Contemporary American Science Fiction Film

Terence McSweeney, Stuart Joy, Terence McSweeney, Stuart Joy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032039640
• eBook ISBN: 9781000540642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media Studies

Contemporary American Science Fiction Film explores and interrogates a diverse variety of popular and culturally relevant American science fiction films made in the first two decades of the new millennium, offering a ground-breaking investigation of the impactful role of genre cinema in the modern era.

Placing one of the most popular and culturally resonant American film genres broadly within its rich social, historical, industrial, and political context, the book interrogates some of the defining critical debates of the era via an in-depth analysis of a range of important films. An international team of authors draw on case studies from across the science fiction genre to examine what these films can tell us about the time period, how the films themselves connect to the social and political context, how the fears and anxieties they portray resonate beyond the screen, and how the genre responds to the shifting coordinates of the Hollywood film industry.

Offering new insights and perspectives on the cinematic science fiction genre, this volume will appeal primarily to scholars and students of film, television, cultural and media studies, as well as anyone interested in science fiction and speculative film.

1 A tale as old as time

Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Christine Muller

DOI: 10.4324/9781003189961-2

Introduction: creation stories

Stories tell how a human life begins. From Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) to the U.S. sitcom How I Met Your Mother (2005–2014), the causal linking of separate occurrences across time helps to explain how we came to be and to imbue our development with meaning. While Darwin’s work disrupted dominant Western views of species hierarchy, the television show, more modestly, entertained audiences as it situated two individuals’ births within a larger context and community. As these two examples illustrate, origin stories matter to a person’s sense of identity and worth in relation to others.

The religious text known as “Genesis” has passed down an influential narrative of this kind in the Bible. According to Genesis, after first generating a world populated by a rich variety of creatures,

God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them.

(Gen. 1:26–27, NRSV)

According to these passages, human life first appears when the creator of all living beings fashions a particular being as distinct from the others through a unique similarity to the creator. A model original produces a simulation, forging a close but unequal connection that makes the new being special among and even superior to other creatures, yet still inferior to and dependent upon the one who creates and who persists as the standard by which all else is measured and understood. This scenario configures a relationship between the act of creation, the identities of the creator and the created, and what each can expect in terms of treatment by and obligations toward others. For many, this scenario is literal, an account of an event that actually happened precisely in the way that it is portrayed. For others, this scenario is figurative, an allusion to fundamental truths untethered to specificities of historical time and place. Above all, though, whether regarded literally or figuratively, this scenario presents a framework for determining whose existence will be recognized and validated and how that existence will be valued.

Sustaining tension among its cultural heirs for millennia, this religious tradition’s disparate interpretations echo crucial, enduring questions flowing from the heart of the tradition itself. A vision of who human beings are by nature interweaves derivative resemblance with novel authenticity. So, how do we disentangle what people are like from what they actually are? A vision of human history recounts what predates human history. So, how do we disentangle what is reported about events from the events themselves? As a story of creation, this vision predicates the purposes and principles guiding human life and conduct, rendering debates about what is fabricated, what is real, and what is due ethically significant to each. It may or may not have been the first of this kind of story; it certainly has not been the last. Whether in the form of Darwin’s scientific treatise on the mechanisms of evolutionary biology for all organisms or a televised comedy on the romantic mishaps leading to the existence of two specific children, the origin story remains a compelling mode through which human beings contemplate their place in the world.

As a story of a mechanical boy yearning for a human mother’s love, Steven Spielberg’s (2001) film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)¹ showcases how timely, and how uneasily resolved, such questions would remain at the turn of the twenty-first century. A year on the precipice, 2001 pivoted between the large-scale economic, political, and cultural disruptions of the late twentieth century and those of the early twenty-first. The 1990s had featured massively-consequential developments such as amplifying globalization (and fierce resistance to its economic dimensions), burgeoning climate change awareness (and the politicization of climate science), and accelerating tech industry growth, all of which would matter even more evidently and profoundly in subsequent years. With anxieties about Y2K (shorthand for “year two thousand”) worldwide catastrophe unrealized, and the transformative responses to September 11, 2001 still a few months away, the notion of “apocalypse” for American viewers in June 2001, when A.I. was released, might very well have been rooted less in a singular traumatic event and more in an intensifying sense of alienating foreignness within the everyday. And yet, as the film itself suggests, what appears exceptionally new and different might not actually be all that extraordinary. After all, what we take for granted about the old and familiar – our notions of self, our feelings for and responsibilities to others, and our understanding of the world around us – might also be other than what they seem.

