Session 9: Future Humans in Contemporary Film and TV Production II.
5th Global Conference
Sunday 11th July 2010 – Tuesday 13th July 2010
Mansfield College, Oxford
Who’s your Savior? The Changing Messiahs of Contemporary Science Fiction Film and TV
Sofia Sjö
Department of Comparative Religion, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
More and more scholars in the fields of religious studies and theology are turning to science fiction for a greater understanding of both religion in this world and the world to come. Though science fiction has sometimes been hostile to religion this genre has also always shown interest in many theological themes and questions. One such theme is clearly the myth of a messiah (often found in connection to ideas of the end of times). Modern science fiction clearly shows that this myth is alive and well in at least the popular culture of today. The messiahs we find in contemporary science fiction are however not quite the same as the ones we know from e.g. the Judeo-Christian tradition. Contemporary science fiction saviors challenge ideas about the savior’s gender, traditional masculinities and femininities and also the community’s role in the apocalyptic struggle. This paper aims to look closer at some of these changes and challenges as they are represented in a couple of modern science fiction films and TV-series and to reflect on what these representations possibly can tell us about the role of religious communities, spirituality and the myth of a savior in contemporary and future societies and cultures.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Endgameshow: Mitchell and Webb’s ‘Remain Indoors’ Sketch Series, Absurdist Comedy, and the Collapse of Meaning in Apocalypse Narratives
Ewan Kirkland
Brighton University, UK
The ‘Remain Indoors’ series from Mitchell and Webb’s BBC sketch show is explored in this paper as science fiction, as absurdist comedy, and as apocalypse narrative.
This series of sketches takes the form of a futuristic game show being broadcast after an occurrence referred to only as ‘The Event’. Through the quiz master’s desperately cheerful banter, his engagement with deranged contestants, and the questions he asks – the correct answers to which are unknown to all concerned – viewers are given random insights into this bleak world. While the nature of ‘The Event’ is never clarified, it appears most people are now blind, all the children have died, the word “water” has lost all meaning, and both human civilisation and its memory are corrupted beyond all recognition.
While rooted in dystopian science fiction, the ‘Remain Indoors’ series can also be related to absurdist theatre, and certain traditions in British comedy. Like the hapless characters of Beckett’s Endgame and Waiting for Godot, both host and contestants seem trapped within a ruined landscape, possessing only a hazy sense of who, where or why they are, engaging in nonsensical conversations which have no point or satisfactory conclusion. From The Goons and Monty Python to Brass Eye and Bottom, British comedy has echoed such dark and surrealist themes.
This leads to a consideration of apocalypse narratives, which both the ‘Remain Indoors’ series and Beckett’s plays evoke. The nightmare world of David Lynch’s Eraserhead, the surreal war-zones of science fiction comic books, the tattered narrative style of Threads, or the breakdown of language in the linguistic zombie film Pontypool reflect similar themes, in which the end of civilisation constitutes the end of meaning, the collapse of discourse, and the fragmentation of collective and individual memory.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
“We walk Amid Crowds, ride, fly, or fall with the Hero”: Avatars and Posthumanism (via Surrogates, Avatar and Second Life)
Jenna Ng
Umea University, Sweden
This paper first investigates the concept of the self in two recent films—Surrogates (Jonathan Mostow, USA, 2009) and Avatar (James Cameron, USA/UK, 2009)—before interrogating their ideology of posthumanism through the digital avatar in Second Life. The main characters of both films (Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) and Peters (Radha Mitchell); Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Dr Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) respectively) occupy separate bodies/avatars which they manipulate in the midst of the Na’vi in Pandora and surrogates in a futuristic world of mechanical bodies. These presentations of avatars/surrogates advocate an unabashedly posthuman vision which disavows and, in some cases, abandons the human body and real-life bodily experience. The posthuman self is thus a mode of being not only transferred to but wholly occupies the avatar—perfect, indestructible and, most of all, heroic: “We walk amid crowds, ride, fly, or fall with the hero” (Bela Balazs).
Yet, I argue that the avatar as experienced in the virtual world of Second Life (SL) profoundly qualifies this vision. I argue that the SL avatar remains very much tied to real life experience, whereby its identity of self is determined not by the disembodiment of its digital data or the disavowal of bodily experience, but by the derivation of being from movement, personality, carnality, perceptual experience and haecceity. The interrogation of posthuman identity is thus a more nuanced strategy of slippage between real and virtual worlds, of mining the interstices between them as experience is translated into projected memory, perception, sensuality and embodiment. In this way, the ideology of the human and of posthumanism in the two films may be re-drawn and re-explored, whereby the posthuman identity as interrogated through the subversion of the avatar/surrogate is not of disavowal of the body, but by commingling sensorium and image, so that the meaning and sense of self is no longer discrete but emerges from both body and representation.
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