science fiction – The Implausi.blog

Mickey 17 (Bong Joon-Ho, 2025)

There will be some spoilers in this review and commentary about the recent film.

Do you ever go to a theatre and see a movie with incredible potential but it doesn’t quite reach it, it doesn’t take that next step to get where it needs to be to reach that level of greatness?

That was my experience with Mickey 17 (2025), a movie I enjoyed, with a great concept and cast, and had so many things go for it, but it felt like it was holding back, and this made it a “smaller” film than it could have been, if it really wanted to take some of the ideas that it was exploring up to the next level.

The political commentary in the film was on the nose, which is remarkable given how long ago this would have likely been in pre-production* and development to nail that, but it seems almost restrained compared to current events that we’re dealing with right now (in April of 2025).

We also see continuing elements of class and social commentary that Bong Joon Ho has had in his other films like Parasite (2019) and Snowpiercer (2013), and there’s a lot of similarities with Snowpiercer in this film. They’re both deeply chilling movie in the same way, and this only is in part due to the winter environment that’s an existential threat that forces humanity in on itself. Hmmm. Probably a paper there needed to unpack all that.

However, the part where the movie hit a wall for me is with the implications of the 3D printing tech and the memory storage: it didn’t take it far enough and explore what it could actually do – it took it to a certain point and just stopped, which is unfortunate, as other movies with similar themes like Edge of Tomorrow (2014) or Westworld (1973) and Futureworld (1976) (or the 2016 HBO series) where we have that printing technology going on explored it better, and I think that speaks to some of the films limitations.

One of the ways Mickey 17 falls short is in the portrayal of the 3D-printing technology and the way it is integrated within society. The tech itself comes across as both silly and kinda dorky in the way it’s implemented, with the slow emergence like from a dot matrix printer in the 1990s to the fully-completed form. This is where Leeloo’s build in The Fifth Element (1997) or the hosts emerging from the vat in Westworld (2016) feel more fully realized. The silliness of the process works, in so far that it also highlight the somewhat bizarre way that this future society treats the implications of this tech. So many questions remain poorly answered by the film: why only one person per ship as an Expendable? Why not multiples for each role on the ship (or at least for the combat, exploration, and scout crews?) Why limit what is essentially nigh-immortality to a very limited underclass? Why would the ultra-wealthy not jump on this very tech? (Though this last point is kinda hinted at in the dream sequence in the epilogue). This silliness brings Mickey 17 more in line with other films like Prometheus (2012), and to be honest, I’ve never really enjoyed movies that kick around the idiot ball.

Some of this is answered, though not to my satisfaction, in the presentation of the Expendables and Multiples in the film. The religious proscription against having more than one, and the way they are treated. And of course, the use of the gun as the final commitment to the process (similar to dog in Kingsman (2015)) may be a bridge too far, though one that the crews of Starfleet have long since overcome. (The argument about whether the transporter kills the user or not having gone on for ages.) If one is already on the upper tier of society, would one be willing to risk it all to achieve this pseudo-immortality?

It might be too much to give up, as the process isn’t exactly perfect. We learn in the second act that there are variations in various duplicates, as they emerge from the printer. Whether this is due to the somewhat less that rigorous process of printing and downloading that occurs by the medical team – who remind one of a collection of grad students in a lab, rather than the most top-notch team out there – or due to some natural variations in the printing process is unexplained. There is a lot of difference in the repetition, and this variance might not be appealing to the ultra-wealthy that would be demanding a greater degree to fidelity in the transfers, much as was seen in the aforementioned Westworld in its later seasons.

Ultimately Mickey 17 is a love story. Despite the difference in each iteration of the various Mickeys, each one of them is loved by Nasha, who he loves in turn. Their meet cute happens early in the movie, and it’s love at first site, a love that endures through each reprinting of Mickey. His love for her is constant (and she does change and grow through the movie too – the role she plays at the end of the film is not who we see at the beginning – as is her love for him, throughout all the different foibles and flaws of the many personalities that are printed.

Though there some throughlines, some continuity in the bedrock personality, which is why Mickey 18 makes the sacrifice play late in the film, despite the wildly different personality from 17. Props to Robert Pattinson for pulling off making the same character feel different in Mickey’s varied iterations.

Final thoughts: Mickey 17 is well crafted, there isn’t any misses in the production aspects of it, though some of the satire misses due to the low-key nature of it. I want to see the Luc Besson version of Mickey 17, that takes the premise and goes all out.

*: apparently this is an adaptation**, which I had heard about going in but hadn’t checked the book out. Also, the book was published in 2022, and adapted shortly after, and was originally delayed in release from it’s original set date in 2024. So the political stuff is even more poignant, or perhaps sadly, more eternal.

**: also, in looking at the wiki after writing the above, the short story was also an exploration of the Star Trek teleporter paradox, so… hmm, yeah.

The WYCU

This has been on my mind for a little bit, ever since last summer when seeing Alien:Romulus in the theatre. Of course, that along with Deadpool and Wolverine led to our exploration of the Nostalgia curve. But following Romulus a discussion with a friend led to the discussion of the shared timelines of the Alien and Predator franchises, and the realization that I haven’t actually seen most of the Predator films, save for the first two, and still hadn’t gotten around to seeing the well-regarded Prey either.

I was due for re-watch, or watch in many cases.

So with learning today about Alien: Earth, a new TV series set in the Alien universe will be coming to streaming in the summer of 2025, I thought it was time to start that re-watch. However, that’s a lot of movies to get through before summer, and we’ve still got Andor season 2 and some other projects going on too.

(Yes, my media consumption occurs at a glacial pace; I get enough free time to get through maybe one or two movies a week.)

But…

What if we watched our way through the WYCU chronologically?

The WYCU is the Weyland-Yutani Cinematic Universe, of course, one of the key pieces of memetic connective tissue between the two (aside from the xenomorph skull inside the predator ship in Predator 2. It’s amazing how much inspiration comes from a little piece of throw-away set dressing.) Weyland Yutani, W-Y for short, is the interstellar megacorp behind much of the machinations of the Alien franchise, and they have their hand in the going on of the Predator-verse as well. Much like CHOAM from the Dune franchise, they’ve spread across the galaxy, and have their fingers (or talons?) in pretty much everything.

I think I’ve we’ve mentioned it in passing when talking about our EvilCorp series, a look at the MegaCorps that permeate the science fiction settings of the future, showing up in everything from present-day cyberpunk settings like Shadowrun to the aforementioned Dune 20000 years in the future.

(If I haven’t mentioned EvilCorp yet, then here’s where we started.)

But we digress: what about the WYCU chronologically? The list has been laid our by others (find a link), so we’re by no means the first, but the nice thing is with Alien: Earth set 2 years before the original 1979 Alien film, it means a chronological re-watch mostly involves the Predator franchise (and about an hour of Prometheus).

