REVIEW-ESSAY
Brooks Landon
Doubling Down on Double Vision
J.P. Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay, eds. Science Fiction Double Feature: The Science Fiction Film As Cult Text. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. xiii + 270 pp. £75.00, $120 hc.
Writing in the November 1991 Sight and Sound, Jonathan Rosenbaum, legendary film reviewer for The Chicago Reader, had what could most generously be termed a grumpy response to the publication of J.P. Telotte’s now also legendary The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason (1991):
“It will be a sad day when a too smart audience will read Casablanca as conceived by Michael Curtiz after having read Calvino and Barthes,” Umberto Eco wrote in 1984. “But that day will come.” J. P. Telotte’s collection reminds us that Eco’s sad day is already well behind us— though it turns out to be Eco himself rather than Calvino or Barthes who provides the principal theoretical back-up.
Serious analysis of film cults can be traced back to a 1932 essay by Harry Alan Potamkin, but you won’t find Potamkin’s name in Telotte’s index. Indeed, apart from some cursory acknowledgments, the book fosters the impression that the arrival of film cults coincided with the burgeoning of film studies in the early 70s. This suggests that academic film study is itself an unacknowledged form of cult activity predicated on repeated viewings by a fetishistically inclined minority audience which reappropriates the film in question for its own specialized purposes.
I can only wonder what Rosenbaum would make of Science Fiction Double Feature: The Science Fiction Film As Cult Text, editors Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay’s sort of sequel to that originary collection of cult film criticism, particularly since there is not only still no acknowledgment of Harry Alan Potamkin, claimed by Rosenbaum to have pioneered serious analysis of film cults nearly sixty years before Telotte published his The Cult Film Experience, but also there is now more academic theory being brought to the study of cult film. It is instructive to note that the essays in The Cult Film Experience did not reference sf film as a genre, but only made a couple of passing references to the fact that “midnight movies” such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1973) and Night of the Living Dead (1968) mashed up genre influences, including those from science fiction. It is also instructive to note that in 1983 Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman had published their own take on cult films, Midnight Movies, a book only fleetingly mentioned in Telotte’s The Cult Film Experience and barely mentioned in the fifteen essays in Science Fiction Double Feature, a collection of cult film criticism even more highly theorized than was Telotte’s original anthology, its theory now heavily shaped by the distinguished critics originally collected by Telotte in 1991.1
So here is the bad news. Even if I discount Rosenbaum’s harrumphing animus against institutional academic film study, I must report that despite the perfectly chosen cover photo of the hilarious Robo-Man from the infamously hilarious Robot Monster (1953), Science Fiction Double Feature interrogates “cult work” with serious emphasis on “work.” Indeed, Telotte’s introductory essay uses “Science Fiction Double Feature,” the famously self-reflexive opening song of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), to posit complicated themes of “doubleness” as the critical organizing principle of the fifteen essays in this volume, and stops just short of endorsing the proposition that sf film might inherently be cult film. Like cult film, sf film, Telotte suggests, provocatively and transgressively blurs the line between reason and unreason, between the serious and the silly, and even between “bad” films and those worthy of close study. Doubling down on the kinds of “doubleness” Telotte identified in The Cult Film Experience, this introduction swells with binaries—whether in parallel or in opposition, as almost all of Telotte’s criticism predictably does. This would be annoying were it not for the fact that his binaries are so compelling! As was the case with The Cult Film Experience, this volume in general and Telotte’s introduction in particular seems likely to launch numerous articles and books that will further explore the relationship between sf film and cult film, continuing the academic practice of shifting focus from the fun of cult films to their fundamental importance.
Now here is the good news. For the reader willing to do a little work, Science Fiction Double Feature makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of cult film in the age of digital media and of science fiction film particularly since the 1950s. I think it will be of particular value to students of sf film. Containing essays by sf scholarly notables Mark Bould, Gerald Duchovnay, Takayuki Tatsumi, J.P. Telotte, Sheryl Vint, Rob Latham, and M. Keith Booker, as well as impressive newer voices Matt Hills, Stacy Abbott, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Rhonda V. Wilcox, Chuck Tryon, Nicole Lamerichs, Rodney F. Hill, and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, this volume covers the cult/sf filmscape from the frequently revered (Blade Runner [1982], Star Trek: Into Darkness [2013], Star Wars [1977], Dark Star [1974], Firefly/Serenity [2002-3, 2005], District 9 [2009], A Boy and His Dog [1975]) to the risibly ridiculous (Robot Monster [1953], Glen or Glenda? [1953], Bride of the Monster [1955], Cat-Women of the Moon [1953], Attack of the 50 Foot Woman [1958], Bubba Ho-Tep [2002]), with stops in between for The Man Who Wasn’t There [2001], Shivers [1975], It’s Alive [1974], Zardoz [1974], Innocence [2004], Iron Sky [2012], Tetsuo: The Iron Man [1989], and Space Truckers [1996]). (Alas! Big Meat Eater [1982]is not studied.)
