Excavating the Future

Front matter

Archaeology and Geopolitics in Contemporary florth American Science Fiction Film and Teleuision

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies

Editor David Seed, University of Liverpool

Part 1: Battling Babylon: Military SFFTV and the War on Terror 19

1. Manticore 31 2. Stargate SG-1 44 3. Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen 59 Part 2: Of Artefacts and Ancient Aliens 73 4. Ancient Aliens 82 5. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 95 6 Smallville 112 Part 3: Cyborg Sites: The Case of A.I. Artificial Intelligence 135 7. Battlestar Galactica 145 8. Prometheus 167 Envoi 191 Works Cited 198

Index 223 vii

This reversal is a worldwide phenomenon. It is now becoming clear that everything we once thought dead and buried, everything we thought left behind for ever by the ineluctable march of universal progress, is not dead at all, but on the contrary likely to return—not as some archaic or nostalgic vestige (all our indefatigable museumification notwithstanding), but with a vehemence and a virulence that are modern in every sense—and to reach the very heart of our ultra-sophisticated but ultra-vulnerable systems, which will easily convulse from within without mounting a frontal attack. Such is the destiny of radical otherness—a destiny that no homily of reconciliation and no apologia for difference is going to alter.

Jean Baudrillard, from The Transparency of Evil (138)

List of Figures

Introduction

2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick, director, producer (MGM, 1968).

Part 1: Battling Babylon: Military SFFTV and the War on Terror

Metropolis. Fritz Lang, director, Erich Pommer, producer (UFA, 1927).

Blade Runner. Ridley Scott, director, Michael Deeley, producer (Warner Bros., 1982).

Babylon 5. John Copeland, series producer (Babylonian Productions, 1994).

Chapter 1: Manticore

Manticore. Tripp Reed, director, Jeffery Beach, producer (UFO International Productions, 2005).

Chapter 2: Stargate SG-1

Stargate. Roland Emmerich, director, Dean Devlin and Oliver Eberle, producers (Canal+, 1994).

Stargate SG-1, ‘The Tomb.’ Peter DeLuise, director, Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie, supervising producers (Sony Pictures Television, 2001).

xi xii ll.

Stargate SG-1, ‘Babylon.’ Peter DeLuise, director, John G. Lenic, producer (Sony Pictures Television, 2005).

Chapter 6: Smallville

Smallville, ‘Skinwalker.’ Marita Grabiak, director, Robert Hargrove, producer (Warner Bros. Television, 2002).

Smallville, ‘Absolute Justice.” Tom Welling and Glen Winter, directors, Anne Cofell Saunders and Rob Maier, producers (Warner Bros. Television, 2010).

Smallville, ‘Shield.’ Glen Winter, director, Tom Flores, Holly Henderson and Don Whitehead, producers (Warner Bros. Television, 2010).

Smallville, ‘Icarus.’ Mairzee Almos, director, Tom Flores, Holly Henderson and Don Whitehead, producers (Warner Bros. Television, 2010).

LIST OF FIGURES

Smallville, ‘Beacon.’ Mike Rohl, director, Tom Flores, Holly Henderson and Don Whitehead, producers (Warner Bros. Television, 2010).

Smallville, ‘Finale.’ Greg Beeman and Kevin Fair, directors, Tom Flores and Scott Graham, producers (Warner Bros. Television, 2011).

Part 3: Cyborg Sites: The Case of A.I. Artificial Intelligence

A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Steven Spielberg, director, Bonnie Curtis, Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg, producers (Warner Bros., 2001).

Chapter 7: Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica, ‘Flesh and Bone.’ Brad Turner, director, Harvey Frand, producer (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2005).

Battlestar Galactica, ‘Kobol’s Last Gleaming: Part 1.’ Michael Rymer, director, Harvey Frand, producer (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2005).

Battlestar Galactica, ‘Kobol’s Last Gleaming: Part 2.’ Michael Rymer, director, Harvey Frand, producer (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2005).

Battlestar Galactica, ‘Home: Part 2.’ Jeff Woolnough, director, Harvey Frand, producer (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2006).

