The Mirage of Home: Estranged Modernity of Science Fiction

THE

MIRAGE OF HOME The Estranged Modernity of Science Fiction

JAMES W FENG

supervised by

DR ROSS ANDERSON Dissertation submitted in fulfillment of Bachelor of Design in Architecture Honours at the School of Architecture, Design & Planning

THE UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY N O V E M B E R

2 0 1 8

I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged.

This thesis has not been submitted for any other degree.

INDEX

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INDEX PR E FAC E 7 RO OT S 1 The Birthmark of Science Fiction

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SF Lineage Suvinian Estrangement

C ONDI T ION S 2. Mechanisms of the Mirage

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Optics & Perspective Narrative “Imago” & Mirage

PH ENOM ENA 3. The Unhomely Nostalgia

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Constructed Nostalgia “Das Unheimliche” Mori’s Valley Estrangement Dynamics

C ONCLUSION

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R E FE RENC E L I ST

130

Digital model of mother and child, Westworld title sequence, courtesy of Elastic.

Extended citing refer to reference list.

P R E FA C E

Preface Films that take up the question of the relationship between science/technology and humanity/ spirit, not surprisingly, also take the form of the

quest myth for home.

-Susan Mackey-Kallis, The Hero and the Perennial Journey Home in American Film

Mere data makes a man. A and C and T and G. The alphabet of you. All from four symbols.

I am only two: 1 and 0.

-JOI, Blade Runner 2049

K [pointing at dog] :

Is it real?

Deckard: I don’t know. Ask him.

-Blade Runner 2049

Feng, James, The Encounter, 2018. Digital composite. For extended citing refer to reference list.

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Not real?

But what about me? My dreams? My thoughts? My body? Are they not real? And what if I took these unreal fingers and used them to decorate the walls with your outsized personality? Would that be real?

-Maeve Millay, Westworld

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes.

If you superimpose their two views, you get this result:

Nothing is real.

-Philip K. Dick

Modern man’s most urgent need is to discover the reality and value of the inner subjective world, to

discover the symbolic life...

a pre-requisite for psychic health.

-E.F. Edinger, Ego & Archetype

P R E FA C E

They all think it’s about more detail. But that’s not how memory works. We recall with our feelings.

Anything real should be a mess.

-Dr. Ana Stelline, Blade Runner 2049

...lived space always transcends the rules of geometry... organized independently of the boundaries of physical space and time, [and] resembles

the structure of dream and the unconscious...

-Juhani Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema

The divine gift does not come from a higher power, but

from our own minds.

-Dr. Robert Ford, Westworld

Everything is true...

Everything anybody has ever thought.

- Rick Deckard, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

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The Birthmark of Science Fiction In the early decades of the twenty-first century, popular media increasingly manifests itself as Science Fiction (SF) texts intended, in essence, to provoke the re-framing of perspectives on the human condition. The relevance and social influence of this genre are gaining momentum at an unprecedented rate in media consumed by casual viewers, enthusiasts and academics alike. The architectural discourse within SF, naturally occupies similar theoretical and ontological literary spaces, beyond the formal characteristics of film sets and special effects. To understand these shared spaces, one should first attempt to define the thematic boundaries that exist to define the genre of SF – an essential question that at first seem as straightforward to answer. However, the fundamental qualities of SF have long been a contentious topic of debate amongst SF writers and readers, critics and

Feng, James, Holographic Aquarium, 2018. Digital composite. For extended citing refer to reference list.

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scholars, mostly notably Darko Suvin, Carl Freedman and Stanislaw Lem. The multitude of debates surrounding the SF genre at first glance, to provide unsteady ground, and therefore requires some thoughtful, critical delineation.

Tracing SF back to its roots from the polar forces of fear and wonder1, American artist Ward Shelley’s 2011 interpretation of the SF family tree, a graphical mapping under an appropriate title The History of Science Fiction, in its efforts to flesh out and compartmentalise SF and its relationship with other genres and subgenres, portrays the literary universe as more akin to a biological system of tubules and organs.

Shelley describes his artwork as a ‘tentacled beast’2 inspired by H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds Martians. The chronological graphic traces the genre from its “nascent roots in mythology and fantastic stories”3

1 Sci-Arc’s 2017 three-part lecture series, curated by Liam Young on fictional landscapes interestingly falls under the same name.

2 Ward Shelley, The History of Science Fiction, 2011. A graphic chronology that maps the literary genre from its nascent roots in mythology and fantastic stories to the somewhat calcified post-Star Wars space opera epics of today. thick high quality paper for durability with a matt finish., 39.5” X 21.5”.

3 Ibid.

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▼ Sections of Ward Shelley’s The History of Science Fiction

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to the “calcified post-Star Wars space opera epics of today”4. The SF genre appears in the map as the grandchild of the Enlightenment and Romanticism movements, which collided and birthed Gothic fictions such as M. Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus, considered by many as the first ‘true’ prelude to the SF genre. The accuracy of this complex mapping has been contested since its viral presence in the SF communities in 2011 as enthusiasts scrutinised on the modes of categorisation of genres and chronology, with the British Library partaking in the editing of the work’s latest version. The map’s portrayal of visual chaos and interweaving relationships of SF with other genres is certainly concurrent with the popular description of SF as the “genology jungle”5, an established consensus. It is easy to be distracted by close family members of the SF genre when attempting to delineate its identities, such as horror, fantasy, and adventure, due to the dynamism concerning SF’s addressing of the ever-changing cultural and socio-political demand of the milieu. This constant

4 Ibid.

5 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction : On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 29.

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entanglement between genres is a phenomenon better understood by inspecting genre as perhaps more than a system of classification.

Australian literary critic John Frow famously defines genre as “a set of… highly organised constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning”6. A systemic difference will result in meaning from one system rendered meaningless in another. The SF genre’s struggle in both its production and the interpretation of the meaning of its texts, since its conception, is bound by two factors. Firstly, the entanglement of multiple sub-genres such as horror, popular adventure fantasy and space fantasy, especially in the commercial world, has obstructed ‘higher’ SF texts from being taken more seriously. This has permeated to the cultural attitude and perception of SF by journalists and critics.

Sven Birkerts’ review of Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake controversially began with “science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘L’.”7 SF’s reputation, corrupted by prejudice, arguably

6 John Frow, Genre, The New Critical Idiom (London ; New York: Routledge, 2006), 10.

7 Sven Birkerts, “Present at the Re-Creation,” New York Times, 18/05/2003 2003.

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attributed to the SF writers’ efforts to avoid allowing their works to carry the association, instead labelling them, in the cases such as Judith Merrill, as Speculative Fiction. The struggle for SF to elevate itself as a noble effort to offer an unexpected new which “pushes humanity out of its present to the not yet realized”8 was illustrated by Pierre Bourdieu and Andrew Milner. Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production, describes an economy of genres, plots genres along two axes: symbolic capital vs. economic capital. Symbolic capital serves as the respectability or the symbolic ‘degree of consecration’ associated with the genre: such as comedy as opposed to fine arts, while economic capital outlines the market size of each genre, whether it is esoteric or attracts a mass audience. It is becoming increasingly obvious that SF’s relevance to contemporary, twenty-first-century issues catalyses the potential for SF’s slow shift towards the upper portions of the chart, into the territories of “high” Literature and Culture. Secondly, a perhaps less obvious factor, but one that has silently occupied the

8 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. (Oxford Oxfordshire: Blackwell, 1986).

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subtext of this exploration thus far, is moving back to first-principles and examining the fundamental qualities that allow a text to even be named ‘Science Fiction’. To cut through polarising disagreements in SF to find the last point of definitive consensus, one will naturally arrive at the work of Croatian literary critic Darko Suvin.

In cosmology, specifically in general relativity, an event horizon is a region from which no celestial object, radiation or event can return, commonly associated with the gravitational pull of black holes.

Darko Suvin’s contribution to SF criticism establishes a similar event horizon in the academic world. Gerry Canavan describes Suvin as the founder of “discursivity from which a ‘heterogeneous’ origin point”9 stimulates “subsequent transformations” that “must situate themselves in relation”10, and that the “return to [this] origin” is an

9 Gerry Canavan and Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction on the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, 1st, New ed., vol. 18, Ralahine Utopian Studies 18 (Bern: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2016), xi.

10 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice : Selected Essays and Interviews / Pages 113-138 : What Is an Author?, ed. Josué V. Harari, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (New York1979).

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“inevitable necessity” for this discursivity to proliferate11. Unlike the fundamental nature of the Sciences, in which its epistemology arises from the continual evolution from the previous point of departure, discourses in the Foucauldian sense, “are vitalised by the continual return [with difference] to origins.”12 Canavan argues that this nature of discursivity allows for its adaptive nature to new contexts, “changing circumstances” and to retain relevance, “without falling into...obscurity.”13 This, Author Mark Bould appropriately calls the “Suvin Event” of 1972-1973, “From that moment on, SF theory has inhabited...the Suvin event horizon, or attempted to escape it.”14

Suvin’s critical research into SF began with his publication of On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre in 1972 and was followed by the extension of Poetics into Metamorphoses of Science Fiction in 1979.

These texts lay the foundation for modern SF criticism as well as the

11 Ibid.

12 Canavan and Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction on the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, 18.

13 Ibid., xii.

14 Ibid., xiii.

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discursive framework for not only the scholarly criticism in SF, but ‘speculative’ genres like horror and fantasy, in which all critics of SF post-Suvin are forced to contend with in polarity, but never ignored.

Canavan describes that all SF studies are technically ‘post-Suvinian’.

Suvin’s contribution can be fundamentally understood by his terms novum and the oxymoron cognitive estrangement, appearing in his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction as the driving mechanism on which SF operates. SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement is “ubiquitous in scholarly introductions to the field.”15 Suvin further defines the SF genre as the premise ‘whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”16 Despite its verbosity, this has become the consensus definition, the origin around which SF studies revolve. Cognition is the now, the familiar, the real, the ‘Zero World’; while estrangement deals with the novum, a Suvinian

15 Ibid., xii.

16 Ibid., 20.

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term referring to “strange newness” around which “strange-covariant coordinate systems and semantic fields”17 might be organised. The term estrangement was influenced by Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie, “making it strange”, or ‘defamiliarization’ and German dramatist Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, known also as the John Willett’s translation “alienation effect” - theatrical devices to break suspension of disbelief, or a glitch in the system to remind views of a simulated reality, as in the Matrix films. In A Short Organum for the Theatre, Brecht writes estrangement as the device that “allows us to recognise its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.” Suvin describes the interplay between the “soaring imagination”18 of estrangement and the “real conditions of existence” as producing a “feedback oscillation”19 between the poles. In a typical narrative, this may mean: the implied viewers originate in the irreal20 norm of the author, then is transported to the novum, experienced

17 Ibid., xviii.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., xviii.

20 An alternate reality, a post-modern allegory.

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by the irreal consciousness of viewers immersed in the novum, who then returns with a renewed perspective to the author’s reality. Suvin argues therefore, that unlike fantasy, SF reflects on reality, through the rigorous interplay with Science and cognition, “not only natural (science) but also all the cultural or historical sciences.”21 Cognition, therefore, is more than the device of obsession with empirical science, or the “judgement external to the text on its rationality...of imaginings”, but also the attitude of the text “to the kinds of estrangements performed.”22 As an extension of Suvinian thought, Carl Freeman denotes SF as more than the real dream but as a facilitator of the “viewer’s return from the science fiction estrangement back to the context of the real world” in which we all live, laugh and suffer - a sort of “epistemological poetics”23.

