176: Woman, Mother, Space Marine

[Ray Huling]

Woman, Mother, Space Marine

James Cameron's Aliens inspired a generation of developers, but the games industry missed the most groundbreaking aspect of the sci-fi classic: the Fighting Mom.

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[Dogstar060763]

I remember listening to a programme on the radio here in the UK quite a while ago - the subject under discussion was 'women and power' and it was a prety well-informed and intellectual examination of what happens - and what has happened historically - when women have access to great power, especially political and/or military power. The consensus was that it generally doesn't end well, usually resulting in wars, political repression and other undesirable outcomes. Yes, women in position of power can become autocratic lunatics, too.

Of course, this doesn't absolve men from millenia of war and waste, but even the female historians on the panel seemed to feel that all the weaknesses and failings traditionally exhibited by males in positions of power become somehow magnified and still more destructive in the hands of a woman...

Ripley is a great example of just such an outcome. She might be 'kick ass' etc, but you wouldn't want to cross her, or expect to engage her in meaningful negotiations: she knows she's right about absolutely everything and like all good fascists, she'll brook no other opinion that does not fit with her own view of the world. Her solution to the problem of alien infestation? Nuke everything. It's left to the man beside her to beg for a moment's hesitation, a rethink...some simple compassion.

It's also worth mentioning that as the films progress Ripley moves closer and closer towards becoming one of the xenomorphs herself: a creature wholly without cloudy notions of conscience, morality or guilt. An unfeeling, calmly efficient killing machine that even the relentless aliens themselves learn to fear... Just what was Ripley - or the scriptwriters - telling us about this woman's journey towards power?

Maybe, on the whole, we like Space Marines because they are inherently fallible - in a clumsy, half-assed kinda way. It's reassuring to know you're only human, you're prone to make mistakes, you're not always right about everything and sometimes you get scared. I think on the whole I prefer playing as a Marine, rather than as a 'fighting mom', if it's all the same to you. I sincerely hope the devs creating the next Aliens game feel pretty much the same.

PS: Oh yes, as another example of a strong woman in a position of power, how about Captain Janeaway in ST: Voyager? During her tenure she presided over wholesale genocide, countless violations of the Prime Directive and appalling lapses of professional military conduct...

 

[Hirvox]

It seems like the article could have used some more research: Here's a few examples of Mama Bears from TV Tropes:
Samus Aran from Super Metroid
Sophitia from Soul Calibur
Terra from Final Fantasy VI
Jade from Beyond Good and Evil

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MamaBear

Of those, Samus Aran even takes a detour in her escape from an exploding planet to save some semi-intelligent wildlife (who, in karmic payback, save her later).

 

[Beery]

Sorry, but in my view 'Aliens' is a 'great' movie in exactly the same way that Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers' is a 'great' novel. In other words, it's NOT. Both of these are second rate sci-fi products featuring characters that don't elicit much, if any, feeling from the audience.

I'm all for female badasses, but surely there are better movies than Aliens in which to find them. One is another James Cameron film: Terminator 2 - the queen of female badass movies. But even T2 is not a 'great' movie - it's a mindless blockbuster and hardly of the same calibre as 'The Godfather' or Clint Eastwood's 'Unforgiven'.

But for truly 'great' shows/movies with REAL badass, heroic or even simply 'human' women characters I'm afraid we have to go to anime. So far, western cinema has not even approached the likes of anime such as 'Elfen Lied', Makoto Shinkai's 'Voices of a Distant Star', Yoshitoshi Abe's 'Haibane Renmei' or even Hayao Miyazaki's 'Princess Mononoke' or 'Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind'.

 

[UncleAsriel]

Your statement about feeling a maternal attachment to some in-game character reminded me of Bioshock in some ways. Even though that last, annoying escort mission riekd me to no end as I had to keep a brainwashed little girl from becoming splicer fodder, I still felt some mode of attachment to the rescued but still brainwashed Little Sister. Even though no emotional connection was made to establish the Little Sister I was escorting as someone in specific, the co-mingling of maternal and paternal instincts as I froze, bludgeoned and blasted splicers left me feeling vaguely like the end sequence from Aliens. Get away from her, you *****, indeed!

 

[Tabloid Believer]

I remember listening to a programme on the radio here in the UK quite a while ago - the subject under discussion was 'women and power' and it was a prety well-informed and intellectual examination of what happens - and what has happened historically - when women have access to great power, especially political and/or military power. The consensus was that it generally doesn't end well, usually resulting in wars, political repression and other undesirable outcomes.

