- 3 months ago
Στη Χώρα των Θαυμάτων: Επιστημονική Φαντασία (Wonderland: Science Fiction in an Atomic Age)
2024 | Επ. 3/4 | HD
Με πλούσιο οπτικό υλικό και ειδικά γραμμένη ορχηστρική μουσική, αυτή η σειρά θα εμπνεύσει, θα σοκάρει, θα δεσμεύσει και θα διασκεδάσει, με την υποβλητική περιγραφή των οραμάτων του μέλλοντος που εκφράζονται στα μεγαλύτερα έργα επιστημονικής φαντασίας. Η σειρά διερευνά την ιστορία της επιστημονικής φαντασίας στην ατομική εποχή. Εξετάζει τη δημιουργία της ατομικής βόμβας από τον Robert Oppenheimer και άλλους, τον Ψυχρό Πόλεμο και τις πολλές ποικιλίες έκφρασης επιστημονικής φαντασίας σε όλα τα μέσα.
Παρότι πολλοί ταυτίζουν την Επιστημονική Φαντασία με τη Χρυσή Εποχή της, τη μιλιταριστική ή αποικιοκρατική μορφή της και τη θεωρούν ως μια υπόθεση λευκών, στρέιτ Αμερικανών ή Βρετανών ανδρών, η είσοδος στο είδος γυναικών, μη στρέιτ ατόμων και ανθρώπων από τον υπόλοιπο πλανήτη, έδωσε μια τελείως διαφορετική πνοή στο είδος και το οδήγησε σε πολύ λιγότερο περπατημένα μονοπάτια.
2024 | Επ. 3/4 | HD
Με πλούσιο οπτικό υλικό και ειδικά γραμμένη ορχηστρική μουσική, αυτή η σειρά θα εμπνεύσει, θα σοκάρει, θα δεσμεύσει και θα διασκεδάσει, με την υποβλητική περιγραφή των οραμάτων του μέλλοντος που εκφράζονται στα μεγαλύτερα έργα επιστημονικής φαντασίας. Η σειρά διερευνά την ιστορία της επιστημονικής φαντασίας στην ατομική εποχή. Εξετάζει τη δημιουργία της ατομικής βόμβας από τον Robert Oppenheimer και άλλους, τον Ψυχρό Πόλεμο και τις πολλές ποικιλίες έκφρασης επιστημονικής φαντασίας σε όλα τα μέσα.
Παρότι πολλοί ταυτίζουν την Επιστημονική Φαντασία με τη Χρυσή Εποχή της, τη μιλιταριστική ή αποικιοκρατική μορφή της και τη θεωρούν ως μια υπόθεση λευκών, στρέιτ Αμερικανών ή Βρετανών ανδρών, η είσοδος στο είδος γυναικών, μη στρέιτ ατόμων και ανθρώπων από τον υπόλοιπο πλανήτη, έδωσε μια τελείως διαφορετική πνοή στο είδος και το οδήγησε σε πολύ λιγότερο περπατημένα μονοπάτια.
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00:00Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
00:30Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:00Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:30Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:35και η αλλα Bevölkerung και ο έβugu 완전ίτες σημερινές μία αξισιλότητα,
01:41η χρόνο έχει μια ψηφία μία ζητήρων τεράσης για het να γευνήσουμε με το γεγενο.
01:48Μπορεί άντε ο άντες ως ευκολογητία γινωστάσταση γιλανάς.
01:52Ωναντε την α durationητή προς τις δυσκολογήσεις αλλαγές,
01:55όχι διευθύνες και αλλαγές οδηλών αριστεύχες.
01:59Here one is respected and judged only as a human being.
02:05It is an appalling experience.
02:09A celebrated example would be Ursula Le Guin's
02:14The Left Hand of Darkness,
02:16thinking as it does in really searching ways
02:20about constructions of social identity
02:24within models of gender
02:27and how those might be broken down in different societies.
02:33She reimagines what a world would be like
02:36if gender wasn't fixed and people swapped gender
02:39and you could be a mother, you could be a father,
02:42you spent time as a woman, spent time as a man.
02:44What would society look like in that kind of a world?
02:47The novel famously has the sentence in it,
02:49the king was pregnant,
02:51which in 1968 was quite a striking and shocking thing to say.
02:55And that's one of the things that science fiction can do.
