A Colorful Dystopia: Review of *The Hunger Games*

Last night a whim took my sister-in-law, wife, and I to see The Hunger Games. 

I hadn't read the book. I didn't know anything about it, other than that it was a movie based on a novel about a dystopic future. A gallon of soda and a bucket of popcorn later, I am happy to have seen it and am eager to read the novel.

Let me be clear: there are elements of the story and plot that I might criticize. For example, I couldn't help but dwell on the obvious structural crisis that pervades the narrative: the protagonist, in order to be the hero, must refrain from killing sympathetic characters in a battle where only one person survives; thus, though an corollary narrative logic, any sympathetic characters have to die unfortunately, on accident, or murdered by one of the bad guys. This seemed a little forced to me.

But what did I expect? Should the protagonist have taken out a sympathetic character? The audience would have had a very different, vexed relationship with her then.

Anyhow, with that aside, this was a really, really interesting movie.

Of primary interest to me was the setting. This dystopic future was so intriguing, visually and conceptually. Visually it was intriguing because you had such intense contrasts in terms of the many layers of society: the rural and naturally simplistic district 12 that suggested an idyllic, Appalachian village in early America; the urban, cosmopolitan, technological, and decadent Capital where all the folks were dressed in crazy colors.

This visual contrast suggested a conceptual one: you see the late post-industrial civilization at every level, from the rustic base of production upward and trough the highest level of society, the decadent and perverse aristocrats. Thus, the film encapsulates a "totalizing" impulse: in the manner of a secondary world fantasy, it wants to "map" a complete society.

Another issue. I was really intrigued by the relationship between the female protagonist and the male protagonist. I read a lot of pulp adventure, and always, always there are scenes where the huge-thewed male hero rescues the scantily clad female "prize-wife" from trouble, who then lolls like a rag doll in his arms, all hair and limbs, as he bumps along and slays with sword and gun.

Here--this did not happen. The main protagonist was the female; the person who needed her help and protection was the male. I know this is not so unique these days; it is, however, exciting to see this narrative structure exhibited in a mainstream Hollywood film. That's worth something.

The last thing I want to note was the image of technology in this film. Technology was presented as being so very powerful in this film, almost to the level of magic; and yet--(and here it where things get weird and interesting)--the technology presented didn't seem to me to be very implausible. All of the over-the-top technology--even the arena where the distinction between the natural and the virtual collapses--didn't feel to me to deviate from a "reality principle" too very much. What does that say about me?

Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question": The Potential of Science Fiction Narration

One of my favorite Isaac Asimov short stories is "The Last Question," published in 1956 in the pulp science fiction magazine Science Fiction Quarterly. At just under 4500 words, it tells the story of the fate of humanity, the cosmic intelligence humanity creates, and the entire life and death of the universe.

Think about it: 4500 words and the entire story of the cosmos is related to you. This is truly astounding, a word etymologically linked to the latin extonare (which means to be struck with lightning). It not only "makes you think," but it blows up your mind, if you will.

Some summary: the story opens and some computer engineers are celebrating together because they have just built a supercomputer that has been able to solve all of humanity's problems. Economic scarcity, political differences, production, everything: all these crises have been solved by the computer called Multivac.

In spite of their happiness, however, they start thinking about the far future. In conformity with scientific law, they hypothesize, the universe will and has to end entropically. It will simply fade away. This is the famous problem of entropy that shows up throughout a lot of the science fiction of the 1960s and 70s and onward.

In spite of their happiness, these engineers can't stop dwelling on the fact that they have just saved a world that will necessarily be destroyed. In fact, destruction, according to their hypothesis, is a physical certainty.

And so they ask their computer a question: "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" In other words, how do we stop the universe from being destroyed. The computer's answer. Five words: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER. The story proceeds and more and more computers are made throughout the many eras of the universe until, finally--can't help but spoil it--an answer is found for this question.

There's a lot going on in this story. I want to highlight two elements I find interesting.

