SF Film and Television

Artificial intelligence is often portrayed in science fiction as conscious and humanlike. We explore this phenomenon by analyzing mostly recent TV series and movies in the context of philosophical issues such as the problem of other minds, cognitive theories (computationalism and connectionism), thought experiments such as the Turing Test, the Chinese room, the brain in a vat, what is it like to be a bat and Mary's room. After discussing if direct access to an AI's mind is possible and useful in terms of determining its (un)conscious status, we compare fictional AIs to their human counterparts in terms of relationships, emotions, physicality, and mortality, which ultimately leads to considering the non-humanity of consciousness outside an anthropocentric viewpoint.

Brief study guide for an undergraduate introduction to SF film, providing basic filmographic information, plot summary, brief statement on the setting and background in Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST and Freudian psychology. Raises (out of the work of Vivian Sobchack) the primary generic status of FORBIDDEN PLANET in terms of the Horror tradition of The Monster, and that of science fiction.

This paper examines the ways in which television imagines the relationship between creators and audiences in the contemporary media landscape. This is developed through an examination of the inaugural seasons of three American television dramas that debuted between October 2016 and March 2017: Netflix’s The OA and 13 Reasons Why and HBO’s Westworld; all three series featured the character of a storyteller who was killed within the narrative, in what was presented as an act of collaboration between the storyteller and their audience. We will question whether new participatory modes of media engagement truly engender ‘the birth of the viewer’ through a symbolic ‘killing’ of the creator, or merely serve to reaffirm the authority of the creator, reimagining the author-function as a powerful marketing brand.

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of bachelor of arts in Film and Television.


This paper surveys the points of divergence between Blade Runner (Scott, 1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017) in terms of how they portray their protagonist blade runners' identity, personal lives and their jobs. The main disparities are analysed through concepts of modernity and postmodernity, the latter being specifically applied to the former movie by previous authors with similar approaches. In examining the differences between these two movies, an attempt in cognitive mapping of the cultural differences between the times the movies were made in has come into fruition. By comparing the political and societal differences between 1982 and 2017 with movie universe's differences between 2019 and 2049 and analysing the projection of these variances on the main characters, a historically materialistic progression from postmodernity into today’s social and political culture is discussed.

Análisis de Fargo: la serie La fragilidad del dominio a través de los personajes femeninos Resumen: En el presente trabajo se analizará la segunda temporada de la serie Fargo en base a algunos de los personajes femeninos más destacables. El punto de unión entre todos ellos será la fragilidad y cambios en el poder en relación a los acontecimientos que se les irán presentando. Para ello se tendrá en cuenta todos los elementos fílmicos disponibles para remarcar el aumento o reducción de dominio. TRABAJO FIN DE GRADO Apellidos y nombre: Talegón Martínez, Ignacio Correo electrónico:

NOTE: this is an author's draft of chapter 12 of the book "Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television," eds. Michael Hauskeller, Thomas D. Philbeck, Curtis Carbonell (Palgrave, 2015).  The final, published version is here: http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057/9781137430328.0018?focus=true  ABSTRACT: LaGrandeur demonstrates how the character of the android in film and television represents three themes common to the idea of the posthuman: our blindness to the possible dangers of our own ingenuity and evolving technology; the problems posed by technology-spurred species creation and species-transition (androids often are represented as an emerging species—or human hybrid); and, concomitantly, the perils of human exceptionalism that could lead to the exploitation of any new, intelligent species we may create in our image—in other words, the possibility of a new slave class, with all that it entails.

In defining what he termed 'Television's Second Golden Age', Robert J.Thompson refers to characteristics such as being 'not regular TV', internal continuity, mixed genres but an aspiration towards 'realism', complex writing, self-consciousness and intertextuality. Such characteristics are displayed by the BBC series Life on Mars (2006-2007) which intermingles the Seventies tough cop show with psychological fantasy. This chapter examines the way that the series can be understood as a dramatisation of the negotiation that the creators undertook with their Seventies source material to update it for the values and qualities of contemporary television drama. It will emphasise the importance of television in the generation of the imagined 1973 and its characters, but also as an ongoing connection between the real and the imagined within the programme, including forming a breach of the boundaries between the two. Sam's actions within his Seventies world to remake it to include his own ideas of justice and due process while retaining the passion and freedom of action that the milieu provides will also be be examined in relation to the series' creators' needs to remake the Seventies tough-cop show in the light of modern social and media mores. The paper will also consider how Sam has to come to terms with his father's crimes, as the series' creators had to come to terms with the 'crimes' of taste, morality and approach of their 'parent' programmes from the Seventies' Golden Age.

