We Need More Sci-Fi Movies That Celebrate Otherness

You can be highbrow. You can be lowbrow. But can you ever just be brow? Welcome to Middlebrow, a weekly examination of pop culture. Warning: this post contains “Arrival” spoilers. “We are the hero of our own story,” Mary McCarthy wrote in Characters in Fiction. In other words, in the stories we tell, whether fictional or pertaining to our own lives, our personal beliefs give our choices shape. It’s difficult to see outside of our paradigm, and to understand that the people we ideologically oppose may not be “evil,” but instead driven by a separate set of motivations. This sentiment has been borrowed by contemporary writers like Teju Cole, whose Open City follows a morally questionable narrator, and George R.R. Martin, whose books chronicle warring families who believe staunchly in the good of their own causes. Each author seems to be critiquing a hero-centric approach to storytelling ― stories with zippy plots that rest on the battle of good versus evil. A hero travels to space to defend his ravished homeland; a heroine’s life-as-she-knew-it is endangered by the arrival of ominous visitors. In order for a story to have tension, science-fiction purists argue, it must explore warring ideologies, allowing the “good guys” to triumph in the end, rather than taking a nuanced look at competing wants and reaching a peaceful resolution. But a recent, worthy addition to the science-fiction canon rejects that idea, and succe...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news