The Postmodern Prometheus: Gender, Creation, and Humanity
in Prometheus and Frankenstein
Naja McFadden
Abstract
This paper discusses creation in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) by contrasting it
with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus.This reading helps
a reader begin the difficult work of demystifying the complexities that surprised
audiences approaching Prometheus as an Alien movie. Concerns of gender,
creation, and monstrousness are central to Prometheus and Frankenstein, as are
popular Alien themes of the monstrous-feminine and female grotesque.
Prometheus, like Frankenstein, takes this further by layering issues of spirituality,
creation, and humanity into the fold.
Prometheus portrays gender, creation, and humanity in a cyclic spectrum rather
than as discrete ideas. The narrative explores contradictions and collisions of
masculinity, femininity, the grotesque, birth, creation, sex, violence, death,
rejection, confusing representations between the superhuman, the human, and the
subhuman. Portrayals such as the uncanny android, the godlike superhuman, the
monstrous-feminine, the castrated male, and the woman as grotesque create a
complex and layered meaning. The film offers salient but ponderous
representations of these ideas, allowing readers enormous space for interpreting
them.
This paper does not attempt a conclusive reading of Prometheus or Frankenstein,
but demonstrate the merits in its impossibility. The narrative deliberately
obfuscates any answers, concluding on an open-ended note that allows for great
critical expansion. Its rejection of dualistic representations and exposition offers a
variety of complex and engaging interpretations and gives readers great scope with
which to explore concepts such as those discussed here. For all the questions
raised at gods and monsters, readers are left with something quintessentially
human: curiosity.
Key Words: Prometheus, Frankenstein, gender, monstrous-feminine, female
grotesque.
*****
When men create, it is divine; when women create, it is monstrous. This
theory is dealt with and deconstructed in the film Prometheus.1 Prometheus is a
The Postmodern Prometheus
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difficult text to approach: it deliberately obfuscates an essentialist reading. The
narrative creates and destroys theories a reader might apply, and only by
understanding this can progress be made. Readers are left as confused, but
hopefully also curious, as the characters that repeatedly ask ‘Why?’ and are given
no answers. Suggesting that there is an answer, even to my opening theory, would
deny the film’s complexity. Instead, I would approach the film in the way it
approaches readers: as a series of inconclusive questions and curiosities. As a
guiding point, I use Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, reading into the film its
influences and thematic concerns.2 Questions of gender, creation/destruction, and
humanity are apparent in both texts, but Prometheus demands a reading more
complex than what often appears in criticism of past Alien films.3
Prometheus is the name of the film’s spaceship, sent from earth to
discover what protagonist Elizabeth Shaw believes to be humanity’s creators, or
‘Engineers’. Elizabeth, her husband Charlie Holloway, and the crew are overseen
by Meredith Vickers, the cold representative of mission sponsor Weyland
Corporation. Android David 8 acts as uncanny assistant, often driving the narrative.
Secretly on board is Meredith’s elderly father and David’s creator, Peter Weyland,
who hopes the Engineers have a means of averting death. After planetfall, the crew
explore an apparently-abandoned tunnel system later revealed to be an Engineer
spaceship. The mission goes horribly astray as the gradual discovery of living
Engineers and of xenomorphs - the monsters of Alien - leads the crew to death,
disease, and destruction. Elizabeth and Peter’s questions to the Engineers are met
only with violence, with everyone on the planet killed but for a xenomorph.
Elizabeth escapes on an Engineer ship, decapitated David in tow, to seek the
Engineer’s home planet and find answers.
Similarities to Frankenstein are apparent: the novel’s alternate title is The
Modern Prometheus. I do not seek to juxtapose Frankenstein and Prometheus,
although the influence is clear. The film continues, expands, and explodes issues of
the Alien franchise; but many thematic concerns unique to Prometheus are better
understood by discussing its link to Frankenstein. While for some this may not be
useful, I suggest that Frankenstein can serve as a starting point from which a
reader can navigate some of the problems of Prometheus. The metaphor of
navigation is quite literal: Prometheus is a remarkable Alien film for its space and
pacing, emphasising the stark and hostile territories that surround the tales and
engulf the curious-if-misguided explorers within. A reader’s experience can be
similar, as any theory one might attempt to apply is deconstructed, with Alienappropriate violence, in the text. Prometheus is a contradictory work, managing to
problematise a franchise already rife with debate. It audaciously leaves open-ended
questions, juxtaposing classic spectacles of body horror with ponderous
spirituality. Prometheus avails the Alien mythology to more contentious readings,
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therefore, this paper will attempt an interpretation by reading it not so much as an
Alien movie, but as a Frankenstein movie.