For a couple decades, anyway, it was a valuable exercise to have students (and potentially others) watch Stanley Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and estimate how much screen time was devoted to violence. Standard political theory is that the State and its officially or unofficially licensed agents have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence; as a practical matter, significant numbers of college-age students didn't count violence by the State against so vicious a youth as Alex DeLarge as violence; nor did most find particularly important violence between and among vicious teenagers, nor even crippling and maddening violence against a middle-age man. We talked of "the Rape Scene" in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and it was the rape of Mrs. Alexander that was noted, not so much the simultaneous violence against her husband. Similar exercises could be useful in the 21st century with a less controversial film for a relatively non-fraught context to examine ways of thinking about police shootings, rates of incarceration, willingness to go to war, and selection principles for examples and images of victims to be for agitation and propaganda in causes both virtuous and less than virtuous.

EX MACHINA citation and annotation on the Wiki CLOCKWORKS 2: THE HUMAN/MACHINE INTERFACE IN SF. Discusses character names in EX MACHINA and the deeply traditional possibilities for form of the narrative, implicitly and explicitly dealing with EX MACHINA as a serious and important work in film history (and gender studies) from METROPOLIS to THX 1138 and further.

In recent years, American television has produced an abundance of serial dramas centered on the catastrophic. From real-world terrorism oriented series like “Homeland” and “Rubicon”, to series like “Heroes” and “Flashforward”, depicting various allegorical “terrorists”, these series invariably follow the protagonists’ attempts to piece together seemingly irrelevant bits of information in order to understand what has led up to a catastrophic attack or find ways to prevent one from happening in the future. This abundance of traumatic traces in post-9/11 programming has been discussed previously.
In my thesis, I argue that these series also serve as a cultural coping mechanism with broader existential anxieties inherent within contemporary networked society, governed by rhizomatic thinking and populated by rhizomatic entities, evident in the structures of terrorist networks. I argue that television, itself somewhat of a rhizomatic entity nowadays, is a fitting medium for addressing these concerns, and demonstrate how these complex television narratives offer the viewer comfort and reassurance, by operating on two levels: at the narrative level, through the strategies employed by the characters against terrorist networks, and at the level of audience engagement, by the strategies of narrative comprehension employed by the viewers themselves.

An introductory list of key themes, questions, and topics in much Afrofuturist speculative fiction, each followed by some notes and commentary regarding older and contemporary authors and texts that develop these themes.  Themes discussed: • Ecological disaster, social chaos, forced migrations; • non-binary identities; • Speculative story-telling in text and other media (including serial podcasts) often features polyvocal and dialogic voices, deploying many narrators and/or points-of-view; • the role played in Afrofuturist fiction by mixed languages; • the wide range of family and kinship networks in Afrofuturism, including invented families;  • swamps and the heritage of the ex-slave narrative; • Afrofuturism and the imagined fate of postslavery and postcolonial societies. // The essay also explores ways to take a _historical_ approach to teaching Afrofuturism.  Includes a survey of Afrofuturist works and scholarship as of 2021.

Dozens of tiny explosions ripple across the night sky as a vast, illuminated cityscape comes into view, its horizon obscured by smoke. Hovercars in the foreground haloed by rings of light direct our gaze towards vast twin pyramids in the far distance. The camera drifts slowly in to allow us to explore the texture of one of these glittering monoliths, all ironwork and blinking light, external elevators crawling up its surface. In flashes, we see the megalopolis reflected on the surface of a gigantic eye. We know from the opening minutes of Blade Runner2 that surfaces will be important. Throughout the film, surfaces entice and mislead: animals turn out to be synthetic, crowds in the Chinese sector carry parasols against a non-existent sun, photographs reflect implanted memories, super-sized neon billboards promote opportunities to migrate off-world, when everybody capable of leaving has already left. Elevators appear to be carved out of stone, classical columns denote an imperial past, but there is no imperial past: this is LA in the near future. Or we are told it is LA, but this information too seems unreliable since the cityscape resembles a degraded version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and indeed it was shot on the 'Old New York' street set on the Warner Brothers backlot. The mise-en-scène is so detailed and creatively wrought that it becomes part of the problem of surfaces: audiences may be mesmerized by the retrofitted sets cluttered with the detritus of urban life, and sent up blind alleys. In an early review, the critic Pauline Kael complained that 'Blade Runner doesn't engage you directly; it forces passivity on you. It sets you down in this lopsided maze of a city, with its post human feeling, and keeps you persuaded that something bad is about to happen' (Kael 1982). The acres of print expended on the film since its first release, suggest that critics have not all watched passively. Nonetheless, the visual artistry of the film has received particular attention – the architecture of the cityscape and the Tyrell Corporation pyramid, the long-lens technique which compacts the elements in the frame to give the street scenes their distinctively dense look, the film noir interiors, with their ceiling fans and striped light through blinds, the technical wizardry of the hovercars.

