Tech-Noir Film: A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres

This book is dedicated to Valleyhome Farm

Tech-Noir Film

A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres

Emily E. Auger

First published in the UK in 2011 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2011 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E.

60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-424-7

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

So closely are the components of the power complex related that they perform virtually interchangeable functions: not only in the sense that every operation is reducible to pecuniary terms, but that money itself in turn can be translated equally into power or property or publicity or public (television) personalities. This interchangeability of the power components was already plain to Heraclitus at the critical moment that the new money economy was in formation. All things may be reduced to fire, he observed, and fire to all things, just as goods may be turned into gold and gold into goods.

– Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine

Contents

Foreword by Gary Hoppenstand

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Method and Models

Chapter 2: The Promethean Message

Chapter 3: Tech-Noir

Appendix 1: Charts

Appendix 2: Tech-Noir Films by Date

Appendix 3: Tech-Noir Films by Type

Bibliography

Filmography

Index 1: Film Titles

Index 2: Film Motifs

Foreword

Modern science fiction has become increasingly more pessimistic than optimistic. Perhaps this is because the novel that created the genre was born with a monster for a father and a technophobe for a mother. I am speaking, of course, of Frankenstein (1818) and the novel’s author, Mary Shelley. Many critics and historians of science fiction, myself included, consider Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece to be the first modern science-fiction story, and here Emily Auger takes this same novel as an early example of the genre of tech-noir. Shelley’s sinister cautionary tale of Victor Frankenstein’s hubris, his overweening Promethean theft of the fire of life, and his all-too-human failing in refusing to assume responsibility for his pretension to godhood, directed the fledgling genre down a dark path, a literary trail that eventually led to an overarching dystopian worldview of science and technology.

The reason Frankenstein’s monster was such a frightening, yet fascinating, creature for the young Mary Shelley (and for the many succeeding generations of Shelley’s readers) was due in large part to the era in which the novel was first published: the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was not a single revolution at all, but a series of revolutions that rapidly changed the social fabric of nineteenth-century Europe and America. With the rise in factories, there was also an increase in the size of the cities whose populations supported the factories; there was a dramatic shift in social class, with the working and middle classes expanding into an ever-increasing group; there was an erosion of the power of the church, and a subsequently growing faith in science and technology as a replacement for religious belief. In other words, massive social and cultural changes were transforming the old ways into new ways, and the by-product of this transformation was a combination of awe and fear, the type of awe and fear Mary Shelley envisioned in her monster, the type of awe and fear that has dominated science fiction for nearly two centuries.

This is not to say that the lights of optimism have been intermittent in science fiction during its first one hundred years of existence. The fantastic voyages of Jules Verne, for example, often glorified exploration and viewed the pursuit of knowledge as heroic. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) fearlessly predicted an American utopia at the dawn of the twenty-first century which, alas, never came to pass. Even the American dime novels of the late nineteenth century saw the frontier populated by young inventors and by mechanical steam-men bravely tramping across the seemingly endless western prairies of the Great Plains. Nearly fifty years later, the American pulp magazines of the late 1920s and 1930s – with their fascination for spaceships, ray guns, and beautiful maidens being abducted by gelatinous, amoeba-like aliens – engendered a childlike fascination with science fiction as space opera adventure.

Today, however, darker visions of science seem more relevant: H.G Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) offers a more compelling metaphor than Bellamy’s Looking Backward, because people are more frightened of the unknown than fascinated by it. And when the unknown, created by science and employed by technology, becomes a weapon of war that can literally destroy the world, as seen with the atomic bomb at the close of World War II, then Mary Shelley’s monster dons a grim aspect larger than that of moral or social argument; indeed, the fundamental narrative of science and technology in fiction – in print, film, and television – in the latter part of the twentieth century became one of human survival itself.

As anyone who has seen the James Cameron film knows, the Tech-Noir is a hip nightclub where Sarah Connor is hiding from the deadly Terminator, a machine passing as a human, following its programming from Skynet, and closing in to kill the mother of Skynet’s destruction. It is an appropriately named bar of garish neon light and shadows, a place where humans are attacked by black technology that seeks not only to snuff the life out of the individual Sarah Connor, but of humanity itself. When Kyle Reese, a soldier from the future and father to Sarah’s warrior-child (and soon-to-be-savior of humanity), intervenes to attempt the impossible and terminate the Terminator before it terminates Sarah Connor, then conflict ensues that defines the dystopian relationship between man or woman and machine. It is a fight to the death.

The Industrial Revolution gave us the Tech-Noir, constructing it brick by grimy brick. It gave us godlike potential through our knowledge of science and application of technology, but it also gave us that reoccurring nightmare of imminent destruction, a nightmare fueled by the understanding of our own limitations as mere mortals to control the Pandora’s box of evils that escapes our grasp when the science and technology that we invent becomes greater than us, more intelligent than us (or absolutely indifferent to us), and willing to destroy us if we get in the way. If you look closely, you will discover that the wild party-goers at the Tech-Noir are actually the offspring of Frankenstein’s monster, the great-great-great-grandchildren that include among their vast numbers those brutal cyborgs, or sinister synthetic androids, or metal monsters, or deadly artificial viruses, or artificial brains possessing deadly thoughts, and they are in no way fond of the mortal descendants of Adam. As you pause to consider the ugly truth and consequences of Victor Frankenstein’s pride, you realize that the defining metaphors of the Industrial Revolution, the post-Industrial Revolution, and the post- post-Industrial Revolution are the true inhabitants of the Tech-Noir.

Emily Auger’s book, which you now hold in your hands, offers one of the finest studies of our dystopian imagination in popular entertainment. Her brilliant discussion of the genre and the theory behind the genre is perceptive, well-grounded in theory, and simply fascinating to read. And that is only the first half of her book. For the second half she also offers a first-rate annotated filmography of the best, or most relevant, or most interesting tech-noir motion pictures.