Battlestar Galactica, ‘The Eye of Jupiter.’ Michael Rymer, Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, producers (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2008).

Battlestar Galactica, ‘Sometimes a Great Notion.’ Michael Nankin, director, Harvey Frand, Ron French and Michael Rymer, producers (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2009).

Battlestar Galactica, ‘Daybreak: Part 2, 3.’ Michael Rymer, director, Harvey Frand, Ron French and Michael Rymer, producers (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2009).

xiii xiv EXCAVATING THE FUTURE

Chapter 8: Prometheus

28. Prometheus. Ridley Scott, director, David Giler, Walter Hill and Ridley Scott, producers (Twentieth Century Fox, 2012). 187

Acknowledgements

For their generous financial support I thank Bishop’s University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Special thanks goes out to Sylvie Coté and Julie Frédette of Bishop’s Office of Research, to Lee St. Onge and the staff at the John Bassett Library, to Nancy Robichaud and Monique Lafaille for their dedicated administrative assistance, and to my energetic and insightful research assistants Jeffrey Parent, Arian Fecteau and Jeanette Greven.

I would also like to express my appreciation to everyone at Liverpool University Press, especially for my editors, Anthony Cond and Jenny Howard, whose guidance was instrumental in bringing this project to completion, and to David Seed and the Editorial Advisory Board for their encouragement. Thanks too to the helpful and professional staff at Carnegie Book Production.

For their collaboration, discussions and companionship over the years, I wish to acknowledge the support of my friends and colleagues of the Science Fiction Research Association. For their help in seeing this manuscript through its various stages, warm thanks go out to Lisa Yaszek, Patrick Sharp, Sherryl Vint and Despina Kakoudaki, and for their various kindnesses and encouragement, to Peter Sands, Doug Davis, Ritch Calvin, Eric Otto, Craig Jacobsen, Amy Ransom, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Steve Berman, Neil Easterbrook, Alfredo Suppia and Jason Ellis.

I also want to express my appreciation to Gregory Brophy, Andre Furlani, Sarah Fournier and the students with whom I have had the privilege of sharing my passion for SF.

My gratitude goes out most of all to my loving wife and companion, Grace Mazzocca, the coolest SF nerd in the galaxy.

XV

Introduction

The most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine the ‘real’ future of our social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come.

Fredric Jameson!

Casting a long shadow across the cinemagraphic landscape, the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is arguably the most recognizable artefact in science fiction film. Simultaneously ancient and futuristic, this enigmatic signifier of the origin and evolution of homo technologus is an apropos ‘site’ to introduce the central concern of this book: digging up the past buried in the future of contemporary American science fiction film and television.

Two archaeological events are particularly germane: the appearance of the monolith in the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence and the excavation of its lunar twin, Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-One. Each discovery imparts tremendous momentum to human evolution. When the monolith inspires ‘Moon-Watcher” to wield a bone to hunt and then to defend territory and resources from competitors, we are confronted with an unflattering image of ourselves as agents of invention and progress. The famous match cut of the bone—which our progenitor euphorically hurls skyward after committing humanity’s first murder—with the space station orbiting the Earth propels the audience on a jarring yet sensible evolutionary trajectory that renders inevitable the discovery of the second monolith

1 Jameson, 288.

2 For the purposes of this argument, I will use Arthur C. Clarke’s nomenclature to refer to Kubrick’s unnamed characters: i.e. Moon-Watcher and the Star Child.

on the moon, astronaut David Bowman’s discovery of the third monolith orbiting Jupiter, his psychedelic voyage ‘into the infinite and beyond’ and ultimate rebirth through the appearance of yet another monolith into the ‘Star Child,’ figured in the final sequence as the next phase of human development. Archaeology is a scientific touchstone and visual field for imagining humanity’s progression from savages clubbing each other over the heads to sophisticated beings compelled to conquer outer space.

