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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACTS
This essay explores a key SF scenario--the encounter with the alien--in four 'postfuturist' SF films, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Dark City, The Brother from Another Planet, and Possible Worlds, through a perspective informed by the materialist critique of idealist linguistics found in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, David McNally, and Alan N. Shapiro. It argues that the critical theory derived from Saussurean linguistics strips language of its materiality in a manner homologous to capital's abstraction of social products from the labouring bodies that produce them, and traces the active and permeable borderline between Self and Other in these films' alien encounters.
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English, Hector, se habla English here!
The Brother from Another Planet
In AVP: Alien vs. Predator (Paul Anderson, 2004), in an ancient pyramid beneath the Antarctic, an account is discovered of the time before human history when the Predators used the Earth as a breeding- and hunting-ground for their alien prey. Discussing this improbable subterranean structure, Weyland (Lance Henriksen) tells his hastily gathered expedition that 'one expert tells me this has features reminiscent of the Aztecs, another tells me it is probably Cambodian; what they're all agreed upon is that the smooth side is definitively Egyptian'. Sebastian (Raoul Bova) tells him that they are all right: 'This pyramid contains the features of all three cultures--this might be the first pyramid ever built.' Sebastian later draws attention to the script carved into the walls of the pyramid, which is written in the language from which Egyptian, pre-conquest Aztec, and Cambodian derive. However, what he actually means is that this presumably unitary ur-language alternates characters from each of the subsequent human languages, as if when the human slaves fled the Antarctic in three different directions each group agreed to take only certain architectural features and every third character from the alphabet, creating three discrete cultures, languages, and races.
It is, of course, superfluous to comment on quite how badly AVP garbles this time-worn conceit about polar Elder Races and their prehistoric or proto-human slaves, hinted at in Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), elaborated in H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1931), and transformed into white supremacist pseudo-history in Graham Hancock's The Fingerprints of the Gods (1995). But the contexts within which AVP deploys it opens up some interesting questions about colliding ontologies--different eras, cultures, movie franchises, and media--and the dialectics of difference and identity. (1) However inadequately realized, this conservative, mainstream, postfuturist SF movie is, at its centre, about the encounter with the alien and the creation of difference; and its absurd conceptualization of racial/cultural/linguistic separations is best understood as Brechtian 'crude thinking' about 'the realities of heteroglossia'. (2)
This essay will explore Vivian Sobchack's notion of postfuturism in relation to Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998) and The Brother from Another Planet (John Sayles, 1984), both of which feature aliens, and then consider another, more recent, low-budget SF film, Possible Worlds (Robert Lepage, 2000), which utilizes the SF device of parallel worlds to replace the alien with a proliferation of selves. Central to this discussion will be the materialist critique of semiotics and (post)structuralist linguistics. Following de Saussure, twentieth-century linguistics has been dominated by an idealism that removes language from lived, material, social being and imagines it as a non-material realm (langue) upon which we draw for individual speech-acts (parole). A properly materialist linguistics refutes the notion of langue, arguing that there are only ever speech-acts; or, in Bakhtin's words, language is 'a social phenomenon--social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors'. (3) This essay is informed by David McNally's suggestive parallel between idealist linguistics' dematerialization of language, and capital's 'abstraction of social products and practices from the labouring bodies that generate them', (4) but its exploration of the alien in these films will be primarily concerned with Bakhtin's argument that it is only through communicative interaction with others that individuals come into being.
