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Record W322390463

The Capitalist and Cultural Work of Apocalypse and Dystopia Films

2015· article· en· W322390463 on OpenAlex
David Christopher

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueCineaction! · 2015
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicUtopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDystopiaUtopiaCapitalismIdeologyPostmodernismAestheticsVisionNarrativeRepresentation (politics)SociologyPoliticsLiteratureHistoryPhilosophyArtArt historyAnthropologyLawPolitical science
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] We are living in a dystopia. Our world is the capitalist aberration dystopia films depict. In his essay regarding the Canadian horror (and semi-dystopian) film Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997), Angel Mateos-Aparicio reports that French philosopher Jean Baudrillard ... has argued that the 'real' world has become utopian and that fictional models provide an experience of what reality has actually turned into. (1) Mateos-Aparicio goes on to observe that Cube addresses postmodern anxieties about the nature of contemporary social relations, the purpose of political structure, and the consequences of the predominance of capitalistic economy as the organizational principle of human relations. (2) Indeed, much post-modern cinematic narrative has been preoccupied with apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian fantasies that closely reflect aspects of our lived reality. These three categories are closely related in their ideological underpinnings. Certainly they share certain characteristics, not the least of which is a representation of the repressed anxiety regarding the potential fall of capitalist culture. All are concerned with horrific visions of a world in which patriarchal capitalism has been either annihilated or corrupted, and all three function as warnings or harbingers, cinematic realizations in the tradition of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, of what must be changed and what must be protected in order for patriarchal capitalism to survive. However, dystopia film does not inherently require there to be an apocalypse, and these films have a closer relationship with fantasies of utopia than do the other two categories. This paper seeks to distinguish the boundaries between films categorized as apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian and to examine some of the most iconic cinematic artifacts in each of the categories to differentiate their parameters and to explore in detail dystopian film through the prism of cultural theory, to better understand the cultural work that specifically dystopia cinema does. The last section elucidates the different cultural work effected by dystopia films that were produced before 9/11 and the more contemporary films In Time (2011) and The Purge (2013). Elizabeth Rosen succinctly describes the fundamental characteristic of dystopia narratives: utopia comes at an unspeakable cost. (3) However, the fact that dystopia film presents an ersatz reality that is ostensibly worse than our own works to ideologically mask the fact that the horrific side-effects of capitalism in these otherwise utopian worlds ganged agley are representations of capitalist relations that already exist. Dystopia film is primarily concerned with the social conditions inherent to patriarchal capitalism in which the narratives simultaneously expose and reproduce social and economic contradictions in an ideological process of repressive tolerance. Dystopia cinema appears to criticize the damaging effects of self-indulgent capitalism while positing fantasies of class integration. These fantasies offer romantic justifications in which the altruistic tendencies of two characters resolve class contradictions in a narrative trajectory that ostensibly transcends capitalism and all of its evil, greedy commodification. Decadepost-9/11 dystopia films such as In Time (Andrew Nicoll, 2011) and The Purge (James DeMonaco, 2013) are significant contemporary examples due to the way in which they realize explicit capitalist axioms. In Time literalizes the capitalist axiom that time is money, while The Purge effectively dramatizes the commodification of violence in the convention of horror cinema. What these films have in common is the way they operate in a process of neo-Marxist repressive tolerance to criticize the aspects of capitalism that contradict romantic mythologies in an ideological effort to reconcile these contradictions with a valorizing fantasy of romance and revolution. Neo-Marxist cultural theory remains an effective framework in which to understand the cultural work accomplished by apocalyptic and dystopian narratives, especially in the context of widely distributed media commodities such as blockbuster cinema. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.980
Threshold uncertainty score0.225

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.048
GPT teacher head0.239
Teacher spread0.191 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it