J.P. Telotte,
Science Fiction Film.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001.
ISBN 0 521 59647 9
254pp
AU$49.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Cambridge University Press)

Uploaded 20 September 2002

It says something of the science fiction film genre that it reaches from Metropolis (Lang, 1926, Germany) to Metropolis (Rintaro, 2001, Japan).

There were earlier science fiction films of course (eg., Melies’s A Trip to the Moon (1902)), but it is significant that after 75 years not only are the same grand themes still central to the genre, but so is the name Metropolis and the vision it invokes. It is a dark and complex vision which, in the cases of Germany and Japan, clearly has much to do with the cultural trauma of rapid industrialization and urbanization leading to nazism, fascism, totalitarianism, total war, mass atrocities, abject and utter defeat and a desire for redemption.

The American historical experience has been quite different and so the science fiction film in the US has usually concerned itself with different themes, although many of these have frequently been derivative of certain elements of the Metropolis Ur-text.

It is a strength of this book that it covers extremely well the history and theory of the American science fiction film; it is a weakness that it doesn’t place this material in a broader comparative context that would illuminate all science fiction films. One might expect this comparative treatment in our age of globalisation, except that the science fiction film is a singularly excellent example of where globalisation does very much mean US cultural imperialism.

Nevertheless, this book is a work in the series of “Genres in American cinema” and its limitations are therefore both necessary and understandable. Within these limitations, its strengths are manifest. There is no doubt that J.P.Tellotte, who is Professor of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has written an important book.

Central to the book’s strengths are its clearly written and engaging style and its sensible and coherent organization. It has three parts: Part I “Approaches”, introduces the SF film and its critical context; Part II “Historical Overview”, provides a comprehensive but also concise history of the American science fiction film; Part III “Film Analyses”, offers valuable insights into four science fiction films that the author regards as important.

For the present reviewer, the first two parts are the book’s best aspects. Its discussion of science fiction as fantasy is lucid, as is its explication of various critical perspectives on science fiction films. These include humanism, ideological criticism, psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism, and Susan Sontag’s contributions. The historical review is almost worth the price of the book alone, offering an intelligent discussion and making good use of the critical perspectives introduced in Part I.

Part III suffers from the inevitable problem that scholars’ tastes and methods of evaluation of films will differ. Telotte has chosen four films:  THX 1138 (Lucas 1971), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg 1977), Robocop (Verhoeven 1987), and The Fly (Cronenberg 1986). If one had to choose only four films to focus closely on in a book such as this, one’s case for Close Encounters and Robocop would be very strong. However, it is not at all clear how one could feature THX 1138 and The Fly in front, for example, of Alien (USA 1979), Aliens (USA 1986), The Andromeda Strain (USA 1971), Blade Runner (USA 1982), E.T.the Extra-Terrestrial (USA 1982), Forbidden Planet (USA 1956), The Matrix (USA 1999), On the Beach (USA 1959), Star Wars (USA 1977), Star Trek (various), The Terminator (USA 1984), The Time Machine (USA 1960), 2001:A Space Odyssey (UK/USA 1968), or War of the Worlds (USA 1953) – to mention just the most obvious of recent American science fiction film masterpieces.

No doubt the author wants to illustrate and apply certain themes and approaches (eg., the fantastic, the marvellous, the uncanny) through the films chosen, and the discussion that is provided is valuable as far as it goes. Nonetheless, an overall vision of the American science fiction film genre that culminates in this selection is perhaps problematic.

What is this vision? It is a view that sees the American science fiction film as being primarily concerned with the implications for Americans and American society of the “science-technology-reason triad” and the challenges for accepted boundaries implied by it. Around this core vision are woven many useful analyses, including discussions of some of the films mentioned above. However, there are alternative visions of the science fiction film, based on different concerns, phobias, anxieties, fantasies and insights. Some of these were mentioned at the outset of this review in connection with the iconic Metropolis Ur-text, but their interest lies precisely in their being non-American films.

However, even within the history of specifically American science fiction films one could argue that the central concern is not simply with the “science-technology-reason triad” but with encountering the Other, conceived in a variety of ways. Aliens, extra-terrestrials, cyborgs, androids, replicants, robots, Martians, the monstrous-feminine, are central to film after film with science and technology serving mainly as the infrastructure that makes such encounters possible. Closely coupled with this preoccupation with Otherness is an obsession with violence – Blade Runner, for example, is an extremely violent film, and the “director’s cut” that seems to imply that Deckard is himself a replicant can be read as a clumsy but revealing attempt to limit the violence to the replicants themselves instead of accepting that it originates ultimately in their human creators and regulators. No such reticence limits James Cameron’s vision in Aliens, which cuts deeply into the cultural traumas of American culture to reveal the horrific capacity and fascination for the violence that can erupt in the encounter with the Other. John McTiernan’s Predator (USA 1987) offers another perspective, but with the same vision. In Starship Troopers (USA 1997), Paul Verhoeven depicts the earth transformed into a fascist dystopia as its population is totally mobilized for a genocidal war with creatures from space that are deeply alien. It echoes, of course, The War of the Worlds, where the war is won not by total mobilisation of the human race but by common bacteria. A further dimension to this anxiety about the Other is the paranoia portrayed in films like the original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (USA). In a recent departure made imaginatively possible by the advent of cyberspace, Otherness is invested in reality itself and the self become the alien. Consequently, films including The Matrix, eXistenZ (Canada, France, UK 1999), Dark City (USA 1998), Total Recall (USA 1990), and Minority Report (USA 2002) resonate deeply in a culture obsessed with identity and the elusiveness of reality in a postmodern hyper-real world. At this point, one must lament the absence in this book of any particular discussion of the pivotal role played by Philip K. Dick in contemporary science fiction.

Nevertheless, despite such concerns with focus, one cannot deny the value of Telotte’s book. It complements and up-dates other works like Vivian Sobchak’s Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (London: Rutger’s University Press, 1987); Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (London: Duke University press, 1993); Kim Newman’s Apocalypse Movies: End of the World Cinema (New York: St Martins, 2000); and Carl Freedman’s Critical Theory and Science Fiction (London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000). It would be an excellent text for any academic course on the subject.

Mervyn Bendle