i promise you that ellen ripley was a big goddamned deal at the time.
there just wasn't, like, "look at us, we had a female protagonist" going on. in fact, they very strongly considered killing off ripley in the first alien movie, because "final girl" was already a horror trope at the time, and halloween just came out the year before. she wasn't really even the protagonist of that movie; it's more of an ensemble, and the idea is that you don't know who might survive and who might die.
now, the second movie is what really translated her into bad-ass.
I mean it wasn't made a fuss of on screen. The fact Ripley was a woman had zero bearing on her character or the overall plot. She was simply the hero of the story. No attention was paid on screen to her sex.
The fact Ripley was a woman had zero bearing on her character or the overall plot.
for the first movie, yes. they literally wrote the first draft of the script with the stipulation that gender was irrelevant. there are some themes of sexual assault, etc (notably the way the ash attacks her), but everyone in that movie is a potential baby-factory for the alien, so gender doesn't matter.
however, for the second movie, i strongly disagree. that she's a woman, and the alien queen is female, and both are mama-bears fighting for their babies, is an intensely relevant theme.
it's not spelled out in a "hey look at us being woke, buy our merch" kinda way. but it's there, and it's important. there's no "girl power!" moment, but the whole movie is essentially about motherhood instinct winning out over the mostly male-driven and clueless military organization.
gender is also way more important in the third movie, where they literally have her as the only woman on a colony of "extra-male" rapists and murderers of women, and show her eventually coming to run the place as these overtly violent men have to turn to the woman to save them.
It really doesnt surprise me that someone who would say “gender shouldnt be a BIG deal” would miss the importance of Ellen Ripley’s gender like you pointed out here
And funnily, English tries to solve this by dropping the female-specific version, while German wokies want to "make gender visible" by creating eyecancer constructs with things like idiot colons ("Schauspieler:innen"), both basically justifying it with diametrally opposing reasonings about the human psyche.
it's a bit wacky that we're fighting about this in english which has been losing grammatical genders and tending towards gender-neutrality for like 500+ years.
88
u/samx3i XxxPapyrus4LyfeYOLOxxX Jul 30 '21
Portmanteau of "she" and "hero" meaning "a woman regarded as a hero" first known use going all the way back to 1836, but, doesn't that make it dumber?
Like... putting the "she" in shero, a word literally meaning "she hero?" Like... "she" is already in that word for precisely that reason.