Well, first of all, I completely disagree. There are plenty of examples of women who were in power that led their nations to greatness, or presided over a time of greatness in a particular country. The UK certainly has its share of female leaders who help it gain prominence in the world.

However, that argument, whether it be true or false, has little bearing here. We're talking about video games and what would be suit video games and their narrative.

Her solution to the problem of alien infestation? Nuke everything. It's left to the man beside her to beg for a moment's hesitation, a rethink...some simple compassion.

Actually, if you recall the movie, it's the male leader, Hicks, who orders for the nuke to occur. As for compassion - compassion for what? The Aliens in the movie are not depicted as creatures or animals, but rather a force of nature. It's difficult to sympathize with a tornado or hurricane. Such forces of destruction simply are.

It's also worth mentioning that as the films progress Ripley moves closer and closer towards becoming one of the xenomorphs herself: a creature wholly without cloudy notions of conscience, morality or guilt.

I would normally agree with this but...the subsequent films are a violent departure from James Cameron's vision and the work of other authors and directors. In that sense, each movie is almost its own story with its own narrative and its own themes. The should not be seen as one contiguous work.

 

[Tabloid Believer]

Sorry, but in my view 'Aliens' is a 'great' movie in exactly the same way that Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers' is a 'great' novel. In other words, it's NOT. Both of these are second rate sci-fi products featuring characters that don't elicit much, if any, feeling from the audience.

I also disagree with this statement and I can easily show how Aliens is a great movie. Simply put - look how much it's been ripped off. The original Doom was obviously an homage to Aliens and many, many, many FPS's out there continue to be homages to the Aliens movie. Halo, Gears of War, and even the recent Dead Space have clear references to Aliens.

It may be that you personally do not connect with the movie. However, there can be no denying that the Aliens movie has left a permanent footprint upon cinema and video games for all time.

 

[Beery]

Dogstar060763 wrote:
"I remember listening to a programme on the radio here in the UK quite a while ago - the subject under discussion was 'women and power' and it was a prety well-informed and intellectual examination of what happens - and what has happened historically - when women have access to great power,"

Whenever someone says there was a "well-informed and intellectual examination" why do I get the feeling that what the writer means by "well-informed and intellectual examination" is that the 'examination' in question merely mirrored the writer's own deeply held prejuduces - in this case the prejudice being that women are inherently more destructive than men.

Just because some 'expert' agrees with you, it doesn't mean the expert's argument is well-informed, intellectual or even correct. All it proves is that bigots tend to like people who agree with them.

 

[boredbootneck]

The first game I ever played which gave me the protective mother feeling you are describing was Yoshis Island on the SNES!
When baby Mario was drifting away in that bubble, bleating his little lungs out, the sheer feeling of desperation and potential failure was immense!
Also because Mario had no AI to annoy me with, he felt like a total blank slate innocent who deserved my protection and in being essentialy a character I already loved, the emotional effect was very suprising to me!
I have to say that I loved this article! A note on the space marines from Aliens themselves, they are some of the most realistic soldier characters I have seen in any movie!
My friends and I quoted them frequently when I was in the military and I notice that the further away we get from the drafting era and films made by people with real military experience (even if a director had not been to Vietnam, chances are his dad had been in WW2 or a good portion of his crew could be veterans) the less authentic the soldiers tend to feel.

 

[Beery]

Tabloid Believer wrote:
"...there can be no denying that the Aliens movie has left a permanent footprint upon cinema and video games for all time."

True, but movies like 'Plan 9 from Outer Space' and 'Attack of the Killer Tomatoes' also left a permanent footprint upon cinema and the public imagination (and even on some godawful games), but leaving a footprint doesn't mean a show is great art. Aliens is hardly of the same calibre as its own predecessor (which might just be a 'great' movie). But James Cameron is no Ridley Scott, and Cameron's best movies sit squarely in the B-movie category.

When all is said and done, at its best Aliens is just another Vietnam movie along the lines of 'Go Tell The Spartans'; at its worst it's merely a slasher flick set in space. We have disposable redshirts who get killed in gory setpieces, and it all leads to the standard pyrotechnic-rich finale. I mean seriously - 'Aliens', a great movie? Give us a break! Michael Bay's awful 'Transformers' had a richer plot and more effective characters. Heck, Paul Verhoeven's 'Starship Troopers' was a better film - at least that film tried to make a real political point (a point that was lost because it was made 4 years too early - i.e. long before we could use it as a lesson to help us fight the post-9/11 propaganda of the Bush administration). Rather than making a film that had societal value, Cameron's 'Aliens' was merely an attempt to cash in on a popular anti-corporate zeitgeist.