Telotte’s Introduction, revisiting some territory explored by essays on Rocky Horror by Barry K. Grant and Robert F. Wood in The Cult Film Experience, points to, reifies, and expands the example of Rocky Horror as a film that reveals a “natural” (1) connection between the cult film and the genre of science fiction, particularly as embodied in sf film.2 This connection is a “kind of double relationship” (2), “a doubleness that takes many forms” (2), including similar fan bases, a pastiche of boundary blurring genre elements, a potentially subversive self-reflexivity, a shared call for serious further study that recognizes in their outrageousness or tawdriness an underlying focus on the body and emotion, and an oppositional stance toward Hollywood/mainstream production values, procedures, and economic mechanisms. Both cult film and sf film, Telotte writes, create “a distinctive narrative space of difference: a space of double vision, a space for exploring cultural paradox and a space that has simply become especially important for addressing the science-and-technology-haunted cultural environment we inhabit today” (8).
Nevertheless, while Telotte’s Introduction and nearly all the essays in this volume persuasively detail the convergences or “intersections” of cult and sf film, Telotte is not quite ready to claim an “easy equation” between the two, only going so far as to suggest they are “fundamentally linked” (4), pointedly noting that this link has been largely and curiously unexplored by previous cult film criticism (6-7). Strongly implicit in the analysis presented throughout this volume is the suggestion that—in much the same way sf has merged with or disappeared into mainstream literature and media—the cult film (apart from nostalgic “classics” such as Casablanca) is merging or disappearing into sf film, while sf film is more and more being recognized for its subversive, cultish aspects.
Unified by their commitment to the notion (and rhetoric) of the essential doubleness of cult film and sf film, a doubleness both between and within these traditions, and by their insistent focus on the blurring of boundaries between and within these traditions, the fifteen essays in Science Fiction Double Feature have been divided into three broad categories. The first section or “portfolio” (11), “The multiple Texts of the SF/Cult Film,” considers broad interpretation issues raised by the mash-up aesthetics of the cult/sf multiverse—a concern much like that with the megatext in sf thinking. The second portfolio, “SF Media and the Audience,” shifts focus to case studies of the disparate driving concerns of fans, “the special nature of audience activity” or “interactivity” (13). What might be dismissed as “bad” films are the subject of the third portfolio, “Occulting the Cult: The ‘Bad’ SF Text,” in which the essays offer ingeniously recuperative readings of “bad” films, supporting the case made by Jeffrey Sconce that “studying ‘bad’ texts can be a highly useful exercise, teaching us much ‘about film itself—as a practice, as an art, as an object’” (qtd. by Telotte 15). This section’s delightful readings offer a reminder that rigorous scholarship practiced by gifted critics and backed by various theories can redeem anything!
All of the essays in Science Fiction Double Feature are engagingly well-written and of value to readers invested in film in general and sf and cult film in particular. Many of the essays explore the ways in which digital media is creating something of a new world for both the production and the reception of cult films, with particular attention to new social media conditions for fan community formation and performance. Apart from and sometimes including the scholars collected in this important volume, these essays suggest who the IT scholars of contemporary cult sf film, as indicated by numerous citations, might be: Timothy Corrigan, Rob Craig, Barry K. Grant, Matt Hills, Ingeborg Hoesterey, Mark Jancovich, Ernest Mathijs, Xavier Mendik, Jeffrey Sconce, Jamie Sexton, and, of course, Telotte himself. More essays stand out for their insight and reach than I have time to describe, but I found several particularly important for their broad relevance and applicability to the study of sf film.
Stacey Abbott’s “‘It’s Alive’: The Splattering of SF Films,” explores “splattering,” both in the gory imagery of some sf film and in “sf tropes themselves, particularly those surrounding the science/military machine and the creation of monsters, within the changing production context of the 1960s/1970s that privileged independent film production typified by cult auteurs George Romero, Larry Cohen, and David Cronenberg” (54). Chuck Tryon’s “Iron Sky’s War Bonds: Cult SF Cinema and Crowdsourcing” introduces us to the new economic production possibilities of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Takayuki Tatsumi offers a fascinating study of the possible global interconnectedness of sf film in his “Transnational Interactions: District 9, or Apaches in Johannesburg,” which traces sf film intersections among the alien “prawns” in director Blonkamp’s Johannesburg in District 9 (2009), the subculture of Japanese postwar junkyard scavengers called “Apaches,” their Native American forerunners, and William Gibson’s “Low Tek” outlaw technologists, contrasting these diverse oppressed and transgressive scavenger cultures with the Overlord aliens in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953). PHEW!