02:57It can change your way of thinking about the world.
03:01In this first phase of Chema, he remains completely androgynous.
03:07Gender and potency are not attained in isolation.
03:12A Gathenian in first phase Chema is kept alone or with others not in Chema,
03:19remains incapable of coitus.
03:22Yet the sexual impulse is tremendously strong in this phase,
03:26controlling the entire personality,
03:29subjecting all other drives to its imperative.
03:34With the cessation of lactation,
03:36the female re-enters Soma
03:38and becomes once more a perfect androgyne.
03:42No physiological habit is established,
03:46and the mother of several children
03:48may be the father of several more.
03:52Ursula Le Guin is kind of a counter story
03:56to the triumphalism of American science fiction.
04:00She is not a writer who was much interested ever,
04:04I think, in the Joseph Campbell paradigm
04:08from The Hero of a Thousand Faces,
04:10in which a male hero leaves the village,
04:15goes through an ordeal,
04:18travels, finds treasure elsewhere,
04:22in the immensity of the galaxy,
04:25comes back, gives gifts to his people,
04:28and the cycle begins again,
04:30perhaps with his children,
04:31perhaps if he is immortal,
04:32because many science fiction heroes are immortal,
04:35he does it himself again.
04:37Almost in secret,
04:39that, I think, may be the main subversion,
04:43technically, that she applied to the genre,
04:46because she told conventional science fiction stories
04:49for several years without actually, at heart,
04:52telling the conventional science fiction story
04:55of the hero and the hero's return.
04:58There's no frontier as such in Ursula K. Le Guin.
05:03My world, my earth is a ruin,
05:06a planet spoiled by the human species.
05:10We multiplied and fought and gobbled
05:13until there was nothing left,
05:15and then we died.
05:18We controlled neither appetite nor violence.
05:22We did not adapt.
05:24We destroyed ourselves.
05:26But we destroyed the world first.
05:31Ursula Quinn's The Dispossessed,
05:33which is an extraordinary novel
05:35about a balance of utopia and dystopia,
05:38about the different ways societies are organised,
05:40about men and women,
05:42beautifully written characters,
05:44a powerful and brilliant engagement
05:47with all that science fiction can be.
05:50It starts off on a moon settled by anarchist exiles
05:54who've built a society
05:56which isn't organised around families.
05:58It's an austere setting.
06:00That's set in contrast with the world
06:03that that moon is orbiting around,
06:05which has a hyper-capitalist society,
06:07a kind of futurist America,
06:09but with the feudalism underlying a lot of capitalist relations more evident.
06:14And a second country on that planet,
06:17which is a kind of late-period Soviet Union,
06:20a declined workers' state.
06:22And so what Le Guin is able to do in that novel
06:25is put these three societies and political and economic systems
06:29in play alongside each other.
06:31So this brings us back to a core idea in her work
06:34of finding balance.
06:35It's part of the Taoist interest in her work.
06:38And day to day, life's a hard job.
06:42You get tired, you lose the pattern.
06:46You need distance, interval.
06:50The way to see how beautiful the earth is,
06:53is to see it as the moon.
06:56The way to see how beautiful life is,
06:59is from the vantage point of death.
07:03Later, Margaret Atwood in A Handmaid's Tale, 1985,
07:09creates a more political model,
07:13a dystopian model,
07:15for how relations between the two genders might
07:20turn sour and might become oppressive.
07:25Women are the creative sex
07:29in that they conceive and give birth.
07:32And in a context where that creativity,
07:36that fertility has been challenged
07:39by some unspecified environmental disaster,
07:43the capacity to give birth
07:45is then managed and controlled
07:48by a profoundly oppressive patriarchy.
07:52Maybe none of this is about control.
07:55Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom.
07:58who can do what to whom and get away with it,
08:02even as far as death.
08:05Maybe it isn't about who can sit
08:08and who has to kneel or stand or lie down,
08:12legs spread open.
08:14Maybe it's about who can do what to whom
08:17and be forgiven for it.
08:19never tell me it amounts to the same thing.
08:26Margaret Atwood that I have a very, very strong admiration for
08:31is the Margaret Atwood of A Handmaid's Tale,
08:34which is a rigorously told, utterly depressing dystopia
08:40and embedded in hard thought about religion, politics, sexism,
08:47America, and has been a justified classic
08:51since it was first published in 1985.