Plus, Aliens itself was derivative. It seems to me that it's a remake of George Romero's Day of the Dead, which 'coincidentally' came out the previous year. And all those slasher type films derive from John Carpenter's 'Halloween'.

In short, I think it's a big stretch to claim that Aliens was a 'great' or even an 'innovative' movie.

 

[Nugoo]

Oh yes, as another example of a strong woman in a position of power, how about Captain Janeaway in ST: Voyager? During her tenure she presided over [...] appalling lapses of professional military conduct...

... and I think we can all agree that Cap'n Kirk would never do any such thing.

 

[Killerbunny001]

The article is deep, the subject at hand is as well something buried in something that was somehow forgotten.

I really imagined selling this to someone in a meeting, I also imagined the response :

"Oh... yeah... this is really excelent.... yeah..... I think will go with the space marine though [...]"

The fact is most game designers don`t really go that deep when thinking up their future projects. There is a Space Marine folder in their heads, they open that up and build on it. That is it.

 

[krans]

Cameron had the actors playing his marines read Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers before filming. It is a terrible book.

Actually, I think that statement unfair, and unreasonable. The fact that I disagree with the philosophical and/or moral arguments presented by an author in a book (or in any other medium) does not make that work "terrible". Bad spelling/grammar, incomprehensible plot, incredible* characters -- these are all arguments for calling a book "terrible". For all that I disagree with the societal structure Heinlein argues for in Starship Troopers, it is good, fun read, and he presents his viewpoint through compelling characters and well-written dialogue.

And after reading it, who didn't dream about what it would be like to be a member of the jumpsuit-clad, superhumanly-tough Mobile Infantry?

As controversial as its socio-political agenda might be, that book invented the futuristic warrior. Warhammer 40,000's Space Marines, Halo's Spartans, the marines in Aliens, and the Terran Marines of Starcraft: the list of sci-fi fighting forces inspired directly or indirectly by Heinlein's soldiers goes on.

* Incredible: impossible to believe in.

 

[Novan Leon]

But for truly 'great' shows/movies with REAL badass, heroic or even simply 'human' women characters I'm afraid we have to go to anime. So far, western cinema has not even approached the likes of anime such as 'Elfen Lied', Makoto Shinkai's 'Voices of a Distant Star', Yoshitoshi Abe's 'Haibane Renmei' or even Hayao Miyazaki's 'Princess Mononoke' or 'Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind'.

Speaking of strong female "mother" characters, you should check out the anime Seirei no Moribito. It's the story of a strong woman warrior in her mid 30's who is tasked with caring for and protecting a young prince from a number of monsters who seek his life. They do an excellent job of showing the battle-hardened warrior side of her personality in conjunction with her soft "maternal" side. Check it out.

But I agree. The Japanese have a keen talent for appealing and realistic female character development, whereas American media tends to simply place their women into a feminist stereotype and be done with it. By American Hollywood standards, all women are fashion models who are sexually demanding, hold high positions of authority and have no problem physically holding their own in a fight with one or more well-built men at one time. Japan doesn't have the same kind of aggressive feminism that we have here, therefore they tend to have a better chance of creating female characters that don't fit into a particular stereotype.

PS. I'm not saying that anime doesn't have it's own female stereotypes, it DEFINITELY does, it just seems that their ratio of well-developed female characters to simple stereotypes is higher. Every culture has it's own stereotypes, creativity is a culture's ability to create characters outside of standard stereotypes and give birth to a living, breathing person, figuratively speaking.

 

[Jordan Deam]

After 24 years of holding out, this article is what finally made me rent Alien. (I'm following up with the sequel later this week.) Thanks, Ray!

 

[Robyrt]

@krans: Right on. Starship Troopers is an excellent science fiction book. It is well-written, contains some new technology and reasonable uses for it, and the main hero is a believable and three-dimensional character. (Not to mention it's free of the sexual repression that plagues so many of Heinlein's works.) Although I may disagree with its ideology, that doesn't mean it's "terrible" by any sense of the word.

Unless, of course, Ray is a Marxist and thinks entertainment has value only insofar as it is correct, in which case I wonder if he also thinks Wagner is terrible music.

@Jordan Deam: Alien != Aliens. The original is actually a really good horror movie, and the action parts are almost incidental to the storyline. One of the only successful instances of a sequel changing genres that I know of.

