“From the ‘millennial dreams’ and ‘apocalyptic nightmares’ of alien contact to the Buddhist visions of Neo’s matrix, Doug Cowan weaves a grand adventure for fans and students of religion and science fiction. If the hope for transcendence is the universal human religious question, as Cowan ably presents, then science fiction film and television are the blank screens most qualified in our media-rich culture to propel us on that journey.”
—Conrad Ostwalt, Professor of Religious Studies, Appalachian State University
“Cowan convincingly demonstrates that modern science-fiction films and television shows have made religious questions and answers central to the issues they raise about human identity, values, and purpose. By emphasizing the diversity of religious ideas present in these media, Cowan shows how they are as multivariant as the nature of religion itself. In so doing, he sheds light not only on what religion is, but also on what it might be.”
—John Lyden, Professor and Chair of Religion, Dana College, and author of Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals
“Highly recommended. Here we learn that science fiction is more than bug-eyed aliens and saucers—and that it often reveals our quest for the sacred.”
—John W. Morehead, editor, www.theofantastique.com
“Cowan’s in-depth exploration of the religious content of science-fiction films and television shows is a great step forward for the study of religion and popular culture. By taking fictional religions on their own terms, he uncovers complex meanings within some of science fiction’s best-loved films and television shows. His discussions of the role of religion in War of the Worlds, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Stargate SG-1 are the most thorough you’ll find.”
—Gabriel McKee, author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction
A preview of what the reader has in store in this volume is hinted at in my previous interviews with Cowan linked to below, as well as in his article in the Journal of Religion & Film reproduced as chapter 4 in the book.
Related Posts
“Douglas Cowan Interview Part 1: Forthcoming Book Sacred Space“
“Douglas Cowan Interview Part 2: Sci-Fi, Transcendence, and Sacred Space“
For those who may have come to this post via a search engine or link on a website or blog expecting to find something anti-Semitic you’ll be disappointed. Instead, I want to draw the reader’s attention to the recent discussion of various monsters from Jewish folklore, religion, and myth. In the West we tend to be more familiar with monsters from Europe and their American derivatives, as well as our own unique monstrous creations. With the popularity of J-horror we also have a growing awareness of Japanese culture’s contribution to human conceptions of monsters. But it is worth noting that every culture has its unique monsters.
Patheos, a website exploring various facets of religion, recently featured an article by Jay Michaelson, a Ph.D. candidate in Jewish thought at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, titled “Demons, Dybbuks, Ghosts, and Golems.” The article provides an introduction to Jewish monsters from the Kabbalah, the Talmud, and folklore, including the female “demonic personality” of Lilith, the dybbuk and the phenomenon of possession with one soul connected to another (as depicted in The Unborn [2009]), the ibbur which is a possessing entity similar to the dybbuk, and the golem (most famously depicted in the expressionist film The Golem [1920]). For those interested in a brief introduction to cross-cultural considerations related to the monstrous this article is worth a read.
Various media outlets are reporting the discovery of the body of a beheaded male in a temple in West Bengal in India. Reporting on the grisly discovery, THAINDIAN NEWS states:
The detached head which was lying beside the body appeared severely injured. Police Superintendent Rabindranath Mukherjee speaking on behalf of the police authorities of the district reported today that the severed head was also marked with vermilion. Keeping in mind the fact that the temple was of the Hindu goddess Kali, authorities have raised the claim that the man was not murdered but was killed as a token of sacrifice to god.
Other sources in the article dispute the claim of human sacrifice believing it was a murder staged to appear as a ritual act. At any rate, while this event is disturbing I think I would be more concerned if the victim’s heart had been removed and authorities made a connection to the crime and missing Sankara stones tied to the cult of Mola Ram.
Kotaku has an article of interest titled “Infection vs. Resurrection: The New Science of the Zombie.” The article contrasts the changing explanation for the reasons why these undead creatures come back from the dead as it chronicles a shift from supernatural to more “natural” and scientific explanations.
