Gary Morris: Future Imperfect

(An example of a genre essay--critique of science fiction)

Future Imperfect: Sci-Fi's Nationalist Narratives
by Gary Morris
Bright Lights Film Journal

Excerpt:

The questioning attitude behind films like Forbidden Planet finds fuller expression in a key work of the 1960s, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This film, of mixed origins (Kubrick is American but lives and works in Britain), repudiates the myth of the conquerable, exploitable frontier in its picture of the universe as a deadly space, driven by incomprehensible forces, indifferent to the strivings of humanity. Kubrick's vision of space and future is as beautifully bloodless as Forbidden Planet's artificial paradise, Altair 5.

In the 1970s, more politically aware audiences continued to embrace an anti-expansionist agenda. By now the nationalist narrative was increasingly rejected. Corporations, the chief beneficiaries of expansionism, were reborn as deadly amusement parks (Westworld, 1973), or faceless entities that systematically murder "useless" citizens (Logan's Run, 1976) or convert them into a renewable resource — edible wafers — after the usual sources have been depleted (Soylent Green, 1973). WestWorld is particularly intriguing because it recreates three environments that were pivotal in the creation of the American mythos: ancient Rome, medieval Europe, and the beloved Old West become lethal spaces for leisure-class vacationers — a startling image of an appropriated history suddenly turning against its exploiters.

But myths are more easily forgotten than destroyed, and the 1970s also saw the resurrection of a primitive, reactionary science fiction form — the space opera. George Lucas's seminal Star Wars (1977) retrieved the nationalist narrative from the early days of science fiction, specifically from the work of 1930s pulp writers like E. E. Smith, whose Lensman series stressed entertainment and spectacle over self-examination. Another source for Star Wars was the 1930s sci-fi serial a la Flash Gordon, where good and evil are so clearly differentiated there's no need to think about them. Lucas's use of the phrase "the evil empire" for his villains is telling, since that was America's Cold War nickname for Russia. Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan was among many who listened when Lucas spoke; he called his outer space missile defense system, the Strategic Defense Initiative, "Star Wars." Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has linked the ethos of Lucas's film, with its emphasis on the visceral pleasures of destruction on a cosmic scale, to America's 1991 war against Iraq, where an estimated 200,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed "off-screen." In both cases, death is made thrilling but it's also sanitized, unseen, its consequences never acknowledged or reckoned with.

If 2001 uses spectacle to philosophize about the insignificance of humanity in the cosmic scheme, and the hopelessness of trying to "conquer" space, Star Wars reconfirms the myth of the cosmos as a kind of masculine play space, where primal battles between competing masculine forces can be replayed as they were in the science fiction literature of the 1930s. Star Wars' then state-of-the-art special effects ushered the science fiction spectacle into the modern age, in spite of its reactionary underpinnings. Lucas brought another innovation that's become a major aspect of U.S. cinema — the mass marketing of imagery from the film in the form of McDonald's lunches, action figures, and other corporate-totemic references. Audiences could now become more intimately involved with a movie — and the myths it promulgates — by literally taking a small part of it home with them as a constant reminder of those myths. If they could no longer conquer the frontier themselves, they could at least be associated with someone, something, that did.

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) marks a temporary backlash against the imperial saga of Star Wars. While the special effects are again the lure, Scott's future is bleak, even despairing. The opening tableau, Los Angeles in 2039, is a vast cityscape at night, with massive explosions of flame bursting into a black sky. By day the city is almost equally dark, a garbage-strewn, multiracial metropolis that looks like a filthy medieval village. The godlike Tyrell Corporation, an unholy alliance of science and capitalism, has turned the world into the equivalent of a pig sty. The innovations of the future don't create leisure or pleasure in this cramped, commerce-driven world. Tyrell's inventions seem frivolously self-indulgent, as in its creation of quasi-human "replicants"; or anti-human, as laser guns and flying cars are used mainly to oppress and kill the citizenry. Star Wars' emphasis on marketing is satirized here in the image of a huge video screen advertising Coca-Cola, counterpointed by an off-screen voice that offers the promise of yet another frontier when the Earth — read: America — is in chaos: "Visit the off-World colonies!" Scott turns an intrusive device — the corporate-sponsored "product placement" that's now de rigeur in film — into an anti-corporate motif, as Coke becomes both part of, and complicit in, a nightmarishly crowded, polluted mise-en-scene. It's surely significant that Blade Runner also attacks one of the icons of the nationalist narrative. Star Wars' Han Solo, a double for those boyish 1930s science fiction heroes who conquered "evil empires" through sheer determination, reappears in Blade Runner as a killer cop who brutally murders the replicants, modern automata whose only crime is that they long to be human.

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