Alien ... a question

I had watched Alien many times in pieces, but I finally watched it end-to-end tonight. A great, great scary movie it is.

One scene had me confused. After the Alien kills (?) Yaphet Kotto, it confronts a terrified Veronica Cartwright who is either trapped or frozen in fear. As it approaches her, it cuts to a scene where one of its tentacles reaches beneath her legs and starts to rise up, presumably in the direction of her vagina.

The movie then cuts to Sigourney Weaver trying to get to the shuttle, but she can hear the audio of Cartwright's demise through a walkie-talkie. You hear a bunch of tortured staccato moans before the Alien finally kills her off.

Was rape implied? Am I just reading into it?

I Googled it up and the geek-ass sci-fi community seemed split on it. The storyline geeks said it wasn't consistent with the behavior of the alien (because, you know, they were right there with the scriptwriters :), others thought it was rape, among other things, citing the equally geeky idea that since the Alien was born of a human it would take on the worst of human characteristics.

I think it was a rape myself. What do you think?

On a related topic, I swear I watched a version of Alien that had a scene where Ripley found Tom Skerritt and Harry Dean Stanton in mid-Alien egg mode and she burned them up. Is that in the director's cut?

 

It's been awhile since i've seen the movie, but i'd say it did hint at rape. And now i wish i had the movie to pop in and watch cause i cant sleep.

 

It was rape, and Veronica Cartwright was asking for it.

 

begging.

 

Not rape. She never said no. [/Mike Tyson]

 

Was it inevitable?

 

One of my all-time favorite movies.

Yes, it's on the director's cut. Interesting scene.

As for Lambert's death, it's hard to make a case that it isn't rape because nothing is very subtle in that scene (the slow deliberate movement of the tail, Lambert's panting, etc). Like yourself, I sought out other perspectives, and still have no definitive answer.

 

To quote a famous sports journalist, she should have just laid back and enjoyed it.

 

wow.

 

I seem to remember reading that the scene was deleted initially because it was regarded as being too intense. Which, in the context of that movie, is saying a lot.

Because of the H.R. Giger influence, there's all kinds of sexual imagery playing around in the movie. The way Ash tries to kill the Weaver character – choking her on a rolled up magazine – always seemed really odd to me.

And the entrance to the crashed ship that contained the alien eggs ...