Problems of genre in science fiction films and novels

WEEK SEVEN:


Representations of science and technologies:
Dystopic and utopian visions in popular culture


Examples: The Matrix and Gattaca


I’d like to explore three different issues today.

The first is a question of audience: who constitutes the audience for science fiction, and how does that audience shape the genre? I’ll start off from Goldman’s observations about the prevalence of dystopic visions in science fiction films and discuss the difference between science fiction film audiences and science fiction book readerships.

The second is an attempt to draw out some useful categories into which we can divide science fiction texts (films, books, etc) in order to offer an analysis of what distinguishes science fiction audiences from readerships and films from books, and also to hopefully open up a useful space to explore my third question, which is one of definition: exactly what makes something a science fiction film? How intuitive are the genre boundaries? How are they decided upon and how are they controlled?

Audience and Readership

As Goldman points out, there is a prevalence of dystopic visions in science fiction films, a prevalence which is apparent all the way back to Fritz Lang’s 1926 film Metropolis, arguably the first science fiction feature. However, this abundance of dystopias is not apparent in science fiction writing. This of course begs the question: what is it about film that makes a dark future marketable and a bright one not? And why doesn’t that occur in science fiction writing?

The first difference is straightforward: the audience for science fiction films is not the audience for science fiction books – or, perhaps more accurately, science fiction readers are only a subset of the people who might be expected to view a science fiction film. As Walter Benjamin has pointed out, the advent of film ushered in the era of mass culture, but film is also dependent on that mass culture in order to ensure its continuation; in other words, as an expensive medium, a film must reach a mass audience in order to recoup its costs and make a profit. In comparison, a novel is a relatively inexpensive thing to produce, and thus does not have the same incentive to be widely accessible that a film does. The audience for a science fiction novel, while it overlaps to some significant degree with the audience for science fiction films, is relatively minute and specialised.

With that in mind, and given the clear differences in the material produced for these two audiences, it seems reasonable to take up the idea that film is more attuned to the zeitgeist of public opinion, and that its dark predictions resonate more closely with the public imagining of the technologised future. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that those science fiction novels which have achieved classic status, are themselves visions of dystopic futures – novels such as 1984, Brave New World or Fahrenheit 451. Similarly, the novels chosen to be adapted into films – and thus ensured a kind of classic status – tend to be dystopic.

Research indicates that the adult readers of science fiction tend to be, at the least, scientifically literate, and often educated beyond high school level in science or technology. Scientists as a group tend to be modernist in outlook, which is to say that their view of technology tends to be optimistic. If these are the readers of science fiction, it’s not surprising that there exists a market for science fiction that reflects their optimism – ie, utopian visions. By way of contrast, the anxiety amongst the general public around technology finds an outlet in dystopic science fiction visions, and dystopic visions in particular which tend toward the postmodern noir exemplified by films like The Matrix, Blade Runner and Minority Report.

Modernist and postmodern sci-fi – what do I mean by that and how does it inform an understanding of audience?

Science fiction offers a key point of intersection between modernist and postmodern artistic movements. While it is generally accepted that the modernist period ended with World War II, there are clear resonances between modernist movements such as futurism and the work of science fiction writers in the 1960s and later. Futurism was one of the most long-lived modernist movements -- which tended, in the main, to be fairly fleeting – and really flourished in the space between the two World Wars. Its Manifesto, written by Filippo Marinetti in 1914, visualises an artistic movement founded on and celebrating technological innovation.

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
…
4. We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. …
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
…
8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! … Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
…
11. … We will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

There are clear imaginative links between Marinetti’s vision of Futurism and the work of writers of science fiction, both during the modernist period and afterwards. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as science fiction moved from a sidebar in pulp magazines to a genre in its own right, science fiction writers began a program of self-advocacy which, among other things, sought to establish a kind of literary respectability for science fiction.

This program took two approaches. On the one hand, there was an attempt made to mainstream science fiction by drawing on public fascination with technology, an attempt which invoked the idealistic notions so well encapsulated decades before in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto – and interestingly, some science fiction writers within that movement referred to themselves and their cohorts as ‘futurists’, a name which was, so far as I can determine, arrived at independently from Marinetti’s movement (Isaac Asimov, himself a scientist, was prominent in this group). The second approach sought almost to sideline science and technology within science fiction, uniting fantasy and sci-fi under the single banner of ‘speculative fiction’. This approach resulted in the production of soft science or social science fiction – such as that produced by Robert Heinlein.

