116 Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics
Dystopoi of Memory and Invention: The Rhetorical “Places” of Postmodern Dystopian Film Ben Wetherbee, University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma
In her introduction to The Left Hand of material into a persuasive whole— Darkness, the renowned American science significantly resembles what rhetoricians fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin (2010) since Aristotle have termed invention. rallies a series of provocations around one Generally regarded as the primary and central refrain: “Science fiction is not conceptually richest of the five canons of predictive; it is descriptive” (p. xiv). rhetoric (the others are arrangement, Through its futuristic confabulations, sci-fi style, delivery, and—finally, an oft- deliberately “lies” in order to get at some neglected category I take up here— “truth” about the present; its concerns, memory), invention describes the artful though typically projected into an composition of cultural knowledge and imagined future, stem from “what the rhetorical appeals to suit a specific weather is now, today, this moment, the argument before a specific audience.1 rain, the sunlight, look!” (pp. xiv, xv). Le Aristotle (1997), for example, devotes Guin’s imploring directive, look!, voices two of the three books of his Rhetoric to no transcendent, romantic imperative of the processes of invention, which he the genre. It doesn’t ask readers to lift the describes through various devices and veil of mystification or to finally see the strategies: appeals to ethos, pathos, and capital-T truth for the first time. Rather, logos; deductive enthymemes; inductive sci-fi as Le Guin understands it asks examples; and rhetorical topoi (literally readers to perceive how fabrications, the “places”; topics; loci), which can be genre’s “lies,” refract the light of quotidian classified as discipline-specific “special” life into new shapes with new contours of premises (idia) or “common” procedures significance. Sci-fi matters, in other (koinoi topoi) used to generate arguments words, not for its ability to create an across diverse circumstances. Here, I entirely novel alternate universe, but for single out this final concept, the topos, as its ability to reassemble our own present in particularly useful in investigating not just an illuminating way. This art—the invention, but the multimodal nexus of purposeful assembly of available cultural memory and invention.
1 This definition is my own approximation of an bibliographic synthesis of rhetorical invention, see amorphous and contested term. For a useful Simonson (2014).
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In this essay I configure the rhetorical that recur in these films: first, what I call topos as useful tool in the study of narrative the technological swamp, or the expansive fiction film—and particularly dystopian bricolage of high-tech detail, excess, and sci-fi film—in order to analyze how film waste that implies decay and neglect; and rhetoric draws credibility and connotative second, the clinic, or the overlit rhetorical power from its construction of surveillance site that implies oppressive, place. Below, I examine the rhetoric of panoptic oversight. Below, I detail how dystopian space, whose “places” constitute each genre of dystopian place—or both memetic representations of our dystopos—powerfully imbues its narratives world gone wrong and rhetorical “places” with ideological, rhetorical energy, (topoi) rich in persuasive power. These capable of implying and enhancing social two senses of place, one traditionally arguments. I argue, finally, that the poetical and the other traditionally rhetorical coexistence of these dystopoi rhetorical, irrevocably overlap, especially exemplifies the heterogenous complexity through the medium of film, the rich of postmodern spatial argument, which visual texture of which powerfully orients one can rarely boil down to a single text audiences both within poetical, memetic posing a single argument. space and within the persuasive, This essay also notably contributes to ideological structures of meaning-making an area of study, the rhetoric of film, more traditionally assigned to rhetoric. historically characterized by intermittent Here, I take up this dualistic sense of interest but general scholarly neglect. rhetorical topoi to examine the persuasive While a few rhetoricians, like David dimensions of three dystopian sci-fi films Blakesley (in English studies) and Thomas from what film scholar Vivian Sobchack W. Benson (in communication), have (2005) has called the second “Golden Age” repeatedly returned to this topic, film of American sci-fi film (p. 267)—Alien rhetoric has failed to cohere as a consistent (Scott, 1979), Outland (Hyams, 1981), subdiscipline of multimodal rhetorical and Blade Runner (Scott, 1982)—each of study.2 I suspect, though, that mounting which exemplifies the complex and interest in multimodal rhetorics as such difficult patchwork of postmodern spatial (without de facto subservience to new composition, and all of which share visual media studies or digital rhetorics in textures that could imply a common particular) could rejuvenate rhetoricians’ narrative universe across the three films. I interest in film, which—in the era of focus on two particular genres of “place” Netflix and IMAX—remains a potent,
2 This is not to say that work on the rhetoric of andmodern rhetorical theory to film and television film is altogether lacking. It is beyond the scope of include Hendrix & Wood (1973); Behrens (1979); this essay to supply a thoroughgoing bibliography Chatman (1990); Booth (2002); Blakesley (2004); on the rhetoric of film, but interested scholars Benson & Snee (2008). See Wetherbee (2015) for might begin with Blakesley’s (2003) wide-ranging another application of the term topos to film edited collection The Terministic Screen. Other analysis and Gunn (2005) for a more general particularly notable applications of classical examination of visual topoi.
