Final Girls Week: Ellen Ripley, Alien
“This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off,” is the last line of Ridley Scott’s Alien, and with it Ellen Ripley establishes herself as sci-fi’s final girl.
Who is the final girl? The term was coined by academic Carol Clover in her 1987 essay ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’. According to Clover, the final girl is “the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again.”
To me, Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver in the 1979 sci-fi horror classic) not only fits this description but also represents the time that we’re living in right now. As the xenomorph picks off the rest of her crew one by one, Ripley spends much of Alien alone. Similarities can be drawn between her crisis and our current crisis – a (mostly) invisible, unseen threat hijacking the body and warnings go unheeded as we live in fear of lethal consequences.
A big part of its fear factor is its realism. The crew of the Nostromo are not on an epic adventure in deep space, they’re working. They’ve completed a job and they’re on their way home. Things are mundane and uneventful. Everything is as it seems until it’s not, and it’s this violent disruption of the quotidian that makes the events of the film seem so sinister.
Sci-fi often makes space seem full of life, but Alien makes its audience painfully aware of how large and empty the universe is. None of the characters really get to explore their surroundings; instead, we are stuck with them inside their quiet, nondescript ship. They are left without help from Earth and the corporate powers-that-be, and as the film progresses Ripley is very much on her own.
Alien holds up because its vision of the future is not so different from its present. It doesn’t try hard to create a futuristic landscape; the interior of the Nostromo could easily be a set from 1979 or 2019. It doesn’t romanticise space travel or the technologically advanced world of the future, and its core messages resonate now: ultimately, for those in power, profit is more important than people; we may not technically be alone in the universe, but we’re on our own right now.
However, although Ripley faces a crisis in isolation – crucially – she comes out alive on the other side. She’s the sole survivor of the Nostromo (well, aside from Jonesy, the cat). She screams, staggers, falls, rises. She’s the final girl.