All of the essays in the third section of this volume, “Occulting the Cult: The ‘Bad’ SF Text,” are pure dynamite, each offering compelling reasons for giving ostensibly ridiculous sf cult films a close second look. In “Science Fiction and the Cult of Ed Wood: Glen or Glenda?, Bride of the Monster, and Plan 9 from Outer Space,” Rodney F. Hill not only effectively recuperates the widely acknowledged “worst sf film ever,” Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), but also manages to enroll Woods’s transgressive transgender psychodrama, Glen or Glenda? (1953) as both an avant garde and an sf film. Sherryl Vint focuses on gender differences in recasting notoriously bad cult sf films based on fears of female agency, including Cat Women of the Moon (1953), Devil Girl from Mars (1954), The Astounding She-Monster (1957), and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), as “paracinema,” Jeffrey Sconce’s term for cult films offering a skewed perspective on reality. Vint describes these films as “demonstrating a dialectic of indulgence and critique that characterizes cult sf’s treatment of gender difference, revealing how such difference—as well as differences in educational, cultural, or economic capitol—inform the ‘raid’ on legitimate culture that such films stage” (191). Rob Latham turns his encyclopedic interrogation of the sf New Wave to film in his “‘Lack of Respect, Wrong Attitude, Failure to Obey Authority’: Dark Star, A Boy and His Dog, and New Wave Cult SF.” Latham argues that Dark Star (1974) and A Boy and His Dog (1975) “share not only ideological terrain but also a certain mode of cult reception with New Wave fiction, coming to constitute—along with Kubrick’s sf films of the period, 2001 and A Clockwork Orange (1971)—a kind of New Wave cinematic canon” (205-06). Challenging Barry Keith Grant’s view that the cult film is only superficially transgressive, ultimately serving to recuperate conventional ideologies, Latham concludes that “most New Wave cult films gain their charge from a relentless deconstruction of heroism, of the traditional or countercultural variety, as well as from an uncompromising pessimism” (215-16). While not quite as much unlikely fun as the other essays in this section, M. Keith Booker’s “Capitalism, Camp, and Cult SF: Space Truckers as Satire” profitably (ouch!) explores this cult film’s debts (ouch!) to Alien (1979) and the cult canon of trucker films, while examining the problematics of a cult critique of capitalism, soberly concluding that the film, “however loudly silly its surface, faintly whispers a commentary on the difficulty, amid the pressures of late capitalism, of imagining any real alternatives to the current system” (231).
But the absolute treats in this section are the tour de force essays by Telotte and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, both of whom work normalizing critical magic on impossibly ridiculous films. Even in the company of famously outrageous films, Bubba Ho-tep (2002) stands out for mashing up so many unlikely narrative assumptions that any attempt to detail its plot collapses into absurdity. Yet Weinstock opens his essay, “Bubba Ho-tep and the Seriously Silly Cult Film,” by situating the film in chaos theory’s concept of “the strange attractor” as appropriated by Žižek to help explain the Lacanian idea of the objet petit a (233)! (Talk about seriously silly!) The “strange attractor” in chaos theory represents a powerful organizing phenomenon, “a pattern of seemingly chaotic behavior around which all other trajectories converge” (Gleick qtd. by Weinstock 233). Quickly (and mercifully) turning his attention to less theoretical notions of cult film, Weinstock constructs the cult film as a strong attractor because “it produces and regulates the turbulence, eddies, and whirlpools of a kind of chaotic desire that marks the cult” (234). Or, as he further explains, “What one loves in the cult film is something more than the film—it is the idea of the film as well as the affect produced by the film,” ideas apart from and beyond conscious reaction (234). But enough of chaos theory! The more easily understandable takeaway from Weinstock’s essay is his brief for “silliness” (“a sensibility or disposition that is related to, but not quite the same as carnival, camp, satire, and absurdity”), a kind of childlike innocent playfulness that is an end in itself (235). Or, to return briefly to chaos theory, “the silliness of the silly cult film functions as the strange attractor inaugurating and ... regulating a chaotic system of desire,” Weinstock’s point being that “the silliness is what one loves in the silly film more than the film,” an excess inviting the viewer “to participate in an imaginary economy beyond lack and scarcity” (236).
