Science Fiction and the Counterculture

French | Spanish | Portuguese | Italian | German | Japanese | Chinese | Korean | Russian | Arabic

Following the plethora of bug-eyed alien, nuclear mutation fi lms seen in the 1950s, science fi ction in the 1960s turned away from its B-movie roots and started to focus on the more political aspects of nuclear proliferation and technological advancement

.Two strands began to emerge in the genre: one continued to use the potential threat and consequences of nuclear war as a backdrop to its stories, including On the Beach (1959) and Fail Safe (1964), and the other has been identifi ed by John Brosnan (1978: 139) as ‘a small trend in satirical [science fi ction] fi lms', including Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and Barbarella (1968).

However, Dr. Strangelove clearly combined elements of the nuclear theme and satirical form, offering audiences different perspectives on America's national agenda. Strangely, for a period in American history that is most characterised by social confl ict, war and suffering, science fi ction fi lms largely neglected the more extreme visions of contemporary and future society (Baxter 1972: 140); instead, the genre can perhaps be viewed as being in a state of fl ux as it struggled to attract audiences tired of alien invasion narratives and more impressed with the colourful action adventure serials now appearing on television. Like most genres in Hollywood, science fi ction was experiencing the changes and uncertainties brought about by the industrial shake-up in Hollywood: the period starting in the late 1960s and stretching to the mid-1970s known as New Hollywood. Christine Cornea sees the effects of New Hollywood on the industry the infl uence of European cinema, growth in art cinema, new directors, revisionist interpretations of history and established genres as vital within science fi ction. Stanley Kubrick's 2001:

A Space Odyssey (1968) is representative of what she terms the ‘new art' cycle of science fi ction fi lms, ‘marked by the simultaneous display of the creative energies and sensibilities associated with the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s/1970s and the industry's efforts to engage with a new and younger audience' (Cornea 2007: 82). 2001's infl uence and impact (see boxed text) has long been debated and defended within academia, yet other fi lms in this

New Hollywood period deserve further exploration. Indeed, if Hollywood was struggling to maintain audience appeal by experimenting with form and style, it was also still producing more traditional genre features that relied on special effects and B-movie themes.

For example, Fantastic Voyage (1966) depicts humans achieving miniaturisation and entering the human body using the latest in effects technology. Hollywood also returned attention to the literary classics, providing adaptations of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), Mysterious Island (1961) and The Time Machine (1960) are evidence of the industry's fascination with adapting established authors and stories, only these versions carried the hallmarks of studios willing to splurge money on effects and sets to help guarantee high box offi ce returns. The 1960 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), directed by Irwin Allen, may have been described by some as ‘appallingly juvenile' (Brosnan 1978: 140), but it was surely a sign of greater things to come for the genre, especially with regard to Allen's work soon to be seen on television.

No discussion of science fi ction is complete without consideration of the genre's most landmark fi lm, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still seen by many as the archetypal science fi ction movie, 2001 is one of the most analysed and critiqued texts in fi lm studies.

This point is alluded to by George Zebrowski (2009: 60) in his rather short analysis of science fi ction on fi lm, where he asserts that it ‘showed what scientifi c accuracy combined with visual realism could do for written [science fi ction]'.

This statement reveals the tension between those who defend the literary form of the genre over the visual, and indeed Zebrowski begins his summary by outlining the prejudice against fi lm from those who deem it incapable of containing the ideas that stimulate readers. However, 2001 is often accepted as part of the literary canon (not least because it is a book) because Kubrick's ingenuity gave the fi lm depth and elicited ‘thought in the viewer' (Zebrowski 2009: 57).

Another reason for its seminal status is that it literally redefi ned the genre after a period of relative stagnation. As the alien invasion and nuclear monster movies of the 1950s lost favour and died out, they were replaced by fi lms less informed by a sense of Cold War paranoia and rather more receptive to the changing technological landscape and the real life space exploits of the astronauts and cosmonauts battling to win the Space Race. In effect, one might have asked oneself in this period, ‘Why go see a movie about space suited astronauts and interstellar travel when you could turn on the TV and watch the real thing as it happened?'