Sorry, by chronological I mean by within the continuity, not release order. This, this has some potential. There’s only 9 movies or so to “catch-up” to the continuity before Alien: Earth comes out in “summer 2025”. We can do this.

For fun, and future reference, here’s what the WCYU chronology looks like:

WCYU Chronology

Title	‘Verse	Year	Chrono Order
Prometheus *	A	2012	1
Prey	P	2022	2
Predator	P	1987	3
Predator 2	P	1990	4
Alien v Predator	X	2004	5
Alien v Predator 2: Requiem	X	2007	6
The Predator	P	2018	7
Predators	P	2010	8
Predator: Badlands***	P	2025	9
Prometheus **	A	2012	10
Alien: Covenant	A	2017	11
Alien: Earth	A	2025	12
Alien	A	1979	13
Alien: Romulus	A	2024	14
Aliens	A	1986	15
Alien³	A	1992	16
Alien: Resurrection	A	1997	17

*: the first bit of Prometheus, in the distant past
**: the rest of the movie, as it appears in the main timeline
***: there's also a rumored stealth Predator movie slated for 2025 that may come out before Badlands, but we probably won't see that until it's too late

Appendix W 04: Dune

(this was originally released as Implausipod episode 30 on March 11, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14666807-e0030-appendix-w-04-dune

With the release of Dune part 2 in cinemas, we return to Appendix W with a look at Frank Herbert’s original novel from 1965. Dune has had a massive influence on the Warhammer 40000 universe in many ways, especially when looking at the original release of the Rogue Trader game in 1987, in everything from the weapons and wargear, to space travel and technology, to the organization of the Imperium itself. Join us as we look at some of those connections.

Since its release in 1965, the impact of Dune has been long and far reaching on popular culture, inspiring science fiction of all kinds, including direct adaptations for film and television, and perhaps a non zero amount of inspiration for the first Star Wars film as well. But one of its biggest impacts has been in the development of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe.

So with the release of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune part two in cinemas on March 1st, 2024, I’d like to return to a series on the podcast we call Appendix W and look at Frank Herbert’s original novel Dune from 1965 in this episode of the ImplausiPod.

Welcome to the Implauosipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. So when we first started talking about Appendix W in the early days of the podcast back in September 2022, I had posted that based on a list I had put up on the blog a year prior about what some of the foundational titles for the Warhammer 40, 000 universe is.

Now, Warhammer 40, 000 is the grimdark gothic sci fi series published by Games Workshop. The Warhammer 40, 000 universe was originally introduced in 1987 with a version they called Rogue Trader, which has become affectionately known as the Blue Book, and I think I still have my rather well used and worn copy that I picked up in the summer of 1988 on a band trip.

For the most part, Warhammer 40, 000 is a miniatures war game, though the Rogue Trader version had a lot more in common with Dungeons and Dragons, and there’s some roleplay elements in there. The intellectual property now appears in everything from video games, to action figures, to merchandise of all sorts, to web shorts, and a massive amount of fiction set in that universe.

As primarily a miniatures war game, it sits as a niche of a niche with respect to the various nerd fandoms operating at a level far below Star Wars or Star Trek, but you might’ve heard more about it recently with rumors of an Amazon Prime series and Henry Cavill, the former Superman and Witcher himself being behind the scenes on that one, or just talking about it positively on various talk shows that he’s appeared on. Other fans include people like Ed Sheeran, who’s been spotted building Warhammer model kits backstage at his concerts. By and large, despite its popularity, it’s managed to stay relatively under the radar compared to some of the other series that are out there with respect to mainstream attention, knowledge.

It is what it is. Now, the material isn’t necessarily something that’s gotten a lot of scrutiny in the past, but that’s pretty much it. Part of what we’re doing here on the Implausipod, especially with the Appendix W series, and the goal of the Appendix W series is to look at some of those sources of inspiration that got folded into the development of Warhammer 40, 000.

And for those unfamiliar, what is Warhammer 40, 000? Well, it’s a nightmare Gothic future where humanity is fallen, basically. They’re still living with high technology that they no longer totally realize how to build and maintain. They are living in the shadows of their ancestors. Humanity spread across the galaxy, across untold millions of planets, united under an emperor in the imperium of man, beset by a civil war nearly 10, 000 years in the past that tore the empire apart, and now facing foes on all sides with alien races, both ancient and new, vying with humanity for control of the galaxy.

Humanity is maintained in this universe by a massive interstellar bureaucracy that redefines the word Byzantine. And much of humanity lives in massive hive worlds where massive cities cover the entire surface of a planet.

Ultimately, life for most of humanity in the Warhammer 40, 000 is what Hobbes would call poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It’s not solitary by any means, there’s way too many people around for that to be the case, but still. Now, as we covered earlier in our previous episodes on Appendix W, obviously Games Workshop is a British company, and there is a particular British flavor to a lot of these sources that Warhammer 40, 000 drew inspiration from.

And we’ve seen that in some of the sources that we’ve already looked at, like Space 1999. But even though Frank Herbert is an American author, Dune has had such an impact on the development of sci fi since its release, it definitely shows up as interesting an impact on Warhammer 40, 000. Now I’m going to lay out the evidence here throughout the rest of this episode.

You can take it or leave it as you see fit, but in terms of structure, what I like to lay out here is what we’ve done in previous episodes, looking at Appendix W and look at it in terms of things like the military examples within the book. Now, not all the sci fi influences that we list in Appendix W are military ones, of course, but as it’s a military war game, that’s a big part of it.

Then we’ll look at other elements of technology. And then cultural elements as well. A lot of Dune’s impact on the Warhammer 40, 000 universe expands outside of the miniatures war game itself into the larger structure of the setting. So we’ll take a brief look at those too, even though that isn’t our focus.

And then even a work like Dune didn’t appear out of nothing, ex nihilo, so we’ll look at some of the other sources that were out there that inspired Dune itself. And then I’ll wrap up the episode with a brief discussion of the future of Appendix W, so stay tuned.

Now looking at a work like Dune, you might think that the main source of inspiration is the planet Arrakis itself, with the hostile environment and the giant worms and everything. That’s actually one of the least influential elements. We do see the appearance of various, what Warhammer 40, 000 calls death worlds, planets that are very hostile to life, that as serve as recruiting grounds for various troops within the setting, including various Imperial Guard, sorry, Astra Militarum regiments, including the Talarn Desert Raiders.

But the biggest influence from Dune is the existence of the Empire and the Emperor. Within the book, the emperor is an active participant in the machinations that are taking place in the empire that they control. Whereas in Warhammer 40, 000, the Emperor is a near godlike figure that’s barely kept alive by the arcane technology of a golden throne where they’ve been placed for the last 10, 000 years since suffering a near mortal wound in combat.

In Warhammer 40, 000, the Emperor is not well, but their psychic power serves as a beacon that allows navigation throughout the rest of the galaxy for those who are attuned to it. But despite that difference, the other main takeaway from Dune is the Emperor uses his legions in order to maintain control.

