Quote from: bobby brown on Dec 20, 2016, 08:38:07 PM
Everything Alien did in 79 doesn't work today. Take mothers chamber for instance, or the display screens. Star Wars is differently, because it is a universe on its own, While Alien is trying to portray OUR future.
I've spent an entire semester studying the aesthetics and motives of science fiction texts (visual or orthographic). I would have to disagree with you on its representation being our future. It may have been the future in the mind of a 1970s filmmaker or artist, but it is still an imagined "future of one moment of what is now our own past" (Jameson 151).
Of course, Jameson is talking about Utopian writings of science fiction, but according to him, we have "[a] constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself" (153)
but in the same article, extends this logic to Dystopian concepts:"All of this can be said in another way by showing that, if Soviet images of Utopia are ideological, our own characteristically Western images of dystopia are no less so, and fraught with equally virulent contradictions [...] Orwell's novel [
1984] indeed, set out explicitly to dramatize the tyrannical omnipotence of a bureaucratic elite, with its perfected and omnipresent technological control [...] to show how, without freedom of thought, no science or scientific progress is possible, a thesis vividly reinforced by images of squalor and decaying buildings. The contradiction lies of course in the logical impossibility of reconciling these two propositions: if science and technological mastery are now hampered by the lack of freedom, the absolute technological power of the dystopian bureaucracy vanishes along with it and "totalitarianism" ceases to be a dystopia in Orwell's sense. Or the reverse: if these Stalinist masters dispose of some perfected scientific and technological power, then genuine freedom of inquiry must exist somewhere within this state, which was precisely- what was not to have been demonstrated" (155-6).
In regards to Alien's so-called envisioning of our future, Jameson would argue "...These visions are themselves now historical and dated-streamlined cities of the future on peeling murals-while our lived experience of our greatest metropolises is one of urban decay and blight. That particular Utopian future has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past.
In reality, the relationship of this form of representation, this specific narrative apparatus, to its ostensible content-the future-has always been more complex than this. For the apparent realism, or representationality, of SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us "images" of the future [...] but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present" (151).
In other words, there is no "future" in what Alien shows us. It is not a crystal ball in that sense. It reveals something in our own present that we cannot ordinarily see: "Elaborate strategies of indirection are therefore necessary if we are somehow to break through our monadic insulation and to "experience," for some first and real time, this 'present,' which is after all all we have" (151).
Works Cited
Jameson, Fredric. "Progress Versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?"
Science Fiction Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 1982, pp. 147-158.