Heathers: A Fitting Destruction of the Eighties

The first time I attempted to watch Heathers it was in a dormitory common room with eight other people and a girl named Heather trying to force us to enjoy it. We never finished it. Suffice to say, from the moment the shoulderpads entered the scene, it did not go over well -- the group was looking for any reason to condone the film just because it had been so forced upon us.

So, I didn’t quite have the highest expectations returning to this film for class, even from a more critical perspective. But, man, am I glad I got the chance to try it again. This film is so very.

I can’t quite figure out why Heathers seems to scratch an itch that other teen movies like Mean Girls only seem to make me aware of, but it probably has something to do with what Willa Paskin notes in the Vulture.com article: “Heathers doesn’t do heartwarming messages.” More specifically, Paskin notes that when TV shows like Glee are held next to Heathers they feel “like a tour through a Hallmark card factory,” and “even the willfully edgy Mean Girls and Gossip Girl are earnestly committed to portraying socially positive values . . . in an uncomplicated way that Heathers would scoff at.” It’s not that Heathers is more impressive because it’s darker, or because it’s less caring, or because it’s so nihilistic; it’s more impressive because the movie doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is: a parody (and thus a member) of high school dramas that channel morals into the audience either through support or through scorn. Heathers doesn’t “pretend” because it doesn’t wish to mollify the venom in these schools; in fact, it cranks them to a ridiculous point, sharpening the film in the role of parody.

Perhaps Heathers is more satisfying than some of its successors because it has escaped the scrutiny of a contemporary America. Just as Paskin concedes, there is absolutely no way this film would be made today, and even if it were, surely it would not capture such mass appeal. This movie really could only have happened pre-Columbine, pre-9/11, pre-cyberbullies. It is in a safe zone, free from being seen as deplorable. I suppose this line of thought, that Heathers is in a realm of immunity and that even though we’re shocked we still give it great praise, would imply that Heathers acts as a sort of relief to the stifling constraint and a deficient sense of irony in today’s world, which is probably a dangerous thought -- one that I don’t necessarily subscribe to as those three circumstances are truly considerable matters.

In that case, the more interesting question is: why are films like Heathers not remembered as learning experiences to the same degree as other contemporaneous, warmer-and-fuzzier, films like The Breakfast Club? As Paskin asserts, “While you can see some of Heathers influence in modern teen movies, John Hughe’s movies . . . and Beverly Hills 90210 . . . have had a more lasting influence on the ethics, if not the style or basic premise (high school is nasty), of teen-centric entertainments.” Why do we strip the ethics of movies that Hughes creates, but we sometimes forget that nihilistic films like Heathers are cautionary and admonishing, thus promoting similar values? Perhaps we just like our morals spoon-fed to us, or maybe it’s less work, rather than having to sift through the stacks of irony.

How perfect then is the framing of this online article? The article separates the background of the film, it’s targeted demographic, and the analysis of how well the film has aged, into categories that are, what, more manageable? It’s like the concise but separate structure of a scientific study, rather than a uniform article, is more digestible for attention spans that grow evermore evanescent. Yeah, I’m reading into this article too far, as it’s probably not meant to be anything more than quick, accessible, and fun, but it’s so neatly packaged that I can’t help but wonder that, on some level, our impatience and diminishing attention for reading an article might relate to our lesser awareness (or maybe less prioritization) of irony. But here’s hoping that the studious presentation of the brief article is merely irony meant to parallel the rampant polling present in Heathers.

Returning briefly to the popularity given to Hughes’ movies, I do think that Heathers teases, and perhaps even slanders, some elements of the Hughes film. Heathers is a parody in many respects, but one of its chief targets is the peachy, Hughes’ “takeaway.” The icing on this cake, of course, is JD’s final moments. In his badass trench coat, he raises his hands to the sky, in a manner that seems to recall Bender’s cheer in the final frame of the Breakfast Club, and then he explodes.

Yeah, exactly.

Other than that, I’d say Heathers provides a commentary on or takes a jab at any number of themes and narratives that we’ve witnessed this semester, making it a fitting final movie. On one hand, it seems to zap the idealized Small-town America in a fashion similar to Blue Velvet: by taking Bluecollar, Ohio with its stereotypical fanaticism regarding high school football, and it brazenly pokes fun with moments like one father’s, “I love my dead gay son.” Again, you’re not going to see a film like this made any time soon.

