by Goffredo Fofi

Youth is certainly a factor in the nostalgia for good old fashioned science fiction and the disappointment with what is now left of a genre that was central to 20th-century imagination. Its roots go back to the 19th century and the machines that began to change the world, already at an uncontrollable speed with the First World War. After World War II, reconstruction meant new hope, borne up by a basic and obstinate humanism that was hardly justified by history but made possible by the firm belief that everything would now change for the better, because humanity would know how to learn from the disasters it had committed. In any case, right from the start, science fiction was divided between two visions, represented by two “champions” of the stature of Verne the optimist and Wells the pessimist – even if Verne’s last years were marked by a more complex boldness, for example metaphysical doubt and unexpected anarchic sympathies, and Wells, in The Time Machine, imagined the presence of Man (the man we know and still are) lasting for much longer than any writer today would dare, unless they were talking of ex-humans who have become robots or, worse still and more realistically, a cross between the robot and the animal in which the human part is the feeling, thinking and programming element whose actions are founded on the ethics he has been able to create collectively in the face of the trials of history.
Utopia and Dystopia: a world of rational harmony with living beings and things against a world of oppression and ignorance of higher aims (“try and not live as animals”, and all that follows from that) have always been opposed in the imagination of writers and creators, both based on the original dilemma: mankind’s power to shape history and resolve conflicts and inflict punishments – “original sin” – to repeat Cain forever, that is, the killer of his brother but also the one who survives to build civilisation.
Science fiction also seems to have run its course, after the 1970s and, after Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, an infamous year), its moment of greatest clarity – not just film-wise – on the origins and essence of culture and civilisation built by humankind (the armed ape who learns and builds through a domination of weapons that makes him violent and gives him the power of the strong). At the same time, that film represents the greatest hope for his possible evolution with the much-discussed finale (after man and machine we will have centuries, millennia, so says the director, of the “entities that will have total understanding and will be able to become beings of pure energy with an almost divine power”, and at the end we see man – the astronaut of the film – reborn “in a superior form, already angel and superman who will return to Earth like all mythological heroes”). The so-called great critics and esteemed editorialists turned up their noses at Kubrick’s film as they perceived no philosophical depth, and they shocked many of us lesser critics who certainly were not on their level, but also for example Roman Polanski who expressed the opinion, in an interview for “Cahiers”, that the official reactions showed that “the French are a bit retarded”. We can only imagine what he had to say about the Italians!
The truth is that the optimism of 1968 was still a result of the optimism of the “magnificent destinies”, an optimism that was just as much capitalist as Communist and “Social Democrat”. Progress – or its most advanced form that was revolution and “the construction of socialism” – was going to solve every problem, and mankind and his destiny were far removed from the age-old worries of the Christian religions, and also from Darwinism, then considered “right-wing” because it did not believe much in mankind’s ability to improve life, or the world in general, based on intelligence and social solidarity. Much more was forgotten here: all that science had taught after Darwin.
Polanski said of Kubrick’s film that “there has not yet been another film in which fantasy is so based on documented history”. Always a pessimist about man and his destiny (and he had every right to be), Polanski insisted that the opening sequence of 2001 is the visual synthesis of that “moment in the history of the species in which everything began, because we are by our nature the aggressive ape that defends its territory and kills: thanks to that we are what we are”. Polanski forgot the final message: beyond Jupiter and the return to Earth, where the film demonstrates a sort of “Kubrickian” lack of faith in the short term (relatively short!) but a faith in the future evolution of both man and machine in a universe so completely different that our minds cannot perceive it, let alone understand it.
In a more immediate future, Dr. Strangelove, about military stupidity, and A Clockwork Orange, on the impossibility of controlling the individual’s negative impulses, were certainly not optimistic, nor were the historic views in Paths of Glory or Barry Lyndon; while Shining, an historical as well as gothic film, revisited the ambiguity and ambivalence of 2001, with the negative influence of history and civilisation, as well as the negative side of humanity, but also all the hope inherent in mankind’s hidden powers, which, in the film, only a child and a black (human beings that Kubrick considered nearest to the hidden truths of nature) possess.
