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Science fiction tells us more about society now than it can ever tell us about the future.
As we speak, a whole generation of computer engineers is projecting visions of the world onto our shared electronic infrastructure. Social life, buying and selling, mating, bonding, eating, keeping fit:—all these essential activities have come to be structured around technical conduits. This is the real-life science fiction of the market: Engineers propose, and naturally selective consumers dispose.
Over and above this technical-industrial-practical complex, we are in the marketplace of dreams—those visions of a future after money, upon Mars, after the next bomb. These worlds are best understood on the big screen because cinema reveals our dreams. And while movies about Artificial Intelligence or urban dystopias from Blade Runner (1982) to Total Recall (1990) reveal our hopes and fears, it is space movies that deliver a congealed image of our native qualities, the human nature to which we are bound, no matter where we reside.
In Solaris (1972), Space itself is the locus of our hopes. Space on the planet Solaris is the other, the superhuman – that which is beyond us, a world of blinding light and deepest night. In director Andrei Tarkovsky’s conception, the planet Solaris itself knows us better than we know ourselves; its sponge contains us with ease besides. In this movie, we find that our thoughts, beliefs, and desires are the very extent of space. This late Soviet vision suggests we cannot project anything that nature cannot know and give back to us in the proportions of a nightmare.
More recently, in Gravity (2013), we see characters floating through epic cosmic loneliness, cut off from each other and the earth below. In fact, this movie seems emblematic of America’s new Cold War genre: the filme technophallologica. Other examples are Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Star Wars reboot, Martian (2015), and Interstellar (2014), where a militarized techno-freak genre sobers up from manifest destiny.
A key concept in space films is techne, the Ancient Greek concept for craft, or craftsmanship, with the implication of an underlying knowledge of principles. Techne is related to habilis, as in Homo habilis, meaning "man, the able," or "man, the crafty." Any emphasis upon man’s nature as artificer is also a reference to man as distinct from animals through his ability to make things using tools, to manipulate nature towards his own needs. A classic illustration of techne in the space narrative is Tom Wolfe’s 1968 novel (also a 1983 motion picture), The Right Stuff, where the essence of habilis/techne is mixed with some good old pioneer American sweat and chutzpah in the brave enterprising pilots set to expand the heliocentric reach of the human race.
Techne, as used in space movies, is some reflection of what it means to be human now, including prescribed gender roles and in many examples of the genre, a morbid sense of loneliness and alienation. The techne uber alles element of these films reflects a video-gamification of blockbuster cinema. And the hallmark of blockbusters would have to be the breadth of cliffhangers—the riveting sequences that endlessly incite anxiety, leaving the viewer numb by the end of the film.
The psychological draw of this popular genre may be the titillating depictions of our techne. Remember 2001 (the parking odyssey) (1968) where computer program HAL played the role of God, and how about Star Wars and its reboot, from shots of toys floating against painted screens to CGI phantasmagoria. It is no surprise these films are produced in a highly militarized country—even Sparta did not have a stockpile of 4,018 atomic bombs! In all these films, including Apollo 13 (1995) and the comic dystopia WALL-E (2008), the machines, spaceships, or robots, are like the city of Paris in the nouvelle vague: They are not only the main characters but also the mise-en-scènes.
Of course, there are unique colorations in each film; for example in Gravity (2013) the postindustrial digital angst meets a neo-Darwinian Gaia rebirth sequence, and throughout there are subtle geopolitical allusions to China and Russia, whose radio controllers sound like yelping dogs. Also striking is the psychological depiction of absolute loneliness in the female character, from her daily life on earth to her existence in space. During the denouement, the male character teaches her that being a person is more important than being a mother; he serves as her archangel in this annunciation where an escape pod, techne, is the sole key to rebirth.
And then the loneliness, the desperate psychology of solitude displayed in the space film genre’s depiction of being cut off and removed from the human community. What strikes one most about these films and their success is that at the core we see characters who exist in utter isolation, alone in space with nothing but computers and sophisticated equipment. Does the popularity of these films suggest that there is something we can all sympathize with in the emotional state of the main characters?
If cinema reveals our dreams, then the lonely characters up in space are simply representations of us on Earth, cosseted by beaming screens and cut off from human contact. The space film reveals that it is we ourselves who are floating in the ether. Indeed, techne in the electronic infrastructure that has come to shape our daily lives can breed a form of augmented social isolation.
Science fiction in the space film is an accurate mirror, for it is when we feel that we are transcending ourselves that we show our roots most of all. The space movie ultimately projects our failure to use techne in a balanced manner. Now that is a space disaster.
