Group 3: Revival of 1980s Technological Dystopian Films

As we have studied the implications of dystopia in film, our project is about the revival of 1980s technological dystopian films. This list includes, but is not limited to: Mad Max (1979 & 2015), The Terminator (1984 & 2015), RoboCop (1987 & 2014), Poltergeist (1982 & 2015), and Star Wars (1977 & 2015)

We used scholars Althusser and Jameson to analyze the ideological shift and attitudes toward technology within the two Mad Max movies, using the following categories as a framework: Technology Then & Now, Franchises, Setting, Themes, Plot, Characters, and the Technological Anxieties of Society.

We argue that these movies aren’t about people in relationship to technology; rather, they show an ideological shift in society’s feelings towards technology: from hope to anxiety.

Althusser:

"All Ideological State Apparatuses, whatever they are, contribute to the same result: the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation." 

• ·      However, we must remember it is not a relationship between production and individual, but of the individual's fear/anxiety/feelings and the production (emphasizing the revival of the fear in technology)

"All ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive from them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them."

Jameson:

"Anxiety and hope are two faces of the same collective consciousness, so that the works of mass culture, even if their function lies in the legitimation of the existing order-or some worse one-cannot do their job without deflecting in the latter's service the deepest and most fundamental hopes and fantasies of the collectivity, to which they can therefore, no matter in how distorted a fashion, be found to have given voice." (144)

For those of you who have not seen these films, here’s some quick info (taken from imdb.com) and their trailers:

Mad Max (1979)

Director: George Miller

Budget (estimated): $650,000

Box Office Gross (USA): $8,750,000

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Director: George Miller

Budget (estimated): $150,000,000

Box Office Gross (USA):  $150,986,661