1. This is the initial version (pending final revisions and corrections) of the first, introductory
section of the first chapter of my Long Thesis as a PhD candidate in Film Studies. It was
written directly in English.
Eleven years ago Titanic (1997) became the most profitable film ever made,
accumulating 1.9 billion dollars at the international box-office. In the process it
developed into not only an Academy Awards’ champion, by winning eleven out of the
fourteen Oscars it was nominated for, but also a massive cultural phenomenon that
provoked countless academic and non academic debates, discourses and disputes.
Now, as we enter the second decade of the 21st
century, Titanic has ultimately lost
its crown. Having already collected a little more than 2 billion dollars in less than two
months, and still going strong, Avatar (2009) has become the undeniable “king of the
(cinematic) world”1
. Simultaneously, as it receives accolades from most of the critics
around the world and 9 Oscar nominations from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts
and Sciences, while it also faces accusations for being anything from a leftish2
, anti-
military3
and anti-religion4
propaganda (from the American conservatives, the USA
army and the Vatican respectively) to a product of an almighty capitalistic system
1 The expression is a paraphraseof Leonardo DiCaprio’s line,“I am the king of the world” as Jack
Dawson in Titanic (1997,20th Century Fox). The box-officenumbers are taken from the Box Office
Mojo in http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/, and they regard the collected amount of dollars.
When itcomes to the sum of the tickets sold,and in the USA alone, Titanic fallsin the6th placein the
all timebox office, whileAvatar is currently occupyingthe 21th, as itis calculated again by Box Office
Mojo, in http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm
2
“Conservatives vs. 'Avatar'. Unspecified author, Tuesday, January 5, 2010,in
http://www.theweek.com/article/index/104685/Conservatives_vs_Avatar. And “'Avatar' arouses
conservatives' ire”,by Patrick Goldstein,January 05,2010. In LA Times, The Big Picture,
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/05/entertainment/la-et-bigpicture5-2010jan05
3
«U.S. military claims slaughter in "Avatar" smears Marines”.People’s Daily on Line, January 18, 2010
in http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90782/6871328.html
4 “The Vatican criticizes 'Avatar'. Criticismdirected at its theme of man vs. nature”. Associated Press,
Jan 12, 2010, in Hollywood Reporter,
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3i3602f61793f3cd881424b0b34
e29e771

2. with a guilty conscience (according to the Mayor of London5
) and a racist, white man
Messiah allegory (according to some liberal thinkers)6
, it is well on its way to leave
interminable marks to our collective ethos.
Both Titanic and Avatar are counted among the most expensive motion pictures
ever made, costing around 200 million dollars the former, and 300 million, the latter.
Both were made possible due to the invention or tremendous evolution of
groundbreaking cinematic technologies. Both have greatly benefited from what the
film industry has termed “repeat viewing”: people opted to see each (and
consequently pay the required ticket) at least twice. And both were written, directed,
edited and produced by James Cameron. Thus, if the 1997 film made it difficult, the
2009 one makes it impossible to ignore this born and raised in Canada filmmaker.
After all, he is also the driving, creative force behind a handful, much talked about
and extraordinarily successful, other films that, one way or another, have
considerably influenced the Western, cinematic tradition: The Abyss (1989 - the
least commercially successful, but intriguingly enough, perhaps most significative of
his world view film) gave birth to the CGI special effects as we know them today by
pioneering the digital creation of shape-shifting water; Aliens (1986) introduced us to
the first and still most prominent action heroine the world has ever known;
Terminator (1984) as well as its sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
provided us with an archetypical cyborg organism and a prolific science fiction
franchise; True Lies (1994) is arguably the most expensive comedy (albeit an action
one) ever made.
However, from my perspective, all these unfeasible to disregard, astonishing records,
statistics and numbers are, and always have been, noteworthy only in combination
5 “Stop piningfor lifeon Pandora and come back to planetEarth”. Boris Johnson, 25 Jan 2010,in
Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/7068692/Stop-pining-
for-life-on-Pandora-and-come-back-to-planet-Earth.html.
6
“When will white people stop makingmovies likeAvatar?”. Annalee Newitz, Dec 18, 2009 in io9,
http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar.And
“Digesting Avatar”. Dan North, 6 January,2010, in
http://drnorth.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/digesting-avatar/

