Balancing on Irony's Edge: Risk Staging in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (original) (raw)

Abstract

The concept of the Anthropocene calls attention to large scale human-induced changes to the planet we inhabit alongside millions of other species. Anthropocene implies that human actions in the past will actively shape the future for millennia to come. The enormity of the temporal scales involved make environmental risks difficult to conceptualize in the first place and even more difficult to represent. Narrative in general and science fiction in particular offer unique possibilities for constructing temporal scales that make a staging of human impact in the long durée possible. This paper advances a reading of the 1986 science fiction film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in the context of the discourse surrounding global risk in Late Modernity. I argue that Star Trek IV’s combination of the trope of species extinction with the trope of catastrophic climate change is instrumental in staging planetary risk. The coming together of these two tropes serves to compress diegetic time in order to represent anthropogenic effects on the planet on a large scale. Anthropogenic risk then becomes available to be examined from an ironic distance. Irony plays a central role in the way in which the environmental crisis - which can only be averted through nonhuman agency - is imagined as a crisis of the imagination. By imagining voluntary risk-taking as a key element in the solution to the central conflict, Star Trek IV claims the chance aspect inherent in risk and thereby sets a counterpoint to other narratives of ecological risk that operate with an exclusive understanding of risk as “the anticipation of catastrophe” (Beck 9). References: Beck, Ulrich. World at Risk. Transl. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009. Print. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Dir. Leonard Nimoy. Perf. Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, et al. Paramount Pictures, 1986. Film.

Michaela Castellanos hasn't uploaded this conference presentation.

Create a free Academia account to let Michaela know you want this conference presentation to be uploaded.

Ask for this conference presentation to be uploaded.