21 Canavan and Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction on the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, 18, 26.

22 Ibid., xix.

23 Suvin’s email exchange with Canavan, footnotes in Ibid., xix.

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Much of the debate revolving around Suvin’s ‘hard’ definition of SF is the rejection of fantasy elements as SF. Suvin’s rejection of fantasy as fairytale, epitomised by referring to the popular Star Wars narrative as mere “Space Opera”, continually drawing criticism with the SF community. Fantasy, which Suvin also calls the “hero-princessmonster triangle” is SF retrogressing into “creative suicide” in its escape from present horizons to “closed collateral world indifferent to cognitive possibilities.”24 The critical distinction, according to Suvin, lies in the fantasy genre to not attempting to understand reality through estrangement, instead escaping it all together. Understandably, this argument occupies a somewhat vulnerable position, opening itself to attack. Seemingly, the metric that underlines this genre is the rigour developed through Science with a capital ‘S’, in particular, natural sciences, and increasingly in recent years a shift to social sciences.

SF seems to occupy the space of making of the improbable into the possible, rather than making the impossible probable.

24 Canavan and Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction on the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, 18, 20.

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By understanding SF as cognitive estrangement, clarity arises with some sense of freedom. If one ponders the differences between texts of cognitive estrangement inhabiting a novum, as opposed to the norm of the empirical fictions, SF appears to share an intriguing relationship with other aforementioned subgenres that have occupied the literary world throughout history. These mostly pre-twentieth-century ‘protoSF’ texts occupy the timeline, appearing as clusters appearing in high frequency, or ‘temporal groupings”25. Suvin identifies six such groups, at least in Euro-Mediterranean history: from “Hellenic (folk myths and legends to Plato); Hellenistic-cum-Roman (Virgil to Lucian); Renaissance-Baroque (ca. 1500-1660); democratic revolution (17701820); fin-de-siècle at the end of the 19th Century (1870-1910) and the ‘modern SF’ (1920-present). It appears that these clusters occur at times of “absolutist” worldviews where SF began from a pre-scientific approach to satirise and ridicule those in power as a form of social critique, much like Lucian’s utopic depictions in 125AD. The theme of resistance to the repressive, autocratic, bureaucratic and the presence

25 Ibid., 105.

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of Marxist ideology persists through the SF intention, offering a novum not only to its degree of “cognitive validation” but also to its “degree of relevance”26 as SF serves as not merely a reflection of reality, but a reflection on reality - The novum is the ‘possible’ and should not only be irreal for the purpose to estrange but also to be necessary for the viewers’ return to their ‘zero world’. These necessary novums often appear in the form of “fortunate Island”, “fabulous voyage”, “utopia”: “planetary novel”, “anticipation” or “dystopia (anti-utopia)”27, suggesting the root of SF to stem from innate human curiosity and inquisitiveness, but more so, a hope in finding from the Other “aspects of the Supreme Good (or revulsion from its antithesis)”28.

Remnants of Plato’s Republic, Lucian’s two-millennium-old and Thomas More’s five-hundred-year-old utopian images can be argued to exist in most modern SF aspirations as “fundamentally subversive

26 Ibid., 98. The term “relevance” introduces the concept of both contextual and relativistic interpretation, expanded on in the following chapters.

27 Ibid., 15.

28 Ibid., 18.

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sub-genre”29, novum as an isolated socio-political ecosystem, or as Suvin calls it, More’s “alternative Island.” Utopian images, as with dystopian images, proliferate time and time again. This is particularly true in Philip K Dick’s worlds. The two feature-length30 Blade Runner adaptations stem from his Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), reincarnating into global cinemas fourteen years later in 1982 as a Ridley Scott film, then again thirty-five years later in 2017 as a Denis Villeneuve film, each depicting worlds set three decades into the future. In the time between Dick’s publishing and the release of Blade Runner 2049 in 2017, our world had seen the introduction of Global Positioning System (GPS); WiFi; establishment of megacorporations such as Google and Facebook; completion of the Human Genome Project; CRISPR; quantum computing; rapid prototyping; smart, autonomous systems; artificial intelligence and machine learning. The post-modern fragmentation of what was once thought of as the baseline of natural science and the social science capabilities

29 Ibid., 41-42.

30 Two full-length films with two short animation films laying grounds for the contextual gap for the latest Blade Runner 2049.

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parallels with the amorphous nature of traditional SF genre all along.

The proliferation of autonomous technology pushes SF into a space previously reserved only for religion, philosophy and ethics. Suvin’s established discursivity can thus be applied as a framework to analyse the relativistic experiences of both audience and character in these late-modern SF texts in these new contexts.

SF’s path to the twenty-first century initially sprouted the from concurrence

with

empirical

scientific

developments

of

the

Enlightenment period, as well as the Industrial Revolutions and beyond, whereby the focus was placed on natural sciences, to the existential pessimism and escapism influenced by the World Wars, especially the global nuclear arms race following the WWII. A drastic transition in popular media had also occurred. Since the Lumière brother’s introduction of film to the world in 1896, SF Film has slowly become a prominent outlet to perpetuate cognitive estrangement, partaking a similar trajectory as SF literature had in its infant years. Méliès’ comical Le Yoyage dans la Lune (1902), often regarded as the first ‘SF’

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film31, saw a satire of the veni, vidi, vici32 spirit of European colonialism and an early conception of social and political commentary within the SF film genre at large, notably followed by Fritz Lang’s SF classic Metropolis (1927). Along with the arrival of the Space Age in 1957, SF appropriately moved into the cosmological and existential realm, furthering on themes of machine as embedded, uncontrollable threat, unconstrained by human morality, seen in Metropolis, Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1986). Susan Mackey-Kallis summarises Suvin’s ‘return’ to cognition: “[Films about] alien life forms, and the origin of the universe are implicitly about humanity’s quest to find our place… to feel ‘at home’ in the universe33.” By extension, in the twenty-first century, the silicon revolution has pushed developments into artificial intelligence, social networking and autonomous systems, naturally, allowing SF film to inhabit deeper into the sentient,

31 Suvin would likely categories Le Yoyage dans la Lune as Space Opera despite ‘formal’ ingredients that align it with the SF genre in general.

32 Latin phrase for “I came, I saw, I conquered.” A quote popularly attributed to Julius Caesar.

33 Susan Mackey-Kallis, “The Hero and the Perennial Journey Home in American Film,” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 198.

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Frankenstein beings such as Karel Čapek’s robot; Ridley Scott’s and Denis Villeneuve’s Replicant; Nolan and Joy’s Host. Morevoer, the human condition throughout the cinematic investigation into the existentialism through estranging deep across the narrative-driven consciousness of artificial intelligence. The issues of social identity and oppression, under this new context, form a thematic goldmine for SF writers and SF film directors alike. In order to alienate a well-informed audience of the twenty-first century, Suvin’s metaphysical SF cocktail of estrangement and cognition are churned through IMAX cameras into a multi-faceted treatment of visual-audio aesthetics, layered character development an ever-evolving narrative-mirage.

As it has become increasingly apparent throughout the exploration thus far, science fiction is by popular definition paradoxical. Debate and forever-shifting contexts mark the genre’s value. SF is a genre birthed from, as W. Shelley’s map depicts, the polar forces of fear and

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wonder, its novums either depicted as “carnivalesque” or “austere”34, often marked by either extreme chaos or absolute order, coexisting as structures in narrative space. An interesting proposition arises: amongst the chaos, and anti-chaos, what becomes of the traditionally ‘constant’, the controlled variable of home? What is home as “Zero World”35? In the curious cases of Scott & Villeneuve’s Blade Runner films and Nolan & Joy’s Westworld, and even arguably Scott & Spotnitz’s The Man in the High Castle36, protagonists, unlike traditional SF film narratives, inhabit the novum as the Other without realisation. Suvin’s view of SF as a device to societal inflection through estrangement becomes a narrative occurrence. The novum in Blade Runner is not merely Villeneuve’s 2049 Los Angeles urban environments, or its mise-en-scène, or its socio-political ecosystem as with More’s island; it is also the “new strangeness” of protagonist Officer K as Joe in the form of the uncanny. In Westworld, the novum exists on multiple

34 Terry Eagelton, “Utopias, Past and Present: Why Thomas More Remains Astonishingly Radical,” The Guardian 2015.

35 Canavan and Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction on the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, 18, 23.

36 A Phillip K Dick novel adaptation of the same name.

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dimensions, relative to character and perspective, one of which is prominently symbolised by mysterious labyrinth-like motif called the Maze37, its centre leading to a circumstantial novum – the key to unlocking the hosts’ self-awareness and autonomy from control. By Suvin’s definition, with every novum is a ‘Zero World’, if the novum happens to be a mental space, by logic this ‘Zero World’ must also exist mentally to orientate a space of home. This thesis will thus explore along this premise, the concepts of home situated in relation to origin, identity and its physical and metaphysical manifestations in selected modern SF film narratives set in postmodern futures.

The preoccupation of SF films with the idea of the nostalgic space - home, is a reflection to societal views on belonging, permanence and identity in an environment so deceivingly hostile, transient and duplicitous. David Fortin argues that SF can be perceived as a “cultural

37 Allison Keene, “‘Westworld’: Why the Maze Was Also for Us,” 05/12/2016 2016.

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genre centred on the notion of home.”38 Furthermore, the fundamental questioning of the human condition is achieved through discussion on the mode of creation of sentient beings, as explored extensively in Blade Runner. The consequence, or lack thereof, of uncertainty of the conscious ‘truth’ experienced as viewers occupy the space of confused character subjects, in which all objective reasoning is obliterated into a solace that only Cartesian existentialism39 offers.

As such, the capacities of SF film to inform architectural thinking is becoming increasingly relevant. The following chapters aim to define the relationship between SF and the discourse of pluralist phenomena, by recognising the spaces they both occupy in literary theory, as well as their divergence and thresholds. Focusing on popular SF cinematic spectacles of the twenty-first century, this thesis aims to critically dissect Westworld and the Blade Runner duology in relations to their perspectives on the mirage of home. These case studies offer a

38 David Terrance Fortin, Architecture and Science-Fiction Film : Philip K. Dick and the Spectacle of Home, Ashgate Studies in Architecture Series (Farnham ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub., 2011), 13.

39 René Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am).

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logical framework and vectors to allow for analysis on the SF genre and the twenty-first-century identity, and how we can return from these worlds to inform on ways societies can hope to better inhabit the world of emerging postmodern conditions that will have definitive and profound impacts on society in the very near future.

In a world of paradoxes, chaos and extremism; corrosion of neutrality and privacy; polarised reality and ficticious media, what becomes of the space of self, the space of home?

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MECHANICS OF THE MIRAGE

Mechanics of the Mirage In 1596, a Dutch ship became trapped in ice sheets near an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, close Northern Russia known as Novaya Zemlya, where they were forced to endure the pitch darkness of Polar winter.

To their surprise and subsequent bafflement, they were able to see a distorted sunrise above the horizon two weeks ahead of the usually precise expected date.40 Three centuries later, a German battleship Bismarck, while being pursued by British ships, disappeared in mist, suddenly made an impossible reappearance in closer proximity to the chasers, before fluttering and fading away. Recorded radar watch showed no change of course during this pursuit. 41 Perhaps apparent

40 Gerrit De Veer, The Three Voyages of William Barents to the Arctic Regions, ed. Charles T. Beke (London: Hakluyt Society, 1858).

