Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey
http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/ctcs505/mulveyVisualPleasureNarrativeCinema.pdf
I found a big essay on woman in film on an online discussion through searching on google using Boolean Operators with the words "representation of woman in film"
I will analyse the essay soon :)

Woman in Alien Analysis

After using Ask.com searching for "woman in horror films" i found a relevant article on the website: http://www.helium.com/items/132886-women-in-horror-films-ripley-the-alien-and-the-monstrous-feminine The information speaks about a number of theories and ideas about how the female characters in the film Alien are portrayed

The female character is passive and powerless: she is the object of desire for the male character.' (Mulvey, 1975/1989, pg. 353)



This appears to be reversed in Alien as the active and powerful character who defeats the alien and outlives all, including the men, is female. Furthermore, the dramatic action unfolds around her, and the male characters are presented as weak. Captain Dallas makes mistakes, he breaks quarantine laws and cannot protect his team, eventually dying; and robot Ash, whose look and appearance is that of a man, malfunctions and fails his duties.



Mulvey therefore says, the representation of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego of the male hero stands in stark opposition to the distorted image of the passive and powerless female character.

In Alien the roles are clearly reversed, as Ripley is the strong female character who makes active judgments and survives what is trying to kill her.



It is Ripley who makes the plan to defeat the alien which works, while the powerless' male Captain makes bad judgments as his unsure plan fails and he is killed. So the idealized image, based on Lacan's theory, is with the female and not the male. This therefore suggests that contrary to classical Hollywood cinema (Mulvey's main focus was pre-1960), modern horror films, such as Alien, offer both visual and narcissistic pleasure based primarily on the female character rather than the male character.



In the opening sequence the camera travels through the long corridors of the ship which Creed relates to the inner workings of the female body, before settling on a chamber where the seven astronauts are awoken. Creed discusses this room as womb-like', and as the astronauts awake and come out of the sleeping pods, she relates this to giving birth and the computer, called mother' in the film, which brings them to life' represents that the father is completely absent, here the mother is sole parent and sole-life support.' (Creed, 1992.)