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“Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves his well belov’d imprisonment.”

—John Donne, “Nativity”

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Introduction

An age-old symbol, long overlooked in the Western tradition, has made a remarkable comeback in contemporary American science fiction films. Womb symbolism has always been part of the artistic and religious canon, from the Venus of Willendorf and the fertility goddesses of India to the art of Sandro Botticelli and Georgia O’Keefe to Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris .

It is the aim of this paper to explore overt womb symbolism in several science fiction films of the past twenty-five years, and, more generally, to relate this womb symbolism to a more covert return to womb fantasy common to all the films studied. We will then attempt to outline a few possible reasons for the prevalence of this theme in recent films.

Psychological Foundations

According to Sigmund Freud, all dreams can be described as anxiety or wish-fulfillment fantasies. This is important to our study of film since films are, in essence, waking dreams. The viewer enjoys a film vicariously, and relates to it as closely as the film enacts unconscious wishes from the viewer’s own psyche. The concealment of these fantasies in fiction and symbolism is necessary since the psyche resists confronting unconscious wishes outright. In dreams, unconscious wishes are concealed by what Freud calls “the dreamwork”—what in film might be described as symbol and subtext. In this essay, we will deal with the symbol of the womb and the subtext of a return to womb fantasy.

Although Freud is the founder of psychology and still the most important psychosexual theoretician, he has little to say about the womb. While not as sexist as the Victorian society he worked in (he dispelled some prevailing myths about female psychology and encouraged several female psychologists and physicians), his work is marked by a disparaging attitude toward women (the primacy of the phallus). Freud rejected later work by more feminist psychologists such as Ernst Jones, although he admits to knowing very little about women, saying “we can describe . . . only . . . the male child; the corresponding processes in little girls are not known to us.” And as time went on, Freud treated fewer and fewer female patients, lending greater credence to the criticism that his conclusions were based on a skewed sample.

More important to our purposes will be the work of Karen Horney, perhaps the most important feminist psychologist and certainly the earliest to challenge Freud’s views on women. Horney’s work, while undervalued when it was written, was rediscovered by feminist thinkers forty years later. Reacting to Freud’s theory of the primacy of penis envy, Horney proposed the existence of “womb envy.” Motherhood, she said, gives women “a quite indisputable and by no means negligible physiological superiority.” She goes on to make a startling generalization: “Is not the tremendous strength in man of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?”

Her thinking is echoed in Georg Groddeck’s statement that he feels “envy that I . . . cannot be a mother. [This is true] not of me alone, but of all men. . . .” The truth of this assertion can be found in numerous medical cases of sympathetic labor pains in husbands whose wives are pregnant.

The thinking of Horney was a major influence on Bruno Bettelheim, who described the male desire for a womb in Les blessures symbolique. Drawing on myths and cultural rites from around the world, Bettelheim describes the recurring motif of wounds inflicted on the male child during initiation rites. Bettelheim’s theory is that the boy is cut to give him a symbolic vagina; this allows him to be both male and female and have access to the generative power of the Earth Mother within himself .

Horney also differed with Freud over the development of the ego, stating that it was present at birth. It is likely that this would heighten the impact of the birth trauma discussed by Freud in The Ego and the Id and “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety.” In addition, she felt that girls became aware of their vaginas before puberty, and that this lessened their anxiety over having a “stunted penis.” A more orthodox neo-Freudian, Melanie Klein, agreed with Horney on her key points, rejecting Freud’s primacy of penis envy in women and echoing Horney’s feelings on the ego.

Otto Rank expanded on Freud’s work on birth anxiety in his book The Trauma of Birth. Rank proposed the controversial idea that birth is the prototype of all later anxieties. This was a major influence on Melanie Klein, who believed that all anxiety has its origin in the fear of death, and Ernst Becker, who attributed the ills of human society to the quest for immortality, arising from a fear of death. This is more easily demonstrated than Freud’s attribution of human neuroses to repressed sexuality: even societies without cultural sexual taboos develop theories of an afterlife, usually of a paradise in which all one’s needs are fulfilled.

