This chapter was written nearly a decade after the previous ones. It seems quite appropriate, however, that there be such a gap, such a rupture, between previous chapters and this last one – for in the time and space between, both our lived experience and our cultural representations of time and space have visibly changed. Ten years ago the digital watch, the personal computer, the video game, and the video recorder were elite objects rather than popular commodities. Now they are an integral part of our everyday lives – consuming us as much as we consume them. In the most pervasive and personal way, these electronic artifacts (whose function is representation) both constitute and symbolise the radical alteration of our culture’s temporal and spatial consciousness. Such a change in our contemporary ‘sense’ of time and space cannot be considered less than a change in our technology, but it also must be considered something more – for, as Heidegger says, ‘the essence of technology is nothing technological’.1 Technology never comes to its particular specificity in a neutral context for neutral purpose. Rather, it is always ‘lived’ – always historically informed by political, economic and social content, and always an expression of aesthetic value.
Altered States
Any understanding of the aesthetics of the contemporary SF film depends upon our understanding the ways in which the experience of time and space have changed for us and the cinema in this last and most popularly electronic decade of American culture. As a major capitalist industry and institution, American cinema has increasingly incorporated the new electronic technology into its very modes of production, distribution and exhibition. And, as a symbolic medium whose function is representation, the American cinema has also increasingly articulated the new ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’ generated by this technology and its spatial and temporal transformation of contemporary experience. As might be expected, this articulation is nowhere more evident or given more emphasis than in the SF film – for SF has always taken as its distinctive generic task the cognitive mapping and poetic figuration of social relations as they are constituted and changed by new technological modes of ‘being-in-the-world’.
In sum, the SF films of the late 1970s and 1980s differ from their predecessors – the culture’s technological transformations radically altering their technical and aesthetic character and, more importantly, their conception and representation of the lived world. These differences go much further than a simple transformation of the nature and manner of the genre’s special effects or of its representation of visible technology. Whether ‘mainstream’ and big-budget or ‘marginal’ and low-budget, the existential attitude of the contemporary SF film is different – even if its basic material remained the same. Cinematic space travel of the 1950s had an aggressive and three-dimensional thrust – whether it was narrativised as optimistic, colonial and phallic penetration and conquest or as pessimistic and paranoid earthly and bodily invasion. Space in these films was semantically inscribed as ‘deep’ and time as accelerating and ‘urgent’.2 In the SF films released between 1968 and 1977 (during a period of great social upheaval and after the vast spatial and temporal Moebius strip of 2001: A Space Odyssey had cinematically transformed progress into regress), space became semantically inscribed as inescapably domestic and crowded. Time lost its urgency – statically stretching forward toward an impoverished and unwelcome future worse than a bad present. Pointing to the dystopian despair of a country negatively involved in both domestic and international contestation and unable to avoid its representation in constant and pervasive media imagery, Joan Dean tells us:
The science fiction films of the early 1970s mirror a developing neoisolationism (perhaps a result of a costly involvement in Southeast Asia); a diminishing fear of nuclear apocalypse (partially a result of the thaw in the Cold War); and a growing concern with domestic, terrestrial issues – most of which are related to totalitarian government control of people’s lives or to overpopulation, food shortages, pollution and ecology. Consequently space travel appeared only infrequently … Likewise, extraterrestrial visitors to this planet diminished in number. The single theme … that dominated the science fiction imagination between 1970 and 1977 was overpopulation and its concomitant problems of food shortage and old age.3
Not successful box office, the films of this period are overtly despairing in their evo-cation of a future with no future. Traditional space has no further frontiers and appears as constraining and destructive of human existence as a concentration camp. Traditional time no longer comfortably or thrillingly promises progress as anything other than decay and entropy. The films dramatise, as well, disenchantment with a ‘new’ technology whose hope has been exhausted, which has become ‘old’ – no longer hyperbolised in particularly flamboyant or celebratory special effects or fearful displays.
