A Place in the Stars, a Place in the Dirt

A Place in the Stars, a Place in the Dirt an Investigation into the Utopian Desires in Science Advocacy and Science Fiction written by Ivo Stoop [email protected] toward the completion of the Student ID#: 10850929 Media Studies: Film Studies Master’s Program Completed on: 27 October 2015 at the University of Amsterdam, 2015 23,561 words Supervisor: Dr. A. M. Geil Second Reader: Dr. M. C. Wilkinson Stoop 2 CONTENTS Introduction The Mess We’re In ...……………………………………………………………3 Chapter 1 Utopia: the ShapeShifting Ideology ….…………………..……………………...11 1.1 Thomas More’s Utopia ………………………………………..………………….13 1.2 After More: The Program and the Impulse.……………………….……………....16 1.3 Body, Time, Collectivity …………………………………………..……………...19 1.4 WishFulfillment and The Reality Principle of Science Fiction …….…………....23 1.5 Upon Reaching the (Apparent) Horizon of the SciFi Imaginary …….…………..28 Chapter 2 Cosmos and the Utopia in Scientific Discovery …………………………………..31 2.1 Humanist and Scientific Utopias …………………………………………….........32 2.2 A Personal Voyage ……………………………………………………………......36 2.3 A Spacetime Odyssey ………………………………………………………….......40 2.4 Spaceships of the Imagination ……………………………………………….........42 2.5 Technological Adolescence ……………………………………………………….47 Chapter 3 Interstellar and Scientific Exploration as Utopian Antidote ………….………….54 3.1 The Indomitable “Spirit” of Science ……………………………………………...56 3.2 Scientific Realism ………………………………………………………………...58 3.3 The Other Future ……………………………………………………………….....60 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………….......65 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………....67 Stoop 3 Introduction The Mess We’re In Science fiction in its most general definition concerns itself with fictionalized futures, but under the preconception that that future will be determined by current and yettocome advancements in scientific knowledge and their uses. This predilection toward predictive futurefantasy, which is based primarily in an assessment of current real scientific and/or technological capability, seems to be among the more widely taken premises within the genre — as Peter Fitting puts it, “there is a science fiction which continues to claim for itself some predictive or extrapolative function” (Fitting 136). Works of science fiction thus often work as cultural critique, in that the portrayal of a future antagonistic abuse of the power of science is relevant to its contemporary uses and abuses. The science fiction films of the 1970’s and 80’s often told stories of the bizarre and horrible effect on culture a hypothetical nuclear apocalypse might have; scifi films of the 21st century, in contrast, often portray a future after economic and environmental collapse has decimated human civilization. There seems to be a thread which runs between the constituent qualities of science fiction, apocalypse narratives, and something which can be described as a kind of broad fascination or fear of the ‘moment’ at which humanity teeters between annihilation and triumphant return. Depictions of apocalypse and postapocalyptic settings in film are virtually always placed within the genre of science fiction. It seems that merely the precondition that the world has gone through violent, ‘worldending’ catastrophe is enough to associate a narrative with the imagination of scifi, even if the cause of the apocalypse is vague or unknown — a curious example being the Mad Max series, which despite depicting a markedly antifuturistic and technologically backwards postapocalyptic world is widely considered to be a work of science fiction. Arguments can undoubtedly be made that Mad Max sits well within the genre parameters of sciencefiction for a variety of other reasons, but the association between apocalypse and other scifi constituents is strong enough that it may be considered a scifi element in and of itself. This is obviously not a new notion, as apocalyptic themes have appeared frequently in scifi narratives since the literary genre took off at the turn of the 20th century. However, where apocalyptic events had initially been included to show an extremely long passage of time — as in, Stoop 4 for example, the strange postapocalyptic farfuture visited in H.G. Wells’s 1892 novel The Time Machine — the apocalypses of scifi films in the 1980’s onward have drawn nearer and nearer to the present day. Pulp science fiction once stood generally as a chronological opposite to medieval fantasy, and contained arguably the same fantasy escapism in a different guise. It was changed fundamentally, however, when apocalypse began to take a more critical role in the narrative: it became social/political critique, as the world ending was almost always the result of