science-fiction

When Utopias Become Dystopias

I really am getting old, aren’t I? I was looking into the new Star Trek series, Starfleet Academy, a bit earlier. There was a time, not that long ago, when the prospect of a new Star Trek series would have made me ridiculously excited. It would have been all I could think about. I knew how infatuated I had been by the previous Star Trek series, and would be looking forward to that continuing:: epic stories about wonderful characters exploring the galaxy.

Now though, that giddy excitement has been replaced with a deep resentful cynicism. Star Trek is not by any means what it once was: the epic stories it once told us of a United humanity’s exploring the galaxy have been replaced with puerile streams of cliches and nostalgia. I no longer have any interest in watching such tripe. Of course, a large part of the problem is the fact that I no longer respect the country Star Trek comes from. There is no denying the fact that Star Trek is an inherently American franchise, and that the vast majority of its characters are ultimately American. Despite its claims to multiculturalism, the future Star Trek shows us is ultimately an American one, and after so long letting it slide I’m afraid that is a notion which I now find repugnant.

The last future humanity needs is one where America dominates, or at least the America we now have. A future where yanks fly around in star ships, doing whatever they want having dominated all other cultures on earth. I have no interest in watching a television program made by the fools who elected Trump, whose country is now descending into the depths of fascism; a program portraying the world remade in their image, where their culture stands over all others. A future where everyone speaks English in American accents, plays baseball and listens to New York jazz. 

While I daresay that I will never stop loving characters like Picard, Worf or Miles O’Brian, the utopian future Star Trek shows us seems repugnant and dystopian under the current light. What we took to be a future of unity now seems like one of dominance and control. Or rather, the culture which such enticing stories came from has now transformed from a bastion of tolerance and opportunity to one of repression, dominance and hatred. The storyteller has transformed, so the stories change too: a realm of unity and acceptance now seems, in this deranged Trumpian epoch, like one of conformity. Contemporary America casts a deep shadow over all of Star Trek, so if Star Trek can be said to reflect America – as it always has – then I have no interest in it.

Fooled Into A Spinoff

I was expecting to write my response to the BBC’s exciting new science fiction series today. From the trailers it had looked quite promising: at last something new to get into and blog about. Something which would potentially divert my intellectual energies away from the usual staples of Star Trek and James Bond. Thus last night I settled down to watch the first two episodes of The War Between the Land and The Sea full of optimism.

I freely admit I can be a dumbass sometimes, but it took me a few minutes to realise what I was watching. The opening struck me as somewhat cheesy, but I could let that slide. It wasn’t until I kept hearing references to “The Doctor” that I realised that, rather than the brand new science fiction series I was expecting, I had stumbled upon some sort of godawful Dr Who spinoff. The odd thing is, there had been no mention of Dr. Who in the trailers, leading me to feel rather misled.

I have not watched Dr. Who in years. It is, let’s just say, not my thing. As much as I love science fiction, I prefer it to be grounded in some semblance of reality – something which Dr. Who does not have. The plots are derivative and contrived, lapsing so far into the fantastical that it becomes nauseating; the special effects third rate at best. Thus to have been tricked into that fictional world when I was expecting something far more refined irritated me. More to the point, I quickly found that what I was watching wasn’t any better.

As an educated, aware man I have nothing against environmentalism. Of course we must do what we can to curb the damage we are now doing to the environment. However, to have such an ethos rammed down my throat with all the subtlety of a shovel wielded by a Eastend builder whose football team just lost five nill was another matter altogether. What we were witness to last night, with its mysterious sea-bound yet humanoid species emerging from the depths to reprimand us for filling the seas with shit, made Beavis seem like an expert in Lacanian psychoanalysis or a three-year-old with a well-loaded paintbrush look like Turner or Matisse.

Check out this no less critical Guardian article for slightly more detail, but if guys like Russel T. Davies want to spread the message of environmentalism, there are far better ways to do it than through something so crass and infantile. Of course, people need to be told about such issues, but to do so so heavy-handedly risks putting people off.

A Breaking Bad Film?

I suppose it is fair to say that it has been a bit of a rough week. Not just generally, where international affairs seem to be steadily progressing from bad to worse, but for me personally. Due to a bug or something I haven’t felt at all myself, and at one point was in fact beginning to get rather worried. However, I’m glad to say that has now passed – as I knew it would – and I once again feel like my usual, curious self.