Then, in 1977, George Lucas’s Star Wars and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind were released, initiating what seemed a sudden and radical shift in generic attitude and a popular renaissance of the SF film. Both films could hardly be described as ‘cool’ and ‘detached’ in their vision, or ‘cautionary’ and ‘pessimistic’ in their tone. Through some strange new transformation, technological wonder had become synonymous with domestic hope; space and time seemed to expand again, their experience and representation becoming what can only be called ‘youthful’. Mechanical and biological aliens were realised as cuddly, if powerful, innocents. These seminal films and the ones that followed shared little attitudinal similarity with their generic predecessors. Even the low-budget and marginal SF films that emerged in the mid-1980s as a kind of ‘counter-cultural’ response to the spatial simplicity and suburban cleanliness initiated by Lucas and Spielberg were hardly pessimistic or paranoid, representing instead a peculiar form of born-again ‘heart’. Celebrating all existence as wondrously e-stranged and alien-ated, films like 1983’s Liquid Sky (Slava Tsukerman) and Strange Invaders (Michael Laughlin), or 1984’s Repo Man (Alex Cox), The Brother from Another Planet (John Sayles) and Night of the Comet (Thom Eberhardt) accept or embrace trashed-out, crowded and complex urban space, and appreciate the temporal closure of the future for all the surprising juxtapositions such closure allows and contains.
Although there are exceptions, unlike their predecessors most of today’s SF films (mainstream or marginal) construct a generic field in which space is semantically described as a surface for play and dispersal, a surface across which existence and objects kinetically displace and dis-play their materiality. As well, the urgent or hopeless temporality of the earlier films has given way to a new and erotic leisure-liness – even in ‘action-packed’ films. Time has decelerated, but is not represented as static. It is filled with curious things and dynamised as a series of concatenated events rather than linearly pressured to stream forward by the teleology of plot. Today’s SF film evidences a structural and visual willingness to linger on ‘random’ details, takes a certain pleasure (or, as the French put it, ‘jouissance’) in holding the moment to sensually engage its surfaces, to embrace its material collections as ‘happenings’ and collage. Indeed, both playfulness and pleasure are cinematic qualities new to SF in the late 1970s and the 1980s, replacing the cool, detached and scientific vision authenticating the fictions of its generic predecessors.
The changed sense of space and time experienced in the last decade has also transformed SF’s representation of the ‘alien’, the cultural ‘Other’. (Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien, John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The Thing, and Tobe Hooper’s unpopular 1985 Life Force stand as the few contemporary echoes of the earlier period in which space was inscribed as deep, and invasion still possible.) The title of Enemy Mine (Wolfgang Petersen, 1985) only emphasises this major shift in attitude toward the cultural (and biological/mechanical) Other. In part, of course, this shift owes much to the last decade’s ‘recovery’ from the upheavals of the late 1960s. During the last decade, the representations of both American politics and popular culture have attempted to recuperate and re-vison the past (and televised) failure of bourgeois patriarchy – both in relation to its challenge by the Civil Rights, youth, and feminist movements of the late 1960s, and by its loss of face and imperialist power in Southeast Asia. Most recently (and coincident with SF’s most loving treatment of the alien), this ‘recovery’ has been celebrated in self-congratulatory and electronically represented acts of ‘redemption’ – among them the ‘Live Aid’ concert and the media blitz surrounding the recording of ‘We are the world, we are the children’.4 It is no accident that two related cinematic coincidences serve to mark both the mid-1970s renaissance of SF and its mid-1980s popularity as somehow entailed with the revisioning of America’s history of failure and guilt in Vietnam. It is just after the 1977 release of Star Wars and Close Encounters (the first with its inverted tale of an evil imperialism fought by ‘underdog’ rebel heroes, the second with its scrawny, little and powerful aliens and childlike human males) that the first films to directly address American involvement in Southeast Asia are released to wide popularity: Coming Home, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. All represent American men as the naïve and innocent victims of an incomprehensible and criminal war. It is just as telling to note that in 