruin, you realize what makes you different: you’re going to live.
Lieutenant Ellen Ripley just can’t seem to rest in peace in the Alien saga—even after she actually dies at the end of Alien3. Fast‐forward two hundred years to the opening sequence of Alien: Resurrection where United Systems Military (USM) science officers aboard the Auriga are toying with her DNA—salvaged from frozen blood samples on Fiorina 161—to try to create a cloned version of the alien queen that was growing inside her at the time of her death. The only problem: they need to successfully clone Ripley in order to get at a cloned Xenomorph embryo. Shortly after the film begins, when we witness a supposed clone‐job and alien‐extraction gone right, we notice it took the USM eight attempts to succeed. This cloned version of Ripley survived the disturbing caesarean section‐like procedure and has been kept alive by the science officers as an “unexpected benefit.” A number “8” is tattooed on Ripley’s forearm, hence her official title in the film: Number 8, or, eventually, Ripley‐8. And it doesn’t take her long to start developing at an extremely fast rate and realize what she is and what they have done.
Part of this advanced level of learning and comprehension is a result of Ripley’s DNA hybridizing with the Xenomorph during the cloning, the effect of which we see more clearly in those failed attempts she discovers on display in the laboratory. Ripley‐8 is much cooler than that Ellen Ripley from two centuries ago everyone keeps talking about: she’s part alien. She’s got heightened levels of sense perception and memory recovery, exaggerated levels of strength and precision (remember that next time you try to shoot some hoops with her, Johner!), an incredible tolerance for pain, and that infamous acidic blood we’ve all grown to both fear and find totally awesome. It’s pretty clear why the science officers wanted to keep her around to study and observe. But, when she does make that alarming discovery about who—or, what—she is, she’s confronted with a crisis of identity and meaning that continues throughout the remainder of the film: not only has she genetically merged with a species she’s been fighting for almost three hundred years, but she’s also not really Ellen Ripley. So, let’s take a closer look at this crisis and her place in the world around her—a crisis that I think we can rightfully say seems pretty absurd.
The French essayist, journalist, playwright, and novelist (yeah, busy guy!) Albert Camus (1913–1960) made a name for himself in French intellectual circles as the fellow who thought life was characterized by “absurdity,” and it’s easy to see some parallels between his views and the situation of Ripley‐8 throughout Alien: Resurrection. According to Camus, “the absurd” arises from the desire for meaning and intelligibility in an unintelligible world—or, in other words, “the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”1 It’s not that the world is absurd. The absurd is what links the two—Ripley’s desire to make some sense out of her troubling existence and the fact that the world is unable to offer her any such sense. Camus repeatedly stresses this point in different, sometimes rather poetic, ways throughout his classic essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” But the point is always the same: we yearn for the world to make sense to us, and its response is that it couldn’t care less about what we do or how we feel.
Let’s face it, Ripley‐8 has one messed‐up and confusing life. How could she not feel like a lab‐created freak who only exists because of some unforeseen outcome of the latest, most successful cloning attempt? Sometimes, she’s rather clear about this feeling, too—like when she confesses to the synthetic, Annalee Call, that her alien‐filled nightmarish dreams are more of a comfort now than anything else:
RIPLEY:
CALL:
RIPLEY:
That’s how depressing her life is. It’s hard not to feel bad for Ripley: she’s not only struggling with the fact that she was created in a lab as part of some sort of twisted science experiment, she’s also dealing with an internal biological battle of human versus alien. Not only that: since she has been fighting this alien race for most of her life, how could she not completely and utterly despise what she is now? This is where Camus comes in: maybe she should just kill herself.
Camus begins “The Myth of Sisyphus” with one of the most startling opening lines ever written and one of the most important and pressing questions you’ll likely ever ask yourself: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest…comes afterwards.”2 And that’s it. Close your copy of Camus, grab a beer, and give that question some thought before you even decide whether or not to bother reading the rest of his essay: is life worth living, especially after recognizing its absurdity?
Now, before you start to think, “well, yeah, of course it’s worth living—I have a great job, wonderful friends and family, and even on the worst days, I still find joy in the beauty of the natural world,” keep in mind that those valuable aspects of life aren’t exactly what Camus was talking about. We can have joyful experiences and delight in our activities—and for Camus, that’s really the only point of our existence. Remember, he perceived the world as completely unintelligible—not as devoid of happiness and pleasure—and our effort to make some overarching, intelligent sense out of it all is what causes our pain and turmoil. Ripley‐8 seems to grasp this, too. Call asks Ripley at one point if she understands her desire to save everyone on the Auriga: “I did once. I tried to save…people. It didn’t work out.” Reflecting back on her previous—and all‐human—life, Ripley has finally realized that the world (and universe!) is a mess, so why bother trying to make sense of it all?