3. with Cameron’s specific, provocatively challenging and unconventional world-view. A
distinctive stance that even though is consistently and unmistakably ever present in
his body of work, it either remains almost entirely veiled for the majority of the –
professional or not- audience, or is easily disregarded. One explanation for this
misinterpretation may perhaps be the distractions instigated by the sheer scale of his
undeniably and extraordinarily ambitious, expensive and spectacular films, as well as
their apparently simplistic narratives that more often than not conclude with a
presumably unsurprising happy-end. Hence Alexandra Keller’s scorning assertion:
“… increasingly, Cameron’s groove has been money itself… Just as John Ford
made his mark in the western, and Alfred Hitchcock spoke through the thriller, so
Cameron seems to have gravitated towards the blockbuster as his format… we
expect our blockbusters to be experientially onomatopoetic, which is to say, we
expect them to bust our blocks… to be loud and noisy, and to have impact that is
visceral first, emotional second, and intellectual a very, very distant third. Largely
we think of action films, science fiction, and adventure films –exactly what Cameron
does- when we think of blockbusters. Or rather, when studios lay out that much
money, they are not going to do it on quiet films…”7
In an attempt to critically elucidate Avatar’s remarkable and diverse popularity, Jörg
Heiser surfs a somewhat similar to Keller’s wavelength of thought and has this to
state:
“Avatar is an amalgam, as if in a strange dream, of many… allusions and
associations, and you can look at it being very clever[ly] calculated to capture the
widest possible audience globally, playing many cards at once; but by way of the
very same strategy, it also could be seen as capturing the widest possible 3-D
panorama shot of collective anxieties about the future (ecology, war, loss of social
7 Alexandra Keller,‘Size Does Matter’, in Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster, eds. Kevin S. Sandler and
Gaylyn Studlar (New Brunswick,New Jersey: Rutgers Univrsity Press,1999) p.135, 136.

4. love and security etc.). And in the same contradictory way, it is this all-
encompassing ambition that is interesting about it, but also what is off-putting”8
He thus seems to propose that unlike most typical and conventional blockbusters,
Cameron’s latest phenomenon of a film is much more than merely loud and noisy
and has an immediate intellectual impact that is not a very, very distant third.
However, to Heiser’s eyes, this intriguing as well as disconcerting trait is only a
consequence of the film’s first and, odds-on, only priority: the biggest possible
commercial success. After all, it is an extremely expensive investment that is forced
(by 20th
Century Fox – the studio that green lighted its creation) to make, at least, its
money back.
Nevertheless, neither Heiser nor Keller elects to take into account, and therefore
address, some of the more fascinating, often (and beguilingly) conflicting, aspects of
Cameron’s cinematic endeavours, that are constant and fundamental within and
without the text of his films. If, for example, he has chosen to express himself through
the blockbuster, why is he not content by producing thoroughbred, full of
testosterone, visceral experiences, made of nothing more than roaring sounds,
images and pricey special-effects, perfectly capable of becoming box-office
champs?9
How come, instead, he ventures to spoil the unsophisticated blockbuster’s
DNA with qualities of other, more character and drama driven, socially conscientious,
so called “serious” genres, bringing into being films that elicit always extreme, even
fanatic, either positive or negative reactions, while they are populated by atypical,
strong-minded, independent and anything but traditionally attractive or objectified
female protagonists? This is a habit of his that, in addition, has constantly caused
minor or major disagreements and frictions between him and the studio executives,
8
Jörg Heiser,Editor's Blog, Frieze Magazine,January 26, 2010,in
http://www.frieze.com/blog/entry/extraterrestrial_irish_pub_type/, as quoted by Catherine Grant,
Seeing through Avatar: FilmAllegory 101, FilmStudies For Free, January 27 2010,in
http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/2010/01/i-see-you-on-avatar-and-allegory.html
9 Like the solely eye and ear splitting Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which was released in
2009,with an estimated cost of 200 million dollars and earned more than 400 million in theUSA box-
office alone.

