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Sci-Why?: On the Decline of a Film Genre in an Age of Technological Wizardry

Author(s): Vivian Sobchack
Source: Science Fiction Studies , Vol. 41, No. 2 (July 2014), pp. 284-300
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.41.2.0284

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284 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 41 (2014)

Vivian Sobchack
Sci-Why?: On the Decline of a Film Genre in an Age of
Technological Wizardry
In some ways my title says it all, questioning as it does the present value of
the science-fiction film (and perhaps of science itself) at the start, and then
displacing technology from its traditional instrumental alliance with the genre
to what is an unexpectedly unsurprising conjunction with wizardry—and, by
implication, magic—at the end. And, indeed, since the millennium, there has
been an unprecedented rise in the mainstream production—and popularity —of
fantasy film and television, in which anything resembling empirical logic has
been trumped by magical thinking (of which more later).1 Certainly, sf has not
disappeared from our screens. Nonetheless, it has lost much of its pride of
generic place in amazing us with its spectacles or provoking us with resonant
narratives that both displace and deal with contemporaneous cultural concerns.
In relation to spectacle, this loss of privilege is the result of the exponential
increase in the use of CGI cinematic and televisual effects and their diffusion
across a variety of genres. “Special effects” have become naturalized and are
no longer quite so special, nor need their visible presence be bound (and
allegorized), as it has been in sf, to a “rationalization” that pretends to some
empirical basis in natural law or extrapolates from present science,
technology, and social organization. In many ways, then, the spectacles of
most sf film and television have become both expected and commonplace.
Moreover, as I will later discuss in some detail, not only have contemporary
digital effects (and the effects of digital technology more broadly) been
cinematically naturalized, but they also have been culturally internalized. In
sum, sf spectacles have lost much of their aura—the only recent exceptions
being Avatar (2009) and Gravity (2013), both of which were sufficiently
innovative to put the “special” back in their effects, “wow” audiences, and
achieve “blockbuster” status.2
In relation to narrative, sf always has also been—and still is—much more
constrained than fantasy because of its alliance with empirical logic and
instrumental process, and the need to explain its extrapolations and thus the
presence of its effects. Historically, this constraint (and restraint) has been an
asset rather than a liability. Today, however, whether set in outer space or
earth-bound, sf seems narratively grounded by a generic gravitas that disallows
its full participation in the wizardry and wish fulfillment allowed by the
narrative exemptions that grace fantasy—a genre that has come into its own
as such only since the millennium. Moreover, although often leaden, sf’s
narrative gravity seems also lightweight and trivial insofar as the genre has
primarily avoided any reflective relation (allegorical or not) to the significant
issues that trouble contemporary culture.3 Indeed, I can think of only three
recent mainstream sf films that explicitly addressed culturally relevant
concerns. Both In Time (2011) and Looper (2012) not only extrapolated from

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 SCI-WHY? 285

the commonplace awareness that “time is money” and that, with enough
money (an overt class issue), one could “buy time,” but they also resonated
with the intensified phenomenological sense that we “have no time” in digital
culture and that, in an imploding world (and planet), time itself is “running
out.” Refusing easy satire, Her (2013) extrapolated from our unprecedented
intimacy with personalized digital technologies and our increasing incapacity
for intimacy with other human beings in a comedy that was also both serious
and poignant.
These films, as well as a few others, are exceptions to sf’s narrative
decline. Overall, however, given the loss of the genre’s cultural ballast, we
have seen the recent slippage of narrative sf “proper” into lengthy but
meaningless chases (what were they doing in Prometheus [2012]?); endless
battles (in 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2014) with those alien mega-Legos known
as “Transformers”; and what seem like countless adaptations and “spin-offs”
of ersatz-sf “superhero” comic books such as the aptly-named Fantastic Four
(2005) “astronauts” who gain “superpowers” after being exposed to cosmic
radiation. Indeed, the latter makes explicit the increasing transformation of
screen sf into fantasy. Of the 63 fantasies from 2000 to 2013 that rank among
each year’s 25 top-grossing films in the domestic market, half were focused
on superheroes with either technologically altered and enhanced or
supernatural powers.4 Thus, in what follows, I want to speculate further about
the recent generic ascendancy of fantasy and its “enchantment” of American
popular movies and television series, as well as about the correspondent
decline of interest in sf. What might this historical shift mean in relation to a
pervasively reconfigured technological culture in which both genres serve as
co-constitutive discursive elements as well as poetic narratives dramatized in
specific chronotopic (or spatio-temporal) forms? 5
For several disparate reasons that I later hope to show are intimately
connected at a deep structural level to the digitization of American culture, as
suggested above, I date this historical shift to the turn of the new century.
This, however, is not only because X-Men and Unbreakable were theatrically
released in 2000 to great success, respectively ranking third and eighth at the
box office, whereas Space Cowboys ranked only twenty-fifth. I would also
argue that the millennium saw the beginning of the end of the predominantly
ironic stance toward the contradictions, vicissitudes, and “cultural logic” of
life in the period of “late capitalism,” characterized so famously in 1984 by
Fredric Jameson as “postmodernism.” Emphasizing new forms of
spatialization (both disorienting and euphoric) that collapsed and absorbed time
in the simultaneity and historical pastiche of an extensible present, postmodern
temporality was informed, as Jameson argued, by an “inverted
millenarianism” that replaced “premonitions of the future, catastrophic or
redemptive” with the sense of “the end of this or that” (53). In this context,
sf became a privileged genre. Its spatializations and often dystopic scenarios
were embraced not only by the public but also, and as never before, by the
academy, which saw sf as a chronotopic form not of “fantasy” but of late
capitalist “realism.”