This brings us to some of the options Camus offers for responding to the absurd: Go ahead and kill yourself, Ripley. Just end it—hopefully, this time, for good. Label this option “physical suicide.” Or maybe: This universe may seem like it doesn’t make any sense, Ripley, but you must have faith that it does, even if you can’t figure it out. Camus calls this one “philosophical suicide.” A third option: Life is absurd? Okay. Now we know what we’re up against, Ripley. Let’s get off this ship before it blows. This one is Camus’s favorite, and, for him, is really the only sound option out of the three: “revolt” against the absurd.
But, let’s back up a little bit here. What’s so wrong with the first two? If the meaning of life is the most urgent question to be asked, and if it’s necessarily characterized by a lack of meaning, why shouldn’t Ripley‐8 just kill herself? Well, for starters, physical suicide amounts to a submission—a submission and a confession that life is just too much to handle. And it really dodges the problem we’re dealing with here: there’s no meaning in death either, so why give in and preclude any further responses to absurdity? A strong human(ish) woman like Ripley‐8 is certainly unlikely to go for this as well, even in such crummy circumstances. The first time she meets Call, Call sneaks up on her with a knife:
CALL:
RIPLEY:
There’s a confusion of meaning involved here, which is probably making you scratch your head at this point: life not having any meaning does not exactly translate to a life not worth living. We can be happy and have valuable experiences, and, as we’ll see, that might just be enough—or at least all we can ask for.
When Camus talks about philosophical suicide, he’s really talking about an irrational “leap of faith.” Typically, this involves belief in a deity or some other source of supernatural power, the existence of which solves the problem of unintelligibility—either in this life or in another after death. Camus refers to this option as a negation of human reason, and, just like physical suicide, it too evades our rather serious problem. What he means is that humans have limitations on their knowledge: Ripley can’t possibly know everything about the universe, where “she” was for two hundred years before resurfacing in her new, Xeno/Ripley state, or the origins of both the human and Xenomorph species, among so much else. Instead of rationally recognizing this limitation on reason, people commit philosophical suicide by sacrificing it for an irrational explanation: “when, starting from a philosophy of the world’s lack of meaning, it [the mind] ends up by finding a meaning and depth in it.”3 It’s tempting to give in to this sort of thing: “History is not lacking in either religions or prophets, even without gods,” Camus assures us.4 Our goal, he instead advises, is to stay strong and only accept what little we can observe and truly understand.
We don’t really see this taking place in Alien: Resurrection. And, actually, the only time “religion” comes up is when Ripley and Call enter the Auriga’s chapel and Call crosses herself: “You’re programmed to do that?” Ripley judgingly asks (we can hear the chuckle just waiting to burst out of her chest, too…pun intended). But, the fact that Call was programmed to react that way in a chapel does imply that the universe hasn’t exactly been purged of what Camus would call irrational ideologies. This scene illustrates a tendency Camus recognized throughout history that humans might continue to have a hard time avoiding when confronted with the nature of their existence—even in the face of advanced technological development and futuristic space travel and colonization.
This brings us to the third option: permanent revolution—an acceptance of one’s fate, and a revolt against absurdity. This option is equally a rejection of physical resignation and of any possible explanation beyond the observable facts of life. And we see this taking place with Ripley‐8: she’s not interested in ending her own life, no matter how crummy it may be, and she’s not interested in allowing Call to do it for her—and she’s certainly not “finding God” behind the door of the laboratory. One must live, Camus claimed, in order to reject “the most obvious absurdity”: death.5
For Camus, this revolt doesn’t just remain a solitary experience either, which is a theme he takes up in The Rebel. What we can’t forget is that Ripley‐8 isn’t alone in this absurd scenario. Everyone else aboard the Auriga is faced with a similar, urgent question. Ripley’s might be the most apparent, considering her unnatural and troubling creation, but she’s rebelling just as much as everyone else. Camus tells us that “from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience” and “the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men…I rebel—therefore we exist.”6 But, one of these other passengers is actually rebelling under very similar circumstances: Annalee Call.
Ripley and Call are both artificial creations living a similar sort of existence. Ripley‐8 is not Ellen Ripley: “You’re a thing. A construct. They grew you in a fucking lab,” Call tells her. But, Call isn’t exactly the young woman she presents herself to be either. When she’s shot in the chest by Doctor Mason Wren during the group’s escape to the Betty, we were certainly surprised to see her come to their rescue shortly thereafter—with a gaping hole in her torso, oozing the white, gooey android “blood” we’ve seen in previous Alien films. “You’re a robot?” Ripley rhetorically asks after seeing the “wound.” “Son of a bitch!” Johner adds. “Our little Call is just full of surprises.” But, she’s not just a robot. She’s apparently “second gen”—a robot designed by robots, or, an “auton,” making her that much further removed from humanity and different from her companions. Just like we felt sorry for Ripley‐8, it’s hard to not feel something similar for Call when everyone starts to talk about her as if she’s a lesser creature.