5. during the production and post-production of all of his films (with the single exception
of Avatar’s creation process, which followed directly, albeit with a seven year delay,
the exceptional triumph of Titanic). In fact, as it is well documented in the extra
features (commentaries and documentaries) of the special editions of his films10
, two
of them (The Abyss and Titanic) were almost shut down in the middle of their
shooting, threatened to remain incomplete and three suffered less or more
mandatory re-editing (17 minutes were cut off Aliens, 28 off The Abyss and a little
over 15 off Terminator 2: Judgment Day). In the case of Titanic, the people of the
studio could not stomach (but eventually tolerated, as soon as he declared himself
ready to walk out) Cameron’s costly and meticulous perfectionism in recreating the
legendary liner, as well as his resolve to devote two thirds of his 3 hours long,
spectacular disaster movie to the unspectacular, illicit romance between first class
passenger Rose and steerage commuter Jack. Conversely, as far as the re-editing is
concerned, it becomes clear that in most instances the footage that was removed
shed more light on the temperament and motives of each film’s heroes, (i.e. in
Aliens, Ripley has a biological daughter, who died before her mother’s safe, yet long
overdue return to Earth), or illuminate further the thematic attitude and concerns of
the film itself: the theatrical version of The Abyss in particular, has been almost
completely striped from the anti-war, anti-martial, anti-chauvinism, even anti-
American / capitalism ideas of tolerance and peaceful coexistence that swim the
waters of the Special edition in abundance.
On the other hand, if we were to unequivocally pursue Heiser’s line of reasoning we
would come to an inescapable conclusion: Cameron is deliberately playing with
“many cards at once” in every one of his films, in order to allow as many members of
his prospective massive audience as possible to read whatever each one,
10 The Abyss, Two Disc Special Edition,20th Century Home Entertainment, 2000. Terminator 2:
Judgment Day, The Ultimate Edition,Momentum Pictures,2001. Aliens Quadrilogy,Deluxe
Collector’s Edition,20th Century Home Entertainment, 2003.Titanic,Deluxe Collector’s Edition,20th
Century Home Entertainment, 2005.

6. individually, wishes to read in their images. However, it is my belief that such a
strategy not only is farfetched to curry into execution, but also completely negates
one of Cameron’s recurring themes. That is the notion of the difference between just
seeing and truly seeing, which is clearly stated by Lindsey in The Abyss, as she
utters “We all see what we want to see. Coffey looks and he sees… hate and fear.
You have to look with better eyes than that”, and is one of Avatar’s key claims,
implied in the repeatedly spoken line “I see you”. As if responding to Lindsey’s
urging, James Kendrick is one of the few who refuses to take Cameron’s work at face
value and decides to examine it more closely. What he discovers are films displaying
“numerous conflicting characteristics that make them difficult to pigeonhole into one
particular genre”11
and comes to the following startling supposition:
“… Cameron has shown early in his career a tendency to create films that are more
structurally and thematically complicated than they appear when first examined.
This is important to note because Cameron is not an overtly political director… The
political/ideological content of [his] films exists almost entirely on a secondary level
that resides just beneath the primary narrative content. In Morawski’s terms,
Cameron’s films most likely display ‘symptomatic expression… [where] the artist
may or may not be aware of having adopted a position’ (25)… [However] His films
are usually so large, loud, bold and brashly entertaining that whatever ideological
content exists in the film’s substructures is easily missed… One of the strongest
and most informative themes running throughout the films of James Cameron… is
the Marxist struggle between classes… ”12
In other words, Kendrick identifies an exceedingly uncharacteristic for blockbusters,
ideological constant that reinforces Cameron’s films with a rather philosophical depth.
And although Kendrick’s proficiently argued case of Marxist allusions may inform my
long thesis to some extent, it is another set of philosophical constants I am interested
in and would like to focus on. A set that, in my opinion, not only is ever central in
11James Kendrick, MarxistOvertones in Three Films of James Cameron, in JPF&T – Journal of Popular
Filmand Television,1999. P. 38.
12 Ibid,39

