Shani Heckman
Final Paper
Fall 2008/Kerner/722
Science Fiction Film: Spectacle, Entertainment, or Truth?
Science fiction film is a film genre which emphasizes actual, extrapolative, or speculative science and the empirical method, interacting in a social context with the lesser emphasized, but still present, transcendentalism of magic and religion, in an attempt to reconcile man with the unknown”.[1]
“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” Guy Debord, “Society of the Spectacle”
“All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.” Adolf Hitler
The above quotes taken together imply that film, particularly Science Fiction, film has the ability to manipulate, confuse, and ideally, control, its viewers. SF film has never been a genre that I personally appreciated, until recently. Full of animated actions, violence, and war, and wrought with homosexual-based gender inequalities, SF films did not speak to me as a spectator, and consequently, I refused to watch them. However, recently discovered, is that most SF Films use levels of realism in their storytelling and it is this ability to represent real situations, real possibilities, futuristic worlds, and histories, that makes them so powerful and piqued my interest. Could SF film also be used to assist citizenry against government and ideological forces? It is as, David Hogan, Editor of Science Fiction America, suggests in his introduction to the book that, “by its nature, film appeals to our voyeurism…There is nothing elite about film, the artist and his or her sensibilities always are shaped by the same realities and concerns that affect and model all of us. Movies entertain us, but they also tell us who and what we are.”[2]. Not only is film universally attractive, traveling around the world through satellite, and prior to sound, in one universal language, film is made by one of us, a human-hand, and therefore on some level, it can be trusted on some intimate level. Films represent a real viewpoint or reality for the human filmmaker, even if that filmmaker is hired by a government to create their specific images, to manipulate the people, the film still contains some level of truth simply because the human hand was involved. Perhaps it is a truth only for the person making the film like much wartime propaganda, but sociological, philosophical, and psychological, aspects of the human mind making the film will always influence the resulting final production whether the creator is conscious of this aspect or not. Film is meant to represent the real, through illusion and spectacle and to entertain. Combine these notions of realism in cinema with what Paul Virilio has referred to as “cinematic derealization” and the way in which media culture has provided us with a “substitute for reality” and it is clear that SF film evokes enormous possibility to manipulate through imagery and has a use in propaganda. J.P. Telotte suggest that the overuse of media creates a context wherein “the world around us increasingly comes to seem little more than a kind of detached spectacle, and we find ourselves essentially reconstituted as its spectators.” [3] SF films of the 1940’s through 1960’s focused on Atomic Warfare and Alien Species invasions and much has been written about to expose the government’s direct hand on the stories, subjects, and images, created in those films. The films represented the current, Japanese Invasion and later, our Communist Fears. It would seem then that today’s films would reflect environmental blight, continued invasions, but on a global scale, a hunt for limited resources, and perhaps, even, financial anarchy. However, competing with global media systems, a constant proliferation of images, and news, the ability to act as a tool of propaganda would also requires these films to be more covert. In this essay, I will explore how capitalism and war affected the creation and presentation of recent SF film, exposing new attempts at layers of control by world governments and multi-nationals in their efforts to manipulate and control people.
For my project and research, I watched a variety of SF films: first I re-watched Species, E.T., and Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind, they all seemed so different from what I remembered but did not impassion me to write or explore the films further. I watched a wide variety of SF films to try to get an overall feel for SF films, focusing on films from the U.S. only and those made more recently these include: Omega Man, I am Legend, Starship Troopers, War of the Worlds, Escape From New York, 300, and one documentary, Out of the Deep Blue Yonder. Tom Cruise’s War of the Worlds, was the most poorly acted, but contained impressive special effects, and perhaps, a direct exploration of our fears of terrorist attacks post-9/11, particularly when Dakota Fanning asks her father as they are escaping if they are being attacked by “terrorists” when sheer seconds prior her brother had just asked the same question, making it clear that the film wants you to relate these alien creatures to the current terrorist threat. What is most interesting of the alien films that I watched from the 1980’s, were the alien’s overall friendliness and the adults childlike support of these visitors from outer space, including allowing the aliens to develop friendships with human children. E.T. revealed the archetype of child versus parent, especially when the suited agents come to take E.T. for studies and Close Encounter of the Third Kind explored Citizens versus their Government, especially in its last scenes. Positive views of alien visitors pretty much ended with these films, leading way for films like Alien I & II, Independence Day, War of the Worlds and Starship Troopers. Omega Man, the first version of the film, based upon the book I Am Legend was more nuanced and political than the latter that featured Will Smith, but the FX in Mr. Smith’s version were much more realistic. Later, in this essay, I discuss the importance of creating “real looking” special effects and SF film’s role in special effects presentation. The absence of real looking effects causes Omega Man’s half-dead to appear pretty cheesy by today’s standards and the film utilizes real humans wearing makeup whereas, War of theWorlds the 2005, post 9-11 version uses animated creatures. Aside from the choice to use non-humans to represent the attackers, what drastically differs between the films is the political depth the directors chose to utilize. The very choice to use humans in Omega Man makes it clear that the monster is one of us, we can not trust our friends and neighbors, anyone can pass to the other-side at any time. The film also utilizes flashback anti-communist footage in a dream sequence Charles Heston has before the attacks formally begin. Starship Troopers was the most revealing in its politics by exposing an extreme fascist world where everyone blindly follows the Federation.