On the other hand, the film coincides perfectly with some of our discussions regarding the commodification of images, like we saw in Wall Street. The Heathers are a Corporation. Polling is their business, their shoulderpads and scrunchies are their image. These brands are so prevalent that their families and surroundings must adhere to similar identities. Heather #1 has a grandmother with an entirely red kitchen complete with red accessories, so that the viewer knows the setting belongs to constantly-clad-in-red Heather #1. Similarly, Veronica lives in a house painted in blues and whites. When she sits out on the patio catching up with her parents, her parents’ clothes and her own clothes correspond with the white-and-blue shades behind their shoulders. It is only appropriate that the drainer, that JD and Veronica poison Heather #1 with, is the color blue -- it secures the image of Veronica, and her ownership of the color blue, when she removes her competition.

This was a fantastic movie. One, though older, that has taken the mantle from Mean Girls  as my favorite high-school centric film. I find it fortunate that this movie can still thrive in relative safety, even if it must be taken with a huge grain of salt.

Wall Street: "Deceit Gets Results"

It seems appropriate that we watched Oliver Stone’s Wall Street in addition to Platoon this semester. Stone seems to provide a refreshing dose of realism in what can sometimes feel like a litany of postmodern films with hugely aesthetic focuses and with often tongue-in-cheek irony. Not to say that Wall Street isn’t postmodern or without its own fair share of irony; only, it demonstrates a postmodern world and is not itself a postmodern product (at least not as much as Platoon is on the technical side of the film). That said, in a lot of ways, Wall Street and Platoon parallel one another from anything as simple as the reuse of certain actors and the recycling of character archetypes, to things as thematic as both of Charlie Sheen’s characters struggling between, as Jack Boozer puts it in “Wall Street: the Commodification of Perception,” “two opposing father figures and two distinct sets of values” (93). Platoon rejects the revisionism of Vietnam and Wall Street exposes the dangers and realities of lucrative Wall Street wealth -- neither making a claim for which values are the correct one. For instance, even though Gekko is clearly the antagonist, he is not entirely condemned as evil -- or rather, even after such a condemnation he is still highly admirable like some glorified conservative hero.

Gekko remains this hero, or antihero I suppose, because the values of America, particularly the youth’s, have changed from the values of Carl Fox’s day. Some of Boozer’s most interesting comments were the ones that detailed the diminished patience in the American 80s with its redesigned values. “Carl’s world is the mythological realm of family values America would like to hold on to” but in reality there is much more individualistic motive. “So seductive is Gekko’s approach that we almost forget that father Carl's alternative advice, however ethical, doesn’t answer to Bud’s experience.” Similarly, there is an “overwhelming desire to enter even the bottom rung of the commercial power system.”

While the film may reveal the pitfalls of idealizing such values, it does not seek to dispose of them -- perhaps it even seeks to encourage them, especially the correct use of such values. Obviously, the correct use is that “greed is only good when one can get away with it by passing negative repercussions on to someone else.” Throughout Wall Street there is a “strong association between financial success and virtue.” Even after losing the battle, getting fooled by Bud Fox, Gekko never appears to lose his credibility or the image of his superiority. As Boozer has pointed out, an eighties American society has fostered viewers to appreciate and oblige Gekko’s speeches: “We are smart enough not to buy into the oldest myth running -- love” ; “If you need a friend, get a dog”; “It’s all about the bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.” Gekko never loses our reverence. Even after the film and the viewers have concluded upon his moral depravity, he is still a glorified conservative antihero -- one in which might lead us to ponder: what if we did have that money?”

