reading two - key points

(in correspondence with Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader edited and compiled by Sean Redmond)

one, Two - Science Fiction's Disaster Imagination by Sean Redmond

• "...science fiction seems to be able to represent and reproduce the individual and collective fears, paranoias, and cultural and political transformations that exist in society," (Redmond, pg. 38).
• "J.P. Telotte examines the significance of what he calls the 'doubling process' ... this 'alluring and potentially destructive' desire to reproduce oneself  'seems to promise a reduction of man to no more than artifice' but with nonetheless holds 'man' in its spell because of the promise of 'bringing us back to ourselves, making us at home with the self and the natural world in spite of ourselves,'" (Remond, pg. 39).

two, The Imagination of Disaster by Susan Sontag

• Scenario 1, colour/wide screen, pg. 40:
1. The arrival of the thing.
2. Confirmation of the hero's report by a host of witnesses to a great act of destruction.
3. In the capital of the country, conferences between scientists and the military take place, with the hero lecturing before a chart, map or blackboard. A national emergency is declared.
4. Further atrocities. At some point, the hero's girlfriend is in grave danger. Massive counter-attacks by international forces...
5. More conferences, whose motif is: 'They must be vulnerable to something.' Throughout the hero has been working in his lab to this end.
• Scenario 2: black&white/low budget, pg. 40:
1. Suddenly, someone starts behaving strangely; or some innocent form of vegetation becomes monstrously enlarged and ambulatory.
2. ...in short, conducting some sort of crude investigation - the hero tries to warn the local authorities, without effect...
3. The advice of whoever further is consulted proves useless.
4. Either the hero prepares to do battle alone, accidentally discovers the thing's one vulnerable point, and destroys it. Or, he somehow manages to get out of town and succeeds in laying his case before competent authorities.
• "Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster... it is a matter of quantity and ingenuity. If you will, it is a question of scale," (Sontag, pg. 41).
• "The standard message is the one about the proper, or humane, use of science, versus the mad, obsessional use..." (Sontag, pg. 43).
• "Most of the science fiction films bear witness to this trauma, and, in a way, attempt to exorcise it. The accidental awakening of the super-destructive monster who has slept in the earth since prehistory is, often, an obvious metaphor for the Bomb ... [and] radiation causalities - ultimately, the conception of the whole world as a casualty of nuclear testing and nuclear warfare..." (Sontag, pg. 44).
• "Science - technology - is conceived of as the great unifier. Thus the sicence fiction films also project a Utopian fantasy... In these societies reasonableness had achieved an unbreakable supremacy over the emotions," (Sontag, pg. 45).
• Depersonalization:
  "For, again, there is a historically specifiable twist which intensifies the anxiety.  mean, the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle of the twentieth century when it became clear that, from now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life under the threat not only of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost insupportable psychologically - collective in - cineration and extinction which could come at any time, virtually without warning," (Sontag, pg. 47).
• "For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror... for one job that fantasy can do is to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us from terrors - real or anticipated - by an escape into exotic, dangerous situations which have last-minute happy endings. But another of the things that fantasy can do is to normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it. In one case, fantasy beautifies the world. In the other, it neutralizes it," (Sontag, pg. 47).