118 Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics influential medium of cultural production. emotionally package key social issues I hope this essay contributes to such a (19.1456b). While, as Aristotle explains, resurgence. poetics dramatizes social events and Below, before turning to a specific rhetoric comments on those events examination of Alien, Outland, and Blade through direct speech (19.1456b), both Runner, I find it necessary to reflect on arts require an intimate familiarity with how the rhetorical study of dystopian cultural doxa and the emotional space reflects both (1) the intersection predispositions of one’s audience toward between rhetorical (persuasive) and certain ideas and events (cf. Burke, 1966, poetical (literary, mimetic) discourses and p. 296). But, as Kenneth Burke stresses, (2) that between invention and the long- this distinction between overt neglected canon of memory. I then turn argumentation and dramatization rarely these critical pairings toward the topic of yields neat boundaries: the distinction is cinematic dystopian space seen in “forever on the move” (1966, p. 307). dystopian film. Anecdotes and didactic narratives, one might point out, often dramatize events in Rhetoric, Poetics, and Epideixis service of overt argument, while literary As many historians of rhetoric have genres like the novel integrate numerous noted, the schism between poetics and rhetorical forms into their discursive rhetoric—which mirrors both the fiber.3 disciplinary split between English and Put another way, ancient purveyors of communication studies and, within liberal education might have perceived the English, the intradisciplinary split between ostensibly hard-and-fast present-day literature and rhetoric/composition—is a distinction between rhetorical genres (the fairly new phenomenon. In the words of political speech, essay, advertisement, George A. Kennedy (1999), “poetics can etc.) and poetical genres (the novel, be regarded as parallel to and overlapping poem, film, etc.) as artificially rigid.4 with rhetoric” in antiquity; both concern Here, the ancient category of epideictic style, generic convention, and appeals to rhetoric merits especial attention. In the character and emotion (pp. 135-136). In Rhetoric, Aristotle (2007) offers a tripartite the Poetics, Aristotle (2009) prescribes taxonomy of rhetorical orations: that, in the composition and performance deliberative, political speech concerning of drama, rhetorical knowledge should future of the polis; judicial, courtroom dictate how playwrights represent and speech demonstrating a forensic under-
3 Numerous critical discussions of the rhetoric of dynamics of textual authority between authors poetics now exist, but Bakhtin (2004) and Booth and readers. I believe the rheto-poetical study of (1983) provide two paradigmatic and particularly space I advocate here could supplement both useful examples. Bakhtin focuses on the novel as perspectives. the artistic arrangement of rhetorical forms like 4 For latter-day speculation about reintegrating the letter, speech, and so forth, while Booth (and rhetoric and poetics, see, for example, Crowley Chatman [1990], by extension) discusses the (1985-1986); Berlin (2003); Bialostosky (2016).
Fall 2018 (2:2) 119 standing of the past; and epideictic, or rehash the example above, nothing in ceremonial speech concerned largely with, present American culture valorizes the but not properly limited to, the praise and rogue masculine hero more effectively blame of individuals and values in order to than the epideictic rhetoric of video firm up a sense of cultural community in games.) Such “dramatizations” of social the present (1.3.1358a-59a). But the values may not argue before a “decider” or concept of epideixis, as Jeffrey Walker an electorate in the tradition of pragmatic (2000) has argued, should be understood rhetoric (Walker, 2000, p. 10), but they not as courtly pomp, subordinate to the do epideictically sustain certain values and more hard-headed genres of deliberation archetypes through their narratives, and forensics, but rather expanded perpetuating a storehouse of rhetorical wholesale into “the rhetoric of belief and knowledge vital to the rhetorician. This desire,” that which “establishes and storehouse is made up of topoi, which mnemonically sustains the culturally provide, as I describe below, charged authoritative codes of values and the nodes of discourse that orient audiences paradigms of eloquence from which... within the shared vista of cultural pragmatic discourse . . . derives its memory. ‘precedents,’ its language, and its power” It follows that utopian and dystopian (p. 10). By Walker’s estimation, the narratives constitute subgenres of pragmatic genres of deliberative and epideictic rhetoric, where rhetorical and judicial rhetoric are “secondary” and poetical expression intermingle. depend upon “primary” epideictic Typically, these genres already read as rhetorics of cultural sustenance and more overtly rhetorical (or political) than reproduction (p. 10). In a courtroom most other literature. It takes few defense of, say, a man who slew his intellectual gymnastics, that is, to bracket daughter’s murderer, the litigator might the frankly political and persuasive draw from the stock archetypes of dimensions of prototypical utopias5 like masculinity and familial bond sustained Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis through diverse rhetorics of epideixis that Bacon’s The New Atlantis, modernist praise the individual masculine avenger as utopias like Edward Bellamy’s Looking an agent of justice. Backward, William Morris’s News from This robust and inclusive version of Nowhere, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s epideixis, Walker notes, accounts also for Herland, or their modernist dystopian everything modernity has categorized as counterparts like E.M. Forster’s “The “literature” (p. 7)—to which we can now Machine Stops,” Yevgeni Zamyatin’s We, rightly add quasi-literary narrative media Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George like film, television, and video games. (To Orwell’s 1984, and Fritz Lang’s landmark
5 On the various classifications of utopia and dystopia, see Booker (1994); Moylan (200); Baccolini & Moylan (2003); Jameson (2007).
