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Monsters and Robots

I love science fiction, but at times the genre can be like a friend who, while entertaining, can’t help but embarrass you in public.

All fiction has the same goal: to say something about the human condition by telling stories about people who never existed and events that never happened. Genre fiction, I’ve always felt, is often more effective than other forms of storytelling simply because the stakes are higher, the events grander in scale. By working in the horror, fantasy, or sci-fi genres (as well as crime stories and westerns), you can externalize internal conflicts and personalize societal ones in a way that is nearly impossible to do in straight fiction. You can watch a drama about a woman with a disrespectful, rude, out-of-control daughter, and that woman’s desperate attempts to bring back the sweet little girl she once knew — certainly there is no shortage of these stories on the Lifetime and Oh! networks — or you could watch that same story played out genre-style, in the form of Friedkin and Blatty’s The Exorcist, in which the idea of the out-of-control teenager is presented via a wonderfully apt metaphor: a girl who’s been possessed by the Devil. The scary teenage rebellion every parent fears is turned up to eleven here as the child literally becomes an evil monster overnight, and her disrespect for authority is taken to a degree that would seem ridiculous outside of the horror genre. Young Regan curses at her loving mother, masturbates with a crucifix, vomits on a priest (. . . and she probably listens to 50-Cent, too); her face and voice change, becoming something horrifying and unrecognizable.

I’m getting away from my point — or maybe I’m not; we’ll see. What I’m trying to say is that this kind of exaggerated, metaphorical storytelling is what makes genre fiction so great. Horror movies succeed by taking common, universal fears and blowing them out of proportion. Take Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance. The vulnerability of sleep is a universal fear, and the film exploits that fear beautifully by giving us a monster who kills people in their dreams. And since sleep is something that can only be staved off for so long, the monster is inescapable. Great stuff. The sequels, on the other hand, were not concerned with metaphor or theme in the least; they were only about Freddy Krueger killing teens in increasingly baroque ways while delivering increasingly bad puns. Furthermore, while the kids became more and more disposable, Freddy himself got more and more likable, morphing from the “filthy child killer” he was in the original into a sort of malevolent prankster, a Puckish figure who wasn’t killing for revenge anymore so much as for fun (and, bizarrely, the heavy-handed irony of the deaths in the later films seems to suggest that, over the course of the series, Krueger became almost a moralistic figure, dishing out Dante-style punishments to all those bad, bad kids . . . but that’s another discussion altogether). There’s nothing wrong with blood and guts or with the illicit thrill one gets by reading about or watching a character being killed in some particularly nasty way, but if there’s nothing underneath it, if the creators aren’t saying anything more than, “Hey, look at this! Doesn’t that look painful?” then it’s pointless. It’s all icing, no cake.

While horror works on personal fears and insecurities, science fiction works best when it tackles large-scale societal issues: abuse of power, racism, fascism, mob mentality. It’s hard to say anything about these issues directly without coming across as trite or preachy, but sci-fi can pull it off by coming at these topics sideways. Unlike the straight fiction writer, who is, one could say, shackled by “realism,” the sci-fi writer is able to create societies, worlds — in some cases, entire universes — that are themselves metaphors for whatever the author is examining. I’m not even talking about heady, high-flown stuff like 1984 and Brave New World, pop sci-fi can be just as brilliant. RoboCop, for example. On one level it’s a great futuristic action movie with lots of really fun dialogue and some fantastic explosions, and if you want to enjoy it purely on that level, more power to ya. But dig a little deeper, Watson, and you’ll find a surprisingly weighty statement about corporatism. Officer Murphy is a warm, likable family man who is literally turned into a machine by the corporation he works for. He is stripped of his humanity, his personality, his family — even his ability to tell right from wrong and act on his conscience is compromised (”Directive Four”). It’s a perfect metaphor for the soullessness and amorality of corporate life, and the entire film is then about Murphy trying to regain his humanity. The film ends when the Old Man asks his name (earlier in the movie a cop asks what his name is, to which Murphy’s handler responds: “He doesn’t have a name, he has a number” — that’s pretty blatant, as corporate metaphors go); he smiles and says, “Murphy.” Taking out Dick Jones wasn’t the victory, regaining his soul was.

While bad horror concerns itself solely with methods of execution, bad sci-fi gets hung up on the intellectual challenge of making bizarre technology sound plausible. In place of theme and emotion, we get reams of what the old pulp writers called “technobabble,” long-winded descriptions of the technology used by the characters. I’ve seen sf novelists spend twenty or more pages explaining how the interstellar drive of the hero’s spacecraft works, what powers his raygun, or what loophole in theoretical physics his time-machine exploits*. These writers (and, one presumes, their loyal readers) are obsessed with the tedious details of How Things Work, completely ignoring the fact that most people really don’t give a shit how the technological marvels around them work, only that those marvels do what they’re supposed to do. (Consider the microwave oven. There is hardly a kitchen in the western world that doesn’t include one of these, yet I can guarantee you that nine out of ten people on the street have no idea how it cooks their food — and furthermore they don’t care. “Something to do with radiation…” is likely to be the best explanation you get, unless you happen to run across a microwave repairman or a high school science teacher.) This kind of nerdy minutia brings the entire genre down, just as bad, blood-n-guts-but-no-heart horror hurts its genre. It’s self-serving — all the tropes of the genre without any of the things that make it brilliant.

And I suppose that’s my rather long-winded and obvious point. A genre’s strength doesn’t lie with its trappings. Good horror stories are about more than monsters and psychos, just as good science fiction stories are about more than rockets and robots. And if you don’t have anything to say beyond “Look at this nifty and well-researched device,” or, “Look how cleverly we kill these people,” then maybe it’s best to say nothing at all.

* Probably the best explanation for a far-out gadget I’ve ever heard was in Robert Zemeckis’s Back To the Future. We all know the film, so I won’t waste time recapping the plot. Yes, you’re welcome. The movie concerns a time-machine, a sci-fi device which has, over the years, produced more tedium and windbaggery (quantum planars and tachyons and string theory, blah blah blah) than just about any single item in the genre. Back To the Future is, it must be said, the world’s most popular time-travel story, even eclipsing H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine in terms of sheer familiarity and love-of-the-masses. And what was the explanation of the time-machine that lay at its heart? What was the hard science behind the premise? The Flux Capacitor. Doc Brown simply points to a little wishbone of blinky lights set into the Delorean’s backseat and says, matter-of-fact, “That’s what makes time-travel possible.” That’s it, folks. Even after three movies and a Universal Studios ride, all we know about the Flux Capacitor is that a) it requires a hell of a lot of juice (1.21 jiggawatts!), and, b) it doesn’t kick in until the car it’s housed in hits eighty-eight miles-per-hour. Both of these details are absolutely necessary, as they form specific obstacles that block Marty’s road back home after he is accidentally transported to 1955. Zemeckis was smart enough to know that technical details and theoretical physics were not important. This was not a documentary on the feasibility of fourth-dimensional travel; it was a movie about a kid trying to clean up his mess and get back home.