I spent part of today catching up the last part of Battlestar Galactica Season 4, and I saw Terminator Salvation this evening with Y. I learned in BSG today that the Thirteenth Tribe were actually Cylons–skeletons, bodies, and all. In Terminator Salvation, Marcus Wright is constructed in the other direction than Terminator 3’s Terminatrix–Marcus is the fusion of man and machine. However, Marcus was once a murderer–the unconscionable, monstrous, the inhuman. Given his second chance, he becomes human, or at least what we may consider the human ideal–altruistic, helpful, and self-sacrificing. Thus, the machine makes the man more human. However, throughout Terminator Salvation and BSG, I’m reading a shift in the concern about the machinic appropriation of the human. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the original Terminator and T2 films, and older SF, the fear was only about the surface, about the appearance of human mapped or stretched over a cold, metallic infrastructure. Now, it seems like the concern has more to do with organs and the organic. Where does this anxiety over our bodies and the tissues that make them work and function come from? Obviously, the fear of losing human-ness to the machine is rooted in the emergence and subsequent evolution of anxieties following the integration of humans into the great machine and system of the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps following the turn of the century into the 2000s, the organic (i.e., genetics) meshes with the machine (i.e., AI representing the networked/computerized landscape of the now). What this might mean for future SF and our engagement with organic and machinic technologies I do not know. However, I am eager to discover where this future might lead.
Tag: Film
-
Wall-E, Terrific Science Fiction
Y and I just got back home from seeing Pixar’s latest animated film, Wall-E, at the single screen Highland Theatre in Akron, Ohio. It’s everything but a “silly cartoon.” I have to tell you–Wall-E is TERRIFIC Science Fiction, and GREAT filmmaking!
I’ve seen every film by Pixar except for the Toy Story series, and I’ve enjoyed all that I’ve seen thus far. However, Wall-E surpasses all of their previous work through a well-thought out story, amazing cinematography, good examples of real-world physics, and the interweaving of American consumer culture with capitalistic-paternalism and eco-disaster. The most striking element of the film goes back to Leo Marx’s work, The Machine in the Garden, but I believe Wall-E is emblematic of how Marx is wrong. Marx’s thesis is that American literature imagines an idyllic garden which has been lost and is reattainable through the embrace of technology, but the lost Edenic pastoral is gone forever, and technological progress pushes us further away from it. The characters of Wall-E and his girlfriend, Eve, show humanity the way toward regaining what we’ve lost through two key scenes (one in the film, and the other during the end credits). The earlier scene has Eve take Wall-E’s plant offering into what is best described as a womb. There, the plant is safe until returned to the corporate robot controlled Axiom starship (accepted/unquestioned truth, wow, what a perfect name!). Wall-E and Eve keep the plant safe, and reawaken obese humanity’s connection with (mother) Earth. Then, during the end credits, there are developing scenes in a variety of stylzied animations covering cave paintings to Egyptian heiroglyphics to Impressionism. In these scenes, the garden is recreated by the cooperation of humanity with its autonomous robotic creations.
Wall-E is a really fun movie for all ages, and I guarantee that you’ll be as enchanted as I was by this amazing Science Fiction allegory!
-
More Thoughts on Forced Fellatio in AVP2 Requiem
There’s one point that I didn’t make that clear in my last posting on Aliens Vs. Predator Requiem and that is the underlying problematic nature of the hybrid Alien-Predator. It signifies the ambiguous sex of transsexuals. Its body contains the Predator’s vagina-like mouth, which in turn houses the Alien’s phallus-like mouth extension. Through this imagery of design, the Alien-Predator hybrid represents both the female and male sexes. Which leads me to wonder if the Alien-Predator hybrid’s forcing a pregnant woman to have unnaturally impregnating fellatio represents a culturally derived fear of transsexuals and the intersexed? Is the Alien-Predator hybrid the new barbarian at the gates? Intersexed persons are most definitely individuals and human subjects, so how do these SF images of the marauding/barbaric/primitive/animal Alien-Predator hybrid Other challenge cultural progress in regards to sex and gender? It’s time to reread Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.”
-
On Forced Deep Throat in Aliens Vs. Predator Requiem
On Christmas Day, 2007, I went to see Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem with Ryan, Jarret, Bert, and Stacey. Considering the poor quality of the first Aliens Vs. Predator film, and the general decline of the franchise in general (Aliens is clearly the high-water mark), I wasn’t expecting much from this film. Despite the dreadful story and horror film hijinks, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was something worth discussing embedded within the film. However, I don’t say that flippantly, because it involves serious subject matter in need of reflection away from the glare of the big screen.