120 Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics film Metropolis. Such narratives follow a not what these texts methodically “argue” version of what Burke (1968) terms for the future but postmodernity, as I do “syllogistic” form, following, or at least below, the questions for rhetoricians mimicking, the progression of “a perfectly increasingly take up how they assemble an conducted argument, advancing step by imaginary but intelligible future from the step” (p. 124). Much like deliberative available places (topoi) of the present. rhetoric, these narratives fix one eye on the future, demonstrating explicitly (by Invention and Memory way of a fictional historical narrative) or To better understand the rhetoric of half-explicitly (by strongly implying such a dystopian space, one can consider narrative) how present social rhetorical canons of invention and circumstances could be adapted for a more memory in tandem. The classical art of desirable future or warped into a memory, or mnemonics, describes a disastrous one. disciplined system speakers could use to But the similarity is limited. As navigate long orations without external Marlana Portolano (2012) writes, more aid, by traversing an imaginary set of than that of the deliberative, utopia and places (loci in the Latin texts) that dystopia are “most pervasively . . . the associatively guide the speaker’s train of playground of epideictic persuasion,” that thought.6 Variations of this system remain which praises some present circumstances highly effective for those willing to and eschews others (p. 118). (One might commit to their rigors, but the modern say utopias generally deal in praise and proliferation of print resources—not to dystopias in blame—though praise of one mention the Internet—has long reduced ideal implies the blame of another, and mnemonics to more or less a historical vice versa.) True to Le Guin’s insistence curiosity. In ancient Roman treatises on that speculative fiction most centrally rhetoric, however, the canon of memory concerns “today’s” climate, even the most receives sustained attention as a requisite didactically precise utopias and dystopias feature of rhetorical education. The probably contribute to the storehouses of anonymous author of the Rhetorica ad rhetorical knowledge that dictate attitudes Herennium ([Cicero], 1999) explains how toward the present more than they orators should concoct a path of distinct provide a literal, deliberative route to the “places” among which are arranged future. And when one shifts focus to the symbolically significant “images” (3.16). messy, fragmentary dystopias to center The “image” metonymically represents subject of one’s oration—the orator
6 My use of memory loci extends more-or-less definitive twentieth-century historical study of directly from its discussion in Roman handbooks of memory places between antiquity and the rhetoric; thus I refer directly to the Rhetorica ad Enlightenment. See also Jameson’s (1991) brief Herennium ([Cicero], 1999) and Quintilian’s commentary on Yates in relation to modernism Institutio Oratio (2002) here. It bears note, though, and postmodernism (p. 154). that Yates’s The Art of Memory (1999) remains the
Fall 2018 (2:2) 121 might, for example, imagine a lion or a Rhetoric; a concern with degree and scope crown to evoke the subject of the king, or characterizes Aristotle’s thinking about royalty more generally—while the loci literal and metaphorical places. Second, organize the images within the structure this sense of scope implies a basic function of the complete speech. of orientation. Rather than the “matter” of a My contention here is the common use body, which takes no definite shape, or a of the term topos/locus to theorize both body’s “form,” which determines the thing Greco-Roman rhetorical invention and itself but not its location in space, “place” rhetorical memory is no mere demarcates an object’s location in relation etymological accident. To most fully to other significant locations (the appreciate the metaphorical scope of the atmosphere, the earth, the universe, term, we can return not to Aristotle’s etc.—but also the home, the polis, the Rhetoric, but to his Physics, which offers nation) (Aristotle, 1957, 4.4.5-14.211b). Aristotle’s fullest articulation of “place” as Rhetorical “orientation,” as Burke (1984) a concept (see Miller, 2000; Muckelbauer, describes it, provides reference to “a 2008, pp. 123-141). There, Aristotle bundle of judgments as to how things (1957) explains, were, how they are, and how they will be” (p. 14). One can append this a “place” may be assigned to an object understanding of orientation to Aristotle’s either primarily because it is its special notes on “place” to suggest that rhetorical and exclusive place or because it is topoi are not just rote procedures or stock “common” to it and all other things, or arguments, but devices that economically is the universal that includes the orient audiences among broader proper place of all things. landscapes of significance within short