Within Dune, the Emperor lends out his personal guard, the Sardaukar, to engage in the combat on behalf of the Harkonnens against the Atreides. Quoting from the glossary included at the back of the original Dune novel, the Sardaukar are, quote, the soldier fanatics of the Padishah Emperor. They were men from an environmental background of such ferocity that it killed six out of thirteen persons before the age of eleven.

Their military training emphasized ruthlessness and a near suicidal disregard for personal safety. They were taught from infancy to use cruelty as a standard weapon, weakening opponents with terror. Within Warhammer 40, 000, when the Emperor was still active, he had, of course, 20 legions of his space marines, the Adeptus Astartes, who were loyal to him.

Two of those legions became excommunicado and stricken from the records, and another nine ended up turning traitor in a civil war known as the Horus Heresy. But the tie is very deep. I mean, both of these draw on some Roman influence, obviously, but still, the linkage directly from Dune to Warhammer 40, 000 is strong, and much like the Roman Empire, both of these have the vast bureaucracy that I mentioned earlier.

Within Dune, of course, there’s the various noble houses that the Emperor is playing off against each other, like the Harkonnens and the Atreides, but there’s many more besides that. Within Warhammer 40, 000 can often be seen within the various Governors of various planets or systems who are given a large amount of latitude due to the nature of space travel and sometimes the chance that systems could go without without communications for Hundreds or thousands of years and the final major linkage would most likely be the religious one within dune It’s the role that the bene gesserit have behind the scenes with their machinations taking place over decades thousands of years.

Within Warhammer 40, 000, it’s the role of the ecclesiarchy, the imperial cult, that reveres the emperor as godlike. And as I’m saying this, I realize I’m only talking about the impact of the first Dune novel on Warhammer 40, 000, and not the series as a whole. So as we look at later books, later on, as part of Appendix W, we’ll see how some of those other linkages come into play into how Warhammer 40, 000 looked at launch and how it’s developed subsequently.

But for right now, we’ll just look at the impact that the Bene Gesserit have on the storyline within the novel. Now, despite all these deep linkages that really inform the setting, it’s with respect to the military technology that we see the influence that Dune really had on Warhammer 40, 000. Despite all the advanced technology in the book, oddly enough it’s a defensive item that comes to the forefront.

One of the conceits that we see with Dune is that a lot of the combat takes place with the Melee weapons with swords and knives. The reason for that is because of the shields. Reading again from the appendix in the back of the original Dune novel, it describes the defensive shields as, quote, The protective field produced by a Holtzman generator.

This field derives from phase one of the suspensor nullification effect. A shield will permit entry only to objects moving at slow speeds. Depending on setting, this speed ranges from six to nine centimeters per second, and can be shorted out only by a Shire sized electric field.

These are the shields that were visible in both movie adaptations early on, with the fight training between Gurney Halleck and Paul Atreides, the ones that made them both look like fighting Roblox characters in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. Within Warhammer 40, 000, we can see evidence of those with refractor fields that are widely available to various members of the Imperial forces.

These are fields that distort the image of the wearer and then bounce any of those incoming attacks into a flash of light. Within the Dune Universe these are so widely available that even common soldiery will have them, though in Warhammer 40, 000 they’re a little bit more rare, but as we said, it’s a fallen empire.

The other commonly available tool to the soldiery is that lasgun, which is described again in the appendix as a continuous wave laser projector. It’s use as a weapon is limited in a field generator shield culture because of the explosive pyrotechnics, technically subatomic fusion, created when its beam intersects a shield.

So even though they’re commonly available, they’re not widely used because hitting somebody who has wearing a shield with it is like setting off a small nuke. And within Dune, those Nukes, or atomics, remain one of the most powerful weapons available to the various houses and factions, to the extent that they’re kept under strong guard and rarely if ever used.

In fact, there’s a prescription on their use against human combatants. This is why Paul’s use of the nukes against the Mountain Range during their final assault doesn’t provoke sanctions from the other houses. Those sanctions could be as severe as planetary destruction, which in Warhammer 40, 000 would be called exterminatus, even though they’re not typically called that framed as being done by nukes. There’s a number of other weapons that show up in various ways in Dune that also make their way into the Warhammer 40, 000 universe. Everything from the sonic attacks, from the weirding modules, to the Kriss knives that are used in ritual combat. And we can see other technological elements as well, like the Fremen stillsuits, elements of that showing up in the Space Marines power armor in 40k, the look and feel of The mining machines showing up in the massive war machines of the 41st millennium, like the Baneblade or Leviathan or Capitol of Imperialis and even the Ornithopters themselves, the flapping wing flying machines that show up so prevalent in every adaptation of Dune.

All of these will appear at some point within the 41st millennium, even if they’re not present within Rogue Trader at launch in 1987. But It’s more than just the technology. It’s more than just the emperor and his legions. It’s more than just the psychic abilities, which we barely even touched on. There are two essential elements that deeply tie the Warhammer 40, 000 universe to Dune.

And those two elements are two groups of individuals with very specific sets of skills, the Mentats and the Navigators of the Spacing Guild. Now, the Mentats are basically humans trained as computers to replace the technology that was wiped out in the Butlerian Jihad in the prehistory of the Dune universe.

For those just joining us here in this episode, we covered the Butlerian Jihad in depth in depth. in the previous episode in episode 29. It was basically a pogrom against thinking machines that resulted in the destruction of all artificial intelligence, robotics, or even simple computers. Within Warhammer 40, 000, the Butlerian Jihad can be seen in the war that took place against the Men of Iron and led to the Dark Age of Technology, again in the Prehistory of that universe and while the mentats themselves aren’t as directly prevalent because obviously machines still exist. The attitude towards technology that it’s treated as a Religious element and something that’s known and understood is widely prevalent throughout the universe The final element is the Spacing Guild. Within the Dune universe the spice that’s only available on Dune – the melange – that allows for the navigators to gain prescience and to steer the ships as the Holtzman drives allow them to fold space and move them rapidly through the stars.

Over time, through their exposure to the melange, the navigators become something altogether no longer human. Whereas in the 41st millennium, the navigators are outright mutants to begin with, whose psychic abilities allow them to see the light cast by the Emperor on Terra, the Astronomicon that serves as a lighthouse to guide everybody through the shadows of the warp.

Now, both of these are mentioned in Rogue Trader in 1987, but they show up much more commonly outside the confines of the miniatures board game where much of the action takes place. They’re prevalent in the fiction and a lot of the lore surrounding the game, even though they rarely function within it, at least within the confines of the Warhammer 40, 000 game proper.

Now, the Games Workshop has leveraged the IP into a number of different realms, including the game systems like Necromunda, Battlefleet Gothic, and their various epic scale war games. So some of those elements are more common in certain other situations, but the linkage between the two, between Dune and 40k, is absolutely clear.