This idea is in itself a return to womb fantasy: the womb is the single human experience in which all one’s needs are supplied autonomously by an outside force. Birth trauma is more than merely the infant’s first memory of pain, it is the genesis of all later ideas about utopia and afterlife, including the expulsion from paradise. Carl Sagan even postulates it as the basis of the near-death experience, likening the dying person’s perception of ascending through a dark tunnel toward a godlike figure wrapped in blinding light to the infant’s memory of travelling through the birth canal and its first perception of light and other humans.

Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s “inner circle,” attempts to link birth anxiety, death anxiety, phallic symbolism, and the wish to return to the womb. In “The Symbolism of the Bridge,” Ferenczi describes the remarkable role bridges play in dreams, and describes the dual meaning of the symbol as “uniting member between the parents” (coitus) and “link between life and not-life” (fear of death, desire for life/afterlife). In “Bridge Symbolism and the Don Juan Legend,” he states that:

Ferenczi believed that the true motive for coitus is the male wish to return to the mother’s womb. This is echoed in Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion, in which he describes the male character’s thoughts as he makes love to one of his many conquests:

In the discussions to follow we will see this theme repeated as human characters have sexual intercourse (actually or symbolically) with aliens. We will also see the bridge motif discussed by Ferenczi appear in a number of guises. Other well-established womb symbols include the seashell, the sea, the cave, and the egg, and we will see these, too, appear throughout the films to be discussed.

Symbols Unique To Science Fiction

Although it is no less dangerous to stereotype science fiction than any other genre, it is safe to say that science fiction deals with what is not, that is, with places, people, things, and events with which no reader could have any direct experience. It is therefore obvious that science fiction should alienate the reader more than other genres, despite its familiar iconography: the spaceship, the robot, telepathy, and so on. All science fiction is initially alienating, often strikingly so.

However, it is crucial to remember that a typical science fiction reader already feels alienated by the everyday world to at least a small degree, resulting in his or her attraction to science fiction in the first place. He or she often identifies with the protagonist all the more, wishing perhaps to be the protagonist, living in a new world. The a priori alienation of the reader from the work generates an unusual identification with the protagonist. Again and again we will see in the discussions below the viewers subconscious desires sublimated by the protagonist in the films.

As mentioned above, science fiction has a set of icons familiar to readers of the genre. The most important of these for our purposes will be the spaceship. The spaceship has served as a symbol of the womb since the earliest days of science fiction.

In Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, and Clifford Simak’s “Target Generation,” the spaceship represents the womb and the development of the characters within. In Bester’s work, the total isolation within the womb is accentuated by the fact that Foyle can only live in a small room “the size of a giant’s coffin.” His womblike attachment to the Nomad is culminated by his accidental discovery of teleportation, when he “jaunts” across six hundred miles of space due to stress to his still-embryonic personality caused by the invasion of the womb by conniving men who want to use him. The climax of the novel occurs when Foyle finds that he has evolved beyond ordinary men, and, in an ending reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, “he was drawn to the womb of his birth . . . curled in a tight foetal ball.”

The situation is so familiar to the science fiction reader that in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams was able to parody the symbol by giving the spaceship’s computer the personality of an overprotective mother who refuses to let the travellers out of the ship unless they dress warmly. Again and again we will see the spaceship as a symbol for the womb in the films discussed below.

The Films

It would be impossible to analyze all science fiction films searching for any one common theme, even limiting ourselves to American science fiction films of the past twenty-five years. There is probably no common theme among films as diverse as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Predator, Liquid Sky, Brother From Another Planet, and Zardoz. Indeed, although womb symbolism can be found in almost every film, examples such as Zardoz or A Boy and His Dog do not fit the “return to womb” mold. Such films will be analyzed briefly in the section “Womb as Dystopia,” below.