 

[Dogstar060763]

Dogstar060763 wrote:
"I remember listening to a programme on the radio here in the UK quite a while ago - the subject under discussion was 'women and power' and it was a prety well-informed and intellectual examination of what happens - and what has happened historically - when women have access to great power,"

Whenever someone says there was a "well-informed and intellectual examination" why do I get the feeling that what the writer means by "well-informed and intellectual examination" is that the 'examination' in question merely mirrored the writer's own deeply held prejuduces - in this case the prejudice being that women are inherently more destructive than men.

Just because some 'expert' agrees with you, it doesn't mean the expert's argument is well-informed, intellectual or even correct. All it proves is that bigots tend to like people who agree with them.

Actually I think that's unfair. The discussion was well-informed by a variety of academics of both sexes and the exchange of views was frank. Most of all, the programme got me thinking again about some of great historical female figures and how we view them and their actions next to those of their male counterparts.

I could never put my finger on why I found Ripley such an unsympathetic character, but I began to see it might be because (for me at least) she becomes gradually less and less emotionally connected as the quadrilogy progresses. Even in the very first movie, we were all left with little doubt this girl was a kick-ass kinda chick who took no sh*t. Whereas later female characters encouraged sympathy, even some comedy, Ripley remained throughout coldly aloof and hard to connect with.

Anyway, forget all that: ask the average young male gamer whether he'd rather play as a 'fighting mom' or a 'badass Male marine' and I think I know which way the numbers would go...

 

[Obliterato]

Heck, Paul Verhoeven's 'Starship Troopers' was a better film - at least that film tried to make a real political point

In my opinion Vernehovens Starship Troopers sucked, what was his political point? The Film was originally going to be called bug hunt on planet *insert number here* (I can't remember the exact title), he then heard of the starship troopers book and ripped the title away, heard Heinlein had what could be seen as a 'radical political view' nowdays (really he was just a man of his time), then without reading the book he went on to 'satirise' it, missing out the key concepts of the book and one HUGE fact, it was the first one to introduce the idea of powered armour. The troopers arent ill equiped in the book, they just came up against an enemy theyd never seen before, just like aliens. However in the book officers are required to have done at least 2 years as a ranker, so are combat tested, aliens runs on the real life system where and officer is commisioned after doing the basic training of his juniors and then a little bit of leadership training. Anyway if Vernhoeven aimed to put people off from joining the military he failed, his only success was making a cinematic joke of a film that was so awfully acted that it is funny.

Back to a point i touched on a minute ago, isn't the shit useless Lieutenant a stereotype from the vietnam war, sure when their new hteir not going to be the best but that doesn't mean their as much use as a chocolate teapot. When starship troopers was written the vietnam war had properly begun so world war 2 and korea was their main war experience of the era, world war 2 most of the US army was inexperienced. Vietnam for officers would have been a baptism of fire whilst napalm was poured on top. They had to deal with draftsmen that didn't want to be their, insubordination, drug abuse and sergeants that instead of trying to help the lieutenant and improve them would rather shove a bullet in his back and keep run the show himself, forgetting that he was a shit useless recruit once too and it was partially pure luck he'd survived that far.

The problem with bringing in female characters to games (unless their Lara croft) is gaming is still a male dominated medium, so no matter the groundbreaking heroine in Aliens and all the games following its lead on everything but this, males just aren't going to relate in general to a female character. Lara Croft was only really accepted because she had big boobs, all the others are either exactly like her, i.e Jill Valentine or are some form of tomboy so its alot like playing as a male emotionally but physically their slightly differently built.

 

[hamster mk 4]

I really enjoyed the article, but the closing argument for a game whose story is based on the maternal protection instinct is flawed. While the protection of your civilization or species is justification enough for the whole sale slaughter common in video games, a mother's desire to protect her child is not. Perhaps a game that emphasizes danger over violence like Prince of Persia would be a good match for the story, but the average space marine game would not.

There was a game released in 1999 called "Drakan: Order of the Flame" whose driving plot point was a strong (scantily clad) female character trying to rescue her brother. The game play was good and the sub plots were compelling but after the 5th kill I lost all interest in saving my brother and continued the game for the joy of the game play. The "save your brother" plot kept emerging to string the player along but it felt artificial and forced.

I am not saying the protective instinct is not a good instinct to harness for games. Ico being the prime example of a game where it worked, to a degree. I have heard many complaints of "let the stupid girl die she deserves it". However there are more ways of getting it wrong than there are of getting it right. After all most players don't mind charging into battle screaming "for king and country!" but when the battle cry changes to "for little Billy!" a lot of players will start wondering who is this Billy and why should I kill 1000 people and die 100 times for him.

 

[johnman]

Ray Huling is a freelance journalist living in Boston. He would like to dedicate this essay to the memory of Sarah Palin.

whats all that about?
And good article.