preserved for prosperity
Posted: Sun Jan 01, 2012 10:09 pm
i wuv you manshroom wrote:it really got me thinking though, about how certain subset of science fiction and science fiction fans no longer have an appreciation for the inexplicable and the magnificent and the beautiful, and how if it doesn't fit into their axiom of industrialization and cold steel and hard technology and all that brute aesthetics that come with the whole modern militaristic take of science fiction - which as we know comes with obsessives going on about the weapons yields of their military technology - if it is not with these, then it is somehow against this or inferior to this, and thus reviled or belittled for its difference and for its alternative ways.
I think it's imperialism. Not of nations imperializing each other. But more like imperialism of the mind. Abstract, different, alien thoughts and concepts are derided for being unorthodox and unusual. Conformity is enforced. You can see it around you, how some - many - no longer relish in the wondrous and miraculous and prefer to bottle it and dissect it with cold calculations. The amazement of seeing strange new things and the curiosity and desire to be amazed has given way to something darker, something ugly, the desire for conflict and the adoration of instruments used to bring about and carry out conflict and violence.
It's a trend you see in science fiction in general too. Gene Rodenberry's vision of the future, of explorating the stars and encountering wonders and miracles, gone and replaced by transpositioned Marines and soldiers in space gunning down and killing crude facsimiles of America's past, present or future enemies likewise transplanted into the science fiction setting. Fantasy and the fantastic gone and replaced with ritual celebratory depictions of violence, as the byproduct of a violent culture.
Star Wars wasn't about just nations warring against each other. It was a war of ideals, of natures, of Luke Skywalker as he's thrust into a Campbellian odyssey, the hero's journey, encountering monsters and bandits, laser sword duels in death fortresses in space, World War 2 dogfights, and most importantly - the central theme of Star Wars itself - a war between one's inner natures, dark and light, good and evil, the shades of passion that can bring both good and evil, and even the redemption of what was once thought to be lost and corrupted by a force greater than all the weapons in the universe, strong enough to cast away an invincible warlock emperor: the power of love.
And look at what it has become now. Gigatons and kilojoules. Mandalorians. Karen Travvisties. Meesa meesas. An Engorged Universe filled with dour repetitive tripe. It has been twisted and deformed by an environment, a cultural growth medium, that thinks nothing of declaring war on not just persons or places or nations, but even abstract concepts. So, no wonder today so few can capture the essence of the original Star Wars, because they're no longer thinking of that kind of metaphysical or metaphorical war as envisioned by Lucas who conjured facets of his tale by consulting mysticism, because they are thinking of an entirely different kind of war - a far more mundane, dour, and trivial one, which their society likes to indulge in.
This imperialism of the mind confines the different and the unorthodox into concentration camps of thought. To reinforce sameness, to castigate foreign concepts that somehow threaten the security of the dour boring numerical conformists who've built an ivory tower heightening themselves through the self-congratulation of militarism and destructive prowess. It's built on a culture that encourages such, that breeds violence and defensiveness against strange things from the "outside". We can't blame those who conform to this powerful environmental force. But still, it is a sad and poor state of affairs.
In one of the most celebrated science fiction epics, 2OO1: Space Odyssey, made by the visionaries Clarke and Kubrick, the tale begins were mere tribalistic apes shrieking and fighting and beating things with sticks. It then progresses to a vision of the future. The moon, the Earth, space travel in cold sterile machines envisioned at the time of the film's making to be the technology of the future - depicted so accurately that today it is still regarded so highly - this is the industrialization we speak of. This is the epitome of humanity's ascension, its journey beyond the limits of Earth and the nature that is limited to the world's confines.
Yet despite this, how does the movie end? The betrayal of a homicidal machine that, ironically, displays more emotion than the human who decommissions it, a man who himself has become as cold and sterile and antiseptic as the starship he rides. But there is more. Eventually, all this rationality, all this logic, all this quantified and scientifically accurate depictions of the future are cast aside - by what? By incomprehensible vistas of surreality, going beyond outer space and into the inner mind. The man's communion with a divine... thing. A cosmic object far greater than he is, far greater than anything that can be quantified, something magical, mystical, fantastic. Majestic. Terrific. And it does not deride him. It does not ridicule him for his primitive ways. It embraces him. Insinuates into his very essence. Makes him transcends his rational limitations and conceptions and allows him to become something in-conceivable.
The tale ends with the Star Child - which cannot be quantified, which cannot be calculated, which is not industrialized, which makes utterly no sense at all - coming down from the heavens on an eightfold path through the endless expanse of the nine vectors, from Jupiter and the Infinite, reaching back to touch Earth.
I think those who encounter something different and yet magnificent, but end up deriding or dismissing it for its differences, are akin to those who cannot perceive color being made to see a rainbow of dead monochrome hues. It is like men who cannot perceive scent made to waft fine precious cologne. They have been stifled. Perhaps their ability to appreciate the great and the beautiful have been amputated by the thought-imperialists, in their concentration camps of the mind. It is a shame. It is a travesty.
I am so sorry.