08:54It is a novel that warns how the freedoms
08:59and the new opportunities that women were experiencing
09:04in the 1980s after the first generations of feminism
09:08might, after all, be more fragile than we imagine.
09:13And it's a novel that thinks about reproductive biology
09:18in quite different ways.
09:20It's a novel, too, that explores issues of complicity
09:26and the difficulties of resistance
09:29for those who are caught up
09:32in a really authoritarian and oppressive political context.
09:39How hard it is to hold out against that.
09:42Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!
09:45We're not bad! We won't go bad! We won't go bad!
09:48Don't let the bastards grind you down!
09:51We won't go bad! We won't go bad!
09:53Handmaid's Tale spoke very powerfully
09:58to a generation of women who might have felt
10:02that the fundamental work of feminism was done,
10:06but there was always, at that moment,
10:09an underlying frisson of uncertainty and insecurity.
10:15It is about gender, and it's about sex,
10:18and it's about reproduction,
10:20but it isn't just about those things.
10:23It's also about power.
10:26of course you don't want me to be stupid, bless you.
10:29You only want to make sure you're intelligent.
10:34You don't want me to commit suicide.
10:37You only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency.
10:42You don't want me to lose my soul.
10:45You only want what everybody wants,
10:49things to go your way.
10:51Writers like Joanna Russ,
10:54who is a very forceful and polemical feminist,
10:59are looking at power structures in a broader sense.
11:04Men and women don't belong to different races,
11:10and that what is destructive for women
11:12will finally always be destructive for men.
11:16and reversed, also true,
11:19we are not separate categories.
11:22That is a point often made in science fiction novels
11:27that are looking at questions of gender.
11:30I was attracted to science fiction
11:33because it was so wide open.
11:35I was able to do anything,
11:37and there were no walls to hem you in,
11:39and there was no human condition
11:41that you were stopped from examining.
11:43There is nothing new under the sun,
11:47but there are new suns.
11:52You got to make your own worlds.
11:54You got to write yourself in.
11:56Whether you were a part of the greater society or not,
12:00you got to write yourself in.
12:02So I got to write myself in.
12:04People who feel, often with very good cause,
12:09their identity, they are given at birth as a black person
12:14or as a female person.
12:17That is challenged and questioned.
12:19Certain social categories may be oppressed
12:24and yet may, at the same time, be fluid.
12:27You treat subjects like race, sexual prejudice.
12:30Sure.
12:31All of that.
12:32You could put that in a context that has...
12:34I write about people.
12:35I write about people
12:36and the different ways of being human.
12:38And you can't really do that
12:40unless you write about a lot of different kinds of people.
12:44Has it been difficult for you?
12:46It was horrible at first.
12:49I have a book called Kindred.
12:51It was my fourth published book.
12:53Right.
12:54And in Kindred, my character is a new writer.
12:57And she has lots of horrible little jobs,
12:59cleaning, warehouse, factory, office,
13:02you name it, food processing.
13:04All jobs you knew.
13:05All jobs I'd done.
13:09Octavia Butler, in Kindred,
13:12reverses HG Wells' notion of time travel
13:15to go backwards in time
13:17and return to the world of 19th century slavery as a slave.
13:22One descended, as many slaves were,
13:25from a slave owner
13:27and who was forced into challenging
13:29and painful sexual and other compromises to survive.
13:35She's using the paraphernalia of science fiction
13:38to question how do you live
13:40when you're marginalised and oppressed?
13:43What kinds of complex accommodations
13:47do you have to make with others,
13:50with the society you're in,
13:52in order to live a life of dignity?
13:55The African-American narrator
13:57suddenly finds herself time-slipping back
14:00into the pre-Civil War South
14:02onto a plantation where there is slavery.
14:04and she intermittently slides back to the present
14:07and back to the past.
14:08She suffers horrible injuries.
14:10She suffers horrible abuse.
14:12But through this process,
14:14she discovers that the plantation she's on,
14:16the owner, the owner's son who becomes the owner,
14:19was actually an ancestor of hers.
14:22And she has to decide what she's going to do about this.
14:27Is she going to avenge his treatment of his slaves?
14:31Or is she going to collaborate
14:33in what is effectively the rape
14:35of one of his slaves who's also her ancestor?
