Description
Science Fiction media has long been analyzed as a reflection of or commentary on culture and political economy. Science fiction media itself, from Frankenstein to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Blade Runner and beyond, has evolved over time as culture and the economy change. Many perspectives on science fiction seek to determine its role in culture. Early critical theorists saw mass media as having a dumbing down and homogenizing effect on culture. Marxist theorists argue that science fiction acts as a genre that is able to subvert the world of capitalism and all of its negative effects on humanity. From a critic of the postmodern era, Fredric Jameson argues that all forms of cultural production, including science fiction, have been completely commodified, stripping them of their subversive potential. This project surveys contemporary science fiction film and television to discern if the genre is simply part of the culture industry as early critical theorists argue, offers the powerful critique argued by Marxist theorists or if the genre has been commodified, as Jameson suggests, rendering it incapable of offering subversive messages. A multi-perspective analysis of contemporary science fiction reveals that the genre and its traditional themes have largely been commodified, causing them to reify rather than subvert capitalism. Most science fiction today, at best, clumusly struggles to articulate the postmodern era, rather than critique it, and reveals that this completely commodified postmodern era contains a fatalistic view of humanity, one marked by a death of utopian thinking and a lack of imagination. There are a few examples, however, of science fiction that offer updated critiques as they acknowledge that the postmodern era is itself dystopian, rather than projecting dystopia into an imagined future or alternate reality. These examples are also successfully subversive due to their anti-essentialist views and their placement of liberation in human interaction and experience rather than in technology or science.