A.I. traces the beginning and the end of the story of David (Haley Joel Osment), an intelligent robot designed to simulate a young boy and to give his human owners/parents² unadulterated, everlasting love. With references to the Bible, as well as to Pinocchio and other fairy tales, the idea of David as not only a character, but more importantly a story, provides both the contrast with and the connection to the movie’s other characters as well as its viewers. All share the need for coherence and fulfillment in self-identity, feelings and responsibilities toward others, and placement in the world, and as the movie progresses, all increasingly clearly do so with certainty only about their personal senses of these phenomena – of self, feelings, responsibility, and world – rather than with certainty about these phenomena’s external, verifiable reality. According to A.I., what might be most radical in 2001 is not the possibility of a human-created artificial intelligence, but the recognition of how artificial human intelligence might be. Whether God creating Adam, or Gepetto crafting Pinocchio, or Professor Allen Hobby (William Hurt) manufacturing David, or filmmakers producing movies, or even viewers living our own daily lives, intelligence proves relational and subjectively perceived, with self, others, and world rendered coherent only when past, present, and future link together on a purposeful trajectory – through the form of a story.³ At the start of a new millennium manifesting powerful changes in lived experience, the potential for story to shape and ultimately construct that experience perpetuates wonder about what it is that viewers know at all about themselves and their world.

June 2001

In the late 1990s, the approaching turn of the millennium occasioned anxieties that, for some, reached apocalyptic levels of fear. Talk of the end times could have seemed anachronistic for an American culture embracing technological breakthroughs that presumably afforded ever-greater control over human fate. Yet, technology itself had prompted the unease. Journalist Richard Lacay’s January 1999 Time magazine article with the title “The End of the World As We Know It?” explored why and how worry about disaster of any kind had accreted around a simple calendar change. In sum, a common computer coding shortcut had used the last two rather than all four numbers in a year when signaling dates. This conceivably meant that at midnight on January 1, 2000, the programs on which so much of the world’s infrastructure had come to rely would not be able to distinguish 2000 from 1900, an ambiguity that could cause chaos in code-informed systems ranging from international finance to national defense. According to Lacay, while government and industry worked to correct the glitches within their purview before New Year’s Eve 1999, largely reassuring most people, some Americans were stockpiling food, drilling their families in emergency response, and essentially planning for a collapse of all human order. But, as fellow Time journalist Lily Rothman’s (2014) retrospective highlighted, it became quickly apparent by the dawn of New Year’s Day 2000 that a Y2K-related cataclysm would not materialize. Instead, the holiday passed under relatively ordinary, unremarkable circumstances. Following this lived experience of a forecasted high-profile calamity manifesting as a nonevent, and with September 11, 2001 part of the future unknown, American viewers of the June 29, 2001 release of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence might have had a prosaic sense of pivotal catastrophe as something unrealized and possibly even unrealistic. But even without pivotal catastrophe, was daily life at the time so truly ordinary and unremarkable?

While projections of a dramatic Y2K fallout fell flat, other developments of the time period not only were proving immediately relevant but also would come to prove far more portentous. By the summer of 2001, ventures on a global scale were seeding alterations within local settings that would indeed mature into radical transformations. For example, while the idea of globalization was not necessarily new (consider the Roman Empire’s expansion of communication and trade across swaths of its own known world), the internet, as well as arrangements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Treaty of Maastricht, embedded trans-border integration in the 1990s with unprecedented scope. Through the internet, more people could connect across any distance seamlessly and instantaneously, building and maintaining previously-inconceivable relationships and exchanges of information. Likewise, international compacts pushed national sovereignty to recalibrate flexibly to accommodate extra-national needs and norms, opening territory to entirely new flows of people, goods, and priorities. Easing interconnections of human contact and commerce augured opportunities, but also challenges, by expediting foreign interaction within areas once considered domestic domain, which tended to advance the influence of the more powerful – whether businesses, governments, or even individuals – over the less powerful or simply unprepared. Counter-movements responded particularly vehemently to market liberalization with their own worldwide mobilizations, exploiting internet connectivity to cohere international protest against “neo-liberal economic policies, the anti-democratic nature of international financial institutions (the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank in particular) and the increasing power of transnational corporations” (Buttel and Gould, 2004: 39). By 2014, a popular press publication such as The Atlantic magazine could characterize concerns such as income inequality, inadequate product safety and environmental regulation, and precarious workers’ rights as rooted in the dynamics of economic globalization, suggesting that what was germinating at the turn of the millennium had sprouted into lasting repercussions pervading daily life around the world (Smith, 2014). With distant decisions producing intimate effects, the planet could be feeling smaller yet also less familiar and less hospitable.

