Hollywood Utopia

186 Hollywood Utopia
even utopian, constructions of what has coalesced into the postmodernist
aesthetic.
Metaphorically, the cyborg embraces the fractured identity of the postmodern
world. In many ways it also symbolises and articulates the post-gender politics of
ecological consciousness, while also serving to promote a powerful humane
expression of eco-responsible agency. The dangers, however, of such metaphoric
essentialising concerning varying ontological notions embodying ‘human’ and
‘post-human’ ecological agency, must remain foregrounded as a cautionary subtext.
Legacy of 1950s Science Fiction
Modernity helped to legitimise the theoretical foundations of the Enlightenment,
‘whose outlook, goals and predisposition characterize the modern world’ (Berman
1994: viii). It has hitherto been defined by two central, apparently opposing
affirmations which contend that nature must be (totally) dominated as a means to
human ends and that human ends can be reconciled with each other and nature
through a mutual recognition of free and equal subjects. Such a simplistic, even
naive, agenda can be seen as incorporating the total control of nature and has
augmented a profusion of commodities that attempt to simulate or fulfil human
‘desires’ without always understanding, much less exploring, human ‘needs’. The
postmodernist aesthetic often actively seeks to engage with this dilemma, one with
which ecology has always been preoccupied.
1950s science fiction films dealt with ecological fears most explicitly by exploring
the potential effects of nuclear destruction together with environmental
degradation. 1 With the transformation of science fiction films in the 1980s, the
mood had changed, many claim, towards the presentation of a much more complex,
pessimistic and nihilistic vision of the future. Human nature itself was no longer
accepted as consensual, a fixed entity (as in Body Snatchers), which had to be
defended by right-minded individuals to protect its sacredness. In this new postnuclear
world, good and bad, machine and human, often could no longer be easily
distinguished. Brian McHale correctly regards such science fiction with its ‘relative
openness to intertextual circulation’ as the most valuable model for a
postmodernist consciousness (McHale 1992: 12). In fact, as E. Ann Kaplan says, it
is this ‘blurring of opposition between human and machine, self and other, body
and world, like the blurring of distinctions between plot and mise-en-scène, which
is what makes postmodern science fiction texts so fascinating for cultural critics
especially’ (Kaplan et al. 1990: 100).
This chapter will illustrate how in many of these ostensibly dystopic texts the
cyborgs/machines often manifest more effective, even redemptive, attributes than
their erstwhile human role models. They also, I suggest, (re)present post-human