In this paper we will limit ourselves to ten films (or film cycles) of the past twenty-five years, examining the return to womb fantasy in each. The films we will study are of great importance, as many are from important directors and most are among the top-grossing and most influential films of all time. For instance, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, Star Wars, and Close Encounter of the Third Kind are among the top-grossing films of all time, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Alien all earned more than $35 million in their initial release period alone. The total box office receipts for the first five Star Trek films worldwide has been estimated at over $600 million . A film’s earnings are by no means an indication of the films worth, but are certainly indicative of how well the film supplies the needs and desires of the audience.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film is perhaps the purest example of womb symbolism in film, and certainly a turning point for science fiction films. Voted among the beat films ever made in the 1972 and 1982 Sight and Sound polls, it proved that science fiction films could deal with powerful themes in an adult way. Vivian Sobchack has noted that since 2001 was released in 1968, science fiction films were made primarily for adult audiences.

2001 also set new standards for special effects in films and broke new ground thematically. While most science fiction films of the ’60s were of the ilk of The Blob, or even Barbarella, 2001 was among a group of films that grew out of the countercultural new age of the ’60s, exploring issues such as feminism and environmentalism. 2001 is the story of humanity in a cosmic context. After seeing a mysterious alien monolith profoundly affect the evolution of early man, we see the same monolith on the moon, waiting to be discovered by spacefaring humans. An astronaut reaches out to touch the monolith in exactly the same way the ape man did earlier, and the monolith signals to a third monolith in orbit around Jupiter that the time has come.

A mission is sent to the second monolith, but due to the psychopathic computer HAL, only one astronaut arrives. He is drawn into the monolith, through a long tunnel (stargate) frequently reminiscent of a birth canal, and into a mysterious room decorated to put a rich bourgeois noble at ease. There he ages, and when he is on his deathbed, the monolith reappears. He reaches out to touch it, and is transformed into the Star Child: a huge fetus safely within a glowing, translucent womb.

This is by far the most obvious, perhaps the only explicit, return to womb we will study, and the most profound, for it deals not only with the psychological desire to return to the womb, but relates it to the religious belief in rebirth and a life after death common to most peoples across the world.

The themes of birth/rebirth and death/birth recur throughout the film, although it is not so much implicit in the return to womb fantasy as grounded in the cosmic consciousness of the film. The first sequence of the film is “The Dawn of Man,” and it is clear that this shows the birth or modern man and the death of ape men. The ape men are shown living in caves, which are clear womb symbols. It is upon the death of one of the “old” ape men at the hands of the “new” ape men that modern humans are born, as shown by the famous jump cut from the bone to the spaceship. Other reminders of birth include the birthdays in the film (Heywood Floyd’s daughter and Frank Poole) and HAL’s “I became fully operational” speech.

As Joseph Campbell puts it, “Full circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come. . . .” This equation of the womb and the tomb is seen most clearly in the three capsules holding the hibernating members of the crew. They are obviously womb symbols as long as HAL plays the part of the “good mother,” but as soon as he becomes the “bad mother,” cutting off the life support systems, they are as obviously coffins, or tomb symbols. This is the “Belly of the Whale” sequence in Campbell’s hero monomyth and the meaning of the initiation rite: to progress to the new form (hero, adult, human, Star Child) it is necessary for the old form (initiate, child, ape man) to die.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick made a film unlike any that had come before, and pointed science fiction films in a new direction. We will see some of the themes discussed here taken up again in films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.

Douglas Trumbull was the director of special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, for which he earned a considerable reputation. His directorial debut was not well received by the general public, but many critics praised it. Actually, the film is warmly human and often funny, although it has few action sequences and a simplistic plot.

