April 2013

Retro Nostalgia

Retro Nostalgia: Gattaca (1997) and Framing the Multivalent Ethical Dilemma

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Before Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997) begins in earnest, we are compelled to think about its underlying ethical dilemma:  is a meritocratic system based on (mostly pre-selected) genetic variables justified, even if that means denying some people equal access simply because their genes say there is something wrong with them?  If you have seen the film, then you know how the story ends — the genetic “weakling” succeeds at doing the impossible, throwing into question the very notion that one’s genetics are an absolute determination of one’s potential.  Thus, one possible side question is:  without the aforementioned meritocratic system, would Vincent/Jerome have fought so hard to succeed?  Questions like this are why films like Gattaca, The Truman Show, The Minority Report and, to a lesser extent, District 9, Logan’s Run, and Soylent Green (just to name a few) are such profound models of ethical problems put in action. Gattaca is one of the few films that does so directly, offering the following William Gaylin quote in first the few moments: “I not only think that we will tamper with Mother Nature, I think Mother wants us to.”  It is difficult to tell whether the film is a direct response to Gaylin’s belief, a partial acceptance of the principle, or a violent refutation.  I am, however, partial to violence.  Gaylin’s quote is put in place without context, almost as if to tell us that this is a future we very well might see — and soon — not because it is “happening now,” but because we will give in to Mother Nature’s demand.  The natural progression for an intelligent, technology-oriented species such as ourselves is to tamper with what makes us “us.”  In one sense, you might think of Gattaca as Andrew Niccol’s answer to that notion:  yes, we might do it, but the ramifications will create an underclass marked (just like with race or gender) by factors beyond their control. The moral quagmire, however, makes race and gender look relatively tame.* Unlike most (if not all) arguments about race or gender, there is a logic behind Gattaca‘s worldview.  There are no real, scientific differences between Caucasian, African, Asian, and so on — at least, not differences that matter in a meritocratic sense.  But the opposite is true for Vincent/Jerome; he is, in fact, a genetic “weakling,” containing within him flaws that limit his lifespan and his cognitive/physical abilities.  A world where such information is freely available, as it is in Gattaca, has two main options:  it can discard all other subjective factors for selection, or it can shift to the only seemingly objective standard by which to judge people’s capabilities — genetics.  It’s a purely logical system, when you get right down to it, and that, in a sense, is what makes Gattaca a more disturbing dystopia than more violent, direct incarnations. But underneath this is another important factor:  choice.  William Gaylin’s quote suggests that we’ll tamper because that’s what nature wants, implying that genetic augmentation and genetic meritocracies are natural progressions for human civilization.  Yet doing so will mean punishing people for their parents’ behavior.  Vincent/Jerome, as a “god child” (someone born with natural “chance”), is not a participant in his creation; thus, all the disadvantages his genetics offer are ones he could not change even if he wanted to.  The dilemma, as such, is yet another question:  if ability is mostly determined by one’s genetics, and many jobs require a great deal of natural ability, do we relegate entire segments of the population to menial labor in order to increase “productivity” despite the fact that many of those people had no hand in their own creation?  And is doing so the best course of action for this society? Yes, it is (says Gattaca in my mind).  And we’re not supposed to feel particularly good about that prospect, in part because most of us recognize the terrifyingly logical discrimination at the heart of the film.  In the end, Gattaca wants us to reject this entire idea, to throw our chips in with Vincent/Jerome — after all, he does exceed his genetically-determined potential.  But Vincent/Jerome is the exception that proves the rule.  There is no way to know if his success will shatter the perceptions of his world, though it is possible to read the various events in the final moments of the film as leading to that conclusion.  However, I tend to see the end as confirmation:  Vincent’s/Jerome’s success isn’t public, and, therefore, whatever change he might represent for this genetic meritocracy can never be fulfilled.  We will tamper with Mother Nature, yes, but we will also have to accept and adapt to its vulgar consequences. (Can you tell I’m a not terribly optimistic about genetic testing?) ——————————————————————- *When I say “tame,” I am referring to the concept’s logic, not to the historical treatment of groups based on race or gender.  From a conceptual point of view, race and gender, for the most part, are illogical.  We know this only because we live in a world where the vast majority of us agree that having different skin or gender does not mean that you are, by default, inferior to another group.  The only way to maintain that belief in any pure sense is to intentionally maintain paradoxes in one’s mind — I think these paradoxes are what compels some to violence, since the psyche cannot keep contradictory ideas afloat if such ideas are connected to identity construction.