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286 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 41 (2014)

It was thus fitting that the twentieth century ended with its own
“real”—and dystopic—sf scenario in “Y2K”: the millennial date change that
was projected to crash computer systems and wreak world-wide havoc.
Already tinged with postmodern irony, ultimately this catastrophic scenario
became emplotted as a full-out satire—because it never happened. Nonetheless,
in little over a year, postmodern irony and satire (despite Michael Moore)
seemed an inadequate and reprehensible response to the unanticipated and
catastrophic events of 11 September 2001 (9/11) and the non-stop plague of
catastrophes to follow (wars, climate change and its disastrous consequences,
global financial collapse, mass shootings, political gridlock) not only seemed
to concretely fulfill the last century’s “premonitions of the future” as “the end
of this and that” but also seemed to mark the end of the future itself. Although
still with us, irony and satire seem now merely a sign of impotence parading
as critical distance. Indeed, once so functional in dealing with the
contradictions of life in postmodernity, both irony and critical distance
seemed, after 9/11, not only overwhelmed but also outmoded.
In this regard, in Metahistory (1973), his important work on the
emplotment and deep tropological structure of four major narrative forms of
nineteenth-century historiography, Hayden White discusses satire and irony.
The form and its trope function not only to create critical distance but also to
disclose, as White writes, “the ultimate inadequacy of … visions of the world
emplotted dramatically” as a representation of reality (10; emphasis in
original). Unlike the genres of romance, comedy, and tragedy, satire and
irony reveal a “world grown old” (10). Moreover (and relevant to the
transition from millennial postmodernity to our present historical moment),
White argues that this revelation that the world has grown old functions not
only to “prepare … consciousness for a repudiation of all sophisticated
conceptualizations of the world” but, in so doing, also “anticipates a return to
a mythic apprehension of the world and its processes” (10). All this is to say
that beginning with the satire of a millennial catastrophe that never happened
shortly followed by so many that did, we have come to sense on a daily basis
that the world we live in has grown old. American culture has become
increasingly impatient with—and exhausted by—“sophisticated
conceptualizations of the world,” by social, economic, and political
complexities so intricate, so global, and so life-threatening that they not only
challenge notions of “critical distance” and “objectivity” but also defy
“comprehension.” Hence, although yapping dogs are still around, satire and
irony no longer seem able to hold the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at
bay. Given this lived-world context since the millennium, my argument here
is that we have seen a gradual return—if with a digital difference—to “a
mythic apprehension of the world and its processes” apparent in both our
popular moving image media and more broadly in our culture.
Indeed, and counterintuitive as it may seem, this return to “mythic
apprehension” has emerged not only in the face of constant and global
catastrophe made visible by television (our “old” medium) but also from our
constant and powerful daily engagements with “new media.” Since the

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 SCI-WHY? 287

millennium, the consumer use of various digital technologies and applications,

primary among them the Internet and smartphones, has escalated, significantly
reconfiguring our experience of space, time, cognition, and process. We have
become increasingly engaged in modes of non-linear and “associative”
thought. Further expanding the spatializations of postmodernity, the Internet
and smartphone have also intensified the contraction of time. Spatially, all
things and all people seem technologically—and also
magically—“interconnected.” Temporally, our sense of sequence and duration
has given way to that of simultaneity. Cause and effect have imploded to brief
instants in which desire, affect, and agency coincide, and processes that “take
time” to produce desired outcomes try our ADHD attention as well as our
patience. In sum, even as new media seem immediately obsolete and never
immediate enough to satisfy us once we buy and use them, our desire for—and
enchantment by—their “immediacy” has also returned us (if with a significant
difference) to what White calls “mythical” reasoning, but what we today call
“magical thinking.” It has also led to the dramatic rise in the popularity of that
mode of “representation of the world” known as fantasy, which, unlike sf,
owes no allegiance to “realism.”
Although I will later characterize magical thinking in more detail, the
generic status of cinematic and televisual fantasy demands some initial
elaboration. As Brian Attebery writes, genres are not “clearly demarcated
territories … but fuzzy sets,” with a number of “prototypical examples” but
“no definitive perimeter” (“Elizabeth” 122; see also Attebery, Strategies 12-
13). As a set, however, fantasy seems a lot fuzzier than sf. Extremely
disparate in their themes and motifs, fantasy texts tended to be regarded
individually—only occasionally coalescing (as during WWII) in sufficient
quantity to be thought of, or written about, generically. Thus, in The Fantasy
Film (not insignificantly published in 2010), Katherine Fowkes laments the
scant attention paid to what she calls an “orphan” genre (171). The
“prototypical examples” of the fantasy films that structure her chapters (and
argument) are telling: The Wizard of Oz (1939), Harvey (1950), Big (1988),
Always (1989), Groundhog Day (1993), Spider-Man (2002), THE LORD OF THE
RINGS trilogy (2001-2003), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe (2005), and the HARRY POTTER series (2001-2011).6 Noteworthy
are both the “fuzzy” diffusion of her selections and the number of films
released since the millennium. As Fowkes explains (quoting an industry
analyst writing in 2007), “Until recently the film industry has considered
fantasy ‘box office poison’” (1). By 2010, however, film scholar Harry
Benshoff writes in a blurb on the back of Fowkes’s book that fantasy has now
become “contemporary cinema’s most lucrative genre.”
If X-Men was the advent of fantasy’s rise to generic privilege, its actual
arrival began in 2001 with the release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s
Stone and The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. Both begat two
extraordinary fantasy franchises and broke records at, respectively, first and
second in domestic box- office ranking for the year. Also released in 2001,
and updating a fairy-tale classic, was Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story.