The perception that real science was taking over from the science fi ction once popular with kids and young audiences was being created by NASA to help sustain a public relations campaign designed to put pressure on the government to continue funding research and building for the Space Race: ‘there were televised reports and offi cial photographs of the missions undertaken.

As early as 1962 close-up photographs of the moon were taken from Ranger 4 and in 1964 television pictures of Mars (recorded from Mariner 4) were available. The exploration of space was truly a spectacular media event' (Cornea 2007: 76). As we shall see later in this chapter with reference to television in the 1960s, science fi ction did still attract an audience, with numerous series charting the voyages of space and time travellers becoming ever more popular with children and adults alike.

What such media and television coverage created, according to Howard E. McCurdy (1997: 110), was a sense of ‘cultural anticipation' whereby the fi ctional images of space and space travel spurred scientists to realize such potentials sooner, and in turn their achievements prompted people to wonder what, if anything, could hold them back from fi nding out the secrets of the universe.

The American civilian space program tapped into the cultural fascination for exploring the unknown and debating the potentials of there being extraterrestrial life, and by 1968 (the same year as 2001's cinema release) ‘public support for NASA space fl ights reached a peaked [sic]' (McCurdy 1997: 102). The optimism felt for NASA's continuing Apollo missions and the multitude of mediated images of the Moon, space and space fl ight ensured a receptive audience for Kubrick's fi lm. Yet, interestingly, 2001 would not be quite the science fi ction fi lm such anticipation demanded.

The fi lm would certainly be visually spectacular, but its message would in fact be less affi rmative about humanity's technological and scientifi c achievements to date. J. P. Telotte (2001: 100-1) suggests that the fi lm followed the documentary style of Destination Moon (1950) and The Conquest of Space (1955), offering a visual experience coupled with the promise and wonder of science fi ction. Kubrick wanted more than to simply chart the meteoric rise of human achievement; he wanted ‘to develop a larger story of human evolution'. With this, the fi lm is split into three distinct narrative segments that chart such evolution over the course of our pre-, current and future history.

The fi rst segment, titled ‘The Dawn of Man', shows our simian ancestors surviving on the plains of ancient Africa; the only preoccupations for the ape men are to survive being eaten by feline predators and protect the waterhole which gives them life.

The fi rst of the four appearances of a mysterious large black monolith (its appearance each time provides the impetus for the next stage in human evolution and the fi lm's narrative progression) seemingly prompts the ape men to realise the use of bones as primitive tools for protecting themselves from other apes and to

kill large animals for food. In the act of killing, the alpha male of the group throws his bone high into the sky where, through the use of the most famous match cut in fi lm history, it becomes an orbiting spaceship fl oating in the open vastness of space.

It is at this point that the audience is thrust four million years into the future, from primitive Earth to 2001, where humans have mastered space travel and we now inhabit large space stations and the Moon. America and the Soviet Union still maintain their Cold War in this 2001, yet in their attempts to achieve technological superiority all sense of human instinct and emotion have been lost

For Mark Crispin Miller, this part of the fi lm emphasises Kubrick's use of antimyth, where human technological achievement has served only to stifl e and suffocate the evolutionary process instigated by the fi rst black monolith: ‘In 2001, in other words, there is too much science, too much made, the all-pervasive product now degrading us almost as nature used to do'

(Miller 1994: 19). So, far from being a fi lm that celebrates human triumphs, 2001 is a philosophical denunciation of humanity's overreliance on science and technology. The famous match shot emphasises that humans are no longer on the rise but are instead on a descent; we are being reduced by the very tools we have created to help ourselves. The second segment, titled ‘Jupiter Mission', is prompted by another encounter with a black monolith found underneath the surface of the

Moon technology has allowed humans to reach the Moon, and the second slab will set humans on the next course of evolution further into space.

This next chapter in evolution, however, is tempered by perhaps the genre's most notorious representation of technology gone bad: the HAL 9000 computer. Following a signal emanating from the moon, Earth sends the spaceship

Discovery to Jupiter to discover the origin of the monolith. Five astronauts, three of whom remain in hibernation for the voyage, are the only human members of the crew. The ship is largely maintained by a HAL 9000, the advanced supercomputer on board. To keep themselves occupied, the two supervising astronauts play chess with HAL, watch TV, and exercise. After a HAL makes a minor error in anticipating a fault with the communications unit, the two astronauts, David Bowman and Frank Poole, contact Earth to inform them of HAL's mistake. HAL 9000s do not make mistakes, so the potential dangers of maintainia faulty computer force Dave and Frank into having a private conference in one of the space pods. Unbeknownst to them, HAL is watching them, reading their lips; it discovers that it may be switched off before the mission is complete.

