Ripley's panties
In space, no one knows the color of your underwear
A few days ago, the always attentive Anthony Mitzel sent me this meme, which appeared in the Dune shitposting group (“siechtposting,” to be precise; a siecht is a “Cave warren inhabited by a Fremen tribal community” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_Dune_(franchise)_terminology#S).
My first reaction was puzzlement. I was looking at the meme on my phone and, while I could see that the “groin’’ region of the picture had been manipulated, it was not easy to discern what was the change. So, I did what every researcher should do: I asked the question: “What am I missing?’’ Anthony obliged immediately: it’s the the codpiece from Dune.
The scene is of course famous: Ripley has apparently killed the alien and is preparing to enter the stasis apparatus to fly back to earth. Of course the alien is still there and Ripley needs to fight a final battle that results in her killing it for good (and saving the cat). Coming after a fairly intense sequence of gore and mayhem in the movie, the scene is a brief respite from the violence and horror. Symbolically it entails Ripley showing her frailty and vulnerability, before destroying the monster. However, none of this matters relative to this meme.
The scene appears in Alien (1979) which was re-released in 2019 in HD-BlueRay. Aliens, the 1986 sequel, was rereleased in 4K Ultra HD in 2024.The fact that the restoration of the two Aliens movie had just come out around the time that the Dune memes were flourishing is completely coincidental. Even more so given that the rerelease of the first Alien movie, from which the still is taken, took place three years before.
This meme illustrates well the aleatory nature of some memes. Nothing could predict the juxtaposition of Ripley’s and Feyd’s underwear and, aside from the fact that they both wear underwear, or a cod-piece to be fair, there are no similarities. There is no reason to overlay the two, except that they both share some visual affordances (shape, position on the body).
Of course there are some prurient aspects to the meme, mostly clear to teenage boys, who probably get some form of arousal from the legend that Sigourney Weaver’s pubic hair had to be airbrushed out of the final version of the film (this has been debunked widely, but still pops up in the comments on the meme). There was some speculation that with the remastered version the public hair was more visible (it’s not, at least from the stills I have seen). Be these as they may, the provide no real explanation of why we would want to overlay Ripley’s and Feyd’s underwear.
These may be considered examples of nonsense humor, as they are referred to in humor theory. Pure incongruity, unrelieved by a resolution. However, the juxtaposition of two items, even if purely on formal terms is in fact a resolution (albeit a very weak one). Indeed, in the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo & Raskin, 1991), juxtaposition is one of the logical mechanisms which provide some, often partial and almost always merely playful, resolution to the incongruity.
So, yes it’s random, and the coincidence of the two images being in the available knowledge of the siechtposters at the same time is precisely that, a coincidence. However, it’s not completely random, as underwear is underwear, in any universe.
References:
Attardo, S. & Raskin, V. (1991). Script theory revis(it)ed: joke similarity and joke
representation model. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research,
4(3-4), 293-347.
I will note that whenever I screened "Alien" for my Science Fiction and Horror class at a Taiwanese university, this scene would always incite a round of nervous laughter, perhaps because of the incongruity of watching such a scene at school, or the sheer “tiny-ness” of the panties. (I always worried a bit it might get me in trouble screening it.)
The nature of the shot, especially when it moves from a medium to almost full shot (and then when she leans over for the “plumber's crack” shot [1:14/3:52]), always reminded me of the POV killer (voyeuristic) shot, a kind of formalistic genre signal that all is not well.
https://youtu.be/iW5OvI6NOl8?si=Ml0L3E6REj1OEAcf
Final note: To me, that shot is also a clear example of the “male gaze” (Mulvey, 1975), how Hollywood structures females as objects of desire for male spectators. For the meme, the juxtaposition of it being on a male body in “Dune” (then montaged onto the “Alien” shot) also contributes to the humoristic element in the meme (What are we “gazing” at, and more importantly, why?”)
M)
Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16, 6-18.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6
See also the great Gayln Studlar, as regarding the position of the female spectator
STUDLAR, G. (1985). VISUAL PLEASURE AND THE MASOCHISTIC AESTHETIC. Journal of Film and Video, 37(2), 5–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20687658