In 1987 Sobchack's The Limits of Infinity: The American Science Fiction Film, 1950-1975 (1980) appeared in an expanded edition entitled Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. The new fourth chapter, heavily influenced by Jameson's 1984 essay 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', introduced the concept of 'postfuturism' to describe an interlocking set of changes in the nature of American SF film. In the 1950s,
cinematic space travel [...] had an aggressive and three-dimensional thrust--whether it was narrativized as optimistic, colonial, and phallic penetration and conquest or as pessimistic and paranoid earthly and bodily invasion. Space in these films was semantically inscribed as 'deep' and time as accelerating and 'urgent.' In the SF films released between 1968 and 1977 [...], space became semantically inscribed as inescapably domestic and crowded. Time lost its urgency--statically stretching forward toward an impoverished and unwelcome future worse than a bad present. (5)
Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) changed all this:
Through some strange new transformation, technological wonder had become synonymous with domestic hope; space and time seemed to expand again, their experience and representation becoming what can only be called 'youthful.' [...] Even the low-budget and marginal SF films that emerged in the mid-80s as a kind of 'countercultural' response to the spatial simplicity and suburban cleanliness initiated by Lucas and Spielberg were hardly pessimistic or paranoid. (pp. 226-27)
Films like Liquid Sky (Slava Tsukerman, 1983) and Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984) 'celebrat[ed] all existence as wonderfully e-stranged and alien-ated', and 'accept[ed] or embrace[d] trashed-out, crowded, and complex urban space, and appreciate[d] the temporal closure of the future for all the surprising juxtapositions such closure allows and contains' (p. 227). In both 'mainstream', big-budget, blockbuster SF cinema and 'marginal', low-budget, and independent SF films, Sobchack discerned a new depiction of space and time, with space 'semantically described as a surface for play and dispersal, a surface across which existence and objects kinetically dis-place and dis-play their materiality', and time 'giv[ing] way to a new and erotic leisureliness' filled 'with curious things and dynamized as a series of concatenated events rather than linearly pressured to stream forward by the teleology of plot' (p. 228). Ultimately, Sobchack locates these transformations within the logic of multinational capital and electronic/digital media, which fragment and dislocate experiential and represented space, producing a culture in which 'nearly everyone is regularly alienated from a direct sense of self, [...] is less conscious of existence than its image', and in which 'the once threatening SF "alien" and Other become our familiars--our close relations, if not ourselves' (p. 229).
While Dark City is inspired by Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of a Nervous Illness (1903), which both Freud and Lacan discussed at length, (6) it often seems more like a fairly straightforward adaptation of Sobchack's chapter on postfuturism. The protagonist, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), suddenly wakes in a seedy hotel room, with no idea of his name or identity. The room also contains the corpse of a young woman, into whose flesh spiral designs have been carved. A phone call warns him to flee, as his pursuers are nearby. For Murdoch, there is nothing beyond the immediate moment in which he finds himself, with no sense of anything that happened before he awoke; and for a while at least the viewer has little more idea of what is going on (although an opening narration provides some clues). Gradually it is revealed that the eponymous retrofuturist city, where it is always night, is an experiment being conducted by the alien Strangers--gaunt, pasty-skinned humanoids dressed in black leather, who recall both Max Schreck's eponymous Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922) and the Cenobites in Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987). They have abducted an unspecified number of humans and released them into the city to observe them. As the Stranger Mr Hand (Richard O'Brien) explains, 'we fashioned this city on stolen memories, different eras, different pasts, all rolled into one; each night we revise it, refine it in order to learn [...] about you [...] what makes you human. We need to be like you.' The Strangers are a 'group mind', possessing only 'collective memories', and they believe that if they can fathom the human 'capacity for individuality' they will be able to save their dying race. In order to do this, every night at midnight they use their power of 'tuning'--the ability to alter material reality by will alone--to halt the city and, while its inhabitants are unconscious, to reshape it. Simultaneously, selected humans have their memories erased and new ones injected. In one such sequence, for example, a blue-collar couple in a run-down apartment are transformed into the bourgeois occupants of a grandiose penthouse, their personality changes made manifest in the very different politics informing their discussion of the labour relations now they are owners rather than workers. While at least one human--Walenski (Colin Friels), the apparently deranged ex-detective first assigned to investigate the prostitute serial killings for which Murdoch is being framed (or has perhaps unknowingly committed)--has glimpsed the truth, Murdoch is unique because he has developed not only the ability to resist the Strangers' telepathic powers, but also to 'tune', probably...
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