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288 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 41 (2014)

Although it received little attention, it nonetheless planted a seed that, in

subsequent years, would yield a great deal more than a hill of beans. Indeed,
when I began this project in the first months of 2013, Jack and his beanstalk
were featured in an episode of Once Upon A Time (2011- ), a TV series based
on a “mash-up” of fairy tales that had emerged to great success in 2011.7
Only a few weeks after the episode aired, a cinematic Jack, the Giant Slayer
appeared—and was reviewed quite favorably by David Denby in The New
Yorker, who preferred it to yet another new fantasy release, Oz, the Great and
Powerful (“Kid’s Stuff” 56-57). And that’s not to mention (although I will) the
three films based on fairy tales released in 2012: Mirror, Mirror; Snow White
and the Huntsman; and the execrable (meaning “accursed” as well as “awful”)
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.
2001, however, was the year that inaugurated major changes in the
industry’s attitudes toward fantasy for (now obvious) economic and
technological reasons related to the year’s two blockbusters. Both Harry Potter
and Lord of the Rings were adaptations of beloved and widely known books,
and name recognition was a major factor in their production. Their huge box-
office success suggested that other well-known fantasy texts might generate not
only high revenues but also an ongoing franchise, this at a time when, as
Fowkes’s analyst put it, rather than a film’s actors, “the franchise [was] often
the star” (qtd. 31). Of course, also central to the two fantasies’ success were
their spectacular visual effects rendered by CGI, which had advanced
exponentially in the late 1990s. Perhaps less obvious but just as economically
compelling was the fact that fantasy films could easily secure a PG-13 rating
from the industry’s self-regulated MPAA and promised the broadest and
largest audience demographic in what was rapidly becoming an increasingly
segmented and niched mediascape. Finally, yet another incentive for the
industry to embrace fantasy was the extremely positive (and lucrative)
reception of both Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings abroad, suggesting that
fantasy would do well in export. And so began the unprecedented quantitative
rise in the genre’s mainstream production.
Fantasy’s rise and sf’s decline, however, is as much a qualitative as a
quantitative matter and, as I have suggested earlier, is not solely attributable
to technological and economic changes in the film industry. One need only
contrast the reception of Snow White and the Huntsman in 2012 with that same
year’s John Carter, an sf film based on novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Both
used extensive CGI, but John Carter was also screened in popular 3D and
IMAX formats. Unlike Snow White and the Huntsman, it also had a ready-
made series of sequels available for franchise. Nonetheless, John Carter was
a devastating commercial failure and set box-office records only in Russia,
whereas Snow White and the Huntsman was the highest-grossing film on its
opening weekend in the US, ranked seventeenth in the year’s box-office
rankings, and also was a big success in thirty other countries. One might
argue that the difference between the two films rested on star power—and that
Charlize Theron was a bigger audience draw than the unfortunately named
(and unknown) Taylor Kitsch. Thus it is also worth noting that, in the

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 SCI-WHY? 289

following year, two major mainstream sf films with popular stars—Elysium

with Matt Damon and the presciently-named Oblivion with Tom Cruise—were
also disappointments, ranking, respectively, only thirty-eighth and forty-first
at the domestic box office. It is never a truism in Hollywood that “if you build
it, they will come,” and we cannot hold the film industry solely, or even
primarily, responsible for the shift in the culture’s interest from sf to fantasy.
My data in arguing both a quantitative and qualitative shift in the two
genres’ production and reception is more than anecdotal. Selecting from a
much larger list of sf and fantasy films screened between 2000 and 2013, I
chose films that were clearly popular by virtue of being top grossers at the
domestic box office. I also included films that were sufficiently successful to
ensure that their titles would be familiar to most of us (whether we had seen
them or not). The criterion for selecting television series was that they had
aired for a minimum of two seasons. In my initial accountancy, however, I
disregarded such media specificity and grouped each year’s sf film and TV
series together and did the same for fantasy. What was surprising (and seemed
counter to my sense of sf’s “decline”) was that, as the years passed, each
genre’s increasing numbers stayed roughly equal. (Between 2000 and 2003,
for example, 22 sf films and TV series that fit my criteria were matched by
fantasy’s 26. Much more recently, and despite the increase in numbers
between 2011 and 2013, there were 47 sf and 55 fantasy films and television
series.)
Looked at separately, however, there were significant quantitative and
qualitative differences between both media and genres. Film fantasy saw the
continued success of the HARRY POTTER series, which unreeled between 2001
and 2011, and THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, which ended in 2003 but
inaugurated THE HOBBIT trilogy in 2013. As mentioned previously, the number
of films based on fairy tales increased. Most notable was the increasing
number of superhero films over the years. Between 2000 and 2007, there were
only one or two per year, but from 2008 through 2013 each year saw three
or four. Some of the superhero films were derived from mythology but were
far outnumbered by those drawn from comic books. What is particularly
striking quantitatively is that between 2000 and 2004, the number of fantasy
and sf films was relatively equal but, beginning in 2005, fantasy began to
significantly overtake sf. In 2005, for example, there were six fantasies to two
sf films; in 2006, four fantasies to sf’s zero; in 2007, four fantasies to sf’s
two; and in 2008, six fantasies to sf’s zero. The numbers go on like this. In
contrast to fantasy’s steady ascent, sf’s peak years were more erratic: 2000
and 2001, for example, were sparse, with only Jurassic Park III and a remake
of Planet of the Apes attracting broad attention (respectively, they were ninth
and tenth at the box office). 2002, however, saw a significant number of
popular sf films included in the top 25 box office rankings: Signs (sixth), Men
in Black II (eighth), and Minority Report (seventeenth), as well as Star Trek:
Nemesis—which, released in mid-December, didn’t make the year’s rankings
but did very well. Then, in 2003, only three sf films were major successes:
the two Matrix sequels (fourth and ninth) and the third Terminator (eighth).

