Hollywood Utopia

5 POSTMODERNIST SCIENCE FICTION
FILMS AND ECOLOGY
The totalizing incorporation of Nature by industrialized culture, and the commodification
of the Unconscious into a visible and marketable ‘desire’ produced as media spectacle
have now expanded capital to its ‘purest form’, and with that expansion we have seen
the emergence of a new cultural logic: ‘postmodernism’
(Sobchack 1997: 244).
This apparently new ‘cultural logic’ is most clearly expressed in the proliferation of
science fiction texts in Hollywood. This final chapter addresses the popular
representation of spectacle and the use of a form of sublime excess within a range
of popular science fiction fantasies. To do this, a selection of close textual analyses
will again be used, focusing in particular on the representation of human agency
and applying cyborg theory to illustrate how such apparently transgressive
postmodernist expressions can be applied to an ecological utopian discourse.
Postmodernism is often identified with an all-consuming late capitalist economy
drained of its critical power. However, we need a more flexible analytical model to
help detect traces of varying, sometimes contradictory, discourses. Art Berman’s
methodology of separating ‘groups of ideas into two poles and then walk[ing] back
and forth between them’, especially using textual analysis, so that in the end a
‘visible path’ is hopefully worn (Berman 1994: viii), is especially useful. To help
create this path, conceptual ‘myths’ such as transgression, excess and, in
particular, Donna Haraway’s theorisation of the figure of the cyborg will be used.
The following discussion highlights how ‘nature’ and its co-present ecological
sensibility can evoke a potentially subversive, even utopian, presence as opposed to
the ‘cultural logic’ of contemporary Hollywood film.
In effect, the science fiction genre affirms that we are only truly human when we
are in contact with what is not human. This section serves to articulate
contemporary eco-fears as expressed through science fiction films which are
usually dismissed as being preoccupied with empty spectacle. The chapter in
general also focuses on the transgressive potential of excessive scenography, but
more particularly, on new forms of representational agency which attempt to help
revitalise, if not create, potentially new ecological metaphors within postmodernist
science fiction. Initially at least, the notion of postmodernity is applied as a crude
periodising strategy to connect science fiction films made since the 1980s and to
frame various attributes concerning pessimistic readings together with positive,
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