Cory Doctorow has a recent article in Locus Magazine on why high definition is bad for science fiction films. Basically, the argument is: in the case of CGI special effects (SF films being the perfect genre for showcasing the next unimaginable spectacle), their quality--or at least definition--exponentially increases each year, as does the amount of money poured into such projects. While a film released five years ago might seem laughably outdated by today's visual standards, a certain amount of longevity can be ensured by small-screen formats on which it may be harder to see the primitive blemishes of last year's computer graphics. But with an attendant decline in the cost of bigger, high definition LCD screens, Doctorow says "Whatever longevity can be wrung from a movie by releasing it to smaller, more forgiving screens is cut short by the living-room behemoths that are being pushed on us today," and the returns that can be anticipated by major studios for investing in $200 million SF blockbusters will be less and less. There is an inverse relationship between Moore's law and the valuation of filmic SF spectacle.
But I think this argument might not consider the internal mechanics of SF's reception and the increasingly small epicycles of nostalgia that we seem to be going through in popular culture, which becomes especially pronounced in the case of science fiction films. SF seems to have a different sort of half-life than other fictional modes, it ages much more quickly, in a way that I'm not sure how to talk about. Perhaps SF films draw off of a particular a mode of being in the world that is more easily forgotten, more fragile than the raw materials used in the construction of other types of (realistic) films? A mode of being with technologies that would otherwise be forgotten, but can only be recovered in any sense through some sort of patronizing nostalgia?
1 comments:
I think you are so right (as usual!) that Doctorow's argument assumes a peculiar idea of the reception of science fiction, over and above the particular simplicity of his formula (the inverse relationship you quite nicely specify), which smacks of technological determinism (or rather fatalism).
I think though your lack of certainty about how to talk about the aging of scifi might be couched, however, in the fact that you have to use that odd term "nostalgia" to talk about it: the "increasingly small epicycles of nostalgia" and "patronizing nostalgia" that recovers the lost modes of equipmental/technological being-towards.
I think you hit the nail on the head, rather, when you use in that very phrase about nostalgia the word "epicycle" (and less with "half-life"): it could be that there is a particular type of memory that technological life makes us engage in, one that returns upon itself or circulates at a different speed. So the reception might be more determined by a sort of historicity and memorization that technology (and techniques more generally--cf. Foucault's Technologies of the Self on writing) actuates in our Dasein and that is involved in our involvement with it, rather than determined by the peculiar time of just technology by itself causing memories to return more quickly. I think this is what you're getting at, actually. Amazing post, though!!
PS. you NEED to read Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time--it really tries to think about this specific thing.
Post a Comment