Overview

Offering a survey of Hollywood science fiction cinema from 1979 to 2017 (from Ridley Scott’s Alien to Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049), Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film argues that the trajectory of Hollywood’s dystopianism in that period is inextricable from the phenomenon of the ‘new enclosures’, the new dispossessions and privatisations sweeping across the United States since the 1970s. More precisely, it contends that the critiques of such dispossessions elaborated before the turn of the century – consider the satire of private policing in RoboCop (1987), the portrayal of commodified air in Total Recall (1990), and the nightmarish extrapolations of postmodern urbanism in Blade Runner (1982) and The Truman Show (1998) – begin to disappear in films such as The Matrix (1999), The Island (2005), District 9 (2009), Repo Men (2010), and The Purge (2013), the further commodification of land, forest, reservoir, ideas, even the human genome having diminished the contrast between capitalist and non-capitalist spaces on which the earlier critiques depended. Bringing close readings of blockbuster films into dialogue with historical and theoretical scholarship on dispossession, Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film proposes a new understanding of the politics of science fiction in particular and utopian thought in general.

Full Product Details

Author:   Harry Warwick
Publisher:   Liverpool University Press
Imprint:   Liverpool University Press
Volume:   95
ISBN:  

9781802077612

ISBN 10:   1802077618
Pages:   216
Publication Date:   01 March 2023
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Introduction – Anticipation: Science Fiction between Spectacle and Speculation PART 1: ENCLOSURE AFTER ENCLOSURE1. Extrapolation: The New Enclosures in New Hollywood2. Privatisation: Conceptualising Enclosure in RoboCop and Total Recall3. Urbanisation: Images of Los Angeles in Blade Runner and The Truman Show PART 2: DYSTOPIA AFTER DYSTOPIA4. Expropriation: Marx, Utopia, and the Limits of Political Economy5. Innovation: Intellectual Property in The Matrix, The Island, and District 96. Speculation: Credit, Crisis, and Foreclosure in Repo Men and The Purge Conclusion – Negation: Capitalism at the End of the World

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Author Information

Harry Warwick is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

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