In this essay I want to explore the relation of science fiction to the cinema – that is to say, the relation between the genre of science fiction and the medium of film.1 As I shall argue, the inherent nature of cinema as a visual medium has tended to work against the distinctive dynamics of science fiction as a genre. However, my intention is not to claim, as indeed some critics have, that ‘science fiction film … is an intellectual impossibility’.2 Clearly such a sweeping claim would be absurd, yet fans of science-fiction literature have lodged this complaint against science-fiction film frequently.
For my purpose here, we might begin to hack our way through what Darko Suvin calls the ‘genealogical jungle’ of science fiction by distinguishing it from horror.3 Although the two genres share some of the same generic elements (iconography, character types, conventions), their treatment is notably different. So while the genres of science fiction and horror often overlap, even more so in film than in literature, the contrasts between them are rooted in the particular nature of science-fiction film.
Both science fiction and horror, along with fantasy, are types of narrative that have been called speculative fiction or structural fabulation.4 Horror and science fiction are both rooted in the real world: the former works by positing something as horrifying in contrast to the normal, quotidian world; the latter by acknowledging to some extent contemporary scientific knowledge and the scientific method. Hence the close relationship between the two genres. Such works as Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1817), Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), and the two versions of The Thing (1951, 1982) have been categorised as both science fiction and horror, for all employ iconography and conventions found in both genres. By contrast, fantasy narratives are based neither in the natural world nor in the supernatural, but the supranatural. As Robert Heinlein notes,
Science fiction and fantasy are as different as Karl Marx and Groucho Marx. Fantasy is constructed either by denying the real world in toto or at least by making a prime basis of the story one or more admittedly false premise – fairies, talking mules, trips through a looking glass, vampires, seacoast Bohemia, Mickey Mouse.5
The distinctive aim of fantasy, then, according to Lester del Rey, is to present ‘alternative impossibilities’.6
Despite the narrative relation between horror and science fiction, the two genres offer experiences and pleasures strikingly different, in fact almost opposite, in nature. As such critics as Robert Scholes and Bruce Kawin have argued, the appeal of science fiction is primarily cognitive, while horror, as the genre’s very name suggests, is essentially emotional.7 Linda Williams has discussed the horror film as a ‘body genre’ – that is, one of those genres (like pornography and melodrama) that works by eliciting pronounced emotional and physiological excitation. Science-fiction, by contrast, is often defined more cerebrally as a philosophical openness described as a ‘sense of wonder’. Science fiction critic Sam Moskowitz, quoting Rollo May, for example, invokes the phrase as the essential quality of science fiction and defines this sense of wonder as a heightened awareness and open attitude to new ideas.8 Science fiction, quite unlike fantasy and horror, works to entertain alternative possibilities.
Perhaps, then, the fundamental distinction between the two genres is one of attitude: a closed response in horror, an open one in science fiction. Horror seeks to elicit terror and fear of something unknown or unacknowledged. According to Robin Wood’s highly influential Freudian/Marxist analysis of the horror film, the genre’s monsters represent a ‘return of the repressed’, forbidden desire disowned and projected outward by the protagonist.9 Accordingly, in horror stories narrative consciousness is often trapped or contained, set in claustrophobic, enclosed places, as in the countless castles, vaults, tombs and chambers that typify the genre’s dramatic spaces. And vision is often obscured, from Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1843) to John Carpenter’s The Fog (1979). Because the sleep of reason breeds monsters, horror tales emphasise darkness and night (Stephen King’s The Dark Half [1990], the numerous movies entitled Night of …) and superstition (Halloween [1978], Friday the 13th [1980] and the various Curse(s) of …).
Tellingly, the narrator’s struggle in Poe’s story ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’ (1841) to employ empirical reasoning to prevent himself from being sucked below the surface is paradigmatic of the horror tale. By contrast, the rapt upward gaze of faces bathed in beatific light in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is emblematic of the expansive thrust of science fiction. Vision in horror tales tends to focus down and inward, as in Poe’s ‘The Premature Burial’ (1844) or David Cronenberg’s Parasite Murders (a.k.a. Shivers/They Came From Within, 1975), while science fiction gazes up and out – from man’s one small step in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) to the giant step for mankind through the stargate in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Kawin sums up the difference by comparing the last lines of The Thing – the dire warning ‘Keep watching the skies!’ – and Brainstorm (1983) – the hopeful and expansive invitation to ‘Look at the stars!’10 It is no coincidence that one of the first science fiction movies of the sound era was entitled Just Imagine (1930).