41 Ludovic Kennedy, Pursuit; the Chase and Sinking of the Bismarck (London,: Collins, 1974).

K encounters new ’Joi’, Blade Runner 2049, courtesy of Alcon Entertainment.

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by now, these phenomena we now understand as the workings of the mirage. A mirage is a scientifically observable phenomenon, caused by light refracting while travelling through different densities of air42, resulting in various forms of optical illusions that had long baffled humans. Fantastical tales of floating cities, dessert oceans and vanishing boats have been attributed to this phenomenon. In this chapter, the concept of mirage serves as an elegant, yet complex framework to analyse the nature of mirage in modern SF texts43, more importantly – the spatial-narrative interplay between geography, character and cinema and their relationship with the notion of home.

Purely on subjectively level, mirages are no simple phenomena to comprehend. As explained by Newtonian physics, the appearance of mirages are determined by specific environmental parameters, such as distance, angle and the circumstances of temperature difference. This results in either an inferior mirage, commonly known as a “highway

42 Generally observed as a result of substantial a ground-air temperature differential 43 In a narrative sense, in literary and cinematic spaces

MECHANICS OF THE MIRAGE

mirage” or in ancient times “dessert mirage”, where the “notorious promised water that never materialized” lies. 44 The appearance of a pool of water on a hotter surface is the result of light refracting towards the sky due to a thin lower hot air layer and higher cold air layer.

Inversely, cold air layer at ground level and hotter air above (known as thermal inversion) refract light towards the ground, allowing a glimpse beyond the horizon, as with the Dutch ship account that began this chapter. In optic science, the environmental parameters that affect the properties of a mirage makeup the air’s index of refraction, a value proposition to the density of air, which correlates to temperature.45 Inversely, at the event of thermal inversion, a superior mirage can also appear in various forms depending on air profile. One of these forms is known as the hafgerdingar effect, translating to “castles in the air” or traditionally referred to as “Fata Morgana”, an expression stemming from fifteenth-century descriptions of Mediterranean mirages46, after

44 David K. Lynch and W. C. Livingston, Color and Light in Nature, 2nd ed.

(Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

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the enchantress in Arthurian legend. This phenomenon appears as compressed and stretched sections of its object stacked to create an often unrecognisable distortion, unstable and transient. Stories of the ghost ship Flying Dutchman, so vividly depicted by films such as Pirates of the Caribbean, could be attributed to by this phenomenon. A detailed look into the allure of the mirage is by no means an exercise to demystify these events or to make children cry. Instead, understanding principles of the mirage appropriately posit the spatial and parametric relationship between observer, medium and projections of reality.

On a purely subjective level, a mirage is challenging to confront, cognition signals a visual deception, yet the experience is alluring, the experience innately manifests wonder, magic. This French word, mirage, stems from the Latin word mirari47, not only a physical prescription of “mirroring”, but to “wonder at”, to “admire”. The idea of mirage in the history of narratives stems from the conceptions of storytelling.

47 In Latin grammar, a present active infinitive of miror, which means to be marvel at, admire, be amazed at, wonder at…

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Olga Freidenberg, a Russian and Soviet classical philologist, in her Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature, delved into the intertwining nature between mirage and reality. To Freidenberg, the traditional phenomena can be understood as either what exists, or what exists as “illusion”. “Illusion” is not simply what is false, but an indirect mirroring or the real, a “formal variant or allomorph of the same reality”48. This constructs the “Classical imago”49, founded on the imitation of “concrete concepts”, or mimesis50. While Freidenberg places a negative connotation on the term mirage, using it in place of deceit or impersonation, her delineation of the antinomies of the world either being of “essence” or “appearance” would more closely unite the explored concept of mirage in this chapter with her definition of “imago”. 51 Conveniently, “illusion” was closely associated by the

48 Olga Freidenberg, Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature, ed. Nina; Moss Braginskaia, Kevin, vol. 2, Sign/Text/Culture: Studies in Slavic and Comparative Semiotics (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), 29.

49 Ibid., 99.

50 Ibid., 29.

51 Ibid.

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ancient Greeks to mean “deceit”52. Thus, mirage can be understood as the Classical image, in which the “gnoseological microcosm”53 of human action is mapped onto the world of good and evil, truth and deceit. As abstract concepts began to evolve in literary history, mirage was no longer just “opposed to ‘authenticity’, but it also became a category of imagination, appearance to the mind”54. By extension, as much as the mirage is a mimesis of the “authentic macrocosm”, the authentic is a mimesis of the mirage, echoing Plato’s theory of “the literary image art is ‘the image of an image’”55. Freidenberg continues to propose that the distancing of this mirage to the real gave rise to the metaphor, “so-called figurative meanings”, introducing its “as if ” into “the transmission of the image”, turning into “conscious unreliability – the same in form, but with new content”56. Whether it be Homer’s Odyssey, Plato’s Republic, or Lucian’s A True Story, Classical models of

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., 30.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 31.

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narrating the mirage occurs in two scenarios, entrance and exit; and in two separate times: “the past described in the present” and the present itself57. Most ancient narrations were “fantastical”, “miraculous”, utopic in nature, to a large extent occurring in mythic locations of “nowhere”, “no-place”, and of “no time”58, foundational precursors to Suvinian estrangement discussed in the previous chapter.

This mix of timelessness and the fabric of the irreal is established by the character Dr Ford, the original android developer and god-figure, brilliantly played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the 2016 TV series Westworld, in Westworld’s Season 1 trailer59:

FORD Do you know where you are?

57 Ibid., 58.

58 Ibid.

59 Richard J Lewis, “Westworld - Official Trailer - Warner Bros. Uk,” Warner Bros. Television Distribution, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9BqKiZhEFFw.

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DELORES I’m in a dream.

FORD You’re in my dream.

And in Ford’s very first dialogue exchanges with a ‘lost child’ in the park after a long walk up a barren mountain ridge60:

FORD And here we are.

CHILD Nowhere land.

FORD That seems hardly a fitting name for a place so full. Can’t you see it? Perhaps you are not looking hard enough.

60 “Westworld Season 1 Episode 2: Chestnut,” in Westworld (HBO: Warner Bros. Television Distribution, 2016), 37:00

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Tracing back to the roots, estrangement in Classical texts such as the Odyssey works in narration, more specifically, “Ich-erzählung”, simply understood as first-narration61. Following the establishing mise-en-scene of visually estranging imageries, all that concerns the extraordinary journey of Ulysses “unfolded out of his I in the form of personal narration62”, indirect speech resumes as “mystical” elements recede. Freidenberg calls this the “narration-mirage”63. The correlation between “narration-mirage” and first-person narration is significant and well-versed in cinematic space. It is, therefore, a productive exploration to analyse how this device propels narrative flow in modern SF films to offer perspective into the notion of home.

The specific narrative-mirage observably operates in several parallel spaces within the modern SF film. These spaces seem to interplay to create the cinematic experience designed to confront viewers and thus catalyses the Suvinian journey of conscious contextual estrangement.

61 Freidenberg, Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature, 2, 59.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

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First to be explored is the cartographic, geolocational space of the portrayed novums, in which citizens of this world inhabit, roam and explore. These worlds will shift, mould, break or split, certainly defining characteristics of SF films, to manipulate dynamics and tension with the purpose to cognitively estrange the viewer. Blade Runner 2049’s future Los Angeles builds from Syd Mead’s futurist concept art for the original Blade Runner film establishes extremely hostile landscapes, both environmental and social. In this novum, hostility is established in binary: the rich and poor; the splendour and squalor; the worthy and worthless; the capacious and constricted; the fertile and the barren; the dominant and the oppressed; the real and the false. It is through the plot development, and the geographic exploration of Officer K, as he investigates the whereabouts of the replicant child, that these binary schisms begin to interweave and overlap, disrupting the order of the Blade Runner world. The environments in which these worlds are constructed aesthetically are significant. Director to the 1982 Blade Runner, Ridley Scott commented on the SF framwork in a recent interview:

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“Science fiction is a very special form of auditorium. It’s a theatre, a box, within which anything goes – but you’d better draw up the guidelines and the rulebook before you begin.64”

Director to Blade Runner 2049 Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins, and two artists spent weeks enclosed in a hotel to visualise the dystopic aesthetics of Blade Runner 2049. David Gassner was hired as the production designer for his expertise in neon lighting which contributed largely to Scott’s L.A. 2019, where he was given the brief from Villeneuve: the essence of L.A. 2049, was to be “brutality”. Villeneuve’s personal experience with a harsh climate, in which he actively uses to “create an intimate dialogue65” into someone else’s story became the atmosphere of L.A.2049. Growing up in Quebec, Canada, Villeneuve felt the weather was a great departure

64 Brian Raftery, “The Replicant: Inside the Dark Future of Blade Runner 2049,” WIRED 2017 65 Denis Villeneuve, interview by Demis Hassabis, 2017.

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point, to “approach Ridley’s universe through the lens of something so familiar to [him]” 66, it had allowed him to filter the old and the new, as winter was the “only violence [he] had gotten in [his] life” . Just as Roy Batty’s narrative ends in rain, K’s narrative ends in

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snow. Art director Paul Inglis’ comments on the sequel’s aesthetic outlining that the film was expected to be familiar, but also needed to “slightly diverge into the new world.” 68 Mead had similarly stated that working on Blade Runner 2049 was a “completely new inventive challenged, which [he] relished”69. This slightly new world is, in essence, a temporal and geographical expansion to the original world, enabling a different form of estrangement to occupy their respective protagonists. The physical, the tactile, the spatial became a focus both in the production design and the narrative of the film to enhance the qualities and plausibility of the narrative-mirage. To achieve this, expansive locations and twenty-meter-tall soundstages were used to

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

69 Syd Mead, interview by Ciara Wardlow, 2017.

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physically construct sets at their true scale, as well as miniature sets (paying tribute to the original). Limited computer generated images (CGI) was used in place of physical set designs, and when used, only as a means to extend the peripheries of the scene or to replace the skyline. Deakin had stated that many modern SF films feel the same because the “effects were done by rote70” while they were “desperate to create [their] own world.” 71 Lighting effects were practical, achieved through analogue methods such as projection, diffusion, refraction through translucent materials, by placing large-scale lights on mobile, rigged dollies. Villeneuve summarised “all the streets all the exteriors, we constructed everything.” 72 Actors were then able to interact with the “perfectly functioning sets” and immerse into the narrative, while their personas are forced “back out into the world to meet people, find clues and travel to new places. 73”

70 Evan Husney, “Inside the Making of ‘Blade Runner 2049’ “ in Vice Talks Film (2017).

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid.

73 Villeneuve, “”Blade Runner 2049” | Talks at Google.”

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In husband-wife duo director Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s Westworld, despite the overall intricately woven complexity, or to some, utter confusion, depicts a narrative progression that simultaneously parallels an outward geolocational expansion and conscious enlightenment inward. Westworld is established as a story of a “dark Odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin”74. Introduced in its season one trailer as a utopic world set in 18th century American Old West, where the protagonist Delores Abernathy lives as a Rancher’s daughter. That is her subjective reality as androidactor, it is what her code has been programmed to “execute”. Delores is the oldest “host” in operation within the theme park operated by an extremely wealthy Delos Inc., set in the not so distant future. Hosts in Westworld are effectively indistinguishable from humans from the exterior and are constantly monitored, both from external cameras and internal processing by an underground control centre known as “the Mesa”. These androids are comparatively more primitive than

74 Lesley Goldberg, “Anthony Hopkins, Evan Rachel Wood to Star in Hbo’s ‘Westworld’,” 2018, no. August 03 (2014), https://www.hollywoodreporter. com/live-feed/anthony-hopkins-evan-rachel-wood-676206.

