I was trying to explain to E. why I’m obsessed with the Alien films, and the art of H.R. Giger. To someone unobsessed with horror, it must seem silly. So I’ve been thinking about the meaning of Alien, and the meaning of the alien, and why I love those films so much.

The alien is Slavoj Zizek’s favorite symbol of jouissance, the Lacanian notion of pleasure-in-pain that is sort of the secret satanic lifeblood of the world, and which erupts where the world has become wounded through some trauma. Zizek’s approach is good, in principle, but he’s notoriously careless, and what he actually says about the movie suggests he never actually saw it or was drunk when he did. He describes the face-hugger as a “disgusting polyp,” for one thing. Odd word choice. But I do think it is worthwhile to push the joy-in-pain idea. What is the “trauma” that gives rise to the alien? What is its relevance to the “real world” outside the film, especially now, almost three decades later?

The gender politics of the Alien films, especially the first one, are clear enough: Ripley is a career woman. If you remove the terrifying intrusive presence (Zizek’s excellent methodology for interpreting any horror film), you are left, in this case, with a modern workplace of the late 1970s, where women have made their way into the next-to-top-most echelons (as Ripley has) but still find their authority precarious.

The setting of Alien is significant. From the very first shots, the Nostromo is presented as an office, with its corridors, its papers, its little human touches (the glass drinking bird). Kane, the first to awaken from cryosleep, is like the office manager, groggily opening up, putting on the pot of coffee for his coworkers, etc. Dallas is in charge — a jaded but competent and sensitive boss. Ripley is the second in command: a young, cold, ambitious career woman who has risen to upper management and seems to eschew traditional female roles. The men in the film disobey her, call her a bitch, and one (who turns out to be an android) even tries to kill her with a rolled up pornographic magazine.

In the 1970s, women like Ripley began to face tradeoffs between their traditional female roles (reproduction, femininity, beauty) and their new desexualized professional identities where they struggled to have a voice and be heard as equals, to be taken seriously and listened to. Men didn’t really like it. This was the world in which behaviors like “sexual harassment” were coming to be conceived and named as transgressions. We are still very much with and in the legacy of this change, and its repressed underside is every bit as alive and unspeakable.

In other words, no longer acknowledged within the workplace the Nostromo mirrors is the subject of sexual difference. This includes not just overt attraction or romantic behavior between sexes, touching, sexual humor, etc., but also just the noticing/acknowledgment of our different bodies. Men and women notice each other as sex objects, not just as coworkers, even if we are prevented from talking about it openly. What was driven underground with women’s traditionally feminine concerns and roles (such as childbearing, still a notoriously taboo subject in the workplace) was male sexual desire, which used to find expression at work as much as in any other context. A generation of male professionals has now fully internalized a public decorum that does not acknowledge the male sexual gaze, or reserves it for safe (male only) company. (Women half know this and half don’t know it, which is one of the interesting and electric things about offices.)

When the cryosleep cocoons open up at the beginning of Alien, revealing a mostly naked crew rendered equal/desexualized in this technical future, what male viewer is not inspecting the scene for a glimpse of a woman’s breasts — breasts which, we know or suspect, may be bare in this clinical and asexual context? The camera’s strictly neutral view (centrally positioned squarely opposite the empty “place” of a computer control console) is subtly charged with this disavowed desire — the same way that sexual interest in one’s colleagues, and interest in one’s colleagues’ sex, is disavowed in the ostensibly “neutral” context of work.

I think this disavowed desire that charges an ostensibly or overtly neutral office space provides the true “hidden meaning” of the film.

It is not enough to talk about Ripley as a new feminine heroine, a role model for “strong and independent” women in the modern world, and about the alien as a loathsome, hypermasculine (impregnating, oral-phallic) presence. Sure, its head is a giant penis, but it’s not that simple. The alien is an eruption of what is unspeakable (literally unspeakable, because potentially illegal) within the new gender-equal, sex-neutralized workplace: physical desire, sexual embodiment as such, and the truth of sexual attractions/reproductive urges that can now be expressed only under the table, if at all. The alien (whose fascination comes partly from its blindness — a classical symbol of the impartial or neutral Law) gives physical form to what we have all, on both sides of the sexual gap, cut away from ourselves, sacrificed, in pain, for the sake of the new capitalist order.

Thus the reading that only sees Ripley as a hero and the alien as the enemy is blind to this sexual gap and to the male gaze altogether, which retains a wish to regard the female center of this film as an object of sexual desire — a gaze that, in this film, finds itself perpetually thwarted/obscured (just as Ripley’s voice is, throughout the film, not heard by her male colleagues — the film’s logline, don’t forget, was “In space, no one can hear you scream”). Among many other things, the alien represents the potential fulfillment of such a wish. And insofar as women in this new world have “given up their femininity,” they too have lost something; Ripley, alone with her cat in the shuttle at the end, represents a terrifying possibility for the desexualized career woman as much as a victory blow for her independence. I suspect that, besides obviously being a fearful antagonist, the alien is as much an object of female repressed (sexual and maternal) desire to be “treated like a woman” in the old fashioned way. Isn’t it only the alien, of all the characters in the film, who can be said to treat us like a woman?

The alien is terrifying, but we want to see it, because it is so incredibly beautiful. The intense, almost unspeakable beauty of H.R. Giger’s creation is what is so hard to notice behind the veil of genre (horror) that is drawn over the film. We turn our eyes away from gore as such, from the insides of the body revealed, and from the chest-burster rising from the bloody pool of Kane’s chest. But afterward we yearn to see what this “star child” has become, what it has grown into, how it has turned out, and the film never quite satisfies us. In a way (though it is also partly an effect of the time when the film was made, before CGI, when monsters weren’t all that scary-looking because they were just men in suits), the beauty of the alien “hides” behind the horror-film truism that what you can’t see is more frightening than what you can see. But our longing to see the full-grown alien, to drink in its gorgeous form, is as nonobvious, and as difficult to admit perhaps, as the male longing to see some breasts in the cryosleep room at the beginning of the film (or perhaps an even more intimate glimpse in the shuttle closet at the end). I can’t speak for ‘the female gaze’ but is it any different? Does it not thrill to the beauty of the xenomorph in its disavowed nostalgia for (a bit of good old) ‘sexual harassment’?

The term “jouissance” is pretentious and vague. I submit that the alien is simply sex, in all its tacit dimensions that we, after feminism, have lost the will and the capacity and the freedom to acknowledge. It is the difference and vibrancy (and danger) that was drained from the gender-egalitarian workplace for it to function as a place of work. The alien is what has fled into the cooling ducts, biding its time, as we men and women sit at our computer consoles, in our neutralized offices, pretending for eight or nine hours each day that our differences aren’t the most exciting thing in the world.