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290 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 41 (2014)

Another extremely good year for sf films did not occur until 2009, when
once again there were a significant number of releases, all of them among the
year’s 25 top grossers; Avatar (first), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
(second), the rebooting and rejuvenation of Star Trek (seventh), 2012
(fifteenth), and Terminator Salvation (twenty-third). In 2010, however,
Inception was the only unequivocal sf hit (sixth), its clever premise and novel
visual effects perhaps making up for its tedious dénouement in the
unconscious, which, as Peter Schjeldahl writes in another context, has the
“disheartening tendency … to be, in the usual way of other people’s dreams,
boring” (82). Although the number of sf releases increased somewhat in 2011
with Transformers: Dark of the Moon (second at the box office), only Rise of
the Planet of the Apes (eleventh) and Source Code (sixty-second) could
properly be called sf. Good numbers continued in 2012, but aside from The
Hunger Games (third at the box office), Men in Black III (fourteenth), and
Prometheus (twenty-fourth), most of the new releases did not do well: as
mentioned, John Carter was a major disaster given its cost (forty-first), the
lower-budget Looper got good reviews but drew a limited audience (forty-
fifth), and the remake of Total Recall did not meet studio expectations (fifty-
fifth). Indeed, if we compare the two film genres since the millennium, what
is most striking about all this box-office data is the big difference in the
number of each genre’s respective successes in securing the most domestic
ticket sales and largest audiences. From 2000 through 2013, the number of
fantasies in the 25 top-grossing films is not only double that of sf (63 to 30),
but fantasies also sell more tickets than sf: 44 fantasies are ranked among the
top ten high-grossers compared to sf’s mere seventeen. In sum, while certainly
not “disappeared,” it would seem that sf film has lost not only much of its
imaginative power but also much of its popularity.
Television tells another story even if it ends the same way. Between 2000
and 2013, although the numbers increased for both genres, there were more
sf series on television than there were fantasies. Qualitatively, however, a
disproportionate number of the sf series in the earlier years were spin-offs of
Stargate SG-1 (1997-2007). In 2003 and 2004, for example, one could watch
four different Stargate series each week—although, by 2009, two of them
were in their final season, as was the long-running Battlestar Galactica (2004-
2009). Moreover, between 2009 and 2011, a significant number of new prime-
time sf series failed. Although Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
(2008-2009) made it (barely) through a second and final season, the highly
promoted and major network offerings FlashForward (2009-2010), The Event
(2010), and Terra Nova (2011) were canceled after only one season, and Joss
Whedon’s much-anticipated Dollhouse (2009) in less than that (also the fate
of his 2002 sf series, Firefly). Indeed, there were only two new sf series
appearing between 2009 and 2011 that lasted two or more seasons: 2009’s
remake of V (which ended in 2011) and 2011’s Falling Skies (still extant in
2014). Since 2011, only three new sf series have proven popular enough for
renewal: 2012’s Revolution, and 2013’s Almost Human and Under the Dome.
(However different, it seems significant that Falling Skies, Revolution, and

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 SCI-WHY? 291

Under The Dome all dramatize a highly ambivalent “neoprimitivism,” figuring

a world literally deprived of power—and digital technology. “Rules” of The
Dome, for example, specify that within the mysteriously enclosed town, phone
service, television, and Wi-Fi are not operative [Battaglio 5].)8
Fantasy, however, has fared better on television than has sf, despite its
initially lesser numbers than sf. Between 2009 and 2011, for example, only
a single fantasy series was cancelled after its first season, with a good many
others continuing their long run from earlier seasons, these including
Ghostwhisperer (2005-2010), Heroes (2006-2010), and Supernatural (2005-
). As well, 2011 saw the emergence of three new, and highly popular, series
that, in 2014, are in their fourth seasons: two are updates and mash-ups of
fairy and folk tales, Grimm and Once Upon a Time, and the third, Game of
Thrones, an epic and ersatz historical fantasy about warring dynastic families.
Moreover, fantasy’s numbers began to increase in 2012, catching up to and
overtaking sf. Indeed, from 2012 through the first quarter of 2014, a
significant number of new fantasy series have appeared: a revived Beauty and
the Beast, Sleepy Hollow, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., DaVinci’s
Demons, Believe, and Resurrection. There are more yet to come, including
Heroes Reborn (scheduled to air in 2015). Particularly notable is that almost
all of these series have appeared on major broadcast television networks—and
during primetime hours. Comparatively, this has not often been the case with
sf, which tends to be “niched” on cable networks like Syfy. Thus, between
2012 and early 2014, although the number of new sf series is equivalent to
those of new fantasy series, only Revolution and Under the Dome are on major
networks; Continuum and Helix (now on hiatus until 2015) appeared on Syfy,
while The 100 and Star-Crossed (two 2014 offerings focused on teenage
protagonists) found a home on one of the lesser networks, CW.
So, again, why this generic and cultural shift that now gives preeminence
to fantasy—to mythical kingdoms and wizards, to fairy tales and wish
fulfillment, to superheroes with special powers? Although I’ve suggested a
number of coincident reasons for this shift, to respond seriously to this
question I think it necessary to consider what White called “mythic reasoning”
and we call “magical thinking.” And to do so, I want to return to
anthropologist Bronis³aw Malinowksi’s “Magic, Science and Religion” (1948),
an essay I drew on long, long ago (and in a culture that now seems far, far
away) for my Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1987).
Malinowski argued that magic, science, and religion are endemic to all
cultures, but each differs in its expectations, practices, and social functions.
Although all three respond to the limited extent of human knowledge and
control (in particular, and respectively, of desire, the natural environment, and
death), Malinowski writes that each is a “special mode of behavior—a
pragmatic attitude built of reason, feeling, and will alike”; each is also “a
system of belief, and a sociological phenomenon as well as a personal
experience” (24). Moreover, all are always present in any culture (however
low- or high-tech), all are also in dialogic and dialectical relations with each
other, whether purposefully or not. (Such dialogic relations can be seen in the

