Science Fiction [SF] cinema has never received the degree of analytical and theoretical attention devoted to other film genres.

In her book Alien Zone, author Annette Kuhn demonstrates that SF has been difficult to define as an actual genre, simply because it encompasses so many different elements. SF films rework and transform established themes and conventions of the film industry. The mise-en-scene of future worlds, and particularly the myth of human mastery over nature is a constant theme. The concept of the Police State and the reliance on high technology is part of its allure.

Yet the SF genre has traditionally been hard to pin down.

Kuhn is not as interested in defining the genre as she is in demonstrating its cultural instrumentality: how SF affects our cultural identity.

She provides a textural analysis using SF literature as a starting point for studying SF cinema. Kuhn examines the narrative inter-texts or ideologies in relation to the genre. At the heart of the matter are certain cultural symbols and meanings and the way they are transmitted to the audience. Eventually these inter-texts become part of popular culture: Star Wars, Blade Runner, Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, etc…

Clearly, there are deeper, hidden and more profound meanings to be found in SF cinema which are sometimes subtle, sometimes ambiguous – but they can also be quite blatant – such as the Statue of Liberty scene at the end of Planet of the Apes.

SF cinema hasn’t received the scholarly attention it deserves.

Our current reality to so brutal and dystopian, who doesn’t want to escape? SF films serve this function perfectly.

Film critic H. Bruce Franklin believes that Science Fiction cinema is highly relevant to popular culture. He is concerned with archetypal themes such as the concept of a global fascist corporate state, which repeatedly crops up in SF films.

He comes up with several different models to explain this phenomenon. The first of these is THE WONDER CITY OF THE FUTURE, which in most cases signifies an utterly dystopian and grim vision of humanity’s future. This model usually extrapolates current pop culture motifs and brings them to their logical conclusions. Franklin gives several examples of this dialectic, most of which demonstrate a very dismal totalitarian future for mankind.

The second theme is MARVELOUS FLYING MACHINES: where all action is relegated to the gigantic spaceship or planetary bases, and there is no relevance whatsoever to the economic and social life of the species. Still, even though humanity no longer has to face up to the environmental and economic destruction wrought by civilization, the MARVELOUS FLYING MACHINES are never the answer to our all-too human problems. In fact, as Franklin explains, the MARVELOUS FLYING MACHINES model instead is used as a means for the hideous monopolistic society on earth to loot and devastate other parts of the universe (see Elysium).

As in the film Logan’s Run, many SF movies in this category demonstrate man’s ultimate folly. Humans are in constant conflict: either against nature, some alien beast, or against the decaying empire itself. Franklin goes on to show that many of the themes adapted from other genres – such as the western and gangster films of the past – have been co-opted and regurgitated to create new social relevance. Some are obviously more successful than others.

Thomas B. Byers’ essay Commodity Visions is primarily concerned with the dehumanizing aspects of technology portrayed in SF films. Movies like Alien and Blade Runner portray a grim future for humanity, a world dominated by high-tech corporate capitalism.

Byers compares the future worlds portrayed in three movies in particular: Aliens, Blade Runner, and Star Trek II Wrath of Kahn. All these films promote a specific kind of value system, particularly those of patriarchal America (the “white male supreme”). All three explore the relationship between the high-tech corporate capitalism and humanity’s – usually doomed – response to it.

Scholars argue that the generally nihilistic views portrayed in SF cinema reveal something about the character of our current society and indeed these projections are profoundly frightening.

For the most part, the message is: The future is hopeless. Get used to it.

[Repost from 2019]