I wish to examine how Prometheus expands on the questions of gender,
creation, and humanity raised in Frankenstein. One can read in Frankenstein the
fear and obsession of birth and creation, which for Victor Frankenstein are linked
to the horrors of sexuality. Characters express abhorrence to the feminine and
female creation , a popular source of criticism in Alien films that is complicated by
concerns of humanity in Prometheus. Victor’s obsession with creating life, and
later his horror at the commission of a female monster, bring gender and sexuality
to the forefront in Frankenstein, as they are in Prometheus.
The Monster of Frankenstein is at once eponymous but also superhuman:
unlike in traditional filmic interpretations, the image of the Engineer in
Prometheus recalls the Monster’s sublime beauty and intelligence as well as its
uncanny-valley grotesqueness and violence. 4 It is worth noting that unlike the
Monster, Engineers represent creators more than creations - usually. The issue of
humanity, monstrousness, and godliness or divinity is explored in both text. The
Engineers of Prometheus demonstrate the Monster’s violence, while the android
David 8 reflects its love and hatred for humanity, its intelligence and perfection,
and its resentment of creation and inhumanity. The creation and destruction of life
are central in both narratives, however it is fallacy to read these representations as
dualisms. Even in these simple examples, it is evident that simultaneous and even
contradictory aspects of gender, creation, and humanity can be found in
Prometheus.
Prometheus articulates these concepts through characters and action in the
narrative, and I deconstruct these to create an effective means of applying a reading
to the film. First, there is the gender/sexuality spectrum; second, the processes of
birth, creation, transformation, destruction, and death; and third, the monstrous or
grotesque, then humanity, through to the divine, godlike, and sublime. These
concepts cannot be expressed as binaries: they exist as cycles or in a spectrum.
Even this mode of thinking suggests a feminist undertone: the cyclic theory recalls
the constant yonic iconography in the Alien series, described by Cobbs as ‘vaginal
doorways, cervical mazes [...] bulbous mammary projections everywhere.’5 It still
abounds in Prometheus and useful also in conceptualising the thematic concerns of
creation, humanity and gender. The visual reading and the thematic reading are
similarly cyclical: part of the Alien films’ appeal is in their ability to be both crass
and complex. We can read the literal sexuality of a face-hugger and discuss its
repercussions cultural analysis, understanding the relationship beyond dichotomy.
Just as I will read gender, creation, and monstrousness as a cyclic spectrum, so will
I apply it in close readings of imagery and as articulations of existential concerns.
One cannot approach any Alien film without discussing gender and
sexuality. Horror traditions such as Barbara Creed’s monstrous-feminine, Mary J.
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Russo’s female grotesque, and Carol J. Clover’s final girl have some of their most
famous examples in Alien, and all are deconstructed in Prometheus.6 Gender exists
as a spectrum in Prometheus, particularly as it intersects with sexuality. Sexuality
often emphasises how characters perform gender, and this performance is the main
aspect of Clover’s theory I will use. Clover’s discussion of a character’s behaviours
influence a fluctuating gendered reading is key to this text.7
Xenomorphs can easily be gendered any way a reader chooses; however, I
opt usually for the popular reading of xenomorphs as the monstrous-feminine. The
xenomorph is a famous mother-monster, and with her vagina-dentata-evoking
jaws, and her propensity for female-grotesque fluids, it is an easy reading.
Prometheus’ ambiguity complicates gendering: a case can be made for the
symbolism behind the xenomorph’s knobbed tentacles attacking orifices, invading
and compromising bodies, and protruding inner mouths being phallic. Vaughn,
discussing the initial Alien trilogy, reads xenomorphs as ‘cross-gendered’ in
different life cycles.8 The xenomorph embodies a variety of elements in the gender
spectrum, and acknowledging this helps illuminate how the human characters
perform gender variance.