First element: this story paints an interesting picture about humanity's relationship with technology. In large part, technology is painted as a kind of savior of humanity. Without giving away the end of the story, the computers continue to grow and human interactions with computers become more and more intimate; eventually, computers and humanity are inextricably bound together in a kind of "erotic" union. This is the story of human's merging with computers and technology, a story told over and over in science fiction in the form of cyborgs, androids, intelligent machines, etc..

Second element: we have in this story a powerful demonstration of the potential of science fiction narration. Incorporating the mythology of science into its narrative logic, science fiction texts are able to represent not only the human world--which is somewhat limited (in space, in time--a city, a nation, a planet)--but the entire cosmos. Let me be clear: there are no pychologically nuanced characters in this story. Human beings, in this narrative, are less individuals and more a flowing force of energy, like the molocules of water in a river; nevertheless, this sort of macro-perspective is something science fiction really does well.

If you haven't read this Isaac Asimov's, "The Last Question," it's available online for free. Here's the link: "The Last Question."

Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror (Post 6): Technology-as-Human versus Technology-as-Anti-Human

Pre-Post Preamble

Today I'm going to continue my post series that is an attempt to log and to preserve the insights that came out of a science fiction class that I taught at Case Western Reserve University in the Summer of 2011, titled, "Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th century." 

Here is a link to the first post: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror

Now that I'm on post 6 I feel compelled to offer a table of contents of previous posts. Here they are:

Post 2: Ray Kurzweil and "Transcendent Man"

Post 3: Cultural Studies Classrooms and Aesthetic Value Judgments

Post 4: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Loving and Hateful Androids in *Star Trek* Episode 7 

Post 5: Technology-as-Woman in *The Twilight Zone*

As I'm proceeding through this post series I'm starting to realize how each post is going to become less and less "self-contained" as I proceed; by which I mean, I find I am compelled to refer to previous posts in a way I haven't had to in previous post series. 

***

Another text we treated in my science fiction class was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The was episode 14 of season 1, titled, "Datelore." This episode truly captures the theme of ambivalence towards technology that was at the heart of the class.

Data and Lore

Some summary (I'm taking some ST:TNG corpus knowledge for granted here): the Enterprise stops by the planet where Data was found by the Federation. There they find in a hidden chamber an exact replica of Data, except this replica is disassembled. They bring the android pieces on to the Enterprise and reassemble them. It turns out, this is Data's brother, another android by the name of Lore. Immediately there are things about Lore that begin to disturb and stir the suspicions of the crew. It turns out Lore was disassembled because of his evil tendencies. He thinks androids are better than humans and therefore they deserve to die, or at least serve androids as slaves.

What is so interesting about this episode, I think, is the two separate visions of technology that emerge out of the two different android characters. 

Lieutenant Commander Data is a kind of "Pinocchio" figure who loves humans and strives to be a human. Data is moral and helpful and very often endearing. 

Lore, on the other hand, is a megalomaniac. He is deceiving and extremely powerful; furthermore, he thinks of humans as flawed and as insects that are dispensable.

We begin to see in this episode all sorts of parallels with the previous texts we've treated in this class. 

Ray Kurzweil and Transcendent Man

In Kurzweil's documentary, Transcendent Man, a major debate is whether or not the super intelligences he predicts will be empathetic to humans or hold us in contempt as insects. Hugo De Garis obviously believes the latter is the case while Kurzweil believes that not only will the robots serve us, make us better (his argument is much stronger), but that the robots will be us. 

And so, we can perhaps see in Data--struggling to become human--as suggesting Kurzweil's vision of technology; and we can see Lore--the evil, human hater--as suggesting De Garis's vision of technology.

Star Trek (Episode 7): "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

We see this very ambivalence played out in the Star Trek episode I treated in an earlier post. In episode 7 of Star Trek you have two avatars of robots or technology: Ruk, the human hater, and Andrea, the robot who falls in fall and commits suicide when she realizes she will never be able to love.

The Twilight Zone (Episode 7): "The Lonely"

At the end of this episode the android, Alicia, is shot and killed. I'd like to suggest that the episode doesn't key us into how to read this. Is this a murder? Something horrendous? OR! Has the protagonist (who was in love this this android?) been freed from a kind of spell? Was Alicia truly in love with the protagonist? Or, was Alicia's love an illusion, the product of software?

