SPECULATIVE VISIONS AND IMAGINARY MEALS

Abstract

As speculative visions, science fiction films reveal the dreams and the anxieties of the present. This essay focuses on food scenes in science fiction films depicting the future on a post-apocalyptic earth to explore the commentary they offer on the health of the environment (including humans). Familiar and unfamiliar foods, prepared, shared, denied, and eaten illuminate popular perceptions about nature, technology, and humanity. In this analysis, food is imagined not only as a necessary sustenance for corporeal needs, but also as a liminal cultural symbol of life and death, nature and culture, human and non-human. Such projections of food, whether dramatic or parodic, help illustrate competing claims of nostalgia, progress, failure, control, alienation, and excess.

Keywords:

• food
• science fiction films
• post-apocalytic
• environment
• liminal
• nostalgia

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Phaedra Pezzullo for her encouragement and many helpful suggestions from this essay's beginnings (at the 2003 National Communication Association Convention) to its final draft.

Notes

1. These films, spanning a nearly 30-year time period, are #2. Star Wars ( 1977 ), #4. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial ( 1982 ), #5. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace ( 1999 ), #7. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ( 2003 ), and #10. Jurassic Park ( 1993 ) (p. 229).

2. Kuhn (1999) notes, ‘overviews of the genre, for example, very often adopt a historical approach in which science fiction's thematic preoccupations are tracked alongside social events and attitudes prominent at the time the work first appeared’ (p. 3). These preoccupations and concerns often take the form of explorations of environmental crises, matched to each era's own set of anxieties. In the 1950s, fears of radioactive fallout spawned mutants: It Came from Beneath the Sea ( 1955 ), Them! ( 1954 ), The Incredible Shrinking Man ( 1957 ), The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman ( 1958 ). By the 1970s, when nuclear holocaust seemed poised to extinguish all life on earth, films responded with opening shots of mushroom clouds and a world thrown into chaos: The Omega Man ( 1971 ), A Boy and His Dog ( 1975 ), Testament ( 1983 ), The Aftermath ( 1985 ), The Lathe of Heaven ( 1986 ), The Terminator ( 1984 ), Terminator 2: Judgment Day ( 1991 ). Biological weaponry ravaged cities and citizens in Twelve Monkeys ( 1995 ), The Postman ( 1997 ), and The Last Man ( 1999 ). Widespread pollution forces the creation of the domed city that becomes both refuge and prison in Logan's Run ( 1976 ) and the spaceship greenhouses containing the last remnants of earth's forests in Silent Running ( 1971 ). Pollution and overpopulation result in the grim New York cityscape of Soylent Green ( 1973 ) and the dreary Los Angeles of Blade Runner ( 1982 ). Toxins causing widespread sterility refigure life in The Handmaid's Tale ( 1990 ). Greenhouse gases and global climate change altered the worlds found in Waterworld ( 1995 ), Artificial Intelligence: AI ( 2001 ), and The Day After Tomorrow ( 2004 ).

3. Scholarly attention to food in film only recently has begun to flourish. Telotte (1985) argues the persistent images of food and appetite in film noir suggests an underlying critique of society in post-World War II America and an anxiety about consumerism. Boswell (1990) concludes that the abundance of food popular Hollywood films is used to set up a direct contrast; it becomes a sign of ‘spiritual famine,’ exposing other yearnings that are not so easily filled. ‘Hollywood's America,’ argues Boswell, ‘is forever the land of plenty, and Americans are forever uncomfortably hungry amidst an abundance of food’ (1990, p. 21). Dorfman's (1992) exploration of the ‘carnal kitchen’ in American popular culture examines scenes in which intimacy and seduction are entangled with food preparation and consumption. Barr (1996) uses food scenes in films to explore ethnicity, specifically the ways in food choices and dining scenes help to relay information about Jewish identity, culture, and assimilation. See also Poole (1999), Ferry (2003), and Bower (2004).

4. Not all science fiction films treat the subject of food, though such occasional absences are surprising. See Logan's Run ( 1976 ).

5. The role of technology in Americans’ food system is visible as well in the technologies used to plant, cultivate, and harvest foods, as well as the extensive infrastructure used to transport and deliver food. See Berry (1997).

6. Forster (2004) raises a similar point, noting ‘there are many points of convergence between food and science fiction, making food such a helpful point of illustration for metaphor and exemplification of social concerns’ (p. 253). Forster identifies only two points of convergence: the body and technology. A third could be also added: the environment. The three are deeply entangled.

7. I have excluded futuristic science fiction films set in space or on distant planets. My interest lies in what films have to say about this planet and its environmental conditions – with food serving as one important means of measuring the health of natural conditions and technological systems. One exception is my discussion of Silent Running ( 1971 ), for the plot is driven by the destruction of the earthly environment and the effort to preserve what remains of nature.

8. A detailed analysis of this scene is found in Cimagala (2005).

9. Food scarcity and hunger offer films an opportunity to examine humanity on another level: teasing out what constitutes proper, or at least permissible, food. To assuage their hunger, characters ingest bugs (Twelve Monkeys), rats raw (Battlefield Earth), rats roasted over open fires (2019: After the Fall of New York), and canned dog food (The Road Warrior).

10. Tellingly, when the Robocop is injured, his partner nurses him back to health, bringing him three jars of babyfood. Though she willingly assumes the role of nurturing mother caring for a sick child, the Robocop refuses his part. He has regained memory of his past, and this humanizing element causes him to reject the food. Later, he sets the jars atop each other in a small pyramid and shoots them (and the smiling face of a young boy on their label) one by one. His childlike innocence has been lost.

11. The following two science fiction films also make reference to agriculture: Tank Girl ( 1995 ) (a glimpse of a hydroponic garden helps explain the source of food) and Sleeper ( 1973 ) (a comic garden of gigantic fruits and vegetables lying on bare ground, attached by hoses to a central source of nutrients).

12. Jefferson (1787/1954) argued, ‘Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue … Corruption of morals … is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition’ (pp. 164–165).

13. With fewer than two percent of the American population currently engaged in agricultural labor, Vic's understanding of farming may, in fact, parallel that of most contemporary Americans living at a distance from the farm fields and orchards which supply their food (and their cotton, wool, silk, linen, and hemp clothes). The mirror image of ‘urban legends’ may be the rural stories circulated among farmers about ‘city slickers’ who look for potatoes growing above ground, etc.

14. A more compelling reading of the logic of cannibalism is found in Fernandez-Armesto (2002), who regards it as a ‘ritual practiced not for a meal, but for its meaning’ (p. 27). He argues that cannibalism arises out of a desire for self-transformation, in which human flesh – like many other foods – are eaten in the hopes that they will pass on their virtue.

15. For further reading on GMOs, see Teitel and Wilson (1999), Rifkin (1998), and Lappe and Bailey (1998).

16. Recommended sources on the social consequences of contemporary agricultural policy and practices include Berry (1997) and Davidson (1996).

17. On links between food and health (especially obesity), see Nestle (2002), Critser (2003), and Schlosser (2001).