For Damon Knight, ‘Some widening of the mind’s horizons, no matter in what direction’ is what science fiction is all about.11 In this sense science fiction narratives are, to use Méliès’s own phrase, voyages extraordinaires which, befitting their frequent setting in the future and/or on parallel worlds, emphasise the vastness of space and the fluidity of time. Thus in science fiction, narrative point of view expands to entertain rather than contain new possibilities. As in, say, Olaf Stapledon’s novel Last and First Men (1930) or H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) and the film version Things to Come (1936), which Wells scripted, the dramatic conflict in science fiction is quite often exactly this: the difficulty of accepting rather than combating forces larger than the individual will. According to Suvin, the genre works by providing us with an experience of ‘cognitive estrangement’: as in Russian Formalism, our attention is returned to reality by the premisses of science fiction tales, which make us question the givens of our world.12
In both Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man (1956) and the film adaptation The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), the mental perspective of the protagonist expands even as his body dwindles. At first Scott Carey is terrified by the new, challenging world in which he finds himself, but ultimately he achieves spiritual transcendence. His epiphanic perception, on the novel’s final page, is that he has moved from the ‘universe without’ to the ‘universe within’: ‘Why had he never thought of it; of the microscopic and the submicroscopic worlds? … He’d always thought in terms of man’s concept, not nature’s … But to nature there was no zero. Existence went on in endless cycles’ (or, as the film concludes: ‘To God there is no zero’).13
The horrible dangers of an enlarged world are embodied in both novel and film in the spectacular form of a spider that comes to seem monstrously large. Both horror and science fiction make generic claims to monster movies – ‘the Creature film sits (awkwardly, for some) between horror and SF’, observes Vivian Sobchack14 – but they are represented quite differently in the two genres. This difference follows from their respective orientations of vision. In horror, creatures are monstrous violations of ideological norms, while in science fiction monsters are often simply a different life form. Because of this difference in the treatment of the Other, as Sobchack observes, horror monsters threaten the disruption of moral and natural order, while those of science fiction address the disruption of the social order.15
So the monsters of horror are typically abject, sometimes explicitly unnameable, as in Stephen King’s It (1986); but in science fiction they may be subjects of rational scrutiny, as in John W. Campbell Jr’s novella ‘Who Goes There?’ (1938), the source of both versions of The Thing. Because the monsters of horror commonly represent ‘the return of the repressed’, they tend to be anthropomorphic (the vampire, the zombie, the mummy) and animalistic (the wolf man, cat people), to spring from our physical nature, albeit in unnatural or ‘interstitial’ form.16 The Other of science fiction, however, frequently takes non-humanoid forms, whether animal (War of the Worlds, 1953), vegetable (The Andromeda Strain, 1970) or mineral (The Monolith Monsters, 1957).
The fundamental difference between science fiction and horror is conventionally represented within the two genres themselves as a differing emphasis on the mind (science fiction) and the body (horror). Science fiction focuses on heady issues, as in such movies as The Brain from Planet Arous (1958) and The Mind of Mr Soames (1969). The premiss in Poul Anderson’s novel Brain Wave (1954) is that the human race is suddenly confronted with a quantum leap in intelligence. By contrast, horror commonly evokes our anxiety about the body, so vividly invoked in such horror films as I Dismember Mama (1972) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Indeed, many horror movies focus on the graphic spectacle of the violated body to such an extent that they have been referred to as ‘meat movies’. For Philip Brophy, they tend ‘to play not so much on the broad fear of Death, but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it’.17 In many of these movies, such as the Hellraiser series, evisceration and flaying – that is, exposing the body as a visible site, are treated as the privileged moments of horror, the generic ‘money shots’. (Indeed, it might even be argued that the history of the horror film traces a trajectory of gradual, inexorable surrender to the allure of the visible, and that the genre had reached an aesthetic impasse as a result of its wholesale capitulation to the representation of horror as that which is corporeal, physical – that is, seen.)
For Christian Metz, the chronological development from Lumière to Méliès marks an evolution of ‘cinematography to cinema’ – that is, from a conception of film as a recording tool to an artistic medium.18 But it is perhaps more accurate to say that cinema is simultaneously Lumière and Méliès, science and fiction, for the film image is at once a concrete, scientific record of things in the real world (‘actualités’) and a selected account of that world (‘artificially arranged scenes’). Dziga Vertov’s Kino Eye, that unblinking machine capable of perceiving the world with a greater objective fidelity than the human eye, always open to that which is placed before it, would suggest that the cinema would be an ideal medium for conveying science fiction’s sense of wonder. Indeed, cinema as a medium displays three central aspects central to the genre of science fiction: space, time and the machine – or the apparatus, in the terms of materialist film theory. (We might note in passing that these themes appear much less often in the horror genre.)