***

Robots-as-humans versus robots-against-humans: this is an ambivalent, vexed issue that recurred consistently throughout the class. The core queston these texts seem to be asking is, is technology of us? For us? Inextricably bound to us? 

OR! It technology becoming something else? Something other? And therefore, something hostile or something we should be suspicious of?

Hmm...

Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Loving and Hateful Androids in *Star Trek* Episode 7 (Post 4)

Andrea and Ruk -- Two Androids

Tonight's post is the fourth in my series that treats on a science fiction class I taught at Case Western Reserve University in the Summer of 2011. Here is a link to the first post, where the class is explained in detail: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror (Post 1)

One of the first "television show texts" we looked at in this class was an episode from the original Star Trek: season 1, episode 7, titled, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" This episode was written by Robert Bloch, a famous science fiction, horror, and fantasy writer who published in--*drum roll*--Weird Tales. Bloch was close friends with H.P. Lovecraft who was, some have argued, his mentor and main source of encouragement. 

One of these days I'll treat his fiction here, but I think it's noteworthy to mention that the Star Trek episode we watched was written by a member of the H.P. Lovecraft circle.

Anyhow, what is this episode about and how did it relate to the class as a whole? 

Well, let me offer some summary. In this episode Nurse Christine Chapel is in search of her long lost fiance, Dr. Roger Korby. Korby's last known whereabouts were the planet Exo III, where he went to study an extinct race. Long story short: the race that once inhabited Exo III were destroyed by a race of androids they created. We have here the somewhat classical narrative of the robot uprising. But here's the twist. In the course of the episode it becomes clear that Korby has mastered the art of creating androids and that he is, in fact, an android himself. The original Korby died and he downloaded his consciousness into an android body.

This episode raises some very interesting questions, particularly about the relationship between robots and humans. We get both kinds of relationships represented here: love and hate. Let me explain.

Love. One of the androids introduced in this episode is a beautiful girl, Andrea. Captain Kirk, of course, seduces her and she falls in love with him. And through her love for Kirk she comes to regret being an android, i.e. being unable to love fully. Another example: Dr. Roger Korby--who is himself an android--is deeply in love with Nurse Chapel; however, she rejects him because he is an android. 

Hate. Meanwhile, there's another android--a giant, monstrous android--named "Ruk," who seems to hate all humans and wants to kill them all. Furthermore, the human characters never fully come to trust the androids and, in the end, kill them with little fanfare. They are figured as tragic transgressions of the natural order and therefore abominations.

There's another interesting theme that shows up in this episode that recurs over and over in other texts we looked at in this class. This theme is the "sexy android" character. Most of the time the android is a woman. There are all sorts of science fiction texts that turn technology into women; thus, male protagonists engage with technology as a woman. Think of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Bladerunner, the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. I plan doing a specific post that treats on this theme of technology-as-woman.

Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Ray Kurzweil and "Transcendent Man"

This is the second post in a series, Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th Century. Here is a link to the first post where I explain the series: Post 1

On the first day of class we watched a documentary, Transcendent Man (2009), directed by Robert Barry Ptolemy, which focuses on the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil. The documentary is, to an extent, a film version of Ray Kurzweil's nonfiction text, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2006).

If you're not familiar with Ray Kurzweil's ideas, then I recommend familiarizing yourself with them. I want to go so far as to say he comes closest to articulating the general "mythology" of our time in regards to our relationship with technology.

This was a wonderful documentary to start the class with because the ambivalent nature of our relationship to technology comes through in such an intense way. Indeed, the extremes of "technology-as-savior" and "technology-as-doom" are evident in this documentary. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that, eventually, machine intelligence and human intelligence will merge together, and that the next stage of human evolution involves our connection to technology: this connection will result in immortality. And yet, other scientists believe that machine intelligence will stay separate from us and, surpassing us in capabilities, intelligence, vision, will come to see us as a mere "insects." Thus, they'll destroy us with as much prejudice as we destroy a nest of wasps or some irritating rabbits.