In 2001, archaeological ‘discovery’ conveys both the sense of finding something lost or hidden and of advancing scientific knowledge. But for artefacts that have no sensible historical referent outside the film text, they are, as film scholar Garry Leonard observes, ‘unconcealed’ in the epistemological structures erected around them. As intelligences motivated by the monoliths’ evolutionary imperatives, Moon-Watcher and HAL describe a typology of consciousness that is decidedly violent and proprietary. The archaeological imagery offers a pointed critique of the film’s SF premise. ‘Buried, unburied, afloat in orbit, or in a dying man’s bedroom,’ relates Leonard, the monolith ‘persists as an ineradicable progenitor and remainder, the inscrutable presence of which defamiliarizes the myth of origin most science fiction takes for granted’ (45).

Itself an SF artefact, the film is also ‘unconcealed’ by the impenetrable figure of the monolith, which if laid on its side ‘would have the dimensions of a movie screen’ (49). As found object and source of technological wonder, the monolith is a metageneric image of SF film.’ In the Dawn of Man sequence, the monolith channels unmarked space into defined territory, fashioning the world in which Moon-Watcher becomes self-aware as a technological being into an environment he begins to measure and master. The cinematic mise-en-scene that recalls this originary moment unconceals the nature of progress latent in our own ritualistic ape-like gatherings before monolithic projection screens. The film’s special effects, relates Carl Freedman, ‘propose a continuity between the film itself, as a product of cinematic technology, and the characteristic technological content of the genre.’ The monolith is not simply a special effect of the film, but, in the film’s own mythology, the mother of special effects from which all other technological projections and their power to shape life are born and thematized as the ‘alien intelligence that lies behind the obelisks’ (2002, 101, 110).

The archaeological content also shapes the geopolitical subtext. Moon-Watcher’s discovery of the monolith is coeval with the dawn of

3 Marcia Landy observes that Kubrick dramatizes human evolution through cinematographic effects, conflating the history of consciousness with the history of cinema (88).

material culture, unconcealing a version of deep time that is ideologically consistent with the present and, by implication, the imagined futures shaped by the discovery of subsequent monoliths. The camera remaps the heretofore ‘free’ extreme long shots of open savanna into quasicolonial spaces in which the hominids assume central focus. The province of archaeological and anthropological investigation themselves, these prehistoric figures reflect and project the particular historical moment of the film’s making. At the conceptual core of a film released on the eve of the lunar landing—the extra-terrestrial stage for Cold War competition— Kubrick’s vision of space exploration raises important questions about the political and social ramifications of appropriating, like the ape-beings, the world for humanity’s ‘evolutionary imperative’ (Freedman, 2002, 110). While the global tensions between the superpowers are fairly well resolved in the film—the Cold War space race has warmed to tepid discussions about Soviet and American zones of political and archaeological influence on the moon—the geopolitical moment is displaced into the SF fabula of the battle against an intelligent machine, whose own manner of unconcealing the meaning of the monolith reiterates the human drive to master new frontiers at any cost.

While I have more to say below about archaeological imagery in 2001, the salient point is that the monolith’s visual, narrative and ideological properties cohere in a genre whose being resides, like archaeology itself, in speculations about change and technology. Gary Wolfe’s chapter ‘The Artifact as Icon in Science Fiction’ is useful for aligning archaeological praxis and theory with SF poetics. Classifying the roll call of robots, intelligent machines and spaceships as artefacts is symptomatic of the way archaeological materials furnish ‘evidence of some specific (usually remote) time and place, [that is] invested with some indeterminate value [...] to those who receive or discover it in some other time or place’ (83-84). Like archaeological objects, the SF artefact accrues significance through acts of discovery and recovery; like the monolith, manufactured objects in SF assume their status as artefacts by virtue of being ‘unconcealed’ within the ‘shifting and often counterintuitive visions of base reality that science itself reflects’ (29). As material signifiers of time and difference, artefacts are thereby ‘analogous to the function of the narrative itself’ (96); as a source of objectified temporality in SF, archaeology is a critical tool for unearthing the contradictions and fissures of historical discourse displaced into imagined futures.