[This paper was presented at "100 Years of Estrangement", the academic track of Helsinki WorldCon (2017). It is adapted from the first chapter of my thesis, and should therefore be read as a work in progress.]

Darko Suvin’s theory of cognitive estrangement originates in his 1975 “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” wherein he defines SF as:
a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment. (375)

Unlike genre definitions which draw on textual structure or plot delimitations, Suvin primarily bases his vision of SF on a cognitive experience imparted to the reader, a subtlety that neither he nor the multitude of critics who have drawn on his work have truly explored. This paper seeks to rectify this by the exploration of cognitive estrangement’s experiential core, examining how the SF text and SF reader work, in collaboration, toward its generation, and why SF, as a genre, provides it with such fertile ground.

This paper first delineates the wider theory of estrangement, and its particular manifestation in SF critical theory. Utilising reader-response theory, it demonstrates how the SF critic might identify and analyse certain catalysts for estrangement in SF texts, and the interpretive and heuristic paths which they present to particular types of readers. It specifically posits that the fantastic text necessitates an immediate ontological inscription – that is, for the reader to progress through the text, the borders of its possible must be established, its reality bounded. This can be related to what Suvin terms the “feedback oscillation,” the cognitive and interpretive movement between personal and textual reality which results in an estranged view of both (Metamorphoses 71). The reading process is here fed not only by the individual reader’s cultural and educational capital, but, critically, their wider knowledge of the genre. Thus the textual reality might be understood not just by analogues in our consensus reality (feudalism transported to space is yet feudalism), but by other unrealities. The experienced reader will, for example, be aware of the possibility of ontological obfuscation – virtual reality, psychoactive visions, alternate universes, alternate timelines, and various other devices of narrative levelling. Even the text which employs no such devices is thereby subject to the need for ontological inscription – unstable until proven otherwise.

In this regard, SF, as a genre, might be understood as working towards the destabilisation of the individual text; locating a text in the SF multiverse necessitates its distinguishing from the infinitely possible. While genre feeds this potential polysemy it also, however, consumes it, providing an experiential buffer between the reader and the nova of the SF world. Literary experience in the worlds of William Gibson will, for example, provide narrative touchstones in further cyberpunk – potentially naturalising their strange newness. Considering these twinned but oppositional cognitive movements, I argue, therefore, that the SF genre is ouroboric – that it is the genre itself which both provides and yet consumes the indeterminacy and impossibility of otherwise indigestible unreality.

This paper studies the contemporary hero and their transformations in the television serial fiction, led in recent times to the serial killer protagonist figure in the already completed Dexter (Showtime, 2006-2013) and Hannibal (NBC, from 2013). Both fictions are two highly relevant examples for the reprocessing of the hero, in the light of the archetypal story that lies at the core of both: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and its main concept of “doppelganger". From a qualitative methodology, this study first address some preliminary questions about the transformation of the classical hero in contemporary seriality, in its passage from classical to post-classical hero to move to focus on the figure of Stevenson twice already addressed in his work, and so proceed to analyze from this point of view the NBC and Showtime series about heroic archetype mutation in its contemporary figure.
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Este artículo pretende estudiar el héroe contemporáneo y sus transformaciones en la ficción serial televisiva, llevada en los últimos tiempos al extremo en la figura protagónica del serial killer
en la ya finalizada Dexter (Showtime, 2006-2013) y en Hannibal (NBC, desde 2013). Ambas ficciones son dos ejemplos altamente relevantes para la reelaboración del héroe, a la luz de la historia arquetípica que yace en la esencia de ambas: El extraño caso del doctor Jekyll y el señor Hyde  de Robert Louis Stevenson y el concepto de doppelgänger que hayamos en ella. Desde una metodología cualitativa, en este estudio abordaremos en primer lugar algunas cuestiones previas sobre la transformación del héroe clásico en la serialidad contemporánea, en su paso del héroe clásico al héroe postclásico; para pasar a centrarnos en la figura del doble que ya abordaba Stevenson en su obra; y así pasar a analizar desde este punto de vista las series de Showtime y NBC en cuanto a la mutación del arquetipo heroico en su figura contemporánea.