7. every single one of Cameron’s cinematic universes, but is also less symptomatic as
well as more political and radical than Kendrick is willing to admit. I am talking about
Cameron’s belief that only through the ‘Other’ (may this be woman, alien, foe, or
even technology) we will be able to find our place in the world and discern at least
part of its truth. I have recognized this conviction of his to dwell, more or less
obviously, yet unambiguously and persistently in all of his films’ texts. And as I have
recently discovered, he is aware that this is a position he systematically adopts. After
I pointed out the thematic parallels between The Abyss and Avatar, I asked him how
we may achieve the better eyes Lindsey is requesting for13
. This is what he had to
say:
“This question is in the heart of the film, isn’t it? And as… Neytiri says ‘no one can
teach you how to see’. It has to come from inside… I think we need to stay curious
and informed. Most importantly we need to have an openness about other cultures,
other points of view... We are essentially closed in self-defining bubbles of reality,
where you find people like you and you are all agreeing on everything… I think we
need to break these… self-referential bubbles and reach out and see people from
other perspectives… I try to live my life that way and I suppose this film is asking us
to do that as well. I am not saying am perfect at it. I mean there are some cultural
things that I do have a big problem with – in terms of the treatment of women and
things like that. But we have to see the world through other’s people eyes…”14
However, this statement of his is not enough if I am to persuasively flesh out my
arguments, in order to prove my point of view. I have to find the appropriate tools and
methodologies that will facilitate my effort. And there is no other way to do so, but to
embark on an auxiliary quest through what has already been written about Cameron.
13 Duringthe official Avatar Press Conference, which took placein London, 12 December 2009. Tran-
scripted and translated in Greek it was published in the weakly, inletmagazine, Big Fish,of Proto
Thema newspaper. Ioanna Papageorgiou,‘James Cameron: The Wonder- maker’, in Big Fish,Proto
Thema, 20 December 2009. Pp. 64 – 68.
14 Ibid,68

8. The extraordinary, physically and mentally strong, independent female heroes that
populate Cameron’s films have become the focal point of the majority of thinkers’
critical explorations. Among them, Stephen Mulhall’s philosophical analysis, in his
book On Film15
, is the most extensive and thorough. Along with other, apt
observations, he manages to falsify the consensus identifying Sarah Conor’s
centrality and importance in the narrative of The Terminator (however he is quick to
point out that she does, somewhat escape the fate that men had envisioned, pre-
arranged and put in motion for her in Terminator 2: Judgment Day). As he shrewdly
argues that the fertility of her body appears to sideline her, placing her in a solely
instrumental role. What is important is not herself as an individual, but the fact that
she is destined to bring into the world the future savior of humanity in the war against
the machines. Thus it seems that Sarah occupies the same apparently central but
ultimately marginal position that Mary occupies in the Christianity’s Holy Family,
where femaleness is important only as far as it is needed as a vessel to reproduce
maleness16
.
When his attention is turned to Aliens, Mulhall goes on to propose that Elen Ripley
has much more in common with the insignificant Sarah than what meets the eye.
Since Aliens is a film composed with “displaced re-productions” of its predecessor’s
basic elements of construction17
, Cameron’s Ripley, like Scot’s Ripley has to
maintain her resolute virginity if she is to become powerful enough to defeat the alien
species, which is a monstrous vision of sexual intercourse, pregnancy and birth and,
consequently, threatens to feminize humanity by rendering it merely the means that
makes the alien’s reproduction attainable. In a way, Mulhall suggests, Cameron
invites his heroin (and the spectators) to face what she has so far repressed
(introducing her to the previously unknown alien Queen – Mother), to re-experience a
15Stephen Mulhall,On Film,Thinkingin Action, eds. Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney (Oxon, New
York, Routledge, 2002).
16 Ibid,62
17Ibid, 67