In cinema, narration proceeds by manipulating time and space, clongating and condensing both for dramatic and affective purposes. The techniques for achieving such spatial and temporal distortions constitute the foundation of classic narrative film, but such manipulations are central to documentary and experimental cinema as well. Across the range of different film practices the camera, the recording apparatus itself, seems capable of moving through both dimensions at once. Terry Ramsaye has noted how much the cinema resembles a time machine in his discussion of H. G. Wells’s description of travelling through time in The Time Machine (1895).19 (Later in the year Wells’s book was published, inventor William Paul, whom Wells knew, applied for a patent for a machine that would provide simulated voyages through time.)
The cinematic machine, like the Constructors in Stanislaw Lem’s novel The Cyberiad (1967), is a device capable of imagining and ‘building’ (through special effects) other machines infinitely more sophisticated than itself. Science fiction film has relied heavily on special effects, and these effects in turn constitute one of the particular pleasures of the genre. The genre’s reliance on special effects is itself an enactment of science fiction’s thematic concern with technology. It is therefore understandable that for many viewers the value of (that is to say, the pleasure derived from) science fiction movies is determined by the quality (synonymous with believability) of the special effects. For these viewers, nothing destroys the pleasure of a science fiction movie more than seeing the ‘seams’ in a matte shot or glimpsing the zipper on an alien’s bodysuit. Even Richard Hodgens, an apparent purist who bemoans the lack of scientific knowledge in science fiction movies, seems to confuse the failure of some films’ special effects to be ‘convincing’ with the plausibility and consistency of their narrative premises.20
Special effects are ‘filmic moments of a radically filmic character’,21 for they seek to achieve unreality as realistically as possible – to engage ‘our belief, not our suspension of disbelief’, as Sobchack puts it. We marvel at special effects images at once for their fantastic content and for the power of their realisation. They announce the powers of cinema while, paradoxically, taming the imagination through the very fact of visual representation. This visualisation for the camera pulls the images from speculation to spectacle – in Sobchack’s terms, it transforms the poetry of the possible into the prosaic realm of the visible.22
Because of the science fiction film’s emphasis on special effects, the genre’s primary appeal has been the kinetic excitement of action – that ‘sensuous elaboration’ which Susan Sontag describes as ‘the aesthetics of destruction … the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess’.23 (This pleasure is itself visualised in the ‘bird’s-eye view’ shot in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 (science fiction?) thriller The Birds, as the viewer is placed with the hovering birds looking down in seeming satisfied contemplation of the picturesque destruction they have wrought in the town below.) At least one subgenre of the science fiction film, the apocalyptic film, is founded on the promise of scenes of mass destruction. In these films, from When Worlds Collide (1951) to the more recent Armageddon and Deep Impact (both 1998), we eagerly await the climactic tidal wave that will sweep over New York and its famous landmarks of Western civilisation.
The paradigmatic example of this difference between science fiction in the two media is, perhaps, Frankenstein. Shelley’s novel is a central early text in the history of science fiction literature – the ‘first great myth of the Industrial age’, in the words of Brian Aldiss24 – while James Whale’s 1931 movie is a classic horror film. In the film, philosophy is replaced by frisson, and the white magic of science becomes black.25 Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory, with its battery of crackling generators and steaming German Expressionist beakers – clearly influenced by Rotwang’s laboratory in Metropolis (1926) – evokes not enlightened scientific inquiry but the dark supernatural world of the Gothic. The creature is transformed from a nimble and articulate being, an effective metaphor for Romantic hubris and encroaching industrialisation, into a lumbering, grunting monster. The movie is less interested in the moral implications of human artifice than in the frightening spectacle of Boris Karloff’s stiff-legged strut, and so shifts the focus from, as it were, the doctor’s dilemma to the revenge of the creature. The doctor’s famous cackle, ‘It’s alive, it’s alive’, as uttered by actor Colin Clive, unmistakably marks him as an unhinged man – the familiar mad scientist of horror who has committed the hubristic sin of investigating phenomena ‘Man was not meant to know’.
Monsters, phaser-gun gadgetry and large-scale destruction are staple motifs of science fiction literature, but they have been more prominent in science fiction cinema. If the cinema’s BBBs (big-bosomed babes, in the jargon of the genre), as represented by Fire Maidens From Outer Space (1956) and Jane Fonda as Barbarella (1967), cannot hope to match the depictions in the science fiction pulps in the ‘Golden Age’ (approximately 1938 to 1950), it is only that actresses of flesh and blood could never equal the damsels in the fantastically stylised illustrations of the pulp covers – although Russ Meyer’s amply-endowed women in Dr Breedlove (1964) come close.
