The present is the form of all life: A textual analysis of Alphaville and THX 1138
Abstract
While science fiction is often recognized as being a reflection of the modern world, many science fiction films feel heavily detached from our current reality. They often taken place in settings with little to meaningfully tie them to our current time and place, and as such their attempts at social commentary fall flat. However, there are many films that demonstrate a way to approach this problem, not only by filming recognizable locations, but by the unorthodox matter they use these locations to create a futuristic setting. This paper serves as a rhetorical analysis of two such science fiction films: Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) and George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971). Alphaville is a cross-section between film-noir and science fiction that transforms Paris at nighttime into a computer-controlled city-state dominated by rigid logic, while George Lucas’s THX 1138 focuses on a nightmarish, technocratic society created almost entirely by filming various commercial and industrial locations in contemporary Los Angeles. Both films are unique, not only in that they are shot almost entirely on location, but in the way these locations are used. In most science fiction films, the aim is to depict a fictional future from the ground up and to maintain its verisimilitude and internal consistency in such a way that the audience believes it is real. Alphaville and THX 1138 differ because they emphasize the distortion of reality, taking familiar locations and filming them in such a way as to make them recognizable, yet “other,” blurring the line between the real and the unreal and creating an effect that seems fairly unique compared to other science fiction films. In analyzing this effect, there is an attempt to see how this effect ties into the goal of science fiction as a reflection of the modern world, and how it can tie in to a new way for filmmakers and critics to approach the genre.
Degree
M.A.
Advisors
Barbour, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Film studies
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