While this division of camps within science fiction is no longer particularly apparent – specifically, the attempt to subsume the differences between science fiction and fantasy has been largely abandoned – there still exists a difference of approach between what I’m going to term modernist and postmodern science fiction, or science fiction in which science is the focus and science fiction in which social affect is the focus.

I’d like to stress at this point that I’m not using the terms ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodern’ in the sense of an historical placement of art; rather I’m using the terms as a convenient shorthand for the unities of theme which are apparent in these two schools of science fiction and which resonate strongly with key themes of modernism and postmodernism – specifically, the fetish character of technology in modernist thought and the focus on irony which is characteristic of postmodern thought. (This irony is clearly drawn out in the two films we’ve taken as examples today, The Matrix and Gattaca, in which the technologies created by man become his downfall (or potential downfall, as in Gattaca) – the failure of The Human to control its creation, The Machine, which was created to be controlled and controllable. I’d term both those movies postmodern noir.)

I think these divisions offer a useful way of thinking about the differences in perspective between film audiences and book readerships. As I’ve already mentioned, science fiction readerships tend to be scientifically literate, and thus somewhat predisposed to a modernist perspective, the same modernist perspective which is apparent in utopian science fiction novels. The mass audience for science fiction films is by no means so homogenous as the group of science fiction readers, and that mass audience has only really emerged since 1968, which is when 2001: A Space Oddyssey came out. This was the first science fiction film to be taken seriously by both audience and critics. With that time frame in mind – from the late 1960s onwards – it’s pretty apparent that the audience for science fiction films is a postmodern audience.

Imagining sci-fi and Policing the Genre

However, it goes a little further than that. The boundaries of exactly what constitutes science fiction film are rigorously policed, and with that in mind, I’d like to try a little exercise in definition with the class. When you go to the video store, the movies are arranged according to section (comedy, family, drama, thriller, action, sci-fi, cult, documentary. etc) and the movies are placed into these sections on a pretty intuitive basis – so that people can find movies where they’d expect to find them. To some extent, the label defines the genre, so I’d like to explore exactly what that label entails.

Question for the class: When you hear ‘science fiction film’, what movies spring most immediately to mind? Where would you find it at the video store? Under sci-fi, or somewhere else?

What I found in making my own list was that the overwhelming majority of the films I thought of as science fiction were classed under other groupings in the video store, and that those groupings seemed to be dependent on the vision of technology embodied in the film. In particular, I found that those films which presented a neutral or positive attitude towards technology tended not to be placed in the science fiction category – two examples would be Flubber (apparently comedy) and the Back to the Future films (family). Maybe more strikingly, the Matrix cycle has a great deal thematically in common with Bicentennial Man (the narrative arc in both films is of a machine created to serve, becoming self-aware and rebelling against it’s human masters), but the bicentennial man of the title poses no real threat to humanity – this lands the film in the ‘family’ category, whereas the darker Matrix is in science-fiction. The science fiction film, to be defined as such, needs to speak to public anxiety. Films like Terminator or Alien Vs. Predator, which are too hyperbolic to be threatening (in other words, in which suspension of disbelief is a conscious effort, and which doesn’t evoke that ‘Hey, that could happen’ reaction in the viewer) get put in the thriller category at the video store. Films like Flubber or Coneheads are put into comedy. Anything before about, oh, 2001: A Space Odyssey is either cult or classic. Red Dwarf and the BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide are both in comedy.

I think what is most interesting about this is the way in which the science fiction film is something other than the sum of its parts. It’s not a straightforward equation of Technology + Special Effects + Keanu Reeves = Science Fiction Film – or even of Science + Fiction + Film = Science Fiction Film. Instead, it seems that the science-fiction film, as a named genre, is being situated a position such that the prevalence of dystopias in science-fiction film is one, an expected component of a science-fiction film and two, a necessary component for it to be defined as a science-fiction film. With that in mind, I think it’s useful to ask why it is that the audience wants their science-fiction films to be threatening. I’d like to leave the class with these two questions: not just ‘why are only dystopic science fictions filmed?’, but ‘why, when non-dystopic visions appear, are they excised from the canon of science-fiction?’

