PH2224GEK2040

Philosophy & Film

John Holbo

Lecture 3

Vocation or Vacation?

The Day The Earth Stood

Still

thaumatopoieô - to work wonders

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

- Arthur C. Clarke

“It is owing to wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders); and therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.” - Aristotle, Metaphysics

Science as Vacation or Science As Vocation?

“Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.)”

“Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts. Most frequently, the scientific dressing clothes fantasy. And fantasies are as meaningful as science. The phantasms of technology now fittingly embody our hopes and anxieties.”

-Aldiss, Billion Year Spree

"Hitherto, except in exploration fantasies, the fantastic element was brought in by magic. Frankenstein, even, uses some jiggery-pokery magic to animate his artificial monster. There was some trouble about the thing's soul. But by the end of the last century it had become difficult to squeeze even a momentary belief out of magic any longer.

It occurred to me that instead of the usual interview with the devil or a magician, an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted. I simply brought the fetish stuff up to date, and made it as near actual theory as possible."

-H. G. Wells, Preface to The Scientific Romances (quoted in Aldiss, pp. 8-9)

Things To Come was supposed to be a step forward. So Wells hated any step back …

Then comes the crowning imbecility of the film - the conversion of the Robot into the likeness of Mary. Rotwang, you must understand, occupies a small old house embedded in a modern city richly adorned with pentagrams and other reminders of antiquated German romances, out of which its own has been taken. A faint smell of Mephistopheles is perceptible for a time … There is not one good-looking nor sympathetic nor funny personality in the cast; there is, indeed, no space at all for looking well or acting like a rational creature amid these mindless, imitative absurdities.”

- H.G. Wells reviews Metropolis

… Set into the black wood of the door stood, copper-red, mysterious, the seal of Solomon, the pentagram … It was said that a magician, who came from the East (and in the track of whom the plague wandered) had built the house in seven nights … Then came a time which pulled down antiquities … but the house was stronger than the words on it, was stronger than the centuries. It hardly reached knee-high to the house-giants which stood near it. To the cleanly town, which knew neither smoke nor soot, it was a blot and an annoyance. But it remained.

- Thea von Harbou, Metropolis

“By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allen Poe type of story - a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision … Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading - they are always instructive. They supply knowledge … in a very palatable form …

New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all possible of realization tomorrow … Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written … Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well.”

- Hugo Gernsback

“Scientific methodology involves the proposition that a well-constructed theory will not only explain away known phenomena, but will also predict new and still undiscovered phenomena. Science fiction tries to do much the same - and write up, in story form, what the results will look like, when applied not only to machines but to human society as well.”

- John Campbell, editor Astounding Stories

“The idea that a magazine like Astounding, or Analogy as it’s now called, has anything to do with the sciences is ludicrous. You have only to pick up a journal like Nature, say, or any scientific journal, and you can see that science belongs in a completely different world.”

- J. G. Ballard (1969)

“Einstein fulfills all the conditions of myth, which could not care less about contradictions so long as it establishes a euphoric security:

at once magician and machine, eternal researcher and unfulfilled discoverer …

unleashing the best and the worst, brain and conscience,

Einstein embodies the most contradictory dreams and mythically reconciles the infinite power of man over nature with the ‘fatality’ of the sacrosanct, which man cannot yet do without.”

- Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“Compared with the science fiction novels, their film counterparts have unique strengths, one of which is the immediate representation of the extraordinary: physical deformity and mutation, missile and rocket combat, toppling skyscrapers …

… The movies are, naturally, weak just where the science fiction novels (some of them) are strong - on science. But in place of an intellectual work-out, they can supply something the novels can never provide - sensuous elaboration. In the films it is by means of images and sounds, not words that have been translated by the imagination, that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death, and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.”

- Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster”

Must I take action in order to get a hearing?

What sort of action do you mean?

Violent action. Since that seems to be the only thing your people understand. Leveling New York City, perhaps. Or sinking the rock of Gibraltar …

I wouldn't want you to harm anybody, or destroy anything. Maybe a little demonstration?

Something dramatic but not destructive? That's quite an interesting problem. Would the day after tomorrow be alright?

“Another kind of satisfaction these films supply is extreme moral simplification - that is to say, a morally acceptable fantasy where one can give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings.”

- Susan Sontag

Barnhardt: Tell me, Hilda, does all this frighten you? Does it make you feel insecure?

Hilda: Yes, sir, it certainly does.

Barnhardt: That's good, Hilda. I'm glad.

“There is a vast amount of wishful thinking in science fiction films, some of it touching, some of it depressing. Again and again, one detects the hunger for a “good war,” which poses no moral problems, admits of no moral qualifications.”