Hollywood Utopia

3) Modern agricultural methods – addressed in several chapters.
4) Overusing natural resources – explicitly addressed in several chapters (Leslie 1996: 68)
3. This is reminiscent of the 1950s evocation of the transcendental sublime in the closure of The
Incredible Shrinking Man, discussed earlier.
4. Like nostalgia, ‘utopianism is of course commonly associated with escapism; with a distracted,
unrealistic gaze towards a perfect future rather than a preferred past’ (Brooker 1997: 273).
5. Remediation is defined as ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms’
(Bolter and Grusin 1999: 273).
6. Haraway further readdresses many of the primary essentialist and pedantic feminist debates and
asserts how ‘monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imagination’
(Haraway 1991: 180). The marginalised other has remained a site of contention within cultural
studies, and feminist discourse in particular, since their inception. However, cyborg identity goes
beyond the reductive opposition of male/female and represents an ‘imaginative resource’, says
Haraway, in developing an argument for ‘pleasure’ and ‘excess’ in the confusion of boundaries
and creating a sense of responsibility in their reconstruction (Haraway 1985: 66B7).
7. These notions are addressed in her appreciation of cyberpunk narratives which she describes as:
‘focusing explicitly on the destabilising impact of new technology on traditional social and
cultural spaces, with the collapse of traditional cultural and critical hierarchies and the erosion of
distinction between experience and knowledge, which has provided the decentering and
fragmentation of the subject. Cyberpunk explores the interface between human and machine in
order to focus on the general question of what it means to be human’ (Wolmark 1994: 110).
8. Feminist critics tend to undervalue action heroes (as purely goal-oriented and narrative-driven)
compared to melodramatic texts which more faithfully address the ‘interior self’ of emotions. I
would take issue with this generic comparison and affirm that such action genres can effectively
connect with the interior self of their protagonists as much as their melodramatic counterparts.
9. In many ways the framing narrative is structured like a classic Greek tragedy which exposes a
(Christian) controlling meta-discourse, with oppositional future forces looking down on
‘contemporary’ humans as they send back proto-agents to fulfil their predetermined destiny.
Such a narrative structure privileges a ‘conservative’ teleological time-shift and frame of
reference, unlike more elastic and open-ended postmodernist texts which do not appear, on any
level, to privilege any one position. Consequently, the film must remain stunted as a prototype for
a progressive form of eco-sensibility.
10. See, for example, George Bataille’s cross-cultural study of violence and the sacred analyses of
deep-seated psychological motives for such sacrificial devices, which affirms sexual motivation.
5 Postmodern Science Fiction 229