Science fiction meets the noir detective: The postmodern problem of genre in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner

Blade Runner eludes straightforward classification into a single genre. While it is based on a science-fiction novel, and its futuristic setting confirms that classification, it also incorporates and problematises elements from detective fiction. The film carries with it a nostalgic sense of the early days of cinema, pastiching 1930s detective films, as well as paying visual homage to such early science fiction films as Fritz Lang’s 1929 film Metropolis. However, Blade Runner also overturns a number of the conventions of such films, perhaps most notably by twisting the generic detective script to preclude straightforward modes of spectatorship and audience identification. W. Russel Gray has suggested that Blade Runner offers a unique site at which the conventions of the detective film can be refreshed and renewed by their intersection with science fiction, an intersection which he sees as ‘natural’, given the focus on spirits of inquiry in both science and detection (1997: 71). His argument is useful but flawed by his failure to discuss the science fiction film as comprehensively as he does the detective film. The analysis elides the impact of science fiction in reshaping, as well as refreshing, the conventions of fictional detection, and it is this reshaping of the detective fiction form which will be explored in this essay.

Detective fiction follows a clear generic form, which offers up an expected script and facilitates straightforward spectator identification with the detective hero. Blade Runner problematises this identification from the outset; as Jenna Tiitsman puts it, ‘The film denies … facile links to readable characters; instead, we are tossed onto a twisting sea, unsure of each character’s place in relation to the creator/created divide and ultimately unsure of our own’ (2004: 33).
Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced robot evolution into the NEXUS phase – a being virtually identical to a human – known as a Replicant.

The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. Replicants were used Off-World as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets.
After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 6 combat team in an Off-World colony, Replicants were declared illegal on earth – under penalty of death. Special police squads – BLADE RUNNER UNITS – had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicant.
This was not called execution. It was called retirement. (Scott 1982)

The scrolling introduction to the film points to the injustice of the police system and the victimisation of replicants, inciting sympathy in the audience for the replicants and undermining identification with the detective character. However, as Tiitsman points out, even when the audience negotiates their identification (with either replicants or detective) after the prologue and introductory scenes, the identification is destabilised as the distance between hunted and hunter decreases as the film progresses (2004: 33-4) – a distance which is effectively closed by the conclusion of the film. The detective, who must not only see but notice everything, is the spectator, who in viewing Blade Runner is bombarded with detail upon detail until they can no longer assimilate and understand the clues they are presented with.

Deckard’s personal life clearly conforms to the conventions of the private eye film, in which any personal relationships of the detective are sidelined or excluded altogether. In the film, Deckard is only shown in intimate interactions with Rachael; all other relationships and interactions are founded in his business of policing. As W. Russel Gray puts it, ‘Rick Deckard … has few if any friends, no family, and at first no lover. Also, he has a strong sense of duty, takes fearful punishment, and works in uneasy alliance with the establishment’ (1997: 71). These later characteristics are specific to the male detective; as Robert Connell has observed, enduring violence is a rite of passage into manhood (1995:192). Deckard’s – and later Roy’s – uprightness in the face of considerable personal violence serves as symbolic definition of their masculinity. However, Deckard is also a flawed man, albeit in some non-visible way, as evidenced by his continued presence on Earth. In the world of Blade Runner, there has been an exodus of the fit to the off-world colonies; with the exception of Deckard, all the Earth-bound characters in the film are visibly flawed, either by physical disability (as in Sebastian’s ‘accelerated decrepitude’ or Gaff’s damaged leg) or by their ethnicity (of Asian or Middle Eastern descent).

Pris: What’s your problem?
Sebastian: Methuselah’s Syndrome.
Pris: What’s that?
Sebastina: My glands. They grow old too fast.
Pris: Is that why you’re still on earth?
Sebastian: Yeah. I couldn’t pass the medical.
(Scott 1982 and 1991)

Deckard’s presence on earth is never explained – might he have chosen to stay? Or can he, like Sebastian, not pass the medical? – but given that he returns to blade running under duress (the threats from his former supervisor) it seems clear that he has not chosen to remain on earth out of a sense of public duty. However, given the suggestion in the Director’s Cut that Deckard might himself be a replicant, it is possible that his non/sub-human status is the flaw which ties him to earth. While this is perhaps not a flaw in the classic sense – as indicated in the prologue, cited above, replicants are ‘superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence to the genetic engineers who created them’ – it seems that the fault of the replicant lies in their being too good a simulacrum of the human, and thus falling into the threatening category of ubermensch. Deckard, then, occupies some middle ground between Nietzschean superman and defective detective – a space which poses further obstacles to audience identification with his character. The defective detective – a man in a position of authority who is nonetheless fallible and thus, loaded term that it is in this context, human – is a sympathetic character who offers a straightforward target for audience empathy.

