Saturday, 7 September 2013

Riddick: Alien vs. Aliens and the death of Ripley

by Christopher Barr



Riddick is about a man left for dead on a sun-scorched, alien-beast infested planet.  Left by a war-lording empire called Necromongers, Riddick, the title character, must fight for survival to regain his strength in order to go home to the planet, Furya.  Bounty hunters soon learn of Riddick’s location and come to collect the wanted mass murdering convict, only to fall victim to an adversary they should not have underestimated.  Aside from Riddick being a threat to them, a swarm of half scorpion, half psycho dino-beasts come in the dark rain to kill everyone, including Riddick.  The men now join forces to fight off an even worse enemy, an enemy that doesn’t negotiate or barter for freedom.  The movie is also about the objectification of women while man struggles with his own existence.

Riddick is two movies; the first half (my favorite half) is like the film Alien (1979) in the sense of it being more quiet and about a man (in Alien’s case a woman) using his wits and skills to overcome a vicious adversary.  The second half is more like the movie Aliens (1986), where blasting machine guns and pulsating biceps are the fueling force.  Men with massive weapons shooting at anything that moves, while they compete with each other for alpha male status, which clearly belongs to the titular Riddick.

The movie is the third installment of a trilogy; the first being the most satisfying of the three, Pitch Black, the middle movie being the weakest, The Chronicles of Riddick.  All three movies explore a character that, in spite of all odds, survives, not because of chance or luck but because of choice, by being skillfully better than whatever or whomever is hunting him.  Riddick is a complex guy because in many ways he’s not relatable, he’s a mass murdering, hateful, nihilist of a person, a man we presume would snap our neck sooner than look at us.  Or is he?  Is he a man that’s just been misunderstood?  A man that, if left alone, could live a fulfilling existence without the use of his innate sense of violence, but is he not just an animal, when backed into a corner, comes out fighting with blades and fists? 

Nietzsche spoke of such a man, a man that dares to be more than the sum of all his parts, a man that strives to be the Superman and leaves the banal, trite existence of being an ordinary man behind him.  Maybe that’s not quite what motivates Riddick, but never the less, he strives to survive in the face of enemies that would dispatch hell on earth for most of us.  I think Nietzsche would agree that his version of the Superman would see the world with a new set of eyes.  As in the case of Riddick, he sees into the abyss with a set of eyes that allows him to see in the dark.  He doesn’t see the world the way everyone else does, he sees it more clear and bright.  

Riddick fought his Jungian Shadow and for the most part, beat it.  He is unafraid of the Real, that place beyond the symbolic world.  I think the symbolic world is the one he sees as being off in some way.  But yet at the end of the movie it is the symbolic order that beats out the atavistic Real, saving Riddick from being overcome by it.  It’s almost as if Riddick, in the Freudian sense, is fighting to get back to the womb, a place that lacks symbolization, but in the end he is dragged back in.  A plight, Freud knew himself; a person couldn’t entirely overcome.    

Pitch Black was a love letter to Alien and Aliens, respectively.  The protagonist was a woman and remained so to her untimely, yet heroic demise.   (I say ‘remained so’ because a lot of heroines in action movies seem to play men with guns rather than remain as they are, women) She allowed the madman within Riddick to see in her, a person that cares for him, and a person who wants him to live in spite of all his misdeeds.  Unfortunately when Riddick finally can see that, she is gone, snatched into the dark of night by one of the fiendish creatures that brought them together in the first place. 

Sadly I find these movies portray women from good, to bad, to worse, in that order.  In Riddick, women are mere objects, an alien dog in the movie is held with a higher regard.  What Pitch Black was well aware of, was that Ripley in the Alien movies was a strong and resilient woman, not a man in woman’s clothing.  In Riddick, like too many Hollywood movies, women are objects for men to do whatever they want with.  When one of the two bounty hunter ships land to capture Riddick, a female prisoner is released to make room for him.  During her incarceration, it is eluded to that she was there to meet whatever sexual needs the husky men on board desired.  Upon being released, she runs away from the ship only to be shot in the back and discarded.  This was a person that likely would have died on that planet, yet her captors felt it might be a good idea to kill her themselves, presumably for the fun of it.

Riddick himself is not exempt from this misogynistic behaviour.  There was a woman that was part of the platoon of men there to capture Riddick.  When captured and bound, Riddick informed all the men that they will meet death very soon by his hand and before his escape, he’ll be going ‘balls deep’ into the female bounty hunter, also mentioning that he liked her toe nail shade because they matched the color of her nipples.  Presumably he was tainting her, but it’s still oddly acceptable to promise to rape a woman in some of these movies.  Like in the case of The Mother Fucker in Kick Ass 2, failing to rape a captured woman because of an erectile dysfunction, while others around him laugh about it.  In a flashback sequence in the first act of Riddick, a number of women are sprawled all over each other naked in bed.  Riddick sits in a king’s chair, all masculine, sporting a crown, lamenting about his current station in life as ruler over these Borg-like Necromongers, while looking over at the women like one would in a buffet line.

Riddick had its moments of beautiful CGI vistas and exciting action scenes.  But I think, not only did the movie drop the ball, the industry has.  With characters like Ripley, now in the distant past, where are all the new female characters going to come from?  Tarantino?  James Cameron?  Ridley Scott?  Joss Whedon?  The personal struggle that Riddick underwent will always exist in movies and other forms of storytelling, man vs. himself, man vs. nature and man vs. animal, but what is left for the fairer sex when all the men in the world are going crazy? 

"Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence.  It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness.  It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music.  There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."  
                                                                                       - Camille Paglia











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