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▼ William approaches door at the end of a clinical hallway at Delos Inc., Westworld

▼ William moves through door to enter a vintage interior, Westworld

▼ Pull-away shot revealing that William is inside the Black RIdge Ltd., Westworld

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Blade Runner’s replicants in that they are more reminiscent of simpler software, whereby their host characters are determined by the digital puppeteer to perform and play out character narratives, including cues, dialogue and even nuanced micro-expressions and human-like mannerisms. Backstories and memories are prescribed into code and can be altered or deleted through regular “hardware” updates. As Lee Sizemore, Delos Destinations’ Head of the Narrative Department says: “We sell complete immersion in a hundred interconnected narratives, a relentless fucking experience.”75 These host narratives are aimed to cater to live interaction with guests and naturally allows room for limited, code-driven improvisation until the end of a multi-day cycle where memories are ‘wiped’ like a formatted hard-drive. This cycle repeats until code corruption appears over-time, often through the build-up of trauma traces, then the host would be decommissioned or repurposed as a different character in the microcosm of Delos’ worlds.

75 Lewis, “Westworld - Official Trailer - Warner Bros. Uk”.

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Westworld removes all retribution and moral consequence from guests in the name of offering a fully interactive, immersive, guilt-free utopia. As hosts are coded to be restricted from injuring or harming guests, i.e. harming any real living subjects will have no effect, guests are allowed to do whatever gratifies their inner desires in this world, including rape, torture and murder. The overall geolocational structure of the Westworld series is impressive in that this futuristic theme park becomes a large scale theatre for the hosts to perform “on-stage” at ground level; the technicians to monitor “back-stage”, directly underground; and for guests to move from the “outside” onto the stage, where the hosts refer to them as “the newcomers”. Ford poetically summarises the essence of the park in a potent blend of optimism and sinister undertone: “everything in this world is magic, except to the magician.”76

Delores’ physical, external breaking out from the Park in the first season parallels with her sustained, internal rise of self-driven

76 “Westworld Season 1 Episode 2: Chestnut,” 37:50.

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consciousness. Her journey to establish a sentient gaze mirrors her attaining of freedom from externally programmed protocols, her “straying from host narrative”. This mirroring between geolocational revelation and character’s internal, identity revelation allows SF films such as Westworld to establish and impose large-scale “scientific mechanics” into the worlds of the story and characters. Moreover, it is important to recognise the overall geographic mirage that permeates the overall setup of the Westworld world. The compartmentalisation mentioned earlier of this world: the “stage”, “back-stage” as theatrical metaphors are perhaps, in a sense over-simplifying their contribution to the narration-mirage. As the season-one storyline unfolds, Delos Inc.’s once hidden architecture is slowly revealed. Freidenberg mentions the pinnacle points in classical narratives with the Other is always with entrance and exit77, as these architectural concepts become the critical points of spatial breaches.

77 Freidenberg, Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature, 2.

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▼ The Mesa, Westworld

▼ Arnold explains the consiousness pyramid, Westworld

▼ The Maze, Westworld

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The same can be observed in Westworld as entrance into the park is a seemingly mystical experience. In the first season’s second episode Chestnut, young William, the son of James Delos, CEO of Delos Inc., decides to visit the park for the first time. After arriving at modern, minimalist train station on a bullet train of the same aesthetic: ultraclean, slick rationalism expected of a very well-funded biotechnology company. William is led by reception to a dressing room where he was chose his outfits and accessories and weapons, as if it in a video game, then, navigating through a linear passageway with a black timber-clad ceiling, white glossy wall paneling on either side and lit by two continuous parallel stripe lights above, leading to a dark door that is embellished to the style of the Old West. Once William moves through the door, he asks his companion Logan: “So how do we get into the park?”78 He immediately finds himself on-board Black Ridge Limited, a vintage steam train as it exits a tunnel and reveals the vast landscapes of this new world. William is informed that encounters in

78 Johnathan Nolan, “Westworld Season 1 Episode 1: The Original,” in Westworld (HBO: Warner Bros. Television Distribution, 2016).

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the Park distribute outward in a radial gradient, the further out the guest ventures, the darker and more twisted the experience. The train eventually delivers all guests to the middle of the park to the town centre of Sweetwater, where William first encounters Delores.

Interestingly, by the end of the season, this same train-line becomes the route to the reversed “entrance” to the “outside world” as Delores leads the first rebellion of the hosts, the first spatial breaching of their “zero world” into a novum quite literally of the future. Instances of physical entrances are littered and hidden all over the park, in the form of perfectly camouflaged, secret “back-door” elevator shafts embedded into the ground or cave for technicians and Delos staff to enter and exit at will. These also become tactical passageways for rouge hosts later in the narrative to witness the horrors of their production and disposal, their commoditised birth, life and death.

By far the most intriguing echo of Freidenberg’s Classical entrance motif is the nature of the Westworld’s maze. The maze is introduced

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in Chestnut by the Man in Black as the “deepest level of this game”79.

The true intention of the maze, as revealed much later in season one, is better understood as a secret manifestation of a ‘virus’ within Westworld, left by deceased founder Arnold to encourage the host’s self-development of true consciousness, thereby awakening freedom and choice through internal introspection, while staying undetected to “oppressors”. The maze itself manifests as more than a symbol; it appears as a wooden toy that resembles a ball bearing within circular labyrinth with a centre chamber slot, the intuitive objective for the “player” is naturally to move tilt the labyrinth board in such a way that the ball rolls into its centre. Being a recurrent, yet secretive symbol in the Park, similar to what modern gamers would refer to as Easter Eggs, the Man in Black (MIB) mistakenly interprets the maze as a geography-mirage, to which he recruits Lawrence in Chestnut to “help [him] find the entrance”80. After massacring Lawrence’s forces, a new clue is introduced through Lawrence’s daughter, as she breaks

79 Richard J Lewis, “Westworld Season 1 Episode 2: Chestnut,”ibid.

80 Ibid.

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▼ Introduction of ‘K’, Blade Runner 2049

▼ Introduction of Delores Abernathy, Westworld

▼ Introduction of new model replicant, Blade Runner 2049

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character of a scared child witnessing violence to ‘switching’ into an oracle type figure, disclosing to MIB that “the maze is not meant for you, follow the blood arroyo to the place where the snake lays its eggs.” 81 MIB quest to find and discover the maze lays the narrative groundwork for the rest of the season’s storyline.

Confirmed in a later episode The Bicameral Mind, the maze is designed for the hosts in secret to help them attain what they would consider enlightenment, or awakening. This process is the essence of the narrative-mirage in Westworld: the host’s quest of self-discovery through navigating the geographic maze, and simultaneously selfrealisation through exploring the internal maze through accessing erased memories and developing an inner voice, not the voice of God, but the voice of Self. The maze mirage is also for the audience, as the subjective lens allows viewers to see through the perspective of the hosts, building concrete empathetic connections, and with the hosts discovering piece by piece, encountering revelation by revelation, the

81 Ibid.

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building blocks of a journey simultaneously geographically outward, and mentally inward.

The maze brings this exploration of the narrative-mirage to the second narrative space: the interior space – the subjective experience and awareness of characters portrayed, thereby revealed to the viewers in the film medium’s linear chronology. Blade Runners, Deckard in 2019 and K in 2049, reflect the worlds in which they inhabit. These characters are introduced to be every bit as unfeeling and stoic as their “zero worlds”, revealed through their focused objective and lack of emotional process. In Blade Runner 2049, as Niander Wallace’s “new model” replicant, K’s obedience to his sole purpose to hunt down rogue models is a genetic certainty. This manifests in his character as an ever-cold, unfeeling, disinterested personality, best observed in his violent but detached “retiring” of Sapper Morton and the following routine post-trauma baseline test at police headquarters, where K exhibited no signs of emotional distress for his recent act of murder. It is only when K begins to doubt his own identity, after the realisation that he could be the replicant child of Rachael, that enough emotional

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influences are exhibited for him to fail his baseline test, necessitating his escape from law-enforcement.

In comparison, the manner in which Westworld achieves narrativemirage through character spaces is more nuanced.

Hosts are

programmed and have the capacity to inhabit more than one persona, the “front-end”, “user experienced” character played by the hosts and the operating system of the host itself, activated by authorised voice commands such as “bring yourself back online”, or “diagnosis”. As true consciousness is achieved, a third persona develops and envelops the first two, overriding all external control.

By logic, when hosts gain consciousness and realise that these familial relationships are in essence coded emotional baggage, therefore emotional responses developed while in the first false-character persona are expected to be rejected as false. However, this was not the case with the enlightened Delores with her rancher “father” and enlightened Maeve with her young “daughter” from their previous narratives. Their emotional attachment to something that is

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▼ Deckard picks up an origami unicorn, Blade Runner.

▼ Maeve picks up foreign toy, Westworld

▼ Joi shows K’s wooden horse, Blade Runner 2049

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programmed, much like Joi is to K in Blade Runner 2049, poses an interesting question: are emotions attached to false subjects valid?

What drives it validity?

One possible answer is that these emotions are powerful and valid to a now fully conscious being because it is attached to home, to which their new found soul desperately clings, despite knowing that this attachment is an artefact of the oppression they have tried so fervently to escape. Memories of home become the “needed emotional cushioning”82 that sustains the mental stability of those that lack one.

Whether or not these memories are, in whatever shape or form true, does not seem to affect its validity to its carrier. This suggests that the notion of home is not Martin Heidegger’s objekt, but perhaps closer to Heidegger’s thing83: an unstable, but alluring projection of the heroes’ consciousness and identities. From a subjective perspective,

82 Daryl Hannah et al., Blade Runner the Director’s Cut (Pyrmont, N.S.W.: Warner Home Video, 2006), videorecording, 1 videodisc (DVD) (111 mins.) : sd., col. ; 4 3/4 in.

83 Referring to Martin Heidegger’s concepts in his famous 1927 book Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), an attempt at fundamental ontology.

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this projection is the narrative-mirage influenced by the character’s interiority as it interacts with the Other.

Regarding the concept of “narration-mirage�, the previous delineation of it as established by the conditions of geography, character and perspective, it is now increasingly evident that the mirage of home exists as an overarching agenda in these stories. The mirage of home can be spatially dissected as a four-dimensional phenomenon. The scientific mirage, as mentioned in the start of the chapter, consists mainly of three portions, the observer, the observed, and the distance between the observer and the observed, where the environmental factors of this in-between medium distort the connection between the observer and the observed. By metaphor, it is an intriguing exercise to suggest the observer is the protagonist, the observed is the mirage of home, and in-between exists two perpendicular planes, horizontal being the narration-mirage and vertical being the Suvinian cognition and estrangement paradox.

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The relationship between observer and the observed thus becomes the chronology of the narration and as observer moves forward through the multi-dimensional planes of narration-mirage and SF cognitive estrangement, due to the ever-changing “environmental� and narrative circumstances the resulting mirage will flutter, fade and ceases to exist, or other times stretch and appears in closers proximity.

