Liquid Space

Science Fiction Film and Television in the Digital Age

Sean Redmond

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781780761862
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786721044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Science fiction is perhaps the most effective genre to explore the concerns of the present whilst reflecting on the possibilities of the future. But what precisely can it tell us about present and future by setting these two timeframes in the same critical space?

1

Then and Now

Television Time Travel and the Once Wonderful End to the Working Day

Let me begin this book at the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end – at the shape-shifting doorway between the analogue age and the liquid digital present. Let me begin this book with the then and now of television time travel, to historicise these particular narratives of transformation, and to demonstrate how the experience of time (and space) changes from the analogue age to the digital epoch and its liquid modern propensities …

In this first chapter I will present three interlinking arguments. First, the argument that the time travel television series historically provided viewers with a spectacular temporal and spatial alternative to the routine of everyday life, the regulation of television scheduling and the small-world confines of domestic subjectivity. In what is principally the dawn before liquid modernity, and taking the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, predominately in a UK viewing environment, I will suggest that the (analogue) special effect rendering of the time travel sequence expanded the viewer’s material universe, and affectively wrenched the television set free from the strictures of scheduling and realist programming. Further, I will suggest that the time travel series readily and regularly moved the domestic space, the ordinary day and the everyman/person into awesome environments and situations that suggested alternative lifestyles and behaviours, with a different existential tempo and rhythm. At a narrative, thematic and aesthetically spectacular level, television time travel saw to the wonderful end of the working day. My chosen case studies include Sapphire and Steal, Doctor Who and Quantum Leap.

Second, in this chapter I will argue that rather than the contemporary time travel television series being an extraordinary alternative to ordinary life, it instead articulates convergence culture, deregulation, multiple channel viewing, and time-shift culture where there is no such thing as an ordinary working day or domestic viewing context. This type of time travel, then, takes place in and communicates through the watery age of liquid modernity. Taking the decades from the 1990s onwards, and the rise of the digital in particular, the extraordinary television time travel series is seen to be but one portal or dock or download in an age where a great many people affectively time travel. The irony here, as I will point out, is that the once sublime wonder of television time travel becomes potentially commonplace and, therefore, ultimately ordinary. The chapter will suggest that television time travel series such as Life on Mars are a nostalgic, emotional calling for a return to the end of the working day as it once was (emotively) experienced. These ‘future to the back’ texts return us to a pre-liquid modern age, where things are reimagined to be more purposeful and more whole than they are today. My case studies include Sliders, Doctor Who and Life on Mars .

Finally, the chapter will explore the idea of time and timeliness as key engines of digital age science fiction and liquid modernity. In the contemporary moment, time seems to be both set free and tightly controlled – a liquid paradox that keeps us in the thrall of what is the ‘science fiction of time’.

Feeling Boxed In

I have always been enchanted by the very words ‘special effects’. Seen written on the credit sequence, poster, or in a critical review, or sounded out in trailers and adverts, they are emotive letters to something extraordinary, something wonderful and deeply affecting. As a child in particular, they were a calling card for me to go to see that movie, or to tune in to the box, where, given scheduling patterns in the UK in the 1980s, it would for me mean a TV dinner set in intergalactic contexts. Special effects allowed me to encounter incredible creatures, planets and civilisations beyond the metaphorical and small-world confines of the little cathode ray, black-and-white box on which I would avidly watch science fiction programmes. In addition, the infinitely variable journeying of special effects allowed me to travel away from, and free of, the small-room, domestic context in which I found myself viewing. Special effects poured out of the box, threw unearthly light shadows and sound across the room, and lifted me upwards and outwards into and through spaces, places and times once unimaginable.

Homes are very particular social and cultural environments; familiar and familial, lived in and encountered in the most ordinary but intimate of ways. They are a type of body, of skin, an emotional and belonging environment that allows or enables one to call them home (Bourdieu 1990). From the middle of the last century, with the mass production of similarly designed and built houses, on parcelled-up plots of land, many homes were themselves box-shaped and placed on box-shaped grids with regulated and regular lines, roads and pathways, and uniform green spaces (Harris and Larkham 2003). In an experiential, closed-in sense, this was particularly true of high-density, low socio-economic-level housing in the UK, where conformity in design and planning was (and still is) the norm for cost factors and where perhaps – in the context of the post-World War II period – modernist utopian imaginings hoped that mass-built, faceless homes would free society (‘the masses’) from property hierarchies (Rowe 1993).

