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.
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?’
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?’
posted by beck at 7:33 pm
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