Speaking of Gekko’s untarnished image, the brunt of Boozer’s observations and Wall Street’s main depictions are those that deal with image. Essentially, in order for one to maintain the right image, the profitable one, one must lose their originality and their identity. “Bud lose[s] any vestige of coherent private self separate from his economic standing.” Furthermore, “The particular discourses and signs of the media come to dominate both the actual event reported and the functional use value of the commodity advertised. The individual finds it nearly impossible to distinguish direct personal experience from mediated images of similar experience.” In this regard, Wall Street portrays some of the core components of postmodernism, namely Jean Baudrillard’s third stage simulacra: a copy that pretends to portray reality but is, in actuality, a copy without any original. Speculative projections of a company’s future worth are represented by numbers and information that people consider representations of a company’s actual worth. As Boozer channels Baudrillard: “free-floating signs… have increasingly replaced the initial social relations they purport to represent.”

In this sense, the ending of Wall Street either bothers me or it intrigues me. If Bud Fox is a representation  with a long gone original identity, and his resumption or rediscovery of his identity in the last act is due to the need for a conventional ending, then this seems to be an inconsistency in the film’s portrayal of postmodernism, and I am bothered. But, if Bud Fox’s relinquishment of the images of himself and of the insubstantial signifiers he consists of, and he is subsequently reassuming his old identity shaped by his father’s ethical values, then I am intrigued because now this film that has only depicted postmodern values has chosen to reject those values -- as if the film wishes to cast away postmodernism and it yearns for a real and tangible truth.

To Shuffle Hollywood

Most of what I have to contribute to this week’s conversation, on the subject of Hollywood Shuffle, is merely corroborative of Harriet Margolis’ very compelling analysis:  “Stereotypical Strategies: Black Film Aesthetics, Spectator Positioning, and Self-Directed Stereotypes in Hollywood Shuffle and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.” With such an encompassing title as that, and with an even more comprehensive examination within, it’s not surprising that I find it difficult to refute much of what Margolis asserts. She details the machinery of racial stereotyping, what with its cognitive foothold in our lives and that “To be successful, the least that the strategy of using stereotypes to combat negative stereotyping must do is to invoke an ironic response in the spectator, based on an ability to identify with or at least recognize the Other, as well as an inability to stand naively and comfortably in the place of the One relative to the Other” (54). She also pointedly describes the monolithic categorization and streamlining that black filmmakers, unfortunately, have to deal with when any sort of film they create is labelled, ever so broadly, as black cinema; and that “black cinema” is assumed to oblige a communal Black image, for better or for worse.

I had enjoyed Hollywood Shuffle quite a bit. I still do, even after having read Margolis’ argument. However, having been persuaded by Margolis, I now find that the film does fall short of what its self-directed stereotypes set out to do: what all self-directed stereotypes set out to do, the removal of offensive stereotyping. I had thought initially that Shuffle’s stereotypes were well wrought with a foreground of a realistic and traditional narrative being used as a springboard for the irony of the parodic scenes to land suitably in the minds of the film’s target audience.  In this respect, Shuffle succeeds with great aplomb. However, it’s not the landed awareness of the stereotypes that is the issue, it is the audience in which the stereotypes are landing (either an ironic audience that is not in need of correction when it comes to stereotyping; or a white audience, in which Shuffle does not address powerfully enough, because it adopts “a point of view that puts different classes of African Americans at odds with each other” -- being individualistic rather than communal) and it is the way in which negative stereotypes are replaced. As Margolis puts it: “Townsend attacks specific, individually expressed stereotypes more than the process of stereotyping itself” (55). She goes on to say that “Simply replacing a negative image with a positive image does not solve the original problem; it imposes one view of the world over another, leaving that view in turn equally vulnerable to changes to its authenticity” (55). In fact, it substitutes negative black stereotypes with stereotypes like the “unredeemable” white producers and the shallow gay-hairdresser.

