Science Fiction Lecture 1

Science Fictions: The Forbidden Planet

Made in the 1950s, this film was competing with the recently invented television. This was before Star Trek had come out and all that other lure of Sci Fi that had yet to come. Anyway, what is Sci Fi? Well, the genre encompasses certain themes and contexts, iconography, signifyers and narrative structures. Genre is like a “brand” say in which people find it easy to define what it is they’re watching.

In the 20s and 30s, Sci Fi was just another form of horror. In the 20s that was referred to as “the Machine Age” the car was being mass-produced, industry was really taking off. All this change was sparking off anxiety in people about technology and its possible side effects.

In the 50s, the Cold War was upon us, thus loads of nuclear/apocalyptic/Dystopian fantasies were being played out that were being set in the future in B movies. They normally came in double bills at the cinema, or in drive ins.
In the 60s, art cinema directors were backing up the counter culture at the time, Hippies. Scientists were making larger discoveries with more unethical means of doing so. 2001 by Stanley Kubrik was one of the first of Sci Fi intellectual films.
In the 70s, the first big blockbuster movies arrived. “Jaws” was the first one, but then came the first Sci Fi blockbuster, “Star Wars”. This was the first time a crossover between action/adventure met Sci Fi. It was also one of the first films to have a lot of money backing it.

In the 80s, hybrid genre forms were rising. This was because the old genres had had their time, so the cinema was full of SF comedies, SF Horrors such as “Alien”. The anxieties at the time were that of ignorance about genetics/robotics/virtual reality. The dystopian fantasies were being played out here rather than the Utpoian visions because they were more interesting for narratives.

The Pleasure of Sci Fi:
The pleasures we get out of Sci Fi are that we are seeing a mind blowing spectacle, such as, a huge ship descending on us with flashing lights, jets of air coming out like in “Close Encounters of a Third Kind”. New worlds, new sounds, new beings and cool looking weapons also add to the spectacle. More recently, worlds have been becoming more plausible because of technological enhancements in CGI and SFX. Another thing that makes Sci Fi still so popular is that technology is getting better all of the time and we as an audience are constantly enticed to come back to see how far we’ve come and to be blown away again and again.

Another pleasure we get out of Sci Fi is that the genre plays with larger than life ideas; who are we? Why are we here? And who is this God person Anyway? Also subjects like evolution and the future of mankind are played out.
You could say that Sci Fi stories are fables in a way as they show us what could happen in the future and what not to do if we’re going to live.” If we carry on like this, bad things will happen. Subjects that are deeper and that are more current though are subjects like “what’s the difference between us and a robot?” For starters, the word ‘robot’ means slave in a foreign language, most likely Arabic. Or the question that Morpheus from the Matrix asks, “what is real?” So Sci Fi is thus a fable or an extrapolation.

Fictional Modes:
Sci Fi has a fuzzy and blurry relationship with fantasy. Now we all know great and fantastic tales such as LOTR and Harry Potter, but what’s the difference between the two genres? Sci Fi has a distinguishing feature about it, it portrays realism/what could be real one day while LOTR is based entirely in a fictional world. The fact that Gandalf still has hair after being fire blasted by the Balrog is prime evidence that it cannot exist. In reality, the heat blast in the air would singe every hair of his body off. Not to mention all of the magic. So Sci Fi can be probable and possible whilst fantasy is stuff based on folklore and total and obscure imagination. But here’s the blurry part, sometimes Sci Fi tries to convince that it is possible when in fact it just isn’t. It’s terribly impossible. So is it fantasy? Not if it claims that it isn’t. So Sci Fi asks all of these questions “what if?” Extrapolation. What if we could invent a robot that was as intelligent as a human being? Would it have human rights? There a re a lot of psychological issues being raised here with a lot of meaning. This is called “novum”, the word originating from the Sci Fi scholar Darko Sulvin meaning technological plausible but not necessarily possible.

SF narratives are thus driven by the novum. There are many binary structures in SF films that get played out again and again;
• Sci vs nature.
• Sci vs magic.
• Human vs Alien.
• Human vs machine.
• Human vs Sci vs machine vs religion (not really ☺).
• Dystopia vs Utopia.
Many SF texts/films are either left or right winged. Americans believe in the individual heros. All the enemies in these films thus devalue the individual. Th value is all about arming yourself and surviving. These are great and empathetic motives.
Frankenstein and Enlightenment:

This tale was all about the dangers of Sci and how playing God is very sinful. There are a lot of Greek themes such as the Tragedy in Sci Fi films.

Two thems come to mind; Hubris and Nemesis. Hubris is all about the human arrogance resulting in the human challenging God through Sci. The Forbidden Knowledge is a theme that crops up everywhere. Releasing it is like Pandora’s Box. Nemesis is thus about the retribution given out by God/the Gods for upsetting the pre-ordained equilibrium.
The writer of Frankenstein, a “Mary Shelley 1818” was obviously female. So it comes at no surprise that her feministic views come out in the form of a male scientist trying to create life. Yeah, creating life is apparently only exclusive to women. When GM foods were destroyed by Greenpeace, it was the Frankenstein posters that they used about playing God that hit home the most. They thought that bad things would come out of GM foods. A line that was censored in Frankenstein was “I have become GOD!” There was a thunderclap over this sentence.

Thus the tale of Frankenstein’s monster going hay wire and killing people led to it becoming the sub text for nearly every script about robots, cyborgs and replicants. These were by and large SF Horror hybrids.

The Forbidden Planet:
There is the Utopia vs Dystopia in this film with a lot of stereotypical gender roles and cool new technologies.
Gender speaking, the girl in the film is just something to gork at who surcomes to her feminine emotional weaknesses at the end and stays with the trust worthy captain. A bit like in “Star Wars: Episode 3” where Padme kicks arse throughout but then at the end she dies because she has no will to live because Anakin rejected her.

The character “Robby” comes from “I Robot” by Isaac Asimov. He wrote a load of short stories that this film was based on nearly one hundred years ago. The idea that the robot has prime directives to not harm humans and to obey their orders comes from these books. The film is obviously all about these topics. The author claimed that machines should have rights just like humans, but please, can we o animals first.

The Krell technology is a sign of warning, as it states that the Krell just had to think of something and it would be created for them. It ends up destroying the entire civilisation because of Freud’s idea of the ‘id’. The id is based on people having sub conscious desires that they cannot control and thus everyone got destroyed utterly by these subconscious desires. Monsters killed everyone. These are inbuilt primitive drives. So are the Krell our future? Possibly. The film was based on the Shakespearean play “the Tempest”. There’s a cook there, a crazy magician, a slave called Calaban, etc. This was written at the time of Christopher Columbus so the political context there is all about colonisation. The colonisation was going on with space at the time of the “Forbidden Planet” because of Sputnik. The first line in “Star Trek” is “Space, the final frontier.” Why is always about frontiers with America? What’s the current one the Middle East? Was “Star Trek” about the Space Race that was going on with the USSR at the time? I think it was. It could be taken as an advertisement for the whole thing, or sometimes as a warning. It depended entirely on the filmmaker who had the ideas.
So this is the low culture of 50s B movies paired with the high of Shakespeare.

THE END.