9. traumatic event in order to finally cure herself. The reward for this therapeutic,
cinematic session is the gift of a family: Corporal Hicks becomes her husband and
Newt their daughter. However, Ripley’s new family comes into being in a non-
biological way, leading us to understand that she can only heal herself and become a
hero only if she denies a very important aspect of her femininity. Mulhall arrives to
that conclusion by taking into account (in a footnote) but ultimately dismissing, as
misguided, a deleted (from the beginning of the film) scene included in the special
edition18
of Aliens. In it Ripley is revealed as a grieving mother to a dead, biological
daughter. Although the discussion of where and why we should draw the line
between the theatrical and the special, readily available on DVD editions of the films
is still open, I believe that a further study of the above mentioned scene is warranted,
specially since Cameron himself, in his introduction to the extended edition of Aliens,
declares that “at 2 hours and 37 minutes this is the ride that we intended you to
take”.19
By ignoring this fact, Mulhall deprives his analysis from a variety of
meaningful and subversive probabilities. As, for example, the inkling that Ripley,
striped from her virginity, is the one powerful enough to vanquish the alien species,
exactly because she, like the alien Queen, is a mother, armed with the fundamental
drive to protect her (female) child. Moreover, due to a maddening inexplicable
misinterpretation of a particular scene, Mulhall goes on to accuse Ripley for
committing genocide20
! He founds this argument by claiming that Ripley is the one
who brakes the wordless pact she makes with the alien Queen (which can be
understood as “let us go and I won’t harm your offspring”), when, after saving Newt
from being impregnated, accidentally runs into the alien’s “nursery”, faced with
uncountable numbers of facehugger eggs. However, a more scrupulous exanimation
of this scene enables us to see that it is the alien species that betray the pact. In fact,
18 It restored 17 minutes of footage and was firstreleased as a limited,laser disc edition (of 10.000
copies only) in 1992.It wasn’t until the DVD releasein 1999 that mainstreamaudiences sawThe
Director’s Cut. Alternate version for Aliens in www.imdb.com
19 Aliens Quadrilogy,DeluxeCollector’s Edition,20th Century Home Entert. 2003.
20Mulhall,64-66

10. by the time Ripley destroys the nursery, she has already been rendered incapable of
genocide, since she has long before became aware of the fact that the high-tech
apparatus which creates the breathable atmosphere will explode within 4 hours due
to overload. Consequently, Mulhall fails to perceive Ripley as absolutely central and
important to the narrative, plus as an empowering and life affirming vision of
femininity as Lindsey is in The Abyss.
In her interpretation of the latter film’s happy-ending, Jody Lyle exhibit an analogous
to Mulhall’s lack of judgment, when she argues: “The film ends, in familiar Hollywood
fashion, by reconstituting the couple... the woman, after an entire film of
independence, is simply recuperated into male patriarchy”.21
She goes on to suggest
that while underwater The Abyss promotes peaceful feminism, as soon as we reach
the surface, the gender fluidity cease to exist and the progressive tone of the film is
undermined. What she fails to recognise is that the film ends by absolutely
vindicating Lindsey in the most irrefutable manner. Just in case we have not realised
by now that she was right about everything (her belief that the rig should not be used
for a military operation; her need to communicate with the aliens instead of regarding
them with fear and hate; her courage to drown so that she and Bud may live,
together again), Cameron floods the final scene with the colour he has previously
established as hers: everyone and everything are enclosed in warm, undisturbed
shades of red. After all, it is not the woman who is recuperated into male patriarchy,
but the man who is reborn into a female matriarchy.
Well now, this is an inference of mine that Alexandra Keller would find exasperatedly
inaccurate, since she accuses Cameron for a “virtual feminism... proposed in the
figure of the take-no-prisoners woman, [that] may be atypical for Hollywood but
ultimately does not disturb its patriarchal imperative... [because] it is eminently
21 Jody Lyle, ‘The Abyss Like a fish outof water’, in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Meda, 1993,
pp. 9-13

