Science Fiction Film: Predicting the Impossible in the Age of Neoliberalism by Eli Park Sorensen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Science Fiction Film: Predicting the Impossible in the Age of Neoliberalism by Eli Park Sorensen Troy Michael Bordun Unpredictable Blockbusters. Eli Park Sorensen. Science Fiction Film: Predicting the Impossible in the Age of Neoliberalism. Edinburgh UP, 2021. 168 pp. $110 hc & ebk. A pandemic was always in our collective futures. It was also going to be an unpredictable event: we knew neither when nor how it would arrive. Nevertheless, our failure to prepare for the pandemic was due, in no small part, to neoliberalism and the assumption that should our post-political world encounter something so terrible, it could be well contained by the systems currently in place. Yet the pandemic has demonstrated liberalism's limitations. [End Page 591] For Carl Schmitt, politics is what occurs when the sovereign declares a state of exception (the suspension of legal norms) in an extraordinary circumstance in order to ensure an eventual return to the normal ordering of things. Since early 2020, we have lived in a state of exception. With Schmitt's definition of politics in mind, Eli Park Sorensen ends his recent monograph with the reminder that the authoritarian measures enacted in 2020 were otherwise unimaginable (to liberalism) before the pandemic. By enacting states of emergency, governments attempted to hold back the future, that is, a future that would look radically different from the pre-COVID era. Given the governments' authoritarian measures in the service of public health, however, Sorensen further reminds us that after such crises, the return to a former state often includes a few of those exceptional measures—emergency and normal become synonymous in the permanent state of exception (147). In Science Fiction Film: Predicting the Impossible in the Age of Neoliberalism, Sorensen investigates politics in the extraordinary circumstances of six sf films. The author begins with Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis, arguing that by the late twentieth century we could no longer think "beyond ourselves": we have "difficulty imagining anything coming after ourselves that will fundamentally improve today's political coordinates [Western-style liberal democracy]" (145, n.1). This is what Sorensen, after Schmitt, calls the post-political era. While much scholarship on sf cinema "is caught up in Fukuyama's … thesis" and posits that sf contains a utopian impulse, Sorensen understands the genre as capable of thinking the political proper, "that is, what it takes to create and ensure the survival of an autonomous political unity within which the normative situation of the present becomes a sustainable possibility" (4). In scenarios where aliens, artificial intelligence, advanced medical technologies, and clones are the norm, sf cinema imagines politics for unpredictable futures. Following Schmitt's critique of liberalism—a political system that refuses to acknowledge the future as unpredictable and that organizes itself as a bureaucratic machine with minimal state intervention—Sorensen asks what political life looks like after the end of (political) history. Each film in his sixchapter book reveals how the sovereign functions as the one who declares that the future has arrived (in the form of AI, aliens, or advanced technology), enacts the state of exception, then makes that state of exception permanent. In short, the sf films under discussion "rediscover the true face of power" (18). To start, the title of Sorensen's book is a bit misleading. Science Fiction Film suggests a broad overview of many works. Sorensen's selection of films ranges from 1979 to 2017 and falls within the contemporary genre of Hollywood realist sf (the future technology seems possible from our present era and is also coherent within the temporal setting of the film). Three of Sorensen's films involve Ridley Scott; Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford each star in two films; Twentieth Century Fox and Sony Pictures each produce two films; Philip K. Dick's stories are source material for three films; five of the six films have white male leads; and no films have women at the helm as either directors or writers. Luckily for Sorensen, what matters for his short [End Page 592] volume is the political theory. What is intriguing about Sorensen's application of Schmitt's theory is that it allows him to pose original and sophisticated questions about these much...