It is not surprising then that one would believe that SF films were simply tools of the government and of Hollywood to desensitize young people towards possible attacks on US soil. It is as Rod Sterling creator of Twilight Zone notes: “SF is taken seriously by so few people, it’s an ideal vehicle for social comment that, in other contexts, might be unacceptable to audiences. Exploration of gender issues, war, xenophobia and other difficult topics are more easily accepted by viewers if the tales’ protagonists exist in the future times or alien places with discernable, but not too literal, links to our own world.” [4]. It is clear then, that SF film has the power to manipulate and create false ideas and images of the world, like other genres of film, but it would seem that most thinking people would see through the jargon and simply see SF films as the stories that they are. Jurij Lotman refutes that:
Cinematography resembles the world which we see…
But this similarity is as unreliable as the words of a foreign
language which sounds like words of our own. That which
is different pretends to be identical. [Movie magic] The illusion
of comprehension is created where no genuine comprehension
exists. Only by understanding the cinema can we be convinced
that it is not a slavish copy of life, but an active recreation in
which similarities and differences are assembled into an integral,
tension-filled—sometimes dramatic—process perceiving life.[5]
The problem, it seems, is whether or not one views cinema as a language of reality and representation, or as a form of artistic manipulation and illusion of image. SF film itself seems confused on which angle to pursue, in what Vivian Sobchack refers to as:
“unique visual construct of every SF film…for in order to be
believed, to achieve credibility, the SF film must also deny its
alien images at the same time that it promotes them. To make
us believe in the possibility, if not the probability, of the alien
things we see, the visual surfaces of the films are inextricably
linked to and dependent upon the familiar; from the wonderous
and strange and imagined, the cameras fall back on images either
so familiar they are downright dull, or neutralize the alien by
treating it so reductively that it becomes ordinary and comprehensible.
Thus in every SF film there is a visual tension which exists
in such earnestness in no other genre—a tension between those
images which strive to totally remove us from a comprehensible
and known world into romantic poetry and those images which
strive to bring us back into a familiar and
prosaic context.” [6]
It is these contradictions that create holes in various theories on SF film and its use in spectacle. It is what Brooke Landon refers to as “aesthetic ambivalence” the blending of the real with the imagined such that the viewer must discern for herself what the filmmaker’s message was.[7]
Another topic explored in SF film, that of space exploration and alien visitation, is based on reality and the purpose of which is only becoming more known in the mainstream as we venture further into space. Aside from support for a militaristic society, one other real-world experience supported by SF films is space exploration. Space Exploration is controlled by, and funded from the leadership society and future benefits will support only those who can afford it. But it is only recently that NASA has revealed that they are looking for water and other sources that may support human life. Early in the 1980’s, when space shuttles and satellites were being launched quite regularly, several environmental groups pointed out the extreme damage to the Ozone caused by such large combustible engines. Mathematical derivatives proved that more than 300 shuttle trips would eliminate a vast Ozone layer over much of the U.S. Why then, is the shuttle still exploring? How come space exploration was not stalled when it was proven that such exploration could cause extreme damage to all creatures on Earth? SF films support space exploration and treatment of other living species as Alien and something to be battled and killed. It is man versus nature, man versus everyone. It is this type of thinking that stalls developments to assist with Global Warming.
To work with nature would compromise decades of western beliefs about controlling and dominating nature as Steven Pinker describes in his book Botany of Desire. Domestication of animals and plants by early humans to current day destruction of rainforests worldwide, represent examples of our continued need to control and dominate nature even when it causes damage to us, and how this battle between humans and nature is destroying both nature and the human race. SF films like Cloverfield and The DayAfter, support continual domination of the environment by humans and the examples they create allow for continued ignorance towards the real problem and the real destruction. Millions of dollars are spent on Space Exploration films, these films represent a power dynamic that supports space travel for the wealthy and powerful. We must explore for our own safety, to know what is ‘out there’ these films seem to suggest. What is not revealed is the fact that most of the film spectators will not be included in those who get to leave planet Earth. Space travel is for those who can afford it, and 98% of the world’s human population will not be able to flee this dying Earth. Is it surprising that during a time that the truly reality based documentary films like the 11th Hour and Inconvient Truth are counter-balanced by SF Hollywood survival films like Cloverfield, and The Day After, that more is not being exposed on how space travel negatively affects the environment.