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292 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 41 (2014)

2001 television season, which not only aired Stargate SG-1 and Star Trek:
Enterprise but also Charmed, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, and Buffy, the
Vampire Slayer.) Thus, following Malinowski, I suggested in Screening Space
that the “special modes” of Malinowski’s triumvirate found their discursive
and poetic expression in the three related genres of science fiction, fantasy,
and horror. At the time, however, my focus was on the sf film and I paid no
real attention to fantasy—to which I, as well as the rest of the culture, had
given little, if any, serious thought.
What, then, characterizes magical thinking—and fantasy as its expressive
practice? As Malinowski writes, magical thinking’s “theory of knowledge” is
dictated “by the association of ideas under the influence of desire” (87). Over
and above “impersonal” or objective observation of the “laws of nature” upon
which science bases its practices and sf its extrapolations, magical thinking and
fantasy base their practices upon the belief “that no rigid boundary exists
between the mental and the physical, between the subjective and objective,”
and thus all elements of the world are “interrelated” (St. James, Handelman,
and Taylor, 235). Hence a major character in the 2014 romantic fantasy
Winter’s Tale tells her lover, “Magic is all around us. Everything is
connected.” As Malinowski elaborates, this view of the world’s systemic
“wholeness” emerges “from the idea of a certain mystic, impersonal power”
that can be mobilized practically so as to enable humans to overcome obstacles
and achieve desired outcomes (19).
In this regard, magical thinking and magical practice (in some cultures,
films, and television series, performed by a shaman or wizard versed in
appropriate spells and practical rituals) are “not directed so much to nature as
man’s relation to nature and to the human activities which affect it”
(Malinowski 75). Magical thinking and practice are thus motivated not by
objective curiosity but by subjective emotion and desire. Indeed, much like
fantasy narrative, magical thinking is preoccupied with the simultaneous gap
and bridge—the chiasmus—between the nature of will and the will of nature,
this reversibility creating correspondences between psychic and physical
worlds and between subjects and objects. Hence, with some few exceptions,
magical thinking has been regarded historically as a “pre-logical” form of
cognition—in early anthropology, of “primitive” peoples, and, in
developmental psychology, of very young children. Its primary forms of
logical connection operate by proximal association (or coincidence) rather than
sequential causality, and lead to what has been judged an illusory correlation
or causal fallacy. (A common example is students who use the same “lucky”
pen to take exams because they received an “A” the first time they used it.)
Such associational logic depends to a great degree on simultaneity, collapsing
the sequential temporality of “if, then” to the relative immediacy of “if, now.”
Thus, in vernacular terms, such logic is often described pejoratively as
“jumping to conclusions.”
Nonetheless, if science and rational logic have “laws,” so, too, does
magical thinking. Derived from what contemporary anthropologists call the
overarching “law of participation” in which everything is, dare I say,

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 SCI-WHY? 293

interconnected, are the laws of “contagion” and “similarity.”9 The law of

contagion affirms that “things that once have been in contact with each other
may influence or change each other for a period extending well past the
termination of contact” (Kerinan 48). Hence, magical spells and potions often
require some personal item or bodily residue that contains some “essence” of
the person with whom it was in contact. Moreover, the “direction of influence
between the source and the recipient can be reciprocal,” and “certain
properties of one can be transferred to the other.” The law of similarity
affirms a related form of correspondence in that “like affects like”; that is,
things “that resemble one another share fundamental properties” (Kerinan 48;
emphasis added). Hence, the use of mandrake roots or dolls or photographs,
all of which resemble human beings, in magical practice. Like the law of
contagion, the direction of the law of similarity’s influence can also function
reciprocally and “backward causation is possible (e.g., the belief that tearing
a person’s photograph will harm him or her)” (Kerinan 48).
In “civilized” Western culture, magical thinking in adults has generally
been seen as a sign of regression to naïve, childlike, or primitive behavior that
usually emerges in stressful situations in which the effectiveness of one’s
agency is in doubt. That is, “exhausted from the battle of coping, … magical
solutions promise shelter and temporary respite” from stress (St. James,
Handelman, and Taylor 643). Indeed, most accounts of adult magical thinking
see it as an attempt to reduce uncertainty and enhance one’s sense of control
instead of dealing rationally with the complexity of real-world problems. Thus,
it would be reasonable to claim that, since the millennium the growing
popularity of fantasy film and television is an indication of some mass
psychosocial regression in the face of great and ongoing cultural stress—a
mode of escape from the present to an imaginary, simpler, and mythic past
that has much more positive force than science-fictional projections of a
dystopic future, which, since 9/11 and the world-shaking events that have
followed, is no longer imagined as a time and place one would want to
inhabit.
Certainly, to a great degree, this claim makes sense. There is also another
view of magical thinking, however, that suggests it has more progressive
properties. Given magical thinking’s belief in the agential power of human
desire to directly affect the world as well as its correlative belief in the
mystical interconnectedness of all things, might not its expression in fantasy
take us recursively back to imagining a “better” future? Indeed, recent
research demonstrates that magical thinking is not only about reducing
uncertainty but also about world-building. “Through symbolic negotiation and
play, [magical thinking functions to] provide [subjects] the opportunity to
construct … a space of ambiguity in which they can find agency in contrast to
their current situation that offers very little” (St. James, Handelman, and
Taylor 645; emphasis in original). Moreover, “in the act of conjoining … dual
threads of fantasy and reality,” magical thinking enables what might be called
“chimerical agency”—“chimera” meaning not only “imaginary” or “fantastic”
but also, from Greek mythology, “an entity created as an amalgam of

