El camino de las heroínas en tiempos de ciencia ficción

Abstract

2020 wasn’t our best year. We never had lived in a global quarantine, we never had seen the strongest countries so vulnerable, we never had feared in such a desperate way for our loves ones. We face the COVID-19: the “Invisible Enemy”. From overnight we crashed into a science fiction scenario. The foreboding in Flu (Sung-su Kim, 2013), Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011) and Outbreak (Wolfgang Petersen, 1995) became real. The fear of death and sickness escaped from “silver screen” and the world changed forever. It was science fiction –aside from fantasy stories– that fed their plots from the panic of invasion, hunger, contagion, consequences of nuclear activity, bombing, unexpected catastrophes. All stories in which death no longer awaits “the end of life rushes by proximity” (Rodríguez Alzueta, 2020, p.81). Such as other film genres and subgenres, it found its origins in literature, and the first work known as such is Frankenstein, a novel written by a woman (Aldiss, 1973). With the arrival of film industry, the love crush was immediate. Since Le Voyage dans la Lune (Georges Méliès, 1902) science fiction established itself in the big –and small– screen and won’t stop expanding and diversifying. However, it must be said that representation of the scientific practice has not been one of the most favored by cinema. The treatment of techno-science “seems to give writers and directors a sort of letter of marque that often present an image of science that looks nothing true” (Moreno Lupiáñez, 2007, p.1). And there show up stereotypes like the “evil alchemist”, the “clueless genius”, or the “mad, bad and dangerous scientist” (Haynes, 2003). If this is the recurring image of the man dedicated to science, what’s left for women in a genre where “masculinity” has had a privileged place? Filmakers and movies of all ages, starting with Fritz Lang and his automata in Metropolis (1927), going into The Stepford wives (Frank Oz, 2004), even Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and many more examples, have fascinated in presenting women as a scientific creation, “a proper fantasy of a patriarchal society that dreams with subduing women to men’s rules” (Dos, 2010, p.32). Difficult will be the search for women with a leading role, where their discoveries come from their intellect, as banners of mathematical, physical, medical solutions. Women as a symbolic subject, not as an object. “During the 20th century, film became a media that broadcasted values, behaviors, ideology and stories about urban society and modernization of cultures, with the capacity to influence our feelings and thoughts” (Acosta Jiménez, 2018, p.52). With this premise present and understanding film as document, a place of the memory and the collective imagination, let us try to approach the different “ends of the world” that the seventh art offered, to reflect on the place of the female hero in science fiction. Because after all, the coronavirus also “throws us in the big ring in which what matters above all are society’s great debates; how we think society from here on out” (Svampa, 2020, p.18).