Visions of Science and Technology, Part 2

Abstract

Just as science and technology have changed the production, styles, and techniques of film, the medium itself has changed the perception of and response to science and technology. Early in the sound era, Arrowsmith (1931) and The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935) celebrated the conquest of disease by modern medicine, and Things to Come (1 936) showed a gleaming technological utopia rising from the ruins of a world ravaged by war. Films released after 1945 continued to tell stories about the power of science and technology to change the world for the better - about robot servants in Forbidden Planet (1956), miracle drugs in Awakenings (1990), and communication with benevolent aliens in Contact (1997) - but they were increasingly outnumbered by more pessimistic visions. The transformations wrought by science and technology in postwar films reflected the anxieties of the age: nuclear holocaust in On The Beach (1959), environmental devastation in Silent Running (1970), machines run amuck in Terminator 2 (1991), and the erosion of privacy and freedom in Minority Report (2002). In this issue of Film ^History, the second in our special volume on Visions of Science and Technology in Film, five articles explore how science and technology, along with the hands and minds that bring them into being, alter - and are altered by - our social, poh ti cal, and moral worlds. Andrew Huebner, in Lost in Space: Technology and Turbulence in Futuristic Cinema of the 1950s, looks beyond Cold War fears of nuclear weapons to consider the increasing role of technology in everyday life, asking whether the resulting changes can be reconciled with morality, humanity, and faith. Science -fiction films of the era, populated by unfathomable creatures, fantastic machines, and misguided scientists, dramatized authences' struggles to reconcile post-war disruptions in the balance between nature, religion, and scientific advancement, as innovations transformed reality. Jason Eberl, in I, Clone: How Cloning Is (Mis)Portrayed in Contemporary Cinema, brings questions evoked by cinematic clones into dialogue with philosophical debates on the nature of identity and humanity. Using this framework to illustrate how contemporary films ask authences to consider what it means to be human, the article explores whether our moral and ethical frameworks are robust enough to keep pace with changes in our ability to create sentient life through increasingly sophisticated laboratory techniques. …