11 - Moving in Circles: Kinetic Elite and Kinetic Proletariat in ‘End of the World’ Films

Summary

After road movies, science fiction is the fictional genre in which journeys play the greatest role. Arguably the first SF film and a noted example from the first years of cinema, Georges Mélies’ Le voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon (1902) concerns a group of astronauts travelling from the Earth to the Moon. The film testifies to the ambition to transcend the borders of human existence through the development of technology, of which both the cine camera and the spaceship became potent symbols in various cultural contexts. During the period of the Cold War the moon was ‘conquered’ by humans, hence trips to the moon were relegated (or upgraded) to the documentary genre, but journeys to faraway planets and galaxies remained a staple diet of SF films, produced in the capitalist West and the socialist East. The ability to represent such journeys testified primarily to the technological and colonial ambitions of the respective political orders, capitalism and state socialism. During the Cold War outer space, both in reality and in filmic representations, was seen as a place where new technologies could be tested to ensure the hegemony of one or the other political order. Another common motif, especially at the peak of the Cold War, was the invasion of Earth by aliens. It was particularly common in Hollywood films, but there were also a number of Soviet and Eastern European films which used it, such as Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky. Usually this was regarded as a metaphor for the threat posed by a hostile political order.

In most research devoted to SF films with the motif of interplanetary journeys made during the Cold War period, a class aspect is omitted. This is not without reason, because even when the trips are undertaken by a tiny minority of the bravest and fittest (the elite), the travellers act on behalf of the whole of humanity, rather than to advance the position of a specific social class. Similarly, when aliens invade the Earth, they are regarded as a threat to the entire population rather than a specific stratum. The issue of how aliens were chosen to come to Earth, and the class structure of the populations of distant planets, is also usually omitted from the narrative.