Where once they shuffled, now they run. Initially born of forbidden voodoo rituals or the sign of a religious apocalypse, for the past decade zombies have slowly metamorphosed into the by-products of something else entirely.
Science now, not the supernatural, is most often to blame when loved-ones become something less than human and begin to prey on the survivors.
While earlier works of fiction have played with the notion of what a zombie is and how it comes to be, it is pop culture’s modern influence on an ancient fear that has had the greatest impact on the undead’s evolution.
But why?
Although the supernatural expression of the zombie was never widespread in film, I think the author rightly recognizes the explanatory shift in zombie causality which reflects changing cultural dynamics in relation to religion, technology, and potentially apocalyptic anxieties as particularly popularized by George Romero with his groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead. A similar dynamic can be seen in depictions of vampire causality. Even so, in my view the “technological zombie” still has a lot to say to us about ourselves, even on a religious level. As theology and religious studies interacts with cultural studies we might consider whether our fascination with the zombie in more technological than supernatural fashion is indicative of the continuing influence of Judeo-Christian concepts of bodily resurrection, but with the post-Christendom context altering this idea so as to remove the idea of bodily redemption and transformation. Things to ponder in light of “the new science of the zombie.”
Related post
Titus Hjelm – From Demonic to Genetic: The Rise and Fall of Religion in Vampire Film
Paul Meehan is a friend and frequent source for interesting explorations of the fantastic at this blog. In the past he has visited here to discuss his books Saucer Movies: A UFOlogical History of the Cinema (The Scarecrow Press, 1998), and Cinema of the Psychic Realm (McFarland, 2009). He has also been a guest contributor with a film review of The Fourth Kind. With this post Paul returns to discuss his book Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir (McFarland, 2008).
TheoFantastique: Paul, thanks for another visit, and with it an opportunity to explore another of your books. How did you develop a personal interest in “tech-noir,” and how is this hybrid defined with its key elements?
Paul Meehan: The starting point for me was an obsession that I have had for many years with Blade Runner, a film that has always haunted me because I believe it represents a true vision of the future. That is, I think that Ridley Scott actually saw the real future via some kind of psychic remote viewing and rendered it into cinema. Blade Runner led me into an appreciation of the film’s roots in the film noir genre and to the realization that sci-fi and noir had more in common than anyone ever suspected. The term tech-noir, which was invented by James Cameron in The Terminator, denotes science fiction works that exist in a recognizably noir milieu of crime, murder, mystery, suspense, obsession, political paranoia, perversity, predestination, femmes (and hommes) fatales and identity transference. In addition to thematics, some sci-fi noirs also appropriate the visual hallmarks of film noir such as high-contrast lighting, unusual camera angles, extreme close-ups, etc. Another key element is an intensely urban setting common to both genres. In tech-noir the oppressive city of night that provides the setting for most films noir is ramped up into the dark mega-urban spaces of Metropolis, Blade Runner, Batman, Total Recall, Dark City, and The Matrix.
TheoFantastique: In what cultural influences and films does tech-noir find its origins?
Paul Meehan: The film noir and science fiction genres both have a common origin in the German expressionist films of the silent and early sound period. Works like Homunculus, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Hands of Orlac, Metropolis, Alraune and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse all combined futuristic technology with the dark shadows of the German “shudder films” such as Nosferatu, The Golem, The Student of Prague and Waxworks. A number of sci-fi/horror thrillers made in Hollywood during the 1930s such as The Walking Dead, Black Friday and The Return of Dr. X combined the dark shadows of the horror film with science fiction in an urban setting that seems to anticipate the inception of film noir in the 1940s. Later, during the waning years of American film noir in the late 50s-early 60s, a number of science fiction films deliberately appropriated thematic and stylistic elements from noir in low-budget programmers like Indestructible Man, She Devil, The Astounding She Monster, The Day the World Ended and The Wasp Woman. Beginning in the 1980s the ascendancy of cyberpunk science fiction provided inspiration for tech-noirs such as The Terminator, Virtuosity, Johnny Mnemonic, The Ghost in the Machine, The Thirteenth Floor, Existenz and Vanilla Sky.
