Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film, 1979-2017: The Aesthetics of Enclosure

Offering a survey of Hollywood science fiction cinema from 1979 to 2017 (from Ridley Scott’s Alien to Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner
2049), Dystopia and Dispossessionin the Hollywood Science Fiction Film argues that the trajectory of Hollywood’s dystopianism in that period is inextricable from the phenomenon of the ’new enclosures’, the new dispossessions and privatisations sweeping across the United States since the 1970s. More precisely, it contends that the critiques of such dispossessions elaborated before the turn of the century - consider the satire of private policing in RoboCop (1987), the portrayal of commodified air in Total Recall (1990), and the nightmarish extrapolations of postmodern urbanism in Blade Runner (1982) and The Truman Show (1998) - begin to disappear in films such as The Matrix (1999), The Island (2005), District 9 (2009), Repo Men (2010), and The Purge (2013), the further commodification of land, forest, reservoir, ideas, even the human genome having diminished the contrast between capitalist and non-capitalist spaces on which the earlier critiques depended. Bringing close readings of blockbuster films into dialogue with historical and theoretical scholarship on dispossession, Dystopia and Dispossessionin the Hollywood Science Fiction Film proposes a new understanding of the politics of science fiction in particular and utopian thought in general.

Harry Warwick is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.