Hollywood Utopia

228 Hollywood Utopia
the human species. They have witnessed, even literally embodied, the extremes of
a dystopic future and consequently serve as potent if unrepresentative signifiers of
a revivified and deep ecological form of post-human agency.
This ethical and ecological dialogue always involves the need for choice,
dramatising the need for core values while allowing space for ambiguity, even
multiple dialogical space. Film has finally helped to affirm the potency especially of
these dialogical ‘moments’, 16 allowing audiences to both look at and through these
opaque representational diegetic significances. While (over-used) concepts such as
‘excess’ and ‘sublime’, even the Joycean narrative device of ‘epiphany’, often appear
to endorse a conservative romantic heroic experience, predicated on closure, I
would affirm their liberatory, even residual transcendental powers. By opening out
all the senses to the experience of the primary elements of nature through a
therapeutic form of aperture, especially after experiencing the breakdown of
various dystopic universes, this helps to counterpoint a potentially progressive, if
sometimes incoherent, form of ecological exposure, even legitimation.
The affirmative pleasure of the postmodernist critical aesthetic endorses a ‘bothand’
frame of reference without having to conform to the limiting and controlling
straitjacket of an ‘either-or’ scenario, which continually privileges sometimes
restrictive rationalist paradigms. Appreciating these mythic human fantasies need
not infer that they have to conform to established norms, such as rationality, logic
and compatibility. Consequently, often contradictory mythic tropes can happily
overlap and merge into each other without causing unnecessarily disruptive
dissonance. Such potentially disruptive fusion - if only evidenced through excessive
moments in otherwise conventional narratives - is almost encouraged within the
postmodernist aesthetic in its seemingly endless creative expression of new forms
of entropy. Many of the films discussed in this book express in varying degrees such
contradictory ecological tropes, implying both dissonance and dissent as well as
consent. 17
Notes
1. ‘In the post Hiroshima world, S.F. made emotional sense. The fears that S.F. had treated in the
past were too real and the genre flourished as a means of simultaneously highlighting and
banishing these fears as film after film depicted the awful consequences of the misapplication of
technology and man’s inability, after much destruction, to regain control of his destiny’ (Hardy
1995: xiv).
2. Biodiversity is, according to Leslie, lost as a result of four main causes which can loosely be
connected with the various chapters of this study:
1) Destruction of the wilderness – addressed in Chapter 2.
2) Pollution – addressed in all chapters, but particularly with regards to science fiction.