11. nonthreatening and therefore consumable, and... popular”.22
Moreover, she
sarcastically identifies Titanic’s Rose as “independent, smart, idiosyncratically
beautiful, sexy, powerful (fill in another complimentary adjective here, like an
especially flattering Mad Lib) as Cameron’s previous leading women”, who
nevertheless, ultimately serves both patriarchy and the owning classes she appears
to reject in favour of Jack.23
Alas, in an essay that attempts to make too many points
at once, her thoughts, however wittily articulated, are argued hastily and are not
sufficiently entrenched on the film’s imagery and narrative, remaining thus
unconvincing.
Disparate to Keller tactics, Jeffrey A. Brown24
astutely demonstrates how since the
early 80s the action film constructed the male body, with its well-displayed muscles,
as a spectacle, while women were present only to be rescued or to corroborate the
heterosexuality of the hero. Brown laments the effect that the 60s and 70s “feminist
critique of patriarchy based on the ‘politics of the body’”25
combined with the “woman-
as-image theory typified by Laura Mulvey” in her seminal thesis ‘Visual Pleasure and
the Narrative Cinema’26
had on film analysis. Not only did it, for too long, habitually
situated men as active and women as passive, but also encouraged film theorists
and critics to perceive action heroines like Ripley in Aliens (the first of her “kind”) or –
the extraordinary muscular- Sarah in Terminator 2, who handle weapons, “can take
it and give it” equally proficiently with the “biggest and the baddest men of the action
cinema”27
as nothing more than “gender cross-dressers”, or “really only ‘boys’ in
‘girls’ clothes”28
. Then, by productively drawing arguments from Judith’s Butler
conception of gender as a performance of a learned set of characteristics or traits,
22 Keller,143.
23 Ibid,146.
24 Brown, A, Jeffrey. ‘Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the “Point of No Return”’ in
Cinema Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Spring, 1996),pp. 52-71
25 Ibid,53
26 Ibid,56
27 Ibid,52
28 Ibid,53

12. that has assumed the air of naturalness, he lays bare the artificiality of gender
absolution. And even though he uses as a case study the faithful, Hollywood remake
of Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita, Point of No Return (directed by John Badham)
and not one of Cameron’s films, his essay provided me with particularly valuable,
guiding clues and references.
Constructions, representations and -on as well off the screen- use of technology is
another popular issue when Cameron’s work is put into discussion.
Focusing on Aliens, Tim Blackmore29
identifies a distinction between friendly and
unfriendly technology: the former are “small, human-scale, easily operated and
understood” (like the wristwatch tracker that Hicks gives to Ripley and Ripley gives to
Newt), while the latter are “large, complex, untrustworthy and dangerous” (i.e. the
power-loader or the atmosphere processor)30
. He also accepts Aliens as an astute
investigation of the Vietnam War, by combining the Science Fiction tradition with that
of the War movies, drawing attention to the similarities between the outfit and the
equipment of the film’s marines with that of the US force during the Vietnam War (or
the Vietnamese wave attacks with that of the aliens) and associating Aliens with
Oliver Stone’s Platoon. What is particularly interesting in Blackmore’s account is the
point he makes when he writes “Aliens’ emphasis on the failure of intricate
technology parallels the complaint that much of the Vietnam War was lost due to
smugness about U.S. firepower and materiel”.31
On the contrary, by identifying Aliens as a “generic hybrid” that “fuses the logic and
conventions of the horror film with that of the war movie”32
, Mulhall negates
29‘Is this goingto be another Bug-Hunt?” S-F Tradition Versus Biology-as-destiny in James Cameron’s
Aliens’, in Journal of Popular Culture, Spring96,Vol. 29 Issue4,p211-226
30Ibid,218
31Ibid,217
32 Mulhall,78.