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294 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 41 (2014)

previously separate entities” (St. James, Handelman, and Taylor 646;

emphasis added). Here, then, we might find contemporary fantasy’s parallel
to Donna Haraway’s postmodern, science-fictional, and playfully ironic
cyborg.
And, indeed, an ironic response to cultural contradiction is not a
characteristic of magical thinking. Rather, “in a space between reality and
fantasy that has been blurred and made ambiguous,” subjects are endowed
with a form of agency that allows for the construction of narrative scenarios
potentially able “to reconcile the expressive and cognitive dimensions of …
experience” (St. James, Handelman, and Taylor 648; emphasis added). That
is, magical thinking “empowers informants to transform coping with the day-
to-day paradoxes endemic to [contemporary life] into moral strivings” (St.
James, Handelman, and Taylor 647; emphasis added). This transformation
occurs through “narrative structures which re-enchant [the subjects’] lived
worlds” and affirm “a moral universe where good deeds are rewarded and evil
ones punished”—and, as in most fantasy scenarios, where loyalty,
steadfastness, and friendship counter treachery, self-interest, and greed (St.
James, Handelman, and Taylor 636). In this enchanted world, even magic is
resolved in terms of moral and poetic “justice”—hence the warning, “Be
careful what you wish for.” The fulfillment of “bad” or “evil” wishes in
fantasy tends to backfire on the ones who made them (again an instance of
“backward causation”).
Jack Zipes, a scholar of fairy tales, likewise believes that fantasy narratives
transform coping into moral strivings and the desire for a different and better
world than the one we live in (see, e.g., his The Irresistible Fairy Tale). As
Joan Acocella glosses his argument on the subject, “Because [fairy tales] are
grounded in a naïve morality,” [they] “offer us a ‘counterworld,’ which
encourages us to step back, consider the dubious morality of our own world,
and take steps to reform it” (77).10 Zipes’s argument is aptly illustrated in an
anonymous posting on the Internet Movie Database about Once Upon a Time
(the aforementioned series that remixes fairy tales and locates their characters
in the contemporary world as well as in fairy-tale settings). The poster seems
both reflective and sincere: “You have characters who you want to hate but
can’t, and characters you are just trying to figure out. You have people who
are in it for themselves. People who just want to help. It’s relatable (aside
from the fairy-tale aspect) to people who are working in their everyday life,
which makes this show so intriguing. If you are the kind of person that [sic]
wants to escape from your world, but you have to deal with this world, watch
this show!” Magical thinking and fantasy are in this sense not simply
regressive or escapist in function. Indeed, as Malinowski writes, “The function
of magic is to ritualize man’s optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of
hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over
doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism” (90).
And, in our present life-world, looking toward the future, we have much to
be pessimistic about. Building a counter-world seems in order. Unfortunately,
however, world-building shouldn’t stop at the Sims or Second Life.

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 SCI-WHY? 295

I began this meditation on the ascendancy of fantasy by suggesting that

following the millennium, several disparate phenomena were involved in the
extraordinary rise of interest in a genre that previously was barely perceived
as such. More coincident and coeval than causal, the phenomena I discussed
were economic and technological changes in the film industry; distressing and
stressful natural and cultural events of great magnitude that followed one upon
another, confounding rational comprehension and solution as well as any
positive imagination of the future; disenchantment with (and often outright
repudiation of) sophisticated scientific conceptions of the world and the
naturalization of new technologies through daily use; and, last but not least,
a concurrent rise in magical, or associative, thinking. As I move toward
conclusion, however, I want to add one more phenomenon to these other “co-
incidents” that is hardly “coincidental” and provides the deep structure that
culturally links them all. As suggested earlier, this is not merely the
naturalization of digital technology but also, and more radical in its
implications, the culturally pervasive, yet personally intimate, internalization
of digital technology.
What might I mean by “internalization” in this context? Although written
in 1962, Arthur C. Clarke’s oft-quoted “third law” resonates throughout our
present life-world: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic” (21). The sufficiently advanced technology in question here is,
however, definitely not extraterrestrial. Thus, also quoting Clarke in a 2001
article entitled “Logic Versus Magic in Critical Systems,” software engineer
Peter Arney points out that “most of the devices we use daily, and rely on,
are now too complex for anyone but a specialist to understand…. When [a
certain level of] such … understanding becomes infeasible—for example the
cellular phone—perhaps we give up and accept the device as being ‘magic’”
(49). Indeed, I would argue that our constant quotidian use of “new” digital
technology (in particular, but not limited to, computers, the Internet,
smartphones, and other mobile devices) has led to a chronotopic
reconfiguration not only of our sense of space and time but also of our modes
of cognition. That is, despite their grounding in the rationalism of sequential
and algorithmic logic, all these digital devices have not only enabled the
depressing 24/7 visibility of our “world grown old” but also fostered our
cognitive “return to a mythic apprehension of the world and its processes”—to
magical thinking and the ascent of fantasy as the preeminent form of its
cultural expression.11
This internalization of digital technology has also led to contemporary
culture’s unprecedented fascination with superheroes. In this regard,
philosopher of technology Don Ihde has connected magical thinking to
“technofantasies” that refuse the unintended consequences and trade-offs that
occur with real-world technologies (47). Certainly, those hard- and software
engineers who created the Internet and our various devices never dreamed that
their rational designs and algorithmic applications would lead to the decline of
sequential logic or that their goals of connectivity and efficiency would lead
to an intense desire for “immediacy” and the effacement of technological

