“Hi. I’m Wheeler Winston Dixon, James Ryan professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and this is Frame By Frame. Science fiction films first came about in the beginning of cinema with Georges Méliès’ Trip to the Moon, but they’ve come in sporadic waves of interest.
I’m thinking, for example, of Things to Come, the fantastic British film, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927. But a vogue for science fiction didn’t really hit till the 1950s in America, with things like When Worlds Collide, The Thing, which was one of the first great science fiction films, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, when science fiction reflected a kind of Cold War paranoia.
The other thing about science fiction is that it’s tied curiously to the Western. As the westerns sort of became moribund, and now people don’t make too many westerns these days, science fiction became ‘the final frontier.’ As manifest destiny was more or less explored, space became the new frontier that had to be explored. And this, of course, led to the success of the Star Trek and Star Wars series, and of course, the dystopian science fiction films like Alien.
Now, that we’re here in the 21st century, science fiction has become an absolute generic staple. Science fiction films are more popular than ever. I think they offer a sense of escape; they offer a sense of wonder, they offer a sense of exploring something beyond what we know. The world has become very small now. We’re in touch with everyone around the world, whether we like to or not. Science fiction offers us a sense that there’s frontier out there that we don’t know.
There’s civilizations out there that we don’t know, and science fiction offers us a way to escape, but also it’s a commentary on the smallness of our world right now, and also it projects into the future the possibilities of what can happen, in terms of both good, or in terms of bad… as in Blade Runner, in which the future does not work. So science fiction projects both our fear, and our hopes, on the cinema screen.”
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