1984 (at the height of SF’s new popularity), Academy Award consideration is given to two performers who represented two different but similarly sympathetic, sweet, forgiving, and loving ‘aliens’ – the one from ‘outer space’ in Starman (John Carpenter) and the other from Cambodia in The Killing Fields. In effect (and counter to the further revisions of Rambo), recent SF has figured the alien as a heartrendingly, emotionally empowered ‘innocent’ – and its human protagonists as striving less toward an assumption of power (with all its negative responsibility and potential for failure) than toward an assumption of Heideggerean ‘care’ (in the mainstream films) or a peculiar transformation of Heideggerean ‘dread’ (in the marginal films).5
In part, however, this shift in sensibility toward the alien and Other seems also a function of that new technology which has transformed the spatial and temporal shape of our world and our world view. The popularisation and pervasiveness of electronic technology in the last decade has reformulated the experience of space and time as expansive and inclusive. It has recast human being into a myriad of visible and active simulacra, and has generated a semantic equivalency among various formulations and representations of space, time and being. A space perceived and represented as superficial and shallow, as all surface, does not conceal things: it displays them. When space is no longer lived and represented as ‘deep’ and three-dimensional, the 1950s concept of ‘invasion’ loses much of its meaning and force. The new electronic space we live and figure cannot be invaded. It is open only to ‘pervasion’ – a condition of kinetic accommodation and dispersal associated with the experience and representations of television, video games and computer terminals. Furthermore, in a culture where nearly everyone is regularly alien-ated from a direct sense of self (lived experience commonly mediated by an electronic technology that dominates both the domestic sphere and the ‘private’ or ‘personal’ realm of the Unconscious), when everyone is less conscious of existence than of its image, the once threatening SF ‘alien’ and Other become our familiars – our close relations, if not ourselves.
As in the 1950s, the contemporary SF film seems to divide into two groupings related, in great measure, to the conditions of their production. But the two groups are no longer divided as a function of their big-budget optimism or low-budget pessimism. Rather, ‘mainstream’ and ‘marginal’ films differ in the way they both celebrate a thoroughly domestic space and domesticated technology, embrace the alien Other, and realise a temporal reformulation of the genre’s traditional ‘futurism’.6 The dominant attitude of most mainstream SF has been nostalgia – an attitude clearly evidenced by Star Wars’ shiny evocation of the future as ‘Long, long ago…’ by Close Encounters’ yearning for childhood rather than for its end, and by the blatant pronouncement of the very title of Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985). More complimentary than contradict-ory, the dominant attitude of most marginal SF toward the genre’s traditional ‘futurism’ has been a literal (rather than ideological) conservatism: an embrace of pastiche – a nonhierarchical collection of heterogeneous forms and styles from a variety of heretofore distinguishable spaces and times. Indeed, the marginal nature of these independent SF films goes far beyond their production budgets and distribution problems, for their playful erasure of the boundaries marked between past, present and future, between outer space and domestic space, between alien and human, locates them liminally – both ‘within’ and ‘without’ the genre. Their presence and claim upon SF questions the very temporal and spatial premises upon which the genre has traditionally based its identity.
Whatever their apparent differences, then, the generally sanguine attitudes and spatial and temporal realisations of both mainstream and marginal SF are surprisingly coincident. However significantly opposed in mise-en-scène, Starman and The Brother from Another Planet offer us the same protagonists – the same male human being born again in a state of wonderful and innocent ‘alien-nation’. D.A.R.Y.L. (Simon Wincer, 1985) and Android (Aaron Lipstadt, 1982) are made of the same innocent and sweet machinery. And, although their modes of sublimity resonate quite differently, the transcendent endings of both Cocoon (Ron Howard, 1985) and Repo Man have much in common with each other. In sum, whether mainstream or marginal, the majority of contemporary (and popular) SF films celebrate rather than decry an existence and world so utterly familiar and yet so technologically transformed that traditional categories of space, time, being and ‘science fiction’ no longer quite apply.