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296 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 41 (2014)

mediation. Thus, Ihde writes, “Desire-fantasy with respect to technologies

harbors an internal contradiction” (47). And pointing explicitly to the figural
function of superheroes, he continues: “On the one side, we want the super-
powers or enhancements which technologies can confer … but on the other,
the technofantasy is to have this enhancement be so totally transparent that it
becomes us. This is a Superman technofantasy; to have and to be the power
embodied” (47; emphasis in original). In sum, “technofantasy hype is the
current code for magic” (47). Magic in this fantasy is what we might articulate
as (im)mediacy: superheroes just “have” the power of technology—whether
born with it like Superman, or biologically altered in some way like the Hulk
or Spider Man, or technologically accessorized like Batman, or suited up like
Iron Man in a transparent mode of second nature. Superheroes in film and on
television efface the difference between science and magic, between sf and
fantasy. They are our culture’s “chimera,” embodied so as “to reconcile the
expressive and cognitive dimensions of … experience” and our couplings with
technology (St. James, Handelman, and Taylor 648; emphasis added).
Moreover, they hyperbolize our own—and a great deal less
powerful—“chimerical agency” as we wield our (always only nearly)
transparent digital devices. Better to save the world than to order a pizza
online.
It is worth remembering (for those old enough) how relatively recent our
digital devices are. Our desktop and personal computers became commercially
viable on a mass scale in the early 1980s. Public access to the Internet
followed shortly thereafter and allowed us to browse the web according to,
dare I say, our heart’s desire and its associational, rather than solely
rationalized, impulses. Although mobile (cellular) phones became
commercially available in 1983 (just a year before Jameson’s essay on the
logic of “late capitalism”), phones combining telephony, tele-vision, and
computing didn’t hit the stores until 1994 and weren’t referred to widely as
“smartphones” until 1997. 1994 was also the year that Amazon.com was
founded and that ordering pizza and other consumer goods became available
through the Internet—this only six years before the millennium.
On a daily basis, all these new devices and the speed of their processes
condensed time into a quasi-transparent yet mediated (im)mediacy that allowed
for the (almost) instant gratification or wish fulfillment of our desire for
communication, for information, for material things. Moreover, these devices
effaced spatial distance and expanded our sense of simultaneity, the sense that
everything and everyone was in contact and interconnected (“interrelated,” to
use Malinowski’s term). Given the speed at which our devices responded to
our desire, our patience and pleasure in duration shrank in proportion to our
desire for (im)mediacy, as did our interest in the sequential operations and
rationalized logic not only of process but also of explanation. Above all,
however, we increasingly spent much (if not most) of our daily lives in a real
ambiguous space which, like fantasy, conjoined the real and the virtual—this
conjunction constructing, quite literally, a chimerical agency not otherwise

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 SCI-WHY? 297

readily available when off our computers and smart phones—or outside of
fantasy narratives.
In sum, there is a deep structural homology between the cultural logic of
our daily digital practices and the associative logic of magical thinking. In this
regard, the digital revolution has wrought what Ihde would describe as an
“ironic technics”—irony, here, a function not of human critical consciousness
but, rather, of the “unintended or contingent consequences” of technological
design and practice (47). In this instance, our constant use of digital devices
not only promotes magical thinking’s laws (of participation, contagion, and
similarity) but also is homologous with magical practice. That is, recent
research suggests that magical practice “may operate as efficient causality,
evoking a technological utopia and acting as an imitation of technology or a
compensation for its effects” (St. James, Handelman, and Taylor 636;
emphasis in original). Moreover, “premised on the omnipotence of
technology” and now “embodied in consumer goods,” efficient causality finds
its expression “in a proclivity for magical solutions to life’s problems, that is,
quick and low-effort gains” (St. James, Handelman, and Taylor 636). Where
once in “primitive” societies, magical practice imitated technology, in the
magical logic of backward causation, technology now imitates magical
practice. Is it any wonder, then, that Hogwarts is a technical school? Or that,
in our Muggles world, in place of wands and spells and curses, the digital
technologies we live with on a daily basis have operationalized sequential
causality into something more efficient and low effort, the speed of its
processing transforming it into the efficient causality of magical thinking?
Science and science fiction demand due process. They are characterized by
both high-effort labor, temporal duration, and sequential operations, and
causation. Suffice it to say that if sf was the chronotopic form of late capitalist
realism before the millennium, fantasy has increasingly become the
chronotopic form of a “later capitalist realism” after it. How long this will be
the case is hard to predict—particularly in a culture that cannot imagine a
positive future and regards the recent escalation of catastrophe as a revelation
of an impending—and retributive—end time. Given that magic, science, and
religion are always at war with each other for cultural preeminence, when one
fails to satisfy, another will step into the breach. Indeed, on Easter weekend
of 2013 when I was writing the first version of this essay, NBC primetime
news featured a story on the film and television renaissance of the Bible.
Apparently, the History channel’s series on the good book captured more than
10 million viewers. Moreover, both Ang Lee and Ridley Scott were planning
Moses movies, and film director Darren Aronofsky was in post-production on
his retributive end-time film, Noah. Religion, Malinowski writes, “saves man
from a surrender to death and destruction” (51). (As we all know, Noah, his
family, and the animals survive to repopulate the earth.) It is telling, however,
that as I was updating this essay in late March of 2014 on the cusp of Noah’s
momentary release, Aronofsky described it as “a fantasy film taking place in
a quasi-Biblical world” (Friend 56). A few days later, the Variety reviewer
echoed this reference to fantasy, describing the film’s major battle sequence