14:38I could literally smell his sweat,
14:44hear every ragged breath,
14:46every cry,
14:48every cut of the whip.
14:50I could see his body jerking, convulsing,
14:54straining against the rope
14:56as his screaming went on and on.
14:59My stomach heaved,
15:02and I had to force myself to stay where I was
15:05and keep quiet.
15:07Why didn't they stop?
15:10I had seen people beaten on television
15:14and in the movies.
15:15I had seen the two red blood substitutes
15:18streaked across their backs
15:20and heard their well-rehearsed screams.
15:23But I hadn't lain nearby
15:26and smelled their sweat.
15:28or heard them pleading and praying,
15:31shamed before their families and themselves.
15:35And she thinks about issues of complicity
15:39because a black woman might very well
15:42have been a willing party
15:46to a sexual union that at the time
15:49was her best hope for a better life
15:52or for escape from an intolerable life.
15:56so that it isn't easy to see it simply
16:01in terms of a brutal oppression,
16:04though it is oppression.
16:06I wanted the call for revolution.
16:08I wanted the armed insurrection.
16:10I wanted the revenge narrative.
16:12But what Butler's doing in her work
16:13is a much more complex dealing with
16:17the physical and material realities of existence.
16:20and the pressures, the social pressures
16:23that might have led to white slave owners
16:27behaving as they did.
16:29And you see this in Octavia Butler's thinking
16:32about race move between different identities,
16:35between a generosity and kindness and brutality
16:39as indeed do the slaves.
16:41When I began to do a little public speaking,
16:46one of the questions I heard most often was
16:49what good is science fiction to black people?
16:52I was usually asked this by a black person.
16:56At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination
17:02and creativity.
17:04It gets reader and writer off the beaten track,
17:07off the narrow, narrow footpath
17:09of what everyone is saying, doing, thinking,
17:12whoever everyone happens to be this year.
17:15The overriding question in so much of science fiction
17:21is what is the fear?
17:25Where does the risk come from?
17:27And it invariably comes from the alien, the outsider.
17:30But when you see it depicted in science fiction,
17:34I think it's saying something more to us.
17:36I think it's saying that those beings from outside,
17:40from maybe Martians,
17:42or they may be people from the past
17:45that's invading us on time travel,
17:48that those beings that come from without
17:51are also potentially you.
17:55Samuel Delaney in the late 60s and 70s,
17:58African American queer author,
18:01questioning what it means to be a person
18:04in new and different ways.
18:07He wants to develop a model for science fiction
18:11that would be internalised
18:14to think more searchingly about communication
18:19and about how communication
18:22might connect with oppression,
18:25how communication might in itself
18:27have a political dimension.
18:30It's a rotten, poor city too,
18:32thought the general,
18:34turning the corner by the garbage-strewn curb.
18:37Since the invasion,
18:40six ruinous embargoes for months apiece
18:43had strangled this city,
18:45whose lifeline must pulse
18:47with interstellar commerce to survive.
18:50Sequestered, how could this city exist?
18:54Six times in 20 years it asked himself that.
18:58Answer? It couldn't.
19:01Panics, riots, burnings, twice cannibalism.
19:10We see something comparable in his Dahlgren,
19:13a novel that looks at a city where normal rules
19:18of human existence somehow don't quite apply.
19:22So there's endless disruption and overturning
19:25of the expectations both of the characters
19:28and of the readers.
19:30There is nothing left to watch
19:32but fire and the night,
19:34circle within circle,
19:36light within light.
19:39Messages arrive in the net
19:41where discreet pulses cross.
19:44parametal engines of joy and disaster
19:48give them wave and motion.
19:51We interpret and defeat their terms by terminus.
19:55The night? What of it?
19:58It is filled with bestial watchmen
20:00tramelling the extremities
20:02and the interstices of the timeless city,
20:04portents fallen,
20:06constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke,
20:09roaming the apocryphal cities,
20:11the cities of speculation
20:13and reconstituted disorder,
20:15of insemination and incipience,
20:18swept round with the dark.
20:22We are in the melting pot.
20:24We are in the melting pots.
20:25We are in the melting pots.
20:26We are in the French term,
20:28I think, de gringolade,
20:30the chaos and panic subsequent
20:33to the blowing up of the central tower.
20:37We talk a lot about the 21st century
20:42becoming a science fiction century,
20:45that science fiction has become identical
20:48to the story of our lives as we live them now,
20:52a few decades into the 21st century.