These were boxes, then, which framed one’s viewing experience and contained one’s everyday life. If one was to extend this concept of the boxed frame, the actual institutional and commercial imperatives that operated in UK broadcasting in the 1970s and 1980s produced a scheduling that was also boxed in, with rules for their timing, patterning and directed flow. One knew what was on the box without really having to check the TV guide since, in approximate terms, soap opera was followed by situation comedy was followed by drama was followed by the nightly news. This concept of television flow (Williams 1974/1992), or repeated and causal segmentation (Fiske 1987), or of flow and seamless segmentation (Feuer 1983), created a framed viewing context in which elements, patterns, forms, segues and links were held together in an arresting chain-like gestalt.

These were thus boxes of perception, space and time, mirrored by and connected with the strictures of capitalist work and school time, and with the regulated patterning of the everyday and the everywhere. Routine existence, ‘disciplinary society’ to use Foucault’s (1975) terms, was experienced from morning to night, in and through an articulating range of discursive practices and processes. For the most part, television was free of and from special effects unless countenanced in occasional, spectacle-driven ritual, such as the Royal Variety Show, or big events such as a royal wedding, or ‘escapist’, ‘flights of fancy’ genres such as science fiction. I would like to suggest that what television special effects gave life to during this time was a feeling of what it might be like to exist ‘outside the box’ while still being inside it. While American soap operas such as Dallas (CBS 1978–1991) showed viewers glamorous, freer, less regulated lifestyles (Ang 2013), it was science fiction and the wonder of the time travel scenario in particular that provided a seemingly limitless temporal-spatial alternative to life outside the in-box.

In the Sapphire and Steel (ATV 1979–1982) episode ‘Assignment 1: Escape Through a Crack in Time’ (1979), Time has invaded an old country house and stolen the parents of two children. As Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) informs the children:

There is a corridor and the corridor is time, it surrounds all things and it passes through all things … Time can enter into the present, break in, burst through and take things, take people … It can become weakened, like worn fabric, and then time can reach in and take things that it wants.

In this episode, at a metaphoric level, time represents science fiction’s capacity to transcend and recast the regulatory rules of everyday life: it can weaken, then bend and move the walls of the lived-in box; and it can take the viewer to and through any number of different time co-ordinates.

At a narrative level, the moment time invades the present, all the clocks in the house stop as if regulatory life can itself be arrested and escaped. In effect, this is the ontological and existential power of science fiction being demonstrated. The sound of the ticking of numerous timepieces (the father of the house is an avid clock collector) and the silence that punctuates the arrival of Time provide the acoustic key for the sublime wonderment that follows. The children cut free of real-world time and witness its wayward spatial and temporal capabilities – time is no longer regular, linear or regulatory.

At the level of spectacle and special effects, walls, doorways, staircases and furniture become porous and dynamic. Ghosts, objects, memories made concrete, pour through them. For example, the wall in the girl’s bedroom becomes a portal through which the ghosts of time can enter the present and steal people. This illusion of spatial movement is achieved through the use of the in-camera effect, the crash zoom, which distorts perspective, creating the impression that the background is getting closer. Film images of deep space, phantom people, and objects from the past are also projected onto the bedroom wall to create the sense that two worlds are blending together. The boxed-in life that was there is now liquefied through the way special effects affect the construction of time and space.

One might term this a special type of ‘heterotopia of time’ or, better still, a ‘heterotopia of special effects’, outside or beyond the ordinary through which a synthesis of ‘special’ irregular moments of time and space, conjoined with the wonder of special effects, recasts the places in which one largely exists. The ordinary becomes extraordinary, and Other. In one scene, the four walls of the bedroom extend out and deepen, and a cloaked figure emerges in, between and through the space created, moving toward the children as they sit watching, like TV viewers. The wall then becomes a screen, hit by cluster-like particles and atoms, as a nursery rhyme incantation is heard. Time and space are on the move in this scene and their linear and logical order has been broken. Together, time and space stop, expand and contract, even if by episode end they are again routinised, a point to which I will return below.

These are analogue special effects, nonetheless: unable to capture or replicate the uncanny valley or match entirely the verisimilitude of the fictional world. And, yet, the very fact that they were sometimes visible suggested an openness in/to the fictive world – one saw through them, and beyond them, to the world on the other side of the screen. There was a desperate wish for many on the lower levels of society to escape from and into something beyond the dour horizon of their everyday lives. I certainly did.