SF/F Commentary

To the Hugo Defenders: Check Your Financial Privilege at the Door

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If you have been following the Hugo Awards discussion, then you’ll be familiar with the various forms of this argument:  if you don’t show up and do the work, then you should stop complaining.  In the Hugo discussion, it translates to the following:  you don’t like how the awards work, but you don’t bother to show up to the meetings, so your opinion is really irrelevant; if you don’t like it, show up and change it…or STFU. To illustrate, I present you some actual examples: Firstly, the WSFS Business Meeting is entirely self-selected. It is not a representative body of any description : the people who participate are there entirely on their own recognizance, & the only opinions they can reasonably be expected to bring are their own. So, to expect them to “engage with wider debates,” when the people who consider themselves to be part of those “wider debates” don’t bother to come themselves, or to form committees & send delegates to represent their views (thus splitting among ten or twenty people what can be the problematic costs of attending a Worldcon), or to “engage” with the people who do attend in any other fashion than writing derisive comments about them on the Internet, seems a bit (to use your words) “self-serving”.  And: Want to be a SMOF? Volunteer to work on conventions. Come to Business Meetings. Get involved. Be competent. Convince others to vote for things you want. In short, cooperate with other people and show that you’re not a crank. But even that relatively low bar is too much for some people. And (this one is actually ironic, since the WSFS system is not actually properly democratic): I had complaints and gripes about the system. People told me how hard it was. They said, “Don’t bother.” I did it anyway, by the book and within the rules. Sometimes I lost, sometimes I won, but the fact that Democracy is Hard Work wasn’t by itself sufficient to discourage me. If you really think this is important enough, then do it already! Otherwise, I’ll continue to consider it whinging. And: So let me pose a hypothetical. You own an apartment in a building, or a flat for the British. And your complex has a management committee that sorts out things like communal gardens, upkeep, roof maintenance and the like.  Typically these things are voted on and people take part. Would you feel just as entitled to moan about how decisions were taken if you’d never been to a meeting, never attended and done nothing other than write letters complaining about how everybody else did it?  Because I’m sorry, that’s what I am seeing a lot of, and I see it pretty much every year, either complaining about the Hugos, or moaning about how expensive Worldcons are to attend and how unfair it is to charge so much.  That can’t be helped. But as you point out, there’s a lot more to Fandom than the Worldcon and the Hugos. But just because you are a Fan, it doesn’t mean that that is a two way street. These arguments are repeated over and over, defended ad naseum, and accepted by a select few as “the way things are, and the way things should be.”  Jonathan McCalmont has called this a strategy of derailing and silencing.  I’m not convinced of the latter, but it is certainly a variation of the former.  At worst, it is a tactic used to devalue an entire subset of opinions by identifying them as “outside” a given arena of engagement, where only quality action occurs.  If you are not an attendee of that arena, your opinion is inherently worthless (or at least worth less than anyone who takes the time to follow the “proper channels”). These arguments should sound familiar in another sense, too:  they are often used against marginalized groups to de-legitimate civil disobedience.  I don’t want to suggest that the folks speaking out about their frustration with the Hugos are a marginalized group; rather, I make this connection because I find it strange that a tactic of the immensely privileged has been re-purposed to marginalize “dissent,” even when that dissent arrives from other privileged individuals (most of us are white males, after all). The problem with this tactic is that it is completely impractical, and downright classist.  In an ideal world, you could easily verbally slap someone for bitching about something in which they take no part.  In that ideal world, we’d all have access to cheap and fast transportation.  In that ideal world, we’d all have Star Trek transporters in our living rooms. But we do not live in that ideal world.  In a very real sense, we live in a far less ideal world than we lived in as little as 6 years ago, before the recession took its toll.  Many of us are making less than we ever did before, or aren’t making anything at all.  Some of us are trying to get our degrees.  Still others live in parts of the world where the cost of transportation is prohibitively expensive — hence why the World SF Travel Fund exists. I happen to be attending Worldcon this year.  There are a number of reasons for this: If #1 and #2 weren’t true, I wouldn’t attend (and I’m not sure if I’d pay for a supporting membership).  For me, Worldcon is prohibitively expensive in general.  Maybe fortune will change that in the future. Currently, I am both a graduate student at a major public university and adjunct faculty as a state college.  In terms of my finances, that means I receive a small stipend as a student and supplemental, non-guaranteed income from adjuncting (i.e., my course load is not fixed and I am paid by-the-class, rather than a standard salary).  Last semester, I worked roughly 80-100 hours a week to make enough money to qualify as lower middle class.  If you’ve lived as an LMC, you know that’s not a lot of

