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

Offering a survey of Hollywood science fiction cinema from 1979 to 2017, Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Filmargues that the trajectory of Hollywood's dystopian filmmaking in that period is inextricable from the 'new enclosures', the new dispossessions and privatisations sweeping across the United States since the 1970s.Offering a survey of Hollywood science fiction cinema from 1979 to 2017 (from Ridley Scott'sAliento Denis Villeneuve'sBlade Runner 2049),Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Filmargues 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 inRoboCop(1987), the portrayal of commodified air inTotal Recall(1990), and the nightmarish extrapolations of postmodern urbanism inBlade Runner(1982) andThe Truman Show(1998) - begin to disappear in films such asThe Matrix(1999),The Island(2005),District 9(2009),Repo Men(2010), andThe 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 Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Filmproposes a new understanding of the politics of science fiction in particular and utopian thought in general.Introduction - Anticipation: Science Fiction between Spectacle and Speculation

PART 1: ENCLOSURE AFTER ENCLOSURE
1. Extrapolation: The New ElÓÌ