Hollywood Utopia

or newly-defined ‘human’ values more robustly and convincingly in the struggle
against dehumanising totalitarianism, as evidenced through various forms of
ecological imbalance.
The invention and reinvention of nature remains the most central area of hope,
oppression and contestation for inhabitants of the planet Earth. Science fiction,
which can be considered a primary postmodern genre, explicitly represents and
problematises notions concerning ‘nature’ and thereby addresses specific ecofears
and sensibilities, in particular environmental pollution and the potential risk
of human extinction.
While technological advances encourage huge population explosions, they also bring
about new risks of sudden population collapse through nuclear war, industrial pollution,
etc. 2
(Leslie 1996: 2).
Fears around technophobia, together with problems of environmental waste, can
often be analysed most effectively within postmodern science fiction films. For
instance, Terminator 2 (to be discussed in detail later) with its explicit anti-nuclear
message, can be regarded as more ‘effective’ as a critique, from a textual and
ecological (peace-making) perspective, than many of the more overtly serious, wellmeaning
realistic exposés of the fear of military and nuclear destruction. All this in
spite of the formal structure of the film which privileges consumptive and wasteful
action, which at first sight appears to efface a green aesthetic as defined and
exemplified in Chapter 1. Of course, this corresponds with the inherent
contradictions embedded within popular texts which effectively incorporate and
disseminate often mutually contradictory discourses. T2 (1991), for instance, also
invites its readers to critique the violence it presents, most explicitly in Sarah’s
feminist diatribe to the scientist Dyson: ‘Men like you built the hydrogen bomb,’
she roars. ‘Men like you thought it up . . . you don’t know what its like to create
something.’
Postmodernist Breakdown/`Radicalised’ Modernism
Many left-wing critics remain pessimistic about the beneficial cultural effects of
what they regard as the impotence, or even the inadequacy, of much postmodernist
theory and its attempts to legitimise what they continue to regard as vacuous
popular culture. As one critic asserts, the ‘map of myth is lost to us. At the pivot of
the millennium the high energy, information rich nations share a unique epistemic
crisis’ (Broderick 1995: xi). Such a ‘crisis’ is transcribed in popular texts through
an apparent ‘breakdown’ in both formal conventions and aesthetics together with
characters and performers inside the pro-filmic event who do not maintain or
5 Postmodern Science Fiction 187