SF/F Commentary

Book Suggestions for “American” Lit Syllabus (a terrible title…)

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If you don’t follow me on Twitter, then you are unaware that I am attempting to teach a somewhat unusual American Lit survey in the fall.  Basically, I am not teaching the traditional American canon (i.e., the greats of U.S. literature).  Instead, my course will offer a broader interpretation of “American” to include works from U.S. writers and writers from the Americas at large — North, Central, South, and the Caribbean.  Essentially, this course will be designed to challenge the traditional canon in almost every way; even the U.S. texts I select will offer a challenge.  While I am familiar with a great deal of work from these regions/areas, there is always the possibility that I’ve missed something I should seriously consider for inclusion — hence, this post. If you have a suggestion for a short story, play, or novel that is from one of these regions, please leave a comment.  I am also open to suggestions for U.S. works written by traditionally marginalized groups (Native Americans, people of color, etc.). So suggest away! P.S.:  Translations are more than welcome (and expected, considering the range I’ve selected).  As long as I can get it in English, it’s open game.

SF/F Commentary

Link of the Week: “Hugo Thoughts and Friendly Fan Space” by Renay

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The Hugo Awards discussion continued quiet eloquently with this post by Renay at LadyBusiness.  She does a fine job adding depth to thoughts I have had since Justin’s harsh criticism for the awards and its process (thoughts I also shared in the latest episode of The Skiffy and Fanty Show).  Hopefully Renay’s thoughts will bring us all down to Earth, even if only for a little while. Go read!

