Review: Science-Fiction Film Criticism and the Debris of Postmodernism
Author(s): Peter Ohlin Reviewed work(s): Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema by Annette Kuhn Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction by Constance Penley ; Elizabeth Lyon ; Lynn Spigel ; Janet Bergstrom Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, Science Fiction and Postmodernism (Nov., 1991), pp. 411-419 Published by: SF-TH Inc
This text is more generalized than the others investigated and is a critique of the science fiction genre in general through a postmodern filter, as opposed to detailed critique of Blade Runner itself. It talks about science fiction films remaining obdurately, more interesting and more complex that the theories being developed in response to them. Therefore while much of the current work has interesting things to say about Science Fiction films, it is a long way from creating the crucial bond between genre and criticism we have come to accept in other fields.
It also delves into repressed, ego-centered attitudes and threads through Science Fiction as a genre in terms of sexuality and duality. (Feminist Reflections)
The text generally offers the opinion that Blade Runner is used so frequently for so many different purposes, before emerging finally as an icon of the postmodern condition. It cannot be all things to all theories. Furthermore, as its academic interest increases, it ceases to become as important as a genre film.
It uses references from Blade Runner, Alien (both Ridley Scott), King Kong, ET, among others.
Vivian Sobchac believes that ‘sex and the science fiction film….. is a negative topic.’
‘Where as the semiotic link between biological sexuality and women has been repressed or broken by the genre, the semiotic link between biological asexuality and men has been forged by it and allowed a full range of representation. ...
They have rejected her biology and sexuality-pushed it from their minds and bodies to concentrate on the technology required to penetrate and impregnate not a woman but the universe.
The virginal astronauts of the science fiction film are a sign of penetration and impregnation without biology, without sex, and without the opposite, different, sex.’
This, to her mind, is the basic structure informing the genre, a kind of push-pull configuration in which what is repressed will return in disguise to become overtly articulated; and while historical and cultural changes may be marked, this structure remains constant.
"Displacement and condensation will occur or the genre will not exist-in the same way that metonymy and metaphor exist or there can be no language."
The Science Fiction film, she continues, is
"that genre which most visibly figures the grandest illusions of a capitalist and patriarchal cinema, and which spatially liberates powerful born-again male 'children' from social, political, and economic responsibility for the past and to the present"
In other words, in relation to other genres, Science Fiction cinema is clearly a privileged site for the expression of a number of current concerns with ideology and gender, though that privilege is here pretty clearly limited to the last decade-suggesting that the genre has somehow acquired its privilege in a gradual process which is not explained in more detail.
It sums up by asking the question… for all the accuracy of the observation, which is not whether SF cinema may or may not at times document the postmodernist aesthetic dilemmas, but whether there is any necessary reason for why this is occurring, why it is occurring now, and specifically, why it is occurring in these works at the present time.
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