There’s a lot of lessons in Trump’s ascendancy that illuminate much of what we don’t want to admit about race relations in the US. One thing we don’t want to admit is how recently did racism become a vice; before a certain point, all American Presidents, including those who were Civil Rights heroes (Lincoln, Grant, Coolidge, FDR, Truman), were publicly and unapologetically, racist. Racism was so normal, certain, and essential, that civil rights stands were not in contradiction to a racist character, but being non-racist was weird. The first President who we can safely say was not racist was Republican Eisenhower, and he was elected very recently, 1953, so I know some people reading this remember him. He began the Civil Rights Revolution that Democrat Truman before him attempted to spark, but failed to, because of Democratic Party infighting. The last President to get away with public racism was Democrat Johnson, Eisenhower’s ally in the Senate and the greatest of all Civil Rights...
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Contact (1997)
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Contact (1997) I think everyone who loves SF started with loving Spaceships. As we grew, we might’ve been drawn to other narrative Sub-Genres more, Near-Future, Post-Apocalyptic, Time-Travel, etc, but in the English-speaking world it was almost always about the Spaceships, and there are Historical reasons for this. Between 1937 and 1949, there was virtually no SF cinema in the English-speaking World except Children’s Serials, and the most beloved of these was the Space Opera “Flash Gordon” (Serial Film Franchise began in 1936, continued to 1940, and there were many imitators that followed). Film Serials, brought into a new media, became the cornerstone of SF on TV when that technology first became culturally important in the USA (around 1948) and the first regularly broadcast, original to TV, SF program in the USA was “ Captain Video” (first aired 1949) which was one of those “Flash Gordon” imitators. SF would return triumphantly to cinema w...
Twelve Monkeys (1995)
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Twelve Monkeys (1995) James Cole to Kathryn Railly : “I want the future to be unknown. I want to become a whole person again. I want this to be the present. I want to stay here this time, with you. ” - From “Twelve Monkeys” Probably the boldest, zero-budget, SF film ever made was Writer/Director Chris Marker’s “La Jette” (1962). It was short film, shot in B&W, and presented as a Slideshow with Narration ( Jean Négroni , the only voice we hear), yet captivated Art House Audiences around the World with its tale of Time Travel and the Inescapability of Fate. It plays with the Confounding and often Fatalistic Concept of a Causal Time Loop, which one of the ways of addressing the narrative issue of a Time Paradox, something no SF Author dare ignore if you have your Characters Time-Travel into the Past, because if you do, you risk changing the Past, and if you change the Past, you’re almost inevitably c...