One of the best things about this week, on the other hand, was that I’ve been continuing to enjoy Breaking Bad. As I wrote a few days ago, until very recently I was completely ignorant of it, I suppose having previously dismissed it as just another American mass entertainment franchise. Just a few days later, though, and I can’t get enough of it. I’ve been binge-watching it, and am already well into the second season.

I think it might well be the ‘something new’ I was looking for – after all, there are only so many times you can watch James Bond films or Star Trek episodes. It seems fresh and novel, like completely uncharted territory: new characters to get to know, as well as new ideas and themes to explore. To be honest, knowing there’s still so much to find out is quite a wonderful feeling.

However, I must admit that there is one nagging question which has already occurred to me: did Breaking Bad ever get a cinematic outing? Did it ever have a filmic manifestation? Obviously, I could simply google whether a Breaking Bad film was ever made or not, but the question nonetheless seems quite interesting in itself. For one, how might the highly complex characters I’m now watching being developed slowly over several seasons be translated into film? And how could you get the same balance of scientific gravitas and criminal transgressiveness?

Structurally of course, films and episodic franchises are very different things: one is self contained where the other is spread out over several hours. Yet fictions created as one can be adapted for the other, the obvious example being Star Trek. As a cinephile, I would be intrigued to find out if there ever was a film adaptation of Breaking Bad, or see what one might look like. It has a combination of academic intelligence and outright subversiveness I have never come across before – a dynamic which I would absolutely love to see transposed to the big screen. I’m now really looking forward to digging a little deeper.

And to think, all this came about due to my shave at the weekend!

Going Off Star Trek

I am, of course, a huge Star Trek fan. I’ve loved Star Trek since my family and I used to watch it every Wednesday evening when I was growing up. I especially liked it’s reassuring, optimistic vision of the future, in which humanity has overcome our petty differences and come together to explore space as one united civilisation. Recently, though – ie in the last few months – something about that vision hasn’t been sitting so well with me: perhaps I’m just getting old and cynical, but what once looked like a united, cooperative humanity, to be honest now just feels like America and American culture writ large. By that I mean, where Star Trek claims to present us with a united Earth culture, if you actually look at it, it’s pretty obvious that the characters and cultural structures we’re presented with are fundamentally American. It is an American film and television franchise after all. The future Star Trek presents us with is one where American culture and the American mindset has somehow risen to dominate the entire globe.

Until now, that has sat comfortably with me, or at least I’ve let it slide. Recently, however, the vision of such an Americanised future has felt more and more insulting. Since their second election of Trump especially, the inherent arrogance of it has become more and more apparent: what gives Americans the right to assume they will dominate humanity’s future? Why will First Contact take place in North America, and why is Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco? Why are these starships crewed mostly by Americans? Indeed, how conceited do Americans have to be to presume that the supposed warp barrier will be broken by a lone maverick from Montana, particularly given that many Americans currently seem convinced that the world is flat and/or was summoned into existence by an imaginary creator being?

Obviously, Gene Roddenberry intended his future to be global and united, famously putting a Russian at the helm of the first Starship Enterprise at the height of the Cold War. Yet these days such things feel more and more like shallow, hollow gestures, varnishing over an America-centric future where their culture is the only one that matters. And at a time where distain for America is growing and it no longer has any claim to the respect it once had, frankly what once felt so optimistic now feels like gut-wrenching arrogance.

Avatar, Then and Now

Dom suggested we watch Avatar last night. Believe it or not, I don’t think I had ever seen it before – I think it had crept under my radar somehow. Now that I have though, I think James Cameron’s 2009 film is certainly worth saying something about, especially in the light of all that has happened since it was released. At it’s heart, Avatar is a narrative of imperialism, especially American imperialism: it is a story about humans colonising another planet to exploit it for it’s resources, and in doing so decimating the homes of the indigenous people. Obviously, this could be taken as an allegory for the invasion of Iraq being invaded for oil, the colonisation of North America, or many other real-life situations. Yet what I was most struck by, watching the film last night, wasn’t so much the combination of live action or CGI the film was famous for; nor the weird intellectual issues rising from having humans control these avatars, seemingly entering into a completely different CGI space which was nonetheless supposed to be the same planet. What I was struck by was the sheer brashness with which the colonisers were acting: they seemed to think they had a god-given right to the planet’s resources, that the natives were inherently inferior to them and were just getting in their way.

