Alien Identities

Deborah Cartmell

Description

This is a lively and stimulating look at representations, mutations and adaptations of 'the alien' in literature, film and television.



Using notions of the alien and alienation in a broadly defined sense, the contributors cover early science fiction, from the gothic aliens of Dracula and H.G. Wells, to the classic fifties Cold War sci-fi movies, such as War of the Worlds, twentieth-century reworkings of various 'alien' metaphors, such as The Fly movies and the Alien series, and comic variations on the theme such as Mars Attacks.



Moving beyond the conventional genre boundaries of the alien, particular essays look, too, at 'race' as an alien condition, and at the use of illness and disease as a metaphor for alienation in modern film and fiction.
Introduction - Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Film and Fiction by Heidi Kaye and I.Q. Hunter

1. Satan Bugs in the Hot Zone: Microbial Pathogens as Alien Invaders by Peter Hutchings

2. America's Domestic Aliens: African Americans and the Issue of Citizenship in the Jefferson/Hemings Story in Fiction and Film by Sharon Monteith

3. See Europe with ITC: Stock Footage and the Construction of Geographical Identity by Nick Freeman

4. ‘Leaving the West and Entering the East’: Refiguring the Alien from Stoker to Coppola by Paul O'Flinn

5. Another Time, Another Space: Modernity, Subjectivity and The Time Machine by Jonathan Bignell

6. 'The Martians are Coming!': Civilisation v. Invasion in The War of the Worlds and Mars Attacks! by Liz Hedgecock

7. Vagabond Desire: Aliens, Alienation and Human Regeneration in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic and Andrey Tarkovsky's Stalker by John Moore

8. Adaptation, Teleportation and Mutation from Langelaan's to

Cronenberg's The Fly by Karin Littau

9. The Alien Series and Generic Hybridity by Martin Flanagan

10. Aliens, (M)Others, Cyborgs: The Emerging Ideology of Hybridity by Patricia Linton

Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies
• Anthropology
• Social
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 mars 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781849645133
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Film and Fiction

Pluto Press

Film/Fictionvolume 4

Alien Identities

Exploring Difference in Film and Fiction

Edited by Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

First published 1999 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling VA 20166–2012, USA

Copyright © Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan 1999

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1405 8 hbk

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Alien identities: exploring difference in film and fiction/edited by Deborah Cartmell … [et al.]. p. cm. — (Film/fiction: v. 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7453–1405–8 (hc.) 1. Alienation (Social psychology) in motion pictures. 2. Aliens in motion pictures. 3. Monsters in motion pictures. 4. Film adaptations. I. Cartmell, Deborah. II. Series. PN1995.9.A47A44 1999 791.43'653—dc21 96–46720 CIP

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Production Services, Chadlington, OX7 3LN Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the EC by T.J. International, Padstow

Contents

Notes on contributors

Introduction – Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Film and Fiction Heidi Kaye and I.Q. Hunter

1Satan Bugs in the Hot Zone: Microbial Pathogens as Alien Invaders Peter Hutchings

2America’s Domestic Aliens: African Americans and the Issue of Citizenship in the Jefferson/Hemings Story in Fiction and Film Sharon Monteith

3See Europe with ITC: Stock Footage and the Construction of Geographical Identity Nick Freeman

4‘Leaving the West and Entering the East’: Refiguring the Alien from Stoker to Coppola Paul O’Flinn

5Another Time, Another Space: Modernity, Subjectivity andThe Time Machine Jonathan Bignell

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1

11

31

49

66

87

6‘The Martians Are Coming!’: Civilisation v. Invasion inThe War of the Worlds andMars Attacks!104 Liz Hedgecock

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Alien Identities

7Vagabond Desire: Aliens, Alienation and Human Regeneration in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’sRoadside Picnicand Andrey Tarkovsky’sStalker John Moore

8Adaptation, Teleportation and Mutation from Langelaan’s to Cronenberg’sThe Fly Karin Littau

9TheAlienSeries and Generic Hybridity Martin Flanagan

10Aliens, (M)Others, Cyborgs: The Emerging Ideology of Hybridity Patricia Linton

Index

121

141

156

172

187

Notes on Contributors

Jonathan Bignelllectures in English and Media at the University of Reading. He is the author ofMedia Semiotics: An Introduction,editor ofWriting and Cinemaand has published numerous essays on aspects of film, television and popular culture.

Deborah Cartmellis Senior Lecturer in English at De Montfort University, Leicester. With Imelda Whelehan, she has recently completed co-editing a book onLiterary Adaptations. She is presently working on a book on Shakespeare on screen and has written on Spenser, Shakespeare and Afro-American literature.

Martin Flanaganis completing a Ph.D. applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theories to film. Recent research has focused on analysing time and space in modern action films using the chronotope, Bakhtin’s device for understanding spatio- temporal relations in the text. He teaches film at the University of Sheffield.

Nick Freemanteaches at Bristol University and the University of the West of England and combines work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature with wider interests in post-war popular culture. He has published articles on Swinburne, Mervyn Peake, British film and contemporary fiction, and is currently working on a book about literary responses to late Victorian London.

Liz Hedgecockis currently writing her Ph.D. on authority and masculinity in the male-authored Victorian novel at the University of Salford. Articles are forthcoming on George Gissing and masculinity, the novels of Philip Larkin, imperialism in the Victorian adventure story andSimpsonsfan vii

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Alien Identities

websites, and she is currently editing an anthology of Victorian dramatic adaptations.

I.Q. Hunteris Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is joint editor of Routledge’s Studies in Popular British Film series, for which he has edited Unearthly Strangers: The British Science Fiction Film.

