LOOKING TO THE STARS: HOW SCIFI CAN LEAD US INTO THE POST-CORONAVIRUS WORLD

Guest columnist Anthea van den Bergh is a 'multi-platform journalist', a Melbourne-based freelance voice with a Masters degree in Journalism from the University of Melbourne. In late 2020, she approached several voices in the speculative cinema community (including Screen-Space editor and Festival Director of the Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival, Simon Foster) to comment on the role that science-fiction narratives might play in a world recovering from the unimaginable. The resulting article makes for a truly compelling appreciation of the role that scifi might play as society moves forward.... 

In the first two weeks of March last year as the coronavirus was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation, one of the most streamed films in the world was Contagion, a science fiction plague film where 26 million people die.

Writers jumped at the opportunity to unpack this phenomenon. In a stunning display of deadpan, Nicole Sperling wrote in The New York Times, “One of the hottest movies in the Warner Bros. library is a nine-year-old drama that kills off Gwyneth Paltrow in its first 15 minutes.”

The film seemed skin crawlingly prophetic in light of the emerging pandemic, filled with all too familiar images of empty airports and offices, people wearing masks, warehouses of sick people, and hysteria over vaccines and supposed cures. But perhaps our fascination with the dystopian thriller tells us more about the human for stories and why we turn to science fiction in times of uncertainty and crisis.

Consider that besides Contagion, sales in plague fiction like Albert Camus’ The Plague went up by 150% worldwide last year, and tripled in France and Italy. Stephen King’s apocalyptic plague novel The Stand also had nearly double the number of online sales.

Scholars, scifi enthusiasts, and even neuroscientists have drawn connections for decades between times of crisis and people creating and watching science fiction. One proposed reason is that scifi helps us to navigate and prepare for future threats that are out of our control. To “simulate” the layers of fear and emotions we feel about scenarios like plagues, nuclear warfare, societal change, and ultimately to cope better.

Sometimes films depict literal threats like plagues and killer robots, but others portray more metaphorical scenarios that stand in for real threats, says Luke Devenish, a professional screenwriter and lecturer on genre screenwriting at The University of Melbourne.

For example, he says creatures like zombies are often a representation of plagues and disease – think Will Smith’s I am Legend (pictured, left).

While other figures like King Kong represent a scifi sub-genre called “Earth’s Revenge” where the Earth sends an agent to punish us, usually for our arrogance and destruction of the environment. Godzilla, for instance, can be read as a metaphor for nuclear destruction after the bombing of Japan in World War II.

Given the past 12 months, none of it now seems particularly farfetched.

“I mean we are living in a dystopia right now,” says Devenish (pictured, below). “A dystopia is a society where something is fundamentally wrong with it.”

He says Contagion, whose screenwriter Scott Z. Burns consulted closely with epidemiologists to construct a highly plausible plague scenario, triggered our deepest existential fears about ourselves and the future.

The thriller, which depicted the origin of viruses like Covid-19 due to humans disrupting natural habitats, prompted us to ask: How will I manage this kind of reality? What will happen to my family, to my society?

Not that sci fi always gets it right. Or even often. The reality is that the genre’s ‘predictions’ over the years have been hit and miss.

On occasion, science fiction has predicted major new inventions. Indeed, the idea for the helicopter is attributed by its inventor to writer Jules Verne who described it in his 1886 novel, The Clipper of the Clouds. Verne had previously written that “Anything that one man can imagine, another man can make real.”

Similarly, something very closely resembling the flip phone appeared in the 1979 Star Trek movie which inspired Motorola’s 1996 model, named “StarTAC” after the film.

However, most of the time the genre falls short of prophesy. Who else sighed when the year 2015 arrived and the world looked nothing like the future predicted in Back to the Future II, decked out with flying cars, hoverboards and self-tying Nikes?

Even Stephen King responded on Twitter about his novel The Stand, where around 99% of the world’s population die, saying, “No, coronavirus is NOT like THE STAND. It’s not anywhere near as serious. It’s eminently survivable. Keep calm and take all reasonable precautions.”

But with the coronavirus changing the world as we know it, perhaps science fiction, from the plague variety to stories based in outer space, could help us navigate not just our current reality, but also the post-coronavirus world.

While the genre may not give an exact blueprint, we could use it to process different realities such as widespread technological advances and use of AI and robots, which we could be racing towards thanks to the pandemic.

Scifi creators have been fixated with AI and robots since the early twentieth century technology boom. We’ve seen the emergence of the sociopathic killer trope in films such as the early German silent flick Metropolis (1927; pictured, left), evolving into The Terminator and The Matrix, as well as more nuanced villains like the haunting Hal 9000 in 2001: Space Odyssey.

