While Ripley portrays an androgynous humanism by retaining her nurturing side as she is forced to access aggressive survival instincts, the elements conspiring against her seem to embody A-humanistic manifestations of propagation—rape, corporate greed, and the objectification and abandoning of the nurturing components of human nature (i.e. the sacred feminine). These conspiring elements—subparts of the “pathogenic mother”—are (like Ripley) both masculine and feminine in nature. Mother (the ship’s computer) mechanically sustains life, but fails to nurture or ultimately protect life in her vessel. Ash, the android who mechanically goes through the motions of appearing to attend to the crew’s medical needs for the first portion of the film sardonically smirks and says, “you have my sympathies,” after attempting to overpower and penetrate Ripley with a rolled up magazine when she learns of his true directive. The monster (both phallic and feminine in appearance) blatantly represents purely aggressive instincts to feed and propagate. Ripley and the rest of the crew are placed in the lethal path of this naked aggression by the Company (a faceless corporation looking to profit from the monster’s potential value as a military weapon).

The most significant cultural value of this film may be its prophetic warning. We might want to be careful, for we may indeed reap what we sow. Rape the universe in mechanized ways, and she will surely propagate, but her offspring will be less human and more mechanized with each succession. Humanistic tendencies such as “sympathies” may become archaic dust eroded from the human experience. It should come as no surprise then when our children (our forced penetrations and blind ambitions) come back to rape us. It should come as no surprise when we are fed upon and ultimately destroyed by that which sprang from within. This entire treatise is brilliantly sublimated by the film’s haunting androgynous phallic image of the creature found perched behind its uplifted cannon, ribs bent outward, a gaping exit wound in the chest where naked aggression had gestated. Cock and womb are androgynously symbolized by an other-worldly creature whose mouth is contorted in a scream, which of course nobody can hear in space. What O’Bannon appears to confront us with in this image is a foreshadowing of the future we humans may be writing for ourselves if we don’t do a better job of incorporating the nurturing sacred feminine into our androgyny. We may, in fact, be the pathogenic mother of future generations.

No one can hear you scream in space.

Ridley Scott is the man.