Now, as I said at the outset, dune had a massive influence on not just war hundred 40,000, but basically Sci-Fi in general. Since its release, it was, it spawned five sequels by Frank Herbert himself, which extended the stories and then. Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert’s son, and Kevin Anderson have done subsequent stories within the same universe.

Galactic Empire has been common throughout science fiction, especially since then, though most notably within the works of George Lucas, the Star Wars series. I believe Lucas has stated at least someplace that Dune was a partial source of inspiration, though some contest that it’s a much more than partial, and that there’s 16 points of similarity between the Dune novels and the original Star Wars film.

I think anybody reading the original novel and then watching the film may draw similar conclusions. But influence is a funny thing, and it works both ways, because just as Dune inspired numbers of works, including massive franchises like Star Wars and Forever 40, 000, Dune was in turn inspired by a number of sci fi works that were written well in advance of its publication.

There’s at least five works or series that were published before Dune came out that had elements that appear within the Dune stories. For the record, Dune was published as serials in 63 and 64, and came out as the full novel in 1965. Now, the first link, obviously, is Asimov’s Foundation, published as short stories in the 1940s, and then as novels in the early 1950s.

Here we’re dealing with the decay of an already existing galactic empire, and by using math and sociology as a form of Prescience, which is the same ability that Paul and the Bene Gesserit have, they’re able to predict the future and able to steer the outcome into a more desirable form. Does that sound familiar?

Asimov calls this psychohistory, and I’m sure if you’re watching the current TV series you’re well aware of that, but wait, there’s more. Next up is the Lensman series, written by E. E. Doc Smith, starting with Triplanetary, which was published in 1948. I mean, there’s aliens and stuff in it, but there’s a long range breathing program on certain human bloodlines in order to bring about their latent psychic abilities.

And then they’re tested, with a device called the Lens, which can cause pain to people that aren’t psychically attuned to it, which, again, sounds familiar. The third up would be the Instrumentality series, by Cordwainer Smith. Now, there’s a novel, Nostrilia, which was originally published after Dune came out, but the short stories from the series came out starting in 1955 and through the early 1960s.

In it, space travel is only made possible by a drive that can warp space, and a guild of mutated humans that are able to see the path between the stars to get humanity to where they need to be. In addition to that, the rulers of Earth are a number of noble houses. that are continually feuding amongst themselves and through various technologies are extremely long lived, almost effectively immortal.

Now we’ve touched on some of that with the instrumentality before, back in episode 18, and we will be visiting the instrumentality again, at least twice more, in Appendix W, with a look at Scanners Live in Vain and then the Instrumentality series as a whole. So if you’re interested in more on that, go check out that episode and stay tuned for more.

Now, even the fighting around the giant space harvesters has some precedent. In 1960, Keith Laumer published the first Bolo short story. In it, 300 ton tanks are controlled by sentient AIs. And the story’s about how the fighting in and around those tanks go. But of course, we know that there’s no AI in the Dune universe because of the Butlerian Jihad.

Which Herbert got from Samuel Butler, who wrote it in 1869, and then published it as a novel in 1872, which we talked about last episode and mentioned earlier. So, of course, this influences almost 90 years before Dune came out. And, of course, the granddaddy of them all is probably Edgar Rice Burroughs, Warlord of Mars.

Now apparently, according to an interview with Brian Herbert, the Dune series was originally proposed to take place on Mars, but it was decided against it because of our cultural associations that we have with the red planet. And some of this obviously comes, takes place from the tales that came before it.

Now, in addition to the sci fi influences, there’s other real world influences like the The stories of Lawrence of Arabia, as well as Frank Herbert’s own observations that he took in the sand dunes in northern Oregon, and the reclamation project that was taking place there to bring back some of the land from the desert.

So all of these and more went into the creation of Dune. Now, don’t get me wrong, Dune is an amazing creative work, and it draws all these elements and other ones together more than we mentioned. It’s unique and interesting, and that’s why it’s timeless as it is. But everybody draws influences from multiple places.

The creativity is in how it gets put together. So we will continue exploring that creativity of both the Dune series, And the Warhammer 40, 000 series in episodes to come.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausiblepod. com, which is also where you can find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 share-alike license. You may notice that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow through the word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along.

If you visit us on implausopod. com, you may notice that there’s a buy me a coffee link on each and every episode. This would just go to any hosting costs associated with the show. If you’re interested in more information on Appendix W, you can find those on the Appendix W YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube and type in Appendix W, and I’ll make sure that those are visible.

And if you’d like to follow along with us on the Appendix W reading list, I’ll leave a link to the blog post in the show notes. And join us in a month’s time as we look at Joe Haldeman’s Forever War. And between now and then, I’ll try and get the AppendixW. com website launched. And for the mainline podcast here on the ImplausiPod, please join us in a week or so for our next episode, where we have another Warhammer 40, 000 tie in.

You see, Warhammer 40, 000 is a little lost with respect to technology, and they’ll spend a lot of time looking for some elements from the dark age of technology. The STCs are standard template constructs. The plans that they put in their fabricators to chew out the advanced material of the Imperium. You could almost say that these are general purpose technologies, or GPTs.

And a different kind of GPT has been in the news a lot in the last year. So we’ll investigate this in something we call GPT squared. I hope you join us for it, I think it’ll be fantastic. Until then, take care, and have fun.

The Old Man and The River

(This was originally released as Implausipod Episode 27, on February 12, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14446788-e0027-the-old-man-and-the-river

The parable of the Old Man and the River tells us it isn’t now deep the water is, but how swift the water flows when it comes to looking at pop culture. There’s magic in how crystal clear those swift waters flow. Join us for a review of the theories underpining the value of studying pop culture for academic analysis, what that means for the future of the Implausipod, and hints at who the old man might be.

The word’s gold rush conjures a particular image in everyone’s mind’s
eye. Images of the old west, and boomtowns where dusty prospectors would
stake a claim and take their chances. Near where I grew up, the heyday
was 1895, where dredges funded by Europeans and Americans would lift up
the riverbed by the bucketful, trying to sift up that glittering metal,
but by 1907 they were mostly gone.Abandoning their tools on the
riverbed to rust away, but that didn’t stop the smaller prospectors.
They continued on. Legend tells of one prospector who’s still tending
his claim to this very day. Every morning he gets up and tends the
hearth in his tiny cabin, makes himself some coffee and porridge, maybe
adds a little salt pork and a biscuit if it’s been a good month, and
then packs up his gear and heads up the mountain.It’s a two hour
hike to get to where the waters run clear. And you gotta get there for
dawn, so that when you reach down with your pan and give it a shake in
the stream, you can hold it up just right against the morning light, and
if you’re lucky, real lucky, you’ll see that glittering gold sparkling
in the pan.You see, the secret that the prospector knows is it isn’t
how deep the water is, it’s how fast it’s going. And those mountain
streams are very fast indeed.