Sexuality is stifled for most of the film, enacted through grotesque
symbolism. Sex acts often reveal and contradict an easy gendering of the
characters. The performative nature of masculinity is apparent in the sexual rivalry
between Charlie and David: Charlie is an inadequate husband, shown up by
David’s chivalric acts for Elizabeth. Charlie derides and literally chastises David
throughout, even teasing, ‘you’re not a real boy’. David’s revenge is to poison
Charlie with xenomorph fluid, later passed on to Elizabeth when they have sex and
she is impregnated. Elizabeth’s supposed infertility reflects an undercurrent of
Charlie’s impotence: the masculine act that Charlie could not do, David has done
by proxy. The sexuality of both male leads is inadequate in different ways: neither
can perform for Elizabeth.
An interesting contrast to these sexually emasculated men exists in the
ship’s captain, Janek: he seduces Meredith with his buccaneer charm, despite her
introduction as a cold-hearted but grotesque androgyne. ‘Are you a robot?’ is his
choice of pickup line: unusual, and telling of Meredith’s unfeminine and therefore
inhuman behaviour. Perhaps to disprove him, perhaps because it is a compliment in
light of her father favouring her robot ‘brother’, or perhaps because the film
negates a simple gendered reading in which an emotionless woman is inhuman,
Meredith agrees to sleep with him. Both sex scenes are implicit: the ‘money shot’,
which according to David Edelstein is as significant in horror as it is in
pornography - and in Prometheus it straddles both genres - comes when Elizabeth’s
monstrous birth attacks an Engineer.9 This sexuality is explicit: the hypermasculine
Engineer is lured in with tentacles and engulfed by the fanged, orifice-covered
monster. Its grotesque heaving after consumption is decidedly post-coital and
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horrific, and in the aftermath appears the most grotesque sexual creation, the
classic monstrous-feminine xenomorph. The final moment of the film reveals its
full female grotesque glory, dripping jaws popping for overt clitoral imagery,
concluding the narrative with a representation of the feminine that is creative,
destructive, hypersexual, grotesque, monstrous, and utterly iconic.
Grotesque femininity is rife in Prometheus: women and the feminine are
wet, sweating, vomiting, bleeding, and oozing. The horrors of the xenomorph are
portentous long before her cameo in the various fluids found in yonic tunnels. The
grotesque embodies both creation and destruction: xenomorphs emerge in various
forms from fluid as it oozes from egg-vases found in tunnels. David’s manipulation
of xenomorph fluid leads to it becoming a substitute for semen, impregnating
Elizabeth via David’s poisoning of Charlie. When an Engineer beheads David, he
is a mess of white liquid, which can be read as semen: it is an easy castration
allegory, revealing that despite his robotic impotence and extreme castration, he
was always brimming with the sexually grotesque. This makes David, like others,
difficult to gender. David personifies well Donna Haraway’s cyborg, a ‘creature in
a post-gender world.’10 In Prometheus, gender is a spectrum of masculine/feminine
through which elements will move.
Creation is a gendered act, particularly the female grotesque creation:
birth, fluids, and the yonic spaces from which life springs are coded as monstrous.
Creed refers to the xenomorph as ‘the mother as primordial abyss, the point of
origin and of end.’11 Elizabeth’s Caesarian of her monster echoes Jane M. Ussher’s
description of the grotesque pregnancy: ‘the corporeality of the changing pregnant
body, the act of birth, the amniotic fluid, afterbirth, and blood [is] the essentially
grotesque body is that of the pregnant, birth-giving woman.’12 The monstrous
creation and masculine destruction highlight the contrast between the gendered
generations of Elizabeth/monster-birth/xenomorph and Engineer/Peter/David. The
humanity and monstrosity in these creative and destructive cycles take on different
genders as they are enacted.
Destruction, resentment, insufficiency, and rejection in response to
creation form the central antagonisms in the narrative. Questions - why create?
