Category / Science Fiction

by Jonathan M

Vanishing Point (2010) by Ander Monson – Describing the Self that was not there

The existential tradition — via Pascal, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre — has it that there is no fundamental essence to human existence:  For Pascal, our nature lies in our customs. For Sartre, existence precedes essence. A simple way of interpreting this viewpoint is through the notion that we, as individuals, are radically free and that we define ourselves through our actions. But if this vision of the self is correct then what does it mean for society as a whole?  what does it mean for our culture?  For an answer to this, we must look to Heidegger. The American philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus interprets Heidegger as saying that each culture defines for itself what it means to be human. This conception of human nature allows them to live as though each culture has a predefined essence, an absolute morality and an objective meaning of life. As history changes, so too does the conception of human nature and all of the philosophical infrastructure built up around it.  Looking back on discrete periods of human history such as Ancient Greece and Medieval Europe, it is relatively easy to isolate their conceptions of being in the world because those conceptions were fully articulated by particular authors; Homer in the case of the Ancient Greeks and Dante in the case of the Medieval Christians.

One’s attitude to this understanding of the evolution of culture will most likely depend upon the amount of ontological weight one ascribes to Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world:

In his book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), Julian Jaynes argues that the ancient Greeks had a fundamentally different form of consciousness to contemporary humans.  A form of consciousness that made introversion impossible but which allowed desires and ideas to take perceived physical form in the shape of gods.  According to Jaynes, Homer’s descriptions of human cognition were literally true at the time.  Under this interpretation of Homer, there is a near one-to-one correspondence between the scientific understanding of existence and that of Heidegger: This we can call the Strong Dasein Hypothesis.

The other way of looking at the issue is voiced by Brian Boyd in his On The Origin of Stories – Evolution, Cognition and, Fiction (2009), which states that the difference between Homer and Proust is not that Homer’s mind worked differently to Proust’s but that the folk psychological model that informed Homer’s writing was less advanced than that which informed the rendering of Proust’s characters.  So Homer’s failure to discuss the inner psychology of his characters does not reflect his own lack of inner state but rather an incomplete conceptual framework which did not allow for this inner state to be rendered in a fictional form.  According to this view, which we can call the Weak Dasein Hypothesis, Heidegger spoke not of being but of world-view and dealt not in actual things but in perceptions.

Regardless of where one stands along a presumed spectrum of attitudes towards Heideggerian ontology, the fact remains that art does reflect upon how we think about ourselves.  So how do we represent the modern self?  Again, there is a spectrum of viewpoints.  The literary critic for The New Yorker James Woods argues in his book How Fiction Works (2008) that the novel effectively reached a state of perfection with the development of the “free indirect style” prevalent in the work of authors such as Flaubert, Dostoyevsky and Proust.  However, David Shields has argued in his book Reality Hunger – A Manifesto (2010) that many of the techniques and conceits of the modern novel are hopelessly outdated when it comes to describing a culture imbued with radically different values by individuals with very different conceptions of themselves and their place in the world.  As an example of works that do capture our epochal Dasein, Shields offers up a list of works mostly drawn from the emerging genre of creative or literary non-fiction.  Works such as Ander Monson’s Vanishing Point, a collection of themed essays which, as the book’s sub-title assures us, is not a memoir.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Valhalla Rising (2009)

Videovista have my review of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising.

Valhalla Rising is a beautifully shot and darkly existentialist riff on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which, in the grand tradition of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), moves the action from colonial Africa to the age of Vikings.

It is a densely symbolic and beautifully shot film and… it bored the shit out of me.  My main problem with the film is similar to the problem exposed by Emmanuel Carrere’s La Moustache (2005) and demonstrated by Thomas Clay’s Soi Cowboy (2008).

I’ll expand my thoughts n the problem in the post linking to the review of Soi Cowboy but the three posts kind of interlink.

by Jonathan M

BG 28 – Dead Space : The Shock Doctrine Goes Interplanetary

Futurismic have my latest Blasphemous Geometries column.