Lastly, seeing as though I’ve hardly advanced the conversation here, I believe that Shuffle, while obviously first and foremost a racial commentary, is also a commentary on the artificial -- and frankly, tacky -- condition of Hollywood in general. This is most apparent in Shuffle’s stereotyping, the kind that Margolis’ asserts is undermining Shuffle, of the white producers/writers/filmmakers who are running the auditions and directing as they are portrayed quite negatively. But also, much of this industry ridicule emerges from the fantasy scenes, where famous films are recreated like Dirty Harry. This ridicule sets out to expose such iconic films as being formulaic -- or at least the quality of these films feels deliberately diminished. This makes the racial commentary even more biting because not only do African-Americans need to struggle to secure stereotypical roles, but even if they surpass those roles and achieve more “respectable” ones, those respectable ones are still not always of great quality -- for everyone. This forwards the movie’s cause even more: if the respectable roles can be of crappy quality, then really, there is no reason that African-Americans should struggle to obtain and then be confined to roles that are significantly inferior to that of the “respectable” ones. It’s arguable that Bobby Taylor’s satisfaction as a mailman also contributes to this sleight against Hollywood. However, personally, I don’t think that Bobby is satisfied, and that the ending is one of dissatisfaction, as he has been spurned from his dreams, and committed to contributing to the communal black identity -- a satirical jab at the notion, this audience being black, that all of a black individual’s actions must be conscientious of the appearance of the black community, for a white audience. In a way, being required to fall back on such a menial position, which can come with its own minority stereotypes, is just as confining as limited movie roles.

Platoon: The Dissolution of Good and Evil

There is a large part of Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) that is concerned with moral ambiguity and I don’t think that I’m sensing the presence of such a concern as a mere residual effect of similarly examining Blue Velvet a couple of weeks ago. The two films share quite a bit in common: their thematic material, their technical construction, and the values that they seek to subvert. In an overly simplified manner of comparison, the two pursue the dissolution of dichotomies like good and evil through both murky narrative content and cinematography that is dream-like or literally obscured; and this assertion of ambiguity functions to interrogate Americans’ impetuous complaisance with national ideals like the American Dream and patriotic, ideological wars.

In fact, I believe that Irena Makarushka’s analysis, “Subverting Eden: Ambiguity of Evil and the American Dream in Blue Velvet,” is nearly as relevant to Platoon as it is to David Lynch’s film. Lawrence W. Lichty and Raymond L. Carroll’s “Fragments of War: Oliver Stone’s Platoon,” on the other hand, is an article with which I have a few discrepancies. While Lichty and Carroll offer a number of dependable assertions regarding Platoon as they note that, compared to most previous war films, it was not propagandized and it was a marked improvement in authenticity; I do think that some of their observations are limited to the surface-level: they are preoccupied with the degree of the film’s validity and the relationship between the production of war films and their final product. Lichty and Carroll mistake Platoon as being a film that is obligated to adhere to reality when, in fact, the film is still an artist's depiction (albeit an artist with first-hand experience) -- complete with creative decisions like the design of the film’s aesthetic and the license to establish symbolism.

As a point of negative criticism, Lichty and Carroll remark: “Unfortunately, this scene [in which a wounded Elias flees in front of enemy soldiers as they fire upon him] looks as though it is staged, rather than a natural part of the film’s action, and it tends to reduce the credibility of the rest of the film” (398). Of course it feels staged: this is a realistic depiction but not reality. This particular scene purposefully details a symbolic image -- an image, that I will comment on shortly, that I find relevant to the film’s moral ambiguity. Even if the symbolism weren’t applicable to one of the film’s large intentions (which I believe it to be), Lichty and Carroll address, and thus undermine, their own criticism when they acknowledge: “War here is depicted from the perspective of the individual, not from the group or from a national perspective. The film effectively reveals Taylor’s confusion and disorientation from beginning to end” (398). It is the duality of comments like these two contradictory quotes that make me apprehensive about the article as a whole because it acknowledges that the film is supposed to have a disorienting quality, that it is an artist’s creation (“All artists manipulate history, and Platoon, as art, can be freely interpreted” (400).), and that these features are representative of the hell that was Vietnam War; but the two critics still penalize the film with an “Unfortunately” for it not having reached the degree of realism that they desired -- a threshold that they never really make clear. A film can be held accountable for botching the consistency of its symbolism or for it having shallow symbols, but admonishing a film’s technical use of symbolism is not a fair assessment when examining cinema.

Platoon is a film about moral ambiguity -- not just in Vietnam but in all of human nature. The film portrays the actuality of moral ambiguity by depicting exaggerated representations of good and evil (Sgt. Elias and Sgt. Barnes, respectively), and then it subsequently dissolves this dichotomy with its treatment of these two characters. Blue Velvet might have ridiculed black-and-white binaries from its very artificial beginning -- setting out to determine that they don’t even exist -- but Platoon takes another route to demonstrate the more realistic presence of ambiguity: good and evil do exist in the film -- they’re merely inferior to more ambiguous characters like Charlie Sheen’s Chris Taylor, or at least just as mortal as the next guy.