We have here the vision of either technology as Utopia or technology as Dsytopia: the U.S.S. Enterprise or Skynet.

A lot of the documentary foregrounds Kurzweil's views, but I wouldn't go as far as to say it's biased towards them. A lot of time is spent allowing his detractors to speak. Particularly, Hugo De Garis becomes the representative of the "dark side" of Kurzweil's technological vision. De Garis spends a lot of time talking about the "artilect war," a scenario he has imagined. The artiloect war, according to De Garis, will take place right before machines achieve consciousness. The war will be fought between people who think that intelligent machines should be built and people who believe intelligent machines are our doom and should not be built. We basically have, in De Garis's scenario, a fight between the two visions: those who recoil from technology as the death of humanity and those who embrace technology as the full manifestation of humanity (i.e. our destiny).

There are other vexed issues in terms of our relationship to technology that come through in this documentary, namely, how we are coming to interface with it. One question is, where do the boundaries of the human end? After we have replaced our eyes, our lungs, our brains, our limbs with technological apparatuses, when do we stop being human and start being machines? This is a metaphysical question regarding the fundamental ontological nature of human being as an discrete experience.

A lot of folks are reluctant to watch this documentary because they feel like Kurzweil is "just wrong." I think that's the wrong way of going about it. It doesn't really matter if he's right or wrong. What matters is that such visions are even being expostulated. That a man has written books claiming that technology will save us; that others have written books saying that technology will destroy us: these developments are culturally significant.

They point toward our vexed relationship with technology, the degree to which we both love it. And hate it.

Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th Century (Post 1)

So, last summer I was lucky enough to be able to create and teach a science fiction class at Case Western Reserve University. The title of the class was "Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th Century." Here is the course description:

Since the Swing Riots of the 1830s, when rural English farmers destroyed the threshing machines that were making their labor obsolete, many thinkers and artists have noticed how we are both amazed by and horrified of the technologies that we have produced to expand and develop human potential. From fears of robot uprisings, misanthropic supercomputers, to hopes of immortality through digital reincarnation, technology as it has emerged in cultural discourses like film, art, literature, music and television has been inflected in a diversity of ways, as messianic, horrifying, beautiful, and perverse. This seminar will probe this intriguing ambivalence by looking at a variety of cultural texts that enunciate this tension, and it will do so in the service of making its participants more critically aware of how our technologically accelerating moment is calibrating and perhaps revolutionizing the way we construct identities, delimit our organic bodies, define our sexualities, and negotiate and reconcile our religious convictions.

In grasping for the above goal, seminar participants will analyze foundational literary texts that negotiate the above themes, namely Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. Participants will also consider important foundational texts in the coordinate filmic tradition associated with these issues, e.g. Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Participants will also listen to and discuss musical texts that deal with the themes outlined above, namely Daft Punk's Human After All and Connor Oberst's Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. Participants will also read and discuss non-fictional texts that treat the above described concerns, namely Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Participants will also consider how television texts like Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek series and Rod Sterling's The Twilight Zone symptomatize historically determined assessments of technology's steadily expanding infiltration of daily life.

Let me be upfront: teaching the class was an amazing experience. Some of conversations we had in that class--about Cylons and Replicants and Androids--are the reasons why I got into academic world in the first place.

A lot ideas came out of that class that--not hyperbole--revolutionized my understanding of technology's role in science fiction. It was propitious, of course, that I had a class of about 20 geniuses helping me along the way.

Anyhow...

I'm going to be blogging about the themes addressed in that class. My goal is to revisit the texts we touched on in order to get down some thoughts on them.

And I'd be happy if you joined me along the way!

Metablog Comment: As with my other series (e.g. extended review of the anthology Swords and Dark Magic, The Weird History of the Novel, and The Rogue and the Merchant Pulp Novel Project) these posts will be semi-regular. Why all the post series? I like having series to return to because sometimes "my thoughts make more sense" when I fit them into an overarching framework.