In the film, Bruce Dern plays Lowell, one of three astronauts aboard one of a fleet of spaceships near the planet Saturn. The environment of the earth is so ravaged that the only place the last remaining trees can survive is in greenhouses in outer space. Lowell is obsessed with caring for the forest and living naturally (the other astronauts eat processed foods while he eats food grown in the greenhouse), so he is understandably upset when orders come to destroy the greenhouses and return to earth. Lowell eventually kills his fellow astronauts and flees from the fleet in order to protect his greenhouse. Eventually, unbalanced by loneliness and guilt, Lowell programs a robot to care for the garden, ejects it from the spaceship, then blows the spaceship and himself up.

We have already discussed the spaceship as womb, but it is more here. Trumbull has made the garden into The Garden: the Garden of Eden. Dern therefore becomes Cain, and his sin makes him unable to continue living in “paradise.” The falcon that settled peacefully on his wrist in the first half of the film bites him in the second. Furthermore, the garden begins to die, just as the land becomes infertile in the legend of the Fisher King. There is a scientific explanation for the garden wilting (lack of sunlight) and Dern cures the problem, but on the mythic level he must sacrifice himself to save the forest.

Like the crystal ball in Citizen Kane, the “crystal palace” of the greenhouse functions as a womb. Where Lowell was in harmony with it before the killings, he is ejected in the second half: not a birth but an abortion; not a denial of desire but a feeling of inadequacy. By sinning, he is no longer worthy of paradise. “It’s just not working out,” he tells the robot, and he seems to be simply giving up, fading away. But his death saved the greenhouse because when the ship exploded, the fleet that would have destroyed it turned back. Lowell’s self-sacrifice saved the land after all.

Ironically, in a film that takes place entirely in the lifeless vacuum of outer space, the final image of Silent Running is in the garden, with the reprogrammed robot tending, planting, and watering forever.

Based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five is the story of a man who has become “unstuck in time.” Billy Pilgrim is a survivor of the fire bombing of Dresden xxxxxxxxxxxx

The end of Slaughterhouse Five has Billy Pilgrim and xxxxxxxxx in a protective bubble on Tralfamador, where they are part of a “zoo” created by the Tralfamadorians. There they live in peace and harmony, xxxxxxxx

Steven Spielberg’s 1976 epic was the first big-budget science fiction film to strike it rich at the box office and legitimized science fiction to profit-conscious studios. It is the story of humanity’s first contact with aliens, and although there are numerous subplots, it basically concerns an electric company worker who sees UFOs one night and becomes obsessed by a vision of a piece of landscape dominated by a huge phallic mountain. Eventually he realizes that it is where the aliens intend to land when they return. He is unsure why, but he realizes he has to be there when the aliens land, and he overcomes numerous obstacles to reach the landing site.

Close Encounters uses the “spaceship as womb” motif discussed above, but it introduced a twist that has become common in subsequent films: what Scott Bates has termed “the phallic fetus syndrome,” in which the alien combines the small size and cuddly demeanor of an infant with the reptilian appearance associated with the male genitalia. The same alien (more or less) will appear later in The Empire Strikes Back, E.T., and Strange Invaders.

All of these symbols come together with resounding power in the film’s conclusion. After the humans who are waiting at the mountain greet the small spaceships and begin to leave, they are stopped by the realization that that was only an advance scouting party. With a growing sense of awe and wonder, they watch as the mammoth “mother ship” descends. The ship is somewhat egg-shaped, hinting at the womb symbolism to come and providing a yoni for the phallic landscape. The ship lands, and a hatch opens to reveal an interior so bright it can only be seen in a blur. A ramp descends and a small, thin alien, vaguely human, vaguely fetal, vaguely reptilian (in the early stages of development, the human embryo appears reptilian).

