A reading about escape cinema: “In the distant thread between the world that is and the one that is proposed to us, there is always a political pronouncement. Knowing our chimeras tells us about our deep cultural origin and our degree of satisfaction or longing for the immediate (fantastic cinema); Contemplating what we expect from the future tells us about our sense of political progress and our degree of confidence in it (science fiction), and knowing what we fear allows us to guide our gaze regarding the political projection of our latent anxieties as a society (terror)”.
I wrote this some time ago to postulate that the genres of evasion are the ones that best x-ray the mood of societies and therefore allow us to clearly perceive the immediate. Science fiction stopped proposing social parables after the Cold War (which confronted two social models) to plunge into reflections on our individual relationship with reality, identity and memory. That shift occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, the golden age of neoliberal individualism: bladerunner, Total challenge, gattaca, Cube, timecop, 12 monkeys or The fly they shared those markedly existential issues, looking inward. It was also a time of stories about the arrival of the messiah, from Matches in the third phase and ET the alien (which are old and new testaments of a new faith), until Starman, abyssor terminatorpassing through the dark messianisms about antichrists, such as Alien or predator.
But the turn of the century saw the gradual return of the great social parable, looking outwards. It started Matrix as a hybrid of existentialism and metaphor of the alienation of society, but then great quasi-Marxist social allegories followed like Divergent, The runner in the maze, District 9, Elysium or The Hunger Games. It was before the Arab spring and the rebellion of the plazas as a result of the Wall Street crash and with it, the breakdown of party systems throughout the West.
Fantastic cinema tells us today that time has broken because the future has disappeared
For not rolling: What do fantasy and science fiction tell us about the social mood today? Well, time has broken because the future has disappeared. The future today is a foggy road where we are not even sure that the pavement is. Some look anxiously to the past, as we have already seen with the rebirths of Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, bladerunner or Matrixand others simply propose the collapse of time and space. he anticipated it Fringethe series of jjabrams: we no longer fear aliens, as in the Cold War, nor our government, as explained X Files In the 90s, and next to the zombies, who are our neighbors devastated by the neoliberal financial voracity, the new enemy appears: ourselves in alternative universes.
This affair that started in the movies indielike the wonderful Another land or Coherencehas already consumed mainstream superhero movies. The movies and series of Marvel (on Disney +), but also the prolific animation production of the superheroes of DC (on HBOMax) propose again and again that we inhabit a point of collapse, a vortex in which all places and all times fold into today and what is returned to us are different and sometimes threatening versions of ourselves. Spiderman in real image or animation, the same as Superman, Batman, Doctor Strange, Wanda&Vision, Captain Marvel or Lokiwander today in a labyrinth of mirrors that returns their own and threatening reflection no matter how far they advance.
The future is a black fog, viscous and intriguing like the smoke of lost. Today the world is anguished before Putin’s next move, Europe is panicking before a cut in gas supply maybe tomorrow, inflation is running wild, Spain is trying to gauge Algeria’s anger and the impact of the crisis, and after the pandemic and war, who else who least expects an alien invasion or a collection of climatic cataclysms. Perhaps for not seeing that, as almost always, the great threat that lies in wait for us is there looking at us in a mirror.
Comments
Post a Comment