Emily Auger’s expert hand is holding the door open to the Tech-Noir for us to enter, so that we may examine and understand what makes Frankenstein’s children tick and why they hate us so. Enjoy the party.

– Gary Hoppenstand

Professor,

Department of English; Editor of The Journal of Popular Culture;

Michigan State University

Preface

Tech-noir is the name of the nightclub in The Terminator (1984) where Sarah Connor tries unsuccessfully to hide from the machine: this term is also a useful descriptor, not only for the film in which it appears, but for many others that show how technology, once considered the utopian dream of science, has become an aggressively destructive force that threatens to transform the environment into a wasteland and forever alter the forms of human individuality, relationships, and ways of living.¹ The initial objective of my study of such films, which began in 1997, was to compile a representative title list and establish the genre’s recognizable constituent units, such as character types, settings, actions, props, motifs, and plot resolutions. My further objective was to find the place of tech-noir film relative to other and earlier popular genres; thus, in the first two chapters, I examine the importance of two specific myths, Oedipus and Prometheus, to the form and content of popular genres and also demonstrate what others have frequently noted – that genre hybridization is the historical process by which new genres form and change to address contemporary social issues.

The selection of the genre classics for analysis was at once arbitrary and obvious: a study of this type could hardly go without attention to Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) may certainly stand for science fiction and who but William Gibson (b. 1948) can represent scifi cyberpunk? The transition from gothic to detective to science fiction is detailed with examples by these authors in Chapter 1 and its supportive charts (Appendix 1); the chapter concludes with a very general history of the film medium and the appearance of various popular film genres. Chapter 2 shows the step to tech-noir, which I treat primarily as a film genre, through the analysis of selected literary progenitors by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), and Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) and their adaptations to film. In taking this approach, I left aside potentially lengthy and useful considerations of many issues and topics contributing to the development of tech-noir and prioritized a demonstration of the genre’s appearance and characteristics: throughout, I consider tech-noir as a cultural manifestation with deep historical roots and a particular relevance at the turn of the millennia. The study proved to be expansive, simply because technology keeps changing, the production of tech-noir films is ongoing, and the availability of past productions is constantly in flux; thus, this volume remains an opening statement, rather than the final word, on tech-noir and its relationship to previously established genres. The third and final chapter is a summary description of tech-noir films based on the titles gathered in Appendixes 2 and 3 and further annotated and discussed in the Filmography.

The chronological parameters of the Filmography are from 1970 to 2005 because, although there are many earlier films that could be included, it is in the 1970s that the core motivation for tech-noir, that is, the realization that technology is a real-world problem, began to consolidate in film in relation to certain plots, constituent units, and didactic messages. It was also, admittedly, much easier, though often still difficult, to gain access to films postdating 1970. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many stores were selling off their videos to make room for DVDs and some older classics with on-going marketability were being re-released on DVD. I searched for titles by browsing store shelves and bins, by cross-searching relevant subject headings in various video and DVD catalogs and encyclopedias, particularly Halliwell’s Film, DVD & Video Guide and the VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever, and later by using the film-related search indexes and ever-expanding on-line resources for purchasing. I have no doubt that my list is not complete, but I believe it is sufficiently comprehensive for the present discussion. These films serve as the primary resource material in my identification and discussion of the genre of tech-noir, including its constituent units and function as part of contemporary discourse about technology.

The films from the 1970s and 1980s differ stylistically from those produced later: they tend to have more dramatic dialogue, less aerobic action, fewer special effects, and make less deliberate or less self-conscious use of the motifs now recognizable as tech-noir genre markers.² Many of the 1990s films are extremely violent and include crude, even obscene, language, while a number of those dating between 2000 and 2005 manage a kind of nostalgic and even melancholic ambiance. All genres evolve from common sources such that their common and distinguishing elements – characters, sets, props, dialogue, and so forth – and the manner in which these elements are composed in the individual work may become recognizable as early, classic, and late or stylized, and may tend to the dramatic, the ironic, the satiric, and even the comic, without compromising the appropriateness of the genre label. At the core of every genre is a didactic message: the specific means and manner by which that message is conveyed is less important than the message itself.

In the interest of creating a manageable list of films, I set other parameters regarding length, medium, and content. Although I included the one hour Max Headroom (1985) because it has been so influential, I otherwise excluded shorts. I included a number of teen films – detective fiction has its Sherlock Holmes and C. Auguste Dupin, it also has Nancy Drew – but excluded pure animation. I omitted historical war films, but included some films based on the selected literary classics – Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) – because they help to demonstrate the shift between literature and film as forms of discourse; and some remakes of other films because the fact those particular films were remade punctuates their relevance to the genre. I excluded straight disaster films and most biological monster films, but included some in which the monster is a direct product of scientific manipulation, such as behavioral programming, DNA alteration, cloning, bionics, and robotics. I left out many fallen civilization films, most regretfully the Mel Gibson Mad Max films Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 aka The Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985): although obviously a significant influence on numerous tech-noir films, the Mad Max world is primarily one in which civilization has simply fallen, thus setting the stage for the appearance of Mad Max.

I included several films set on alien worlds, but left out those with aliens: although I was tempted to include Dark City (1998) and Virus (1998), the presence of aliens seems to divert attention from technology as a product of our societies and from the consequences of human choices and motivations. I included Andromeda Strain (1971), in which a virus threatening the human race is described as alien, because alien here refers to an unknown and nasty, but otherwise conventional, bug. I included Project Shadowchaser IV (1996) in the Filmography, even though it features an android of alien origin because this film is the last in the Project Shadowchaser series. The earlier films in the series do not include aliens and it therefore provides information about how the tech-noir plot evolves in sequels: I left it out of the charts and other discussions of specifically tech-noir films. I excluded a significant number of films with an almost exclusive emphasis on technologically mediated sexual experiences, but I included Nemesis 4 (1996) in spite of its rather violent representations of sexual contact because, like Project Shadowchaser IV, it demonstrates plot trends in sequels and also because it shows the extreme limits of tech-noir reductivism and stylization. Although most of the films were initially released to the theaters, I included a number that were made for television because there did not seem to be any special or absolute correlation between venue and content or even relative quality and generic significance.

