(“Metaphors in the Aliens Trilogy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1995). Even Jones the cat got his own diagram, courtesy of James H. Kavangh’s essay “Son of a Bitch: Feminism, Humanism, and Science in Alien” (October, No. 13, 1980), which sought to align the alien attack on humans with an Althusserian-Marxist takedown of humanism in general:
S <————————> —S
_ X _
—S <————————> S
“The founding term in the film is human (S). … The anti-human (—S) is, of course, the alien, and the not-human /(S) is Ash, the robot. The cat, then function function in the slot of the not-anti-human /(—S), an indispensable role in this drama.”