2001 is the finish line, but it is also the point of no return. Science fiction in cinema, forever behind the literary form, could never be the same after 2001, and the masterpiece by the Russian Tarkovskij, Solaris, from the wonderful book by the Pole (not American!) Stanislaw Lem, follows new and more metaphysical paths to talk about the divine to the exclusion of any centrality of man except his total incapacity to imagine anything beyond himself, to think in any way but non-anthropomorphically.
In 1999, that is at the close of the “science fiction century”, Kubrick left us his will and testament with Eyes Wide Shut, a film set totally in the present, an eternal present whose shadows seem able to be lit up if wished; a world that is now completely capitalist, founded on rather real occult powers, a world that leaves mankind only the chance to be an accomplice, to be dependent and to be a consumer.
Contemporaries of these films, in what remains of the genre, are the idiocies of Lucas as a metaphor of new imperialism – or new imperialisms if we add China –, Spielbergian indecision between a past intelligence and a present of sinister, guilty ideological and commercial compromises, the rare and ever increasingly delayed new age fantasies, the wicked de-humanization of a roboticised cinema aimed at accelerating the robotisation of a universal public. If every now and then there seems to be some sort of sign of intelligence in the cinema, it comes from the direct or indirect influence of an author as the key to those mutations, the most acute and “weirdest” of the writers emerging from the 1950s, who seems able to use a superb ability to forecast and understand the dilemmas of the contemporary world, and above all its basic trends, to show us what is tomorrow already today: Philip K. Dick. But the most “Dick” of the “Dick” cinema is not that directly inspired by his writings but that which does not pay authors’ rights, and (intelligently) steals situations and theories, and it ranges from a lot of Terry Gilliam to the first Matrix and much of Cronenberg, just think, for that director, of an extraordinary film like eXistenZ. In addition, Cronenberg, not accidentally, brought to the cinema a classic of what we could define as post-science fiction, or science fiction that has moved from being “genre” literature to the central and most interesting literature of recent years: J.G. Ballard’s Crash. (Of the three “greats” emerging from the genre, Vonnegut has had the least influence on cinema, maybe because he is still the most “political” of the three and the one who loves life most: at the end of the day, he is extremely parsimonious in an extremely delirious world).
One conclusion that we may draw from these brief comments on the decline of science fiction is that they are obviously based on the belief in its triumph in the modern-day world: paradoxically, science fiction has become a literature of realism, or perhaps the most realistic of all literatures. We post-moderns live in a world where almost all the most serious of the forecasts of that literary genre have become reality. While “mainstream” writing was late in coming to write about the little problems of the common everyday man and described reality only as the immediate feeling and understanding of existence, science fiction dared to imagine other worlds that were not – at least in the majority of cases – extreme or obvious projections of the on-going trends in society, intuitions and worries about what was changing – and in this sense it could paradoxically be claimed that the only Italian writer of science fiction was Pasolini! –, the victory of dominant social and individual forms, and between the obvious and the hidden, of various and infinite forms of schizophrenia and paranoia...
As the exploration of external space was forgotten, so there remained only the internal spaces. Economic, political, military and scientific powers have ignored external exploration, or put it in third or fourth place. The exploration and conquest of space are less and less interesting because their costs are so huge and all we find on reachable planets is rocks. This has given rise to a never-before-seen pressure of economic-political-military-scientific power on the entire globe and its inhabitants, a thirst for widespread and real control of the only living planet, where all human destiny converges in one, and where it is obligatory to be “global” in order to survive as chiefs. Internal space has won over external space but its parameters have changed so much and its mirrors been so deformed that the relationship between reality and science fiction has been blurred, destroyed, the two things have become one and the same.