The Filmography is arranged alphabetically, but the films are also listed by release date in Appendix 2. Each Filmography entry identifies the film’s title, director, writers, other sources, series, release date, and the relevant tech-noir subcategories discussed in Chapter 3 and summarized in Appendix 3 based on articulations of character as human or artificial and related activities. Plot summaries reference main characters, events, and plot resolution. Each film is also briefly discussed in relation to its primary genre elements by cross-referencing to one or more other technoir, and a few non-tech-noir, films. These discussions show how the films are related to each other through repetitions, inversions, or adaptations of character types, character alliances, sets, actions, props, and other elements.

A structuralist approach is used in the first two chapters to show that tech-noir is a genre with unique emphases and concerns that postdates the familiar gothic, detective, and science fiction. Like other popular genres, tech-noir ultimately derives from myths that have been adapted to address current issues in different fields of discourse; indeed, audience reception of a number of these films as myth is encouraged with framing devices, such as text or voice-over explanations about how an apocalypse or other disaster came about, or nearly came about, and the new world order that followed, for good or ill. Genre itself is a historically evolving and cumulative form of discourse that has been dedicated primarily to the person in relation to human society and invention. Each individual genre, including tech-noir, develops conventions in relation to the specific field of discourse it emphasizes: gothic is associated with psychology, particularly that of the individual, detective with sociology, science fiction with science, and tech-noir with aesthetics. Since gothic is the base genre relative to which the others have formed, it is not surprising to find psychoanalytic theory called upon in the interpretation of many literary and filmic genre exemplars, many of which have numerous gothic elements.

The application of structuralist and other theories, particularly those derived from psychology, in the analysis of myth and popular genres is not new; indeed, the dominance of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan’s Oedipus complex and mirror stage in such studies has become quite familiar. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958) uses the Oedipus myth as his principal example in demonstrating the application and usefulness of structuralism.³ Stephen Bauer, Leon Balter, and Winslow Hunt (1978) apply the Oedipus myth as a model in their analysis of The Maltese Falcon, both Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade novel (1930) and the film directed by John Huston starring Humphrey Bogart (1941). They distinguish such European detectives as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, who are generally asexual types who sublimate any Oedipal tendencies, from the American hard-boiled Sam Spade type, who are extremely sexual and, due to their failure to sublimate, quite violent. They conclude that: Just like the European detective, the American represents the Oedipal child. Since he does not sublimate as does the European, he is in much greater danger of committing the Oedipal crime himself, or, at any rate, becoming an accomplice. He often gets so intimately involved with the criminal that part of the drama consists in his ultimately maintaining his innocence.⁴ Similarly, Hanna Charney (1987) finds Oedipal patterns are common in detective stories, but thinks they may be passing out of popularity as greater emphasis is placed on death, rather than murder.⁵ Debra Moddelmog (1993) also gives special attention to detective fiction, analyzing works by H.G. Wells, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Dick, Roger Zelazny, Flannery O’Connor, and others; and finds that, if she excludes incest and patricide from the list, the most common of the Oedipean mythemes in twentieth-century fiction are the encounter with the Sphinx; the investigation into a mystery; the self-incrimination or self-recognition; and the self-blinding.⁶

With regard to film, Laura Mulvey argues in her now classic essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) that the image of woman speaks castration and nothing else.⁷ She draws this conclusion by understanding film and film viewing in terms of the Freudian/Lacanian theory of the formation of the unconscious in which woman functions as a symbol of the threat of castration: once her child enters the realm of the symbolic, she serves purely as memory of both maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.⁸ Man possesses the gaze; woman is the object to which he directs his scopophilic instincts; woman does not look because looking is an expression of desire that is, at least theoretically, psychologically and culturally denied to her. Linda Williams (1984) has shown that, consistent with Mulvey’s theory, when a woman exercises the gaze, or simply looks, particularly in horror films such as Nosferatu (1922) and Phantom of the Opera (1925), she is usually punished both by the sight of the monstrous male and by death or other loss as well.⁹

Psychological interpretations are as commonly applied to horror films, often a kind of hyperbolic gothic, as they are to detective fiction. D.L White (1977) discusses horror in terms of a fear of the id, with monsters understood to be manifestations of the animal within and the fear of powerlessness in the face of this beast.¹⁰ Robin Wood (1978) believes such films demonstrate the Freudian thesis that in a society built on monogamy and family there will be an enormous surplus of sexual energy that will have to be repressed; and that what is repressed must always strive to return.¹¹ In his analysis, Roger Dadoun (1980) invokes notions of the phallic mother, fear of castration, and the proliferation of fetishistic substitutes for the lost perfect mother as inspiration to horror films, but he also believes that horror films reached a kind of generic climax in the decade following the stock market crash. He notes that the same terms are used to describe the effect of the Depression on Americans and the experience of horror films: ‘panic’, ‘turmoil’, ‘fear’, ‘amazement’, etc., probably because both raised anxieties of abandonment, disintegration, castration, [and] dissolution.¹² Filmic creatures, he believes, were designed to keep these stresses in place and this function was served by fetishization.¹³

Psychological interpretations of other genres, like those of detective fiction and horror films, also frequently return to Freudian concepts and Oedipus. Kenneth Munden (1958) interprets the western in terms of the Oedipus complex.¹⁴ Marie Jean Lederman (1979) finds the appeal of the film Superman (1978) in its adherence to specific aspects of the Oedipus myth.¹⁵ Andrew Gordon (1978) relies on Joseph Campbell’s (1904–1987) The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) for his ideas about the hero, but ultimately finds an Oedipal pattern at work in the film Star Wars (1977).¹⁶ William Indick (2004) likewise finds Campbell’s archetypal hero in many films, but returns to Freudian theory for his analysis of the horror genre.¹⁷ Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing (2002) consider The Matrix (1999) as myth, but rely on the Oedipus complex for their terms of reference, concluding that the film suggests a way out of the technological Narcissus-narcosis as well as the Freudian/Lacanian/Mulveyan theoretical template, both of which keep us locked unsatisfactorily between two desires – the temporal world of the Fathers and the spatial comforts of Mother. The hero within the technological myth will probably have to cut his or her ties to both in order to get a footing as an adult, as Neo does when he hangs up the phone, his link to the man-made mother.¹⁸

