Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

than a political alternative to capitalism, but perhaps we
should take this remark in a positive sense as meaning that
it is contemporary capitalism that now owns our powers
of invention, and uses them to imagine a future in which
humanity is overcome, exploiting this ‘threat’ for profit.
As a result, I will argue, it is in films that embrace this
invention of the inhuman while jettisoning any residual
human, neoliberal values, that we will see the emergence of
a ‘new’ future and of a politics that announces it.
But first, let us return to those dystopian interface films
that offer (an often formulaic) critique of virtual reality
in favour of the human. These films almost inevitably
advocate a return to what is ‘real’ (after having placed this
very concept under question) – the human body with all its
flaws and weaknesses, the love of a good woman, a modest
(ie., ‘normal’ and therefore ‘healthy’) sense of self, and the
human rights of individual freedom and ‘happiness’ (a
value that vaguely invokes all of those already mentioned).
These values are posited as universal not because the
films show any great commitment to them, but because
they allow an expedient moral resolution to a narrative
focussed almost exclusively on dark delights. Similarly
unrealistic are the political solutions offered by these
films, which usually involve the extraordinary actions of
a superhero. In these two aspects of the ‘critical dystopia’
film we clearly see the political limits of understanding
science fiction films in terms of ‘cognitive estrangement’.
When cognitive coherency (ie., present reality) dialectically
defines the ‘estrangement’ of the future, then rational and
human factors become the epistemological limits of science
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