an authoritative force getting out of hand. Scifi developed a critical edge over the course of a century, elevating its fantasy element to a more bluntly put reaction to real frustrations and fears in modern life. Apocalypse serves as the ultimate price to pay for the failure to address these anxieties, but also as a morbid catharsis which allows for fantasies of a heroic return. At this point the same could almost be said for Utopia/Dystopia narratives. Once a selfcontained genre of its own right, the concept of Utopia in mainstream narratives is just as readily associated with scifi now as apocalypse is. Apocalypse can provide a useful catalyst for the birth of a narrative Utopia or Dystopia, as is very often the case in contemporary scifi films. In a typical film narrative within the quasigenre of ‘apocalypse films’, political, economic, or environmental catastrophe erupts and results in a new world order. Newly discovered technology or science is usually the cause of the cataclysm — even if that ‘new science’ is an asteroid crashing into Earth (see Deep Impact, 1998). The resulting organization or disorganization of humanity on what’s left of Earth proceed with the same narrative constraints as the older genre of Utopia did: the inhabitants of a time and/or place, spatially or temporally separate from the present known world, are tasked with the chance at a clean slate for humanity. They then either succeed in creating an image of a society which is a correction (according to the ethical leanings of the filmmakers) of our own reallife society, or utterly fail and thus show the folly inherent in Utopian projects. Occasionally, the apocalypticUtopic scifi narrative takes an imaginative leap and presents a scenario in which humans have taken the next “giant step” out into the cosmos as a solution to worldending woes. While not necessarily outright Utopian in the sense that the narrative revolves around a Utopian program, a world imagined in which humanity can organize itself well enough to even attempt such fantastic feats of engineering (especially in contrast to Stoop 5 our own reallife, comparably inept deep space travel abilities) must hold in its structure at least some elements of what can be considered an achieved Utopia. This type of plot trajectory is more typical of science fiction novels of the 20th century — specifically those of Robert Heinlein, whose vast mythos covers the rise and fall of several Utopias/Dystopias on Earth and in outer space over the course of thousands of years. Perhaps many of these ‘postEarth’ narratives from scifi novels were never adapted to film for historical reasons, namely that the United States was caught up in Cold War anxiety during much of the 20th century, resulting in an excess of nationalism injected into Hollywood filmmaking. It’s easy to imagine why fantasies of the collapse of (Western) civilization and leaving a broken Earth behind might not be popular amongst film producers tasked with bolstering the American morale. This has however not at all been the case for the past several decades. The aftereffects of the softending of the Cold War in the United States were that of a kind of anticlimactic, uncertain victory over (not only the Soviet Union, but) the allencompassing destruction which had seemed so imminent in the previous decades; a shift towards more loosely defined, omnipresent ideological threats has been cemented in American media culture since 9/11 — after which not only are the enemies of the state pursued universally, indiscriminate of national borders, but the general civilian population is aware of (and to a very large extent, complicit in) the farreaching surveillance performed by government agencies into their own individual lives. The resulting confusion has left a disillusioned public which can no longer seek legitimate consolation in the virtuous narratives of scifi Utopian success stories — for it would seem that such visions have already to a certain degree been grotesquely actualized, with the most antiUtopian consequences now glaringly clear. The tonal shift of big blockbuster action films from the early 90’s until the current mid2010’s plots a descent into unprecedented dark territory. It is, for example, hard to imagine 1995’s Independence Day enjoying the same box office success 20 years later in 2015 — its classic Hollywood underdog hero story and gungho patriotism (in one scene the President’s plane emerges triumphantly from the flames of an exploding Washington, D.C.) would come across as comical and unintentionally ironic. By contrast, four of 2014’s biggest scifi box office earners — The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, Dawn of the

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