2020 110 Pablo Gómez Muñoz A Better World? Cosmopolitan Struggles in Twenty-First Century Science Fiction Cinema Departamento Filología Inglesa y Alemana Director/es Deleyton Alcalá, Celestino © Universidad de Zaragoza Servicio de Publicaciones ISSN 2254-7606 Tesis Doctoral A BETTER WORLD? COSMOPOLITAN STRUGGLES IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA Autor Pablo Gómez Muñoz Director/es Deleyton Alcalá, Celestino UNIVERSIDAD DE ZARAGOZA Filología Inglesa y Alemana 2018 Repositorio de la Universidad de Zaragoza – Zaguan http://zaguan.unizar.es Tesis Doctoral A Better World? Cosmopolitan Struggles in Twenty-First Century Science Fiction Cinema Autor Pablo Gómez Muñoz Director Celestino Deleyto Alcalá Facultad de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana 2018 Repositorio de la Universidad de Zaragoza – Zaguan http://zaguan.unizar.es CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Abstract/Resumen xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Transnational Science Fiction and Discourses on Cosmopolitan Conflicts 11 1.1. Beyond the Nation: New Approaches to the Study of Cinema and Science Fiction 11 1.1.1. Defining Transnational Cinema 13 1.1.2. Transnational Science Fiction Film 15 1.2. Towards a Critical Cosmopolitan Turn in the Study of Science Fiction Cinema 20 1.2.1. Critical Cosmopolitanism: The Methodological and Normative Dimensions 20 1.2.2. Connecting Cosmopolitanism and Science Fiction: The Modern/Colonial Complex 24 1.2.3. Epistemological Borders as Cosmopolitan Method 30 1.3. Approaching and Analyzing Science Fiction Cinema from a Critical Cosmopolitan/Border Perspective 34 1.3.1. Critical Cosmopolitanism and Western(-ized) Films 35 1.3.2. Generic Galaxies: Science Fiction Films as Complex Systems 38 1.3.3. The Formal Articulation of Cosmopolitan Conflicts in Science Fiction Cinema 44 Chapter 2. Systemic Dystopias through a Cosmopolitan Lens: Contesting Global Neoliberalism, Sort of 51 2.1. Systemic Dystopias Go Global 51 2.2. Elysium: Incorporating Markets, Bordering Benefits 66 2.2.1. Beyond the Fence: Dispersed, Mobile, and Embodied Borders 69 2.2.2. Re-(b)ordering Norms and Sovereignty 73 2.2.3. Territorial Integration and Market Incorporation 76 2.2.4. (De)bordering Benefits: Elysium’s Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism 80 2.3. In Time: Connecting Borders and Global Finance 84 2.3.1. Urban Differentiation and Transnational Connections 87 2.3.2. Networked Borders: Monitoring Bodies, Money, Time, and Identities 91 2.3.3. (B)ordering People and Money: Protecting and Feeding the Financial System 98 2.3.4. Challenging Dichotomies and Doing Borderwork 104 Chapter 3. Greening Apocalypse: Eco-Conscious Disaster and the Biopolitics of Climate Change 109 3.1. Getting the Worst Out of Nature: Climate Change in Science Fiction Cinema 109 3.2. Spectacular Disaster, Global Narratives, and Eco-consciousness 119 3.3. In Case You Didn’t See It Coming: Climate Change Disaster in 2012 125 3.3.1. 2012 as a Climate Change Movie 125 3.3.2. Mirroring Ecological Realities, Envisioning Catastrophes 130 3.3.3. Staging Climate Change: The Domino Effect and Global Action 134 3.3.4. What Are the Odds? The Development and Consequences of Climate Change 139 3.3.5. The Ambivalence of Disaster in 2012 145 3. 4. The Biopolitics of Disaster: Sovereign Individuals and Bare Life in 2012 151 3.4.1. Dollars and Passports, Please! 151 3.4.2. Steering towards Cosmopolitanism, a While 159 Chapter 4. Love for the Alien Same: Interplanetary Romance and Kinship as Harbingers of (Ambivalent) Cosmopolitanism 167 4.1. Cosmopolitan Intimacies 167 4.2. Mapping Transnational Same-Species Romance and Kinship in Science Fiction 173 4.3. The Alien as a Vehicle for Cosmopolitan Discourses 178 4.4. From Enemies to Friends: Alien-Human Romances 182 4.5. The Host: Ambivalent Openness 189 4.5.1. Cosmopolitanism Is Not Inbred: From Struggle to Openness 191 4.5.2. Cosmopolitan Whiteness 204 4.6. Cosmoqueer Utopianism in Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same 208 4.6.1. Interplanetary Camp: Celebrating Aesthetic, Sexual, and Alien Otherness 209 4.6.2. Imagining and Doing Otherwise: Queer Resourcefulness and Cosmopolitan Horizons 219 Chapter 5. Resisting Coloniality: The Cosmopolitan Potential of Human Networks 227 5.1. Transnational Connections and Networks through Time 227 5.2. “There Is a Method to this Tale of Madness”: Putting the Pieces of Cloud Atlas Together 240 5.3. The Multiple Iterations of Coloniality in Cloud Atlas 248 5.4. Connecting Humans across Time and Space in Cloud Atlas 255 5.4.1. Cosmopolitan Reincarnations and Shared Experiences 255 5.4.2. A Multitude of Drops: The Relevance of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism 263 Conclusion/Conclusiones 279 Works Cited 295 Films and Television Series 321 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The writing of this dissertation has been possible thanks to the financial support of a number of institutions and the help of many people during the past years. The Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport has funded a four-year FPU contract and a research stay