13. Cameron’s own proclamation33
that he envisioned the Marine mission to LV-426 as
a study of the Vietnam War. Mulhall acknowledges that by depicting a high-tech army
confident of victory suffering a series of humiliating defeats by an ostensibly less
advanced civilization does put under a critical light some aspects of the American
culture – “its adoration of the technological, its ignorance of alien cultures, its
overweening arrogance”34
. But, he concludes, this criticism works only by placing the
Vietnamese in the position “of absolute, and absolutely monstrous, aliens; and it
rewrites the conflict it claims to analyze by allowing the Marines to win the war by
destroying the planet in a nuclear explosion”35
. Granted, Cameron puts the
Vietnamese in the position of the alien species, but he also makes sure to depict
Ripley expressing respect for it: “I don’t know which species is the worst. You don’t
see them fucking each other over a god-dammed percentage” she declares to the
corrupted Burke. In addition, it is not the Marines who win the war. On the contrary,
one by one they are annihilated by their enemies, leaving behind a woman, a girl, the
android Bishop and the heavily wounded Corporal Hicks, fighting to stay alive by
escaping the aliens as well as the impeding explosion caused not by a weapon of
mass destruction, but by malfunctioning technological equipment.
Ultimately, what neither Blackmore nor Mulhall succeeds in revealingly scrutinizing is
the degree of different “disposition” the various, “friendly and unfriendly” pieces of
technology exhibit when their interaction with men is compared to their interaction
with women. The latter thinker, however, tackling Ridley Scott’s Alien, makes a
useful point when he proposes that the alien species, a creature that has
“internalized or become its own array of defensive and offensive tools and
instruments – its flesh is armour and its blood a weapon” represents a mode of
33 In numerous interviews,as well as the voicecommentary on the special edition and the extras of
Aliens in the Alien Quadrilogy DVD box – set. In the latter, specifically,whilecommenting his film’s
allusionsto the Vietnam War he states, that Vietnam was where the “US forces got their butts kicked
by barefoot guys runningthrough the jungle,because they didn’t understand how to fight that war,
they didn’t understand their enemy – or the determination of that enemy”.
34Mulhall,78
35Ibid,78

14. evolution “that is not dwarfed by or in thrall to (say, alienated from) its technology”36
as the humans appear to be. This assessment may, first, be the source of some
extremely fruitful arguments if it is applied to Aliens. And second, it could open up an
extremely creative dialogue with Joshua Clover’s opposite argument: “The climax of
Aliens pits the gooey, hyper-organic alien queen against Ripley, machined and
metalized inside an exoskeletal power-loader. Victorious she looks like a hybrid of a
woman and the Eiffel Tower (perhaps that’s always true of Sigourney Weaver)”37
. He
proceeds to suggest that the scene could be read as “a schematic reduction of
Donna Haraway’s landmark essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’”38
, and consequently
proposes that we are no longer biological organisms that use technology, but
“increasingly seamless hybrids”. And by bringing forward the historic linkage between
laborers and soldiers, working at the factory floor and firing lines, “the twin crucibles
where human and machine are conjoined” he argues that Haraway’s post-human
begins before the actual melding – “at the moment the body is first made to move to
a machine’s metre”39
. Hence, it is by no accident that Ripley realizes that the
“clanking industrial aid” that is the power-loader is equally “well-suited to killing”.
Focusing on another aspect of technological representations in Cameron’s oeuvre,
Alexandra Keller makes an excellent, (albeit, yet again, inadequately contended),
observation. She detects an aesthetic tradition in all of his films, which she terms
“prosthetic vision”40
and identifies as such the video images that are ever present in
various forms: as the ‘scouting eyes’ of the ROVs in The Abyss or the live feed video
projected from the Marines head-cameras to Gorman’s command centre in Aliens.
Keller argues that this prosthetic vision “simultaneously, and often paradoxically, both
further distances the spectators by adding another layer of vision to the experience of
watching a film, and brings them closer, by reminding them... that they are, in fact,
36
Mulhall,22
37
Clover, Joshua.‘Dream Machines’in Film Quarterly, Winter2007/2008,Vol.61 Issue2, p. 6-7. P. 6
38Ibid,6
39Ibid,6-7
40 Keller,150

