Garbage: The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of: Response to Michael Shanks, David Platt, and William L. Rathje

Garbage appears in science fiction cinema with notable frequency, whether in the retrofitted future Los Angeles of Blade Runner (1982) or the post-Holocaust bricolage of the Mad Max films or The Bed Sitting Room (1969). Whole cities can appear in ruins in the "future archaic" subgenre; think Logan's Run (1976), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), or the more recent A. I. (2001). These futures give us a tingle. In the future, the past, our present, will exist only as stubborn traces, debris that doesn't quite disappear. It was not always thus: in Things to Come (1936), scripted by H. G. Wells, the future-archaic Everytown is simply bulldozed in an unparalleled paean to the technological sublimity of its gleaming white city. A city, we note, without a trash can in sight (perhaps they use disintegrator beams, like Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet [1956], or Daffy Duck in Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century [1953]). This white city points back to the mock permanence of the White City at the heart of the 1893 World Colombian Exposition in Chicago, monumental halls whose stolid presence denied the fragility of the stuff in which they were clad.

The all-new white city of Things to Come was founded on the erasure of the past and harbingered a new beginning, and this theme was echoed in the World's Fair held in New York City in 1939. The Futurama ride carried visitors through the panorama of a future city, circa 1960, where "unsightly slums" have been displaced—to where, no one says. Who takes out the garbage? Where does it go? Beginning in the science fiction films of the 1960s, garbage begins to persist, bubbling up in the interstices or encountered by exiles roaming far beyond the physical boundaries of those perfect white cities. Planet of the Apes (1968) is perhaps the urtext here: the debris that washes ashore from the shipwreck of human civilization is nothing less than its figurehead: a broken, blank Statue of Liberty. Garbage generates nothing less than trauma, repressed memories are given physical forms, but physical forms that are ravaged by their long, hidden histories.

But I would like to consider science fiction garbage of another kind, through a consideration of Joe Dante's brilliant and nearly forgotten Explorers (1985). In this film, a beautiful and wistful adolescent boy dreams of the universe and life on other worlds. His two friends are a frightfully indulged boy genius and a sweet kid from the wrong side of the tracks. The latter's father is a junk man by trade, and of course the kids have no trouble finding wonders amidst the cast-off possessions of the adult world (sharp-eyed film geeks will spot Rosebud hanging in a corner). The first boy has been dreaming of the universe, but has also been given instructions on building a mobile bubble of a force field that they can enter and pilot. Aliens, the kids realize, have been calling to them, summoning them through outer space. "It'll be the greatest thing ever," the dreamer rhapsodizes. He dreams the diagrams, the whiz kid cracks the equations and the junkyard provides the spaceship, actually an old carnival ride retrofitted to accommodate new kinetic marvels. The face of an old television provides a front window, washing machines provide the ports, a suitcase is worked in somewhere. There's a metal trash can attached to the front that serves no particular purpose other than to remind us of this craft's provenance as nothing more than the debris of an adult world that has no more room for boyish fantasy. (Although it should be noted that the one adult who discerns their plan wants nothing more than to join them: "Good luck, kids," he calls as their craft takes flight into...