In an act of self-preservation, HAL turns off the life support to the hibernating astronauts and kills Poole by cutting loose his air hose while he is outside replacing the communication equipment. Bowman realises that HAL must be disconnected so that the mission can continue and he can survive, although HAL is equally determined to continue the mission without human interference. Clearly, this segment of the fi lm serves as a blatant ‘Frankensteinian cautionary tale, a representation of our disquiet over the cybernetic blurring of the human, of our fear of an evolutionary showdown with increasingly autonomous technologies' (Mateas 2006: 105), yet for many critics it functioned as padding, a confl ict between good and evil more familiar to traditional Hollywood movie audiences (Palmer 2006: 19). After Bowman kills HAL he discovers the third monolith of the fi lm in orbit around Jupiter.

The last segment of 2001, titled ‘Jupiter and Beyond the Infi nite', begins when Bowman approaches the monolith in his pod. Entering what is referred to as the Stargate, both Bowman and the audience are confronted by psychedelic images, lights and colours. At this point, ‘the fi lm shifts from a relatively comprehensible [science fi ction] narrative and into a mode of avant-garde art cinema' (Booker 2006: 79) where the next stage in human evolution is envisaged.

An older Bowman discovers the pod has appeared in a period style suite, and upon getting out of the pod he encounters an older version of himself eating at a table. Through a series of jump cuts, an increasingly aging Bowman continues to meet older versions until he is bed ridden. At the foot of the bed stands the fourth monolith, and as Bowman reaches out to touch it the scene cuts to show the now famous image of the Star Child suspended in space, the foetus representing humanity being reborn and ready to embark on the next stage of evolution. Many critics have discussed these closing scenes with reference to the concurrent counterculture movement and the taking of mind-altering drugs.

Telotte (2001: 102) describes the Stargate as a ‘drug-inspired hallucinatory vision' and Christine Cornea (2007: 82-5) links the fi lm and contemporary science fi ction literature to the psychedelic art movement, which at the time was experimenting with marijuana and LSD.

Whatever the reading, 2001's ending is clearly emblematic of the period's fascination with social change and resisting the status quo. A fi lm that still infl uences the genre, both visually and thematically, 2001 serves to ignite thought and challenge preconceptions. However, as inspiration to the fi lms and popular culture that followed, Kubrick's fi lm has fallen victim to its ‘satiric prophecy' (Miller 1994: 25), whereby the ships and corporate logos used to satirise our then ordered and stagnated reality have become symbols of what the future will look like.

With that, the next step in human evolution may not be possible.ng As Hollywood started to revise its attitudes toward and methods of fi lmmaking, America too was going through some deep-seated changes. Society was starting to break apart as the nation's youth began to drift from the more conservative politics shared by their parents and demand social and political change. In a reactionary move away from the consensus of the 1950s, this counterculture movement was shared across the globe running parallel with the spread of socialism and communism in Eastern Europe and the Cultural Revolution in China. Students and young people were demanding changes to the social structures they saw as impinging on personal freedoms.

Feminism, drugs, sex and racial and sexual equality were at the forefront of what critics have called the culture wars, the battle between liberal and conservative, younger and older generations, over who could shape the nation's ideologies and values after World War II. This break away from the old is clearly visualised in the decade's fascination for the new: fashion, art, music and fi lm all stressed novelty. New Hollywood is part of this counterculture movement because of its newness and because of what Jeremy Black (2006: 107) calls the ‘specifi c rejection of conventional social and cultural assumptions'.

Challenging the established norms of the previous decade and generation led to the culture wars and a renewed focus on particular forms of youth culture such as fi lm bearing in mind it had long been seen as a medium that attracted young audiences. Yet whether or not fi lm was for a younger generation, science fi ction continued to be used by some writers and directors as a means to offer political comment and critique during this tumultuous time of social change.