TheoFantastique: What is the relationship of tech-noir science fiction to horror?
Paul Meehan: Of course, many science fiction films are also horror films as well, and the dark expressionist shadows of film noir ultimately derive from the stylistics of the horror genre. Thus, fear is often a big part of tech-noir filmic ambiance. A list of horror oriented tech-noirs would include The Vampire Bat, Island of Lost Souls, Mad Love, The Devil Commands, The Corpse Vanishes, Donovan’s Brain, Not of This Earth, Atom Age Vampire, The Stepford Wives, The Medusa Touch, Scanners, Coma, They Live, The Hidden and Species, among many others. My next book, Horror Noir, due out later this year from McFarland, will examine the relationship between horror and film noir more extensively.
TheoFantastique: What are the best and most influential tech-noir movies in your view?
Paul Meehan: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse are important seminal works of tech-noir. During the 1930s Micheal Curtiz’s Doctor X and The Walking Dead were contemporary urban thrillers that melded crime and mystery with science fiction. The first film to deliberately combine film noir with sci-fi was Jack Pollexfen’s much-maligned 50s thriller Indestructible Man. The first film to feature a film noir private eye plying their trade in a futuristic city was Jean-Luc Godard’s satiric Alphaville in 1965. Some of my personal favorites (besides Blade Runner) include Nick Grinde’s Before I Hang, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds, Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green, Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind, Alex Proyas’ Dark City and Michael Bey’s The Island.
TheoFantastique: I was greatly surprised by your quotation of an interview with Paul Verhoeven, director of Robocop, where he states that the story incorporated his “philosophical concerns about life and death, fear of dying, resurrection, and Paradise lost.” Do any of these concerns ever surface in other tech-noir films or is this an aberration given Verhoeven’s personal interests?
Paul Meehan: Although Verhoeven tends to wax philosophical about his work (he quotes Plato, for instance, while discussing Hollow Man), these themes also appear in a number of tech-noirs, including Six Hours to Live, The Walking Dead, Seconds, Immortal, and Vanilla Sky. These films feature protagonists who walk on the knife edge between life and death and are reborn in order to perform an important task. Certainly the suffering, reborn hero of Robocop represents a kind of Christ-figure who dies and is resurrected and becomes a heroic figure who restores order to a chaotic world.
TheoFantastique: You refer to film noir and science fiction films as “inverse mirror images of each other”. In what ways is this the case?
Paul Meehan: Film noir internalizes the same dark psychic forces that science fiction externalizes. In noir, societal angst is re-channeled into psychological aberration while in sci-fi these forces are represented by prehistoric monsters, giant insects, invading flying saucer fleets and nuclear disasters. Jimmy Cagney’s psychotic gangster Cody in White Heat is just as much a monster as Godzilla or the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.
TheoFantastique: Given the cycles of science fiction and tech-noir, care to speculate on the future possibilities for tech-noir?
Paul Meehan: Tech-noir films peaked around the turn of the millennium but the cyberpunk concept seemed to lose steam when the dreaded “Y2K bug” failed to materialize. Since then humankind has become a lot more tech friendly as computers have become an indispensable part of our lifestyle and have lost much of their dark mystique. Hollywood also seems to have exhausted its fascination with the works of sci-fi luminary Philip K. Dick in the wake of Impostor, Minority Report, Paycheck and A Scanner Darkly, and nothing much has come down the pike since then except for 2009’s Surrogates. What I’d love to see is a film version of William Gibson’s haunting cyber-thriller Neuromancer, a work that can’t seem to find its way out of development hell. I’d also like to see an adaptation of George Alec Effinger’s novel When Gravity Fails, in which private eye Marid Audran solves crimes in a futuristic Muslim society. Tech-noir is a resilient variety of science fiction that will no doubt mutate into new and vibrant forms as the 21st century progresses.
