Constructing The "Other": A Postcolonial Study Of Ridley Scott's Alien, Blade Runner, And 1492: Conquest Of Paradise

In the age of "glocalization" (globalization + localization), the impact of American cinema has become all too evident worldwide, particularly in terms of its power of (re)orienting people's perception of others and themselves. Hollywood cinema, as a most powerful form of propaganda for the social and cultural ideology of the United States, has seldom ceased to produce films that embody the Eurocentric modes of thinking which can be detected from the construction of racial/ethnic/sexual groups of people other than the White male, namely the "Other". On Hollywood screen the stereotypical images of these groups are largely shaped by the three-dimensional framework of "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" that exists and permeates the social, economic and cultural lives of the Americans to a great extent. This thesis intends to explore how the "Other" is constructed and represented in three of Ridley Scott's major films, Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982), and 1492: Conquest of Paradise {1992). Produced by an auteur director of mainstream Hollywood, these chosen films possess comparatively abundant representations of the "Other" and provide evanescent emergence of the diasporic races and ethnicities like the Chinese, Japanese, Hispanics, Egyptians, Native Americans, African Americans, among many others. Seeking recourse mainly to Edward Said's conception of Orientalism, Foucault's discussion about power and knowledge, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's comment on Eurocentrism, and Christian Metz's theory of language and cinema, the present thesis aims at a detailed examination of how the "Other" is constructed by Ridley Scott's cinematic apparatus under the interrelating powers from the three dominating systems-class, ethnicity, and gender, with a focus on the issue of ethnicity.Three chapters are devoted to the discussion of the abovementioned films respectively. Chapter I, Construction of Otherness in Alien, examines how the field of representation is revealed as a place of struggle; Chapter II, Display of the "Orient" and Neo-Colonization of Outer Space in Blade Runner, observes how the scope, institution and impact of the "Orientalist reality" are exposed both inside and outside the cinematic screen; and Chapter III, Re-interpretation of Cultural Myths in 1492: Conquest of Paradise, questions the legacy of the Columbus myth. Finally, the thesis concludes that the images of the "Other" in the chosen films have superficially challenged some of their conventional cinematic portrayals but have essentially conformed to the stereotypical and cliched constructions. Although the image of people in films has to be a representation, more balanced, less stereotypical version should be called for, particularly in the age of glocalization that concentrates on the interpenetration of universality and particularity.