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298 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 41 (2014)

as “an extended outtake from Middle-earth” (Foundas). The New Yorker

reviewer went even further, pointing to the film’s “Game of Thrones-style
helmets” and soldiers’ attempting to get on Noah’s ark as recalling “the
surging masses of the Lord of the Rings trilogy” (Denby, “Man Overboard”
74). A week later, however, Noah’s opening weekend supremacy at the box
office ($43 million) yielded to Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The
Marvel superhero took in $95 million (the highest domestic opening weekend
revenue ever recorded for an April release) while Noah dropped to second and
a paltry $17 million, and Divergent, an sf film based on a series of “young
adult” novels that made more than Noah on its opening weekend ($54
million), dropped to third with only $12 million in box office receipts. Magic,
science, and religion—all there (if not quite in that order), all in dialogue with
each other and the culture of which they are a part. Nonetheless, in the years
of magical thinking and digital wizardry, fantasy dominates the discussion.
Sci-why, indeed!
NOTES
1. Since I am interested in the relations between moving image media and large
segments of the American public, my focus in this essay is on popular sf and fantasy
film and television series that have been made for—and consumed by—mass audiences.
Hence my use of the terms “mainstream” and “popular.” I see popularity as a key
criterion for asserting such relations between media and culture, in the case of film
determined by box-office ranking and, in television series, by the series’ staying
power. Thus, in what follows, I do not address independent or art house films given
their limited distribution.
2. Both films were critical as well as popular successes, praised for their innovative
use of effects technology to create something that had not been seen before. Avatar
used motion-capture and 3D cinematography to achieve the depth of what seemed a
spatially-inhabitable alien world. Gravity combined new cinematographic techniques
with 3D and green-screen compositing to convey kinetically to audiences an imagined
sense of being in outer space.
3. Whereas most recent mainstream sf films seem narratively impoverished. As my
friend and colleague Kathleen McHugh notes in a paper delivered at the 2013 Eaton
Conference entitled “Science Fiction: For the Treatment of Depression,” the genre’s
various motifs linking planetary to personal catastrophe have been borrowed of late by
a number of extremely interesting independent and art house films focused on the
perceived loss of a future. Her presentation focused on three films released in 2011:
Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Miranda July’s The Future, and Jeff Nichols’s Take
Shelter.
4. All of the domestic box office figures in this project are from Box Office Mojo,
accessed at <www.boxofficemojo.com>.
5. I refer here to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope.” First outlined
during 1937-38 and subsequently developed in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope
in the Novel,” the chronotope, as Michael Holmquist glosses it, is “a unit of analysis
for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial
categories represented. The distinctiveness of this concept … lies in the fact that neither
category is privileged; they are utterly interdependent. The chronotope is an optic for
reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they
spring” (435-36).

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 SCI-WHY? 299

6. In my project here, I follow the same exclusions and inclusions that guide
Fowkes’s generic discussion of fantasy. She excludes from her corpus sf and horror
films, both of which have their own established generic status, prototypes, and
variations. She does, however, include superhero films, which, although often linked
to sf, mark their heroes as, indeed, fantastic and share few of sf’s other interests or
themes. For the sake of clarity and also to avoid unnecessary double counting, I have
also excluded those very few films and television series that could be relegated to either
or both sf and fantasy, such as The Twilight Zone (1959-64), The X-Files (1993-2002),
and Lost (2004-2010). I have also excluded all animated films and television series.
7. The series was pitched to the networks early in 2002 but was turned down at the
time because of its fantastical nature.
8. Under the Dome’s executive producer Neal Baer relates the show’s success to
“the nation’s psyche,” explaining, “We’re all trapped under this biodome with
dwindling resources, … and we’re all worried about what the outcome is going to be”
(Battaglio 5).
9. There is an expansive classic and contemporary literature on magical thinking,
its logic and its laws. In concert with Malinowski’s much earlier essay, my
contemporary sources here are Rozin, Millman, and Nemeroff; Kerinan; St. James,
Handelman, and Taylor; and, in a more popular vein, Matthew Hutson.
10. This is a quite different view than that of Bruno Bettelheim, a Freudian who
saw fairy tales as precisely helping children to adjust to—and cope with—the emotional
turmoil caused by trying to make sense of ambiguity and contradiction in the world as
it is.
11. Obviously, however significantly weakened, our older forms of Enlightenment
logic are still with us. It is of note that, particularly on television, the ambiguous space
of fantasy occasionally attempts to reconcile Enlightenment logic and magical thinking.
For example, although both Grimm and Sleepy Hollow focus on supernatural characters
and events, they are also police procedurals.
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Craenest and Alfred Strohmeir. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2001. 49-67.
Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.
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(2009): 114-36.
Bakhtin, M.M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” 1937-38. The
Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist.
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Battaglio, Stephen. “Why Dome Dominates.” TV Guide (15-28 Jul. 2013): 4-5.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy
Tales. 1975. New York: Vintage, 1977.
Clarke, Arthur C. Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible.
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Denby, David. “The Current Cinema: Kid’s Stuff.” The New Yorker (18 Mar. 2013):
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75.
Foundas, Scott. Review of Noah. Variety. 20 Mar. 2014. Online. 28 Mar. 2014.

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Fowkes, Katherine. The Fantasy Film. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
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Hutson, Matthew. 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us
Happy, Healthy, and Sane. New York: Plume/Penguin, 2013.
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ABSTRACT
This essay speculates about the generic ascendancy of fantasy in American popular
movies and television series since the millennium—and the correspondent
disenchantment and decline (although not disappearance) of science fiction. This shift
to fantasy in American culture seems the result of a number of discrete but coincident
cultural phenomena: major advances in CGI technology and changes in film industry
economic strategies; the inappropriateness of postmodern irony after 9/11 and the
ongoing (and highly visible) catastrophes to follow (wars, climate change and its
disastrous consequences, global financial collapse, mass shootings, political gridlock);
the perceived failure of science and “rational” thought to solve major problems; and,
most important, the impact of digital technology and consumer electronics on our daily
lives—and our modes of cognition. The essay argues that all of these phenomena have
encouraged (and in the case of digital technology, enabled) the rise of a form of
associational logic known as magical thinking—and fantasy film and television as its
primary mode of expression. The development of this argument draws upon
quantitative and qualitative data about the shifting popularity of sf and fantasy film and
television from 2000 through 2013, as well as anthropologist Bronis³aw Malinowski’s
1925 essay “Magic, Science and Religion” and more contemporary social science
research on magical thinking.

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