As I promised last month, this column moves away from my recent tendency to use games as launching pads in order to provide a detailed analysis of one particular game – the zombies-in-space third person action game Dead Space.  This piece was quite a lot of fun to write, hopefully you’ll enjoy reading my analysis of what is possibly the most furiously Marxist video game ever produced.

by Jonathan M

Heartbeat Detector (2007) – Re-Engineering Ethical Process Outcomes

A little while ago, I reprinted my Vector piece on cinematic adaptations of the works of J. G. Ballard.  One of the themes of Ballard’s work I used to pull together the different films was the concept of a benign psychopathology.  This concept serves to unite the different works from the various stages of Ballard’s writing career and also forms the heart of his development of an old surrealist saw into a form of proto-postmodernism.  The idea, at its simplest, is that Humanity has become detached from the environment in which its emotional hardwiring evolved.  From a world of mountains, deserts, forests, swamps and plains we have moved into a world of cities, motorways, cars and conference centres.  A world constructed largely by us, for us.  However, despite this world being supposedly designed to suit our needs, we find ourselves paradoxically distant from it : Either the architecture surrounding us reflects our position and role in society thereby dehumanising us, Or it is an abstract expression of some impractical aesthetic ideal and it alienates us.  Our reliance upon the car and the city is physically and psychologically toxic and yet we cannot return to the state of nature we once lived in.  We die in car accidents by the hundreds of thousand and yet we still drive to work.  We self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, losing ourselves in the pleasures of consumerism and empty sensuality and yet we do not seek to change the world.  The co-dependent and unhealthy relationship we have with our environment is a benign psychopathology, a form of madness created by an attempt to adapt to an unnatural environment.  A form of controlled and evolutionarily beneficial madness.  A form of high-functioning dementia this benign psychopathology is an attempt to reformat our emotional hardwiring and set up a new set of stimulus-responses that are better suited to our new world.

In Ballard’s early Science Fiction novel The Drowned World (1962), the character Dr Robert Kerans is horrified when Captain Strangman drains the lagoon and makes it possible for humanity to resettle the ruins of a drowned city.  In Crash (1973), the character of Ballard develops an attraction for people maimed in car crashes as automobile accidents become fetishised.  In Cocaine Nights (1996), Charles Prentice comes to realise that rape, arson, theft and murder are not anti-social activities but rather necessary tools for the creation of social cohesion.  Throughout Ballard’s work, the severing of Humanity’s emotional connection to the environment allowing the development of benign psychopathologies invariably results from some terrible event.  An event which Ballard scholars have come to refer to as The Death of Affect, drawing upon a chapter in Ballard’s central work The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) in which a couple visit the scene of a car crash only to find that the site has been drained of all emotional content :

“These infrequent visits, dictated by whatever private logic, now seemed to provide nothing.  An immense internal silence presided over this area of cement and pines, a terminal moraine of the emotions that held its debris of memory and regret, like the rubbish in the pockets of a dead schoolboy he had examined” [Page 108]

Of course, benign psychopathologies do not have to take the form of a sexual predilection for car accidents.  They can be much more mundane.  Much more common.  Much more familiar.  Nicolas Klotz’s Heartbeat Detector — based upon the French novel  La Question Humaine by Francois Emmanuel — is an exploration of the idea that certain psychopathologies can survive the death of their host organism, living on in the cultural aether to rewire whole new generations to fit with new and emerging forms of environmental unpleasantness.  A process of adaptation that is noticeable in certain chilling linguistic similarities.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Box (2009)

Videovista have my review of Richard Kelly’s The Box.

From the director of Donnie Darko comes a weirdly iconoclastic film based upon a Richard Matheson short story.  Initially, the film structures itself around a moral thought experiment asking us to consider whether we would kill someone we do not know for $1,000,000.  However, then the film opens up into a science fiction conspiracy theory that is one part Alan J. Pakula to one part Arthur C. Clarke.  Not entirely convincing partly because the ideas it contains are so utterly weird, but I did enjoy the rather brutal satire of Christianity as a sinister alien conspiracy.

by Jonathan M

BG 26 – The Changing Face of the American Apocalypse : The Modern Warfare and Bad Company Series

Futurismic have my twenty sixth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled “The Changing Face of the American Apocalypse : Modern Warfare and Bad Company”.