As L&C note, “Stone’s film has succumbed to the temptation of a Coppola-like treatment of a universal madness personified in an individual” as “Staff Sergeant Barnes is the manifestation of man’s most ignoble instincts unchecked” (401). It isn’t difficult to see this allusion to evil in Barnes -- his sinister scar alone could give it away. It’s a little more difficult to extract benevolence from Sgt. Elias, but I believe him to be representative of good. He isn’t afraid to report Barnes for his atrocious execution in the village, his appreciation for drugs seems inherently hedonistic, and even his smiles (like the one he gives Barnes before he is shot) seem knowing like they are given from a person looking downward -- especially when paired with his almost angelic death as he sends his arms skyward and the viewer is to think benevolence from this signifier of crucifixion. Unlike L&C’s assertion that the “flaw in the direction of literary allusion and symbolism is all the more regrettable because the totality of the war’s madness, and what it does to the human beings who populate the platoon, is so finely drawn and credibly conveyed,” (401) I don’t think that these symbolic characters are demeaning to the film for the reasons I’ve already given (that, in addition to its increased authenticity, this is a symbolic film -- symbolism and authenticity are not mutually exclusive). Because concrete morality like good and evil is present, their removal makes the reality of ambiguity all the more adamant. “Chris Taylor… seems to be characterized by both perceptiveness and indecisiveness. He is neither good nor bad. He is neither held up for admiration nor reviled for his conduct” (L&C 401). Chris Taylor removes the complete evil by killing Barnes, and substitutes his gray morality within the vacancy. One might argue that the film is still advocating the superiority of evil over good since Barnes removes Elias, but this isn’t the film’s agenda as Elias endures to be killed by a more ambiguous enemy and Barnes doesn’t escape with his life. These representations are even made clear in the last few moments of the movie as Taylor wraps up his narration and says “I’m sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for … ‘possession of my soul.’ There are times since then I’ve felt like a child born of those two fathers” (L&C 398).

Lastly, the film endorses ambiguity even through its technical aspects. The opening shot of the film is a cloudy view of the landing zone as a plane, carrying fresh troops, blows dust and dirt into the frame. The entire film obscures the camera’s view like this: the jungle thicket is always covering one corner or edge of the frame, the frequent pans are dizzying, the cuts are rapid and endanger continuity, the camera always seems to face characters so that we only see their reactions and not their focus (meaning: we see them get hit by bullets and spray at the enemy, but it is unusual for us to get a good view of their targeted enemy or even their comrades). The platoon’s operation is in an ambiguous area as the location given by the film reads “Somewhere near the Cambodian border.” And there even seems to be inconsistency in Taylor’s letters (and narration) to his grandmother, or at least a certain sparsity. He expresses to his fellow soldiers that he has stopped writing to his grandmother, and his final narration seems directed to a wider audience than the ones at the beginning of the film. All of these elements work together to elucidate the disorientation, the ambiguity, and the disillusionment that these soldiers experience. Chris Taylor starts off as a patriotic volunteer, fighting for his country in a supposedly ideological war. The film quickly dismantles this attitude and this ideology, and exposes polarized morals like good and evil for the artificiality inherent in such a dichotomy.

Disclaimer: If some of my comparisons between Blue Velvet and Platoon are seemingly cut short or my analysis of subverted American values seems like a dropped thread, it’s only because I’m establishing some points to commence my final paper’s synthesis.

"Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?"

“Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?” asks Private Hudson in the film Aliens.

“No, Have you?” replies Private Vasquez.

Her retort seems like it would fit perfectly well into some sort of discussion disassembling gender definitions. Instead, the line is merely used to highlight Vasquez’s endangered femininity so that she becomes a scapegoat to liberate Ripley of homophobic scrutiny and to assure the film viewer -- with the additional narrative threads of romance between Hicks and Ripley, and Ripley’s motherly protection over Newt -- that the action heroine subscribes to heteronormativity.