15. engaged in the act of watching a movie”41
. Blackmore also notices the presence and
explores possible meanings of the video images, in a chapter, aptly titled “Bug-
Eyed”42
. Referring to Cameron’s self-proclaimed desire to create “a sense of you-are-
there reality” by the way he shoots a film, Blackmore claims that viewer participation
is encouraged by the use of video instead of a wide screen format. He notices how
Cameron initially pays tribute to Scott’s Alien, by focusing on a video monitor
displaying one by one the troopers’ names, just before they awake up, thus making
clear the contradiction between the “quite ship” and the “watchful machine”.
However, he promptly argues, Cameron pushes the envelope further. First, because
“part way between metafilm and metavideo, the display of dramatis personaie blurs
the line between those who will play out the action of the next two hours (objective),
or twenty-four (subjective)43
. Then he proposes how the camera, due to Cameron’s
decision to equip every single marine with a head camera, becomes essentially a
character – a “walking eye”. As David McDonnell puts it “Everything they [the
soldiers] see is transmitted… is there with them”44
. And that is why, sitting at his
command centre, in front of a series of monitors showing each of the marines POV,
Gorman is so intent on seeing “what we can see”, and Ripley asks Hicks to “pan
right” as if she was operating a camera. Hence, the video camera becomes “an
omniscient, low-resolution eye”45
, who allows Ripley not only to see through it what
Hicks misses in actuality (the holes on the floor’s metallic rails caused by the alien’s
acid blood), but also to gain control over reality: i.e. by switching off a high resolution
wall screen, which depicts an extremely realistic forest, just before talking with
Burke46
about her daughter. What Cameron ultimately achieves with these mediated
video images, Blackmore suggests, is in tune with the beliefs of a generation that has
41Ibid,150
42Blackmore, 215
43 Ibid 215
44 On page 20 in The Official Aliens MovieMagazine.New York: O’Quinn Studios,1986.
45 Ibid,216
46 Who later,correspondently, controls Ripley’s and Newt’s reality by switchingoff the camera in the
met lab,where they sleep.

16. grown up watching the evening news on TV: something is really happening, or
appears real, only when it is shown on a video screen47
. In spite of all his astute
remarks, Blackmore eventually fails to realize that only Ripley is able to see in the
video images what others miss in actuality and subsequently gain control over reality.
In fact, after careful examination of Aliens, as well as of the rest of Cameron’s films,
it becomes apparent, that this “prosthetic vision” lies to everybody else but the female
heroes. Are they lying to the spectators too?
In order to not only answer this crucial question, but also, most importantly, to prove
my belief in Cameron’s discreet, yet unprejudiced, radical and political habit of
viewing the world through the ‘Other’, I have to venture beyond the ideas of the
above cited theorists. Their arguments are not effectively fertile or rich enough for my
endeavour. Nevertheless they were proven fairly generous in their references, since
they showed me the way to three philosophers that -one way or another- base their
ideas on the participation or inclusion of the ‘Other’: Donna Haraway and her
exploration of hybrids and situated knowledges; Judith Butler and her claim for the
performative, fluid nature of gender; Stanley Cavel and his pursuits of a perfected
society through the knowledge of the others. By utilizing their theories, individually
and combined, as my methodology, I am confident I will find out exactly how deep
the rapid-hole goes in Cameron’s films…
47Ibid,216