What's the Story, Mother?: The Mourning of the Alien

Scobie, Stephen. "What's the Story, Mother?: The Mourning of the Alien." SFS #59, 20.1 (March 1993): 80-93.

On monstrous birth, survivor's guilt, and The Mother in the Alien series, but little directly on the human/machine interface; see, though, for Dallas's entry, by means of "inserting a phallic key in[to] a lock," into the "womb-shaped" room where Nostromo's commanding officer may contact "Mother," the computer (83). See also for a cogent defense of Alien 3 and for a reading of Alien as slasher film (following Carol J. Clover's Men Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 1992)—and for sex and reproduction more generally in the Alien series, with relationships to mechanism SS doesn't stress. (RDE, 28/03/93)