In his essay “Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return,” Jeffrey A. Brown makes the limitations of Sigourney Weaver’s action hero very clear when it comes to crossing the divide of conventional gender roles.  He says that “the development of the hardbody… heroine … indicates a growing acceptance of nontraditional roles for women and an awareness of the arbitrariness of gender traits” but that it does not go far enough to create a “legitimate role for women” because an action heroine like Ripley does not remove women from the “strict binary code” in which women can only be evaluated by the degree of their masculine traits. Brown continues to imply that roles like Ripley are not liberating as they are considered more like a “gender transvestite,” “cinematic cross-dressing,” and that “the action heroine is just a sheep in wolf’s clothing”; especially when compared to roles like Maggie in Point of No Return, which presents a true parody of conventional gender standards. As a biological woman, Maggie illustrates the plasticity of gender definitions through her exploitation of gender stereotypes depending on which suits her objective -- her stereotypical femininity with a mini-skirt appearance and her diminutive demeanor place an enemy off guard so that when she switches to stereotypically masculine aggression and gunplay, she decimates her enemy. I very much agree with Brown that the role of Maggie takes greater strides to expose the artificiality of gender definitions than action heroines like Ripley and Sarah Connor (of Terminator 2), who merely demonstrate that gender boundaries can be crossed. However, I do think that Aliens (and the franchise in general) has a few other objectives in mind when it seeks to "harden" the body of a woman because it is determined to show the capability, and often unstoppability, of maternal instinct.

Before I consider the material of maternal instinct, I want to point out the film’s treatment of women in general. While not as encompassing as Brown would have it, I do find Aliens to be more empowering for women than not. Vasquez may be a scapegoat, but she is also more than just a narrative tool, she is a positive representation of the “butch” or the “ballsy” military woman. The movie isn’t looking to demean her traits -- frankly, she is one of the more heroic characters. In fact, James Cameron is very much looking to emancipate women regardless of those who may think that his intentions don’t extend far beyond the surface level. He takes the damsel of The Terminator and makes her the stoic soldier in the sequel. He takes the “final girl” of Alien, and makes her the dominant matriarch in Aliens who can handle any matter of hardware. Hell, he’s got two women in the marines of Aliens and they’re treated with nonchalance given that the film was released in 1986. I know that women have been allowed volunteer opportunities within the military since the 70s, but it wasn’t until five years after the film, 1991, that 41,000 women were deployed in combat zones of the Persian Gulf war. The movie is well aware of changing times and it is impractical not to acknowledge the fact that, even though the action heroine does not shake gender definitions to their core, she has placated a very sexist industry that is usually only concerned with the objective use of women.

Of course, it is difficult to disband the heteronormativity of the film. The time of its production was rife with homophobia, and contrary to any of the creator’s intentions, there were and will continue to be box office numbers to meet. Let’s, for a moment, consider that the film is wary of a heteronormative agenda because it is preoccupied with its display of motherhood; that display is grounded through a heterosexual female because, while a contemporary argument might assert that caretakers can be of any sex or gender, the general 1987 audience is more familiar with the heteronormative choice. As an aside, and adopting the particular contemporary argument that I just mentioned, I tend to disagree with Brown’s assertion that T2 adheres to the same limitations as Aliens when it comes to removing gender boundaries. This opinion is definitely based on a postmodern perspective, but I think that since Arnold Schwarzenegger is such a cultural icon for stereotypical masculinity, the very notion of him playing the stereotypical feminine caretaker is evidence enough that gender definitions are illusory and made arbitrarily -- whereas Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton didn’t have the benefit of a famous background to dismantle gender boundaries and so they were compared by default to the discourse of previous action heroes.

Returning from my tangent, Aliens is continuing the franchise’s main theme, the examination of motherhood. An argument could almost be made that there are elements of the film’s universe that seek to dismantle gender definitions, particularly the main novelty of the film: facehuggers impregnating humans without any discrimination towards their sex; but because these hosts, usually on the screen as male, give birth by way of their violent death the potential for blurring the role of gender is discredited -- the only motherly role that comes out unscathed is the biologically female Ripley. So again, we have to pursue the role of motherhood in Aliens under the assumption that it is only for heterosexual females.