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The Unhomely Nostalgia Unlike the relatively modern SF genre contention, the depiction and thought of home have been recorded as figurative art since the dawn of the Homo genus as hunter-gatherers dating back forty thousand years. Throughout the ages, home is also widely accepted as being subjective and deeply personal, so much so it is inseparable to identity, authenticity and truth. The idea of home is the idea of origin, from which proliferates a linear sequence of interior experiences. The idea of home is a space at which consciousness operates. The existence of this sense of home is thus equally available and equally valid for all conscious beings. Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa introduces the concept of home in the 1994 Finnish Architectural Review as distinctive from the physical house, therefore setting the context on which this chapter will aim to explore and investigate.

Feng, James, Kitchen Sink, 2018. Digital composite. For extended citing refer to reference list.

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“The house is composed by the architect as a system of spatial hierarchies and dynamics, structure, light, colour, etc, whereas home is structured around a few foci of behavior and symbolization: a front (front-yard, facade, the urban set-up), entry, window, hearth, stove, table, cupboard, bath, bookcase, furniture, family treasures, memorabilia …”84

Pallasmaa’s introduction of home proposed a collage of specificity in physical details and components, as opposed to a wider panoramic setting. Accommodating these physically scattered objects, are the “images of action”85, where architecture provides a “promise

84 Juhani Pallasmaa, “Identity, Intimacy and Domicile: Notes on the Phenomenology of Home,” Arkkitehti, The Finnish Architectural Review1994.

85 Juhani Pallasmaa and Steven Holl, The Eyes of the Skin : Architecture and the Senses, Polemics (London: Academy Editions, 1996), 55.

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of function” 86 and purpose: i.e. a stove provokes the association of cooking with family. As Edward Casey writes: “authentic architectural experiences consists…of approaching or confronting a building, rather than the formal apprehension of a façade…of looking out a window; rather than the window itself as a material object.” 87 Architectural space is not physical, but lived, it is a type of framing, facilitating, articulation, similar to the cinematic space mentioned in the previous chapter, home space “transcends geometry and measurability”88. This focus on action is reflected in phenomenology-oriented architects such as Steven Holl’s “movement of a body through space” and Alvar Aalto’s “verb-essence” 89 of the architectural experience, in particular, his focus on “entering” rather than the preoccupation with the formal material of the “entrance”. Tschumi similar states: “there is no architecture without program, without action, without event.”90

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid.

88 Ibid., 56.

89 Ibid.

90 Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction / Pages: 172-189.

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These scattered behavioural association with the equally scattered, but interrelated paraphernalia constructs the image of home.

Interestingly, Pallasmaa’s “behaviour” and “symbolisation” are terms recurrent in the field of psychology to describe the fundamental archival nature of human memory. Humans remember through associating object, action and emotion. It is increasingly obvious the uncanny overlapping between this “image of home” and the “memory of home”. Therefore, this relational understanding of home can be argued as a construct not merely of raw, remembered experiences, but rather the processing of memories past and current. Pallasmaa reflects on his amorphous image of hom “…my experiential home seems to have traveled with me and constantly transformed into new physical shapes as we moved.” 91 The idea of home certainly encompasses more than actions within the home space, or memories associating specificity to events and actions;

91 Juhani Pallasmaa, An Architectural Confession (2010).

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the more interesting aspect of home is in its volatility and apparent transience in relations to its withdrawal or absence. Pallasmaa recounts:

“I recall vividly the sense of home, the feeling of returning home from a skiing trip in the darkness of a cold winter evening. The experience of home is never stronger than when seeing the windows of the house lit up in the dark winter landscape and sensing the invitation of warmth warming your frozen limbs.”92

As associative events exist in the memories of home, ‘disassociative’ events also occur when encountering the Other. Home and the Other, familiar and strange, interiority and exteriority, cognition and estrangement, although always in flux, are at any given point in time mutually exclusive. Thus, home and the outside are defined one by the

92 Pallasmaa and Holl, The Eyes of the Skin : Architecture and the Senses, 75.

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other. In Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin, the architectural experience of home is presented as “bodily identification”, in which the body of the subject, the “image of the self ” becomes in constant dialogue with the domestic spatial environment to a degree where over time, the understanding of spatial existence is inseparable to self-image.

The domicile is the “refuge of the body, memory and identity.93” It’s contrary, fremdheit, “consists of schism between past and present, I and others, self and world.94” To be estranged means to live in amongst an environment to which “one no longer belongs.” Pallasmaa’s “sense of home” could be interpreted as the transitory inter-relationship between self, home and otherness. Wyn Wachhorst poetically summaries this allure of estrangement for the purpose to “see the self from afar” as similar to the task of Sisyphus, an eternal struggle, “not the treasure but the voyage itself ” in which one “return[s] always to the same point, [gaining] new perspective with each cycle”. 95 This relativistic condition

93 Ibid., 55.

94 Fortin, Architecture and Science-Fiction Film : Philip K. Dick and the Spectacle of Home.

95 Ibid.

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of home breaks away from rationalist definition and enters the realm of postmodern SF explorations and its criticism of the prior.

To understand the postmodern representation of home in SF, it is necessary first to note the social backdrop on which this representation had emerged. The first “Golden Age” of SF occurred in the 1950s, Fredric Jameson describes its “saving science”96 optimism as a “bewildering new world space of multinational capitalism”.97 Considered by today’s standards as the earlier SF, 1950s post-war futurism focuses on the development of natural sciences, with it promising “endless perfectibility”.98 Preceding such was the “radical break” from it, planting seeds of post-futurism and the beginnings of postmodernism. The aforementioned conditions of home, or more specifically the ideas of home, consisting of its omnipresent amorphous nature; its polarising relativity to body-space schisms; and its

96 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

97 Ibid., 6.

98 “An American Utopia: Fredric Jameson in Conversation with Stanley Aronowitz,” (The Graduate Center, CUNY, 2014).

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Sisyphean perspective, closely aligns with postmodern ideals of the SF genre. Fortin places this influence on Gadamer’s magnum opus Truth and Method, published in 1960, which establishes the “phenomenon of understanding”, hermeneutics, as going beyond the boundaries of the modern scientific method known at the time. As a reaction against rational modernism, Gadamer proposes that Human Sciences are concerned with seeking “the experience of truth” that “transcends the domain of scientific method”.99 The difference between “natural” and “human” sciences lies not in method but in the “objectives of knowledge”.100 The resulting hermeneutic philosophy states that the creator(s) of any art or literature, or cultural production “cannot claim truth or meaning to their projection” as all interpretations of such texts are equally valid to any individual’s “experience of truth”.101 The 1980s, often associated with the second “Golden Age” of SF, American literary critic Fredric Jameson observed fundamental

99 Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (London England: Sheed and Ward, 1979), xxi.

100 Ibid., xxvi.

101 Ibid., xxi.

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changes occurring in society-the introduction of the personal computer and the World Wide Web. While the economic structure of the West was overall known as capitalism, Jameson posits three moments of distinction: the nationalistic capital as critiqued by Marx; the imperial, colonial capitalism explored by Lenin, and the current “postmodern capitalism”102 – marked by information technology and globalisation.

The Jamesonian ‘postmodern’ cannot be considered as stylistic, as with postmodern architecture, but as a “social structure”103, more accurately termed in Jameson’s recent works as “postmodernity”. 104 Postmodernity and globalisation do not necessarily relate by causality, but rather, the two are “faces of the same reality”.105 Characteristically, unlike the “temporal obsessed”106 incomplete modernism, in which temporal variations in the social environment exist, the postmodern is dominated by space. The postmodern “status of time under a regime

102 Fredric Jameson, interview by Maria Elisa Cevasco, 2016.

103 Ibid.

104 Ibid.

105 Ibid.

106 Ibid.

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of space”107, by consequence, is reduced to the present. Jameson argues the postmodern ‘past’ occurs in the form of presently engineered nostalgia “constructed in the image we require”108, a compilation of stereotypes, of “ideas of facts” and historical realities. This pseudohistoricity poses fundamental questions: How did these “periods” view themselves, and did their preoccupations echo how the present views them? If not, where and how do these discrepancies occur? Jameson argues the positivist nostalgia often associated with the 1950s America likely stems from “mass cultural representation”109 ingested by society as “the fifties”. The shift from reality to representation derives from its own television programs – “its own representation of itself.”110 This mirage-like correspondence to reality of the past is furthermore contributed to by global imperialism, or “imperial capitalism”111, where the given identity of a nation-state disassociates drastically to

107 Ibid.

108 Ibid.

109 Ibid.

110 Ibid.

111 Ibid.

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their “own interior daily life”.112 The hermeneutic perspective to this disassociation presents even more of a “radical possibility” aligned closer to postmodern thought. In Witold Rybczynski’s Home, this selective mimicking, described as “historic verisimilitude”113 occurs in the stylistic marketing of Ralph Lauren’s nostalgic furniture displays and high-corporate headquarters of Estee Lauder, where modernity was deliberately “kept at bay”. “How do we fit this reality into the dream world, one way is to not even try,”114 Rybczynski writes.

Furthermore, Jameson’s “Nietzschean position”115, perhaps nihilistic to an extent, proposes that this “period concept”116 does not correspond to any reality, a “non-thinkable”, “non-totalizable”117 collective reality validated by the futility of its aspirations. This decentred perspective,

112 Ibid.

113 Witold Rybczynski, Home : A Short History of an Idea (New York, N.Y.: Viking, 1986), 12.

114 Ibid.

115 Reference to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, explored in more depth later in this chapter.

116 Jameson, “Fredric Jameson - from Modernism to Postmodernity.”

117 Ibid.

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while freeing, raises questions that modern SF frequently explore. As the new Age of SF desensitises the now clichéd fear-wonder paradox, the presence of familiarity in new SF lays ground for a new internal struggle. The struggle of identity and consciousness as opposed to the struggle of image and representation. Witold Rybczynski asks a thought-provoking question:

“Is it simply a curious anachronism, this desire for tradition, or is it a reflection of a deeper dissatisfaction with the surroundings that our modern world has created? What are we missing that we look so hard for in the past?” 118

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, first published in 1886, proposes a perspective into this “deeper dissatisfaction”. He outlines that traditions and past cultures continually shape one’s reality and life

118 Rybczynski, Home : A Short History of an Idea, 13.

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experiences from the depths of the human psyche. If one is to attain self-knowledge, one is required to actively explore their own historicity and their remnants within. “Direct observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves, we need history, for the past flows on within us in hundred waves.”119

The modern individual’s struggle with displacement into an absurd world can be remedied with Nietzsche’s “historical sense”120 of conscious disassociation with the past, therefore unable to trace one’s roots amidst blinding internal chaos. Comparing this vector between the ‘lost’ and ‘whole’, between a restless people which “has lost faith in its ancient history”121, obsessed with the commodity of novelty, to a people which has “happiness to know [them]selves in a manner not entirely arbitrary or accidental”, as a people “grown out of a past, as an

119 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human : A Book for Free Spirits (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).