I mean, for instance, that you, at discursive space. this moment, are in the universe While the two differ in express because you are in the air, which air is purpose, memory loci and topoi of in the universe; and in the air because invention function somewhat similarly on the earth; and in a like matter on along Burke’s guidelines. As the Ad the earth because on the special place Herennium suggests, the “places” of which “contains and circumscribes memory provide a contextualizing you, and no other body.” (4.2.31- apparatus for the denotative “images” they 36.209a-209b; emphasis to special and house, orienting speakers to the narrative common added) arc of the oration, but also, conceivably, orienting them within a matrix of Two significant points arise: First, as culturally determined imagery. Memory Carolyn R. Miller (2000) has observed, loci, the Ad Herennium tells us, should be Aristotle describes physical place in the “complete and conspicuous, so that we can same “common” and “special” terms by grasp and embrace them easily by natural which he describes rhetorical topoi in the memory” (3.16). My impression is that
122 Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics this “natural” memory—that which the becomes a logically ordered scaffold orator summons without mnemonic designed to symbolize a set of ideas or practice—should be regarded also as a arguments—those regarding the social cultural memory insofar imagistic places architecture of class hierarchy in find coherence only among the Metropolis, or the oppressive faculties of connotative totality of cultural the surveillance state in 1984. But not all knowledge. Though the Ad Herennium does dystopias are so tidy. As Fredric Jameson not explicitly prescribe as much, one (1991) contends, the “discontinuous gathers that these “complete and spatial experience” of postmodernism conspicuous” backgrounds ought to scarcely permits such self-contained spatial thematically complement the denotative logic, instead shuffling fragments of images they surround, orienting the textualized space into a collage of diverse speaker to the set of contextual permutations that sum less easily to tight knowledge to which the speech might theses (p. 154). I contend here, however, refer. It is telling, further, that the Roman that the effect of such postmodern pedagogue Quintilian (2002) lists “public fragmentation is not to nullify the memory buildings” and “the ramparts of a city” places, but to revitalize the individual topos among possible memory places, suggesting as the nexus of rhetorical invention and a further thematic link between memory memory, a union traceable through films and the iconography of civic life (6.2.20). like Alien, Outland, and Blade Runner. That In the Middle Ages, as Frances Yates is, the selection and establishment of (1999) reports, even the strata of Hell as “place” in these movies constitutes a sort illustrated in Dante’s Inferno were of epideictic invention by way of tapping sometimes visualized as memory places into and reasserting the currents cultural designed to “hold in memory the scheme memory. of salvation, and the complex network of virtues and vices and their rewards and Dystopoi in Three Postmodern punishments” (p. 95). The otherwise quite Sci-Fi Films different examples of Quintilian and There are certainly more recent dystopian Dante each exploit the sense of cultural sci-fi films I could discuss here—including memory that imbues symbolically numerous Alien-franchise entries of significant places. varying quality and 2017’s impressive It’s not terribly difficult to extend such Blade Runner sequel—but I single out thinking to the imaginary and secular, but Alien, Outland, and Blade Runner for this no less culturally formative, examples of essay partly because all three characterize modernist dystopian space—the towering, a sort of postmodern turn in sci-fi film, tiered urban landscape of Metropolis (Lang, one more or less coincident with the onset 1927), for example, or the joyless streets of the “cyberpunk” movement and the of 1984’s Oceania (Orwell, 1977). Here, reshuffling of dystopia into a genre more as in the classical memory place, space ambivalent and less didactic than its
Fall 2018 (2:2) 123 modernist antecedents.7 As Sobchack unfolds as a sort of futuristic Western, (2005) notes, the cinematic era of the late pitting Sean Connery’s lone lawman ‘70s and early ‘80s—born of post- against a posse of mercenaries serving a Vietnam introspection, the rise of second- sinister interplanetary mining corporation. wave feminism, and the mounting And Blade Runner, also directed by Scott enthusiasm of Reagan-era industrialism— and loosely adapted from Philip K. Dick’s begat a new “Golden Age” of American Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (2007; sci-fi film imaginatively responding to a originally published 1968), is equal parts complex matrix of social tensions. Alien, detective story and philosophical drama, a Outland, and Blade Runner also share a set complex