TheoFantastique: Thanks, Paul. I look forward to your forthcoming book on horror and noir.
I recently came across a great source for research and reflection in Robert Geraci’s work. Geraci teaches at Manhattan College in Religious Studies. The college website describes his research and teaching interests, including the power of religion in contemporary culture, particularly with regard to the interaction between religion and technology. His past research focused upon the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and religion (primarily Jewish and Christian apocalypticism but also Japanese Buddhism and Shinto). He is the author of a number of interesting journal articles, and the new volume Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Geraci’s research interests overlap with my own, and his article “Robots and the Sacred in Science and Science Fiction: Theological Implications of Artificial Intelligence” in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 42:4 (December 2007), brings together a number of areas that dovetail with the foci of TheoFantastique. Geraci graciously provided some thoughts about robotics, artificial intelligence, science, and science fiction in the following interview.
TheoFantastique: Robert, thanks for your willingness to discuss your thoughts on robots, AI, and science fiction. You have written quite a bit on these topics. Why is this an area of great research interest for you, and how did you develop this research project?
Robert Geraci: A lot of it was simply good fortune. As I approached the dissertation writing stage of my PhD, I wanted to write on religion, science, and art. So I chose a religion I knew a reasonable amount about (Christianity) and a science that I figured would be fun to learn more about (robotics), and a couple of contemporary artists (Survival Research Labs and Wolfgang Laib, who do very different work from one another). The general pop chic of robotics made it look good to me and a cursory look at pop science in robotics and AI revealed clear religious systems. So once I got going there was no question that I was onto an interesting subject.
TheoFantastique: In your article for Zygon journal you connect Rudolf Otto’s description of the human encounter with the divine in his book The Idea of the Holy and note how this is similar to human reactions to intelligent machines. Can you summarize Otto’s thinking here (which scholars have also observed is similar to human responses to horror), and how this connects to our reactions to robotics in certain contexts?
Robert Geraci: Otto believed that experiencing god (he was a Lutheran theologian) involved two elements: the mysterium tremendum and the fascinans. The former represents (in short) the fact that god is “wholly other” (mysterious to us) and enormously powerful; as other and as a source of overwhelming power, god is fearsome. The fascinans reflects the allure that god has; god is the source of love and of salvation, therefore we are drawn to it.
In science fiction, robots and highly intelligent computers often inspire the same feelings from human beings. In essence, robots nearly always threaten humanity in some fashion while always being necessary in some other function. Sometimes machines threaten human jobs, sometimes they threaten to take over the world or enslave humanity, sometimes machines have less malign intent but nevertheless diminish humanity by their presence. At the same time, there are inevitably things which can be accomplished only with the help of the machines; without them, the human characters would be destined to defeat at the hands of their enemies or even as a result of their own folly. The robots thus lead people to feelings of both fear and fascination.
TheoFantastique: Can you provide some examples from science fiction film and literature that supports this idea of a “sacred response” to robotics and artificial intelligence?
Robert Geraci: There is a pretty wide variety of examples, so I’ll just mention a few. Asimov’s Machines are computers that rule the world, diminishing human beings to mere instrumentality but also offering a peaceful and effective society. His robots threaten economic and social disenfranchisement but are clearly necessary for the future of humanity, which appears to be degenerating in Earthly society. In Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the androids are dangerous murderers but also necessary to enable human migration from their war-torn home planet. As the Terminator films and Matrix films progress through the series, the machines who threaten to kill or enslave all of humanity are necessary in the human struggle against other machines. The perfect example of this is when Arnold Schwartzenegger’s T-800 navigates the shopping mall in Terminator 2, scaring the young John Connor only to actually save Connor from the new T-1000 model. Another good one is Robby the robot from Forbidden Planet. The Krel technology in Forbidden Planet is lethal to the film’s characters but they cannot leave Altair IV without Robby, who is himself representative of the dangerous technology that killed all of the Krel and nearly the movie’s protagonists as well.