This latest installment of the Aliens vs. Predator films is extremely troubling regarding gender, sex, and sexuality. As has been commented elsewhere, Giger’s Aliens are phallocentric with mouths extending beneath the foreskin of the upper cranial case. The crab-like parasites that implant/impregnate potential hosts with the alien egg/embryo are traditionally the means by which the Alien life cycle is completed (Queen lays egg > crab-like parasite implants host > an Alien emerges from the host, developing in part based on the genetic material of the host). Also, the crab-like parasites have a long tail for strangulating the host/victim and thereby forcing the host to accept the implantation from the parasite via a long penis-like extension from beneath its body that enters the mouth and throat of the host to implant the egg/embryo.
Predators on the other hand have never been shown to reproduce on film, but it’s unavoidable to note the terrible resemblance between a Predator’s mouth and the myth of the vagina dentata. It’s only due to an assumption that I first considered Predators male. In the films, their sex and reproduction systems are not explored. They could be a species involving male/female sexing, or considering the fact that these are aliens, they could have a multiplicity of sexes involved in reproduction. In any event, what’s important to consider is the chosen appearance of Predators to have the male anxiety producing (disfigured) vagina dentata.
Aliens Vs. Predator Requiem begins where AVP left off. The fallen Predator warrior initiate is brought onboard the Predator starship, and a new, before unseen Alien potential bursts from the Predator’s chest: an Alien-Predator hybrid. This hybrid wreaks havoc onboard the Predator ship, which subsequently crash-lands in the woodland area near small town America. In this environ, the Alien-Predator hybrid matures into a formidable creature combining Predator strength and Alien voraciousness. Crab-like parasites onboard the Predator spacecraft escape and impregnate human hosts, which begins an epidemic in small town America.
It’s assumed that through some biological process, an Alien hive produces a Queen much like with ants or bees. However, the Alien-Predator hybrid of Requiem is unlike any previously presented Alien Queen. In the other films, an Alien Queen is very large and (initially) stationary in a warm place to lay eggs containing the crab-like parasite. The Alien-Predator hybrid of Requiem develops into a new kind of Queen. Instead of having an ovipositor (using ant terminology) at the rear of its body, the Alien-Predator hybrid is an evolutionary leap that does away with the need for the crab-like parasite.
The Alien-Predator hybrid has a unique delivery system for implanting hosts with an egg/embryo. As shown in the hospital scene toward the end of Requiem, the Alien-Predator hybrid leans over a pregnant woman, opens its Predator mouth folds (think: labia with claws), and forces the Alien-derived mouth extension down her throat. This represents an unavoidable image of forced deep throat, gagging, and swallowing. This already pregnant woman is made to swallow the “seed” of this hybrid sexed creature that in this juxtaposition fills a male role, but an unnatural one of oral impregnation. The result of this impregnation is graphically revealed when multiple Aliens burst forth from the woman’s belly (possibly having devoured the uterus and the unborn human fetus).
What does the Alien-Predator hybrid mean in a wider cultural context? Is this the extreme SF retelling of Knocked Up? Is this an example of male anxiety over childbirth and childrearing? Or, is this new film image a reflection of the backlash against women’s rights following Third Wave Feminism? What about modes of production and reproduction? Each of these are possibilities, as are others, and they should be considered further in regard to this latest film in the popular and on-going Alien and Predator series.
It would be interesting to learn more about the films written, produced, and directed by the team behind Requiem. Is this film part of a trend, or is this a one-off produced to titillate and gross-out the audience (building on the overt horror theme of the film)? Just glancing at the work of The Brothers Strause, they come from a visual effects background, so this could be nothing more than originating from a geek impulse to push the effects envelop. Nevertheless, this image is projected for many people to see, so it has significance beyond the intentions of the films creators and that’s the aspect in need of exploration.
For my friends not familiar with my work as an academic–this is the kind of research that I do. I look at the significance of cultural works in order to interpret and discover meaning. The intentions of the creators, perhaps compelling or interesting, are nonetheless unimportant and generally disregarded in terms of the way the work figures into a wider cultural sense. How can a work be read? How was a work produced (not necessarily literally by hands, but out of a cultural milieu or historical epoch)? How might a work reflect some aspect of culture, and what does that mean?