Because film is primarily a visual medium, it tends to concentrate on the depiction of visual surfaces at the expense of contemplative depth. Science fiction’s characteristic sense of wonder thus works differently in film than in literature. According to Cyril Kornbluth, ‘The science fiction writer churns out symbols every time he writes of the future or an alternate present; he rolls out symbols of people, places, things, relationships, as fast as he can work his typewriter or his pen.’26 Indeed, writing in the interrogative mode of science fiction rather than the declarative mode of realism is necessarily to write symbolically, for it is the extrapolative kind of writing that contemplates the potential of things, how things might be regarded (Suvin’s ‘cognitive estrangement’). Unlike words, which are rendered either as sounds or marks on paper, representational images are by contrast first and always objects in the material world, the things themselves before being symbolic of something else.27
In other genres, inherent symbolism is provided by visual icons which carry ‘intrinsic charges of meaning independently of whatever is brought to them by particular directors’.28 But, as Sobchack notes, the common objects in science fiction films, like spaceships, lack the iconographic consistency of other genres and are relatively ‘unfixed’.29 Still, science fiction films are shaped by the ideological constraints of the genre system, which typically features comfortable narrative closure. Even though science fiction movies allow us the anarchic pleasure of witnessing civilisation’s destruction, the genre also offers us, at least in its classic form (similar to the gangster film, to which monster movies are closely related), the satisfaction of the restoration of social order. So in the monster movies that typified science fiction film during the 1950s (the period John Baxter refers to as ‘Springtime for Caliban’),30 the creatures, which almost always appear as the result of nuclear testing, are often finally destroyed with an ‘ultimate weapon’ that uses similar technology. In other words, the unfortunate results of sophisticated and potentially lethal technology are defeated by the creation of even more sophisticated and lethal technology.
In The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), for example, one of the movies that initiated the 1950s monster cycle, the elegiac atmosphere that informs Ray Bradbury’s 1951 source story, ‘The Fog Horn’, is emphatically sacrificed for visual spectacle. The story is a mood piece about a lonely prehistoric creature drawn from the sea to a lighthouse by the melancholy sound of its horn. Bradbury’s prose is more suggestive than concrete in its description, but the movie features a radioactive, mutated Rhedosaurus that wreaks havoc in New York City, with the requisite shots of physical destruction and stampeding pedestrians. In the film’s climax, the army pursues the creature to Coney Island, for no particular reason other than the visual interest in showing the creature in proportion to the famous Cyclone roller coaster, where it is killed with a new nuclear warhead. Thus our fears about the possibility of nuclear holocaust are at once aroused and assuaged in a narrative trajectory that in short order became a soothing ritual in the myriad movies featuring genetically altered insects, reptiles and other asserted BEMs (‘bug-eyed monsters’) that soon followed. Of course, the ideological assurance of such narrative closure works across numerous genres, but in the specific case of science fiction it compromises the radical potential of the genre’s extrapolative, speculative dynamic.
In recent years, the science fiction film has placed great emphasis upon the child, and this is no accident. Robin Wood has argued convincingly that recent American cinema generally has tended to construct the viewer as childlike,31 in thrall to the illusion. In science fiction specifically, the generic sense of wonder, and by extension the position of the spectator, has been located in the image of a wide-eyed child. This development, of course, is largely the result of the huge commercial success of George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982), all of which rank among the top box-office winners in film history. (The Star Wars cosmology became even more firmly entrenched in American cultural consciousness when former President Ronald Reagan named his national defence programme after Lucas’s film and referred to the Soviet Union as the ‘Evil Empire’.) Subsequent science fiction movies such as Starman (1984), The Explorers (1985), Short Circuit (1986), Tron (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984) exhibited a new adolescent orientation, clearly showing the influence of the Lucas and Spielberg films. Cocoon (1985), with its premiss of alien lifeforms that change a swimming pool into a fountain of youth, even manages to make children of senior citizens.
Before Spielberg and Lucas, children were as sparse in science fiction films as in the stylised towns of the classic western. Aside from such rare exceptions as Invaders From Mars (1953) and Village of the Damned (1960, based on John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, 1957), until recently children tended to be neither heard nor seen in science fiction. In horror, however, children have been presented frequently as figures of evil rather than innocence. From The Bad Seed (1956) to Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983), horror tales have depicted children as figures of demonic possession. Many of these movies, following upon the popularity of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973), may be read as embodying adult fears of being ‘possessed by children’ – that is, of being obligated to them, an expression of cultural backlash against the centrality of the nuclear family in a period of dissolving marriages and more open sexual mores.
