ABSTRACT
Is Alien Resurrection a sequel to Alien3, and hence to the previous two Alien films? It may seem that the presence of the aliens, together with that of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, guarantees this; but, in fact, it merely displaces the question. For can we simply take it for granted that the aliens are the same species that we encountered in the earlier films, or that the Ripley of Alien Resurrection is the same person whose vicissitudes we have followed from their beginning on the Nostromo? After all, David Fincher’s furious, purifying desire for closure in Alien3 resulted in the death of Ripley and of the sole surviving representative of the alien species inside her. Hence Jeunet’s film, helping itself to the resources for self-renewal that science fiction makes available to its practitioners, can recover the queen and her host only by positing the capacity to clone them from genetic material recovered from the medical facilities on Fiorina 161. But, as his renegade military scientists make clear at the outset, the cloning process produces another, distinct individual from this genetic material; it does not reproduce the individual from whom the material derives. Their clone of the original Ripley is not Ripley herself – her body is not Ripley’s body (however much it resembles the one consumed in Fiorina’s furnace) and her mind has no inherent continuity with Ripley’s (it must be stocked from her own experiences). As Call puts it, she is ‘a strain, a construct; they grew you in a fucking lab’. To be sure, as the film progresses the clone begins to recover
some access to Ripley’s memories and character; but that results from an aspect of her nature that reinforces her distinctness from
her genetic original. For, of course, one cannot even regard Ripley’s clone as human – as a member of the same species as Ripley herself. She has acid for blood, her flesh is capable of accelerated healing, her sense of smell is highly developed, and she possesses an intuitive awareness of the thoughts and deeds of the aliens surrounding her. She is, in fact, neither fully human nor fully alien, but rather a hybrid – a creature whose genetic base is constituted by a grafting of human and alien stock (consequent upon the foetal alien queen’s parasitic interactions with Ripley’s flesh and blood); and one manifestation of that hybridity – her participation in the alien species’ hive mind and racial memory – makes it possible for her to recall Ripley’s life and death. If Ripley’s clone is not Ripley, can we say that the cloned alien
queen within her is identical with her genetic original, the last surviving alien entity? Questions of personal identity may seem less pressing, as well as less clear, with respect to a species for whom the collective is prior to (and indeed eclipses) the individual; but what of species identity? If the queen is the new fount and origin of alien life in Jeunet’s universe, within which two hundred years have passed since the original alien species was rendered extinct, should we regard her fertility as engendering the simple reproduction of that earlier race? In fact, we cannot – because the cloned queen is not exactly the pure origin of this new manifestation of alien life, and hence her reproductive cycle turns out to be anything but a simple replication of its monstrous original. For the queen’s genetic hybridity incorporates a distinctively human gift from Ripley to her offspring (the gift bequeathed by original sin to all human females) – that of pregnancy, labour and birth: ‘In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children’. Jeunet’s film thus finds a way of grafting two apparently opposed
or contradictory modes of reproduction onto one another. Cloning suggests replication, qualitative indistinguishability, whereas hybridity suggests the cultivation of difference, a new creation. In Alien Resurrection, cloning engenders hybridity; even genetic replication cannot suppress nature’s capacity for self-transformation and selfovercoming, its evolutionary impulse. This film does not, then, overcome Alien3’s attempted closure of the Alien series by resurrecting either Ripley or her alien other – as if continuing (by contesting)
David Fincher’s theological understanding of the alien universe; for (as Thomas’ sceptical probing of Jesus’ resurrected body implies) the religious idea of resurrection incorporates precisely the bodily continuity that cloning cannot provide. The title of Jeunet’s film thus refers not to a resurrection of the alien species, or of that species’ most intimate enemy; it rather characterizes its hybrid of cloning and hybridity as an alien kind or species of resurrection – as something uncannily other to any familiar religious idea of death’s overcoming. And, of course, Jeunet thereby characterizes his film’s relation
to its predecessors as itself alien or unfamiliar: since neither of its cloned protagonists is identical with the paired protagonists of the earlier Alien films, Alien Resurrection cannot be understood simply as a sequel to them. Its alien universe is at once utterly discontinuous with and intimately dependent upon them; its underlying thematic and stylistic codes owe everything and nothing to their templates. In grafting his own distinctive cinematic sensibility onto that of the series he inherits, Jeunet thereby sees himself as creating a world whose nature is built from the same components, but in a radically new manner – a hybrid clone of its ancestor; and hence he sees himself as following out a hybrid cloning of the idea of sequelhood that has been established by the series hitherto. For to take Alien3 seriously is to acknowledge that no further development of the series is possible in the terms shared by its three members; its further evolution requires their displacement. Only in such a way – only by transposing the central themes of the Alien series into a new key – could Jeunet acknowledge the depth and completeness of Fincher’s closure of the series without accepting its finality.