The grim and grey political contexts of the late 1970s and 1980s are important here. Margaret Thatcher’s far-right UK government (1979–1987) initiated a period of vast economic change and transformation, where greater home ownership became a marker of individualised success and family centredness, as wave after wave of new box-shaped suburbs sprouted in former greenfield sites. At the same time, there was a reduction in the number of council houses and flats as they were sold off to tenants, a corresponding rise in homelessness, and an increase in the number of more expensive private rentals in the market. The boxed home and the neatly packaged life became a battleground, at the ideological and economic centre of a society of haves and have-nots (Balchin and Rhoden 2002).

It is not surprising, then, that the blue police phone box in Doctor Who (BBC 1963–) comes to embody and translate this battleground over the box. It is itself a neatly drawn boxed-in home that carries the tools of surveillance and the machinery of governance, and also a time-and-space machine, bigger on the inside, which can access any point in time as it travels the cosmos. This is a box that can be opened, and that is in (special) effect a limitless environment.

A Blue Box Across the Cosmos

Doctor Who’s blue police phone box encapsulated a rich sense of this culturally inscripted, life lived-in-a-box feeling of the 1970s and 1980s, and yet also transcended it. The phone box is the Doctor’s mobile home, but one in which he spends very little screen time, leaving for new- and old-world adventuring in almost every episode. Often positioned at the control centre, viewers perceive space as expanded, both inside and outside the box, as it hurtles through time and space.

There are multiple, mostly unseen, rooms in the box and hence a sense of it as both unknown and expandable. This is not, then, a realist box, a boxed home or neighbourhood, but a multi-dimensional environment that travels through, within and across layers of time and space. This is not an ordinary phone box but a living Tardis, a magical home, with a heart and soul, and made of cosmic energy that seems able to transcend all scientific rules, regulatory norms and timecodes.

The Tardis is a time and space machine operated by a Time Lord, which resists the very notion of the box and the metronome of capitalist life, since it/he/the viewer travels free of such impulses and constraints. If this limitless environment was conveyed through realist codes and conventions, then the transitory power of the phone box wouldn’t be as affecting or as powerful. What is essential to its limitless potentiality is the alchemy and wonder of special effects that hurtle it through time and space, and which subsequently introduce the viewer to alternative possible worlds, peoples and civilisations.

In the episode ‘The Robots of Death’ (BBC 1977), Leela (Louise Jameson) asks the Doctor (Tom Baker) to explain why the Tardis is bigger on the inside, to which he responds, ‘because insides and outsides are not in the same dimension’. He demonstrates this to be possible by showing how a big box can be fitted inside a small one if there is enough dimensional distance between them. The Doctor places different-sized boxes at a distance from one another, allowing visual illusion to stand in for dimensionality. This scene is captured in a deep-focus, long shot, the Doctor holding the smaller box close to the camera, the bigger box remaining on the Tardis console, at a distance, thus allowing the viewer to see, through this perceptual trick, that big and small can be reversed.

In the previous scene we witness the Tardis spinning in deep space, set against a cluster of stars, while the cut to this sequence has Leela spinning a yo-yo. Not only is a metaphoric relationship implied between expansion and contraction, the reversibility of big and small and in and out, but also space and time are given literal string-like qualities. Importantly, special effects are central to the affecting power of the bend in reason in these scenes: they provide the miniatures and the optical technology to allow the Tardis to appear life-size and as if it is hurtling through space (small becomes big); and they are self-reflexively referred to, not only through the Doctor’s visual illusion trick, but also in his reference to multi-dimensionality as a feat accomplished by ‘trans-dimensional engineering’, an allusion to the special effects team. The Doctor articulates why and how the box can no longer be hermetically sealed and special effects give the viewer the wondrous material to see it evidenced.

Episodes set on contemporary Earth suggest that behind the illusion of the (viewer’s) boxed-in life is another, more exciting, riskier reality. Ordinary city and home environments are invaded, borders infiltrated, and regulation itself threatened. For example, in ‘The City of Death’ (BBC 1979):

The Doctor and Romana (Lalla Ward) are enjoying a holiday in Paris, 1979, when they become aware of a fracture in time. During a visit to the Louvre to see da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the Doct...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Liquid Space
• 1. Then and Now: Television Time Travel and the Once Wonderful End to the Working Day
• 2. Eye-Tracking the Sublime in Spectacular Moments of Science Fiction Film
• 3. Emptying Spaces: Digital Deterritorialisation
• 4. Liquid Bodies
• 5. Millennial Whiteness and Cinematic Outer Space
• 6. Liquid Terror
• 7. Sounding Liquid Science Fiction
• Conclusion: We Never Let the Fire Go Out
• References