8 - Posthumanity and Masculinity

Summary

A sequence of science-fiction films set in the San Francisco Bay Area explore even more fully than The Circle and The Internship the dystopian implications of a world dominated by Silicon Valley. Like William Gibson's science-fiction novel All Tomorrow's Parties (1999), they present San Francisco as the place ‘where the world ended. Was ending’, as if taking Gavin Belson's ‘I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do’ lament to its logical conclusion: better to destroy the world than countenance allowing a rival to dominate it. These films include the first in a reimagining of the Planet of the Apes franchise, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011); a reboot of the Terminator franchise featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg assassin-saviour, Terminator: Genisys (Alan Taylor, 2015); Ant-Man (Peyton Reed, 2015), part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU); and Venom (Ruben Fleischer, 2018), another film based on a Marvel character but that exists outside the MCU. Each identifies the source of major threats to humanity within private corporations linked to Silicon Valley technological research: Rise highlights the exploitation of medical experimentation for profit by a corporation based in San Francisco; for Genisys, humanity's downfall lies in the quest for domination of personal computing by a tech firm headquartered at San Francisco's southern edge; in Venom, a Silicon Valley tech bro's desire to conquer outer space nearly leads to an alien invasion; and Ant-Man sees another Silicon Valley tech bro's willingness to supply cutting-edge military hardware to the highest bidder threaten to disrupt world peace. These films warn us of the instability of the new worlds Silicon Valley hopes to create, and of the problems attached to the quest for the posthuman condition. As this suggests, a deeper tradition underpins these films’ critique: fears surrounding the potential of science to wreak havoc on humanity that can be traced to Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) and similar horror movies.

The films also pick up on themes outlined in the heavily Freudian Hulk (Ang Lee, 2003). Here, a scientist working in a California military base in 1966 hopes to achieve immortality through genetic modification, thus gifting his son a genetic mutation.