Why destroy? - go unanswered. Creators and creations are never secure in their
roles: Elizabeth questions the Engineers’ origin, David reminds humans that he is
their creation, and they all reject others with acts of destruction. The cycle is
voiced throughout, but often its most poignant moments are silent, such the
opening scene where an Engineer stands in a landscape recalling Frankenstein’s
bleakness. He drinks some fluid, and it causes him to disintegrate. His blackening
remains fall into water, reforming into something new: here, the grotesque invades
his uncanny beauty, and destruction breeds creation. The cyclic creation and
destruction, whether divine or grotesque, masculine or feminine, is deconstructed
throughout the film, but is left as open-ended as the beginning.
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Godlike creation is associated with the Engineers - so, later, is destruction.
When Charlie ponders why Engineers created humankind, David asks the same
about himself. Charlie tells him ‘we made you because we could’, and David asks
him to consider the disappointment in this reasoning - then poisons him, again
expressing the destructive will to creators and creations.
David often acts as a voice in the film, being the only one who can
communicate with the Engineers. The lack of translation in his conversation with
an Engineer forms the crux of the mystery: when he addresses the Engineer it is
ambiguous whether it is on behalf of Peter, who wants Engineers to grant him
eternal life, or Elizabeth, who implores David to ask why the Engineers created
xenomorphs to destroy mankind. Despite being ‘programmed’, David has
expressed resentment towards his ‘parents’, mankind, and often acts with reckless
curiosity that endangers the crew. This suggests that David may have an agenda of
his own: his words to the Engineer are a mystery. Regardless, the Engineer
murders Peter, beheads David, who survives, and attacks the other humans.
Why does the creator act so towards his creations? The title Prometheus
suggests that mankind are too like the gods, whether through their violent action,
their impunity demanding infinite life, or their ability to create ‘life’ of their own in
androids and monsters. The Engineers also create the xenomorphs, a useful parallel
to humans. Both are creators and destroyers that fiercely reproduce in grotesque
ways, at the expense of their environments. Are xenomorph’s mankind’s
replacement, or punishment, or are they a monster of inhuman error?
Elizabeth views xenomorphs as mankind’s punishment for an unknown
transgression. After her sadness at being unable to create life, then suddenly
creating a monstrous form that she must destroy, her interpretation is viable. Her
moments of creation are complex, and tainted with death: she has her Victor
Frankenstein moment early, when she reanimates a dead Engineer’s head. The
head appears anguished, swelling suddenly and exploding, much to Elizabeth’s
distress. It is worth noting that in her later encounter with creation, removing the
monster from her womb, she calls the operation a ‘Caesarian’, not an abortion. Her
horror at the grotesque infant is tangible as she avoids its splattering fluid, but she
still cannot conceptualise destroying one’s creation. Her understanding of the cycle
of creation and destruction comes when she traps the Engineer with her monster
birth, where it kills him in the sexualised scene mentioned earlier. The cyclic nature
of creation and destruction here is difficult to articulate: Engineers created humans
and xenomorphs, humans created David, David and Elizabeth create the monster
birth, the Engineer destroys David and humans, and the monster birth destroys the
Engineer, from which a true xenomorph emerges. The confusion in this sentence
summarises the complexity of the film in its approach: no character is solely
creator, created, destroyer, destroyed. Maternity, paternity, monstrous birth, divine
creation, life, sex, and death take place simultaneously in the narrative,
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demonstrating the impossibility of a dualist approach. The reasoning behind any of
these acts is obfuscated, but the answer may be as simple as David’s epithet: ‘To
create, one must first destroy’.
Unique to the other Alien films, Prometheus puts spirituality at the centre
of the narrative. References to Christianity and Greek mythology abound, but
would require another paper to discuss. Rather, it is the aspect most prominent in
Frankenstein that I will focus on: the convalescence of divinity, humanity, and
monstrosity. Another interpretation is the superhuman, the human, and the
subhuman. This range is displayed in bodies, often taking more than one aspect at a
time: superhuman bodies such as the colossal Engineers, David’s android
perfection, and to some extent the pristine presentation of Meredith. Few
characters are unambiguously human, the only major one being Janek, in body and
in his appreciation of simple earthly pleasures. The inhuman manifests everywhere:
Elizabeth’s distending belly as the monster grows inside her, the dying Engineers,
Peter’s grotesquely ageing body, David’s reinforced status as an android, and in
Charlie and other crewmen being infected and transformed by xenomorph fluid.