Article in "Paradoxa", republished in "Strange Horizons" @ http://strangehorizons.com/2016/20160215/macdonald-a.shtml
The contribution of culture and cultural critique to the energy dependencies and dilemmas we face has only just begun to be debated. The “Energy Humanities” interrogate how disciplinary outlooks, methodological conventions and theoretical objectives can elicit “the energy unconscious” in cultural productions. In many ways, sf is the genre best placed to advance our understanding not only of present and future energy crises but also the manner in which we (fail to) envisage and conceive energy as a matter for culture. Sf frequently registers such issues as the future of fuel and mobility, resource imperialism, “realistic” modes of sustainability, and alternative modes of living in geographies and economies altered and reformed by the demands of the environmental crisis....There is a general consensus that future fuel and energy technology has to be radically unlike what we have at present, and I argue that even irresponsible and unimaginable visions of energy futures offer a workable platform to question what we envisage as the future of energy forms and systems—and the scale of our present “worldly” and systemic desires.

Studija iz časopisa Književna smotra
Uvod: veza književne i filmske fantastike Brojni su primjeri bliske suradnje književnika i filmskih redatelja, kao što su brojni i primjeri korištenja cijenjenih književnih djela kao predložaka za filmsko stvaralaštvo, pa komparativno proučavanje filma i književnosti redovito proučava pojedine segmente tih odnosa. Pritom se, dakako, nešto manje pažnje posvećuje žanrovskom stvaralaštvu (području horora, vesterna, SF-a, i tako dalje), a upravo takvo stvaralaštvo može biti indikativno i za neke općenitije tendencije u kulturi. Kada je o znanstvenoj fantastici riječ, blizak međuodnos književnog i filmskog djela toliko je česta pojava da se baš ta činjenica čini jednim od dobrih polazišta razmatranja općenitijih tendencija: značajka povezanosti filma s književnošću nešto je po čemu se SF žanr može smatrati sličnim društveno cjenjenijim oblicima filmskog stvaralaštva, kao što su adaptacije i meta-adaptacije Shakespearea ili hrabri pokušaji ekranizacija klasičnih romana europskog modernizma (djela Döblina, Prousta, Marinkovića...). No, dok unutar SF-a filmovi uglavnom doprinose ugledu književnih predložaka, kod " glavne struje " filmskog i književnog stvaralaštva situacija je uglavnom suprotna. Primjerice, Tarkovskijev Solaris, adaptacija istoimenog romana poljskog pisca Stanislava Lema, smatra se ključnim ostvarenjem filmske znanstvene fantastike, ali i tipično kvalitetnim redateljevim ostvarenjem, 1 dok je bliska suradnja Stanleyja Kubricka s poznatim žanrovskim piscem Arthurom Clarkeom urodila jednim od najzanimljivijih SF filmova uopće – 2001: Odisejom u svemiru. Znanstvenofantastični Metropolis redatelja Fritza Langa, još jedan filmski klasik ovog žanra, 2 podjednako je zanimljiv kao plod suradnje redatelja sa scenaristicom (i redateljevom suprugom) Theom von Harbou kao i drugi, poetički i žanrovski sasvim drugačije opredijeljeni Langovi filmovi režirani u Njemačkoj. U povijestima književnosti i književnim leksikonima, međutim, Thea von Harbou ne zauzima osobito važno mjesto (zapravo, obično ne zauzima nikakvo mjesto), a tek će izdanja specijalistički posvećena znanstvenofantastičnom stvaralaštvu i filmskoj povijesti morati pronaći mjesta za ovu, svojedobno veoma popularnu književnicu i filmsku scenaristicu, podjednako zainteresiranu i za kršćanske legende i za futurističke  Tarkovskijev Stalker inspiriran je pak znanstvenofantastičnim romanom braće Strugacki, vodećih sovjetskih pisaca ovog žanra;

Studija o fantastici i SF-u na filmu; časopis Ubiq.