at the University of California, Riverside. Research projects FFI2013-43968-P and FFI2017-83606- P of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the research project „Cinema, Culture, and Society‟ of the Government of Aragón, and the University of Zaragoza have funded research materials and my participation at conferences. Thanks most of all to Celestino Deleyto for encouraging me to come to Zaragoza six years ago and for his constant help since then. He has provided invaluable advice on all sorts of academic matters and offered extremely useful and thorough comments on this dissertation. His motivation, efficiency, humor, openness, and academic excellence have been a major source of inspiration and have made the long road of the dissertation much easier. I would also like to thank the members of the research project on cosmopolitanism and contemporary cinema, the „Cinema, Culture, and Society‟ group, and the Department of English and German at the University of Zaragoza. I am particularly grateful to María del Mar Azcona for her encouragement and support. I really appreciate that she suggested that I turn my first long piece of writing on science fiction into an article. She has also recommended some of the most useful readings on cosmopolitanism and borders that I have vii come across during the past years. I would like to extend my gratitude to all my fellow graduate students, particularly Andrés Bartolomé, Teresa Carbayo, Julia Echeverría, María Ferrández, Bilyana Kostova, Carmen Laguarta, Mónica Martín, Silvia Murillo, Beatriz Pérez, Andrea Regueira, Mapi Royo, and Rosa Urtiaga. It is a pleasure and privilege to be part of such an active and inspiring community. Beatriz Pérez deserves special mention: she has helped in many ways. My research has greatly benefitted from a research stay at the University of California, Riverside. Special thanks to Sherryl Vint for making this stay possible and for discussing some of the main ideas of this dissertation with me. During my stay at UCR, I benefitted enormously from a series of fantastic events organized by Sherryl as part of the „Alternative Futurisms‟ seminar. I also appreciate the lively conversations about science fiction that I had with Laura Oehme, Josh Pearson, Stina Attebery, Jędrek Burszta, Kai Hang Cheang, and Jeshua Enriquez. I would like to thank JJ Jacobson, Zayda Delgado, Robin Katz and the rest of the staff at the Eaton Collection and the Tomás Rivera Library for providing me with access to all the research materials I needed. Sherryl Vint and Marianne Kac-Vergne have also provided insightful reports on this dissertation. I am grateful for their useful comments on it. I also feel that the conversations that conferences facilitate have had a major influence on the way my work has evolved. In this respect, I would like to thank Dean Allbritton, Mark Bould, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Chuckie Palmer-Patel, Sonja Fritzsche, Noelia Gregorio, Max Gee, Rusty Hatchell, Dan Humphrey, Hollie Johnson, Nadine Knight, Leopold Lippert, Mariano Martín, Ángel Mateos-Aparicio, Monica Michlin, Toby Neilson, Chris Pak, Sergio Rivel, Marijn Rombouts, Ivaylo Shmilev, Ayşegül Turan, and the participants in the 2015 HCA Spring Academy. viii From the perspective of the domino effect, I may not have written this dissertation without the excellent opportunities and academic guidance that I had access to during my undergraduate studies. In this sense, I would like to use this opportunity to express my heartfelt thanks to the University of Alcalá. A student could hardly expect more support from an institution of higher education. I would like to acknowledge the decisive help of the “Cardenal Cisneros” and “Jorge Herreros Martínez” scholarship programs. I would also like to thank the lecturers at this university for teaching me how to write in English in academic contexts and for supervising my first writings on film and cultural studies. I extend my gratitude to La Caixa Foundation, which generously funded my master studies at the University of Zaragoza. I would like to finish by thanking my friends from Talavera, Alcalá, Vienna, Skidmore, and Zaragoza for being there all the time. Special thanks go to Javier Calvo, for sharing his enthusiasm about cinema and for our countless conversations about many of the films mentioned in this dissertation. His help with all kinds of little details has been invaluable. Finally, this dissertation has been written first and foremost thanks to my parents. I am deeply grateful to them for their boundless love and support and for teaching me the most important things I know. Portions of the section “In Time: Connecting Borders and Global Finance” in chapter two have been previously published in slightly different form as part of the article “Keeping Workers at a Distance: The Connection Between Borders and Finance in Andrew Niccol‟s In Time” in Geopolitics 21:1 (2016). Small excerpts in chapter two have also been drawn from the article “Interplanetary Border Imaginaries in Upside Down: Divisions and Connections in the American Continent” in Journal of Transnational American Studies 7:1 (2016).