Review essay: Imagining our selves: another step for sf film-philosophy

Abstract

Imagining our selves: another step for sf film-philosophy Greg Singh Steven M. Sanders, ed., The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2008. 232 pp. us$35.00 (hbk).Questions about space, place, time and that thing we tend to refer to as 'me' stir the imagination in myriad ways. Sf film is a powerfully expressive framework for the imagination, and philosophising can be understood as the exercise of imagination through method. Sf film is often concerned with the nature of humanity, what it is to be a human and what it means to be a particular human - themes fundamental to the genre and to philosophy, both of which also pose generative and enabling 'what if?' questions. The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film contributes towards an understanding of how sf provides materials for philosophical thinking. In this sense, the book is a useful, original and focused intervention in film studies that partakes of the more general academic movement towards the development of an interdisciplinary film-philosophy.Steven M. Sanders' introduction indicates that there is a general consensus among his contributors as to what constitutes sf (and, by extension, sf film and television), and the essays take a rather canonical approach to the genre. There is not much in the way of thinking through a philosophy of genre: as a classificatory or taxonomic system; as a phenomenon of expectation and recognition for various stakeholder groups (producers, consumers, critics, publishers and so on); or genre's relationship to time and personal identity (as found in, for example, fan cultures). For example, while Sanders' contribution indicates the noirish conventions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel US 1956) and Deborah Knight and George McKnight's essay acknowledges the noirishness of Blade Runner (Scott US/Hong Kong 1982) and Dark City (Proyas Australia/ US 1998), they go no further than that. Sanders's introduction, itself surprisingly critical in its evaluation of the rest of the contents, implies an all-too-easy delimitation of Hollywood history, its periods and tropes, particularly in relation to the idea of an sf genre. An essay on the philosophical implications (and paradoxes) of intertextuality, for example, would have provided the opportun- ity to unpack the periodisation tendencies in film history and historiography, allowing a more organic relationship to emerge between genre, time and the political economics of industrial sf filmmaking.Knight and McKnight focus on the connections between memories, emotions and desires in Dark City and Blade Runner as fundamental to the understanding of character motivation through sense of self. The question that popular criticism most consistently asks of the latter film is: is Deckard an android? If so, his memories are implanted and are not his own. Yet this does not stop him from being a reasoning, wilful subject, nor a desiring one. The logic here is sound, even as several of the premises ostensibly offered by popular commentary on the film come unstuck: Deckard might as well be an android, stuck as he seems to be, in a perpetual present. After all, Deckard's alienation is an archetypical form of alienation, directly following Jean-Jacques Rousseau and G.W.F. Hegel as a discrepancy between his own sense of being (he suspects that he may actually be a replicant) and his existence as a replicant exterminator. As Sanders points out, however, such a state of perpetual presence would make relationships impossible to sustain over time: the psychoid nature of perpetual presence is matched by what Giuliana Bruno describes as the 'schizoid' nature of Blade Runner's Los Angeles, a 'ramble city' or postmodern patchwork of memories from different pasts that could not possibly have co-existed (and yet here they are in modern LA).Shai Biderman's discussion of personhood and identity over time in Total Recall (Verhoeven US 1990) is an example of how to philosophise concisely and economically, without cheapening the line of enquiry or talking down to the non-specialist reader. …