The performative characteristics of science fiction film and television (hereafter SFFTV) are particularly suited to engaging these tensions. Susan Sontag’s famous declaration about SF film that ‘[w]le are merely spectators; we watch’ (43) is an aesthetic distinction that also evokes

SF’s central occupation: the pleasures and politics of defamiliarization. In Science Fiction Film, Keith Johnston inverts Sontag’s statement into a question about what ‘audiences find spectacular’ (42). For him, the material conditions of SF are inherently and necessarily spectacular. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) is exemplary, for its haunting archaeological mise-en-scene of ziggurats towering above twenty-first-century Los Angeles is a spectacular ideological marker of a capitalist empire indifferent to its own collapse. Freighted with historical significance, these futuristic temples share the skies with police hover cars and other simulated relics of the twentieth century. The ziggurats remain seats of power and human sacrifice; the cars, referents of a police state dedicated to enforcing naturalized expressions of power as spectacular manifestations culled from ‘ancient mytho-history’ (Johnson-Smith, 5). As evinced by 2001, SFFTV depends upon viewers’ extra-diegetic experience of archaeology, even if such experience is informed by SF spectacle. Wolfe’s artefact as icon thus opens SFFTV to the complex regimes of historical knowledge that archaeology also documents. Fredric Jameson adroitly exploits the metafictive potential of SF archaeology in his monumental Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia. Like Foucault’s genealogical analysis in The Archaeology of Knowledge of radical disruptions in the ‘archive’ of cultural history, Jameson addresses the central paradox of SF historicism dramatized in 2001. He relates, ‘SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us “images” of the future—whatever such images might mean for a reader who will necessarily predecease their “materialization”—but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present’ (286). Like archaeology, SF teaches us ‘that the present [...] is inaccessible directly’ (287). A generative vehicle of material progress itself, SF registers what Jameson calls a ‘symptom of a mutation in our relationship to historical time,’ through ‘our own experience of the object-world of the present’ (284). The fantasies of the future, Jameson insists, are genetically dependent upon the fantasies of the past that we store and experience in places like museums and heritage sites and, moreover, in narrative histories circulating in popular culture. We can appreciate SF as a historicist genre because of its insistence on historicizing progress, of freighting the future with the past. In his chapter ‘Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?’ Jameson is sceptical that this ‘“concept” [...] can somehow be tested for [its] objective or even scientific validity’ (282), and wonders what ‘if the “idea” of progress were not an idea at all but rather the symptom of something else? This is the perspective suggested, not merely by the interrogation of cultural texts, such as SF, but by the contemporary discovery of the

Symbolic in general’ (281). As a symbolic medium grounded in the material record of progress, SF teaches us that we are enveloped in a paradox that is the genre’s ‘deepest vocation,’ namely to ‘bring home, in local and determinate ways and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself’ (289).

The paradox of Jameson’s title is a touchstone for the present study: the manner in which archaeology exposes SFFTV to its political unconsciousness. This book investigates how contemporary SF televisual and cinematic representations of archaeology and their ‘scientific’ sense of the past and of cultural interaction contribute to socio-political investigation and understanding of geopolitics. The terrible events of September 11, 2001, have taught us that geopolitical crises are virtually indistinguishable from, and may even be anticipated by, media events. The apocalyptic vision of the Twin Towers vanishing from the New York skyline was impressed on the global imagination as if it were a cinematic event, like something ‘from a movie’ (King, 2005, 47; cf. Randell). On that fateful day, Slavoj Žižek relates, the ‘fantasmatic screen apparition entered our reality.’ This is ‘what the compelling image of the collapse of the WTC was: an image, a semblance, an “effect,” which, at the same time, delivered “the thing itself” (16, 19). The obsessive, even fetishistic cycling of the attacks in the news and social media is itself an indictment of global power disseminating as a form of Hollywood spectacle. The cinematographic realm of SF not only framed the event for contemporary ‘audiences’ but transformed and rerouted it like the hijacked planes into a weapon of terror. The plethora of writing by film and media scholars on 9/11’s indelible stamp on the ways security, invasion, threats to homeland and fears of mass destruction have since been represented in popular culture demands that we consider that if the attacks are mediatized weapons of retaliation on the West, they have been revitalized as potent images of threat and fear that have leant Western governments extraordinary powers of surveillance and control over their citizens in the name of freedom and security.* If, as Roger Luckhurst observes, SF ‘responds to the intensification and global extension of technological modernity not with new forms, but rather with ones lifted from the genre’s venerable past’ (221), then SFFTV is

