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Intellect Books - Emily E. Auger

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497 pages

English

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From the postapocalyptic world of Blade Runner to theJames Cameron mega-hit Terminator, tech-noir has emerged as a distinct genre, with roots in both the Promethean myth and the earlier popular traditions of gothic, detective, and science fiction. In this new volume, many well-known film and literary works—including The Matrix, RoboCop, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—are discussed with reference to their relationship to tech-noir and one another. Featuring an extensive, clearly indexed filmography, Tech-Noir Film will be of great interest to anyone wishing to learn more about the development of this new and highly innovative genre.

Foreword by Gary Hoppenstand

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Method and Models

Chapter 2: The Promethean Message

Chapter 3: Tech-Noir

Appendix 1: Charts

Appendix 2: Tech-Noir Films by Date

Appendix 3: Tech-Noir Films by Type

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Arts visuels

Cinéma

Cinema

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 juin 2011
Nombre de lectures	11
EAN13	9781841505404
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,3800€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Tech-Noir Film
This book is dedicated to Valleyhome Farm
Tech-Noir Film
A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres
Emily E. Auger
First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-424-7
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
So closely are the components of the power complex related that they perform virtually interchangeable functions: not only in the sense that every operation is reducible to pecuniary terms, but that money itself in turn can be translated equally into power or property or publicity or public (television) personalities. This interchangeability of the power components was already plain to Heraclitus at the critical moment that the new money economy was in formation. "All things may be reduced to fire," he observed, "and fire to all things, just as goods may be turned into gold and gold into goods."
– Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine
Contents

Foreword by Gary Hoppenstand
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Method and Models
Chapter 2: The Promethean Message
Chapter 3: Tech-Noir
Appendix 1: Charts
Appendix 2: Tech-Noir Films by Date
Appendix 3: Tech-Noir Films by Type
Bibliography
Filmography
Index 1: Film Titles
Index 2: Film Motifs
Foreword

