Hollywood Utopia

156 Hollywood Utopia
gender stereotyping which is avoided in the evocation of masculinity in The
Incredible Shrinking Man. Nevertheless, sparks of utopian representation,
embodying the wish-fulfilling urge for harmony with the eco-cosmos, clearly
enunciated by the ‘Shrinking Man’ has not been lost at the end of the millennium.
The mise-en-scène set in the sand in the latter half of Contact continues to focus
on Ellie kneeling down in a supplicant religious pose, while observing a sublime
landscape (similar to the Grand Canyon) and hence reminiscent of the closure of
The Incredible Shrinking Man. However, this apparently utopic vision negates the
possibility of Ellie creating Bryant’s new form of ‘radical otherness’. In particular,
Ellie cannot rise to the challenge of social integration, much less any radical form
of otherness, remaining trapped within her psychological determinants. Her
journey from orphan to mature scientist demonstrates, at best, a faulty sense of
transformation and remains a flawed prototype as an ecological agent.
This is most graphically illustrated in a sequence after Ellie has given evidence to
another committee on the unrecorded events of ‘first contact’. When she leaves the
court escorted by Joss, her surrogate-father/lover, it is he who has to speak to the
reporters and general public massed outside. She has no public voice but instead
privately smiles in approval at her benefactor, a religious visionary who sees beyond
the personal and the scientific and eulogises upon her purity of heart and
continued faith in herself. Her latent characterisation is incapable of developing
like the ‘Shrinking Man’ who effectively mutates outside of the corpus of
egocentric selfish agency.
Since the late 1960s and 1970s, ecological agency and expression became much
more contradictory, as can be appreciated by analysing the Star Trek phenomenon
from the ‘countercultural’ 1960s into the ‘postmodern’ 1990s. The Star Trek series
illustrates how human ecological contradictions and conflicts are best explored
using alien life forms as a counterpoint to human forms. In particular the notion of
‘otherness’ as contradictory is most clearly illustrated by Star Trek, which helped
create a whole new world view alongside other potential life forms, which were at
best sketched out within 1950s B-movies.
Star Trek: First Contact
Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing
(5 year) mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new
civilisations, to boldly go where no ‘man’ has gone before.
This opening mantra of the original Star Trek series serves to position the series
within the frontier myth conceptualised by the Turner thesis and the
Americanisation of the West, which is extended into extraterrestrial conquest. Star