At this point, we might look more specifically at how the last decade of ‘popular electronics’ has altered the spatial and temp-oral state of our lived and represented experience, how the decade’s technological ‘essence’ is more than technological.7 The pervasive experience of electronic technology in the last ten years has caused traditional orientational systems to lose much of their constancy and relevance for us. New spatial and temporal forms of ‘being-in-the-world’ have emerged (to find their most poetic figuration, if not their proper names, in the SF film). For example, previous mention was made of 1950s space perceived and represented as three-dimensional and ‘deep’. Today, however, the traditional perception of ‘depth’ as a structure of possible bodily movement in a materially habitable space has been challenged by our current and very real kinetic responses to – but immaterial habitation of – various forms of ‘simulated’ space (from flight training to video games). As a function of this new ‘sense’ of space, our depth perception has become less dominant as a mode of representing and dealing with the world. To a great degree, it has become flattened by the superficial electronic ‘dimensionality’ of movement ex-perienced as occurring on – not in – the screens of computer terminals, video games, music videos, and movies like Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982) and The Last Starfighter (Nick Castle, 1984).
Our experience of spatial contiguity has also been radically altered by digital representation. Fragmented into discrete and contained units by both microchips and strobe lights, space has lost much of its contextual function as the ground for the continuities of time, movement and event. Space is now more often a ‘text’ than a context. Absorbing time, incorporating movement, figuring as its own discrete event, contemporary space has become experienced as self-contained, convulsive and discontiguous – a phenomenon most visibly articulated through the mise-en-scène and editorial practices of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Repo Man, and most audibly announced in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension (W. D. Richter, 1984) when the king-of-all-trades hero philosophises on this new sense of spatial fragmentation and equivalence to his rock concert audience: ‘Remember, wherever you go, there you are.’8
If the digital ‘bit’ has fragmented our experience and representation of space, then the character of electronic dispersal has dislocated our experience and sense of ‘place’. We are culturally producing and electronically disseminating a new world geography that politically and economically defies traditional notions of spatial ‘location’. As a system of orientation, conventional geography has served to represent relative spatial boundaries predicated by differences not only of latitude and longitude and ‘natural’ geophysical punctuation, but also of national real estate. Conventional geography, however, cannot adequately describe where contemporary Palestine is located. Nor was it able to circumscribe the boundaries of a Vietnam that ‘placed’ itself both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the American living room. Our new electronic technology has also spatially dispersed capital while consolidating and expanding its power to an ‘everywhere’ that seems like ‘nowhere’. Again, traditional orientational systems fail to describe our new economic and political experience. Rather, it is the ‘political unconscious’ of the new American SF film that most powerfully symbolises and brings to visibility this apparent paradox of the simultaneous spatial dispersal and yet ‘nuclear’ concentration of economic and political power (although, as the unconscious is wont to do, it elaborates and projects its negative self-imagery onto an evil ‘Other’).9 The ‘Empire’ of the Star Wars trilogy literalises both the ‘cosmic’ technological expansion and dispersal of economic and political power and the most intense and implosive technological concentration of that power – in the ‘black star’ that is figured as the Death Star. It is Tron, however, that most visibly casts its similar narrative in electronic form – the evil ‘Master Control Program’ both concentrating and dispersing corporate electronic power and militarism across a video game culture in which even the ‘good guys’ are electronic simulacra, occupying a new sort of space that defies traditional geographical description.
