One can never be alone in the South—you cannot take three steps without rubbing up against a ghost. The ghastly spectre of white supremacy has a more fleshy face, but the translucent silhouettes of the Cherokee, the Seminole, the enslaved, make their presence known to all who will listen. The House of Hades is no underworld, it is superimposed in unhappy juxtaposition with the lived present. Tiresias had to drink the blood of a slaughtered animal to warn of Poseidon’s wrath, but our ghosts require monuments and flags to speak from the grave.
Read moreJurassic World: Disenchantment and Dinosaurs
The disenchantment of the world accomplished by the development of capitalism and modern science is a common enough theme in contemporary art and philosophy. Markets and colonialism have driven out the demons, gods, and spirits of the old world and given us a new one, now bathed in the aura of technological advancement. Or so the narrative goes. In the midst of this narrative of secularization, there are examples of new folkore, fantasy, and magic which resist the “iron cage” of bureaucratic rationalization. One such thread of re-enchantment concerns the discovery and popularization of dinosaurs.
Read moreMad Max, Feminism, and the Sublime Car Chase
There are few films that achieve critical and commercial success while asserting ostensibly left wing political content within the rubric of Hollywood blockbuster films. In general, these films are structured to avoid politics altogether while, at best, pushing the boundaries of an established genre’s limits for the sake of appealing to a wider audience. Within these constraints, the achievements of Mad Max: Fury Road are astounding, even if they do fall short of establishing a quintessentially “feminist movie,” as many of the film’s acolytes claim.
Read moreA Review of Monsters: Dark Continent
There is a tradition of film-making going back to Apocalypse Now which draws on the critical legacy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (albeit quite uncritically). Utilizing an adventure tale set in a site of colonial intervention in order to promote a cynical point of view stemming from a nightmarish encounter with barbarism is a classic method of generating a piece of social commentary without engaging in overtly political themes. Monsters: Dark Continent, heir to the critically-significant 2010 masterpiece Monsters directed by Gareth Edwards, aspires to construct just such a work of art. Though it succeeds in its project to create a work of art in the aforementioned tradition, it does not quite succeed in the project to create a good film.
Read moreCritical Thought in Age of Ultron?
One might expect something like The Avengers: Age of Ultron to be utterly bereft of anything resembling critical thought, and indeed the structure of a blockbuster of its kind precludes any sustained reflection on anything substantive . . . Nonetheless, there are a couple of remarkable science fictional elements that can be extracted from the mess of frenetic action sequences and the appalling lack of screen time for Thor (I admit it, I love every moment Chris Hemsworth plays Thor, particularly in his delivery of Asgardian ways of speaking…this is, assuredly, a matter of “likes” and not objective analysis on my part).
Read moreUpcoming Blockbuster Movies: Or, Hollywood Milks Sci-Fi
The culture industry is in full swing with the upcoming summer movie season, the time of blockbusters and, nowadays, big adaptations of sf properties. As I type, the Star Wars Anaheim event is ongoing, complete with a teaser trailer reveal that predictably threatened to burn the internet down with traffic. On top of that, a leak of Batman v. Superman’s trailer compelled Warner Brothers to go ahead and release it, and it has contributed to the current trailer craze. But there is more than just Hollywood, Japan’s infamous Toho—of Godzilla and other tokusatsu fame—is set to release the first of a two part live action Attack on Titan film directed by the infamous Shinji Highuchi.
Read moreHALO and the Quality of Pulp
It is always surprising to see certain culture industry products display a degree of thoughtfulness and quality. There are niche markets which seek to produce this kind of thing, but in general it represents a new trend in the development of “cultural” commodities. After all, capitalist social relations are incredibly flexible in their ability to colonize various spaces and take the plundered goods to new grounds, including that of so-called “high art.” In the world of sf, this process is exhibited best by the transformation of “pure entertainment” products into more subtle stories populated with interesting and developed characters.
Read moreDr. Strangelove Meets Godzilla: a review of World War Kaiju
The advent of atomic weaponry in the 1940s forever changed the calculus of power between humanity and nature. In many ways nuclear power radicalized the metabolic rift between the productive apparatus of global capitalism and the biosphere by making the science fictional prospect of actual global warfare and radioactive fallout a hard reality. Coupled with the anxieties and red scares of this period, a culture of panic manifested itself with the advent of atomic horror films in the United States and the first kaiju films in Japan. The subject matter of writer Josh Finney’s independent graphic novel, World War Kaiju, reflects back on this time period by inverting the relationship between metaphor and its referents: what if the metaphors were the actual, and rather than waging war by means of atomic weapons the US and the USSR carried out an arms race of giant monster production?
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