The Cave of Montesinos: April 2011

In my field there are a lot of serious people who take themselves and their jobs very seriously. No joke. I once used the words "paternalistic" and "silly" in a class taught by one these very serious dudes and he, along with the very serious students in the class, scoffed at my use of the word "silly" because it was a "strange locution" and not very descriptive. Yeah, they are that serious. As a result of their penchant for seriousness (I should note that wit is sometimes aloud in the classroom, but only when it's either campy or self-aware kitsch, which is pretty much he same thing as camp), they often look down their long, sullen, noses at Sci Fi.

Here comes a tangent: though they often deride the 19th century realist novel, these same folks tend to drool over the modern and postmodern novel, in part, because, in their eyes, such novels are "more real" than the old realist aesthetics. Though I agree that the modern aesthetic is much cooler than realism, I don't believe that it is anything more than an aesthetic. Also, I don't believe that reading or writing about literature will lead to a social awakening or revolution, and I don't believe that literature should serve a political purpose (with poetry it's a bit different). I guess I'm what one would call a liberal -humanist (this is a fancy term we use in literary studies to say that such a person thinks that reading literature and viewing art makes us better in that we better understand the human condition and, hopefully, thereby act more ethically toward others).

Having said that, one of the reasons I enjoy sci-fi (or as some might say, "that lowly sub-genre of 20-21st century film/lit.") is that it often does a much better job of making social commentary or exploring philosophical possibilities than anything that we might call plausible or, verosimil. Rather than get into the why, I want to offer an example. The film Another Earth comes out this July. Though I haven't seen it, I can tell from the trailer that, like many other good sci-fi films, it uses the genre as a medium to explore questions of ethics, the possibility of forgiveness, and the complexities of human relations. Can this be done outside the frame of sci-fi? Of course, we only need to look to Bill Shakespeare to give us many examples. However (I guess here is some of the "why") some of the best sci-fi also allows us as spectators (or readers) to partially or completely remove our prior biases from the argument and, hopefully, understand that x or y situation in the fiction we are being presented is analogous to this or that situation in our society. When it's done well (Re: Gattaca or Blade Runner) sci-fi can be very effective in communicating its message. When it's done poorly, we end up with didactic trash like Avatar. I'm hoping that Another Earth will be another example of the former. Feel free to chime in on my thoughts, agree, disagree, why? Or, what's a good sci-fi you enjoyed, or a terrible one you can't stand (I should admit here that I love Lynch's version of Dune (1984)).