Oedipus may take some credit as a template for plot developments in an astonishing number of modern narratives, but this apparent fact says little about the deliberated motives and messages that lead to narrative construction and consumption, most of which may well be more consciously developed and more important than those of the purported Oedipal impulse. Further, as compelling as the evidence seems to be that Western society, or at least its imagination, is, was, or has become Oedipal, there is considerable evidence that, historically, different myths have been called upon to define, revise, and revitalize cultural norms. Many scholars, particularly those inspired by the work of Carl Jung (1875–1961) on myths and archetypes as indicative of the paths to individuation or complete psychic maturity and Joseph Campbell’s study of hero patterns in world mythology,¹⁹ believe that individual myths relate to a larger monomyth recounting the hero’s journey, a journey that is not necessarily defined by or limited to Oedipal issues. Stuart Voytilla (1999), for example, finds the key elements in a wide range of film genres, like those in individual myths, relate to different stages on the hero’s journey.²⁰ The katabasis or descent into hell theme common to myth and discussed by Jung as the dark night of the soul,²¹ for example, is also one commonly found in films of different types: James J. Clauss (1999) discusses its appearance in The Searchers (1956)²² and Erling B. Holtsmark (2001) discusses it in films of a variety of genres and specifically in Cherry 2000 (1987),²³ one of the films included here as tech-noir. William K. Ferrell (2000) likewise relates both literature and films to myth.²⁴ Avent Beck (1992) undertakes a lengthy analysis of Platoon (1986) as a Christian allegory, without once invoking a particular generic classification for the film, or Oedipus.²⁵

Will Wright (1975) does not bother with Oedipus in his structural analysis of the classic western and its variants: the vengeance, cultural transition, and professional western. He finds sixteen constituent units characterize the genre, including the arrival of the unknown hero with an exceptional ability, his status, lack of acceptance, and then his winning of acceptance by helping a social group deal with a villain who not only threatens them, but someone the hero cares about.²⁶ Martin M. Winkler (1985) shows how the western hero follows the general pattern set by the experiences of those of classical mythology by drawing parallels between the two in relation to arms, violence and catharsis, journeys and quests, and finally immortality and apotheosis.²⁷ David Daly and Joel Persky (1990) follow Wright in taking the view that the western has generated its own mythic pattern with characteristic events and motifs.²⁸ Patricia Warrick (1978) arrives at the same conclusion in her summary of the elements of the mythic pattern in science fiction as including, among other things, an adventure into some new dimension of space or time and a roster of characters that includes at least one scientist, machine, robot, android, and/or alien.²⁹

Gary S. Bedford (1981) believes reimagining the historical psyche within the mythological context,³⁰ not outside it as many methods of analysis propose, offers much to the potential reimagining and regrounding of modern man and woman’s experience in the humus of storytelling and imagination.³¹ In the present study, the realization of the historicized aspects of both myth and genre depends on moving beyond an obsession with infantile behaviors and Oedipus and giving greater attention to the world of adults as the product of adults who exercise free will, make choices, build societies, and, at least potentially, live out a tremendously complex variety of relationships and work toward goals invested in numerous fields of interest. The possibility for change in the cultural imagination away from its apparent Oedipal fixation is supported by George Steiner’s (1984) argument that the emphatic obsession with Freud’s points of reference in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and other tragedies dates from about 1905; prior to which and from the 1790s, the myth of Antigone was THE central myth inspiring the collective imagination, including many aspects of gothic literature.³² Steiner shows that Antigone’s story has much more to do with sibling relationships, cousins, twins, and doubles, and less to do with Oedipus’s destiny living out the fixations of sexuality purportedly established in infancy.

Alternatives to the Oedipal pattern are also readily available in twentieth-century narrative: Sisyphus, for example, is not only regarded as the hero of existentialism,³³ he is widely regarded as a prototype for the hard-boiled detectives of 1930s pulp fiction and for the detectives and other characters populating film noir after World War II.³⁴ As Harry Slochower (1948) explains, existentialism is about negating collectives that have passed away and the acceptance of the resulting homelessness, estrangement, fear, and anguish as a final ‘resting’ point. It does not subject its negation to critical self-analysis. It does not explore the question of the sources and bases out of which it has arisen. The individual is not born – he is ‘thrown’ into existence.³⁵ Sisyphus, who sided with the Titans against Zeus, was condemned to repetitively roll a rock up a hill in Hades because he witnessed one of Zeus’s abductions: this experience of being chained to futility summarizes that of many individuals in both Europe and North America immediately following the end of the war. Sisyphus, however, also got the better of Zeus;³⁶ and thus, as Bedford notes, Sisyphus, like Prometheus, is a figure of both death and rebirth; and further, both Sisyphus and Prometheus challenged the hierarchy and did not actually join the new order of the Olympians that arose to replace that of the Titans.³⁷

Prometheus specifically challenged Zeus’s rather selfish distribution of resources and Zeus, to punish him, took fire away from man; when Prometheus gave it back to him, Zeus took his wrath out directly on Prometheus by having him bound and left for an eagle to eat out his liver every day – being immortal, even this torture brought only the unending and recurring experience of pain and never the release of death. The importance of the Promethean gesture to the development of human civilization is indisputable. As Lewis Mumford (1967) observes:

This playing with fire was both a human and a technological turning point: all the more because fire has a threefold aspect – light, power, heat. The first artificially overcame the dark, in an environment filled with nocturnal predators; the second enabled man to change the face of nature, for the first time in a decisive way, by burning over the forest; while the third maintained his internal body temperature and transformed animal flesh and starchy plants into easily digestible food.

