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

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 Dispossession in 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,
proposes a new understanding of the politics of science fiction in particular and utopian thought in general.