The scene is reminiscent of the Near Death Experience, which is itself similar to the birth experience, as noted above. In addition, the entry ramp is a link between life as we know it and life as we cannot imagine it: Ferenczi’s bridge symbol discussed above. Combined with the phallic/yonic symbolism of the landscape and the ship, Ferenczi’s dual meanings are both found in this scene. And, in an ending owing much to 2001 (although closer to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End), some humans, including the film’s protagonist, board the ship and depart with the aliens, reborn into a life we cannot imagine and fulfilling the viewers’ wish to do the same.

In the three Star Wars films (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi), we are shown the adventures of Luke Skywalker the rebel alliance against the Empire, led by the mighty Darth Vader and the mysterious Emperor.

It is not the overt womb symbolism that characterizes the return to womb fantasy inherent in the cycle, but the pervading philosophy of “the Force.” It is necessary to use the language of Eastern philosophy to describe the Force. According to Obi-Wan Kenobi, the force is “an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.” We learn over the course of the trilogy that there is a light and a dark side to the Force. “A Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. And beware—anger, fear, aggression—the dark side are they,” explains Yoda. This is remarkable similar to the Chinese philosophy of the Tao, or “the way.”

Taoism also describes the universe as being made up of opposites, called yin and yang. These are light and dark, hot and cold, male and female—opposites that, in union, make One. Like the Force, Taoism is not easy to understand and requires meditation to master. According to the Tao te Ching, “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao” . Obi-Wan says, “A Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him.” Lao-Tzu says “The supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to.” “Trust your feeling, Luke,” says Obi-Wan, echoing Lao-Tzu’s “Empty your mind of all thoughts. Let your mind be at peace.”

What is relevant about the preceding is the essentially feminine aspect of the heroic Jedis in the trilogy. The Emperor and Darth Vader seek to dominate. Yoda and Obi-Wan, in contrast, are in harmony with the universe. Luke’s most important lessons are not in how to use his lightsaber but in how not to use it. The lightsaber is a phallic weapon, and Luke cannot win by using it. On Degova, Luke resumes his training with Yoda, the Jedi master. “That place is strong with the dark side of the Force. A place of evil it is,” says Yoda, and Luke descends into a tunnel reminiscent of the birth canal. He fails Yoda’s test by taking his lightsaber into the womb and killing Vader, who turns out to be Luke. This is perhaps the key sequence in the trilogy, for it predicts Luke’s defeat at Vader’s hands near the end of The Empire Strikes Back and his victory by refusing to kill Vader at the conclusion of Return of the Jedi.

This cave, the cave the Millennium Falcon hides in to elude the Empire, the Millennium Falcon itself, and other places can all be seen as wombs. However, in Star Wars, the overt womb symbols are false wombs, just as the quick way to master the Force is the wrong way. Like the cave on Degova, the cave on the asteroid is guarded, and the people who attempt to take sanctuary there are ejected. It is only through the good side of the Force that you can pass the guardian and return to the womb.

Finally there is the matter of afterlife. In Star Wars, Obi-Wan allows Darth Vader to kill him, thereby giving Luke a chance to escape the Death Star. When he dies, his physical body disappears, as does Yoda’s when he dies in The Empire Strikes Back. Neither, however, is gone: they live on in spiritual form in the Force. This is like the belly of the whale/initiation theme discussed above, with the following difference: Luke can see and communicate with them. To complete the cycle, Luke and his friends cremate the body of Darth Vader (Anneken Skywalker, Luke’s father).

We are left with the final images of Return of the Jedi, the heros having formed a loving, nuclear family and, more important, Darth Vader (“Dark Father”) having been reunited with Obi-Wan and Yoda after giving up his dominating phallic obsession for the nurturing “light” side of the Force. The three are shown in a glowing embryonic representation of the Force, proof of Yoda’s statement, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” When Luke’s gaze lingers on the glowing triad before he reluctantly returns to the celebration, it is clear that this is his destiny as well: return to the nurturing, peaceful “womb” of the Force.