20:55I think it might be more accurate to say
20:57that the 21st century is no longer
21:00a science fiction century.
21:03Around the millennium,
21:05there arose changes in the subject matter
21:07of science fiction.
21:09There had always been
21:10an international science fiction identity,
21:13Europe, the United States and South America.
21:16Now, the contributions from China,
21:19Japan, Africa and the global south
21:22were at last being understood
21:24and recognised by the previously dominant
21:27anglophone world.
21:29We begin to have a disintegration of easy stories,
21:37a disintegration of any expectable
21:41or predictable outcome.
21:44We are in a world in which our recognitions
21:47as science fiction writers,
21:49as scientific romance writers,
21:51or as writers who do not like to think
21:54of themselves as generically located.
21:57All are necessarily,
22:00unless they are in cloud cuckoo land,
22:04writing in terms of world consequences.
22:07You cannot write an adult novel in these years
22:11without being planetary.
22:15It's just not on.
22:18And that is what science fiction has become.
22:20It's become part of a melting pot.
22:24I think there's no question
22:25that the complexion of science fiction has changed.
22:28It's not as white and straight
22:31and American and British
22:33as it used to be in the golden age
22:36or the age of pulps
22:37or even in the new wave.
22:39It's a much more diverse community
22:41of writers and fans.
22:43If we take the example of the Hugo Award,
22:45which is kind of the blue-ribboned award
22:47for the best science fiction of the year,
22:49it's awarded annually
22:50at the World Science Fiction Convention Worldcon.
22:53It's using Liu, the Chinese writer,
22:55who wrote The Three-Body Problem,
22:57which is the first of his trilogy,
22:59a great trilogy,
23:00coming out of a different Chinese context,
23:03translated brilliantly
23:04by the American writer Ken Liu,
23:07Wonna Hugo, Tade Thompson,
23:11Nnedi Okarafor,
23:13brilliant writers
23:14who draw on different traditions
23:15than the European
23:16or the North American cultural tradition
23:18to write science fiction
23:19that's exciting and innovative and brilliant.
23:23We prefer to explore the universe
23:25by travelling inward
23:27as opposed to outward.
23:29No Himba has ever gone to Umzauni,
23:33so me being the only one on the ship
23:36was not that surprising.
23:39However, just because something isn't surprising
23:42doesn't mean it's easy to deal with.
23:45From my perspective,
23:47the aliens are the colonizers,
23:49the people who colonized Africa and Asia
23:51and other parts of the globe.
23:52They came with better technology,
23:55better, you know, more aggressive ways
23:58of dealing with people,
23:59you know,
24:00whereas you have cultures that
24:02in part, part of their culture
24:03is to welcome strangers.
24:04They took advantage of that,
24:06initially came with religion,
24:07saying, oh yes,
24:08we're here to preach peace and love,
24:10which is a thing that kind of helps
24:12to disarm people.
24:13And then they came with gunships.
24:14What else, you know,
24:16what else are aliens?
24:17You know, aliens are colonizers.
24:20This is a psycho field,
24:22a thought space,
24:24essentially unstable.
24:26While most people conceptualize thinking
24:28as this straightforward linear thing,
24:30I see ideas spreading out into alternatives
24:33before one is selected.
24:36In this place,
24:38every notion can potentially become reality.
24:42It is through culture that such things
24:45will be changed as well.
24:46It is through the writing of narratives
24:48and the shooting of films
24:50that promote different kinds of views
24:53of how society can be done,
24:55that will change people's minds.
24:57So one narrative at a time,
24:59one short story at a time,
25:00one poem at a time,
25:01people can be brought to think about things
25:04in a broader way.
25:05And science fiction hasn't remained as it was.
25:08You know,
25:09it has actually changed over the years as well.
25:11and now more, you know,
25:13different kinds of cultural points of view
25:16are actually being lauded within the field.
25:19You could say the world, SF,
25:24has a chance of telling it how it is,
25:26like it is.
25:28Recognizing the world in all its complexity.
25:31Recognizing the clash of stories
25:35that make up our understanding
25:37as a species of the world.
25:39Getting a perspective
25:41or a multiple of perspectives
25:44on the intractable complexity
25:49and richness of the human story
25:52on the planet,
25:54which is so much more
25:56than the story of the first world.