No one knows exactly what keeps that Prospector going, as I’m sure you can do the math and you can tell he’s been at it for over a century. Some say he’s a ghost, or maybe a revenant. They seem to be popular around these parts. Maybe it’s a
curse, and whenever he finds what he seeks, his soul will be released.

I’ve got an inkling, but I’ll keep my hunch to myself a little bit
longer, and maybe Tell you at the end of this episode of The Implausipod,
while we explore the old man and the river.

Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and
popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and this episode we’ll
pick up almost directly where our last episode left off, where as
Silicon Dreams talked about how literature inspired the mythic
imagination that led to the development of virtual reality and our new
AI tools, here we’re going to talk about pop culture more generally.

At the beginning of every episode, I talk about how this podcast sits at
the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture, but maybe it’s
not so clear as we’ve bounced around a whole lot. We’ve talked about
television shows and cyberpunk novels, we’ve talked about Doctor Who
episodes, ancient science fiction, Warhammer 40, 000, and a few episodes
on some technology too, and it might not seem how they’re connected,
but I assure you they’re all interrelated.

So, in order to lay that all out, I’m going to break this episode into a couple chunks. We’re going to look at the philosophical background, and then we’re going to
look at some of the theoretical approaches about how this is actually
happening. So yeah, philosophy and theory. Exciting. Before we really
get started, I want to take a moment to pique your interest and discuss
why we want to look at philosophy.

Outwardly, it may not make sense to analyze the lyrical content of Taylor Swift’s songs, or look at the political economy of video games, or what they represent, to look at the commercials that air during the Super Bowl and not just the Super Bowl
itself, to take a recent example. But that’s exactly why we need to look
at it, because all those elements that are there in our pop culture are
those elements that reflect and represent So if we want to know what’s
really going on in our culture, it makes sense to look at what we’re
making and sharing with each other, as we talked about in our spreadable
media episode.

Because it turns out, once you get skilled at looking at pop culture, it’s really good at reflecting what our motivations are. That pan that our old man is holding. And let me share with you my favorite quote on it. Quote,

The most fertile ground for analyzing motives is pop culture. Not because pop culture is deep, but because it’s so shallow.It’s where those wishes and longings are most nakedly evident. End quote.

This is from the science fiction author Bruce Sterling in 2002, and I’ve I’ve used it as a touchstone ever since, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s pro wrestling or superhero
movies or stand up comedy or miniature games, I’ve found it to hold
true.So let’s get into the philosophy of why we’re doing this, and
for that we’re going to have to take a trip down the mountain.

Now,depending on your academic background, you may have heard of the Frankfurt School before. It was founded at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Natch. It was
called the Institute for Social Research, and they critiqued society
from a Marxist lens and founded what is now called Critical Theory.
Prior to World War II, the director was Max Horkheimer, who wrote some
of the foundational documents and worked with Theodor Adorno and also
Herbert Marcuse.

Also associated with the school was Walter Benjamin, who we’ll get to in a bit. They were critical of the cultural industry, as tools used to promote, repeat, and sustain capitalism, but also like, just power imbalances of the dominant ideology. The Frankfurt School coined the term the cultural industry, and this included film,
television, radio, music, print media, and By modern extension, video
games and social media would count too, and where Marx was focused on
the means of production, the Frankfurt School extended that to mean the
means of production of culture, as they observed that those who owned
those cultural forms were able to have an outsized say in the political
discourse.

They were able to reproduce the ideology.

And for the Frankfurt School, we can see this in the ownership of media in their
time, with the William Randolph Hearst’s of the world, and in ours with,
say, Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post, and Elon Musk’s
purchase of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg and his advertising company
Facebook, building media outlets for their customers, and the purchase
of Instagram, WhatsApp, and the like.And while the Frankfurt School
were some of our first explorers who identified that river, the flood of
material that we get from the cultural industries, they also had some
rather negative thoughts about it as well.

I’m referring here mostly to Theodore Adorno, who was a musicologist and was critical of Popular music, and in his time that included jazz, but for him popular culture was something that rationalized the arts, that took off all the rough
edges to make it palatable for consumption.And by that it made the
consumers, the listeners or viewers or readers, that much more passive
and just accepting of the information that they were getting. If the art
doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t make you think. But here I think we
need to make a bit of a distinction between mass culture and popular
culture.If mass culture is a big lake or the ocean that’s available
to everybody, then popular culture is that fast flowing river that joins
the sea at some point.

The critical point here is that only some material from mass culture enters the popular culture. to quote John Fiske. But if we want to understand how that happens, we need to start moving on from the Frankfurt School to one of their associates, Walter Benjamin.

Now, he’s perhaps best known for his writing on art and
aesthetics, but for us, the work that’s most relevant is the work of art
in the age of its technological reproducibility. This is a foundational
text about how the very nature of art changes when you no longer need
an artist doing each and every piece, and it can be mass copied and
reproduced.And it’s even more relevant now in the age of AI tools,
so we’ll have to return to this in a few weeks. Now, Benjamin, writing
in 1935, is talking a lot about film at this point in time, as different
from painting and other composition, and being something much more than
just photography itself, and it’s the unfinished nature of it that it
cannot be completed with a single stroke, but rather requires much in
the way of what we now call post production, the work of editors and
colorists and visual effects and sound design, and all these things
together.

Film has a capacity for improvement, end quote, in that all
these things can be done after the shot, and these are One of the
things that make film so magical, that capacity in turn is what Benjamin
quotes from Franz Werfel, quote Film has not yet realized its true
purpose, its real possibilities. These consist in its unique ability to
use natural means to give incomparably convincing expression to the
fairy like, the marvelous.

The supernatural. Of course here Werfel, and Benjamin, is talking about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but we can see how film can be used to create and develop the mythic imagination in its audience as well, as we discussed last episode. So film is about getting us used to new ideas. Also, propaganda, he’s still affiliated
with the Frankfurt School.But the idea of new ideas more generally.

Earlier in the text, Benjamin writes, the function of film is to train
human beings in the appreciation and reactions needed to deal with the
vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily, end
quote. This is using film as a referent, well before television and the
role that advertising on television would come to play.and is so
much more prophetic for that. We can see here the threads of the
development of the idea of the audience as being there for reception of
ideas. And these ideas can also be seen in the work of McLuhan.

Now, we’ve mentioned Marshall McLuhan in earlier episodes, and we will be
returning to him again.McLuhan talked about a lot of things when it
comes to media, but his biggest idea relative to what we’re talking
about here is the idea of content, for if the medium is the message,
this means that the way in which radios, TVs, or phones address us is
more important than what they say when they do. End quote.That was
from Adrian Daub’s Critical Review of Silicon Valley Thought. Daub goes
into depth on how McLuhan was the media theorist beloved by the 60s
counterculture, which ended up turning into the Silicon Valley culture
during the 70s, 80s, and beyond. And for them, McLuhan was all about the
vibe. He passed the vibe check: if you were hip,you got it.

