This Alien is Giant

Although I have made many posts about the Alien figures in my husband’s collection, they never cease to amaze me.

For instance, this is a really big Alien:

The photo quality is kind of bad here, and the scale is a bit harder to see, but if you remember the aliens from previous posts (such as An Alien and A Predator and An Alien Exercise), the Alien figures in the foreground are already big, so this Alien is REALLY big. In fact, her little spiny antennae-like things at the back of her head caused me to do a double take. (This display is from the top of the Expedit and I thought a real bug was hiding behind the action figures.) (Also, that is not so weird since we had some extremely smart roaches in our past apartment in Raleigh.)

I think this figure must be the Alien Mother. (I know true collectors and movie fans will know for sure.) Much has been written about Alien and the Monsterous, Othered mother and even the role of motherhood for Ripley, but as a still relatively new mother myself, I think what is striking is not so much the aspects of the grotesque (though I did think it was a real, legit bug,) but just the sense of size– the sublime. In the previous post I noted how scale plays out in my husband’s sense of care for the art of collecting and arranging action figures, but I also appreciate how action figures can confront us with a sense of the sublime in their scale relative to us (as opposed to each other.)

My impression of this figure is that motherhood is simply, overwhelmingly large. Also, this may not even be the Alien Mother after all.