Blast from the past: hopeful retrofuturism in science fiction film

ABSTRACT

Observing images of jetpacks, flying cars and space colonization today provokes a contradictory reaction. On the one hand, such phenomena remain unrealized and unfamiliar in everyday life but, on the other, they are indexed in the contemporary cultural imaginary to a particular historical moment: the technophilic futurism of the mid-twentieth century. This paradoxical coming together of the future and the past is at the core of the retrofuturist impulse, or the conscious reprisal of disappointed visions of yesterday’s tomorrows. In this article, drawing on a number of science fiction films, I argue that the return to past images of the future has a potentially hopeful function, playing a role in rejuvenating and renewing utopian desire in the contemporary world. After discussing the current literature on retrofuturism, I turn to the work of the great utopian scholar Ernst Bloch, whose account of the dialectic of hope and disappointment offers a productive means by which to understand the residual utopian quality of the technological futures of the twentieth century. On this basis, I analyse two recent science fiction films, Elysium (2013) and Tomorrowland (2015), that bring together retrofuturist imagery and a hopeful disposition.

KEYWORDS:

• Ernst Bloch
• film
• retrofuturism
• science fiction
• utopia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As such, retrofuturism should be differentiated from other cultural movements focussed on yesterday’s tomorrows. Steampunk, for example, is primarily concerned with the future as imagined in the Victorian moment rather than the mid-twentieth century (see Guffey and Lemay 2014).

2. Unsurprisingly, the retrofuturist comedy Space Station 76 (2014), which parodies the dreams of the future articulated in the 1970s, is set on a rotating wheel space station.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/J500033/1].

Notes on contributors

Joe P.L. Davidson

Joe P.L. Davidson is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. His thesis is focussed on the relationship between temporality and utopia. It utilizes a range of utopian texts – from William Morris’s News from Nowhere to contemporary science fiction film – to develop a critical social theoretical account of progress and historical time.