The column looks at the plots of the Call of Duty : Modern Warfare and Battlefield : Bad Company series and finds not only some interesting similarities but also a question that will be familiar to science fiction fans, namely how far can you go before lapsing into the fantastical?  The column considers how SFnal thinking is now absolutely central to the output of Western political think tanks.

by Jonathan M

A Benign Psychopathology – The Films of J. G. Ballard

Back in July of 2009, I put up an article about some of the attempts to adapt J. G. Ballard’s work for the screen and, in particular, Harley Cokliss’ take on “Crash!”, one of the sections from Ballard’s experimental novel/short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1969).  That article was written in order to help me work out a few ideas for a much longer piece I was writing for Vector – The Critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association.  That longer piece turned out quite nicely and, as it has been a bit slow around here recently, I have obtained permission to republish it online – at least until the BSFA sorts out their mooted online archive.

So, many thanks to Niall Harrison for giving me permission to republish this online and I suggest that all those not already members join the BSFA immediately, if only to get the chance to read Vector.

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by Jonathan M

BG 25 – Mass Effect 2 and Racial Essentialism

Futurismic have my twenty fifth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled “Mass Effect 2 and Racial Essentialism”.

It’s quite a long piece as it is looking at, in my opinion, quite a broad problem with the way that works of genre engage with race and racism.  Namely that by using relationships between different species to represent relationships between different races, religions, cultures and nationalities, works of genre are legitimising not only the idea that there are real differences between these social groups, but also the idea that it makes sense to infer something about someone based upon the colour of their skin or the kind of religious service they choose to attend.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Pandorum (2009)

Videovista have my review of Christian Alvart’s Science Fiction Horror film Pandorum.

This was a terrible film to watch but an interesting film to write about as its action sequences have some quite interesting technical flaws and because its overburdened narrative demonstrates one of the more depressing tendencies in Horror film-making, particularly when that Horror takes place in a Science Fictional setting.

by Jonathan M

Solomon Kane (2009) – There is No God but Man

John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian (1982) is one of the most ferociously Godless films ever made.

In one early scene Conan discusses theology with his companion Subotei the archer.  Conan speaks fondly of his warrior god Crom, stressing his power and roundly mocking his friend’s simple-minded animism (“Crom laughs at your four winds. Laughs from his mountain”).  Subotei listens politely to Conan’s tirade and then points out that Conan’s god may well be powerful but in order to wield his power from his mountain he must walk beneath the sky, thereby making himself subject to Subotei’s divine winds and sky.  This suggestion that organised religion is arguably inferior to a pantheistic respect for nature sets the tone for a script that relentlessly takes pot-shots at the idea of a divinely ordered universe.

Indeed, the film’s main bad guys are the leaders of an aggressively expanding snake cult.  A cult that reveals itself to be little more than a retirement home for ageing barbarian raiders.  Raiders who have figured out that, rather than riding around the landscape threatening people into giving up their goods, it is much easier to simply set up a temple and wait for people to surrender their money of their own accord.  Not content with suggesting organised religion is nothing but a rogue’s retirement fund, Conan the Barbarian also goes out of its way to mock the icons of real world religions.  For example, we have the infamous scene in which Conan is crucified on the Tree of Woe.  But rather than allowing himself to die and for god to resurrect him like Jesus or Aslan, Conan refuses to accept his fate and so he eats a vulture and then gets his friends to make a pact with dark forces in order to bring him back from the dead.  Similarly, the ‘Riddle of Steel’ comes across as a mockery of a Zen koan as not only is there an answer but the answer is that the source of all power in the world is not steel or magic or the gods but humanity.

Even when Conan does pray to Crom he admits that he has no tongue for it and his prayer is less an act of supplication or veneration but a threat and an ultimatum : Grant me victory or to hell with you!  Of course, Conan is granted his revenge but Crom’s presence is conspicuously absent from the battle.  Crom, much like all non-existent deities, is evidently the kind of god who helps those who help themselves.

This sense of godlessness is arguably also present in the source material for Conan the Barbarian, the writings of Robert E. Howard and so it is delightful to see the same muscular atheism appear in a film featuring another of Howard’s creations : Solomon Kane.  Michael J. Bassett’s Solomon Kane addresses the issue of God’s apparent absence head-on by asking whether, in a world where God does not exist but the Devil clearly does, is it ever possible for humanity to achieve redemption?

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