Let there be light! With those words, the story of man properly began.³⁸

Just as Prometheus suffered for his sense of fair play and in relation to the distribution of resources, particularly fire, so do the leading characters in tech-noir films suffer – usually because a villain, like Zeus, uses technology to increase his own power: the hero or heroes must often defeat this villain, like Prometheus, by wit and guile, rather than by force of arms. Many of these heroes also show affinities to other mythological characters: Oedipus shadows every son, who may be man, clone, or artificial intelligence, that overthrows the father; and every policeman, detective, and hacker who must deal with computer programs, security, and encryptions is answering the Sphinx’s riddles, just as Oedipus did. Theseus’s journey into the labyrinth echoes through dozens of filmic excursions into high-rise corporate headquarters and virtual reality, not to mention maintenance tunnels, subways, and sewers. These settings seem to be modeled after the designs of Daedalus, of whom Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) wrote in Metamorphosis:

Daedalus, an architect famous for his skill, constructed the maze, confusing the usual marks of direction, and leading the eye of the beholder astray by devious paths winding in different directions. Just as the playful waters of the maeander in Phyrgia flow this way and that, without any consistency, as the river, turning to meet itself, sees its own advancing waves, flowing now towards its source and now towards the open sea, always changing its direction, so Daedalus constructed countless wandering paths and was himself scarcely able to find his way back to the entrance, so confusing was the maze.³⁹

Heroes survive all kinds of labyrinths – and their creatures: like Oedipus, they can answer the riddle; like Theseus, they understand the value of a ball of string; and like the half-human Perseus, they have the wit to know how to put a representation (or reflection) to good use – as he did when he defeated the Medusa with a mirror. Even the Sumerian Gilgamesh’s search for immortality⁴⁰ is relived through numerous fictional and not-so-fictional experiments in body and mind transplants, bioengineering, and cloning.

Tech-noir plot resolutions also take their cues from myth, with the standard endings including those already popularized in gothic, detective, and science fiction: marriage, apprehension of the criminal, and new kinds of relationships involving artificial beings. Tech-noir plots, however, make frequent use of the wasteland motif and attribute the wasteland to the misuse or over-extension of technology in the environment or the technological mimicry, rather than the cultivation, of the natural environment or person: tech-noir thus expands the intense interest in the person in relation to human society and invention characteristic of earlier genres to include a more active awareness of the world in its totality. Plot development and plot resolutions incorporate this awareness, such that they commonly involve the escape of one, a few, or many individuals from the wasteland, the rejuvenation of the wasteland, or the recycling of the wasteland or artificial elements as a means of restoring the natural, if not nature itself. All of these resolutions are structural in that they mediate the natural, understood as both the nature of grass, trees, and water and the conventional social model of the film audience; and the cultural, understood primarily in terms of the variations of technology.

Tech-noir is a historically grounded genre, however, and the core problem or mystery and the crisis posed in each film tend to invoke, deliberately or otherwise, some real-world aspect of the uses and negative effects of technology. Many of the heroes of tech-noir are forced into their role because of technological developments that seem beyond their full comprehension or control and because they thereby become victims of those who would use the Promethean gift as a means to power – a circumstance that film audiences are likely to sympathize with, even as they enjoy their microwave ovens, digital television, laptops, and cell phones.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the organizers of the annual Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference, which I have participated regularly in since 1993, both as a presenter and as an area chair; and to the organizers of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics conference, held annually as part of the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, at which I presented several papers on tech-noir film, including The Aesthetics of Tech-Noir Film (2000), "Baudrillardian Aesthetics in The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and eXistenZ (2005), and To Inform, L’informe and the Abject: The Aesthetics of Dream Representation in Blade Runner, Brazil, and Until the End of the World (2006). The theory of genre development informing this study may be found in my thesis titled A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres: Discourse in Gothic, Detective, Science, and Cyberpunk Fiction" (2001) written under the direction of Professor G.K. Blank at the University of Victoria. I owe a great deal to Professor Blank for his expertise, as well as his patience and continued support during the years between the completion of my thesis and the completion of this manuscript. My research on tech-noir film was financially supported, in part, by a research grant from Sir Wilfred Grenfell College of Memorial University in Newfoundland.

Notes

1. Several websites, notably The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), have since added tech-noir to their search terms, but the titles it calls up remain limited in number and lack a defining reference point. I found the term used by Constance Penley as a subtitle and reference in a discussion of The Terminator (1984): Time Travel, Prime Scene and the Critical Dystopia, Fantasy and Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: British Film Institute, 1989) 197–211. Penley notes that the tech turns noir because of human decision-making and not something inherent in technology itself (199).

2. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner discuss the representation of technology in a few 1970s and early 1980s films, notably THX 1138 (1970) and Blade Runner (1982), in terms of the threat the artificial posses to the natural, in Technophobia, Alien Zone, ed. A Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990) 58–65.

3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Structural Study of Myth, Structural Anthropology (1958; New York: Basic, 1963) 206–31.

4. Stephen Bauer, Leon Balter and Winslow Hunt, "The Detective Film as Myth: The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade," American Imago 35.3 (Fall 1978): 278.

5. Hanna Charney, Oedipal Patterns in the Detective Novel, Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film, eds. Maurice Charney and Joseph Reppen (Toronto: Associated University Press, 1987) 246–47.

6. Debra A. Moddelmog, Readers and Mythic Signs: The Oedipus Myth in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993) 110.

7. Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th edition, eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 746.

8. Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 747.

9. Linda Williams, When the Woman Looks (1984), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th edition, eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 561–77.

10. D.L. White, The Poetics of Horror: More than Meets the Eye, Film Genre: Theory and Criticism, ed. Barry K. Grant (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1977) 124–44.

11. Robin Wood, Return of the Repressed, Film Comment 14.4 (July–August 1978): 27.

12. Roger Dadoun, Fetishism in the Horror Film, Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: British Film Institute, 1989) 46.