120 Ibid.

121 Ibid.

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heir, flower and fruit.”122

In the cinematic world of Blade Runner, manifestations of this traditional “past” exist in two states. The first being the past as constructed and lived environments; Blade Runner’s chaotic dystopia is not merely a novum extrapolated in the scientific sense, it is a world constructed from “traditional verisimilitude”, and in an extreme manner. Futurist Syd Mead references architectural styles across cultures into a heterogeneous postmodern of disorientation. The merging and killing of nostalgic broad stroke Asian references in edifice, traditional practices and contemporary characteristics allow incongruity and fragmented stereotypes to occupy the world, while not corresponding to any particular time or culture. This is seen in oriental signage and graffiti, notably the select few in poorly handwritten Chinese, where sentences are nothing but collated words into meaningless sentences scribed in a manner that seems legitimate

122 Friedrich Nietsche, Untimely Meditations: On the Use and Abuse of History of Life, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambirdge University Press, 1873), III.

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at first impression. This exploited oriental exoticism is further used as the Blade Runner tool to destroy the classical sense of cultural nostalgia. Characters such as eye technician Hannibal Chew switches from Cantonese to Mandarin to Cantonese without explanation in his dialogue while confronting the unwelcomed entry of Roy Batty and Leon Kowalski. The chaotic setting places a sadistic twist on Jameson’s “imperial capitalism” and mixes it with his globalised postmodern to output a dystopia neither true to each – the graveyard of time, space, culture and identity.

The other manifestation of the past, debatably more critical to Blade Runner’s character development is the past existing in the form of an authentic archive. In most cases, memory and its representation remind and record, in the physical form of the family portrait.

TYRELL If we gift them the past, we create a cushion, a pillow for their emotions and consequently we can control them better.

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DECKARD Memories. You’re talking about memories.

Preceding the Voight-Kampff test Deckard administers to Rachael at Tyrell’s headquarter, Rachael visits Deckard at his dormitory to confront him about her identity, believing that Deckard had mistaken her as replicant. Her attempt to convince him of her humanity begins by offering Deckard an image of her with her mother, to which Deckard, without looking, interjects by exposing a series of Rachael’s specific “memories”, “symbolism” and “events” associated with home – memories of the Doctors game with her brother at age six and the spider’s laying of eggs outside her window, eventually hatching to a hundred baby spiders that in turn devoured the mother. These ‘observed’ events seem trivial, yet essential in both acting as the concrete validation of Rachael’s past and the ultimate annihilation of its authenticity. With great irony, Deckard then unwitting apologises to Rachael for making a “bad joke” and that she should “go home”, to which Rachael stands frozen as tears stream down her face.

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The sequence finishes with Deckard examining the now discarded family photo to see a mother-daughter duo posing on a suburban front porch. The extreme close-up shot of the still photography then shifts ever so slightly, while remaining in the same space within the frame, subtle movements and a sense of depth are perceived, and soft dappled natural lighting projects onto the photograph, while sounds of children’s laughter and joyous screams flow through the smooth piano-synth film score. This two-second shot is significant in Blade Runner as it marks the only time in the film’s two-hour runtime to possess naturalistic lighting123 which momentarily induces slight nostalgia while the dystopic environment muffles into the background. Moreover, the creative hint of nostalgia is highlighted in the rarity of the presence of nature, and by extension, humanity within the depicted world. The sequence finishes with Deckard walking outside to his apartment’s balcony covered in a soft blanket; his silhouette extinguished by the cold, claustrophobic, anti-human order of the outside metropolis. As much as the front porch is a buffer space

123 Even though the lighting is evidently a non-diegetic visual effect

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between home and outside in Rachael’s photo, Deckard’s balcony is also a critical threshold between “I” and “world” – a soft touch of Ridley Scott’s cinematic poetry.

The destabilisation of the once concrete is on-going in the postmodern universe, the next stage of this instability raises the ultimate question enthusiasts and critics of Blade Runner has debated over since the release of the first feature film in 1982. Rachael raises doubt to the identity of Deckard, asking whether he has taken the Voight-Kampff test himself. When interviewed by reporter Kim Bennett, Harrison Ford was urged to shed light on whether there was still a debate between him and director Ridley Scott over Deckard’s true identity.

Ford confirms that the question had been resolved internally, but it cannot be revealed because “[it] will go away and people will not have the pleasure of debating it”.124 It seems fitting that despite a resolved truth within the creators, a strong hermeneutic perspective in SF is not merely retained, but celebrated within its community.

124 Harrison Ford, interview by Kim Bennett, 2017.

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After Rachel’s provocative doubting of Deckard’s nature, Deckard falls fast asleep at her question. Rachael proceeds to the piano on which sits a plethora of Deckard’s memorabilia, notably his very own family portraits. As Jameson explains, historicity is “neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future”125, but the “perception of the present [matter] as history”126. The portrait on the piano, assumed to be of Deckard’s mother, allows Rachael to distance herself from the immediacy occupying her character and indulge in a type of estrangement of the past. This critical moment leads Rachael to let down her hair and reclaim some sense of a new found identity – formed from a rebellion from her maker. The conscious entanglement between Deckard and Rachael ensues. As Rachael starts playing the piano, Deckard wakes and joins her.

125 Jameson, “An American Utopia: Fredric Jameson in Conversation with Stanley Aronowitz.”

126 Ibid.

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DECKARD I dreamt music.

RACHAEL I didn’t know if I could play. I remember lessons.

I don’t know if it’s me, or Tyrell’s niece.

DECKARD You play beautifully.

It is interesting to note here of the blurred boundaries between memory and dream. For Rachael, her memory is a dream, as her memory is without experience, an empty implant. Just as Deckard dreamt of music, Rachael in essence also dreamt music. As this narrationmirage intensifies with Vangelis’ dreamy Love Theme, Deckard’s reply changes tense to the present. This sudden change from past, relating to past irrealities and the uncertain, and perhaps unverifiable, to the present tense statement signifies Deckard’s disregard for the past and

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his affirmation to her present validity and value. This liberating shift in identification for Rachael escalates to her final internal confrontation, the confrontation with human privileges: the freedom of independent choice and the selfish pursuit of pleasure.

In Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, Officer K’s search for the replicant child is a search for Nietzsche’s “historical sense” to his own roots and his own reality. As with Rachael’s revelation of non-self, K’s realisation that he is in fact not the replicant child is a revelation of nonself towards the climax of the film. Both experiences are experiences of disappointment, a ‘lesser’ transformation of identity. Both experiences are plagued by false childhood memories, respectively one of affinity and one of protection. K’s journey from identifying as total obedience transforming into rebellion mirror’s Rachael journey, despite their various facades, whether as human, replicant or replicant child – the miracle. Viewers of this SF experience is thus again returned to the same point at the end of this second cycle, gaining new perspectives on a familiar road. However, the difference begins in their departure points: K’s identity as a replicant is known since the character’s

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introduction, his journey to enlightenment is a journey of rebellion against totalitarian control. Elements reminiscent of the original Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampff test becomes of the baseline test in 2049, both a symbol of oppressive control and a narrative device to illustrate K’s character development throughout. The “baseline” was first mentioned by K’s superior Lieutenant Joshi, established as a mother figure to K, like James Bond to M, in a peculiar association: “come on home for your baseline.” Joshi’s motherly statement again urges “come home before the storm” establishes an unsettling background to both character and the 2049 world at large. Back at headquarters, viewers are introduced to the post-traumatic baseline test:

MAN Recite your baseline.

K And blood-black nothingness began to spin.

A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked with one stem. [insert cut, Officer: fuck off skin-job] And

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dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

MAN Cells.

K Cells.

MAN Have you ever been in an institution? Cells.

K Cells.

MAN Do they keep you in a cell? Cells.

K Cells.

MAN When you’re not performing your duties, do they keep you in a little box? Cells.

K Cells.

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MAN Interlinked.

K Interlinked.

MAN What’s it like to hold the hand of someone you love? Interlinked.

K Interlinked.

MAN Did they teach you how to feel finger to finger?

Interlinked.

K Interlinked.

MAN Do you long for having your heart interlinked?

Interlinked.

K Interlinked.

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MAN Do you dream about being interlinked?

K Interlinked.

MAN What’s it like to hold your child in your arms?

Interlinked.

K Interlinked.

MAN Do you feel a part of you that is missing?

Interlinked.

K Interlinked.

MAN Within cells interlinked.

K Within cells interlinked.

MAN

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Why don’t you say that three times. Within cells interlinked.

K Within cells interlinked. Within cells interlinked.

Within cells interlinked.

It is evident that this baseline test, executed at a speedy pace, operates by detecting abnormalities in biological parameters as a result of clever wordplay, double meanings and emotional provocation. The baseline test’s obsession with attachment and suffering regarding biology, love and parenthood pinpoints the difference between the typical replicant and the typical human. In Nietzsche’s On the Use and Abuse of History for life, the botanical metaphors of the “sense of wellbeing of a tree for its roots”, of “heir, flower and fruit”127 is prevalent. K’s investigation begins as physical excavation at the only natural object in the film, at

127 Nietsche, Untimely Meditations: On the Use and Abuse of History of Life, III.

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the roots of the large dead tree outside of Sapper Morton’s residence, uncovering the strata of a hidden past, a box containing historicity to a protected truth – evidence of the existence of a replicant child. Later, K’s search for Deckard leads him to the Garden of Erotic Statues in a dead city, where he encounters beehives for the first time in his life, a metaphor relating back to a chaotic, but orderly absolute obedience of the Blade Runner world, as even the last speck of nature appears in this dystopia as “within cells interlinked”. K chases his “historical sense” externally, not knowing that he was doomed to fail, as this gratification and liberation can only be found through an inward exploration into his own psyche.

K dies alone, as with Roy Batty, his internal struggle arrives at a point of clarity, peace and liberation. According to the leader of the resistance, Freya: “Dying for the right cause is the most human thing we can do.”128 SF nostalgia appears in various manifestations, often in association

128 Denis Villeneuve, “Blade Runner 2049,” (Alcon Entertainment; Columbia Pictures, 2017).

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to the aforementioned “behaviour” and “symbolisation” in home: as a device to affirm identity and origin, and the subsequent realisation of the decentralisation of this origin or identity. Existential crisis and emotional distress or enlightenment generally ensue such events.

The uncanny of nostalgia in postmodern SF can be considered as a deliberate killing of home. Presented within these environments is an almost impossible task to validate the authenticity of self and home, as these SF dystopias skew and alter experience, memory and place without consent, awareness or trace.

In Denis Villeneuve’s interview with the New York Times, he shared his aspirations for the film’s frontier “between reality and dream to be blurred...to find a lyrical feeling to the scene.”1 No better place is this explored than in K and Deckard’s fight sequence within the casino, filled with constructed, nostalgic holograms that glitch seemingly at random interjections. The poetic nature is also a result of using

1 The New York Times, “A Scene from Blade Runner 2049 | Anatomy of a Scene,” (Youtube, 2017).

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these holograms as the device to control lighting and pacing of the sequence. The glitching of these digital reproductions of analogue past experiences, such as the classic performances of Elvis Presley, creates estrangement that works not through novelty, but through disrupting the familiar. Much like the ever-buffering video on slow internet connection, the fragmenting of these ‘nostalgic sensitisation’ allows K and Deckard’s interaction to weave in between, and gunshots and drum beats are indistinguishable from one another. The result is a musical nightmare, distorting the familiar to build fear and discordance in conjunction with cinematography and nuanced manipulations in sound design to mirror the effects in its visual and narrative counterparts. Presley’s classic Can’t Help Falling in Love begins to play without distortion, prompting an end to the fight sequence, as Deckard freezes at the music to remark: “I like this song.”