McLuhan’s idea of media, content, and audience became pervasive in the Silicon Valley. And we’ll come back to both him and Daub’s book in a
future episode. But then, as per the old Heritage Minute that aired on
Canadian television, the content is the audience. We’ve gone into depth
about how the cultural industries commodify audiences and sell them back
to companies, whether they are advertisers, direct marketers, or
through other means.From McLuhan, each successive medium was built
on the material output of another, older medium. Television would
incorporate film, and theatre, and radio, and In that way surpassed them
all, and we saw again similar effects with what social media like
TikTok or YouTube Shorts now does.

The contrast to McLuhan of course is the British critic Raymond Williams.He rejected McLuhan’s more technologically deterministic leanings and focused on the cultural form of television by looking at what was actually reproduced and shown on
it. In his 1974 book, Television, Williams looked at how earlier forms
like the News Bulletin or the Roundtable Discussion were presented on
television.

And there’s always a much more direct, personal,
immediate, intimate relationship that the television broadcast had with
its audience. We can see here that the stream is flowing much faster,
becoming closer, more personal as we skip through the decades to what we
have now. And as we glance back into those waters and see how it
reflects our society around us, we realize that television is really
about perception.

And this is what Pierre Bourdieu notices as well.
Bourdieu is not really big on television. He says that the invisible
structures therein, the ones that operate around and behind it,
determine what appears on screen. These are all driven by ratings, and
what they end up Doing is perpetuating symbolic violence.Now, that
violence was the focus of much research. And we’ll look at the theories
behind that research in the second half of our episode, next.

So, up till now, we’ve been looking at some of the philosophy about why we need
to peer deep into the river. But let’s see if we can learn a little
something by taking a look at the way that that research has been
operationalized, the techniques for panning for gold in that stream. And
as we saw with Bourdieu, one of the main concerns was the violence,
symbolic or otherwise, that was shown.But that actually goes back
further. Quoting Em Griffin, he noted that one of the early theories
that TV’s powers comes from the symbolic content of the real life drama
shown hour after hour.

And this comes from Cultivation Theory, proposed by George Gerbner in 1973. Now, as Griffin notes, television’s function was as society’s institutional storyteller.lines up with what we’ve discussed earlier, but for Gerbner, the story being told was violence.
As part of his 20 years cultural indicators project, there was a lot of
research done into the amount of television violence that was being
shown. And it was more than just the overt acts of violence, it was also
who the violence was directed to, often minorities or marginal
populations.

There was a lot of symbolic vulnerability that was
displayed on television. And this continual repetition of violence
contributed a lot to what people call the Mean World Syndrome. The
people thought the world was a lot more violent and scary than it
actually might be. That there was a high chance of involvement within
violence, there was a fear of walking alone at night.the perceived
activity of police, what they were actually doing, and a general
mistrust of people all kind of came out of this.

For Gerbner, this all
is encapsulated in what he calls cultivation theory, where he studies
the differential between light and heavy TV viewers and sees the
difference in their opinions.Cultivation theory differs from other
things like media effects because in the modern landscape, there is no
non TV environment, no anti environment to it, as we discussed with
McLuhan in our Dumpshock episode back in episode number 14. MediaEffects
is predicated on the idea that there’s a before and after exposure to
measure, but because television exposure happens at such a young age,
there’s no meaningful way to test it.

So Gerbner and others who use it are trying to figure out if the damage is in the dosage. When viewers see repeated instances of violence, they may find that it resonates with their own experiences. People relate the constant portrayal on
television, what they see, to their own experience, even if it only
happened once.But if you’re seeing constant acts of violence,
mugging, robbery, etc, and it happens to you on one occasion, you’re
going to think, that yeah this is what’s happening all the time. But the
constantly flowing river doesn’t just have violence in it. Obviously
that’s one thing that’s there, that’s observable, that’s testable, that
you can get grant money for for a 20 year study.

But there’s other things going on flowing through the river. The question is, how does it all get there? This is where the agenda setting function of the media
comes in. Recognized by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw in 1972, they
state that we look to news professionals for cues on where to focus our
attention.Paraphrasing Bernard Cohen, they note that the media might
not be successful in telling the audience what to think, but they are
very successful in telling the audience what to think about. about.

The challenge is that, as oft repeated, correlation is not causation. Maybe
the audience is driving the agenda.In some instances, this may
definitely happen, as with modern news organizations hopping on TikTok
trends or whatever. But on substantive matters, the media drives the
agenda. And Em Griffin points out that several studies have confirmed
McCombs and Shaw’s hypothesis since it was originally published. So, who
sets the media’s agenda?

Ownership, gatekeepers, PR firms, interest aggregations, and lobbyists, the invisible structures that Bourdieu talked about earlier, and this dovetails all the way back to the Frankfurt School when they’re talking about the ownership of the means
of the production of culture. And I want to be clear here that not
everybody reciting here is like a Marxist or a left wing academic.This
is just from observing what’s going on.

So, if these invisible structures are setting the agenda, are deciding which rivers flow into the lake of mass culture, what’s the role of the audience? Well, people
are not mindless in this, they have agency. They can choose what they
like and what they want.And as we follow that stream back into the
mountains, we’re getting a little bit closer to the source. And we find
ourselves ultimately asking, what does the Audience use media for this
is probably best addressed by the field of study that looks at uses and
gratifications. The primary source we’re using here is the work of Elihu
Katz in 1973.Although we notes the idea of studying the audiences
gratification goes back to Cantrel in 1942.

What Katz and his collaborators were arguing is that quote, people bend the media to their needs more readily than the media overpower them. The media gratify
individuals by satisfying those needs, whether these are social, like in
the terms of connection or standing, or psychological, like in terms of
belonging or reinforcement.And it’s these needs to which media is
most often used for, that use as part of the equation. These needs can
be about knowledge, emotional experience, credibility, or simply
connection. And there’s a whole host more. They did come up with quite a
large matrix to populate their survey with. But the point is, is that
the audience is not a monolith.

They have agency and there’s a wide degree of different uses that they might put the media towards. And some of those may aligned with the agenda setting that’s set in place by the major media companies, but some of it may not. It would be used for
more. Personal purposes. And there’s a continual cybernetic feedback
loop going back and forth between the agenda setting and the uses of the
audience themselves.And somehow the audience always find new things
that they end up using the media for. Which brings us back to where we
started. That high mountain stream running so very, very fast indeed.
You see, it’s in our imagination, both individual and collective, where
we get those ideas from. The jokes we tell with our friends, the wild
stories that we might come up with, and as those get repeated and
shared, they take on a life of their own.

