![]() As Danny Lavery famously wrote in a tweet on Black Mirror pitches for The Toast: What if phones but too much? We see many of the same markers of the badness of a future run amok in such stories: evil governments oppressing the people archaic caste systems endless surveillance and, of course, technology gone too far. Even the most glowing utopian futures depicted in pop culture tend to quickly give way to problems or are exposed as secret nightmares to keep an audience's attention hooked. As is obvious from its very definition, you don't see a lot of stories set in hellish futures where people live mundane lives in a state of content bliss. ![]() The altars called for in almost all extant tragedies.Dystopia is all about drama. ![]() The stage in an ancient tragedy frequently contained an altar or a statue, mainly because Greek tragedy set most of its stories around sanctuaries, temples, and tombs, to fit with the prophecies, purifications, sacrifices, and negotiation over fugitives that occur in many tragic plots. Indeed I suspect that science fiction is one of the things you do with the impulse to create tragedy if the mythic past is no longer available as the impossible other time in which to discover the present.īut rather than argue all the way toward such conclusions, I will content myself for the moment with noting one point of likeness between the genres, in the hopes that the point will illuminate something larger about films (not only science fiction films) and their audiences. In particular we'd want to pick up on ancient tragedy's look into the distant past with moral and political concerns of the Athenian present in which tragedies were performed for science fiction similarly tends to orient itself toward a future in which, despite obvious differences from the present, the moral and political concerns of that modern present motivate the audience's assessment of the future. I believe, although the larger question is not my topic now, that a fresh investigation of the two genres will find a way of going further than such an opposition. (3) As Stanley Cavell was moved to remark, "science fiction cannot house tragedy because in it human limitations can from the beginning be by-passed." (4) Limbs rejuvenate and dead brains live again, at least according to a caricature of science fiction. (2) Science fiction by contrast typically enters the future and invites thoughts about what could happen although it has not yet. The tragedy's plot tried to fix that necessity: Certain events guarantee the ones that follow, as Aristotle indicates in his account of a plot's causal mechanism. Classical tragedy told serious stories from a distant past in which although things could happen that no longer did, still given those mythic possibilities the old story was incapable of changing. A powerful intuition would set the two against each other as rival even contradictory genres, given that science fiction trades on open possibility and tragedy unfolds in necessity. To my mind a productive relationship still unexplored brings science fiction film up against Greek tragedy. But it has made a good heuristic in the past and may well continue to do so. This is not a requirement for the philosophical and critical treatment of a film genre. In light of the role that tragedy has played in histories of the philosophy of art, not to mention the place that tragedy occupies in culture, and in thinking about human life and its suffering, mapping out a film genre today benefits from setting that genre in some relationship to tragedy and to the terms in which philosophy has understood tragedy. Science Fiction and Tragedy or Science Fiction as Opposed to Tragedy
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