And while recent decades have brought us some cuddlier or good guy robots (think WALL-E, Marvel’s Vision), when it comes to AI we remain both fascinated and fearful – fears that are often amplified by scifi.

Scifi often deals with cautionary tales about technology and the misuse of power. The idea of the surveillance state is the nightmare of many classic scifi films such as V for Vendetta, Gattaca, and of course, Orwell’s 1984.

Yet neuro-psychology researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center believe the genre could help us to mentally rehearse and ultimately work through the range of conflicting emotions we continue to feel about technology and the future.

And there is plenty to work through.

With the mammoth efforts going into stopping the pandemic, the coronavirus could certainly be a catalyst for more robots and AI in healthcare and normal life in the future, says Stephen Bornstein (pictured, right), the CEO of the cutting-edge robotics and AI company, Cyborg Dynamics Engineering. (“Yeah, I wanted a cool sounding name,” Bornstein laughs.)

His Brisbane company works mainly with the Australian Defence Force making ground robots and automated technology to support troops entering dangerous areas. “If you think about ground robots in the military, the question is how do we get a human out of harm’s way and use machines instead?”

The 2017 Australian Young Engineer of the Year says the same thinking is being applied to coronavirus around the world. In places such as Wuhan, Seoul and Northern Italy, robots have been used to disinfect rooms, take people’s temperature using infrared sensors and deliver food to Covid patients. One of the robots that visits patients has a cute digital face, wearing a mask. We’ve even seen a robot “dog” called SPOT trialled in Singapore which encouraged social distancing in parks. SPOT is now being used in hospitals in Boston as a walking telehealth robot.

And in South Korea, AI-backed technology and surveillance (including street cameras and money transactions) has been used in contact tracing to find and isolate positive cases.

Scifi could help us to accept advanced futures (and not feel so nervous about seeing SPOT in the park). But in this case perhaps its role is to teach us to be rightly suspicious, to avoid a reality in which we’re ruled by Big Brother or the Tyrell Corporation in the 1982 Bladerunner, to be cautious about the technology we make.

We’ve seen a very contemporary version of this in the 2020 film, Songbird (pictured, right), which imagines the worst case scenario of the current pandemic – a highly mutated “Covid-23”, quarantine camps, helicopters overhead, and ominous sanitation goons willing to break down your door.

But these warnings come with the promise of a more hopeful future, says Simon Foster (pictured, below), the Festival Director of the Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival and Sydney’s Monster Fest.

In his work across several film festivals, Foster has seen more of the scifi genre’s full breadth than most, from mainstream films that we know and love to indie films (both Australian and international) that range from the experimental to the positively avant garde.

“Science fiction and science do have a sort of love-hate relationship,” he says. “[But] the very best science fiction, even with an inherently bleak vision of society, speaks to a better vision and why it got so bad. It’s trying to direct us on a better path.

“Science fiction with a terrible society is saying we should avoid this terrible existence.”

Screenwriter Luke Devenish calls this the “caution with optimism combination”. He says Scifi films, even dystopian films like Contagion, are fundamentally life affirming and hopeful. “At the end of the day, technology is bested by the best of humanity, our resilience… The things we treasure about humanity come to the fore.”

Scifi isn’t just about plagues, technology and aliens, he says, but about heroism, big and small, our faith in humanity, and what drives us to carry on when nothing is the same. It’s telling us, ultimately, that we will be okay.

“Do you notice there are no countries in Star Trek? We’re just from planet Earth.”

Science fiction can also ask bigger questions.  And there’s nothing like the stars to make us feel a little existential, says Simon Foster.

From his years programming speculative film narratives, if there was one movie he’d recommend for perspective about the coronavirus and the future, it would be a film called ★. S-t-a-r.

★’s Viennese director Johann Lurf (pictured, right) is one of the world’s greatest montage filmmakers, taking clips from other artists and condensing them into an entirely different thing.

Featured in the 2018 Rotterdam International Film Festival, ★ is a film of the night sky and galaxies depicted over 105 years of cinema. Every time the camera panned up from someone’s back yard or looked out to the stars on a spaceship, the frame appears in Lurf’s film.

There isn’t a single person featured and Lurf doesn’t cut the sound from any of the clips. This produces a fascinating mix of cinematic orchestra music, 50s jazz crackling like paper, more modern sounds and of course that quintessential Star Wars orchestra.

“It’s an extraordinary film,” says Foster, “It speaks to why we still look to the stars as a species, [expressing] our fears and our hopes. The film worked over me like I’ve never experienced in cinema. It reinvigorated a sense of awe, a sense of scale. We’re still part of a much bigger universe.”