SF/F Commentary

Retro Nostalgia: Metropolis (1927) and the Torment of Humanity’s Dreams

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I’ve often wondered if there is something unique about the “serious” science fiction of the first 30 years on the 20th century (i.e., non-pulp work).  Surely critics more familiar with the era can attest to this with some degree of authority, but since I do not have that experience, I must speak from what little authority I have as a reader and a relatively new teacher of SF/F literature. From this limited perspective, Fritz Lang’s remarkable 1927 film, Metropolis, resembles visionary works such as E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1908) and Karel Capuk’s R.U.R. (1920), each drawing in no small part from earlier SF writings, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or the lesser known Copellia by Arthur Saint-Leon (among others).  The machinic imagination of mankind, in a sense, has always been a part of SF’s consciousness, right from the earliest “true” SF novel, Frankenstein, to the most important (stylistically and philosophically) productions of the era traditionally know as the “Pulp Era” — a more accurate label would be “The Formative Era.”* It is this machinic consciousness that I think defines the era’s most serious ventures in science fiction — serious is defined here as not written exclusively for entertainment purposes (see the works I’ve already mentioned as examples).  For Metropolis, there is a deeply political motive behind the machinic elements:  1) the mechanization-of-man critique of the industrial revolution (imagined by Lang through the brilliant shots of bodies in perpetual motion while maintaining the “machine”); 2) the terror of the Other as imagined through the Machine Man (in this case, there is a third possible interpretation, which takes into account the film’s overtly religious imagery and the mythological allusions surrounding the feminized machine “monster”).  Plenty of film critics have talked about these issues already, so there’s no point covering them in detail here if I have nothing new to add.  However, so much of the important fictions of the era are so deeply concerned with the development of man in relation to his/her technology that it’s impossible to ignore the issue when discussing a film like Metropolis. In a sense, I think of Metropolis as what E.M. Forster might have written if he had turned “The Machine Stops” into a full novel, or, perhaps more accurately, the combination of Jack London’s political dystopia The Iron Heel (which I discussed here) and E.M. Forster’s technological consciousness.  Lang’s film does not shy away from the profound terror that the marriage of religion (broadly speaking), politics, and industrialization (might have) produce(d) — bodies worn down, bit by bit, until there are no bodies left to move the machine (thus, the machine “stops”); class systems split between laborious dystopias (the under “world”) and glorious utopias (the great city of Metropolis itself);** the religious iconography of the broken utopian dream (all hail the machine) and the socialist revolutionary (she is our savior from evil, for she brings us messages from the heart, not from the machine); and the groundbreaking imagination of Lang himself, who made Metropolis into a reminder that utopia has a cost. No wonder, then, that these writers (Lang, Forster, and London, in particular) were never utopians, but realists who could not fathom the future without the immense, distressing struggle to shatter the machinic nature of man.  Metropolis, as an example, cannot help but tear down the foundations of the Industrial Revolution’s grand dreams by stripping mankind of its humanity, literally and figuratively. On the literal front, Rotwang (the mad scientist) creates the Machine Man, steals the likeness of Maria (the virginal “heroine), and turns the machine into the perfect, sadistic “human” anti-revolutionary, determined to destroy the entire system.  The theme is well known in science fiction circles:  the inhuman is always already a threat to humanity’s “sovereignty.”  Thus, the Machine Man’s destructive tendencies are simply a transplanted fear of the mechanization of man embodied in the distressed/ing “heart” of Metropolis.  That Rotwange creates the Machine Man (and steals Maria’s likeness) for his own ends (revenge) is not insignificant.  For a society that imagines itself as “utopian,” it cannot control the irrational core of humanity:  emotion. On the figurative front, Lang’s repetition of mechanical choreographed “dances” suggest that adhering the machine’s “whims” (or, rather, to humanity’s desire to simplify the labor of life) is sacrificing the fluidity of the human subject.  Thus, we are presented with men rocking back and forth in stiff, “perfect” motions, turning dials as if part of a giant clock, where each individual is a gear that must move at just the right pace to keep the entire system running. Quite literally, a segment of Metropolis’ people have sacrificed their humanity during their 10-hour work day to become the gears of a machine.  Unlike the Machine in Forster’s short story, Lang’s machine is laid bare.  We cannot unsee the machinic degradation of humanity, just as Freder (the “hero” of sorts) cannot unsee the lies told to him by his father (Metropolis is perfect; the workers are OK in their position and there is nothing wrong with the world as it is — enjoy your life, my son).*** That these sorts of narratives appear frequently in the two or three decades after the turn of the century (20th, rather) seems somewhat expected, if only because we have the gift of retrospection.  The Industrial Revolution (the 1st and 2nd, really, since there were two distinct “moments”) promised a “new” world (a frontier, if you will).  Lang is just one of many who apparently didn’t see the “good” in the “new.”  What he saw, if Metropolis is any indication, was the death of the human as an autonomous subject.  It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the same arguments are being had about the digital technologies of “tomorrow.”  Is our increasingly digital (read “networked”) culture yet another threat to human sovereignty, or will we weather this just like we did the Industrial Revolution?  Let’s wait and see who tries to be the next Fritz Lang… ————————————————————– *The first 20-30 years of the 1900s were instrumental in

SF/F Commentary

Poll: The Retro Nostalgia Film #8 (Mass Selection Time!)

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I’ve made the following poll open to multiple answers.  If you could, select the three that you’d like to see me cover over for what remains of April.  Only three.  Period.  I’ve come to the conclusion that this will make things easier on me and you (you won’t have to vote every single week to see your film get covered, and I won’t have this constant rush to get to the film in the few days remaining after the poll). So you know the drill — vote!

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