13. Dadoun, Fetishism in the Horror Film 46.

14. Kenneth Munden, A Contribution to the Psychological Understanding of the Cowboy and His Myth, American Imago 15.2 (1958): 103–48.

15. Marie Jean Lederman, Superman, Oedipus and the Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Journal of Popular Film and Television 7.3 (1979): 235–45.

16. Andrew Gordon, ‘Star Wars’: A Myth for Our Time, Literature/Film Quarterly 6.4 (Fall 1978): 320–25. Gordon’s observations about the mixing of genres in this particular film, including science fiction, western, Japanese samurai film, and war film, to name just a few, as well earlier films, novels, and comic books, also point to myth as a creative influence that is stronger than current perceptions of genre categories in film.

17. William Indick, Movies and the Mind: Theories of the Great Psychoanalysts Applied to Film (Jefferson: McFarland, 2004).

18. Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing, " ‘Mother isn’t quite herself today’: Myth and Spectacle in The Matrix," Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.1 (March 2002): 83–84.

19. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

20. Stuart Voytilla, Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 1999).

21. Carl Jung regarded this experience as part of the process of individuation, or movement toward true maturity, and also believed it could be traced in the world of individual artists. See Carl Jung, Picasso (1932), The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, vol. 15, The Collected Works of C.G Jung, trans. R.F.C Hull, 2nd edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) 135–41.

22. James J. Clauss, Descent into Hell: Mythic Paradigms in The Searchers, Journal of Popular Film and Television 27 (Fall 1999): 2–17.

23. Erling B. Holtsmark, The Katabasis Theme in Modern Cinema, Bucknell Review: Classics and Cinema, ed. Martin M Winkler (Toronto: Associated University Press, 1991) 60–80.

24. William K. Ferrell, Literature and Film as Modern Mythology (Westport: Praeger, 2000).

25. Avent Beck, "The Christian Allegorical Structure of Platoon," Literature/Film Quarterly 20.3 (1992): 213–22.

26. Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) 48–49.

27. Martin M. Winkler, Classical Mythology and the Western Film, Comparative Literature Studies 22 (Winter 1985): 516–40.

28. David Daly and Joel Persky, The West and the Western, Journal of the West 29.2 (April 1990): 6–64.

29. Patricia Warrick, Introduction: Mythic Patterns, Science Fiction: Contemporary Mythology The SFWASFRA Anthology, eds. Patricia Warrick, et al. (New York: Harper, 1978) xv–xviii.

30. Gary S. Bedford, Notes on Mythological Psychology: Reimagining the Historical Psyche, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49.2 (June 1981): 231.

31. Bedford, Notes on Mythological Psychology 231.

32. George Steiner Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) 18. For a review of studies of Antigone, most of which seem to find the Oedipal connection irresistible, see David Werman, "Methodological Problems in the Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Literature: A Review of Studies of Sophocles’ Antigone," Psychoanalytic Association Journal 27 (1979): 451–78.

33. Harry Slochower, The Function of Myth in Existentialism, Yale French Studies 1 (1948): 44.

34. Robert Porfirio, No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir (1976), Film Noir Reader, eds. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996) 77–93.

35. Slochower, The Function of Myth in Existentialism 43.

36. Bedford, Notes on Mythological Psychology 237.

37. Bedford, Notes on Mythological Psychology 235, 237.

38. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harvest, 1967) 29–30.

39. Ovid, The Metamorphosis of Ovid, trans. Mary M Innes (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1955) book viii, lines 159–67.

40. Gilgamesh is a favored reference in the essays in George Slusser, Gary Westfahl, and Eric S. Rabkin’s, eds., Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

Introduction

Tech-noir films are about technology perceived as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality. They often expose the temporal nature of concepts of identity and society: rather than being fixed aspects of a permanent and indestructible nature, these concepts, like nature itself, are shown as mere parts of a larger simulacrum that is subject to change, exploitation, and even annihilation. Yet, even as tech-noir films present the mirror that reveals us to be as expendable and replaceable as any consumer product, they simultaneously affirm conventional beliefs and values – as do all popular genres.

The conventions of science fiction have made the discourse of science and its related technological manifestations seem both familiar and friendly: the view of science and technology as problematic, often combined with a negative view of the professionals from other fields who have invested in scientific methods and technological gadgetry, is less generally characteristic of that genre. It is in tech-noir that the center of discourse shifts from the celebrated science of science fiction to its consequences, particularly technology and the ways it can be, and indeed is being used for purposes that challenge just about everything: the environment, economic and social stability, and more. Just as detective fiction tends to pick up after the classic gothic plot resolution of marriage, lending both amateur and professional attention to contractually determined matters of property and social class and, of course, criminality; so tech-noir picks up after science fiction, attending to the real world problems that form the wake of technological development.¹ Unlike detective fiction, however, tech-noir often addresses or at least illustrates all-encompassing rather than isolated problems such that the entire worldview and physical environment – all aspects of the current simulacrum – are compromised by or suffer the aftermath of a violent revision of what we currently take to be reality. The main characters of tech-noir, as true children of Prometheus, are heir to the Titan’s philanthropic gift of fire … and his propensity to suffer for it.

Discourse is the interchange of ideas giving rise to a formal, ordered, and extended expression of thought on a subject or specialization of interest, such as psychology, sociology, science, or aesthetics.² It may be synthesized, embodied, and conveyed in the forms of speech and written language, such as mythology, the traditional romance, and the modern novel; and in the forms of visual art, such as painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as the mixed mediums of theater and film. Popular genres, such as gothic, detective, science, and tech-noir fiction and film, are descendants of mythology via the medieval romance that appear and proliferate as specific types of novels in Euroamerican culture from the eighteenth century³ on as part of the general trend of Romanticism in literature.

