The traditional and most immediately apparent interpretation of the alien invasion movie is as a metaphor for xenophobia, which was certainly a major concern in Reagan’s America. The Other, as repeatedly referenced herein, can be applied to a lot of things, nearly all of which are present in Earth Girls. They are, in fact, as screenwriter/co-star Julie Brown puts it, “three major cute guys.” That’s right, the aliens aren’t the only ones who are horny Valerie (Davis) and Candy (Brown), easy Earth girls that they are, also can’t wait to get a taste of the Other. However, as the critic Devin Faraci asked of the aforementioned Howard the Duck, “Is it bestiality if Howard is a sentient, speaking being?” It’s a worthwhile question, especially taking into consideration the fact that the aliens of Earth Girls are decidedly humanoid, especially after they have been shaved. But as a sex comedy involving intercourse between furry alien beings and ordinary Earth women, it requires no stretch of the imagination to see it as a bestiality comedy. The red alien, Wiploc (Jim Carrey), gives voice to their reason for visiting Earth: “I want a woman!” Lest there be any doubt, this is a sex comedy, right from the start. It’s right there in the title: the aliens of the film are following their space-boners to a completely foreign world, with no reservations whatsoever. In a way, it can all be traced back to King Kong, which got a big, star-studded remake in 1976, right around the same time a few other notable films ( Dirty Harry, Death Wish, First Blood) were paving the way for the vigilante and one-man army tropes in 80s Action cinema.Įarth Girls is especially interesting, though, in the way it explores bestiality as just one facet of a sexual fetishization of the Other. Much like Asian stereotypes ( Sixteen Candles, The Goonies, Gremlins), bestiality was a weirdly prevalent theme in a lot of popular 80s movies, such as The Howling, Howard the Duck, Splash, and Silver Bullet, which features a bizarre woman-werewolf tryst, though the sexual nature of it is even more apparent in Cycle of the Werewolf, the novella which inspired the movie. Unlike The Fly, which was dark and deep enough to warrant speculation about its hidden subtext even at the time of its release, Earth Girls is not the type of movie that generally gets a lot of heavy scholarly analysis, but it is not very hard to see that, for all its sci-fi kitsch weirdness and sex-comedy misunderstandings, Earth Girls is full of clever subtext about the not-so-good but definitely old-fashioned fear of interracial coupling. A few years after enacting a disgustingly doomed romance in The Fly, real-life husband-and-wife Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis went on to play a similarly weird but much less doomed couple in Julien Temple’s 1988 cult classic Earth Girls Are Easy.
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