Discussing the infantilisation that informed much of Hollywood cinema in the 1980s, Wood refers to special effects as the exhibition of technological ‘magic’. Tellingly, Lucas’s special effects company is called Industrial Light and Magic – the name itself suggesting the kind of totemic power the popular audience ascribes to the sophisticated technology required to produce such visual illusions. As Carl Freedman notes, special effects tend to ‘overwhelm the viewer, to bathe the perceptual apparatus of the filmgoer in the very ‘filmicness’ of film’.32 This position is literalised by the placement of the camera (and hence the position of the spectator) in the genre’s now-conventional special effects image described by Martin Rubin as ‘a shot … of an enormous spacecraft rumbling over the camera position, so that the entire underside passes overhead, massive, ominous, bristling with special effects paraphernalia’.33 (The convention is nicely parodied in the opening shot of Mel Brooks’s 1987 science fiction parody Spaceballs, with its enormous ship that rumbles past – and past, and past.)
The scopophilic pleasure of cinema is mobilised most intensely in special effects images, as viewers are swathed in their power. This wondrous dependence on special effects imagery is itself the subject of Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990), based on Philip K. Dick’s short story ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ (1966). Like Dick’s story, the movie is a reflexive science fiction film about the extent to which we look to the image to provide our reality. The protagonist, Douglas Quaid, because of his memory implant, becomes incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy: he does not know whether his adventure is the program he requested at Rekall, Inc, or if his actual identity has been accidentally uncovered. Viewers share Quaid’s lack of epistemological certainty since they are incapable of detecting – indeed, are virtually challenged to detect – a flaw in the state-of-the-art special effects, that is, of distinguishing between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘imagination’. Inevitably, the viewer regresses to that earliest phase of childhood Jacques Lacan calls the pre-Oedipal Imaginary, unable to distinguish the nature of the visual field. The world of the film, with its domestic wall projections of make-believe environments, mechanical taxi drivers and holographic projections, is a postmodern simulacrum, just as the visual media are for us in the real world. The landscape of recent popular cinema offers ample evidence that, like Quaid, we enjoy imagining ourselves as Arnold Schwarzenegger in non-stop action movies – just like Total Recall.
Verhoeven follows the same approach in his more recent Starship Troopers (1997), based on Heinlein’s 1959 novel. The book is a rather straightforward account of the military mindset and values in the future when the human race is threatened by an extraterrestrial army of giant intelligent insects. Without a trace of irony, Heinlein uses the story to offer extended passages about the benefits of a social order organised by militaristic principles. The film, however, completely subverts the book’s conservative ideology by deconstructing military guts and glory even as it provides it so completely. Again with state-of-the-art effects, Verhoeven shows us graphic battles between bugs and humans as soldiers are impaled, eviscerated and dismembered. The protagonists are all played by beautiful young actors with whom the audience can easily identify. But these scenes alternate with images of official government propaganda films (obviously inspired by the nationalistic fervour of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight documentaries from World War Two) that clearly contradict the bloody truths of the war. In the film, the young people still march off to war full of optimistic faith, just as audiences flocked to the film to see the much-touted violence of its battle scenes.
Apart from Verhoeven’s postmodern critiques, much of contemporary science fiction cinema has replaced the sense of wonder with the awe of mystification. Popular science fiction movies like The Terminator (1984) and Predator (1987), offering almost continuous spectacular action, seem to have succumbed fully to the siren call of the sensuous spectacle. Other science fiction films like Alien, Blade Runner (1982, based on Dick’s 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing, which propound ostensible humanist messages, are devoid of rounded characters and overwhelmed by production design and special effects, thus contradicting their own themes.
The starchild of 2001 looking down at Earth, returning our gaze to us for self-scrutiny, has become the regressive child/man of Close Encounters who, wanting to escape his adult responsibilities and enter the womb of the ‘Mother’ ship, gazes upwards, as if in religious devotion. If the reverential awe we accord science fiction images is a debasement of science fiction’s distinctive philosophical attitude, it is because the film medium, and the generic system which organises so much of popular cinema, work to discourage the kind of speculative narrative that has challenged us to embrace what Arthur C. Clarke calls Childhood’s End. Embodied in science fiction films most fully in special effects, the genre’s characteristic sense of wonder is perhaps the ontological fulfilment of the nature of science fiction cinema.