5 ms·

I enjoyed it, and I try to stay away from the gender stuff at HN because it is often trite in part due to the issue you are talking about. First though, I do t

by jerrya 14y ago

I enjoyed it, and I try to stay away from the gender stuff at HN because it is often trite in part due to the issue you are talking about. First though, I do think in Aliens, that part of the mens' and the audience's enjoyment and celebration with Ripley that she ran that loader so well is because she is a woman, so in that respect, it is sexist (woman shows disbelieving men and audience). (It might also otherwise be because she's been in cryosleep for decades and unused to loaders, or just that she does her job so well.) (Also, there are times I really hate Chekhov's gun, but that scene has never been one of them.) And one of the aspects of gender discussions on the web I find annoying is in fact that at many such discussions the male commenters getting the most applause are actually often very sexist, condescending, white knighting, patronizing, cheerleading, and fact free commenters (and that are probably clueless as to their own actual behaviors. (cf. Hugo Schwyzer) For the sake of your essay you categorize men in two groups: Men who don’t much like me or who are subtly trying to keep women out of a male-dominated area or some such but who are basically decent, professional people who don’t stoop to personal attacks and ugliness. In contrast, well-meaning, supportive nice guys are frequently maddening in their boundless ability to pave a road to hell with good intentions. My fear is that you and others default to perceiving the men from Aliens, and in fact, many men, as belonging to the first group. But you can see that Apone and Hicks aren't in either of those groups. One take away from your discoveries is that maybe you should reconsider the nature of the word "enemy" and what it means to be an enemy or friend, because Apone and Hicks, and people that take you seriously and engage in an intellectual argument with you (and fight with you) are probably your friends in ways that the trite cheerleaders rah rahing you for your gender are not. I am not sure what the relationship of your essay is to "Hacker News". Written as is, I think it would be better suited to a variety of feminist and men's blogs, including the Good Men Project. Best wishes,

Mz 14y ago
Thank you for your long, thought out reply. However, I tried to carefully qualify my statements. Please note the use of phrases like "tend to be". It isn't possible to put forth ideas without trying to generalize somewhat. Unfortunately, generalizations frequently then get misinterpretted as bias as well. FWIW: I like the scene so much in part because my father and ex husband were both career military. I don't see Hicks or Apone as her enemies. I like the blunt nature of military culture. I do not read such bluntness as "hostility". I just chose to leave out additional thoughts on that aspect of it because I felt it would be an extraneous (thus distracting) tangent which would take a lot away from my point rather than add value. Edited for accuracy and typos.
nhebb 14y ago
> I do think in Aliens, that part of the mens' and the audience's enjoyment and celebration with Ripley that she ran that loader so well is because she is a woman, so in that respect, it is sexist Also known as "the soft bigotry of low expectations".
- forza 14y ago
  Quite a long time since I saw Aliens, but isn't the divide between the military and the civilians rather than the men and women?
  - Mz 14y ago
    I was just about to make that point myself: Even the military women talk trash about Ripley at first. Have an upvote.
jerf 14y ago
"First though, I do think in Aliens, that part of the mens' and the audience's enjoyment and celebration with Ripley that she ran that loader so well is because she is a woman, so in that respect, it is sexist (woman shows disbelieving men and audience)." While I broadly agree with that analysis, I would point out that's a metanarrative analysis. In the context of the narrative itself I believe Mz's analysis is accurate. And you gotta start there. The metanarrative unavoidably has elements of the real world in it and the way it changes is with people choosing and accepting other narratives over time. I say this because I think in general sometimes people can overanalyze things like this, and the danger there is that sufficient "analysis" can turn anything into anything else. (Which is the core fallacy of postmodernism in an information theory nutshell.) It is unavoidably a product of its time and culture, but irreducibly, it is merely what it is, as well. Too many people get so caught up in the former they forget the latter.
- jerrya 14y ago
  In the context of the narrative itself ... And you gotta start there. See, I disagree that it has to start there. I love the movie, but I analyze it that Dan O'Bannon wrote a script in the 80s for an 80s crowd, and he knew that the audience and the purchasers of his script would love seeing a shapely Ellen Ripley in her feminine white panties one moment and in a masculine yellow loader the next showing all the military men she was their equal or better. It was a rah rah feminism moment, one of many you go grrl moments in cinema. (And O'Bannon also knew about Chekhov's gun and knew it would be good for the audience to introduce her talents with the loader early in the movie.) So I see the internal narrative as a function of what scripts could be expected to sold and be successful in the 80s. Similarly, Aliens can also be analyzed outside the narrative of the movie as a Vietnam War movie, and in the early 80s when it came out, that was a pretty big deal, especially since the movie was a science fiction movie, set in the future, about the Vietnam War.
  - jerf 14y ago
    The problem with your analysis is that it has no information content, in the sense of information theory where "information" has the ability to distinguish between two outcomes. A movie made in the eighties is unavoidably a movie made in the 80s. There is no distinguishing power between 80s movies if you insist on their metanarrative being "correct", for any value of correct other than "comes from the 80s". They all fail equally. I've seen attempts to make movies or write books that somehow avoid the context of the time they were made in for a variety of reasons (political correctness, avante garde art attempts, etc), but when I look at them decades later it's clear to see that they merely demonstrate different aspects of the prejudices and context of their time, not that they even remotely succeeded at being a product of another time. If what you say is true, then there is nowhere to start changing attitudes, because the metanarrative, while interesting and important to consider when analyzing a work, can not be modified, can not be chosen, can not be rewritten. You're stuck with it. You can not write or watch movies from the metanarrative of the 2050s. And if you could, it would surprise you. I guarantee you nobody actually knows what the 2050 metanarrative will be. Any attempts to guess would themselves only be prejudices of the 2010s.