In this respect, Rollerball (Norman Jewison, 1975) seems a somewhat prescient attempt to figure the conjunction of electronic and corporate power – although, as with other SF films between 1968 and 1977, its vision is bleak and hopeless rather than celebratory. Tyrannical corporations have replaced national identity and individual difference with a global and electronic consumer culture – one ambiguously ‘located’ in relation to the concentrated and dispersed display space of the television screen. The electronic and ‘nuclear’ proliferation of multinational capitalism has increasingly concentrated and centralised control over the world as marketplace, but that centre now appears decentered – occupying no one location, no easily discernible place. Where is OPEC? IBM? AT&T? In 1975 their power and pervasive presence both ‘everywhere’ and ‘nowhere’ was perceived and represented as threatening and disturbing, but ten years later that concentrated power and its decentered nature are seen as merely normal. One of the teenage Valley Girl heroines of 1984’s Night of the Comet whines to comic effect: ‘You’re not going to blame me because the phone went dead. I’m not the phone company. Nobody’s the phone company any more.’ How, in fact, can traditional orientational systems help us to conceptualise, comprehend, describe or locate a corporation called National General? The ‘multinationals’ (as we have come to familiarly call them) seem to determine our lives from some sort of ethereal ‘other’ or ‘outer’ space. This is a space that finds its most explicit figuration in the impossible towering beauty of Blade Runner’s Tyrell Corporation Building – an awesome megastructure whose intricate facade also resembles a microchip. It is a space that finds its most alienated and inhuman articulation as the ‘Corporation’ in Alien, and its most outlandish expansion in the mining complex on Jupiter’s moon, Io, in Outland (Peter Hyams, 1981).
Our traditional orientation toward ourselves as singular and private ‘individuals’ has also been severely challenged by recent technological change. So has our certainty about what it means to shape time humanly through images supposedly generated in the privacy of subjective memory and desire. Today, privately experienced ‘interiority’ appears less and less a necessary condition of human being. Intrasubjective ‘personal’ vision once invisible to others has become publicly visible and commodified through media imagery. Our private ‘memory’ has been increasingly constituted from previously mediated ‘spectacle’ rather than from ‘direct’ experience. Indeed, both Brainstorm (Douglas Trumbull, 1983) and Dreamscape (Joe Rubin, 1984) merely figure what is, in fact, the ground of contemporary culture’s production of subjective visual activity as objective and/or inter-subjective visible activity. Similarly, our temporal sense also has been electronically transformed and made visible. Challenging our conventional orientation toward social and personal history as a linear and progressive movement, the nonchronological Moebius strip of television allows us to see and re-cognise the complexity and thickness of temporal experience. Retension and protension are personal structures suddenly made publicly visible in ‘instant replays’, ‘previews’, and ‘rerun’ narratives that subvert the temporally linear notion of ‘series’ in their display of familiar actors, characters and events in nonchronological representations of their youth and age, of past, present and future. Pervasive and invasive, immediately mediating our spatial and temporal experience of the world, and then analysing, replaying, dramatising, rerunning and exhausting it in insatiable acts of consumption, television has produced a historically novel form and model of cultural visibility and reflexive consciousness – heightened in the last decade by the video recorder and the personal computer. Now, more than ever before, different strata in our society have converged in their passionate interest in the image, in representation, in the very processes of mediation and simulation.
In ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (the essay that critically informs both the structure and emphasis of this present chapter), Fredric Jameson tells us that we are in the midst of
a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself – can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and as yet untheorised sense.10
Immersed in media experience, conscious of mediated experience, we no longer ex-perience any realm of human existence as unmediated, immediate, ‘natural’.11 We can only imagine such an experience (now aware that imagination, too, is an ‘imaging’, a mode of mediated representation). This new sense we have that everything in our lives is mediated and cultural explains, perhaps, why Deckard and Rachael’s escape into the ‘natural’ landscape at the end of Blade Runner seems so implausible and artificial. The landscape seems completely imaginary – unnatural in its ‘naturalness’, its lack of the ‘real’ social density we have previously experienced. Thus, the ‘nature’ cinematography strikes us an inauthentic ‘special effect’ compared to the technical special effects we have seen and accepted as authentically ‘natural’ – and we become reluctantly aware of both cinema and narrative straining in their work to produce a traditionally ‘happy’ ending.