This manipulation of familiarity links one to a phenomenon known as the Uncanny. Tracing back to writings of renowned psychologists of the early twenty-first century, such as Ernst Jentsch in 1906 and

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Sigmund Freud’s subsequent critique in 1919. Jentsch in his essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny, writes that the German word Das Unheimlich, “uncanny” appears to describe a feeling that is not quite “at home” or “at ease2” in a particular situation, which associates with a sense of the “foreign”. This “impression of the uncanniness3”, suggests Jentsch, to be a direct consequence of a “lack of orientation”, and that this disorientation is caused by uncertainty ties to the unusual, unease, mistrust and hostility, what he refers to as misoneism. Jentsch’s focus on the uncanny avoids its essence, the “what it is”, rather focusing on the circumstantial elements that may cause such an effect, the “how it happens”. A vector is established, similar to the previously discussed cognition and estrangement, to a confusion between the “old/known/ familiar” with “new/foreign/hostile”4. This is not merely explored in the sense of a straightforward experience as suggested by the common terms, but rather a psychological association in a situation of observer

2 Ernst Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie Des Unheimlichen “on the Psychology of the Uncanny”,” Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrif 22, no. 8 (1906).

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

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and object. In the case of the event of a sunrise, Jentsch argues that no typical human would be surprised to see the sun rise from the east in the morning, as it is a habitually observable event. However, to perceive this movement as a result of earth’s rotation around this centre of the solar system and the observer’s relative position on earth to this interstellar relationship may stir within the observer a sense of the uncanny. This “lack of orientation arising from the ignorance of a primitive man”5, an ignorance mostly concealed by the every day is the basis on which this uncertainty operates.

Moving into a situation of the uncanny the modern SF commonly explores, is the “doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate”, and conversely “doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be inanimate.” This doubt often exists as an obscure sense of terror in one’s psyche, until this doubt is somehow resolved – for example, when one walks past a log and suddenly realises that it is in fact a python. This logic can be extrapolated further, Jentsch theorised

5 Ibid.

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this to be known as the uncertainty whether the character is human or not, exploring the examples used in the fantasy/horror genres.

Theodor Hoffmann’s story Der Sandmann, adapts a Scandinavian folklore character into a sinister creature. The Sandman steals the eyes of children who refuses to go to sleep by visiting them and throwing sand into their eyes so they bleed and fall out, these are then collected and taken to his moon nest to be fed to his children. This cautionary tale uses “one of the most reliable artistic devices” to produce the uncanny by casting “uncertainty as to whether he has a human person or rather an automata before him in the case of a particular character”6.

Jentsch continues his exploration by looking at the effect of viewing or interacting with sick patients, in the case of epilepsy, psychosis or even a dead body. Although Jentsch never associated the term The Uncanny to consciousness or intelligence, it is clear that Jentsch’s exploration can be applied to relative levels of the consciousness ladder, the difference between the character’s objective level of consciousness, (i.e. the log) and the expectation or the perceivable consciousness.

6 Ibid.

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This difference, gap, or confusion between the objective intelligence and the subjective appearance of consciousness is therefore likely the space of uncertainty that Jentsch explores.

Despite appreciating Jentsch’s efforts to pay attention to the “aberrant and repulsive”, Freud is critical of Jentsch’s causal experience of the “uncertain” or the “undecidable”, writing in his essay Das Unheimliche that this “undecidable” cannot be tolerated as a “theoretical explanation” to the Uncanny. Freud instead leans on a different perspective, examining the Uncanny as “related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror”. To better understand unheimlich, He began to investigate the meaning of heimlich by consulting with various dictionaries of differing languages. As was done by Jentsch, Freud provides definitions such as “familiar”, “not strange and “belonging to the house”7, so like Jentsch, Freud also departs on the same stance

7 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: The ‘Uncanny’, trans. James et al. Strachey, vol. 17 (London1955).

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the unheimlich is “not known” and “opposite to what is familiar”8.

However, it is also evident that not all the is “not known” and “strange” necessarily cause unsettling tension or fright, therefore there must be further complexities to be uncovered. Freud considers another less known meaning of the heimlich is its description of what is “concealed and kept out of sight”9. Therefore, it is rational to suggest that unheimlich may correspond to everything that should have remained concealed but has now been uncovered – an unwelcomed revelation of an object or situation one had attempted to hide. As Freud postulates, this applies to one’s own psychoanalytical space, one’s dread and fear associated with the uncanny is stirred by “something repressed which recurs”10, suggesting that the presently “not known” could once upon a time be “known” but later forgotten or repressed, and now is suddenly alerted to it. Jentsch’s earlier exploration of the uncanny of epilepsy and psychosis is further developed by Freud, as he suggests that the event of perceiving madness is uncanny not merely because it is

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

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▼ Joi freezes as HQ call interrupts their intimate moment, Blade Runner 2049

▼ Joi’s emanator is damaged, resulting in malfunction, Blade Runner 2049

▼ Sheriff glitches and displays “aberrant behaviour”, Westworld

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strange or unpredictable, but this perceived manifestation of madness in another “evokes a sinister revelation of the possibility of insanity”11 within oneself. From this analogy, it can thus be summarised that the unheimlich not only involves uncertainty of the other, but primarily uncertainty within oneself, a bilateral psychic projection. Since the time of Jentsch and Freud, the phenomena of the uncanny has been more widely explored in literature, architecture and the horror genre.

Along with the rise of robotics, AI, computer-generated images (CGI) and automata in the latter half of the twentieth century, the uncanny has become more relevant in explaining and educating about the buffer between the aesthetic of human likeness, consciousness and humanity.

In 1970, Masahiro Mori, a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology12, shared insight about the human perception towards android design in his essay Bukimi no Tani Genshō (The Uncanny Valley) in a Japanese journal Enerugi (Energy). The cultural

11 Ibid.

12 Tokyo Institute of Technology was an institution that had spear-headed much of the world’s earliest developments in humanoid robotics

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dimensions of robotics in Japan is a complex one and difficult to summarise without generalisation, however in this instance, a brief contextual outline will be necessary to lay the groundwork for Mori’s theory. Modern Japanese societal acceptance of robots and the robotic culture is unrivalled by the rest of the world. Much of pre-War Japanese literature was concerned with Miri Nakamura’s concept of the Mechanical Uncanny13, a literary mode that “blurs the line between what is perceived as natural and what is perceived as artificial”14.

Japanese intellectuals sought to evoke the “terror” concerning “technological mechanisation”15, for them it did not simply represent social progress but also “fear and degeneration”. Similar to the early SF movement in the early 1900s, Japanese scholars depicted machines in literature constantly in destabilised flux “between a utopian dream… and a pessimistic nightmare”16.

13 W.A. Borody, “The Japanese Roboticist Masahiro Mori and His Buddhist Inspired Concept of “the Uncanny Valley” (Bukimi No Tani Genshō, 不気味 の谷現象),” Journal of Evolution and Technology 23, no. 1 (2013): 32.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

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By contrast, pacifism became the social attitude of the era following Japan’s loss in WWII, the Allies had imposed a restriction to ensure that “war potential” technology will “never be maintained”17, as specifically outlined in Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan that came into effect in 1947. This was arguably the most influential factor that drove the acceptance of pacifist values, and by extension, pacifist technology. This unique integration can be seen in practices whereby robots are not distinguished from their “superior creators” but a fused part of the human social ecosystem, accepted “easily along with the wide world … the insects, the rocks…just simple, quiet acceptance”18.

This acceptance is true to the extent where new industrial robots were often blessed by Shinto priests, followed by welcoming applause by co-workers, ritualistic participation on the same level as a human, these new “members of the team” are also greeted at the start of each working day with a hearty Ohayo gozaimaus! (Good Morning).

Masahiro Mori pacifist approach to technology could be heavily

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

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attributed to this context, marking him an influential figure in the robotic and AI industry. Besides his role as professor, and roboticist, he is also the founder of Jizai Kenkyuko, known to the West as Mukta Institute, a think-tank that provides corporations and research centres with assistance regarding automation.

Mori’s Uncanny Valley is plotted as a two-dimensional phenomena, with human likeness on the x axis, and the y axis depicting Shinwakan (affinity), whether the reaction is positive or negative, or the magnitude of the uncanny. Mori’s set the scene with the typical function graph of y=f(x)19, a formulaic relationship simply explained as cause and effect, an impression that can be used to explain most of human experience in the real, physical world of the everyday. However, Mori’s insight into the Uncanny regarding robotics is likened to a walk. The beginning of this walk is a gentle incline, where with increasing human likeness, the robot is perceived as increasingly positive and pleasing. This relationship steadily maintains itself past the 60-70 percent human

19 Ibid., 33.

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likeness value, then steeply plummets to a negative value20, depicting the discomfort and subtle dread and the uncanny explored by Jentsch and Freud, Mori associates these reactions with reactions to death.

From this point forth, along with the increase in human likeness, the level of affinity is observed to steeply climb uphill to reach a positive association to the endpoint of the “healthy human”. The plummet and subsequent rebound is thus described visually as the Uncanny Valley.

Mori’s agenda after the postulation of this phenomena was to discourage the obsession with human realism that pervaded within the industry at that time, and instead encouraged more primitive aesthetical approach to allow humans to project their consciousness onto these robot beings to enforce a non-threatening relationship, such as with the more extreme example of a pet rock.

Interestingly, Mori was at the time an avid follower of Buddhism, one could argue that Mori’s beliefs in discouraging obsession with human

20 Ibid.

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likeness stem from Buddhists beliefs – debatably an eastern equivalent of transhumanism. If Buddhism sees the typical human as deeply flawed and imperfect, one could therefore question this obsession of replicating imperfection. With this perspective, the examination of the uncanny becomes a little more removed, a little more clinical. In the film industry, three decades after the initial concept of the Uncanny Valley was published, Hollywood experienced the impact of this Valley with the film Shrek (2001), in a test screening of the film, the newly CGI achieved realism of character Princess Fiona caused children to burst out in tears, resulting in DreamWorks’ revision to dilute on the character’s human likeness. Similarly, in the film Polar Express (2004), the almost-real animated Tom Hanks made audiences recoil. Director James Cameron’s approach to Avatar, on the other hand, avoided the Uncanny Valley by using complex motion capture technology instead of practical effects to visualise hyper-realistic characters by remapping facial and gestural emotional affect onto what is essentially an elaborate virtual robotic puppet.

In SF films such as Blade Runner & Westworld, the uncanny permeates

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the narrative subtexts in forms of the temporal disconnect - a psychological phenomenon that occurs in digital interactions. Before delving into SF films, it should be more appropriate to first identify this phenomenon in the digital interactions of the present. In Patricia Wallace’s The Psychology of the Internet, a chapter satirically named The World Wide Wait outlines the experience of internet use during its early stages of implementation. The frustration that often accompanies the use of Web “on a 28.8kb/s modem from home during peak usage hours”21. This frustration extends to the space of the “synchronous chatter”22, in which abbreviations of common terms were used since the early internet to reduce lag times that impede on the flow of what is now termed instant messaging. Social interaction on the medium of the digital is therefore subject to the parameters of data transfer, such as bandwidth and bitrate, and these parameters in turn can be described as the medium that facilitates these social interactions.