The 1990s had also featured escalating and increasingly politicized attention to the issue of global warming. While Earth surface temperatures have fluctuated over epochs, the trend has tended toward slow evolution rather than swift transition. However, from the First Industrial Revolution through the twentieth century, measurements began heightening at a comparatively rapid and persistent pace, destabilizing the climatic equilibrium that has enabled human life to flourish. In effect, a warmer planet would introduce weather, flora, and fauna patterns suited to the new conditions, presenting more frequent perils such as rampant wildfires, extreme storms, low-elevation flooding, and invasive species, to which human beings will not yet have adapted. Sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap noted in 2000 that in the previous decade, discourse within news coverage of this phenomenon had begun shifting focus from its scientific contours – questions about what it is, why it is happening, and what it portends within the terms of empirical evidence – to the political and economic interests that fuel doubt about its very existence (ibid.: 500–501). When writing in 2011 about the American public’s views of climate change during the 2000s, McCright and Dunlap confirmed that clear partisan divides had come to characterize perspectives among Democrats and Republicans, with the former more typically accepting alarming scientific claims and the latter more typically rejecting those scientific claims as alarmist (2011: 178–180). In sum, Americans at the turn of the millennium had begun to become aware of an unprecedented environmental threat to human safety and social stability, while also beginning to think in starkly different ways about the credibility and urgency of this threat. Such perspectival discordance, as well as the environmental hazard itself, would become only more pervasive, more problematic, and more divisive over time, contributing to an undertone within daily life of ambient crisis stalled in suspense.

Additionally, significant tech industry innovations were percolating by the summer of 2001 with their own potential for planet-wide disruption. By that time, the notion that tools could comprehensively transform how human beings live their lives was as old as the first wheel and as recent as the Second Industrial Revolution. With a (somewhat self-serving, from a marketing standpoint) real-time self-awareness among many of its participant innovators, the digital age was inaugurating the Third Industrial Revolution in the late twentieth century through the progressive immersion of human activity in computer- and especially internet-based technologies. Contemporary predictions within the popular press of where this revolution could lead, such as those published in Wired magazine, would accurately foresee the key nodes and modes of transformation while inaccurately anticipating its timing and direction (Schwartz and Leyden, 1997). For example, Schwartz and Leyden’s optimistic conjectures about how...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The fears and fantasies of science fiction film: Genre as cultural artefact
• 1. A tale as old as time: Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
• 2. Through the lens of 9/11: Reflections of Bush-era politics and the post-9/11 milieu in Minority Report (2002) and V for Vendetta (2006)
• 3. Precarious lives, human rights, and ‘the sense of today’: The continuing resonance and relevance of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006)
• 4. Seeing and touching the bodies of others: Evolving the male animal toward secular moral enlightenment in the Planet of the Apes reboot franchise
• 5. Time travel, trauma, and the futility of revenge in Looper (2012)
• 6. Science fiction cinema between arthouse and blockbuster: From Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014)
• 7. Twenty-first-century Star Wars: Profiles in (female) courage
• 8. Rationality, emotionality, and geopolitics in Arrival (2016): From structural oppositions and reconciliations to mixed modalities and claims to “quality” status
• 9. ‘The world is built on a wall’: Deconstructing Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
• 10. Speculative anger and collective economic strength in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018)
• 11. Coping with the deconstruction of American identity: Hybridization and self-destruction in Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018)
• 12. Wakanda forever? On Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018)
• Index