TheoFantastique: How is science fiction a serious and important consideration for scholars of science and religion?
Robert Geraci: That’s a great question and I hope more students and scholars will include science fiction in their research portfolios. Not only does sci-fi reveal many important aspects of human psychology but it is the pre-eminent place for thinking about how human beings relate to technology. Where else is the human experience of technology among the foremost concerns? That there are religious ways of thinking about technology in sci-fi shows that there are religious ways of thinking about technology. While that seems like a tautology, somehow we still have cultural prejudices about sci-fi that interfere with using such books, films, comics, etc. as serious research material. The ways in which sci-fi provides religious incentives, advocates particular religious systems (such as transhumanism, in some 21st century literature), and reveals particular social attitudes about technology makes it really important. No one questions the importance of Victorian literature for understanding 19th century English attitudes yet somehow sci-fi is popularly assumed to be a genre for little boys only. Science fiction is quite frequently very sophisticated and reflects the interests of a wide segment of our culture.
TheoFantastique: In your view, what are the implications of your thesis regarding intelligent machines and the sacred for traditional Christian theologies?
Robert Geraci: First, I think it reveals that in general people frequently have a religious approach to technology, which is a claim that a lot of people would want to deny (I think).
Second, the easy way that sacred categories are applied to robotic technology creates challenges to traditional theologies, which must find ways of engaging individuals who experience something sacred in their engagement with machines. For example, the folks who wish to upload their minds into virtual reality are theological competition for Christianity, etc. in today’s “spiritual marketplace.” I have a paper forthcoming, for example, that addresses how some science fiction books are evangelism for transhumanist religious thinking.
Third, I think it shows how religious practices and beliefs permeate the rest of our cultural production. In our secular culture, we have not abandoned religion; we’ve seen two religious threads emerge. There are powerful movements to preserve traditional religion (such as in fundamentalist circles in the U.S.) and there are religious ideas that escape their old confines and mesh with the profane. That machines might offer salvation (rather than god doing so) reveals the distribution of sacred categories throughout our culture.
TheoFantastique: Robert, thanks again for your research and your discussion of it in this forum.
Robert Geraci: Thank you for the invitation to talk about this! I appreciate your interest.
In our age of re-enchantment in response to decades of secularization it is common for elements of ancient religion and spirituality to surface in pop culture, many times shaped into new forms. Erik Davis comments of this in his book Techgnosis: myth, magic + mysticism in the age of information (Three Rivers Press, 1998):
In Hartogsohn’s view Avatar should be included in this list of examples of psychedelic storytelling, to which its 3D features add “a new level of psychedelic visual richness.” Hartogsohn also points to the “indigenous and shamanic world view” found in the film, making it “a mythic specimen of our culture.” In shamanic cultures the shaman moves between the “natural” world and another realm accessed by altered states of consciousness. This is depicted in Avatar as the Na’vi seek communication with Eywa through a female shaman. Hartogsohn provides additional examples of parallels between the Na’vi and shamanic cultures so that there can be no doubt that Avatar depicts a shamanistic worldview.
This interesting article concludes with a consideration of whether we are experiencing “a new wave of psychedelic cinema.” For Hartogsohn this may be the case not only because of the continued prevalence of films in 3D, and the production of science fiction and fantasy films that open us to new conceptions of reality, but also because of films like Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland “jammed with weird acting mushrooms and even weirder realities” which surely must be construed as an expression of psychedelics. As Hartogsohn writes, “it seems that we might be facing a new psychedelic renaissance brought on by 3D cinema.” Perhaps, but regardless of whether 3D fades again as but the latest attempt at an interesting cinema novelty, the shamanic and psychedelic elements of one of the highest grossing films of all time gives us pause for reflection on a number of significant levels.