and visually striking film about of aesthetic conventions manifested the creation and policing of artificial through spatial representation. Practically human life (living androids dubbed speaking, viewers could easily imagine “replicants”). The respective neo-horror, that all three movies inhabit the same neo-Western, and neo-noir genre narrative universe because the three share formations of these films, though, do not a certain “look” and “mood.” Or, inhibit their common coherence as sci- returning to Aristotle’s special-common fi—and, particularly, dystopian sci-fi. distinction, one could put it this way: Sobchack (1997) helps to explain why. Alien, Outland, and Blade Runner each imply The essence of the American sci-fi film, a single “common” universe insofar as all for Sobchack, lies largely in its three films make use of special places, or iconography—places, motifs, textures— topoi, that orient audiences to that larger which comprises set imagistic categories universe as a contextual apparatus. like the spaceship, the robot, or the In another sense, these are three very futuristic city, that “function” similarly different movies. While they all fit the bill from film to film. Sci-fi iconography, she of “science fiction,” their narratives inspire continues, generally establishes a tension rather different generic classification. between the “alien” and the “familiar”: Ridley Scott’s Alien is the separate “Although they may contain many alien paradigmatic stuff of horror cinema, a images, isolated for wondrous effect, tense, interstellar slasher flick wherein the images which evoke the ‘unknown’ in all titular alien picks off the crew of the its scientific, magical, and religious or starship Nostromo one by one until only transcendental permutation, the films Sigourney Weaver’s “final girl” remains. must obligatorily descend to Earth, to Writer-director Peter Hyams’s Outland, men, to the known, and to a familiar mise an underappreciated morality tale aptly en scene if they are to result in meaning describable as “High Noon in space,” rather than the abstract inexplicability of
7 Despite my focus here on films from circa 1980, urban poverty and post-apocalyptic abandon- the recent Blade Runner 2049 (Villenueve, 2017)— ment—merits further study in the vein of this which combines the dystopoi I here describe as the essay. “swamp” and the “clinic” with other backdrops of
124 Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics being” (pp. 103-104). the studium and punctum in photographic Sobchack’s emphasis on “meaning” images (pp. 25-28)—but the movie returns us to Le Guin’s present-day announces its own strangeness most imperative—to the realm of lived social markedly through Rutger Hauer’s intense, relations, rhetorical epideixis, and cultural animalistic performance as Roy Batty, the memory. The iconographic tension ringleader of the renegade group of the between the alien and familiar maps “more human than human” replicants. approximately onto the image-locus Such alien “images” are striking and distinction of the classical memory place. often disturbing, but true to the example The alien, like the mnemonic “image,” of ancient Roman mnemonics, they calls attention to itself, announces its own achieve narrative and ideological exceptionalism against a less obtrusive coherence only in a familiar context. backdrop. The mummified alien ship that Fitting this rhetorical function are a the Nostromo’s crew in Alien discovers certain set of narrative topoi—that is, qualifies as basically “alien” by this rhetorical “places” of invention and criterion, as do H.R. Giger’s bloodthirsty memory—that elicit the connotations xenomorph itself and the malevolent necessary to evoke “dystopia.” Let us call android Ashe (Ian Holm), whose them dystopoi—literally, bad places.8 The inhumanity becomes terrifyingly apparent genres of evocative backgrounds that late in the film. Several occasions in characterize different dystopian subgenres Outland, meanwhile, see men burst like are many: those composing the vacant fleshy bubbles after stepping into bombed-out cities and sparse landscapes of depressurized space; this horrific and the post-apocalypse, the stratified unexpected special effect announces our Metropolis (Lang, 1927), the cloyingly hip departure from Earth’s embrace and and homogenous bubble-city of Logan’s injects an alien element in an otherwise Run (Anderson, 1976), and so on. The quite familiar narrative. And Blade closer such spaces come to logically—or Runner’s reimagination of Los Angeles syllogistically, as Burke would say— punctuates a largely familiar portrait of dramatizing the “arguments” of their urban decay with alien flourishes like narratives, the tighter the connection flying cars and plumes of fire that ignite becomes between the familiar and the above the skyline—the distinction, here, alien, and the more the mnemonic “image” between the familiar and alien resembling comes to appear a simple extension of its Roland Barthes’s (1981) own categories of dystopos.
