¶ … Handmaid's Tale' creatively and chillingly hypothesizes about the rational result of a world in which draconian laws and convictions/beliefs about women and their bodies prevail. The women in the movie, have become completely subservient to men and to the needs of men. Even their bodies, have turned into playthings for men to use and abuse as they deem fit. In the 'The Handmaid's Tale', a handmaid cannot reject the advances of her "master." And in the sanctified act of sex the man did not need to consider the women's consent, pleasure, or comfort. No foreplay is needed, either… just orgasm or ejaculation (Muir). The Commander is hitched to a cold and bitter woman, who is ironically named as Serena Joy (Faye Dunaway).
Serena Joy longs to have children, not for the purposes of self-interest or personal satisfaction, but rather to "keep up with the Joneses." She states in the movie that all the rich neighbors are having babies and showing off their newborn children at entertaining afternoon garden parties. In the movie, Kate, the handmaid, endeavors to know how her own biological daughter has turned out and at she is also in a State-authorized sexual slavery with her employer, the Commander. Lamentably, the Commander is a sterile man, which implies Kate will eventually be blamed for her inability to conceive a child.
She could be regarded as "un-woman" for her failure to conceive and punished by being sent to a work camp (Muir). Watching the movie and comprehending the story behind it, the depiction in my opinion does not constitute an act of rape because Kate consents to having a sexual relationship with the commander, in spite of the fact that he is sterile and that her failure to conceive will be blamed on her because she is the weaker sex and a handmaid.
The avid fans of the movie 'Alien' do know that the creature in the movie was created by Swiss artist H.R. Giger. O'Bannon had earlier worked with Giger on a failed endeavor at a pre-David Lynch adaptation of a Dune movie. Giger's sexually explicit artwork had stuck with O'Bannon though the film did not get much success, and the dark art helped fuel his revenge scripting when composing the narrative of his new movie Alien. Once the film had passed the initial stages, O'Bannon recommended Giger to producer Ridley Scott, and in the wake of seeing Giger's Necronomicon -- an art collection filled with a lot of sexual innuendo- Scott concluded that he needed to have Giger create the main Alien. By then, Scott was in complete agreement with O'Bannon's man-rape plot (Dietle).
The act of bringing Giger on board ended up being the choice that shaped the entire film, that later became a franchise and one of the most easily recognized pictures in film history. Giger not only designed and created the main alien in the movie he also designed the derelict spaceship, its commander, and the alien's landscape. Furthermore, each and every bit of the movie was stacked with space vaginas and galactic penises. All of the sexual imagery in the movie is intentional. Case in point, when the human crew was "invading" the alien's spaceship, in effect the humans represent sperms creeping into the ship.
The scene after this is that of Kane (played by John Hurt) as he penetrates into the spaceship's "womb" to find an endless scene of eggs, which in the sperm analogy above makes a ton of biological sense. Kane then comes into contact with one of these many eggs, which hatches and releases a little alien. At this point of the movie, it obvious that the director of Alien, Ridley Scott is in effect smashing the movie's audience in the face with a sex-education book (Dietle).
As the little alien bursts out, it attaches itself to Kane's face and jams its galactic penis down his throat, all the while choking Kane in a display of rape that is so clear and evident that we are shocked the alien is not yelling at Kane to squeal like a pig as it does its act. The life cycle of the alien was designed in such a way to match that of numerous parasitic wasps, within it is a penis and vagina merged in such way so as to drive its seed (sperm) down the throat of its victims (Kane in this particular case). We discover that once the alien is attached to the face, it cannot be stopped before it has deposited its seed, or it will kill its victim. Which you may realize is actually the...
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