The conventions and dynamics of discourse in popular genres are here demonstrated with a structural approach that links areas of discourse: psychology, sociology, science, and aesthetics, to realms of experience. These realms are similar to those developed by Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) and frequently applied in twentieth-century psychoanalytic models: Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary.⁴ Psychology is associated with the realm of the symbolic, sociology with the real, and science with the imaginary. The simulacrum, associated with Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) and Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), provides the experiential counterpart to aesthetics: it is used here in the sense of the model preceding and defining what we take to be real or natural. Discourse is not only articulated in relation to realms of experience: that experience is represented in genres through common constituent elements, such as characters, crimes, clues, plot resolutions, and so forth, as well as the details pointing to the differences between them: for example, gothic tends to end in marriage, as in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Tale (1764); detective fiction with the identification of a criminal, as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Speckled Band (1892); science fiction with alliances between different species and aliens, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night (1948); and/or with the displacement of human behavior onto artificial beings, as in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984).

This volume offers a broad view of the consecutive historical development of popular genres and their cumulative engagement of various areas of discourse and incorporation of conventionalized constituent elements. This cumulativeness is readily observed: marriage, for example, is part of the resolution in Otranto, The Speckled Band, and even Neuromancer. Criminals are recognized, if not necessarily punished in these same works, and what might be considered stand-ins for criminality – racism and xenophobia – are overcome in Against the Fall of Night. Changes in science and technology have affected so many aspects of our world that it can easily be argued that they are accountable for all popular genres since gothic, but they are treated more deliberately in science fiction. Similarly, aesthetics direct the representation of all constituent elements in fiction and further the recognition of genres in relation to each other, even as one element is substituted for another: the gothic castle becomes a space ship, the gothic labyrinth and ghost become cyberspace and its constructs, and the detective becomes hard-boiled. However, when perceptions of the impact of technology on the immediate environment and perceptions of what the world is and what the ideal world should be – physically as well as culturally – incorporate the realization that such perceptions exist in relation to a model rather than an absolute, then the discourse of aesthetics is not merely present, it is the prioritized discourse and the realm in which it is experienced is recognized as itself a simulacrum. This recognition fosters an ironic approach in many genres, but it is at the center of tech-noir. As Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner (1990) note, films of the 1970s and 1980s, such as THX 1138 (1971), Logan’s Run (1976), and Blade Runner (1982), negatively affirm such social values as freedom, individualism, and the family by dramatizing oppositions between mechanical and spontaneous, regulated and free, and further, they show technology as the means by which nature and everything associated with it is realized as a construct:

The significance of technology thus exceeds simple questions of mechanics. It is usually a crucial ideological figure. Indeed, as the possibility of reconstructing institutions conservatives declare to be part of nature, technology represents everything that threatens the grounding of conservative social authority and everything that ideology is designed to neutralize.⁵

Not surprisingly, many of the conventions of popular literature and film may be traced to myths and medieval romances about villages and cities endangered by monsters, demons, and other villains, as well as heroes who quest for the restoration of the natural order and are rewarded with power, wealth, long life, and a desirable spouse if they succeed and experience disappointment and death if they fail – and bring the same to others. The details of setting, character, and action keep changing, but this story has survived the transformation from preclassical myth to classical theater to medieval romance to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western literature and film. The ongoing popularity of stories derived from classical Greco-Roman and other ancient myths in popular genres is proof of their success as ideology: these narratives establish what have become constants of life and psyche and both represent and celebrate conventional beliefs and values.⁶

Popular genres arise as adaptations of myths relative to and as part of the content and form of discourse emphasized in a particular time and place: such emphases are a principal means by which a particular ideology or worldview is both arrived at and perpetuated.⁷ All of the traditional forms given to discourse, including those related to entertainment considered here, have developed historically in relation to earlier and alternative forms: the novel descends from such sources as letters, contracts, and wills;⁸ the easel painting from manuscript illumination, wall painting, and oral and literary narratives; and film from novels, painting, and theater,⁹ to name just a few. While all of these forms seem to have the capacity to reformulate and represent myths, their popularity has varied over time. It is also apparent that some myths lend themselves more readily to articulation within some fields of discourse than others. Historically, as interest in different fields of discourse changes, so does the identification with particular myths – as the shifts of attention from Antigone to Oedipus to the more recent engagement with Prometheus indicate.¹⁰ While some tech-noir films are based on a narrative first written as a short story, play, or book, most are developed as film scripts;¹¹ and, like all popular genres regardless of form, technoir films perpetually reground myth in real world events and issues. These events, as always, include war, but the years between 1970 and 2005, the years of the release dates for most of the films considered here, were also years of extraordinary scientific and technological developments. Many of these developments, like the home computer, are related to digital technology, while others, like environmental pollution, are less seemingly innocuous: these realities echo through the Promethean genre of tech-noir.

New genres arise then, not merely as matters of form, but as means to convey meaning in relation to content. Contemporary popular genres, both literary and filmic, share certain aspects of ideology grounded in myth and related to the individual’s coming of age by finding a place in society, but they are usually distinguished from their antecedent, the medieval romance, with its interlaced structure, complex and overlapping plots, and extensive character lists, by the modern preference for more Aristotelian literary qualities: that is to say, more linear narrative structure, plots of more limited scope, and fewer characters.¹² This transformation of form indicates, among other things, a change in emphasis away from a sense of the complex interrelatedness of cosmic metaphysics and the materiality of the physical world toward a melodramatic fixation on simplified dualistic models for generating meaning in relation to characters, particularly victims, who are intentionally chosen as mirror reflections of the anticipated audience, or rather as reflections that match the members of the anticipated audience as they imagine themselves.

These general changes in popular genres find more particular manifestations in many examples of tech-noir and its literary antecedents, including the three classics considered here: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Herbert George Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), all of which have been variously described in relation to both gothic and science fiction. Tech-noir films tend to be more melodramatic than these texts, and provide more thorough and extensive depictions of technology, sexuality, and violence. They also fill out the roster of characters and sets so as to appeal to a larger film audience and lend special dramatic attention to the experiences of the victim or victims of technology. Many of these films have very little dialogue and rely on visual ways of conveying the tech-noir message, notably the frequent treatment of the human form within the mise-en-scène such that it and its representations become part of a conceptual mise-en-abyme that revises the hierarchy or chain of beings. This mise-en-abyme contributes to the overall complexity of technoir films, even as they maintain the conventions of melodrama and genre: in tech-noir films the interrelations of the metaphysical and physical are reasserted by proxy in layered representations of technologized realities.