4 The literature on the cultural responses to the war on terror, 9/11 and the Iraq War in film, TV, news media and the arts is extensive. Quay and Damico’s September 11 in Popular Culture: A Guide is an impressive and fairly comprehensive overview of the subject. Individual representative studies include Berenger; Birkenstein et al.; Bragard et al.; Debrix; Dixon, 2004; Holloway; Izard and Perkins; King, 2005; Monahan; Morgan; Nacos et al.; and Prince.

well suited to entertaining and documenting the ideological concerns of our era, wherein ‘venerable’ generic forms such as alien invasion have renewed cultural currency in the global war against terrorists.

SF has proven to be a flexible medium for responding to recent crises. J.P. Telotte explains that although science fiction has, to some extent, always provided a stage for acting out cultural anxieties—as the cinema’s tales of atomic holocaust and alien invasion at the height of the cold war attest— television’s increased emphasis in this direction should be seen less as a problem or symptom of ‘exhaustion’ than as evidence of its growing importance as a tool of cultural deliberation and ideological exploration. (4-5)

But perhaps because of its close physical, temporal and cultural proximity, 9/11 presents new challenges for SF mediations of insecurity as much as it reenergized, like other TV and film genres, SF narratives of invasion, (in)security, war and conspiracy. As Lincoln Geraghty observes in his cultural history American Science Fiction Film and Television, post-9/11 SFFTV struggles with issues of representing what for many North Americans is a singular and hence fundamentally unrepresentable event outside of the spectacle of media itself. SF film has adapted to this lacuna between the event and its representation by situating ‘9/11 and its fallout as narrative backdrop’ (2009, 103). SF invasion and disaster films like Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield (2008) and Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004) are fairly transparent allegories of New York City under spectacular threat, a filmic tradition dating back to Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933).

But SFFTV has also mined its own history for subtler alternative histories for 9/11. Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds (2005) is illuminating in this regard. Shifting H.G. Wells’s Martian invasion narrative to post-9/11 New York (a point made clear by the bright-eyed Rachael Ferrier [Dakota Fanning] asking her ash-covered father, Ray [Tom Cruise], ‘Is it the terrorists?’), Spielberg displaces the novel’s political questions into spectacular matter. Politics are re-injected into the film not through characters’ reflections (they are for the most part concerned with survival), but through the imagery the film exploits as

> Christine Cornea argues that the special effects of SF films like Independence Day have already manufactured a version of the events of 9/11 (264-65). Cf. ‘The Long Shadows of 9/11.’

é Friedman, 158; Holloway, 92; and Jackson all make this point.

a vehicle for terror. In Hollywood blockbuster fashion, the breakdown in American ideology is experienced as an external threat, in this case by conflating SF imagery with terrorist tactics: the ancient Martian war machines buried underground millions of years ago are artefacts hidden within the nation’s own soil, awaiting activation like terrorist cells. The Martian war machines operate like artefacts both in Wolfe’s sense of SF icons and as historical figures excavated from the substrata. The archaeological imagery offers an oblique means of reading global crises within the spectacular realm of SFFTV.

I have been arguing that archaeology is not simply an imaginative mine for SF’s other worlds, but is an important critical medium for teasing out the ideological subtextures of historical representation within the genre. Treating SF as a form of future history is, moreover, endemic of perspectives by a group of archaeological theorists committed to interrogating the ways they also ‘unconceal’ the material past. It is to these discussions that I now briefly turn.

Archaeology and the contemporary past

A past that is not yet known is a form of the future. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’

In the popular imagination, archaeology is a form of science fiction.