25:58in the first world.
25:59It is the SF or fantastica of the future.
26:03If we have a future,
26:04that future will be told
26:07in many voices at the same time.
26:11Because science fiction is a wonderful form
26:13for exploring difference
26:15and alienness
26:17and otherness
26:18and the heterogeneity
26:21of all possible
26:23and of life forms.
26:24The poetry cloud emits a silvery radiance
26:34which casts shadows upon the earth.
26:40It is said that the cloud emits no light of its own
26:46and the silvery radiance
26:48is caused by cosmic rays.
26:53On the rare occasions
26:54when the intensity of the cosmic rays
26:56dramatically increases,
26:59glimmering sheens of light will appear.
27:05And the poetry cloud
27:06will no longer be cloud-like.
27:10The whole sky will look like
27:12the surface of a moonlit ocean
27:15seen from underwater.
27:20in Denis Villeneuve's film Arrival,
27:25based on the story by Ted Chiang,
27:27a woman attempts to understand
27:29the language of beings from another planet.
27:32In so doing, she saves the world
27:35by bridging the gap between humanity
27:37and the aliens.
27:39Ted Chiang is a writer who's very interested in language.
27:48It's a connection that we might make with Samuel Delaney.
27:52That language isn't just a simple communication tool,
27:56but is a model for human thought.
28:01Memory is a strange thing.
28:05It doesn't work like I thought it did.
28:08We are so bound by time.
28:11by its order.
28:20And this was the end.
28:30Come back to me.
28:31But now I'm not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings.
28:36There are days that define your story beyond your life.
28:41Like the day they arrived.
28:43Ted Chiang's story, which is called
28:46The Story of Your Life,
28:48which was the basis of Villeneuve's film Arrival,
28:51is based on the idea that by learning an alien language,
28:54a language that works in a different way to our language,
28:57that we can understand time in a different way.
29:03With this language, I can see how my mind is operating.
29:08I see the mental structures forming, interacting.
29:12I see myself thinking.
29:14And I see the equations that describe my thinking.
29:18And I see myself comprehending the equations.
29:21And I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.
29:27We can start to see the future.
29:29And that...
29:30Chiang is interested in the question of choice then,
29:34the kind of moral dilemma.
29:35If you know what's going to happen,
29:37would you still choose to do things that might bring pain?
29:40Would you have a child if you knew the child was going to die?
29:43That's, in a nutshell, what the story is about.
29:46From the beginning, I knew my destination.
29:48and I chose my route accordingly.
29:52But am I working toward an extreme of joy or of pain?
29:57Will I achieve a minimum or a maximum?
30:02These questions are in my mind when your father asks me,
30:06Do you want to make a baby?
30:08And I smile and answer, yes.
30:13And I unwrap his arms from around me.
30:17And we hold hands as we walk inside to make love.
30:21To make you.
30:23Knowing the future changes the people we are now.
30:28Accepting the future becomes that circular logic
30:31that makes us whole, in a way.
30:37Eventually, many years from now,
30:40I'll be without your father and without you.
30:44All I will have left from this moment
30:47is the heptapod language.
30:49So I pay close attention and note every detail.
30:53I find Arrival a really beautiful, powerful film.
31:03And it's also a movie about science fiction.
31:06Because science fiction is the genre that imagines what the future might be.
31:10It's a way of looking into the future.
31:12And there's always been that sense, I think, of,
31:14when we look into our futures,
31:18what can we ever see except the fact that we are mortal?
31:22I think science fiction,
31:26as it used to be before the 21st century,
31:30gives us no hope at all.
31:32I think a lot of people in the last decades
31:36have learned a great deal about
31:39how to tell more complex,
31:42humbler, more ultimately adventurous stories
31:47that do give us something like
31:50what we might call
31:52hope.
31:54Let's call it hope.
31:59For one job that fantasy can do
32:02is to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum
32:06and to distract us from terrors,
32:09real or anticipated,
32:10by an escape into exotic, dangerous situations
32:15which have last-minute happy endings.
32:19But another one of the things that fantasy can do
32:23is to normalize what is psychologically unbearable,
32:28thereby inuring us to it.
32:30What I'm suggesting
32:33is that the imagery of disaster in science fiction films
32:36is above all the emblem of an inadequate response.
