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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film, 1979-2017: The Aesthetics of Enclosure

Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film, 1979-2017: The Aesthetics of Enclosure

Warwick, Harry

Paperback

Series: Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, Book 77

Literary CriticismFilm Studies

ISBN10: 1836245106
ISBN13: 9781836245100
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: Sep 2 2025
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.68
Height: 0.46 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Offering a survey of Hollywood science fiction cinema from 1979 to 2017 (from Ridley Scott's Alien to Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner
2049), Dystopia and Dispossessionin the Hollywood Science Fiction Film argues that the trajectory of Hollywood's dystopianism in that period is inextricable from the phenomenon of the 'new enclosures', the new dispossessions and privatisations sweeping across the United States since the 1970s. More precisely, it contends that the critiques of such dispossessions elaborated before the turn of the century - consider the satire of private policing in RoboCop (1987), the portrayal of commodified air in Total Recall (1990), and the nightmarish extrapolations of postmodern urbanism in Blade Runner (1982) and The Truman Show (1998) - begin to disappear in films such as The Matrix (1999), The Island (2005), District 9 (2009), Repo Men (2010), and The Purge (2013), the further commodification of land, forest, reservoir, ideas, even the human genome having diminished the contrast between capitalist and non-capitalist spaces on which the earlier critiques depended. Bringing close readings of blockbuster films into dialogue with historical and theoretical scholarship on dispossession, Dystopia and Dispossessionin the Hollywood Science Fiction Film proposes a new understanding of the politics of science fiction in particular and utopian thought in general.

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