Daniel Shoup’

Excavating the Future is informed by a school of archaeological theory known as ‘post-processual’ or ‘interpretive archaeology.’ Embracing diverse theoretical positions from feminist, Marxist, post-structuralist and postcolonial criticism, and foregrounding the subjective nature of archaeological practice, post-processual archaeologists endeavour to understand how artefactual remains articulate cognitive and symbolic spheres of human action by considering how ideology operated in the production of material culture in the past and, moreover, in the hermeneutics of archaeological discourse in the present. Abandoning the notion of an archaeological ‘record’ and its implication of a direct imprint of the past on objects, post-processualists study artefacts like texts, wherein material signifiers ‘play’ in and between the present and the imagined past (Chilton; Hodder; Hodder and Hudson; Preucel; Tilley, 1990, 1991, 1999). United in a postmodern scepticism of totalizing theoretical schema, meta-narratives and scientific positivism, these archaeologists locate archaeological discourse within broader cultural productions of the past in and for the present. This paradigmatic shift of archaeology as a broadly material science into an array of creative and culturally relative material practices is a crucial cipher for decoding geopolitics in SFFTV archaeology.’

Three important implications emerge for the present study. First, as a mode of ‘unconcealment,’ archaeology is a representational medium whose rhetorical tropes are, in the words of classical archaeologist Yannis Hamilakis, ‘intricately implicated with processes of identity, politics, institutional power, disciplinary authority, and history.’ Archaeologists ‘do not just save and reconstruct,’ he argues, they ‘also ignore and destroy; they produce material realities, but they also tell stories; they too, like poets, are cultural producers working in the field of representation’ (2004, 56; cf. Shanks, 1991). In this vein, Rodney Harrison is particularly suspicious of the meta-tropes of ‘excavation and the depth metaphor for research and discovery.’ He proposes an alternative metaphor: surface archaeology, an approach to ‘assembling/reassembling’ information in order to reorient ‘archaeology away from the past and towards the present and future, which would see it forgo its search for origins to focus instead on the present and only subsequently on the circumstance in which the past intervenes within it’ (143-44, 144).!° For post-processualists, archaeology is a creative intervention that challenges its practitioners to acknowledge and explore the ideological dimensions of their ‘poetics.’

This raises a second point. Post-processualists are also interested in the relationship between amateur and professional interests in material remains. Stanford archaeologist, theorist, multimedia artist and blogger Michael Shanks contends ‘[w]e are all archaeologists today’ (2012, 21), echoing a sentiment shared by many archaeologists that the everyday and amateur concerns with the material past play an integral part

? For a concise study of these schools, see Johnson.

10 Thomas relates it ‘could be argued that this disciplinary orientation towards depth, concealment, mystery and revelation is quite obstructive, for it enhances the belief that the past is entirely separate from the present: it is “somewhere else” that needs to be accessed in a particular way. [...] [It] is unhelpful to imagine that the past is a substance that is secreted away in dark places awaiting its recovery. The remains of the past are all around us, and we inhabit the past in important ways’ (170).

in the dialogic world of archaeological thinking. Practitioners like Shanks seriously consider the powerful influence popular media have in shaping conceptions about what archaeologists do as producers of historical knowledge and identities. In Archaeology Is a Brand! The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture, Swedish archaeologist Cornelius Holtorf invites scholars to take possession of the ways their profession has been ‘branded’ through its own topoi, like colonial adventure in exotic locations, detective work, treasure hunting/artefact rescue, scholarly expertise, and excavation as discovery. Holtorf’s central and controversial argument (cf. G. Fagan and Feder) is that archaeologists should participate directly in the popular culture arena where so much interest in the discipline is itself generated. The implication for the present study is that popular cultural representations of the discipline are more than simple entertainment. They are critical sites for unpacking and confronting the politics of archaeological practice circulating in SFFTV.

