Unit 11: Visions of the Future

Question 1

Compare and contrast the themes, structures, and styles of several works that are products of apocalyptic imagination.

Answer 1

• Popular culture is currently awash with apocalyptic imagery which has deep roots in actual behaviour and religious beliefs.
• Battlestar Galactica shows a nuclear catastrophe brought on by technological dependence and religious conflict.
• The Walking Dead presents human aggression as the primary instigator of destruction, with humankind chased on one side by aggressive zombies, and on the other side by violent and destructive humans. Walking Dead presents a vision of humanity as deeply flawed and unlikely to find resolution; humanity is intrinsically destructive, rather than violent only in its extremes.
• the zombie genre reflects peaks in societal unhappiness, particular in relation to failures of capitalism, such as the 2008 financial crisis. Zombies thrill, they terrify, but, to a surprising degree, they can also make us think of our position in capitalist society, as consumers reliant on a financial system that is difficult to understand in its fullness and complexity.
• The science fiction genre has long been recognized as serving such a function, responding to topical issues salient to the period of their creation (race relations, international conflict, war, disease, gender relations, sexual identity, and so on).
• There is a tendency to blur the term “apocalypse” with dystopia and forget the religious connotations of the apocalyptic.

Question 2

Identify the changing concerns in dystopian and utopian works as they reflect the changing concerns and fears of the society that produces them.

Answer 2

• Fredric Jameson considers not what form a future Utopia might take but rather how the desires signified by the term function and how the concept of utopia might shape our conduct and our understanding of the world.
• After the social anxieties sparked by the Scientific Revolution, narratives of a perfect world or a utopian development of humanity became the domain of science fiction which, along with other genres, proposed a range of utopian visions, from the socialist, capitalist, and technocratic to the libertarian, anarchist, and ecocritical.
• The aliens of a utopia might stand for our parents’ love when we were children,
• Because each vision of utopia reveals ideological assumptions of the writer or period, studies and representations of utopias tend to focus on ideology rather than on the viability or realistic merits of any particular form of utopia.
• Utopia is a good place, and dystopia is a difficult place.
• the dystopia presents what makes our world nasty in its extreme (for example, the unhappy inhabitants might be divided by gender, might struggle for money, or might be overwhelmed by their military).
• the aliens of a dystopia might reflect our unconscious fears of the unknown

Question 3

Determine the significance of the machine and technology in popular works, as well as what their depictions represent on a mythic level and what they say about current attitudes toward technology and change.

Answer 3

• “Black Mirror” presents a bleak view of the way technology can bring out the worst in us.

Question 4

Articulate a function for the utopian and the apocalyptic in society.

Answer 4

• After centuries of utopian visions and a century of dedicated utopian struggles, the notion of utopia had become suspect and poisoned. The path to a perfect world had become a path to authoritarian excess; therefore, fallible and limited vistas that viewed humans as intrinsically imperfect were regarded as better.

Question 5

The Psychomyth

Answer 5

• Dostoevsky’s novel becomes an allegory for spiritual awakening and Christian forgiveness, while Le Guin’s is expressly utopian and political.

Question 6

Reading - “Birthing an Undead Family: Reification of the Mother’s Role in the Gothic Landscape of ‘28 Days Later.’”

Answer 6

• Written by Christopher Williams
• 28 days later refers to the menstrual cycle alluding to the multiplication of the undead.
• Boyle’s film borrows from a genre often concerned with women and their roles: the Gothic.
• Gothic tropes: a woman in peril within a Gothic home, this domestic danger related to possible rape, and the dangers of an exterior natural world that threatens to invade the domestic world and disrupt it. Patriarchy appears both the cause and solution to her difficulties.
• in the film, the female protagonist is defined by her marriage qualities: her reproductive role and ability to ward off domestic chaos and invasion through her position as a potential mother rather than through her persona as a survivor.
• Initially, Selena subverts the traditional concept of gender and reproduction. After she enters the domestic home, her attitude begins to take on a more feminine appearance. It is through motherhood and sexualization that Selena finds her ‘proper’ identity.
• Boyle’s conflicting sense of female power in postfeminist culture that drives the development of Selena as a character in the film and leads to a re-embrace of a more traditional conception of feminine roles.
• The Gothic genre presents a dialectic interplay between romanticism and realism by elicits a tension between the narrative’s regressive to innocence and progressive drive to complete maturation.
• The film follows the gothic model by showing Selena’s maturation occurring through her being placed in traditional womanhood roles and by emphasizing that the threat of this act of violation is present as the catalyst for her maturation.
• Argues the film objectifies women through that same postfeminist definition that see violation as a necessary stage before Selena can be positioned and treated as a sex object and mother, as well as securing her identity as a domestic caretaker.
• zombies don’t procreate, they assimilate, which can be also true of a civilizing society. The film consistently plays with the idea of savagery versus civilizing.
• Selena’s genderless position develops over the film into assimilation into the domestic, civilizing lifestyle.

Question 7

Reading - “White and ‘Black’ versus Yellow: Metaphor and Blade Runner’s Racial Politics.”

Answer 7

• Written by Brian Locke
• The city in the film is a reflection of the period’s economic history: the increasing globalization of the national economy with respect to the Pacific Rime, especially LA, and the widespread “yellow peril” fear of a Japanese corporate invasion.
• Asians appear to outnumber white people in the film; while black people do not appear at all. It departs from the standard racial representation of an American city, which is based on a white and black binary.
• Blade Runner depends upon the category of blackness and its role in the history of American slavery and civil rights.
• the replicants reflect the discrimination of black people as well as the history of slavery. the film re-inscribes white supremacy into another type of racial body.
• Blade Runner’s project of defining humanity through the capacity to feel parallels another literary tradition, the sentimental depiction of blackness and American slavery. the film’s technique of humanization by idealization also derives from the tradition of African American slave narratives, whether factual or fictional.
• Roy’s whiteness operates as a prompt for “the white spectator” to exercise the golden rule in her or his dealings with black people.
• The absence of black bodies is evidence that the film participates in the sentimental logic of casting the white man as victim. It both incorporates blackness, yet it excludes blackness of a literal level.
• Depicts Asian stereotypes throughout the film
• The face of the corporate ruling class is an Asian one. The film portrays Asian people as a degraded form of humanity.