Day: last term, Friday.
Myth and Religion within Battle Star Galactica as is the idea of analysing the concept of conciousness through the medium of Battle Starg Galactica. I could also question why Battle Star Galactica can’t be concidered Cyber Punk even though it conforms to many of its themes such as Cyborgs, the cyber body, the ghost, the stranger and virtual sex. It is invariably a sci-fi in space which makes it not part of the cyber punk genre, however how come Fifth element is? They are both space based sci-fi however fifth element plays a lot like a film noir and it has the most important piece that makes up a cyber punk story line, the character whom does not really want to be involved.
Films to take into consideration along side battle star galactica include, Fifth Element and Blade Runner. The modern band Mindless Self Indulgence could be included too as they parody some classic themes from cyberpunk.
[Link] Philosophy in Battlestar Galactica
[Link] Thoughts on Battlestar Galactica
[Link] Cyber Punk review of Fith Element
“Patriarchal discourse constructs woman as ‘other’: she is different because she is not male; and one consequence of this isthat she is not creditied with that unified subjectivity so beloved of male capitalist culture” (G, Day & C, Bloom ed. 1988:84)
“Patriarchal disourse constructs women not as they want to be but as men want them to be, and in this sense they are absent to them selves but present to men” (G, Day & C, Bloom ed. 1988:85)
“The gaze is both a metaphor in film criticism and an intergral part of film discourse and narrative. Laura Mulvey first introduced the idea that men looking at women in film use two forms of mastery over her: a sadistic voyeurism which controls women’s sexuality through dominating male characters, and a symbolic fetishisation of women’s sexuality” (G, Day & C, Bloom ed. 1988:70)
“Women are objectified eroitc objects existing in film simply as recipients of the male gaze” (G, Day & C, Bloom ed. 1988:70) This is because film assumes that the audience is male.
“The ironic narrative stance gives us a heronine with a consciousness capabe of recognising directy her economic and sexual lack of freedom in a patriarchal world” (G, Day & C, Bloom ed. 1988:148)
“The question of choice, or lack of it, is echoed throughout the tales, and this is the Sadean framework – fuck or be fucked, both in the litteral and in the metaphorical sense.” (G, Day & C, Bloom ed. 1988:149)
“In cultural terms, of course, virginity is the ultimate sign of female purity – it is a state with magical properties. ” (G, Day & C, Bloom ed. 1988:153)
“The irony of all this for pornorgraphy is that female sexuality, whiich it ostensibly shows, parades and displays, is in fact the very thing that pornography represses. What it instead reveals is male desire desireing to be desired by male desire.” (G, Day & C, Bloom ed. 1988:93)
“In some of its most popular interpretations, science fiction is considered a fundamentally twentieth-century phenomenon, rooted in a predominantly western experience of technological growth. Yet the genesis of science fiction could be traced back to the year AD150.” (D, Cavallaro. 2000:1)
“From the 1950s onwards, science fiction became more and more concerned with the impact of technology on everyday lives and on the fate of the planet … The New Wave’s focus was on topical issues such as environmental depletion, urban overcrowding and the relationship between technology, crime, drug addiction and sexuality.” (D, Cavallaro. 2000:5)
“Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929) is a classic of hard-boiled detective fiction that anticipates important aspects of cyberpunk. Its hero is a loner who has to face up to an amorphous world of corruption and violence and juggle with his toughness as both a physical attribute and an intellectual faculty.” (D, Cavallaro. 2000:9)
“… hinting at an analogy between the modern detective and the knight errant of the mediaeval chivalric tradition.” (D, Cavallaro. 2000:9)
“Cyberpunk comments on the conflicting perspectives examined in the preceding paragraphs by emphasizing the idea that reality is always up for grabs. The future does not signal an escape from but actually an amplification of the drab, messy, bruised texture of the every day as we know it” (D, Cavallaro. 2000:37-38)
“… cyberpunk cinematic classic Blade Runner combines the conventions of film noir with those of post modern science fiction.” (D, Cavallaro. 2000:38)
“The terms real and imaginary may seen unreconcilable. How can an imaginary space or concept be real? How can reality associate itself with the imaginary? These sort of questions result from an ingrained tendency to situate reality on the side of things as they are and the imaginary on that of thingsas they might be or might have been.” (D, Cavallaro. 2000:38-39)
“The roots of cyberpunk are not, of course, purely literary. The ‘cyber’ in cyberpunk refers to science and, in particular, to the revolutionary redefinition of the relationship between humans and machines brought about by the science of cybernetics.” (D, Cavallaro. 2000:12)
“… the term ‘cyberpunk’ was introduced by Bruce Bethke in a short story bearing this title that he wrote in the spring of 1980 and was published in Amazing Science Fiction Stories in November 1983.” (D, Cavallaro. 2000:13)
“… a major concern linking these various (cyberpunk) writers is the question: ‘What aspect of humanity makes us human?’ This question is undoubtedly central to cyberpunk and crops up repeatedly as so-called real humans interact with Artiificial Intelligences, androids, cyborgs, computer-simulated bodies, mutants and replicants and are required to establish what exactly distinguishes the natural from the artificial … this is clearly exemplified by Philip K. Disk’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1972), a novel that anticipates cyberpunk in important ways … its hero … is recruited to destroy replicants and … identif(ies) his targets by means of atest supposed to recognise non-human creatures … This suggests that artificial beings may be capable of deeper emotions. ” (D, Cavallaro. 2000:13) This can be linked to Battle Star Galactica because it can be said to question what is conciousness, what is it to be human?
“… the ‘cyber’ component in the term cyberpunk alludes to the fact that the point of reference of this branch of science fiction is cybernetics rather than spaceships and robots. The ‘punk’ element, for its part, hints at a defiant attitude based in urban steet culture. Cyberpunk’s characters are people on the fringe of society: outsiders, misfits and psychopaths, struggling for survival on a garbage-strewn planet.” (D, Cavallaro. 2000:14)
“If reality is a difficult concept to define in science fiction generally, this is particularly true of cyberpunk.” (D, Cavallaro. 2000:14)
“The coupling of cybernetics and punk may well seem an unholy marriage, given certain popular tendencies to associate the former with control, order and logic and the latter with anarchy, chaos and unrest … in order to represent a paradoxical culture riven by conflict and contradiction … (which is ) embedded in cyberculture … a sense of instability. (D, Cavallaro. 2000:19) Read from this page to the end of the chapter, it investigates the meaning behind the words cyber and punk and how they work together to describe cyberculture.
Fifth Element is much like the scream trilogy in that like scream reflects upon and plays with the horror genre; fifth element does the same to cyberpunk. Zorg of Zorg industries wears atop his head a clear plastic shell covering the one bald half while the other is covered by hair, this can be associated with the concept of the cyborg within cyber-culture to the extent that it reflects upon the idea of the cyberpunk cyborg however this time while the plastic prospetic lays atop its users head, it does nothing for the bald half other than make it more obvious to the audiences gaze. (check page 72 onwards from (D, Cavallaro) to find associations of the cyber-body within fifth element, as well as the doll within blade runner and the ghost within battle star galactica. Quite possibly all three can be found within each film at some point.)
A, Butler 2007. The Pocket Essential: Philip K. Dick. Hertfordshire: Pocket Essentials [ISBN: 978-1-904048-92-3]
C, Bloom & G, Day (ed.) 1988. Perspectives on pornography: Sexuuality in Film and Literature. London: Macmillan [ISBN: 0-333-46539-3]
D, Cavallaro 2000. Cyberpunk and cyberculture. London: Athlone [ISBN: 0-485-00607-3]