Peter Hutchingslectures in Film Studies at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle. He is the author ofHammer and Beyondand is currently writing a book on the films of Terence Fisher.

Heidi Kayeis Senior Lecturer in English and Women’s Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester, and is particularly interested in popular culture. Forthcoming publications include articles on ‘Gothic in Film’,The X Filesand the films PersuasionandSense and Sensibilityas well as an edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’sCranfordand other stories.

Patricia Lintonis Associate Professor of English at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where she teaches courses in twentieth-century literature, narrative theory and film. She has published inStudies in American Indian LiteraturesandMelusand has articles forthcoming inLiterary Studies East and Westand Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the ‘Other’ Side.

Karin Littaulectures in Film and Literature at the University of Essex. She is interested in the aesthetics and politics of rewriting from both theoretical and material perspectives. She has published articles on film adaptation, translation and rewrites inMLN,Forum for Modern Language StudiesandTheatre Research Internationaland is currently completing a book on Theories of Reading.

Sharon Monteithis Head of Literature at the University of Hertfordshire and Modern Editor of the literary and cultural studies journalCritical Survey. She publishes on American and British fiction and film. She has recently co-edited a book on gender and the civil rights movement and is working on a book

Notes on Contributors

ix

on the American South. Two books on Pat Barker are forthcoming.

John Mooreis lecturer in Literary Studies at the University of Luton. He has written numerous essays on American culture, science fiction and anarchist writing. He is an Associate Editor ofAnarchist Studies.

Paul O’Flinnhas taught English at Ibibio State College, Nigeria and at Trent University, Ontario. He has also taught sociology at the University of Reading and is currently Chair of the English Studies Department at Oxford Brookes University. Previous publications includeThem and Us in LiteratureandHow to Study Romantic Poetry.

Imelda Whelehanis Principal Lecturer in English and Women’s Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester. She is the author ofModern Feminist Thoughtand, with Deborah Cartmell, has recently completed a book onLiterary Adaptations for Routledge. She is currently writing a book on the impact of anti-feminism in the 1990s.

Introduction – Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Film and Fiction

Heidi Kaye and I.Q. Hunter

When a gung-ho Will Smith announced inIndependence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996) that he couldn’t wait to ‘whup E.T.’s ass’, he cheekily dispelled any lingering affection for our friends from outer space. That Spielberg’s amiable alien, a wizened hybrid of Ronald Reagan, a muppet and a foetus, should have been singled out for violent retribution said much about popular culture’s hardening attitudes towards ‘aliens’ of all descriptions. The alien, in every sense of the word, has become central to popular culture. On the one hand, encouraged by programmes likeThe X Files, conspiracy theories proliferate about Roswell, ‘grays’ and alien abductions. On the other, alien identities of all kinds have been made visible and celebrated by the identity politics which have become central to postmodern culture. We – a problematic word these days – are reminded that otherness and alienation are states of existence not only for imaginary E.T.s but for all who have been excluded from dominant categories of the human, the natural and the native. This volume, the fourth in the Film/Fiction series, ranges widely on the theme of the alien to explore how various cultures and times have determined their own collective and individual sense of identity through external as well as internal contrast. The chapters in the first section consider the alien in the sense of foreigner; those in the second look at humanity’s own alien identity; and those in the final part examine ideas of hybridity in theAlienfilm series itself.

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Alien Identities

The importance of the alien to contemporary culture is reflected in the current wave of American science fiction films. But whereas in the 1970s and 1980s films likeClose Encounters of the Third Kind(Steven Spielberg, 1977),E.T.: The Extraterrestrial(Spielberg, 1982) andStarman(John Carpenter, 1984) were modestly optimistic about their strange visitors, 1990s sci-fi has returned with anarchic glee to the 1950s’ paranoid injunction to ‘keep watching the skies’. It is true that some movies, such asContact(Robert Zemeckis, 1998), still look back sentimentally not only toE.T.but to the 1950s’ more positive, albeit often highly conservative and patriarchal, representations of the alien: the Christ-like ‘Carpenter’ ofThe Day the Earth Stood Still(Robert Wise, 1951), for example, and the much abusedMan from Planet X(Edgar G. Ulmer, 1 1951). But it isAlien(Ridley Scott, 1979) and its sequels which have proved most influential in their fusion of xenocidal horror and misogynistic unease.Species(Roger Donaldson, 1995),Mars Attacks!(Tim Burton, 1996), Independence DayandStarship Troopers(Paul Verhoeven, 1997) – likeAlien– identify the inhuman with monstrous, gloopy, insect-like otherness, and leave no doubt that the only good alien is a dead alien. They offer ironic pastiches of Red-baiting classics such asThe War of the Worlds(Byron Haskin, 1953), but with a vital political difference: their aliens no longer seem to stand for anything. Instead of metaphors for invading Communists and the dangers of conformism, they are simply and conveniently ‘other’ – all-purpose outsiders against which the warring chaos of American identities can muster and unite. To some extent, making aliens the enemy is a politically astute way of avoiding negative representations of identifiable sets of humans. As Paul Verhoeven, the director ofStarship Troopers, noted: ‘The US is desperate for a new enemy ... The communists were the enemy, and the Nazis before them, but now that wonderful enemy everyone can fight has been lost. Alien sci-fi gives us a terrifying enemy that’s politically correct. 2 They’re bad. They’re evil. And they’re not even human.’ Nowadays only white Englishmen – or Arabs, as inTrue Lies (James Cameron, 1995) – can be safely demonised in action movies. But on closer inspection 1990s sci-fi films, with the