Notes

1. For a list of some of those problems, see Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2000) 291–324.

2. Roland Barthes argues that discourse is like spoken and written language in that it is any significant unit or synthesis, whether verbal or visual, but the term contributes more to the precision of critical analysis as a category within which different subject concentrations, forms of expression, and conventions may be identified. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957, trans. Annette Lavers (1972; Toronto: Paladin Grafton, 1989) 119.

3. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) 180–85.

4. Where a very specifically Lacanian meaning of these terms is meant, these terms are capitalized.

5. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Technophobia, Alien Zone: Culture Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990) 58–59.

6. Walter R. Agard, Greek Prototypes of American Myths, The Classical Journal 54.8 (May 1959): 338–43; Laurie Honko, The Problem of Defining Myth (1972), Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, ed. Alan Dundes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 49–51.

7. For a taxonomy of folklore genres ranging from the jargon and slang of the conversational to the riddling and joking of play, and the anecdotes and jokes of the fictive, see Roger D. Abrahams, The Complex Relations of Forms, Folklore Genres, ed. Dan Ben-Amos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970) 193– 214.

8. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).

9. Margaret Morse, Paradoxes of Realism: The Rise of Film in the Train of the Novel, Cine-Tracts 13 (Spring 1981): 27–37. The influence of painting and theater on film is also well documented with reference to early film classics. See, for example, Mike Budd’s essay "Modernism and the Representation of Fantasy: Cubism and Expressionism in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," Forms of the Fantastic, eds. Jan Hokenson and Pearce Howard (Westport: Greenwood, 1986) 15–21; and Angela Dalle Vacche, Murnau’s Nosferatu: Romantic Painting as Horror and Desire in Expressionist Cinema, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 14.3 (Summer 1995): 25–36.

10. Discussion and citations on this point are available in the Preface.

11. Martin Rubin finds that science-fiction film tends more to a dystopian view of technology than does science-fiction literature, and he references a number of films considered here as tech-noir, including THX 1138 (1971), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Logan’s Run (1976), and others, in Genre and Technology: Variant Attitudes in Science Fiction Literature and Film, Persistence of Vision 3–4 (Summer 1986): 100, 103. See also, H. Bruce Franklin’s Visions of the Future in Science Fiction Films from 1970 to 1982, Alien Zone: Culture Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990) 19–31.

12. This historical transition has been noted by numerous scholars of literature. See Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy’s The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981) 4, for one such observation regarding the characteristics, though not the lineage, with regard to film.

Chapter 1

Method and Models

Mythology is the prototypical form of discourse from which popular genres developed and Oedipus is currently the most frequently cited exemplar of a specific myth influencing popular genres in literature and film. The structural relationships between the genres of gothic, detective, science, and tech-noir fiction, like those between myth and other narratives, can be shown by the identification and ordering of constituent units or elements in a manner that brings forward content that may not otherwise be apparent. Vladimir Propp (1928) addressed fairy tales¹ and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958)² revisited Oedipus in this manner. Similarly, Jack Burnham (1971) has shown how the structurally defined myth of the avant-garde in the visual arts involves the treatment of cultural elements, such as tube paints and spray guns, as natural elements and then culturalizing them by processing with choices and decisions about application and arrangement.³ The structuralist approach taken here demonstrates the association of primary fields of discourse – psychology, sociology, science, and aesthetics; with realms of experience – the symbolic, the real, the imaginary, and the simulacrum; and with specific genres and their constituent elements (Chart 1). Discourse, realms of experience, and genres are all somewhat artificially compartmentalized to facilitate the identification and understanding of their presence, relationships, and dynamics.

Any discourse may develop in any realm of experience, but specific areas of discourse take on conventionalized roles in relation to specific realms of experience, the constituent elements of popular genres, and individual popular genres. In other words, areas of discourse are articulated in the experiential realms and constituent elements of popular genres: characters; relationships between characters; the crime, mystery, or social issue at stake; its detection; and its resolution. This structural arrangement of areas of discourse, realms of experience, and constituent elements facilitates charting of the characteristics that historically distinguish individual genres and mark their cumulative development. It is demonstrated here in relation to the Oedipus myth and, more specifically, to exemplars of popular genres: Horace Walpole’s gothic The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Tale (1764), Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction The Speckled Band (1892), Arthur C. Clarke’s sciencefiction Against the Fall of Night (1948), and William Gibson’s scifi-cyberpunk Neuromancer (1984).

Realms of experience and genre

Prometheus is undisputedly the Titan of technology and, by association, of tech-noir; but the Oedipus myth, not that of Prometheus, is the most commonly cited template for Western literature in general, and the inspiration for numerous structural and psychoanalytic analyses of narrative. The story of Oedipus, as compiled, summarized, and popularized by Robert Graves (1955) from sources including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, is as follows: Oedipus is abandoned as an infant by his mother Iocaste because of an oracular prediction about the future damage he will do and is thus raised by adoptive parents whom he later abandons because of a similar oracular prediction. His travels bring him to Thebes, a city tormented by the Sphinx sent by Hera as punishment to Laios, Oedipus’s biological father, for abducting a boy. Not knowing him to be his father, Oedipus kills Laios in a fit of temper. He then answers the Sphinx’s riddle and is rewarded for this accomplishment with the crown and the hand of his own mother, whom he also does not recognize, in marriage. Years later, when a plague blights the land, Oedipus seeks explanation in some human crime against the gods. He eventually identifies his own incest as this crime and blinds and banishes himself to wander as a beggar aided only by his devoted daughter Antigone. His sons (and brothers), Eteocles and Polyneices, war for his kingdom and Antigone has to see to it that