Hollywood Utopia

162 Hollywood Utopia
(Kelly 1994: 191). This is a long way from the total rejection of alien life forms
recommended by the ‘Body Snatchers’ to all ‘right-minded’ humans.
But Kevin Robins in a sceptical critique of such apparently radical systems theory
contends that this utopian vision of new mass technology proposed by visionaries
like Kelly and others are ‘all driven by a belief in Transcendence’: a faith that, this
time around, a new technology will finally ‘deliver us from the limitations and the
frustrations of this imperfect world’. Utopia, Robins concludes, ‘is more than just
a pleasure ground. Communications translate directly into communion and
community’. We need to dis-illusion ourselves, especially since the ‘technological
imaginary’ continues to be driven by the ‘fantasy of rational mastery of humans
over nature (even extraterrestrial) and their own nature’ (Robins 1996: 86).
However, Robins ultimately goes too far, totally dismissing (post)modern society as
‘not an alternative society but an alternative to society’ (ibid.: 246), an assertion
which will be questioned in the final chapter. Critical discussion of ‘alternative’, if
totalising, systems embodied within such populist science fiction texts remains
both healthy and fruitful for developing forms of ‘cognitive mapping’ of possible
future(s) and establishing eco-metaphors for evolutionary and symbiotic modes of
human consciousness. Gregory Bateson, who was influential in the countercultural
movements in the 1960s, forcibly asserts how the species that destroys its
environment destroys itself. Representative archetypes like Picard and the Borg
provide powerful contrasting prototypes within this primary ecological and
evolutionary debate.
The Borg provides a potent metaphor that expresses a form of ecological
representation and agency, exemplifying the beautiful symmetry of the system,
which, unlike the crew of Star Trek, makes few concessions to conventional notions
of eco-humanity. A technologically driven belief in a truly sustainable (Borg-like)
eco ‘super’ system being created is inferred and endorsed by most systems
theorists. Yet as cited by Robins, various dangers remain inherent in any new
system that is not tied into ecological sustainability - especially when such
connections could serve to legitimise, even endorse, regressive ideologies. At the
same time, the Borg alien invaders pose an extreme narrative danger because they
embody a malevolent vision of radical difference, which disguises a fundamentalist
form of regressive sameness. This threatens to exceed the bounds of Star Trek:
The Next Generation’s utopian future, circumscribed as it is by the original
nineteenth-century humanist assumptions. Like the original series, TNG appears
to construct its utopian future by drawing on a modernist faith in rationality,
progress, human perfectibility and expanding frontiers.
TNG’s continuing vision of a communitarian utopia depends on a particular
constellation of concepts -‘progress, perfection, and social harmony, that all revolve