Talking about science fiction is rather difficult these days: the subject is too serious and important to be taken lightly. Yet talking about the science fiction of the past brings a smile to the lips and past enthusiasms return for a time when, even if preoccupied with certain arguments and problems, science fiction was a way for our provincial Italy of the 1950s to escape from the chains of reality, a way to imagine a different future. We did not believe that our love of “Urania” and “Galaxy” that do quickly replaced our enthusiasm for Disney cartoons or “Il vittorioso” (The Victor), Salgari’s adventures or Ellery Queen thrillers, would become such a determining factor in cultural history. Science fiction was a world in colour, like some of the pirate films, westerns and musicals. I am talking about films, but, for us, science fiction did not begin with cinema. If anything, cinema was an extra, a later illustration to what literature had given a long time before. Firstly, because the books arrived at least 10, 15, 20 years before the films, and not just the individual films but the entire genre. They were less touched up and bolder, maybe because the written word left you to imagine the unimaginable, to enter the argument, or maybe because it helped think about things, to understand something that logically could not be understood or, in the cinema, could not be shown. Secondly, because literary science fiction was a “major genre” in mass culture from the early 1950s, or even earlier thanks to the spread of the “space opera”, although it reached maturity with the sociological science fiction of the 1950s, heir more to Wells than Verne, and more to Butler, Shiel, Bellamy, London, Capek, Zamjatin, Huxley and Orwell than Leinster, Campbell, Van Vogt, Heinlein and his contemporaries. We read these authors with some pleasure, obviously, but what held our fascination more than the spaceships and Martians were the atomic fears, the voyages through time, parallel worlds, space-time paradoxes, the doubts about robots, the unaccepted and rebel mutants, the description of societies that were so far from us but which moved with us in advertising, coca cola, new weapons, early television, the myths of well-being, the overwhelming desire for an automobile and even, for the older people but also those who had learned from their father, the memory, or lasting presence elsewhere, far, or not that far, from us of the models of totalitarian society, even if well camouflaged.
We “poor but beautiful” dreamed of a comfort that was late in arriving, an America that took its time in becoming our reality, but we still, like Nando Moriconi who would have liked to have been born in Kansas City, enjoyed our maccheroni and our glass of wine bought directly from the producer or home produced. We dreamed of America but at the same time – thanks to the best American social cinema of those years of crisis and Hollywood glory, and also the more insidious genre films, that described a country under the test of McCarthyism – we saw the dark side, the evil face of discrimination. Science fiction films were full of shadows and hidden references: it was a cinema that nearly always could be read two ways: the first being the adventure and surprise, the second, the message in the bottle – or the spaceship.
We have mentioned the atom and the manipulation of minds, but we have not mentioned two things that we found even more exciting and absorbing, for example in the work of Sheckley and the inventions of Matheson, the possible future humanism of Simak and the rather more traditional one of Bradbury, in the “foreign” thinking machines of Asimov and in the mutant cousins of real handicapped people who have new, unheard-of powers able to upset human limits completely, created by Sturgeon, in the loving monsters charged with a softer eroticism than that of sensual cinema. They brought into doubt many things that had been given as read, and our brain opened, the soul prepared itself to accept the new.
I have written many times before, but I would like to repeat it here, that, compared to the enormous changes of the last three decades or so, the readers of the science fiction of the 1950s and ‘60s were more prepared to understand the world that was coming, and therefore the cleverest things in the world, even those covered by political secret, and they were the most astute in recognising mystification and manipulation; much more so than others, the readers of the pale realism of middle-class, or lower middle-class literature, or even the most adventurous of cinema - by way of explanation and summary, let us say that the “customers” of Moravia, and even Zavattini, down to Agatha Christie and “Espresso”......
Film gave a rather poor echo of this confusion, but it was still an echo. A list of titles and subjects might help here. The conflict between scientists and soldiers which is, unfortunately, a thing of the fictional past, in films like the first of the new era, Destination Moon or The Thing from Another World, by a Hawks so “masculinely” on the side of the military; but it was the scientists who were the bearers of a new tolerance, in films like The Day the Earth Stood Still or This Island Earth and the great British Quatermass series. The atomic mutations in so many Japanese b-movies, but also Them!, Jack Arnold’s little masterpiece out of Richard Matheson, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and scores of others (we cannot forget, in Arnold, the openness of the child protagonists of The Space Children to what is different, even extra-terrestrial and “monstrous”); and the more general fear of the atom bomb, in films of political fantasy, from On the Beach to the already-mentioned Strangelove and the forgotten but entertaining film produced by, and starring, Harry Belafonte liberally based on the literary ancestor of Shiel The Purple Cloud: The World, the Flesh and the Devil. A case apart in this list of the effects of the atom bomb and weapons experimentation is the British The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Possession and control of minds and bodies, somewhat more frightening and ambiguous than that of the territorial invasion promoted by the Cold War, in the wonderful Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Don Siegel, and also in Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate and the even more unsettling The Village of the Damned by Rilla from Wyndham’s book (with its understatement and “banal” initial realism, British science fiction should be re-examined, in the cinema too with the work of Val Guest, Roy Baker and others, not to mention perhaps the most astute science fiction film of the 1950s, and still extremely modern, Mackendrick’s The Man in the White Suit, which deserves new critical review). The destruction of nature, and also the revenge of mutant nature on man, especially effective if imagined and filmed by Hitchcock in The Birds. The disturbing eroticism of Creature from the Black Lagoon. The despair about the destiny of society in which we live in The Damned by Losey, a precursor of the black vision of A Clockwork Orange, but here without the slightest trace of sarcasm. And from Losey to the far from ingenuous sorties into the genre of no less than .....Jean-Luc Godard!: the episode The New World in Rogopag, a short philosophical story that accompanied Pasolini’s La ricotta; Alphaville; and – but here we are already in a “neo-realism” of science fiction that was going to be the winner in reality – Week-end...Today, we prefer these films to those of Resnais, who lovingly experimented with the genre and anticipated not merely visually the later works of Dick and Ballard with Marienbad. And we must never forget the shorted, most “fixed” (photographically) and brilliant of experiments in breaking the boundaries of the genre by Chris Marker with La jetée.
