A Closing Comment
The Gabbards, despite being astute psychoanalytic observers, pay only slight attention either to the political overtones of this movie’s plot or to the place in our mythology occupied by Alien and its many artistic relatives. In this they are, perhaps, like many of us. We have, in general, unreflectively entrusted a great deal of the welfare of our world to institutions (and the people who operate them) whose central motivation (along with extracting from us the most labor they can) is to maneuver us out of as much money as they can, by the most effective means they can find. The devices to do so even include exploiting the insights uncovered by psychoanalysis. Like they do for many commodities, sellers of our popular arts manipulate developmentally early states to increase the volatility of the fuel mixture of their product’s sales rocket.
In a passage from their chapter on Alien, Gabbard and Gabbard (1987) do quite insightfully highlight the powerful psychological element that pulls people into sci-fi and horror movies by drawing upon Freud’s (1920/1955) notion of repetition compulsion. In the same passage, and apparently quite unintentionally, the Gabbards give us grounds for an explanation as to why the proliferation of aliens and their horrific ilk in our society does not more effectively assist us in encountering and processing our own unconscious: “People line up to see movies like Alien in order to reencounter powerful unconscious anxieties while retaining a sense that they have some control of an active nature the second time around” (p. 231). I have sought in this essay to illustrate the ill psychosocial effects that flow from the fact that the dominant goal of people such as movie producers is not to help people work through their unconscious anxieties, it is to encourage, fetishize, and exploit these anxieties, leaving them largely unresolved and festering, such that, time after time, “people line up to see movies….”
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References
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Gene Riddle, Ph.D., 3616 Monterey Blvd, Oakland, Cal, USA 94619
bgyk@earthlink.net
© 1999 by Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology
