Open AccessArrival of the Fittest
Author(s) -
Tess Williams
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
cultural studies review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.116
H-Index - 2
eISSN - 1837-8692
pISSN - 1446-8123
DOI - 10.5130/csr.v22i2.4580
Subject(s) - alien , ambivalence , subversion , narrative , body politic , monster , sociology , aesthetics , survival of the fittest , media studies , art , literature , law , psychoanalysis , citizenship , political science , politics , psychology , evolutionary biology , biology
Prometheus, the fifth film of the Alien franchise, maintains narrative connections to the original four films but the inclusion of new aliens—the Engineers—radically shifts the feminist politic of the series. There is a move away from centralising the monster and the repressed feminine, through images of horror and bodily abjection, toward a politic of carnival, seen in representations of multiple grotesque bodies and subversion of the affect of primal scenes. Carnival is a space where the authority and stability of current social powers and orders are challenged and subverted. This article contends that in Prometheus such a process occurs in the deliberate mixing of scientific knowledge and religious cosmologies, the ambivalent relationship of horror and SF genres to science and scientific knowledge, the gendered complexities of the specific bodies of astronauts and of scientists, and disruptions of the notion of gaze and viewer positioning in the opening scenes