8 For another provocative use of this term, see invention. Though Boyle and LeMieux also take Boyle and LeMieux’s “A Sustainable Dystopia” inspiration from dystopian narrative, their use of (2017), which configures dystopoi as technological dystopos as a critical term differs drastically from “sites whose aim is to provide an experience of my own inasmuch as it enagages only tangentially microruptures as a way to build up greater with the metaphor of place bound up in classical capacities” (p. 218)—that is, to purposefully notions of invention and memory. encumber and disrupt traditional processes of
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The distinction between these The first I call the technological swamp. postmodern dystopias and their more This dystopos entails a façade of intricate didactic precursors is not absolute. As and unexplained technological detail Sobchack (1997) notes, the spaces of Alien, coupled with dim lighting, confined Outland, and Blade Runner each represent, spaces, and, usually, the implication of to one degree or another, the logic of disrepair and neglect. The specific details multinational (or multiplanetary) themselves are familiar enough—pipes, capitalism, whereby a shadowy elite ducts, smoke, leaking fluids, buttons and remotely controls production. Further, dials, computer screens, dirt, and these movies represent, in the words of clutter—but the sheer profusion of detail Thomas B. Byers (1987), a “commodity overwhelms viewers’ perception. As in future” dominated by “high-tech corporate the corridors of Alien’s Nostromo and capitalism” and a consequent disregard for Outland’s mining structure, the the humanity of the lower classes (p. technological bricolage swells into an 326). And the “commodity future” surely almost organic structure of metal bones constitutes a dystopian subgenre. In Alien, and flesh that encircle the structures’ the corporation that owns the Nostromo human occupants (see Figures 1 & 2). The clearly values profitable discoveries over low, shadowy lighting that marks the the safety of its crew, while the mining technological swamp dystopos also permits company in Outland supplies its workers an aesthetic link to more characteristically on Jupiter’s moon Io with dangerous neo-noir settings—the grimy, ribald bar narcotics to increase productivity. Blade and prostitution hall in Outland, or Rick Runner, meanwhile, sees the very synthesis Deckard’s (Harrison Ford) dusty, eerily lit of human life for reasons of profit-driven flat in Blade Runner—that all feel part-and- exploitation. All three movies inhabit parcel of the same dark, swollen monster. spaces that enable such politically charged Moreover, Blade Runner’s Los Angeles subject matter, yet the narratives arcs represents an explosion of the themselves—the horror, Western, and technological swamp across an entire detective plots—have nothing intrinsically urban vista. This city of perpetual night to do with dystopia. These are not and drizzle appears, like the ceaseless “syllogistically” dystopian narratives urban sprawl of William Gibson’s designed to lay out a point-by-point Neuromancer (1984), patched together critique of industrial capitalism in the from surfaces at once high-tech and cheap, sense that something like Huxley’s Brave its corners littered with garbage and scraps New World (1981; originally published in of expendable technology—the sort of 1932) arguably is. Rather, postmodern insidious, self-multiplying junk that Dick dystopia represents more a matter of (2007), in Androids, terms “kipple” (see spatial connotation. I offer two genres of Bukatman, 2009, pp. 42-63). It is telling connotatively rich dystopoi seen in Alien, that one of the replicants, Pris (Daryl Outland, and Blade Runner. Hannah), begins her plan to infiltrate the
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Figure 1: The “technological swamp” as seen in the interior of Alien’s starship Nostromo.
Figure 2: The “swamp” displayed in Outland's Io mining colony.
Tyrell Corporation and gain more life Following Michel Foucault (1975), I (these replicants live only four years) by call the second genre of dystopos the 9 hiding outside a Tyrell employee’s clinic. 30Clinical places are spacious (almost building in a pile of garbage (see Figure 3). cavernous), immaculate, and bathed in Amid this swamp, humans—and certainly oppressive white light. The clinical replicants—blend in as just another type exemplar among science fiction remains of kipple (see Barr, 1997). George Lucas’s experimental 1971 film
30 9 In The Birth of the Clinic (1975), Foucault human interiority. In this book and Discipline and advances the concept of the “medical gaze,” Punish (1995) Foucault also comments extensively which transforms human patients into a discursive on the kinds of spaces by which this discursive record of abnormality, effectively erasing their rendering of the human can take place.
