Hollywood Utopia

42 Hollywood Utopia
The elite eco-sapiens chosen by natural selection, who serve to protect the planet,
must freely sacrifice their individual human past lives for the corporate ‘common
good’. All they have left to define their ‘individuality’ is their unifying black suits
and sunglasses.
Conventional ‘ideological’ critics might dismiss this ‘playful’ over-determinism of
uniformity and rigid belief system - in spite of its ironic postmodernist surface -as
signalling the re-emergence of a dominant ideological corporatist super-structure
that promotes institutional rather than individual values. But such criticism avoids
appreciating the poetics (much less the entropy) of the text in all its formal,
aesthetic and cultural richness, which privileges a pervasive humanist framework.
My reading illustrates that a potent ecological dimension also remains at the heart
of the text, which is at best under-represented within a strictly ideological reading
that emphasises corporate power politics and ‘aliens’, who can only be connoted as
‘illegal’ and thereby harmful to the body politic. This reading suggests, however,
that the film playfully constructs a more provocative yet incomplete position for
audiences to engage with and questions what it means to be human and part of a
planetary eco-system.
Class, race and gender issues cannot be avoided within film and in any case these
more obvious constituents are necessary to attract audience attention and drive the
narrative forward. However, the ethical and philosophical concerns of the text
overlay these more obvious signifiers and underpin my reading of the film.
For example, the film’s dramatic opening is superbly counterpointed by the mythic
signification at the end of the film and helps to exemplify Merchant’s earlier call
for partnership ethics to resolve conflicts between humans and other forms of
nature (Merchant 1995: 217). Race and gender issues are clinically resolved with a
woman becoming a full partner and member of the elite ‘men in black’ team. More
significantly, the finale articulates the deep ecological meaning of the text.
Focusing on the cat’s collar, which contains the much sought-after object of the
quest, ‘a miniature planetary complex’, the audience is finally allowed into the
visual spectacle of this astronomical other-world. The camera pulls out of the
representation of New York and the planet into the solar system surrounded by
several others, which end up making a slight speck on the screen. When all of the
specks are combined, collectively they represent a cosmic super-system.
Overseeing all this hyper-visualised ‘space’ is a strange cat-like deity, who juggles
several other similar ‘universes’ and proceeds to playfully put them in a large
unmarked bag that is drawn closed.
This technically complex but playful closure both demonstrates and dramatises
human insignificance, which is the ultimate message of modern astronomy and, as
such, remains philosophically awesome. But at the same time the ending also