Of course, as you would expect from a Hollywood blockbuster, the ending of the film has the native people’s all joining together and showing the invaders what for; but that is only a great deal of semi-covert imperial justification. Indeed, the central love story of the film has a disabled human in his able-bodied avatar fall in love with one of the native people, whose community he has infiltrated. Even leaving aside the fairly sickening anti-disabled, ‘able-bodied is better’ nonsense, at the end of the day humans had no right to be exploiting the planet in the first place, so having the two characters fall in love, like some saccharin romantic justification for the entire premise of the film was just nauseating. No amount of romance can make imperialism right; such love stories are simply attempts to distract us from the fact that one group of people is invading another in order to exploit their country’s resources. The fact that the guy is shown to switch sides in the end and ‘become a native’, does nothing to change that.

Obviously, Avatar has clear parallels with stories about Pocahontas and early American colonists falling in love with Native Americans. On this level, Avatar can be read as an allegory for the European colonisation of North America. Thus, no matter how much James Cameron may have attempted to depict the invading humans as brazen, arrogant and ignorant, the fact remains the film does not question their right to be there, even depicting a love story between members of the two communities. Although it is mentioned somewhere in the film that the invaders had to be there because Earth was dying, such justification seems half-hearted at best. It is very telling that the text does not end with the colonising forces all realising the error of their ways and going back to Earth or finding another planet to live on. While most are shown to return to Earth, some – the ‘good ones’ – were allowed to remain, the implication being that the creators of the film thought the invaders had an overarching right to be there, in spite of all the destruction and suffering they are shown to inflict.

Hence, at it’s heart and as much as it’s director might try to deny it, Avatar essentially justifies imperialism. In it we can clearly read the American ‘we come first’ mindset, which was an integral part of their culture in 2009 and is even more evident now. Obviously in it we can read a justification of the invasion of Iraq, but we can now also make out far more about what has happened since then, about the American mindset, it’s urge to dominate, and it’s unwavering, unquestionable attitude that it’s needs come first. If Avatar is a story about one group of people dominating, bullying and exploiting another, it is now more relevant than ever.

Section 31? Err, no thanks

Given that I’m such a self-confessed Trekkie, you may be wondering why I haven’t said anything on here about Section 31. If you haven’t heard of it, Section 31 is the new Star Trek film starring Michelle Yeoh which was released a week or so ago on Paramount Plus. To be honest, though, as much as I usually love all things Trek, I can’t say I’m that enthusiastic: from the trailers, it doesn’t look like it has anything to do with the kind of Star Trek I grew up loving and want to see the return of. Rather than a thought-provoking drama about a starship crew going out and exploring the galaxy, this appears to be some kind of naff action film. The reviews I have seen don’t make me enthusiastic either. More to the point, rather than having a cinematic release, Section 31 is only watchable online. As I wrote here a few entries ago about the Bond films, I still firmly believe films like this should be enjoyed in cinemas; releasing films over the web reduces them down to mere distractions. I’m thus afraid that this is yet another instance of what was once a big cultural entity losing it’s way and being turned into yet another piece of generic streamable pap.

I’m a ‘Cyborg of Necessity’, Apparently

One of the first things I came across when I started browsing Facebook this morning was this very interesting academic paper by my friend Darryl Sellwood, et al. Darryl is fast becoming a great disability studies academic and writer, who I must admit puts me to shame. The paper broadly argues that the choices and decisions surrounding Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) should be primarily made by AAC users; that is, people who actually use communication aids should be the primary voice in the future of the field, the rules, customs and habits surrounding it. I find that perfectly obvious, and it gets no argument from me.

Reading the paper, though, I came across quite an interesting phrase which stuck in my mind. The text seems to switch from area to area quite a bit, presumably as it goes from sections written by one of it’s five authors to another. One of the authors refers to AAC users as ‘cyborgs of necessity not choice’, a phrase which resonated with me quite a bit, and which I think needs exploring. In my 2014 MA thesis, I touch briefly on how the equipment I use to communicate and move around could be said to evoke Borg implants. The Borg are, of course, the cyborgs of Star Trek. When I was writing my thesis, I think I meant this as quite a cute, throwaway remark; yet I am obviously not the only person to pick up upon the correlation. Does the use of specialist equipment by disabled people really render us cyborgs? What could the sociocultural implications of that be? Could we really seem like the hostile, unfeeling drones bent on assimilating every other lifeform which Star Trek depicts? After all, most mainstream science fiction franchises frame cybernetic organisms, from The Borg to Darth Vader, as some form of aggressive, malevolent enemy. To be honest being called a cyborg, albeit one of necessity, throws up a few quite dark implications and connotations which aren’t all that comfortable, yet which I think need looking a bit deeper into.