Presently, these agents of data transfer have become so speedy they

21 Wallace, Patricia M. The Psychology of the Internet. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

22 Ibid

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have become synonymous with being instantaneous, like light reaching the eyes. The sense of familiarity with instantaneous data transfer has become a part of the cognition of the human psyche, so much so that disrupting these agents will invoke the uncanny – the uncertainty of time. Additionally, as human interaction is digitised, the uncertainty concerning the degree to which these interactions have a human origin, or the degree to which the machine infiltrates these interactions23 often stirs a sense of the uncanny, prompting the observer to decrypt and assess the interactive stimulus in order to respond appropriately. This examining of digital interactions to identify digital artefacts is portrayed in modern SF in the form of the temporal pause, as it is used as a device to distinguish between the temporal physics of the classical, physical world, and the timeless, simulated irreality of the digital world.

In Blade Runner, this temporal manipulation is best witnessed in the character of Joi. Screenwriter Michael Green intermittently, and often

23  As with corrupted messages, glitches or mistaken autocorrect.

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unexpectedly places the viewer in internal conflict as to whether or not Joi is in fact autonomous and conscious, and whether her ‘love’ for K is real. The viewers are introduced to Joi as an AI that follows typical digital user experience protocols: a welcoming branded soundtrack during startup, the hologram properties reflected in massless translucency. Most notably, Joi is susceptible to time-related digital artefacts and corruption, resulting in phenomena such as the freeze and the glitch.

A pinnacle moment where the digital uncanny became present is the perhaps intimate kissing scene between Joi and K on the rooftop of K’s apartment, after Joi’s transfer into the emanator, giving her semiphysical properties to interact with her environment. K’s passionate kissing with Joi is abruptly interrupted by Joshi’s call, to which protocol pauses all active programs until the call is answered. Joi is left frozen as K moves through her after receiving the request from headquarter, frozen in a moment of uncanny human intimacy. Furthermore, as the narrative had placed Joi as the initiator of this intimacy, the sudden inversion of this power dynamic is unsettling. Just as viewers

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are encouraged to empathise with Joi’s character as human, they are suddenly confronted with the brutal, absolute, digitalised oppression that permeates the Blade Runner universe. A similar situation occurs in the form of a glitch, in which the cue of digital artefacts completely overtakes the Joi’s representation as her ‘humanity’ is momentarily annihilated by digital limitations.

The paradox of Joi can be viewed as mise en abyme, a play within a play, a riddle without clear answer. The narrative sees Joi as a female character with a single, focused motivation: to be the perfect lover, “Everything you want to see. Everything you want to hear.” In the entirety of Joi’s storyline, her choices align with everything she was programmed to be, therefore, does her lack of rebellion to her code reject any possibility for humanity?

One possibility that aligns closely to the postmodern, hermeneutic perspective is that the paradox of Joi exists to provide space for K’s projection, and in turn, the projection of each individual viewer.

Whether the ‘love’ Joi displays for K is genuine is perhaps a trivial pursuit, what is valid is how both K and the individual viewer projects

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their fantasies, insecurities and vulnerabilities onto this character, throughout the sequence of events that results in historicity of the character. By contrast, after Joi is destroyed in Deckard’s hideout, K returns to the advertisement of a different version of Joi, to which she seduces him “You look like a good Joe”, it is apparent to K that this coincidence in referring to him as Joe is pre-programmed off of a psychological analysis of K as a user-subscriber of the service, or a profile generated by Wallace Corp that pairs K’s pre-programmed desires and fantasies with the programming of Joi.

The void that is experience and memory with this new Joi is uncanny despite all else being identical, further reaffirming that one’s history, particularly their history of growth and suffering, allows a stronger reading of their supposed humanity. Michael Green sums up his unsettling emotions stirred by the dilemma and uncertainty between the digital and the organic:

“…Now, if that story is merely a projection of his fantasies combined with excellent

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programming, or if she is a ‘special’ version of herself who became something more because she was involved with someone unique — that’s something I hope people struggle with. When he sees the advertisement for a different Joi at the end… it hurts my feelings. And a Blade Runner film should hurt one’s feelings.”24

Joi’s reality is to a large degree valid to K, despite K’s constant awareness of her digital artefacts. Blade Runner 2047 is littered with moments that cast doubts on Joi’s interiority. “I’ve been inside you, there’s not so much in there as you think.” As well as K’s “you don’t have to say that” are subtle reminder of a rejecting attitude to Joi’s apparent humanity. However, it is clear that through the film K takes comfort in Joi’s presence25, she subjectively drives his sense of

24 Thuy Ong, “In Blade Runner 2049, Can a Relationship with a Hologram Be Meaningful?,” The Verge (2017).

25 Joi was introduced as the embodiment of domesticity to counterbalance K’s inner lacking of origin and social interest.

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purpose and individuality, albeit objectively it could likely be a result of K’s own projection. The underlying social principle of affirmation and projection is digitised, it is also from this perspective that distinguishing between the digital and the organic is a futile exercise.

A visually stunning, yet deeply disturbing shot of Dolores introduced audiences to the profound confrontation of humanity and the digital of the series Westworld. This opening shot continuously dollies into the face of Delores, a subtle blood smear on her cheek otherwise devoid of blemishes. Revealed is the movement of a fly on her face. Beginning on her forehead, the fly climbs jerkily down her nose ridge and eventually into the corner of her unblinking, unfocused eye, then across her opened eyeball. All the while Delores displays no visible response, like Joi’s pause in the rain. A voiceover introduces a conversation, similar to the Blade Runner Voight-Kampff. As the scene opens, the audience sees Delores slouched a few degrees counter-clockwise:

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VOICE Bring her back online.

Can you hear me?

DELORES Yes. I’m sorry. I’m not feeling quite myself.

VOICE You can lose the accent.

Do you know where you are?

DELORES I am in a dream.

VOICE That’s right Delores. You’re in a dream.

Would you like to wake up from this dream?

DELORES

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Yes. I’m terrified.

VOICE There’s nothing to be afraid of Delores. As long as you answer my questions correctly.

Understand?

DELORES Yes.

VOICE Good. [fly climbs to the centre of Delores’ eye] VOICE First…have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?

[cut to Delores asleep in bed, camera skewed to

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the same off-centre rotation as her slouch in the previous shot, sounds of birds chirping outside]

DELORES No.

This line of questioning serves the same purpose to K’s “Interlinked” baseline test to ensure host is functioning as designed. As a narrative device, it is used repeatedly at different stages of narrative development to induce a more profound sense of the uncanny depending on how the dialogue is presented and paced in conjunction with visuals. This is true particularly of the piece of dialogue that is the rest of this baseline test, overlayed into the introduction.

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Cont.

[Delores wakes] VOICE Tell us what you think of your world.

DELORES Some people choose to see the ugliness in the world. The disarray. I choose to see the beauty.

To believe there is an order to our days.

A purpose.

This ‘baseline’ exchange to test for stability of Delores’ code is used again at the conclusion of the first episode. When her father Abernathy’s code is deemed corrupt by the corporation and is declared as a high-risk Host to the park, potentially able to harm living beings, he is forced to undergo a lobotomy, his body later placed into cold storage. Delores’ memory is wiped for the new cycle, the audience

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▼ Fly crawls across Delore’s eye, Westworld.

▼ Later, a fly lands on Delore’s neck, Westworld

▼ Delores kills fly instinctively, Westworld

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again sees the shot of her in her bed, almost identical to the shot at the start of the episode, with an extremely subtle difference: the skew of the composition has been corrected, signifying a resolution of the digital corruption that had ‘plagued’ the story leading up to this point.

Delores’s monologue begins again as she leaves her bed and heads downstairs to her front porch, encountering a ‘new’ Abernathy. In this instance, the same words are voiced-over onto other sequences to imbue new meaning and to establish leads onto the upcoming narratives. With each cycle is a new perspective gained, for both the characters and the audience, a Sisyphean journey of self-discovery propelled through estrangement. The episode finishes with Delores introducing a new line to end her monologue:

DELORES I know things will work out the way they’re meant to.

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The final shot depicts Delores looking out into the morning landscape from her porch, a fly lands on her neck. Delores instinctively slaps and kills it without thought, the significance of her actions evades her as she takes the first step into sentience. The uncanny evaporates.

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Conclusion “Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing.

Once the familiar turns strange, it is never quite the same again. Self -knowledge is like lost innocence, however unsettling you find it, it can never be un-thought or unknown. What makes this enterprise difficult, but also riveting, is that moral and political philosophy is a story, you don’t know where the story will lead, but you know the story is about you.”26 Michael Sandel

26 Harvard University. “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Episode 01 “the Moral Side of Murder”.” In Justce with Michael Sandel, edited by WGBH Boston: Youtube, 2009. ◀ K approaches the Garden of Erotic Statues, Blade Runner 2049, courtesy of Alcon Entertainment

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These words of caution were issued to students of philosophy at a Harvard lecture titled The Moral Side of Murder, it is interesting how in particular components of these lines poetically summarise the exploration thus far looking at the SF experience as a lens for self-introspection. The removed, distancing gaze upon which one examines oneself within the society at large is perhaps the agenda of SF, upon which a simultaneous immersion into the utopia-dystopia complexes of the imagined worlds become occupied by the blurring of morality and values, and the fracturing and collaging of cultural edifice. The postmodern SF is not merely describing and accentuating the experience of postmodernity, but postmodern SF itself is an experience that contributes to the dialogue with the postmodern present.

Through lateral growth and decentralised network systems, the digital has introduced new worlds, new space and new time. It is therefore crucial for academics, designers and artists alike to promptly respond to the evolution of the human condition from the external, classical sense, to the sense of a mirage-like projected interiority. Society’s

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relationship with these new forms of space-time is vividly depicted in Blade Runner and Westworld that centre on the destabilised narrative mirage, cultural representation and the idea of home itself.

Perhaps one of the most meaningful frameworks for exploration is to set the familiar as a point of departure. Organic phenomena such as the mirage and digital artefacts such as the glitch, the bug, or virus provide valuable conditions and circumstances on which one is able to establish parameters and analyse them in the context of film and narrative. This analysis is itself the catalyst to estrangement and discovery. As it may be evident by now, these fundamental concepts of SF: cognition and estrangement, are by no means static, they are relative, and their relativity with one another mutually defines them.

Like I and Other, an experience, at any given time, cannot be both cognition and estrangement, nor can they be only cognition or only estrangement ad infinitum. Estrangement prolonged is familiarity.

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Vice versa, the familiar prolonged often becomes strange27. Thus, by nature they must possess the possibility of the Other within them, like the well-known Taoist symbol ying-yang, in which a seed of the Other is always present in their opposition, forever in flux.

The purpose of this exploration, and more importantly, the experience of this exploration therefore is not dissimilar to the aspired genre agenda of SF itself – to gain insights into “what we already know” and from which we continue to confront and question our own motivations, desires and being. Through SF, one can draw correlations between the mirage of home and the mirage of one’s interiority as they both inwardly permeate and outwardly projects. Idiosyncratic of any mirage experience, the home mirage is perceived as a constant until conditions change to establish new environments, on which the mirage either undergoes metamorphosis or simply disappears. Ultimately, the experience of SF narrative is itself an experience respectively of

27 In the case of semantic satiation, repetition is a word or phrase causes a temporally loss of meaning for the audience.

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awareness, exploration and introspection of I and Other, home and away, catalysing life’s pendulum swings of conditioning and deconditioning, cognition and estrangement.

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CONCLUSION

BERNARD What’s the end of your story?

FORD Isn’t the pleasure of a story, discovering the ending yourself, Bernard?

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