Here come the men in black technology and anxiety in the postmodern age

Futures

Volumn 30, Issue 10, 1998, Pages 1027-1035

  Leach, Joan ^a  

^a IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL IDENTITY; GENDER ROLE; MEDIA ROLE; POST-MODERNISM;

EID: 0032450176     PISSN: 00163287     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/s0016-3287(98)00104-9     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Westfahl, G., Where No Market Has Gone Before: 'The Science Fiction Industry' and the 'Star Trek' Industry. Extrapolation, 1996, 37(4), 291-301.
2. The 'we' that I am adopting as the audience for this review is a very circumscribed 'we'. At several screenings of MiB in the UK, audiences were less amused by the film and not as literate in the web of intertexts and allusions as audiences at screenings in the US who immediately drew parallels to other films and TV shows. In a series of focus groups on MiB among University students in the US and the UK, UK students were much more eager to point out what they referred to as the 'paranoid' quality of the film while US students were much more pleased with the comic results that the film achieved. One way or the other, the 'we' to which I refer is undoubtedly a Western 'we' obsessed with our own development and anxious about 'our' future. One must be quite clear that the readings in this review are informed by that 'we' who can only imagine other non-Western readings.
3. Fitting, P., So We All Become Mothers: New Roles for Men in Recent Utopian Fiction. Science Fiction Studies, 1985, 12, 156-183.
4. Tulloch, J. and Jenkins. H., Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. Routledge, London, 1995.
5. Whether or not one appreciates a subversive quality in the X-files or sees it as 'part police procedural, part suspense thriller, part action adventure, part medical drama, part science fiction and part horror' or any subparts of the above, X-files has been read by a series of critical readers as offering a site of real critique in mainstream programming. For a review of some of the key arguments supporting X-files as a form of cultural critique see Taylor 1996 on the millennium pop website.
6. Taylor, C., Truth Decay: Sleuths After Reagan, http://www.bgsu.edu/ckile/popc290/truth/decay.html.
7. Powers, R. C., G-Men: Hoover's FBI in Popular Culture. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1983.
8. Lisa Parks discusses at some length an internet discussion group entitled 'I want to be like Scully when I grow up' which provides a space for women to imagine themselves as scientists. It turns out that some readings of Scully not only see her as a 'scientist' but as a challenge to science. One woman wrote 'Scully is the real strong character; the one who doesn't gag at blood or bodies, who wants to do her job as well as she can who is ambitious without being self-centred, who has her feet planted on the ground' (quoted in Parks 121).
9. See Parks 121-6 for an in-depth discussion of humour and science in the X-files.