> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>
> look at the _Alien_ series and _The Terminator_ & _The Terminator 2_,
> and you'll see that tough girls's toughness tend to be figured as
> originating from or resulting in motherhood, symbolic or literal.
> Yoshie
Course, there were two sequels to Aliens where the motherhood issue was not the key issue. Ripley's martyrdom (literally Christ-like) in Alien3 and the (not particularly good) complicated set of relations in Alien4 don't exactly fit the model of motherhood, unless we mush every form of maternal and paternal relationship into some Motherhood icon. Aliens played the motherhood card for all it was worth, but the first Alien was rather impressive in the no-nonsense authority it vested in Signorney Weaver as a hero - relatively unprecedented. Okay, she mothered a cat, but the same story with a guy would not have been that different can could still have had a cat. (Doesn't Worf have a soft spot for a pet in the Star Trek series?)
I agree that the general trend of disapproval of single femalehood is there in movies (not that single maleness is that well respected either- coupledom with 2.3 kids is always the ideal), but don't rush to obliterate the more complicated trends in films.
In many ways, Aliens was an odd cross-product of Robert Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS -- there's a direct reference to "bug hunts" -- and the more sexually mixed alien encounters of Joe Haldeman's THE FOREVER WAR. In fact, throughout the series, Ripley suffers many of the time dilation distortions of social experience that Haldeman highlighted in his book. A key part of that distortion of time and social experience is that it messes with the geneologies of families that justify fixed sexual relations - something that Ripley experiences as well during the series.
So I don't think the motherhood indictment of the Alien series is so tight.
--Nathan Newman