THE NATURE OF FUTURE MYTHS: ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE IN SCIENCE FICTION FILM, 1950-1999

Abstract

Given the need to transform the societal relationship with nature, culture demands analysis for the role it plays in defining nature and the relationship with nature. Important as future myths, the environmental discourse imbedded in popular science fiction films since the 1950s is analyzed toward this end. Cultural studies serves as a theoretical and methodological guide. For the most part, the films resonate with reproductive discourse, degrading nature as less valuable than the civilized and favoring a relationship with nature most beneficial to humanity. Specifically, these films glorify science and technology, portray civilization continuing to fill and dominate the wilderness of space, and devalue nature as hostile and inferior to civilization. Resistant discourse, content which values and demands a more benign relationship with nature, is also present, but is less common and arguably less potent. This finding is interpreted in terms of implications for change in the societal relationship with nature as well as in light of other analyses of culture which find evidence for a shift in culture in an ecological direction.

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