Jack Morgan has used the term gothic noir to describe the collapsing together of crime and horror narratives which occurs in certain American films of the 1980s (2002:72), a term which can be usefully deployed in discussing Blade Runner. Morgan’s term points to a problem of genre which is apparent in a significant number of popular crime narratives, and which is compounded in Blade Runner by the film’s roots in the canon of science-fiction. The temporal siting of the film in the future is a significant departure from the classic conventions of film noir. While it is not necessarily nostalgic – tending towards the dark rather than the misty-eyed – film noir generally places its action firmly in the past, offering a sense of retrospective looking-back which removes the threat to the present experience of the audience.

Film noir had always shared a complimentary framing with the gothic species--bleak, stylized landscapes and interior decor, investigation moving into uncharted territory, convoluted plot, aberrant psychology, claustrophobic spaces, social disintegration and reactionary anxiety, a sinister world viewed in nocturnal shadow, and so on; the two modalities were arguably spawned from the same elemental myth-pool. (2002: )

These characteristics of film noir and gothic literature are also apparent in a great deal of science fiction: stylised landscapes and interiors are seen as futuristic by set designers; overpopulation makes every space claustrophobic; and, as Stephen Goldman has observed, science fiction films speak to a significant public anxiety regarding social disintegration in the face of technological development (1989:276).

The question of historicity in Blade Runner is a particularly vexed one; the film is set in 2019, however visual cues evoke a period some hundred years earlier. The costuming of replicant Rachael is reminiscent of a 1930s vamp-secretary, while the images of Deckard’s mother show her with hair and clothing which suggests the late 19th century – a time variation which would be consistent with Deckard’s apparent age. Similarly, Zhora’s incorporation of a snake into her erotic routine was a common device in early burlesque of the 1920s and 30s. These visual cues serve to place the action of the film conceptually in the spectator’s past, even where they refer to the viewer’s present (as in Deckard’s old, pseudo-Victorian photos). That said, it is worth noting that Rachael’s photograph of herself with her mother includes costuming which suggests the 1980s – the era in which the film was made. Rachael’s nostalgia for the time presented in the photo – the audience’s present – sets up a pair of dichotomies between dystopian present and utopian past in the text, and utopian present and dystopian future from the viewpoint of the spectator. These unreconcilable dichotomies serve to blur the boundaries of time within the audience’s understanding.

Giuliana Bruno, drawing on Lacan, has argued that the postmodern condition is characterised by a kind of temporal schizophrenia in which ‘the loss of history enacts a desire for historicity, an (impossible) return to it’ (1987: 74). While the visual cues of Blade Runner blur the boundaries of past-present-future for its audience, the failure of history is also addressed thematically within the text. Detective fictions are simultaneously dependent on and sceptical of personal histories; the detective, in seeking out the criminal, must rely on information given him by witnesses, but must also recognise that these accounts do not necessarily represent truth. This necessary dualism is drawn out in Blade Runner by the texts’ exploration of the real and constructed personal histories of the replicants. As Bruno has drawn out, even documents do not represent an unconstructed and elemental truth in this film. Replicant Rachael presents Deckard with a photograph which represents her mother and herself as a child; by claiming this history, she claims humanity (Scott 1982). Her implanted memories must be supported by physical evidence; however, as Deckard points out, that evidence is as manufactured as the memories themselves. The postmodern detective is self-reflexive and self-aware; Deckard’s failure to extend his scepticism to his own memorabilia is a failure of this postmodern mode of policing. Deckard’s moral crisis is more explicitly represented in the moment of realisation that closes the 1991 Director’s Cut of the film, as he links – as the viewer is intended to – his drunken unicorn fantasy with the papercraft unicorn which evidences Gaff’s presence.