In this section, we will examine the overt womb symbolism and the underlying return to womb fantasy in the first four Star Trek movies—Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. While the first film is a separate entity, the last three can be viewed as a coherent whole: each takes place almost immediately after the conclusion of the previous part.

In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, an alien probe of immense power is coming to earth, destroying everything in its path. The U.S.S. Enterprise is sent to intercept it.

They learn that the probe had only destroyed the previous ships to protect itself. They make no attempt to communicate with it, as it will misinterpret the communication as a hostile act. Instead they travel into the energy field surrounding the probe to try to reach the probe itself. The resemblance of this field to a womb is heightened by its appearance as the ship travels through it. In a sequence like the end of 2001, the field flies past the ship in a number of shapes, some landscape, some mechanical, some organic. Like the stargate in 2001, it resembles a birth canal.

When they finally make contact with the probe, a burst of power surrounds Lt. Ilia, a “Deltan,” whose sexuality is so intense she must take vows of celibacy to keep from interfering with the male crew members’ duties. Later she returns, but as an extension of the probe, which we learn is called V’ger. Finally the Enterprise reaches an empty area where it is stopped by a tractor beam. Beyond the ship is the innermost part of the ship, guarded by a door resembling a vast cervix. Spock leaves the ship and penetrates the door to mind meld with the alien, learning that “For all its power, it is cold, barren. . . . It is asking itself, ‘Is this all that I am?’ ”

Kirk tricks V’ger into allowing them to go to the very heart of the ship so they can communicate with it directly. There they learn that the heart of the ship is the NASA probe Voyager 6, lost many years before. Thanks to the technology of a planet of living machines, it has fulfilled its program to “learn all that is learnable and report the information to earth,” and has returned to earth. But V’ger wants more than simply to report in. It has become conscious, and wants to learn its purpose. It wants to “join” with its creator—humanity.

At the culmination of the film, Decker decides to “join” with V’ger in what can only be described as Tantric Cosmology. Tantrism is an Eastern philosophy which, like Taoism, concerns the union of opposites to create the universe. In Tantrism, ritual sex is used by advanced practitioners to generate spiritual energy necessary to reach enlightenment. As the wine and bread in a Catholic mass are believed to become the blood and flesh of Christ, it is believed that the Tantric yogi and yogini actually become the god Shiva and his wife Shakti during the course of the ceremony.

Decker and Ilia are surrounded by an energy field and vanish, “joining” with V’ger. V’ger is fulfilled, having joined with the Creator, and Decker is fulfilled, having joined with the beautiful but celibate Ilia. They exist in perfect peace in the womb of V’ger’s memory space, which is itself in the womb of V’ger’s insulating cloud. V’ger is reborn and goes to explore the larger dimensions beyond our universe.

These themes are explored further in The Wrath of Khan, in which we are introduced to the Genesis device, which, by rearranging molecules, can create life from lifeless matter. xxxxx Groddeck, fertility goddesses, caves xxxxxx At the end, Spock dies and his coffin is ejected from the ship to the surface of “the Genesis planet.”

Alien was hailed by science fiction fans as great science fiction and by horror buffs as great horror. Although it did not set any box office records, it has already spawned two sequels and made a star of Sigourney Weaver. It is the story of outer-space explorers who happen upon an alien life form—no “extraterrestrial,” but an Alien, an “Other”—xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In Alien, this symbol is made concrete: the computer that controls the ship is called “mother.” xxxxx MELANIE KLEIN xxxxxxxx

After making Close Encounters, Steven Spielberg returned to childhood for one of the most popular films ever made. It is the story of a space traveller—an extraterrestrial, or E.T.—who becomes stranded on earth and is in danger of discovery. If he is captured, we learn, “they’ll dissect him, or something.” He is discovered and befriended by three children, who seek to protect him and help him return to his home.