I’m not going to go into great detail on the exhibition of motherhood in this movie as the symbolism is quite overt (the many affectionate gestures from Ripley to Newt, the battle between Newt-protecting Ripley and the egg-laying xenomorph Queen). If you’re looking for even more evidence, just look at what the theatrical version cut out:

0:08:29: Ripley is sitting on a bench and looking at a clearing. The camera slowly makes a curve and we see that it is only a projection on a video wall. Ripley powers it off with a remote control. Then Dr. Burke enters the room and the following dialogue takes place:

Burke: "Hi, sorry I'm late. I've been running behind all morning."

Ripley: "Is there any word about my daughter?"

Burke: "I do think we should worry about the hearing now, cos we don't have a lot of time now, okay? I read your deposition, and it's great. If you just stick to that, I think we'll be fine. A thing to remember is there are gonna be a lot of heavyweights in there. You got feds, Interstellar Commerce Commission, Colonial Administration, insurance company guys -"

Ripley: "Do you have any news about my daughter?"

Burke: "Well, we did come up with some information. Why don't we sit down? I was hoping to wait until after the inquest. Amanda Ripley-McClaren – married name, I guess – aged 66. And that was at the time of her death. Which was two years ago. I'm real sorry."

Burke gives her the picture of her daughter, an old woman can be seen. Ripley touches the photo.

Ripley: "Amy..."

Burke: "Um... she was cremated and interred at Westlake Repository, Little Chute, Wisconsin. No children. I checked."

Ripley: "I promised her... that I'd be home for her birthday. Her 11th birthday."

Ripley's voice gets weak and she starts crying pressing the picture of her dead daughter against her face.

Or:

1:28:54: Newt and Ripley talk a little longer.

Newt: "Did one of those things grow inside her?"

Ripley: "I don't know, Newt. That's the truth."

Newt: "Isn't that how babies come? I mean, people babies? They grow inside you."

Ripley: "No, that's very different."

Newt: "Did you ever have a baby?"

Ripley: "Yes, I did. I had a little girl."

Newt: "Where is she?"

Ripley: "She's gone."

Newt: "You mean dead."

The film goes to great lengths to describe Ripley’s need for the maternal role and her efficiency once she has obtained it -- the maternal instinct: the take-no-prisoners, leave-no-quarter resolve that Ripley dares the Queen not to cross, and makes good on her threat when she is defied. That is what I am more interested in. The nature of the display of maternal protection in the film and its overall importance. Its nature is akin to the berserker status that we discussed with Rambo. She has entered a state of “nothing left to lose” where her only concern is the well-being of Newt, whom she figuratively adopts as her own child.

Another scene from the Director’s Cut might be relevant:

1:31:24: The DC contains a dialogue extension about the alien-queen. While Hudson and Vasquez are talking in the DC the Theatrical version only shows them looking in silence.

Hudson: "Hey, maybe it's like an ant hive."

Vasquez: "Bees, man. Bees have hives."

Hudson: "You know what I mean. There's, like, one female that runs the whole show."

Bishop: "Yes, the queen."

Hudson: "Yes, the mama. She's badass, man. I mean, big."

Vasquez: "These things ain't ants, estúpido."

Hudson: "I know that."

Is the berserker status needed to illustrate that a mother has respectable opinions that demand attention, or that a matriarchal authority is just as effective as patriarchal leadership? I’d like to think that Ripley’s authority, and the efficiency of that control, is adequately explicit by the time she goes berserk; and that the berserk is merely the final declarative touch cementing the film’s expression of female equality, a touch that is considerate of its predominantly young, male demographic in that it uses the action-hero berserk as a signifier of the hero’s cause being one of nobility. This is an oversimplified and reductive view in which I’d welcome more thorough opinions, but maybe Aliens only does play the role of the intermediary. It is an early, though long past due, wake-up call for the audience to the existence of gender definitions so that subsequent movies like Point of No Return might eventually break those definitions. I’d say the film is still monumental to even the furthest causes of gender theorists who seek to elucidate people of gender’s imaginary substance. It may not have reached the finish line, but it provided something radical in a solidly patriarchal, eighties, American society.