It is hard to look deeply into notions of gender inside movies that are trying to do something different. To me, putting a gun in the hand of a woman, or making a man realize his more sensitive side is not groundbreaking by any means, nor can that be the only redeeming thing about the character. Gender stereotypes have fallen into this black and white area where you are one or the other and by showing sides of the other peeking through the cracks makes you conform.
Strong female leads often fall into the same problem that people had with one dimensional characters like the manic pixie dream girl. Putting a gun into the hand is not the only way to make someone strong. We can have a movie about a weak woman, who has no self confidence, but by making her a real person and picking the battles that we want to see her win, that can make her tough.
I agree with Butler from the reading as he says "Gender does not prescribe our performance; rather, it is performance that ascribes our gender." I think that the gender of the character makes an insanely huge difference in terms of what happens to them, in terms of character arc not so much. Movies do not happen in a vacuum and we take our notions of the outside world with us when watching a movie. That being so, I think that humans at heart all feel the same and have potential to handle obstacles in similar ways. Stereotypes have formed due to social pressures and the circumstantial issues.
I think that Riply falls into a cool category with strong female characters where a lot of the narrative takes place with her trying to be a mother to Newt, yet in the end she still has the standoff. The only problem I had with the movie is that it didnt push either narrative strong enough to necessitate a strong character arc. In her "male" character arc she starts off as a strong model of killing where she has one job, to go in and exterminate yet something has to lighten her up. They teased this with the standoff with the queen where she was going to quell her rampage to spare the young, yet in the end it was all for not. She never had a "female" character arc because she was never passive enough to change into a confident lady. She had a motherly affection for Newt but I don't think it changed her because it was there from the beginning and was there till the end and only affected how she was trying to save her.
The reading talks about how strong female characters become male in they eyes of the press when they pick up guns and kick ass. I think this is very true and I think that the public believe that too. Too many movies are about females following female character arcs and males following male character arcs. When they change, of course we are going to see that subconsciously. This argument is not about what the film did and how the film portrays women and men, it is how the public does. We have black and white characteristics of gender which leaves very little room for growth.
All in all, it was a good movie. The tone and atmosphere of the alien franchise is really what sells me. Not the fact that a girl shot a gun. I think if this movie wanted to take gender to the next level they would have explored a true genderless being, the android.
I really, really like this post. It's original and thoughtful, and I especially like your distinction between the prescriptions of gender and those of character arc. You're getting really close to what Butler means by gender as performance, but from the angle of how film narratives are constructed. Somebody else posted some excerpts from the director's cut of this movie that explicitly deal with Ripley's "female character arc" as you put it, mourning a daughter who died of old age while she was in cryo, discussions with Newt about motherhood and parenting, and all the weird weird issues of modes of reproduction this film raises and importantly doesn't resolve. So it's significant that that matching arc was edited from the film in favor of increasing gender ambiguity--the character arc somehow floating between genders (or arguably, as you suggest, becoming masculine while abandoning feminine, so maybe it's not as transgressive as we'd like). What you're saying here is really important. Do you want to focus on this idea for a final project, and can you find some secondary sources to help you lay out the 'gender role vs character arc' idea? It could work really well.
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