Posthumanism and Hollywood

'I think, therefore I cannot possibly be an automaton.'

Society has always bred anxieties towards 'the Other'. Whether it be a result of Imperial anxieties, differing cultures or, as the human succumbs to the posthuman, the threat of the automaton. In his fantastic and accessible book Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (2004), Neil Badmington discusses how our perceptions of aliens have changed; as human essence seeps away from us, we become more and more identifiable with 'the Other' found in the alien - our fear is discharged. This fear can be seen to be at its height in Hollywood in the early 1950s invasion narratives which were in constant production. 

'When Hollywood need a convenient home for the monsters that cast their alien shadows over the invasion narratives of the 1950s, it regularly turned – perhaps unsurprisingly, to Mars.’

Neil Badmington.

The alien shadows cast over Hollywood by Byron Haskin's 1953 adaptation of H.G. Welles' The War of the Worlds provides the perfect example of this. Humans are forced to come together against an alien threat from Mars which seeks to wipe-out the human race. Haskin constantly reminds us of the incredible difference between 'Us' and 'Them', a binary construction which drives the narrative. Badmington identifies this as an anxiety of 1950s culture - the loss of the self to an external threat which is in no way like us: 'Goodness and mercy seem not to be concepts recognized by the alien invaders.'

This complete difference between the alien threat and us provided a vehicle for fear in these invasion narratives. As the 20th Century advanced, so to did Hollywood's relationship with 'the Other'. The simplistic relationship of 'Us' and 'Them' made way to a much more complex one which would see 'the Other' invade the human. Films such as Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! are direct parodies of such productions, the external alien threat has become laughable by the end of the 20th Century.

The threat now comes from within, the alien is a production of man. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) provides the most notorious example of this as Deckard, the second deliberate pun stemming from the great Humanist thinker Rene Descartes in this article, must trace down and terminate a group of rebel replicants. As the film progresses human identity is questioned as emotion and empathy seem to be traits aligned more with the automatons rather than the expressionless human (Ford).

We have reached what Derrida would describe as a 'crisis of the versus', the binaries humans have constructed to affirm human values have been dismantled. So, where do we go from here? For Badmington, we have moved from 'Alien hatred', to 'Alien love', indeed Alien Chic! By celebrating the things we do have in common with the fictional 'other', we are also distinguishing the things which we don't have in common. 

TBC.