‘Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty’
The Alien Film Franchise as Interspecies Pet Play
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/imaginingtheimpossible.138420Keywords:
Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, science fiction, monster, pet, play, film studies, the fantasticAbstract
This article explores the motifs of pet and play in the Alien franchise.
It is grounded in biocultural theory and draws on play research from
anthropology, ethology, and linguistics (Huizinga, Burghardt, Bateson)
and research in pets from animal studies and philosophy (Melson,
Tuan, Fudge). The article develops three levels of play to discuss the
audience’s engagement: immersed play (play1), shifting in and out
of a play frame (play2), and distanced looking-at-play (play3). The
pet function in the Alien series is performed by various beings, such
as the cat Jonesy and dog Spike, the Alien, the clone Ripley 8, and
the androids David and Walther. Pet and play have until now been
overlooked in analyses of the franchise, but this article develops a new
perspective that concludes with a reflection on the Alien as an animal
"’good to think’" (Lévi-Strauss) with, in that the audience can use the
Alien as play pivot in a game of pet domestication, domination, and
mastery.
References
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Northvale: Jason Aronson Inc., 1987Giger, H. R. Giger’s Alien Film Design 20th Century Fox. London: Titan Books, 1989 (first published 1979).
Giger, H. R. Necronomicon. Sphinx Verlag, 1977.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge, 1980. First published 1944.
Melson, Gail F. “Human–Animal Play: Play With Pets,” In: The Cambridge Handbook of Play (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology), eds. Smith, Peter K. and Jaipaul L. Roopnarine, 103–123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Kindle Edition.
Schubart, Rikke. Mastering Fear: Women, Emotions, and Contemporary Horror. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Thompson, Kirrilly and Bradley Smith. “Should We Let Sleeping Dogs Lie . . . With Us? Synthesizing the Literature and Setting the Agenda for Research on Human–Animal Co–Sleeping Practices.” Humanimalia 6, no. 1, Fall (2014): 114–127.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Rikke Schubart
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