Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film, 1979-2017 The Aesthetics of Enclosure

Offering a survey of Hollywood science fiction cinema from 1979 to 2017 (from Ridley Scott's Alien to Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049), Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film argues that the trajectory of Hollywood's dystopianism in that period is inextricable from the phenomenon of the 'new enclosures', the new dispossessions and privatisations sweeping across the United States since the 1970s. More precisely, it contends that the critiques of such dispossessions elaborated before the turn of the century - consider the satire of private policing in RoboCop (1987), the portrayal of commodified air in Total Recall (1990), and the nightmarish extrapolations of postmodern urbanism in Blade Runner (1982) and The Truman Show (1998) - begin to disappear in films such as The Matrix (1999), The Island (2005), District 9 (2009), Repo Men (2010), and The Purge (2013), the further commodification of land, forest, reservoir, ideas, even the human genome having diminished the contrast between capitalist and non-capitalist spaces on which the earlier critiques depended. Bringing close readings of blockbuster films into dialogue with historical and theoretical scholarship on dispossession, Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film proposes a new understanding of the politics of science fiction in particular and utopian thought in general.

Introduction - Anticipation: Science Fiction between Spectacle and Speculation

PART 1: ENCLOSURE AFTER ENCLOSURE
1. Extrapolation: The New Enclosures in New Hollywood
2. Privatisation: Conceptualising Enclosure in RoboCop and Total Recall
3. Urbanisation: Images of Los Angeles in Blade Runner and The Truman Show

PART 2: DYSTOPIA AFTER DYSTOPIA
4. Expropriation: Marx, Utopia, and the Limits of Political Economy
5. Innovation: Intellectual Property in The Matrix, The Island, and District 9
6. Speculation: Credit, Crisis, and Foreclosure in Repo Men and The Purge

Conclusion - Negation: Capitalism at the End of the World