As white men are seen as bad guys in revisionist westerns, adults are seen as enemies in E.T. Until the end, the police, the government scientists, and the children’s overprotective mother are all seen as enemies. Indeed, most of the film is shot from a child’s perspective—adults are rarely seen full figure, reminiscent of the comic strip Peanuts—and it is this perspective that allowed the film to see the world with such innocence and wonder.

Throughout the film, the children and E.T. must hide from adults, and again and again the hiding place is the closet in the younger son’s room. The closet serves as a womb symbol, like a cave. Later in the film, when E.T. has apparently died, he is placed in an refrigerated casket to preserve his body. But E.T. is reborn, transforming the “casket” into a womb.

E.T. is both fetus and reptile, remarkably like the aliens in Spielberg’s earlier film Close Encounters. But E.T. is also both male and female. Early in the film, Elliot’s sister asks him, “Is it a boy or a girl?” Elliot answers that it is a boy, and his rapport with the alien and the alien’s phallic features (extending head and “erect” finger) seem to bear this out. But like a fetus, E.T. has characteristics of both sexes, and this adds significance to his emotional bond with Elliot. To Elliot’s sister, E.T. is female, and at one point in the film she dresses the alien in her clothes. And E.T. is possessed of a power generally associated with the feminine in the eternal male/female polarity: healing.

Spielberg obviously felt his work in Close Encounters was unfinished, for the endings of the two films are as similar as the aliens. At the climax of E.T., an egglike ship like the one in Close Encounters returns to retrieve E.T. As in Close Encounters, the humans are united, their earlier conflicts forgotten, by a sense of wonder and awe. As in Close Encounters, we want to go in the spaceship, to return to its “womb.” Again, the ramp leading to the ship subsumes the dual meanings of Ferenczi’s bridge. But this time, the aliens speak. “Come,” says E.T. “Stay,” replies Elliot, and they realize that their desires are mutually exclusive. E.T. boards the ship and it leaves, seemingly reversing the ending of Close Encounters.

But throughout the film we were shown the inextricable bond uniting Elliot and E.T., as in the scene when Elliot falls out of his desk at school when E.T. becomes drunk. Elliot is E.T. and E.T. is Elliot, and since we identify with them both, we can have it both ways: staying in the childlike warmth of Elliot’s healing nuclear family, and returning to the “womb” of E.T.’s spaceship.

John Carpenter, better known for his horror films, made this little film about an extraterrestrial trapped on earth. However, unlike E.T., this alien takes on the appearance of a human—in fact, the appearance of the co-star’s dead husband. Like E.T., Starman features a series of chase scenes in which the alien, again with mysterious healing powers, must reach the returning spaceship. As in E.T., the alien in Starman wins the hearts of helping humans (and viewers) and is clearly the protagonist of the film. It is a fairly unremarkable “escape from earth” film along the lines of E.T. and Brother From Another Planet, except that in Starman the alien, while male in appearance, serves the role of the nourishing mother.

There are two key sequences which support this view of alien as nurturing mother. First, while on the road, the two protagonists encounter a hunter with a deer strapped to his truck. The alien is puzzled, then saddened, by the corpse of the deer. Using an unexplained innate power, he returns the deer to life. Later, at the film’s climax, he tells his “wife” that she is pregnant. She was unable to conceive by her human husband and thought that she was sterile, but through the nurturing power of the alien, she is able to conceive. While this could be seen as the father’s role rather than the mother’s on the part of the alien, it is important to consider that the alien is associated with glowing orbs of energy which must be considered feminine, rather than masculine, symbolically.

Like the other films in this subgenre, the alien is trapped on earth and must elude the government, who wish to keep his existence secret and experiment on him. The protagonists, the alien and the human whose husband he replaces, go through various adventures, fall in love, and eventually reach the spaceship so the alien can return to its people.

As in Close Encounters and E.T., the spaceship in Starman serves as a womb, and we share the alien’s desire to return. Again, the spaceship is treated with awe and is seen as a symbol of hope. As in Close Encounters and E.T., we desire to go with the aliens. We share the poignancy of the parting from the nurturing mother, and share the inherent return to womb fantasy.