When Call and Ripley are sitting in the chapel after the gunshot incident, after Call has plugged into the Auriga’s computer to reroute the ship for its Xeno‐destroying crash landing, she tells Ripley, “At least there’s part of you that’s human. I’m just…look at me. I’m disgusting.” This brief exchange is actually pretty telling: it’s clear that Call has been struggling with the same sort of issues Ripley has, but in a different way. Just as Ripley is disgusted with herself—for being genetically intermingled with her archenemy—Call is disgusted with an artificiality of a different kind. And both are equally rebelling against their absurd circumstances: during their first exchange, Ripley tells Call that she’ll never get off the ship alive. “I don’t care,” Call replies. “Really?” Ripley counters. Grabbing Call by the throat, she whispers into her ear: “I can make it stop.” But, we know it doesn’t end for either of them in that scene. Both Ripley and Call, plagued by their equally absurd existences, could’ve ended each other’s lives right there. But, instead, they both chose to rebel—both individually and collectively—forming a bond as others taking charge of their fates.
At the end of the film, Ripley and Call are shown sitting in a deserted landscape, staring out towards what remains of a crumbling Paris, France—a scene Camus himself may have observed hundreds of years earlier under better circumstances, when it was still the dazzling City of Light. As they’re contemplating their next move, Call turns to Ripley and asks, “What do you think? What should we do?” “I don’t know,” Ripley responds. “I’m a stranger here myself.”
As we’ve pointed out above, they’ve already responded to the “now what?” suggested by the absurd: they’re living, they’re choosing to rebel against an apparent lack of meaning and intelligibility in the world. They might not know how things are going to turn out for them—it’s not really clear how long androids last or if they naturally “die,” and Ripley’s life expectancy, with Xeno‐spiked blood flowing through her veins, is equally unclear—but trying to answer these types of questions risks what Camus warns us against: there are limits to what we can know, and our revolt acknowledges this fact.
Camus ends his essay by showing us an image of the absurd hero par excellence from Greek mythology: Sisyphus. Sisyphus is punished by the gods for skipping out on a pleasant stay in the Underworld, and is tasked with rolling a large boulder up to the top of a mountain, only to watch it fall down. Then he’s to roll it back up. Again. And again. For eternity. You’re probably wondering, what’s so heroic about that? Well, the thing to understand about Sisyphus, Camus tells us, is that he can’t stand the gods (obviously!), and that he equally hates death and loves life. Sound familiar? Put another way, Sisyphus has no interest in either philosophical or physical suicide. But, his existence is rather meaningless: he’s just repeatedly rolling a boulder up a mountain forever. And that’s the “catch” Camus is getting at: “The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.”7 The only way we can have a meaningful existence in this world is by not caving in to its inherent meaninglessness (that’s a head‐spinner, I know). Even so, drawing some noticeable parallels between Sisyphus and Ripley might help us make some sense out of Camus.
When Call asks her, “Why do you go on living? How can you stand being what you are?,” Ripley simply responds: “Not much choice.” That’s just who she is: someone living in the face of the absurd, understanding her limitations without sacrificing her reason to irrational appeals for meaning, looking death in the face and telling it to wait another three hundred years. Camus is most interested in that moment right before Sisyphus starts back down the mountain to retrieve the boulder and begin again: when he’s fully aware of what he’s doing as an endless and pointless task. But, we can imagine Sisyphus finds joy, Camus argues, in his choice to keep going—when he takes charge of his own fate. Just like Ripley.
We see that Ripley‐8 is living in revolt of the circumstances of her life, but perhaps she didn’t really grasp the similarly endless and pointless mission she’s destined to have until the end of the fourth film. Maybe the “here” where she’s a stranger isn’t Earth per se, but the state of conscious awareness that she, like Sisyphus, is fated to repeat the same, meaningless task: exterminating the Xenomorph species to save humanity. Starting with rolling the boulder of self‐destruction aboard the Nostromo in Alien, she’s been returning to the bottom of the mountain in each addition to the saga ever since—from beating a Xeno queen in an exoskeleton‐suit duel on the Sulaco in Aliens, to her self‐sacrifice in Alien3 to keep the Xenomorphs extinct once and for all. The cycle never ends, and each grand finale is made meaningless by the continuation of the narrative in the next film.
Until Alien: Resurrection, we could argue that Ripley wasn’t conscious of her fate, nor was she even living in revolt—a fear of death is not the same as its rejection, and the hope for a better, Xeno‐free existence was clearly a pipedream. When the queen is fully grown, we might argue that Ripley finally realizes the repetitive nature of her absurd story: “It’s too late. You can’t stop it. It’s inevitable,” she tells Call. But when Ripley decides she’s going to live despite this endless toil, now manifest in the extreme—she’s part alien now!—she’s entered the “hour of consciousness” shared by Sisyphus on the top of his mountain.8 But, again, we can find joy in this. Just as Camus tells us of Sisyphus, we must imagine Ripley happy as well.