Sve žanrovske klasifikacije neizbježno zapadaju u zatvoreni krug, circulus vitiosus na koji ukazuje književni teoretičar Milivoj Solar. To se ovako može objasniti: nemoguće je tražiti primjerak neke vrste ili žanra (npr. novelu, SF film) među različitim književnim tekstovima i filmovima bez nekog prethodnog operativnog pojma novele ili SF filma. No, takvog «operativnog pojma» nema bez prethodnog čitanja novela i gledanja SF filmova… Taj naizgled nepremostiv problem Solar, međutim, smatra lažnim (a zatvoreni krug nebitnim), jer prethodna klasifikacija «uvijek teorijski preteže i nakon što se stvarno stanje u žanrovima promijenilo, " pa ona, ali isključivo ona, čini hipotezu koja se može pokušati potvrditi i na novoj građi» (Solar, 2000: 269). Dakako, sve dok budemo na temelju prethodne klasifikacije mogli novonastale novele ili SF-filmove prepoznati kao novele ili SF-filmove, te će vrste ili žanrovi nastaviti postojati, pa makar u određenom razdoblju gubili važnost u nekoj književnosti, kinematografiji ili u čitavom međunarodnom i multimedijskom sustavu žanrova. Ideja prepoznavanja filma upravo kao vesterna ili SF-filma (ili kao trilera, melodrame, mjuzikla…) pritom je temeljna pretpostavka svake iole održive teorije filmskog žanra. Razne društvene institucije i centri moći, dakako, trude se klasificirati filmove – industrija ih na određeni način reklamira, mediji ih na određeni način predstavljaju, trgovci ih (uvelike putem medija) «preprodaju», i sami ih dalje opremajući klasifikacijskim i drugim reklamnim odrednicama, a postoje i naizgled nezavisni mehanizmi promocije (u novije vrijeme industrija se infiltrirala i na Internet kojem optimisti i danas pridaju iznimnu oslobađajuću ulogu). No, sav je taj klasifikacijsko-trgovački trud uzaludan ukoliko gledatelj, jednom kada ga u kino privuče neki segment reklamne kampanje (ili filmske kritike) ne prepozna da je riječ o vesternu ili SF-filmu. Neke reklamne kampanje i klasifikacije pritom uspijevaju ostaviti traga, a neke, dakako, budu odmah ili vrlo brzo zaboravljene. Film ceste je zaživio kao koncept (usput rečeno, bez obzira na to što nema pretjeran broj umjetnički uspjelih djela), a «filmove iz predgrađa» i «filmove X-generacije» prekrila je debela prašina zaborava već par godina nakon što su proklamirani u filmskim časopisima i drugim sredstvima filmske komunikacije. SF-film se pak, unatoč svim udarcima i padovima koji slijede nakon uspona trenutno doima praktički neuništivim. Preduvjet za prepoznavanje filma kao, primjerice, SF-filma svakako je prethodno gledanje filmova: mora postojati nekoliko upadljivo sličnih filmova da bi se moglo govoriti o pripadnosti filma određenom žanru, a podrazumijeva se da gledatelj posjeduje znatno gledateljsko iskustvo.
Tekst je prerađen i prilagođen ulomak iz knjige Filmske vrste i rodovi (Zagreb, AGM, 2007).

Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen coined the term ‘supernormal stimulus’ after discovering that birds who lay small, pale blue eggs speckled with grey prefer to sit on larger, bright blue eggs with black polka-dots. He found that he could exaggerate the key qualities of any natural stimulus to produce a stronger reaction yet--be it nurturance, courtship, fear or aggression.
    Animals encounter supernormal stimuli mostly when experimenters build them.  Humans can generate their own and media are awash with them: friendly smiling faces more consistently welcoming than ones own friends, animated cartoon characters with wider eyes than any real child’s, seductive bodies exceeding any proportions found in nature, and a huge array of supernatural menaces.
    This chapter examines film, television, spectator sports, video games, and social websites as well as more traditional media such as print and musical performance in terms of the concept of supernormal stimuli.

Part of some work-in-progress on Suvin's influential notion of cognitive estrangement. Also see "Tomorrow, Today" and "The Dystopian Glimpse." The title is hyperbolic: although this iteration does suggest that perhaps science fiction studies has grown too attached to the notion of estrangement (cognitive or otherwise) -- and although the trajectory of this research is toward suggesting alternative theoretical instruments (the dramaturgical stance) -- I am writing within the Suvinian tradition, not against it.