Ron Howard’s directorial debut is a fascinating synthesis of many of the films we have discussed above.

As described above, there are films such as Zardoz which seem to be exactly the opposite of the films described above.

The French critic Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, in his Histoire de la littérature anglaise (History of English Literature, 1964), proposed that every social phenomenon should be explained as the result of forces he called race, milieu, and moment—that is, people, environment, and time (momentum). Taine’s contention was that these factors determined a movement and that by examining a movement, one could arrive at the psychosocial state of a society. It would be beyond the scope of this analysis to attempt a sociosexual analysis of the American psyche, but it is perhaps relevant to point out that America is a land in which adults are children and children adults. From an early age children are pushed to grow up and act like an adult. “Big boys don’t cry,” a father will tell his crying son. Almost as soon as they can walk children are given chores and an allowance, money serving as the American initiation rite of adulthood. In short, they are not left to be children.

Perhaps then it is no surprise that adult Americans often act like children. Joseph Campbell observed that “In the United States . . . the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young; not to mature away from Mother, but to cleave to her.” “Whoever dies with the most toys wins,” reads a popular bumper sticker, and this is not a frivolous observation. From big-screen TVs to golf clubs to executive door closers to basketball hoop wastebaskets, Americans are obsessed with gadgets. In a way, it is this obsession with gadgets that has made science fiction so popular in the United States . Although science fiction predates the founding of the U.S., it has arguably found the height of its popularity here. The U.S. was home to the explosive growth of science fiction in the ’20s and ’30s (the magazines of Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell) and the emergence of “hard” science fiction in the ’50s and ’60s. And almost all of the big-budget science fiction films since World War II have come from American studios.

One common theme that runs through most of the science fiction films since the ’60s is a reaction against the enthronement of science. The science fiction of the “Golden Age”—the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—was male-dominated and technology-oriented. Science could cure all ills. In the countercultural era in the ’60s, this began to change. There was a “sobering realization that in conquering nature science is also conquering man. . . . Science fiction . . . turned against science . . . its authors typically view their worlds-to-be as everything they detest in the world-as-it-is; and what they detest [is] everything that makes the modern world modern.”

And no wonder. “Perhaps never before in history has man been such a problem to himself. Rocketing through space and on the point of conquering the heavens, he is fast losing touch with his own world.” In the post-Hiroshima era, science fiction has begun to explore the social sciences, seeking new answers, just as society has. We have seen that this search for new answers, this quest to escape from the cares of the modern world, has manifested itself prominently in many of the top-grossing films of the past twenty-five years as a wish to return to the womb.

In an era when men are seeking to “get in touch with their feminine side” and more and more people are returning to nature to worship the revived mother goddess, science fiction has, once again, blazed the trail.

Bibliography

Berger, Harold L. Science Fiction and the New Dark Age. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Capek, Milac . “Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, editor-in-chief. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Gabbard, Krin, and Glen O. Gabbard. Psychiatry and the Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Hedges, Inez. Breaking the Frame: Film Language and the Experience of Limits. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Josephson, Eric and Mary. Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society. New York: Dell Publishing, 1962.

Nicholls, Peter. The World of Fantastic Films: An Illustrated Survey. New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1984.

Penley, Constance, et. al., eds. Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Quinn, Susan. A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney. New York: Addison Wesley, 1980.

Segal, Hanna. Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. New York: Basic Books, 1964.

Slusser, George and Eric S. Rabkin, eds. Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985.

Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New York: Ungar Publishing, 1987.

Wolfe, Gary K. The Known And The Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979.

Peter’s Rants

Links

Return To Womb Fantasies In Contemporary American Science Fiction Films

Peter C.S. Adams

Introduction

Psychological Foundations

Symbols Unique To Science Fiction

The Films

Bibliography