Throughout the last decade, even our bodies have become pervasively re-cognised as cultural, commodified and technologised objects. This is a phenomenon women and advertising agencies have long been aware of, but it now more globally informs a society obsessed with physical fitness. In the last decade we have come to idealise the human organism as a ‘lean machine’ – sometimes murderously ‘mean’, sometimes aerobically ‘perfect’, and nearly (and yet never) impervious to that temporal bodily ‘terminator’: death. Re-cognising the body as machine transforms 1960s narcissism. A cultural sensuality emerges based on bodily production as the production of bodies, and an androgynous erotics is figured in sweat, work and the notion of the ‘routine’ rather than in sexual difference. Indeed, in a decade when organ transplants and remarkable prosthetic devices are commonplaces, we are (for better and worse) theorising our bodies, ourselves, as cyborgs.12 We have become increasingly aware of ourselves as ‘constructed’ and ‘replicated’ – not only through our abstract knowledge of recombinant DNA, but also through our heightened reflexive experience of using an always acculturated (and, therefore, ‘artificial’) intelligence, and of being a ‘self’ always (re)produced and projected as an image available to others. As Jameson puts it, we have become ‘a society of the image or the simulacrum’, a society that transforms ‘the ‘real’ into so many pseudoevents’.13 In Walter Benjamin’s ‘age of mechanical reproduction’, the unique status of the work of art was challenged by the technological transformation of the social world.14 In an age of electronic reproduction and replication, however, it is the unique status of the human being that is challenged by technological transformation.
In the context of our newly exteriorised self-consciousness, the contemporary SF film has emphatically figured reflexive robots, computers, androids and replicants seeking emotional as well as functional fulfillment. They evidence doubt and desire, a sense of negation and loss, a self-consciousness and sentimentality new to the genre. They are (as Blade Runner suggests) ‘more human than human’. However prideful, Robby – a distinctly 1950s robot – displays none of the comical anxiety and continual self-interrogation of CP30, or the tenderness of ‘Val’ and ‘Alta’ in the robotic family romance of Heartbeeps (Allan Arkush, 1981). However intellectually powerful, the computer of Colossus: The Forbin Project (Joseph Sargent, 1970) feels no need to seek the origins of its own existence and meaning as does V(oya) ger in Star Trek: The Movie (Robert Wise, 1979), nor ‘watching’ displays of human affection and sexuality does it experience the love and jealousy ‘felt’ by the small ‘PC’ of Electric Dreams (Steve Barron, 1984). There are no previous SF film counterparts to the prurient sexual curiosity and image-consciousness of Max in Android – who, completely aware of his own existential status as an imitation, still strives to further model himself after images of images: the personae of Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart he has seen in old movies. And nowhere before in the SF film (if in Mary Shelley) has such a fully self-conscious longing for life and eloquently ferocious challenge to humanity been articulated as in Blade Runner. Its ‘replicants’ not only have human ‘memories’ – given to them (as to ourselves) in ‘imaginary’ constructions documented and conserved as the referential ‘reality’ of photographic images. Supremely self-conscious and reflexive, ‘more human than human’, they are also capable of irony and poetry.
In the ten years that separate the first three chapters of this book from this last, our traditional systems for representing ourselves to ourselves have become no longer fully adequate to our experience. Hierarchical distinctions between surface/depth, here/there, centre/margin, organic/inorganic, and self/other are now commonly challenged in our daily lives.
Thus, in the last decade, new symbolic descriptions of contemporary experience have begun to emerge and dominate older ones. One such new description has been the theorisation of ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’ (and its radical entailment of new technological modes of production) as ‘postmodernism’. Another new description has been the practice of this cultural logic as figured in the transformed poetics of the contemporary American SF film.
Notes