Space exploration and cinema have much in common in their creation of spectacle, their military and government uses, and the fact that both benefit war. Virilio contends that “the concept of reality is always the first victim of war” [8] and academic discussions of cinema Post-9/11 seem to suggest that Virilio was right: “industry leaders were eager to censor trauma-inducing images of any kind…stopping theatrical releases of both The Siege and The Towering Inferno” yet “television’s normal routines—it’s everyday schedule and ritualized flow—had been disordered” to return to “normalcy required a commercial breaks and a return to consumerism” [9]. Take for instance the use of and capitalist market for special effects, for which “SF is the designated cultural showplace”[10], millions of dollars are spent to make these effects as realistic as possible:
“great pains are taken to create the illusion of giant starships in flight,
in combat and so on. This naturalization of artifice reenacts the ideology
of the film as a whole in its celebration of the scope and role of war,
weapons, and large-scale technology in daily life…special effects
accomplish the political work of legitimizing current structures of
domination”.[11]
Perhaps it is the commodification of art and cinema that lead to the use of special effects and how the general creation of SF film to reflect and represent moments in history. It is much like Guy Debord’s theory delineated in The Society of the Spectacle, where society is divided between the passive subject who consumes the spectacle and the reified spectacle itself. The focus being on passive spectator, if not passive then there is less fear of manipulation and control. This relation to spectacle is what makes Starship Troopers so great because it exposes “how our culture does the constructing of both our world and ourselves” through the film’s exploration of the future world of beautiful people indoctrinated on every level and how the “pervasive media” and “very structure of society” enables this fascist society to exist, become citizens, striving for and create homogeneity. Blind acceptance are key attributes to members of Starship Troopers and according to Debord, the principal reason the Federation is in control.[12] By pointing out existing problems with real-world media and A/V in his stories, “Paul Verhoeven’s SF films repeatedly suggest how we have come to inhabit a very unnatural and ultimately threatening place, how we have, in great part through our audio visual media, come to fashion a very unreal world for ourselves” and act as self-reflective visuals of a society under fascist rule[13]. With the introduction of smart phones and other ‘ultra’ media devices our daily life is even more consumed by both the virtual, mass media communications and the real, this creates what Baudillard refers to as “a new species of uncertainty, which results not from the lack of information but from information itself and even from an excess of information…information itself which produces uncertainty”.[14]
Every frame of film matters, and each frame requires hours of human labor in pre-production, production, and editing, to make it complete, this value implicates film in its possible use as propaganda. The use of SF film to explore social dilemmas and represent historical moments is in of itself a form of propaganda and refers to the ideologies in the time frame the films were made. In fact, the temporal nature of film itself allows for it to be a tool of propaganda: “All propaganda, as every advertising and public relations professional knows, requires several ingredients—comprehensibility, consistency of message, and repetition…[because] a lie repeated often enough over time will be believed as true”, Adolf Hitler, repetition, being the most important aspect of the moving image.[15] Verhoeven’s world created in Starship Troopers “shows a society totally influenced by media that march lockstep with government…[the film] serves as a predictor of the future by demonstrating the timelessly effective techniques of propaganda”. [16] Starship Troopers shows a world were the media is a tool of the government, where no other media source is available other than that of the ruling government party The Federation while dealing with this world-wide threat to the global society created by Verhoeven, homogeneity, is the accepted and appreciated norm. With the current global marketplace affecting visual representations of culture, food, and media, it appears that the time of global homogeneity is upon us. No longer can we tell by appearances alone what country a person is from, nor can we confirm through their use of language or their employment, the world’s media message about universal appearance and what is deemed “attractive” has been accepted—we all look the same no matter where you are (save for the few isolated un-touched tribes in Brazil). Worldwide, whiteness, blondeness, and boutique fashion labels, are equally desired and emulated, representing images of universal beauty. Television and pay-to-view cable channels feature reality shows for entertainment, wherein we can watch others ‘living’ for entertainment. Images of war are controlled in the nightly news (no dead bodies allowed), People now spend more time on social networking sites than they do meeting in person, with new found ways of living on Second Life, it seems then that the fascist global world of Starship Troopers is already upon us, where are the Bugs?