by jerrya 14y ago

Mz 14y ago

Thank you for your long, thought out reply. However, I tried to carefully qualify my statements. Please note the use of phrases like "tend to be". It isn't possible to put forth ideas without trying to generalize somewhat. Unfortunately, generalizations frequently then get misinterpretted as bias as well. FWIW: I like the scene so much in part because my father and ex husband were both career military. I don't see Hicks or Apone as her enemies. I like the blunt nature of military culture. I do not read such bluntness as "hostility". I just chose to leave out additional thoughts on that aspect of it because I felt it would be an extraneous (thus distracting) tangent which would take a lot away from my point rather than add value. Edited for accuracy and typos.

nhebb 14y ago

> I do think in Aliens, that part of the mens' and the audience's enjoyment and celebration with Ripley that she ran that loader so well is because she is a woman, so in that respect, it is sexist Also known as "the soft bigotry of low expectations".

forza 14y ago
Quite a long time since I saw Aliens, but isn't the divide between the military and the civilians rather than the men and women?
- Mz 14y ago
  I was just about to make that point myself: Even the military women talk trash about Ripley at first. Have an upvote.

jerf 14y ago

"First though, I do think in Aliens, that part of the mens' and the audience's enjoyment and celebration with Ripley that she ran that loader so well is because she is a woman, so in that respect, it is sexist (woman shows disbelieving men and audience)." While I broadly agree with that analysis, I would point out that's a metanarrative analysis. In the context of the narrative itself I believe Mz's analysis is accurate. And you gotta start there. The metanarrative unavoidably has elements of the real world in it and the way it changes is with people choosing and accepting other narratives over time. I say this because I think in general sometimes people can overanalyze things like this, and the danger there is that sufficient "analysis" can turn anything into anything else. (Which is the core fallacy of postmodernism in an information theory nutshell.) It is unavoidably a product of its time and culture, but irreducibly, it is merely what it is, as well. Too many people get so caught up in the former they forget the latter.

jerrya 14y ago
In the context of the narrative itself ... And you gotta start there. See, I disagree that it has to start there. I love the movie, but I analyze it that Dan O'Bannon wrote a script in the 80s for an 80s crowd, and he knew that the audience and the purchasers of his script would love seeing a shapely Ellen Ripley in her feminine white panties one moment and in a masculine yellow loader the next showing all the military men she was their equal or better. It was a rah rah feminism moment, one of many you go grrl moments in cinema. (And O'Bannon also knew about Chekhov's gun and knew it would be good for the audience to introduce her talents with the loader early in the movie.) So I see the internal narrative as a function of what scripts could be expected to sold and be successful in the 80s. Similarly, Aliens can also be analyzed outside the narrative of the movie as a Vietnam War movie, and in the early 80s when it came out, that was a pretty big deal, especially since the movie was a science fiction movie, set in the future, about the Vietnam War.
- jerf 14y ago
  The problem with your analysis is that it has no information content, in the sense of information theory where "information" has the ability to distinguish between two outcomes. A movie made in the eighties is unavoidably a movie made in the 80s. There is no distinguishing power between 80s movies if you insist on their metanarrative being "correct", for any value of correct other than "comes from the 80s". They all fail equally. I've seen attempts to make movies or write books that somehow avoid the context of the time they were made in for a variety of reasons (political correctness, avante garde art attempts, etc), but when I look at them decades later it's clear to see that they merely demonstrate different aspects of the prejudices and context of their time, not that they even remotely succeeded at being a product of another time. If what you say is true, then there is nowhere to start changing attitudes, because the metanarrative, while interesting and important to consider when analyzing a work, can not be modified, can not be chosen, can not be rewritten. You're stuck with it. You can not write or watch movies from the metanarrative of the 2050s. And if you could, it would surprise you. I guarantee you nobody actually knows what the 2050 metanarrative will be. Any attempts to guess would themselves only be prejudices of the 2010s.