McLuhan’s Galaxies: Science Fiction Film Aesthetics in Light of Marshall McLuhan’s Thought

The wide influence of Star Wars has meant that its existence as a phenomenon of popular culture could not be ignored, yet by no means did it mean lack of criticism. As Brooker notes, the film’s popularity and simplicity seemed to have discouraged the academic circles from analyzing the Star Wars films as texts, instead focusing on it as a cultural phenomenon: its audiences, merchandizing, and special effects (2009, p. 8).

In conclusion of the work covering the process of creation of the Alien quadrilogy, Salisbury described the films as “zeitgeist-capturing classic.” One can assume that part of the allure of the Alien series is the stress on the low-tech, the use of tools which seem to imply that the monster appears in normal reality, even though set in the future. Certainly, the threat of technology is particularly well visualized in Alien and Terminator franchises. Their heroes and heroines are working class people, and in both cases, their fictional universes depend very strongly on the establishment of the atmosphere of tension in relatable, industrial locations. The plans and ambitions of the characters are mostly down-to-earth, and depart from the democratic grandiosity seen in the epic stories of space adventures in Star Trek or Star Wars, the grand world-saving destinies of the characters in The Matrix, Avatar or Terminator, or the beatified industrial aesthetics of Blade Runner. It was this ordinary and run-of-the-mill presentation of the future that made Weaver appreciate Alien: “I felt what we were doing was turning over a new leaf in science fiction. I loved the fact that this was a real world, that we were real people, talking about our wages and not getting along. But I don’t think any of us expected the movie to still be so unique.” (p. 8). In this chapter, characterizing Alien and Terminator films as dealing with the danger found in the midst of normal and mundane environments will be the starting point for the discussion of the notion of the anxieties caused by the invisible and yet considerable influence of the new media on society.

In this chapter, The Matrix films will be analyzed together with James Cameron’s Avatar in an attempt to highlight many similarities but also differences between them, all of which make them suitable for analysis in terms of McLuhan’s theories of the media. One of such aspects is the fact that they deal directly with what the Canadian scholar predicted would be the eventual result of the invention and spreading of the electric media: the collapse of Western expansionism and implosion upon itself, with and additional drive towards finding models in the Eastern culture.

Much has been written about the films mentioned in this volume—so much, in fact, that attempting to briefly mention all the sources which pertained to them in fragments or in their entirety would either produce a very thick book, or leave no space for the inclusion of the author’s own analysis. Hence, the main focus of the monograph was entirely different—that of succinctly suggesting new approaches to the classic (and one might presume almost overanalyzed) works and to provide an alternative to the already established theoretical assumptions based on the thought of one of the most original and incisive thinkers of the twentieth century.