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Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science-Fiction Film, 1979-2017: The Aesthetics of Enclosure by Harry Warwick (review)

2024; Volume: 51; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sfs.2024.a931165

2327-6207

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

Reviewed by: Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science-Fiction Film, 1979-2017: The Aesthetics of Enclosureby Harry Warwick J.P. Telotte Commodity Futures. Harry Warwick. Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science-Fiction Film, 1979-2017: The Aesthetics of Enclosure. Liverpool UP, 2023. x+ 202 pp. $130 hc. [End Page 333] For many commentators, utopianism has become practically synonymous with sf as a genre. It commonly denotes a central concern, even a longing, for what might be, and particularly for the ways that science and technology might help bring that other world or condition into being. Expanding this notion, utopian thought has also—and increasingly—become a useful analytic method for deconstructing and recasting a variety of conceptions about contemporary culture and human subjectivity. While primarily focused, as its title underscores, on dystopicnarratives, Harry Warwick's Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science-Fiction Film, 1979-2017: The Aesthetics of Enclosureserves both of these interests. The book repeatedly zeroes in on notions of utopia and its generic status, including in the discussion a close reading of Thomas More's foundational volume, all in the service of identifying a film subgenre, the "utopian dystopia": that is, a narrative that paints a bleak picture in the service of suggesting something better. At the same time, the volume is heavily praxis-oriented, deploying a Marxist methodology to focus on and critique cinematic depictions of what Warwick identifies as "enclosures"—boundaries of public land, of nations, of minds, etc.—that are emblematic of changing attitudes toward what might be. The result is a book that vacillates between trying to identify and employ generic concepts and forwarding a political vantage, as it aims to show how certain "neoliberal narratives," particularly those of American sf films, have lost their way in their treatment of individualism, commodification, and property rights in what remains a stubbornly capitalist world. Bracketing almost forty years of films, Warwick's book argues that, despite sf's demonstrable popularity, the genre is today "in decline" (2). It advances this argument by comparing two groups of what it identifies as "Hollywood" sf films over the roughly contemporary period stipulated in its title, 1979-2017. We should note, however, that it labels as Hollywood films any that have received distribution or some funding from an American studio—a problematic approach in this era of international co-production and talent participation. Working from this basis, the first half of Warwick's book traces out a critique that he identifies as properly dystopian (the "utopian dystopia"), ranging from Ridley Scott's Alien(1979)—a suitable landmark because it so radically shifted the genre's tone from works such as as Star Wars(1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind(1977)—through films including Blade Runner(1982), Robocop(1987), Total Recall(1990), and The Truman Show(1998). While obviously quite different in setting, characters, and style, these and other films from this era are linked here through their common investigations of different forms of enclosure, which, Warwick contends, are actually "the genre's prime object of concern" (12). The book argues that, in their representation of such forms and the practices that produce them (commodification, property laws, etc.), these films offer variations on dystopian futures that might result from "the universalisation of capitalism" (12), as they aim to estrange their [End Page 334]viewers from these futures and thus from the contemporary conditions that could make them possible. The book's second half—divided from the first by a lengthy chapter devoted to explicating Marx, More's Utopia, and contemporary political economy—focuses on several more recent films that, for all their seemingly good intentions, are judged to fall short in their cultural critiques. These include works such as the first three Matrixfilms (1999, 2003, 2003), Children of Men(2006), District 9(2009), Repo Men(2010), The Purge(2013), and Blade Runner 2049(2017). In all these films, we are told, "the critique of enclosure … goes astray" (146), as for different reasons they fail to produce the necessary level of estrangement from a dark future and from the current political and economic circumstances that they metaphorize, and thus go wrong as sf...