Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film

Chapter 4: Humans Unite!: Race, Class, and Postindustrial Aliens

Chapter 4 ​ Humans Unite! ​ Race, Class, and Postindustrial Aliens The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society, and we are their unwitting accomplices. They Live DespitetheappearanceofotherworldlyordistanttemporalsettingsinAmerican SF film, the genre is very much linked to the real political changes, dominant social discourses, and cultural practices at work in American society. Films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came from Outer Space (1953), and the original War of the Worlds (1953) are unmistakable examples of how narratives ostensibly about close encounters with aliens are in fact thinly veiled political metaphors of the pressing geopolitical concerns of the cold war era. Although the cultural fallout from the cold war paranoia of the 1950s made an indelible imprint on American SF film, it is not the definitive sociohistorical event that shaped the genre. The shock waves of postindustrial decline made a deep impact on the American economic order and cut a wide swath across the cultural landscape, which included SF film. From the 1970s to about the early 1990s, America entered and remained in a period of precipitous erosion of the industrial and manufacturing sectors of the economy. This new stage of economic existence, called postindustrial decline, made it increasingly difficult to achieve, much less imagine, upward social mobility for working-class Americans, given the numerous factory shutdowns and massive layoffs. Moreover, the disappearance of employment opportunities in the manufacturing sector drained flourishing working- and lower middle-class communities of their economic lifeblood and left highpoverty , crime-ridden neighborhoods, often in inner cities, overwhelmingly populated by blacks and other people of color.1 On one hand, the SF films Humans Unite! 97 Soylent Green (1973) and Escape from New York (1981) forewarned and projected into the future the social and cultural consequences of postindustrial decline for America as imploding public institutions, moral decay, corruption , crime, and mounting antisocial behavior. On the other hand, SF films like The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), a narrative ostensibly about a humanoid alien in search of water, metaphorically mirrored the increasing anxiety over the American energy crisis in the wake of the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s and the growing economic gap between the rich and the poor in U.S. society. Yet other SF films not only registered the effects of deindustrialization but also offered radical criticisms of the shifting economic landscape by signaling that a political economy of racism was also driving America’s economic slide and too often worked to divide whites and blacks, creating a splintered and increasingly ineffective workforce in the face of consolidated corporate power. In the Reagan era, white working-class Americans became increasingly hostile to helping black and brown underclass, poor, and working-poor communities either because their own economic wishes were stymied or because they perceived that America could ill afford to invest in resourcedraining domestic entitlement programs, such as welfare and affirmative action, given the need for the country to reassert its economic dominance in a hypercompetitive global marketplace. As America became more mired in postindustrial decline, successive government administrations became increasingly candid about abandoning policy-driven racial reform and capitulating to corporate interests. In contrast to this patter, however, several SF films stand out as compelling texts that exhibit a counterimpulse. Rollerball (1975), Alien (1979), RoboCop (1987), and They Live (1988), along with being radically critical of the established economic order, presented racial cooperation as a necessary stage in mounting an effective challenge to economic elites and the institutions they control. These postindustrial SF films are notable because they offered models of resistance to corporate power on-screen and, in the process, signaled that the same could and needed to be done off-screen. Most of all, the strident binary coding of the heterosexual white male conquering a monstrous alien, often as the symbolic racial “other” in American SF invasion films of the cold war past, was replaced in the postindustrial future with another type of rapacious monster—the American corporation. Corporate Games On one hand, Fritz Lang’s seminal SF masterpiece, Metropolis (1927), embodies the most literal indictment of the relationship between capital and 98 Black Space labor, but it is a product of the cultural currents embedded in German expressionism and is far removed from the political economy of America. On the other hand, The Matrix (1999) and The Matrix Reloaded (2003), postmodern sequels to...