32:42The interest of the films,
32:45aside from their considerable amount of cinematic charm,
32:48consists in this intersection between a naively and largely debased commercial art product
33:01and the most profound dilemmas of the contemporary situation.
33:05science fiction's preoccupation with alternative realities combined with spectacle,
33:15questions and confuses us about what world we're living in.
33:18In The Matrix, we are told that we're not living in a true world, but in an untruthful alternative reality.
33:26In Marvel and Batman superhero films, a similar alternative reality is presented.
33:31Is there actually something untrue in the world of the creators of science fiction?
33:38Like the Wachowski sisters, who in their work in The Matrix present these superhero activities,
33:44while at the same time suggesting that these may actually be fantasies.
33:48If we opened our eyes, The Matrix suggests, we could find a truer world.
33:54Except that it's not, and we cannot, it is a film.
33:59Audiences are presented with identifications with superhero activities
34:04where the hero does not break down, does not fail, though they nearly always do in reality.
34:11As insurance, the Wachowskis present other scenes showing that the superhero world
34:17is actually based on fantasy.
34:20But is it?
34:22Their heroes, who are invincible, apparently have no Oedipus complex,
34:28no fear, no unconscious, except that expressed in controlled fantasy.
34:35There is an androgynous and gender ambiguity in The Matrix.
34:40An ambiguous sexual identity could be said to undermine and confuse
34:45and put a smokescreen around Freudian theories of Oedipal conflict and fantasy.
34:52Could this apparently or actually remove Oedipal conflict?
34:58The male child's feeling, in Freudian description for their mother, is removed
35:04because the male child has become a woman.
35:07Therefore, there is no Oedipus complex with the mother.
35:10There is then a full identification with the father, who can have superhero capabilities.
35:17There is, in effect, a psychoanalytic insurance policy in the suggestion not to worry,
35:24because these things are only fantasies.
35:27For the mass audience, usually un-presented with and uninformed of these complexities,
35:34it acts as a reinforcement of omnipotent superhero activities.
35:40You can jump from a skyscraper and not be hurt by the fall.
35:44You just pick yourself up.
35:46The get-out for the Wachowskis and similar creators is that they present superheroes apparently as fantasy.
35:57But are they?
35:59In Freud's description, male children have desire for their mother and female children for their father.
36:05This is not the cause or a reason to blind oneself.
36:11In fact, it is the opposite.
36:14It is a reason to open one's eyes and integrate the various experiences and fantasies of human unconscious life,
36:23the inner life into the outer life.
36:35The power of the film and television industry created a form of science fiction that increasingly defined how science fiction is generally perceived.
36:46Science fiction cinema is as old as cinema itself.
36:51In 1895, the Lumiere brothers, who were best known for films of trains arriving at stations and workers leaving the factories,
36:58made a film called The Mechanical Butcher.
36:59It's a very simple 45-second film, cameras pointing straight at this steam-driven, hand-cranked mechanical device.
37:07Someone leads a pig up to it, puts the pig in a box, the wheel turns, and out come cuts of meat and sausages.
37:15It's all profilmic, there's no special effects trickery there or anything, the pig is shoved in the box and this other stuff comes out.
37:23We can't talk about science fiction without talking about Georges Méliès.
37:27Frenchman, illusionist, conjurer, actor, filmmaker, a pioneer of early cinema.
37:35A man who discovered all kinds of techniques that we have now refined and become are just part of the everyday business of filmmaking.
37:44They build a spaceship which looks like a large bullet and they put it in a gun and they fire it at the moon.
37:51And famously you have the image of the moon looking towards it coming and the rocket landing bang in its left eye.
37:59So Méliès' film is absolutely vital in our understanding of where science fiction comes from and how it develops.
38:08As narrative cinema becomes dominant from about 1907 onwards, so science fiction narratives become part of the normal matter of cinema.
38:19And there's a 1910 adaptation of Frankenstein, only about ten minutes long.
38:23Adaptations of 20,000 leagues under the sea, first men in the moon in the 1910s, so some filmmakers are going to the literary sources because of the cultural capital.
38:37Special effects become quite important as well, so there's a 1925 adaptation of The Lost World, Conan Doyle's novel in which explorers find a plateau in South America where dinosaurs have lived.
38:50But it's the key precursor to King Kong in the early 30s.