While gauging what people actually think about archaeology is a difficult task, media analysis can provide clues about the means by which popular culture documents the work of archaeologists and, hence, its social value. Particularly germane for film and television is, thirdly, the performative nature of archaeology. This objective is perhaps best summed up by what Michael Shanks and performance artist Mike Pearson term ‘theatre/archaeology,’ the title of their collaborative effort to promote dialogue between the historically discrete disciplines of archaeology and drama. Their central premise is that archaeological knowledge is always contingent, because it is fashioned out of inherently performative encounters between bodies, objects and sites. Theatre/ archaeology looks for a composite authority through the living, tactile relationships we have with artefacts, investigating the ways contemporary interests in the past are articulated in popular culture and exert pressure on ‘legitimate’ forms of archaeological discussion. Shanks and Pearson challenge the assumption that ‘if you mix up old artefacts and spectacle, entertainment, interests of the present, then that old artefact is supposed to be of less use to proper archaeological concerns such as producing knowledge of the past.’ They consider, rather, ‘[w]hat use is an entertaining experience to archaeology?’ Understanding archaeology as a cultural production that has always existed within a ‘dramaturgical imagination,’ they promote a new form of archaeological documentation in which the two disciplines coexist within a blurred genre or a science/fiction, a mixture of narration and scientific practices, an integrated approach to recording, writing and illustrating the material past. Here archaeology and performance are jointly active in mobilizing the past, in making creative use of its various fragments in forging cultural memory out of varied interests and remains, in developing cultural ecologies (relating different fields of social and personal experience in the context of varied and contradictory interests) and in their joint address to particular sites and themes, a significant resource in constructing and energising contemporary identities, personal, communal and regional.

Ultimately, theatre/archaeology ‘documents social practices’ by sanctioning performance as knowledge within the archaeological project of ‘piecing together fragments’ (Pearson and Shanks, 114, 101, 131, 12).

While this short discussion does not presume to exhaust the breadth of issues being debated by post-processualists (and their detractors), its purpose is to offer their utopian dream of playful, democratic praxis and theory as an invitation to explore the material histories of our imagined futures in SFFTV. To illustrate how these archaeological ‘science/fictions’ are fertile territory for cultural study, I return briefly to 2001 to pose questions that are central to the present study. What kinds of futures can archaeology offer its audiences? How do archaeological practices shape cinematic storytelling? And, perhaps most importantly, how can archaeology expose SF futures to contemporary geopolitical discourse?

2001 redux

SF, then, is not a genre of literary entertainment only, but a mode of awareness, a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future.

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay!!

In 2001 four monoliths preside over humanity’s development. Produced by some unfathomable consciousness, these alien objects cached away in humanity’s past and future accrue a priori significance by virtue of the activities that take place around them. At the beginning of the Dawn of Man sequence, material culture per se does not yet exist. Time is static, a cinematic effect produced by lingering long distance takes of neutral terrain and tedious shots of outcrops, bushes and scattered

11 Csicsery-Ronay, 1991, 388.

bones that gesture towards a natural state before human agency. Except for a few diurnal cues, time is uncomfortably absent, a mise-en-abyme out of which Kubrick creates proleptic relief through the intervention of the monolith (cf. Landy, 89-91). But its sudden appearance and the reassurance of history and narrative progression it heralds introduces the film’s central dilemma. The ‘dawn of man’ is not a historical event but a cinematic process by which the audience is confronted with discomforting images of Darwinian ascendancy over the environment of our progenitors, a ‘defamiliarization of our need to generate a Myth of Origin, and, having once done so, our inability ever again to see the world except in terms of the “before” and “after” demarcated by this myth’ (Leonard, 59).

The introduction of time and human agency presumed by this myth of origin are also products of ‘camera consciousness’ (Landy, 99), which after the appearance of the monolith focuses on the activities of our ancestors. In a genre where the ‘privileged figure of alterity tends to be the machine’ (Vint, 2009, 225), these hominids become mechanized through technological mastery of the natural world. ‘The image of the ape,’ Rebecca Bishop observes, ‘serves as a mode of revealing’ (243) tool-wielding humanity in contradistinction to the other animals. Ratiocination occurs for the first time when Moon-Watcher applies his experience of smashing skeletal remains with a femur to killing the animals with which he had lived in relative peace. The psychological poignancy of this moment is realized through the meta-filmic rendition of Moon-Watcher’s thoughts, his awakening consciousness visualized for the audience as a slow motion cut scene of a falling tapir. We bear witness, furthermore, to the dawn of politics in the horrible image of the solitary Moon-Watcher gorging himself on entrails at a safe distance from the group.