And sometimes when they’re laid down in a book or a movie, comic book, video game, wherever, they become aspirational. And it’s something we can set our goals towards. It’s like, hey, check out that moon up there, do you think we can get
there? And a hundred years later, maybe it’ll just happen. And I think
that brings us full circle with our Silicon Dreams of last episode as
well.

As we look back over a hundred years of communication, media,
psychology studies, audience research, and the hundred years of
development that have happened while that old man has been up that
mountain, I think you understand now that Perhaps that old man is me.
This has been a bit of a summary of the academic upbringing that I’ve
had over the last 30 years.The stuff that I was exposed to and how I
learned to formulate some of the questions that I did. in my research.
But I have one more secret to tell you about the stream, too. Because,
while I might look and sound the part of the old man, there’s a secret
hidden within those swiftly flowing waters. It keeps you young.

Or young at heart, at least. It might not be comfortable, and it continually forces you to re examine the world around you. You have to climb back up that mountain every day. The water can be cold and uncomfortable, but if you peer within it, you can see what’s going on. So, by engaging where the waters run swift and deep, wherever they’re fresh and clear, whether it’s a TikTok or Mastodon or Snapchat, wherever
the youth might be gathering, that’s where you’ll find a good look at
what the future might hold.

Thanks for joining us here on the Implausipod. In the next episode, we might find exactly what that future holds, when we open up the black box labeled AI that we found during all this dredging in the river, and see what those fast running waters
can tell us about our expectations, the uses and gratifications from
that most recent of our technologies.But we may have to wait a few
episodes to find out how that’s all connected to a guy named Samuel
Butler. And then after that, we’ll soon return to Appendix W to look at
Dune before the second movie’s release. Stay tuned. It’s going to be a
busy month.

Once again, I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. The research,
writing, editing, mixing, and music is all done by me.I can be
reached at drimplausible at implausipod. com, and this episode is
licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 sharer like license. Thanks for
joining us, and I hope to talk with you again real soon. Take care, and
have fun.

Jameson on Nostalgia

Writing on a topic like nostalgia is a path many have gone before, so my own thoughts – summed up over the last handful of posts (and a little bit on the newsletter too) – are unlikely to be wholly new to to the world. That by no means the exercise is wasted, as those reflective moments are wh0ere we can put together what we know, and what we think we know, about a given topic. That reflection can also allow us to compare those thoughts with other works on the subject.

As I outlined in my post on Nescience, I’m aware of at least one major author who has written on Nostalgia: Fredric Jameson. There are a few others that we may get to in time (but I’m not the biggest Freud guy, tbh, so there might be some skips along the way too). Jameson’s essay “Nostalgia for the Present” was published in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1989, and has been reprinted in various books and collections of his since, such as 1992’s Postmoderism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Which, given our previous discussion on commodities and such, may come as a surprise to hear is on my TBR rather than “fully digested”. There’s a lot to chew on out there, and we come to these things as we are meant to, I guess.

Before we get to Jameson’s thoughts on nostalgia, a quick summary of what we’ve covered so far here:

Nostalgia is representational (in a memetic way)
Nostalgia is an assemblage
The perceived value of the nostalgia of a property can impact financing
This value is subjective, and also relative
Nostalgia is also subjective, and can be constraining
Nostalgia can be contrasted with Novelty
Real nostalgia can be the audience longing for something actually produced
Imagined nostalgia is something the audience thinks they’ve seen before
Nostalgia can be organic (from the audience) or manufactured (by the producers)
Nostalgia is substrate neutral – it can happen in nearly any field

With the above in mind, what does Jameson have to say, and how does his work compare with the above? Let’s check out…

1989

Whoops…

(Apparently 1989 was a pivotal year).

“Nostalgia for the Present” (1989)

Fredric Jameson is a literary critic and philosopher who is – as of the writing of this in 2024 – the Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University. He’s written in a lot of fields, most notably on post-modernism and capitalism, and “Nostalgia for the Present” fits in this vein, coming 30 years after the publication of his PhD. He’s been working on these ideas for a while at this point. For the piece, he looks at the role of nostalgia in three works: Philip K Dick’s novel Time out of Joint (1959), Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which is as unique a selection of content as one might to choose to analyze as any, I suppose.

(Though looking over what we cover here on the blog, I’m not going to criticize the selections. Glass Houses (not the album) and all that.)

Time Out Of Joint (hereafter, TOOJ) is a faux time travel story, where a man who is apparently trapped in the 1950s notices small differences are errors in reality, which leads him to suspect that something weird if going on, kinda like the “Deja Vu” moment in The Matrix. These themes are typical of Philip K Dick: representations of reality, false consciousness, things moving behind the scenes. Looking at it in 2024, we’ve seen it in so many of the adaptations of his work, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, Minority Report, and more.

Here in TOOJ, the protagonist is quite astute: he is in a “potemkin village” of the 1950s, rebuilt in 1997 during an interstellar civil war (Jameson, p.521). Not quite our current reality (well the interstellar part, at least), and again like much older science fiction, now rooted firmly in our past, in a future that will not come to be, as we noted in a previous post. While at times TOOJ feels more like a rough draft of The Truman Show, with the apparatus moving around to ensure the world is static for this one particular man, and this feeds into our various narcissistic, main-character desires, the film clip that would best describe TOOJ would be the epilogue to Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), where he wakes in a room, and recognizes from the radio broadcast that things are not what they seem. If there were a way to cliff notes a 221 page novel, this would be it.

There’s more going on in the novel, of course. Jameson notes how TOOJ is set up to be a model of the 1950s, as something that the protagonist will accept, echoing the Machines’ creation of the late 1990s virtual world in order to pacify the humans kept in the endless rows of creches in The Matrix (1999). Elements of the work of PKD have been copied so many times (at least six, by last count) that it’s hard to recognize the original source. We find it here in TOOJ, but that’s what Jameson is arguing (what with the Matrix being released a decade later and all).

TOOJ: “(The novel) is a collective wish fulfillment and the expression of a deep unconscious yearning for a simpler and more human social system, a small-town Utopia very much in the North American frontier tradition” (Jameson, p.521). I guess here’s where we’ll put a pin in our discussion to talk about the Fallout TV series, and Westworld too, but for now we need to press on.

There are details of the other two titles Jameson refers to – Something Wild and Blue Velvet – and they are fantastic films as well, but here they are to bolster his case, provide further evidence and allow him to triangulate towards the elements of nostalgia he is looked for. As our remit, familiarity, and focus here in the Implausiverse is more on the sci-fi side of things, we’ll see what he says about that and then use that to figure out what nostalgia is all about.

Jameson on Science Fiction

Science Fiction is a “category” in Jameson’s words, with bunny ears included, though we might just wanna call it a genre that came about during that Eisenhowerian period, of the US conquering space and battling “communists” at the same time, and this ideology is inherent within the lit. The “category” might be bigger, going large to include some real lit like Moore’s Utopia, and others, or it might be more tightly bound to the pulps. I like the expansive view of sci-fi for our POV here, though it seems best to loop in Shelley’s Frankenstein by definition and intent, and pin down the start of sci-fi proper to ‘sometime around when Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Centre of the Earth‘ (1864 for those keeping track), which scoops up HG Wells’ stuff as well, and gives us a strong foundation.

