Another Conference Highlight

 I’m attending one of the last panels from w hole week of excellent sessions at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association. It’s been an outstanding set of panels snd Roundtables. This year online rather than its 40 year history set in Alberquerque. Heated hoping we csn attend in person next year!!!!

“The twenty-first century has been nothing if not tumultuous, with terrorist attacks, unpopular wars, financial crises, the rise of the Alt-Right, and environmental and ecological collapse. These issues and concerns have one thing in common: they are all anthropogenic. That the human species is violent and destructive towards both itself and its environment is nothing new; however, the multitude of crises and disasters that have categorised the past two decades has generated a profound pessimism regarding humanity and its future. Homo sapiens is closer than ever to extinction, and this is regarded in many quarters as a good thing. This paper argues that what it is calling an antihuman attitude has emerged in twenty-first century culture and uses science fiction cinema to explore this phenomenon. Engaging with Raymond Williams’ structures of feeling, Fredric Jameson’s political unconscious, and Slavoj Žižek’s formulation of the Lacanian Real, it is argued that an antihuman attitude that was repressed in the science fiction cinema of the twentieth century by a dominant humanist paradigm has been galvanised by the events of the past twenty years and risen to the surface of the genre to trouble that dominant paradigm. Sometimes this takes the form of antihuman visuals which are at odds with a film’s humanist narrative. This concept will be examined in relation to The Matrix trilogy, whose humanist narrative is unable to resolve the contradictions between itself and the films’ antihuman visuals which represent humanity as a disease or a virus. Elsewhere, twenty-first century science fiction cinema depicts the destruction of the human species as a positive, with narrative and visuals converging in their antihuman attitude. This will be explored though an analysis of War for the Planet of the Apes, which features the kind of apocalyptic imagery Žižek defines as the spectacle of the Real, images of imaginary destruction supposed to inure audiences to the possibility of real destruction. It is argued that the film engages with issues of animal and human rights and the Alt-Right to code the destruction of humanity as a favourable outcome.”

Christopher Parr