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Figure 3: Pris (Daryl Hannah) emerges from a pile of “kipple” in Blade Runner.
Figure 4: The surveillance state of THX 1138 expands outward like an endless white canvas.
THX 1138, the Orwellian setting of which the latter’s punitive holding cells, have a sprawls outward like one endless, different look from their dark, messy unblemished sheet of white paper (see surroundings (see Figure 5). Bright and Figure 4). THX 1138’s image of the clinic sterile, these places eschew the textured arguably recurs in Alien and Outland, albeit excesses of the swamp for brute excerpted from the syllogistic totality of functionalism—medical procedures, Lucas’s surveillance state. In Alien and quarantine, imprisonment, cryogenic Outland one notices that the medical bays sleep. They also recall Foucault’s (1995) of the Nostromo and the Io colony, as well aphorism, “Visibility is a trap” (p. 200). as the former’s cryogenic stasis room and Like the Foucauldian clinic, that is, these
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Figure 5: The “clinic” as seen in the Nostromo’s medical bay in Alien.
Figure 6: Tyrell’s spacious office in Blade Runner offers a different version of the “clinic.” places transform their contents—humans looms above the dark, cluttered city like a included—into observable specimens giant microchip (p. 234), provides a whose individuality translates precisely slightly different riff on the clinical into abnormality. Pris cannot hide among dystopos, inflecting its occupants with a the kipple in the corner of the clinic sense of ceremonial and vaguely because there is none—only milk-white malevolent grandeur (see Figure 6). But walls providing a backdrop of pure again, the immaculate, cavernous space contrast. In Blade Runner, the office of within the Tyrell Building notably offers robotics guru Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), no room for Rachel (Sean Young), the which, as Sobchack (1997) observes, self-ignorant replicant, to hide from
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Figure 7: In Outland, the “swamp” and “clinic” coexist in the same shot. Deckard’s diagnostic Voight-Kampff test The swamp generally connotes a world of nor for Tyrell himself to evade Roy technological excess, in which consumer- Batty’s bloody vengeance for the curse of ism has ballooned into a self-perpetuating such short life. The clinical place reliably system of production, consumption, and entails exposure and surveillance. junk, and which values the abundance of As Barthes (1978) explains, the stuff (or kipple) over the actual public rhetoric of the image is largely good that stuff does; it connotes a certain “connotational,” exploiting “an breed of late capitalism and the absorption architecture of signs drawn from a variable of humans into that capitalist matrix. It depth of lexicons” that constitute the implies decay, excess, and even anarchy. “domain of ideology” (pp. 33, 47, 49). Put The clinic connotes a world of quasi- another way, the deep-seated connotative militaristic watchful overdetermination “meaning” of the image stems from its that crushes the individual subject under intersection with the epideictic bright light and Foucauldian panopticism storehouses of rhetorically significant (see Foucault, 1995). It implies imagery—from the stuff of cultural compulsory conformity, homogeny, and memory. Barthes’s (1978) essay on “The authoritarianism. Rhetoric of the Image” takes as example a Neglect versus overdetermination: French ad for Italian food, analyzing how These are two quite different dystopian its constituent iconography sums to a visions, one receding toward Gibson’s sense of “Italianicity” built of cultural vision of laissez-faire techno-anarchy and stereotypes. The technological swamp and the other towards the Orwellian police the clinic are no less connotative state. Both, though, are terrible and approximations, visual textures from dehumanizing: it is no better to be whose matrices of association audiences clinically dissected than absorbed into the orient themselves in ideological space. dark night of technological sprawl. These
130 Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics postmodern dystopias, moreover, reveal forms—to once more echo Le Guin— that the thematically contradictory swamp already exist here and now. and clinic can coexist in the same narrative universe. In one of the more visually Conclusion jarring images from Outland, Connery’s Seymour Chatman (1990) delivers an lawman and his deputy stand among the eloquent synopsis of narrative rhetoric: “In high-tech guts of an ill-lit, dusty hallway, my view, there are two narrative looking in on a prisoner who floats in rhetorics, one concerned to suade me to isolation, his cell a pristine white cube. A accept the form of the work; another, to single pane of Plexiglas separates the suade me of a certain view of how things swamp from the clinic (see Figure 7). are in the real world” (p. 203). In didactic So what? One significant point, at least, modernist utopias and dystopias, is that postmodern audiences have grown Chatman’s two rhetorics almost less receptive to the syllogistic narrative