Finally there is the visually monstrous, beginning as Elizabeth’s ‘foreign body’
birth, and its own birth, the extreme monstrous xenomorph.
Monstrosity often coexists within the superhumans. Like the Frankenstein
Monster, the Engineers are huge and beautiful, their strength, stature, and status
rendering them superhuman. Like David, however, their eerie hyperintelligence
and uncanny-valley similarity makes them subhuman as well. Their silence and
violence recalls the hypermasculine stalker-killer, as discussed by Tony Magistrale,
and despite being genetically identical they are superhuman and subhuman but
never just human.13 David occupies a similar space: others remind him he is not
human, but also of his closeness. Sometimes his behaviour is abhorrent, or
monstrous, and at other times his intelligence and visage make him superhuman.
His ambiguously humanity expands on the Alien android Ash, described by T.J.
Matheson as ‘nothing more than an exaggerated version of the human
crewmembers, distinguishable from them only in degree and not in kind.’14 Though
David acts the masculine human part, he never quite fits the role. Elizabeth states
at the end: ‘I’m a human being, and you’re a robot’. But none are quite human
beings: there is no ‘hard kernel of the real’, as put by Slavoj Žižek.15 Humanity is
inconsequent, fluid, and intangible.
Defining monstrosity requires context. There are monstrous acts and
monstrous beings: the most godlike of all, the Engineers, embody both. This is the
theme most implicit in Prometheus but explicit in Frankenstein: who is the
monster? This spectrum is impenetrable, and troublesome. There is no dualism of
gods and monsters that could operate as Manichean. ‘Human’ is an impossible
concept when godliness and monstrosity can be read anywhere.
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The most salient similarity between Frankenstein and Prometheus is its
ambiguity. Both conclude with the explorer in the bleak wilderness, broken and
lost for answers, but still curious. This curiosity is perhaps the only surviving idea
represented by any character. Acknowledging Frankenstein’s influence helps a
reader understand why the narrative leaves itself open. Part of the beauty of
Prometheus is that it deconstructs any resolute assertion we could make about its
representations of the themes discussed. It rejects an essentialist reading, but opens
itself to lasting interpretation. This encouragement for audiences to read these
issues as a spectrum that can be articulated without discretion or dichotomy
provides an engaging and encouraging approach to Prometheus, and will likely
give the film an enduring role in cultural studies.
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The Postmodern Prometheus
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Vaughn, Thomas. ‘Voices of Sexual Distortion: Rape, Birth, and Self-Annihilation
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1Notes
N
Prometheus. Blu-Ray. Directed by Ridley Scott. [Australia]: 20th Century Fox, 2012.
2 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (London: Penguin, 2012).
3 Alien. DVD. Directed by Ridley Scott. [Australia]: 20th Century Fox, 2008.
4 Frankenstein. DVD. Directed by James Whale. [Australia]: Universal, 1999.
5 John L. Cobbs, ‘Alien as an Abortion Parable,’ Literature Film Quarterly, Vol. 18 Issue 3 (1990): 199.
6 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2007).
Mary J. Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity, (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1992).
7 Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, 13.
8 Thomas Vaughn, ‘Voices of Sexual Distortion: Rape, Birth, and Self-Annihilation Metaphors in the Alien Trilogy,’
Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 81 Issue 4 (1995): 429.
9 David Edelstein, ‘Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn,’ New York Magazine, January 28, 2006,
http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/.
10 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century,’ in The
International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, ed. Joel Weiss, Jason Nolan, Jeremy Hunsinger, and Peter
Trifonas (Netherlands: Springer, 2006), 118.
11 Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 17.
12 Jane M. Ussher, Managing the Monstrous-Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body (London; New York: Routledge,
2006): 81.
13 Tony Magistrale, Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film, (Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing,
2005), 149.
14 T.J. Matheson, ‘Triumphant Technology and Minimal Man: The Technological Society, Science Fiction Films, and
Ridley Scott’s Alien,’ Extrapolation, Vol. 33 Issue 3 (1992): 221.
15 Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London; New York:
Verso, 2002), 19.