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The plot of Stephen King's "Cell" - cell phones scrambling human brains like a skilletful of eggs - probably came as no surprise to Daniel Dinello, Chicago-based filmmaker and film studies professor at Columbia College Chicago.
Dinello is the author of "Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology" (University of Texas Press, 2005), which explores the dire scenarios posited by sci-fi writers when it comes to technology and the future.
In an interview last week, we asked Dinello - or a Dinello-like creature who answered the phone (land-line, not cell) and sounded plausibly human - about monster movies and their ilk.
Q. Your book points out that while scientists often give us a vision of a future made better by technology, writers post the opposite - a world destroyed by it. Why the disparity?
A. I think scientists and their corporate and military sponsors, on the one hand, and artists on the other, have different cultures, objectives and interests. Their cultures are so far apart. Scientists often are developing weapons. They're not interested in criticism because it undermines their interests. But the job of an artist is to look at society. The best science fiction evaluates technology and looks at the implications for society and culture. I'm not demonizing all scientists, but some are so arrogant and messianic that they're wildly defensive over the slightest criticism. They turn it around and consider the critics to be technophobes or anti-progress. Because if you're interested in profit-making, you're less inclined to look at long-term consequences.
Q. King's novel is far from the first time a creative artist has fingered technology as a negative force. Tell us about others.
A. "Frankenstein" is usually considered a horror novel, but it's also technophobic science fiction. An artificial human is a technological creation. My special favorites are "Metropolis," one of the earliest science fiction films that shows the horrors of industrialization, and more recent stuff like Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake," which looks at the horrors of bio-technology taken to extremes. There are also examples from video games like "Resident Evil" - a military-corporate creation of a bio-epidemic.
Q. What's the hottest theme in science fiction?
A. Right now, a lot of horror focuses on viral epidemics and electronic epidemics. Virus horror is a metaphor for technology. Technology becomes an autonomous force that manipulates us. When President Bush says, "We're addicted to oil" - well, actually machines are addicted to oil. And we serve our machines.
Q. King's book deals with zombies. What's the deal with zombies?
A. Zombies are the monsters of contemporary culture. More than the individual monster-a king monster - zombies are about an entire group as a pervasive force. It's more like a viral epidemic. That's what happens in "Dawn of the Dead." Zombies are like machines. They're mindless. And they have only one interest - survival.
Q. But what makes them worse than, say, regular monsters?
A. The real horror is, they don't just kill us. They take us over and manipulate us. It goes back to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and the pods. It's the numbers of zombies that makes them so horrific.
Q. You study this stuff from a scholarly perspective and all, but come on - you enjoy it, too, right?
A. I get a real kick out of writing about it and teaching it. My childhood was shaped by movies about insects mutated by nuclear energy such as "Them," that featured mutated ants. The early 1950s was the age of nuclear technophobia. It was scary, but fun. You can look at these things for their entertainment value, but you can look deeper, too - there's a great deal of social criticism in it. You can look at science fiction as our cultural nightmares.
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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