More problematic is Leon’s collection of photographs; Rachael is an experimental model, equipped with implanted memories which – in theory – provide her with the emotional maturity and empathy necessary to successfully mimic the human. Her photographs serve as physical reminders of that constructed history. Leon, however, is a shop-standard model who is not equipped with memories; his collection of photographs then represents an attempt to create his own history. Tyrell observes that the Nexus-6 replicants are advanced to a point at which, after a few years, they may develop emotional responses which mimic the human; it seems that the replicants simultaneously develop a desire for personal history – a kind of memoraphilia, to coin the term. Leon’s photographs are symbols without referents: Lacanian floating signifiers. In the case of Rachael, photographs evoke a false memory and false consciousness of being before inception. Leon can have no memories that predate (or appear to predate) his inception, and so his photographs evoke nothing more than fantasy. In his voiceover, excised from the 1991 release of the film, Deckard comments, ‘Family photos? Replicants didn’t have families’ (Scott 1982). Deckard later comments that:

Tyrell really did a job on Rachael. Right down to a snapshot of a mother she never had, a daughter she never was … Leon’s pictures had to be as phony as Rachael’s. I didn’t know why a replicant would collect photos. Maybe they were like Rachael. They needed memories. (Scott 1982.)

This memoraphilia mimics the mode of pastiche which is characteristic of postmodern film – and which is apparent in Blade Runner’s visual evocation of Metropolis, the first feature-length science fiction film, as well as in the film’s adoption of classic noir visual elements. If postmodern society has become detached from history, then the replicant, detached from memory (which is personal history) is the perfect postmodern subject. Tiitsman has elaborated on the necessary development of pastiche from the failure of history, a development which parallels the desire of the replicants for memory:

‘The loss of history enacts a desire for historicity, an (impossible) return to it … Pastiche is ultimately a redemption of history, which implies the transformation and reinterpretation in tension between loss and desire. It retraces history, deconstructing its order, uniqueness, specificity and diachrony … With the logic of pastiche, a simulacrum of history is established’ (1987: 74).

It is clear that Blade Runner offers a useful site for analysis of the changing form of the detective film. Its presentation of postmodern histories problematises the traditional tension in the detective film between the reliance on oral evidence and the necessary scepticism of the detective, and usefully addresses the question of documentary authenticity which is increasingly an issue in contemporary detective fiction. In this sense, the film is a useful demonstration of the blurring of boundaries between text and reality which Deleuze and Guatarri are concerned with:

There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject … The book as assemblage with the outside, against the book as image of the world (Deleuze and Guatarri, cited in Tiitsman 2004: 37)

The collapsing together of categories in Blade Runner is a signficant departure from the conventions of detective fiction, and represents a failure of the generic detective script. This failure of tradition is thematically akin to the failure of history – both within the text and within the society which produced the text – that is apparent throughout Blade Runner, and produces a site of destruction which in turn becomes a site of production when, as Gray has suggested, the detective film is rejuvenated by its intersection with science fiction.


Bibliography
Bruno, Giuliana. ‘Ramble City: Postmodernism and “Blade Runner”’ in October, v.41, October 1987. pp.61-74.
Connell, Robert W. Masculinities. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. 1995.
Foster, Thomas. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2005.
Goldman, Stephen L. ‘Images of Technology in Popular Films: Discussion and Filmography’ in Science, Technology and Human Values, v.14 no.3, Spring 1989. pp.275-301
Gray, W. Russel. ‘Entropy, Energy Empathy: “Blade Runner” and Detective Fiction’ in Judith B. Kerman (ed), Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” and Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press. 1997. pp.66-76
Klein, Norman M. ‘Staging Murders: The Social Imaginary, Film and the City’ in Wide Angle, 20.3, 1998. pp.85-96
Morgan, Jack. ‘Reconfiguring gothic mythology: the film noir – horror hybrid films of the 1980s’ in Post Script, Summer 2002, v.21 i.3, pp.72-88.
Scott, Ridley. Blade Runner. USA: Warner Bros. 1982
Scott, Ridley. Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut. USA: Warner Bros. 1991.
Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge. 1992.
Tiitsman, Jenna. ‘If only you could see what I’ve seen: Destabilised spectatorship and creation’s chaos in “Blade Runner”’ in Crosscurrents, Spring 2004. pp.32-47