The classic 1950s era of sci-fi is kinda the “Golden Age”: a particular vision of the future both technologically and aesthetically. Its goal is to help us process our history, to come to terms with it and understand how we fit into the current era. Jameson contrasts sci-fi with the historical novel, a cultural form (along with costume films and period dramas on TV) that reflected the ideology of the feudal classes, and had fallen off throughout the late 20th century as the (then new) middle class sought something different, something that amped up their own achievements. Enter sci-fi. The historical novel failed not simply due to the feudalist ideals, but because, according to Jameson: “in the postmodern age we no longer tell ourselves our history in that fashion, but also because we no longer experience it that way, and indeed, perhaps no longer experience it at all” (p.522).

(This may have been true at the time, though the recent rise in historicism and historicity in its forms in the 21st century may suggest Varoufakis is more correct about Technofeudalism than one might suppose. Or rather then, the other way around: did Shakespeare in Love preceed Technofeudalism? Or succeed because of it? Was it the harbinger or the aftershock?)

(We’ll put another pin down here for the fantasy vs. sci-fi debate too, while we’re at it.)

So for Jameson, science fiction is an aspirational vehicle for the masses who are rejecting the previous historical viewpoint. Compared to the historical novel: “Science Fiction equally corresponds to the waning of the blockage of that historicity, and particularly in our own time, in the postmodern era, to its crisis and paralysis, its enfeeblement and repression” (p.523). A lot of the reasons why this occurs have less to do with the content (though there are parts of that too, to be sure), or at least particular aesthetic choices that are made, and more to to with the socio-economic conditions of post-WWII USA (and to a lesser extent Canada and the UK).

And this is where nostalgia starts to come in. Because both historical novels and sci-fi have a tie to the imagination, an imagined past or an imagined future. They use representation in their relationship with the past or future (p.523), but they are really ‘a perception of the present as history’, a way, that we can look at our situation through a few steps removed. This is the conceit throughout the Star-Trek-War-Hammer(s), the alien “other” is but an aspect of our selves, our society, our culture, that we try to take a closer look at.

Nostalgia for the 1950s (in the 1980s)

Describing TOOJ, Jameson presents us with a list of things that “evoke” the 1950s: Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, PTAs, etc., and if it reads like a certain Billy Joel song, that’s not by accident (though “We Didn’t Start the Fire” also being released in 1989 is most certainly coincidental). Nostalgia can often look like a collection of stuff in some hoarders back room. The items are referrents to the era, not facts per se, but ideas about those facts. The question Jameson asks is “Did the ‘period’ see itself this way?” PKD was writing TOOJ in 1959, looking at the decade that just passed and choosing what the essential elements might look like from the perspective of 1997, the year of the fictional interstellar war in his novel, and for the most part getting it right.

There is a “realistic” feel to how PKD describes the `1950s, a feel that arises from the cultural referents that are used. Jameson notes: “If there is ‘Realism’ in the fifties, in other words, it is presumably to be found there, in mass cultural representation, the only kind of art willing (and able) to deal with the stifling Eisenhower realities of the happy family in the small town, of normalcy and non-deviant everyday life.” (p.518, emphasis mine). To the spectator looking back from the 1980s, the image of the 1950s comes from the pop-cultural artifacts that the people in the 1950s understood themselves by. We’re just looking at it from a distance, through a scanner, darkly, and darker over time.

What this accomplishes is “a process of reification” (p.523). The reality gets blurred by the nostalgic elements, and this ends up becoming the signifier that represents the whole. So our sense of our selves, and of any moment in history, may have little or nothing to do with reality, objective reality that is. Which is the biggest PKD-style head trip out there. Though it’s hard to put into words. Show, don’t tell, and in the works of PKD and all of the PKDickensian-inspired media out there, they keep trying to show, over and over again. It’s tricky though. It requires a lot of speculation.

And TOOJ is ultimately a piece of speculative fiction. “It is a speculation which presupposes the possibility that at an outer limit the sense people have of themselves and their own moment of history may ultimately have nothing whatsoever to do with its reality” (Jameson, p.520). How we think of ourselves, our histories, and our generations, are only tied to a fraction of the things that are out there, and much of it may be that “imagined nostalgia” we talked about a few posts ago.

Fitting the pieces together

Which brings us back to the goal we had near the top of this post: What did Fredric Jameson have to say about nostalgia, and how does it jive with our own concept of the nostalgia curve. We can elements of what Jameson was talking about in at least four of our categories:

Nostalgia is representational
Real nostalgia
Imagined nostalgia
Nostalgia happens in different media

Tackling these in turn, we can see how our idea of nostalgia being a representation of a thing, rather than being the thing itself is fundamental in Jameson’s work, and carried throughout it. The ideas of thing, not the things themselves. And for Jameson, those mediated examples coming from pop culture versions, and then informing the generational logic for successive viewers is important too; it connects with our idea of “imagined nostalgia”, the kind that the audience thinks they are remembering, rather than actually experienced.

Jameson doesn’t distinguish between different “kinds” of nostalgia, or at least at the source of where it is produced, but looks at what the the nostalgia is “for” (hence the title, natch). A 1980s audience longing for the imagined view of the `1950s; a interstellar warrior (in the text) longing for their imagined view of the same; or a writer from the decade of the 1950s constructing a longing for that decade while it is still going on. These are all “nostalgia” writ large, to Jameson, whereas we’ve increased the granularity a bit to fine tune our analysis of the Nostalgia Curve/

Jameson also looks at the construction of nostalgia in various media – novels and film in this case, though there could be others – tying in with our “substrate neutral” idea above. The Nostalgia Curve is a transmedia property, and not particular to any one kind or another.

The elements of nostalgia that focused on value are largely absent from his work. Not completely, but as he was looking at the reification of ideology that takes places via nostalgia, and not necessarily the production culture and political economy elements, this is understandable.

Next steps: Memory and Soylent Culture

There’s more to nostalgia than just the media aspect, though, and we’ll need to take a deeper look at the connection it has with memory. There are a few authors I have on the bookshelf that talk about it, and we’ll get into them soon.

The other place nostalgia is showing up in is as part of our Soylent Culture, where bits and pieces of past properties we like or love are dredged back up by the cultural sieves that are our Generative AI tools, and the Platforms that encourage their use as Spreadable Media. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan talked about how new media is built out of the pieces of the old, and nowhere is that more true than in our current online culture. We’ll look deeper into these pieces soon.

References:

Jameson, F., (1989). “Nostalgia for the Present”, The South Atlantic Quarterly 88:2, Spring 1989. Duke University Press,