Remember that all of this has to do with Bubba Ho-tep? Weinstock describes the “unabashed silliness” of this film which features two elderly inhabitants of a nursing home, one a sequined-white-jumpsuit wearer (played by Bruce Campbell) claiming to be the quite undead Elvis Presley who years earlier had tired of his celebrity and left his career to an Elvis impersonator, who was the “Elvis” that died. The other (played by Ossie Davis), is a wheelchair-bound black man claiming to be John F. Kennedy dyed black and disappeared by Lyndon Johnson. These two identity-conflicted elders battle an evil ancient Egyptian mummy who wears a cowboy hat and feeds on the souls of nursing home inhabitants since their deaths do not arouse suspicion. This implausible conflict forms only part of what Weinstock describes as the film’s “fractal silliness,” manifested “on all scales from the macroscopic levels of plot and character to the more microscopic levels of scene, image, and line” (237). After considering ways in which the film presents a “poignant meditation on aging and celebrity,” an insistence on the “postmodern conception of identity as performance” (242), and observing that Bubba Ho-tep, the soul-sucking mummy, represents a well-worn example of an Orientalist stereotype (243), Weinstock reads the film in light of its gender and sexual politics (245), noting how Bubba Ho-tep offers the “double satisfaction of both rejecting dominant cultural values and remaining safely inscribed within them” by filtering its transgression through its “insistent pattern of silliness” (245). This very silly film, Weinstock concludes, supports the case that “we need to add silliness to the catalog of qualities” that evoke the affective response associated with cult film (245). It also illustrates that “silliness inevitably obscures or even defuses political messages, that it becomes a kind of alibi for the doubleness that lurks in these texts” (245). In these ways, a serious reading of Bubba Ho-tep’s silliness also suggests how silliness can function in serious ways in a range of other sf cult films.
In step with Weinstock’s brief for the value of silliness, J.P. Telotte marshals persuasive evidence for the paracinematic value of Robot Monster (1953), a film so hysterically ridiculous that it once long ago caused me and my high school girlfriend to interrupt in amazement our hormone-fueled makeout session on a living room couch by the light of a Saturday night tv midnight movie. So, while I initially resisted Telotte’s explanation of the Ro-Man’s “existential dilemma” (167), I was ultimately convinced by the well-crafted argument that the Ro-Man becomes “a recurrent return of the repressed, an image of the monstrous haunting itself, of the sort that characterized sf in this era—as well as all of American culture,” becoming “a sign of both the attraction and the at times appalling presence that marks the sf genre as it, seemingly by turns, announces its importance and admits its exaggerations.” (168-69).
Telotte concludes his remarkably persuasive recuperation of Robot Monster with the admirably reasonable observation that this “bad” film “practically forces us to see differently, even to see sf itself in a more revealing light” (170). He proposes that such a flawed narrative can “surprisingly confront us with our own flawed selves, show us our own mismatched parts, and remind us of the genre’s own, unacknowledged but informing paradox: of how we always hope to correct those flaws—of science and technology that have themselves repeatedly proved to be both compelling and problematic, so very ‘watchable’ yet also at times so ‘terrible’” (170).
A final note on the materiality of this volume. While the thirty-two illustrations in Science Fiction Double Feature do not necessarily line up with the arguments in the essays in which they appear, they consistently reinforce the larger ideas in the volume and offer some welcome relief to the look of pages that seem unusually densely packed with prose, in part because they discourage the eye with incredibly long paragraphs. The book’s forty-seven-item “Select SF Filmography” and its eighty-five-item “Select Cult/SF Bibliography” will be of considerable use and value to students of sf and cult film.
NOTES
1. The Cult Film Experience followed Hoberman and Rosenbaum’s lead insofar as it divided consideration of cult film into two broad categories, “The Classical Cult Film” and “The Midnight Movie,” the latter category specified and explored in The Midnight Movies.
2. While Rocky Horror has been widely recognized as the paradigmatic midnight movie cult film and the flagship example of the place of fan activity in conferring cult status, Barry K. Grant’s long look at the film in his “Science Fiction Double Feature: Ideology in the Cult Film” barely mentions its ties to sf, spending much more attention to the film’s affinities with the musical (129).
WORKS CITED
Grant, Barry K. “Science Fiction Double Feature: Ideology in the Cult Film.” The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason. Ed. J.P. Telotte. Austin: U of Texas P, 1991. 122-37.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Play It Again: Review of The Cult Film Experience.” Sight and Sound (Nov. 1991). Online.
Telotte, J.P., ed. The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason. Austin: U of Texas P, 1991.
Back to Home