39:03Filmmakers have always been interested in spectacle and you see it particularly in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
39:101927, German Expressionist Futuristic Film with truly startlingly wonderful images of what a city of the future, a dystopian future certainly, but nevertheless a future that's producing the most extraordinary cityscapes in Lang's imagination.
39:3640s is kind of a fallow period for science fiction cinema, but science fiction takes off again in the 1950s.
39:43You also get the monster movie and King Kong's kind of responsible for that.
39:49But there's also other things going on in science fiction. One of the key science fiction films of the period is Don Siegel's Invasion of Body Statures from 1956.
39:57No, no, you've got to get out of here, please!
40:07They come from another world, spawned in the light years of space, unleashed to take over the bodies and souls of the people of our planet.
40:13It imagines a current moment in American suburban life where conformity has suddenly become this huge threat.
40:22So alien pods imitating and replacing regular small town folk or suburban small town folk.
40:27They're like huge seed pods.
40:30This must be the way that body in my closet was formed.
40:34Miles, where do they come from?
40:36I don't know. If they are seeds or seed pods, they must grow someplace on a plant probably.
40:41And somebody or something wants this duplication to take place.
40:44But when they're finished, what happens to our bodies?
40:47I don't know. When the process is completed, probably the original is destroyed or disintegrates.
40:51No, wait!
40:53This is much more about post-war America that is becoming more conformist and is really, really anxious about what conformity looks like.
41:02About how you deal as a nation, as a culture, with the newfound work freedoms and sexual freedoms women had had during World War II.
41:11There are two films made in 1953. The first of them is George Powell's film of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
41:21And the power of that film, which although updated and set in America, is quite clearly following the scenario that Wells imagined,
41:31is that these aliens are hell-bent on destroying our world.
41:36So the outsiders, in this case aliens, are the danger that we have to overcome.
41:43Sure? Everybody understands when you wave the white flag you want to be friends?
41:49Hey there! Open up! Come on out! We're friends!
41:53That's right! We welcome you! We're friends!
41:57Yeah!
41:58Now the danger is overcome, as in Wells' story, by the vulnerability of those aliens coming in to being susceptible to an infection that exists on our world.
42:12So it isn't us, it's not the human beings of the Earth that destroy the Martians.
42:19It's their own overreaching themselves by not understanding the dangers of our world.
42:24But, however, the story as portrayed is bleak.
42:27And it's one which, whilst ending with, ironically, but obviously for the period not so ironic, with the people of the world going into church and celebrating the fact that they've been saved, in their eyes, by a power beyond them,
42:45which is in fact just the power of the vulnerability of the outsider.
42:49By exactly the same year, a film is made called It Came From Outer Space.
42:56Not quite as successful as George Powell's film of The War of the Worlds, but hugely significant.
43:03Because here, the aliens come to Earth by mistake.
43:08And they find themselves stranded on Earth. Their aim is then to escape.
43:12But the people of that time, they see them as invaders.
43:17They don't see them for what they really are, because they don't understand them.
43:20They are alien, not just alien in their looks or appearance.
43:24They're alien in their requirements, their desires.
43:28That we read into those aliens and need to suppress us, overcome us.
43:34And that's not what they're about.
43:37That spider.
43:40Why are you afraid of it?
43:42Because it has eight legs?
43:44Because its mouth moves from side to side instead of up and down?
43:47If it came towards you, what would you do?
43:53This.
43:54Exactly as you destroy anything you didn't understand.
43:57One of the most poignant moments in those films of that era,
44:01is where right at the end, somebody realises that, okay, they were wrong.
44:05The aliens were not bad beings.
44:09It wasn't the right time for us to meet.
44:12But there'll be other nights, other stars for us to watch.
44:18They'll be back.
44:19Who Int magari are every one thing?
44:21What about the world you lived in your life?
44:22They'll be right now.
44:23Something like this?
44:24No.
44:25Anything like this?
44:26Yours is that lives when the world is rising like that'sn Including a place.
44:27No, no.
44:29My host is the one to 박usmu�ида Posakao noises.
44:31Here in your life...
44:33It's just a republic for a bit of science,
44:36You know, the miracle for a month in the moon kamura,
44:37And I'm a journalistunity so often come to hell.
44:39It's just a big топ of that bulunix,
44:41So all it's a big이죠,
44:44and I'm segue eternally.
44:45Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
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