completely converge: establishing the that assembles its space to neatly illustrate good or bad place of the future entails a a single thesis about our social undoing. corresponding vision of the real-world The rhetoric of the postmodern dystopia is present and its problems. In the less a rhetoric of syllogistic progression postmodern dystopia, these two rhetorics than one of branching enthymemes— intersect and diverge more fluidly. When divergent, if largely complementary, Sobchack (1997) notes that, sci-fi film, inferences that rarely conjoin upon a “[s]pace is now more often a ‘text’ than a single thesis. This is the logic not of either- context[,] . . . self-contained, convulsive, or but both-and: we might be neglected and and discontiguous” (p. 232), I take this surveilled and—well, who knows what point to echo the rhetorical primacy of else? My point does not discount the place in the composite postmodern text. barbed political subtexts that Sobchack The rich evocation of cultural memory, in and Byers detect in movies like movies other words, constitutes a rhetorical end like Alien, Outland, and Blade Runner, but it in itself, one every bit as vital as the does place any such political claims within abstract forwarding of a “thesis” or a circuitous matrix of rhetorical “argument.” I hold, moreover, that such composition. The dystopoi or memory loci attention to place, in turn, yields a richer, by which these films work to invent their more medium-specific understanding of narratives provide a network of familiar film rhetoric than that advanced by prior, iconography that ground dystopia in the more traditional models of film as circumstances of the present without, argument and/or communication (e.g., necessarily, determining the exact Hendrix & Wood, 1973; Behrens, 1979). directions such narratives will take. To slightly reframe the matter, I Postmodernity, thus, seems to recognize believe that the credible establishment of that dystopia may exist in many forms, place increasingly corresponds, in classical probably many at once, and that those rhetorical terms, to the category of ethos,
Fall 2018 (2:2) 131 or the establishment of character and Runner remain rhetorically potent for their credibility that—as Burke (1969) rich connectivity to the annals of cultural especially has demonstrated—matters in memory. All three recognize that rhetorical performance as much as, or dystopia, the bad place, is not just explained often more than, one’s logical but felt through the dystopos—through propositions (cf. Hendrix & Wood, 1972, sensory inundation, epideictic affirmation, 10 p. 109). 31Deckard and Rachel’s studio- and a grounding in the experience of the imposed escape into the verdant present. Each film’s successful forays into countryside at the end of Blade Runner’s the realms of the philosophical and original theatrical release seems political begin, in turn, with this essential “implausible and artificial,” Sobchack understanding of place. (1997) posits, because of “the new sense that everything in our lives is mediated and cultural” (p. 237). I would add that References this thematic rupture, which Scott wisely Anderson, L. (Director). (1976). Logan’s excised from the director’s (1992) and run [Motion picture]. USA: Warner. “final” cuts (2007) of the film, more Aristotle. (1957). Physics (Vols. 1-2; P. specifically betrays the sense of place the Wicksteed & F. Cornford, Trans.). rest of the film had labored to construct, Loeb classical library 228 & 255. ceding the ambient modality of the Cambridge, MA: Harvard University visual—and all the rhetorical credibility it Press. affords—in the process. Especially in the Aristotle. (2007). On rhetoric: A theory of postmodern dystopian film, place public discourse (2nd ed.; G.A. Kennedy, represents a vital piece of the rhetorical Trans. & Ed.). Oxford, England: whole, the neglect of which deadens the Oxford University Press. influence of the composite text by Aristotle. (2009). Poetics (S. Halliwell, Ed. forfeiting the cinematic economy of & Trans.). Loeb classical library 199 rhetorical connotation. So it is, I will add, (pp. 1-141). Cambridge, MA: Harvard that many of the glossy and plastic CGI University Press, 2009. (Originally vistas enveloping the last fifteen years of published 1995) Hollywood blockbusters are already Baccolini, R., & Moylan, T. (Eds.). showing their age compared to the (2003). Dark horizons: Science fiction and carefully wrought settings of the films I the dystopian imagination. New York, discuss here. Alien, Outland, and Blade NY: Routledge.
3110 See Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives (1969), Wood (1972), not wrongly but a bit literal- which famously configures “identification” as the mindedly, suggest that “the rhetorical critic can primary term of rhetorical engagement. Burke’s apply the concept of ethos to the sponsoring reformulation of rhetoric foregrounds ethos, or agency and director of the film, to narrators and demonstration of consubstantiality,” as necessarily characters in the film, and to acknowledged prior to arguments from logos, or logic. Hendrix & sources within the film” (p. 109).
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