Modern science fiction has become increasingly more pessimistic than optimistic. Perhaps this is because the novel that created the genre was born with a monster for a father and a technophobe for a mother. I am speaking, of course, of Frankenstein (1818) and the novel’s author, Mary Shelley. Many critics and historians of science fiction, myself included, consider Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece to be the first modern science-fiction story, and here Emily Auger takes this same novel as an early example of the genre of "tech-noir." Shelley’s sinister cautionary tale of Victor Frankenstein’s hubris, his overweening Promethean theft of the fire of life, and his all-too-human failing in refusing to assume responsibility for his pretension to godhood, directed the fledgling genre down a dark path, a literary trail that eventually led to an overarching dystopian worldview of science and technology.
The reason Frankenstein’s monster was such a frightening, yet fascinating, creature for the young Mary Shelley (and for the many succeeding generations of Shelley’s readers) was due in large part to the era in which the novel was first published: the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was not a single revolution at all, but a series of revolutions that rapidly changed the social fabric of nineteenth-century Europe and America. With the rise in factories, there was also an increase in the size of the cities whose populations supported the factories; there was a dramatic shift in social class, with the working and middle classes expanding into an ever-increasing group; there was an erosion of the power of the church, and a subsequently growing faith in science and technology as a replacement for religious belief. In other words, massive social and cultural changes were transforming the old ways into new ways, and the by-product of this transformation was a combination of awe and fear, the type of awe and fear Mary Shelley envisioned in her monster, the type of awe and fear that has dominated science fiction for nearly two centuries.
This is not to say that the lights of optimism have been intermittent in science fiction during its first one hundred years of existence. The "fantastic voyages" of Jules Verne, for example, often glorified exploration and viewed the pursuit of knowledge as heroic. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) fearlessly predicted an American utopia at the dawn of the twenty-first century which, alas, never came to pass. Even the American dime novels of the late nineteenth century saw the frontier populated by young inventors and by mechanical steam-men bravely tramping across the seemingly endless western prairies of the Great Plains. Nearly fifty years later, the American pulp magazines of the late 1920s and 1930s – with their fascination for spaceships, ray guns, and beautiful maidens being abducted by gelatinous, amoeba-like aliens – engendered a childlike fascination with science fiction as space opera adventure.
Today, however, darker visions of science seem more relevant: H.G Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) offers a more compelling metaphor than Bellamy’s Looking Backward , because people are more frightened of the unknown than fascinated by it. And when the unknown, created by science and employed by technology, becomes a weapon of war that can literally destroy the world, as seen with the atomic bomb at the close of World War II, then Mary Shelley’s monster dons a grim aspect larger than that of moral or social argument; indeed, the fundamental narrative of science and technology in fiction – in print, film, and television – in the latter part of the twentieth century became one of human survival itself.
As anyone who has seen the James Cameron film knows, the Tech-Noir is a hip nightclub where Sarah Connor is hiding from the deadly Terminator, a machine passing as a human, following its programming from Skynet, and closing in to kill the mother of Skynet’s destruction. It is an appropriately named bar of garish neon light and shadows, a place where humans are attacked by black technology that seeks not only to snuff the life out of the individual Sarah Connor, but of humanity itself. When Kyle Reese, a soldier from the future and father to Sarah’s warrior-child (and soon-to-be-savior of humanity), intervenes to attempt the impossible and terminate the Terminator before it terminates Sarah Connor, then conflict ensues that defines the dystopian relationship between man or woman and machine. It is a fight to the death.
The Industrial Revolution gave us the Tech-Noir, constructing it brick by grimy brick. It gave us godlike potential through our knowledge of science and application of technology, but it also gave us that reoccurring nightmare of imminent destruction, a nightmare fueled by the understanding of our own limitations as mere mortals to control the Pandora’s box of evils that escapes our grasp when the science and technology that we invent becomes greater than us, more intelligent than us (or absolutely indifferent to us), and willing to destroy us if we get in the way. If you look closely, you will discover that the wild party-goers at the Tech-Noir are actually the offspring of Frankenstein’s monster, the great-great-great-grandchildren that include among their vast numbers those brutal cyborgs, or sinister synthetic androids, or metal monsters, or deadly artificial viruses, or artificial brains possessing deadly thoughts, and they are in no way fond of the mortal descendants of Adam. As you pause to consider the ugly truth and consequences of Victor Frankenstein’s pride, you realize that the defining metaphors of the Industrial Revolution, the post-Industrial Revolution, and the post- post-Industrial Revolution are the true inhabitants of the Tech-Noir.
Emily Auger’s book, which you now hold in your hands, offers one of the finest studies of our dystopian imagination in popular entertainment. Her brilliant discussion of the genre and the theory behind the genre is perceptive, well-grounded in theory, and simply fascinating to read. And that is only the first half of her book. For the second half she also offers a first-rate annotated filmography of the best, or most relevant, or most interesting "tech-noir" motion pictures.
Emily Auger’s expert hand is holding the door open to the Tech-Noir for us to enter, so that we may examine and understand what makes Frankenstein’s children tick and why they hate us so. Enjoy the party.
– Gary Hoppenstand Professor, Department of English; Editor of The Journal of Popular Culture ; Michigan State University
Preface

"Tech-noir" is the name of the nightclub in The Terminator (1984) where Sarah Connor tries unsuccessfully to hide from the machine: this term is also a useful descriptor, not only for the film in which it appears, but for many others that show how technology, once considered the utopian dream of science, has become an aggressively destructive force that threatens to transform the environment into a wasteland and forever alter the forms of human individuality, relationships, and ways of living. 1 The initial objective of my study of such films, which began in 1997, was to compile a representative title list and establish the genre’s recognizable constituent units, such as character types, settings, actions, props, motifs, and plot resolutions. My further objective was to find the place of tech-noir film relative to other and earlier popular genres; thus, in the first two chapters, I examine the importance of two specific myths, Oedipus and Prometheus, to the form and content of popular genres and also demonstrate what others have frequently noted – that genre "hybridization" is the historical process by which new genres form and change to address contemporary social issues.
The selection of the genre classics for analysis was at once arbitrary and obvious: a study of this type could hardly go without attention to Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) may certainly stand for science fiction and who but William Gibson (b. 1948) can represent "scifi" cy