We have already arrived at the 1960s, and even if we are in a new era, we cannot forget the humanist conviction of Truffaut via Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), the extraordinary Seconds, again by Frankenheimer who once more attacks the American dream, Charlie by Ralph Belson from a story by Keynes, Demetrius and the Gladiators by Peter Watkins that treats the subject of the spectacle of society seriously while Flaiano and Petri joked about it in Sheckley’s La decima vittima (The Tenth Victim), where science fiction becomes commedia all’italiana – and that was not the only example. With these films, we have already reached the post-modern, without realising it. At the same time, and I do not mention it last by accident because it is truly a film of 1968, and the science fiction of ’68, in Ice Robert Kramer is perhaps the last to narrate revolutionary utopias in action, together with their difficulties and crises.
Two of the extremes of the genre from the popular narrative modes of the 1950s come down to us in the 1970s: Cornel Wilde’s No Blade of Grass, from the “ecology” book by Britain’s John Christopher, who, as opposed to Ballard, started on the left-wing and finished up on the right (it does happen!), and Soylent by Richard Fleischer out of Harry Harrison, one of the one most frightening and realistic forecasts of the city awaiting us, worthy of that brilliant forerunner The Iron Heel by Jack London, where, however, there was a reaction to the disasters caused by the logic of money in the hope of a revolution that Fleischer had already seen as historically and theoretically beaten: yesterday’s failure.


Without Dick or Ballard, we would not have had Pynchon or De Lillo; not that I am sure we should be happy about that! Without B science fiction, we probably would not have had Kubrick’s 2001, just as without the gothic novel and its reviver, we would not have had Shining. All the same, Dick, Ballard, Pynchon, De Lillo, Kubrick (I have my doubts about King) cannot be happy, and I believe they are not, at least those who are still alive, to have foretold a fantasy world that has become reality. The living speak of the present, but they cannot love it. However, they no longer seem able, nor do any of us, to imagine the future, let alone a better future. Literature and what is left of the cinema have to reckon with what the parasites of art think of as “pure” imagination. Either that or they manipulate the past, rewriting it shamelessly, falsifying it, or they simply tell the lies that those in power, or at least those with influence, would like us to make our own, so that we spectators and readers and no longer actors, behave accordingly.
The Grand Master of this new world is perhaps a German from whom the Americans learned the basics. His name was Goebbels and he perfected communication as advertising, “art” as propaganda, a canon of behaviour and the surgery of dreams. The days have gone when mass culture meant access for the masses to culture, an opening to democracy, an enriching of the imaginative heritage and an invitation to freedom of thought. Now again we have one way of thinking. The most pessimistic science fiction has won, and all we need now is for it to win on a larger scale than contemporary catastrophes.
It – the pessimistic vision – has won, and there is no longer a need for it, for the “system”. But we must start thinking again, otherwise we will accept the post-modern slavery of thought as the inevitable destiny of the species and the planet. What freedom! What adventure the science fiction of our youth promised us! And what a way, for those who can understand it, to imagine the future, a better future!