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Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir (review)

Paul Meehan, Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir. Jefferson: McFarland, 2008. 264pp. us$55.00 (hbk).Alexia L. BowlerOn receiving this book for review, the exciting prospect of a new critical study on the commonalities and the culmination of sf cinema and film noir in what Meehan, following James Cameron, dubs 'tech-noir' was tempered with a nervous anticipation regarding its status as part of a growing corpus of mainstream publications on sf film which often fall short of the expectations of an academic audience. Considering the mutable and hybrid nature of genre throughout the history of film, the premise of Meehan's project - to chart the common origins and features that historically point to the emergence of an identifiably new cycle of noir and sf in the twenty-first century - is reasonable and one that would be welcomed by scholars of sf and film noir. Indeed, in the wake of The Matrix phenomenon (Wachowski and Wachowski US 1999-2003), and an everincreasing volume of academic material on the nature of technology in cinema, Meehan's book attempts to enlarge upon the marrying and merging of the discourses of each category, which have begun to seem so indistinguishable in our spectacular technological age. His inquiry, then, is whether 'tech-noir' should be considred a new sub-genre with traits and concerns distinct from those of traditionally accepted sf and noir film.Meehan's 'tech-noir' seems particularly relevant today, bearing in mind the ever-multiplying sf films with noir overtones, ranging from Blade Runner (Scott US/Hong Kong 1982), Strange Days (Bigelow US 1995), Species (Donaldson US 1995) and Dark City (Proyas Australia/US 1998) to eXistenZ (Cronenberg Canada/UK 1999), The Thirteenth Floor (Rusnak Germany/US 1999), Minority Report (Spielberg US 2002) and the recent films Gamer (Neveldine and Taylor US 2009) and The Surrogates (Mostow US 2009). However, his book cannot seem to decide whether it is, as the blurb states, 'a critical study' or an aficionado's attempt at gate-crashing the party. Having identified Blade Runner as a defining genre-splicing moment, Meehan - amidst anecdotal material about his first engagement with sf and noir - briefly cites the flurry of academic investigation into the fluid relationship between film noir and sf, with the stylistic and thematic influences of German Expressionism on the former also evident in early examples of the latter. Although he suggests the necessity of examining the relationship between sf and noir, he does not spend enough time setting up an appropriate framework for his material, nor does he satisfactorily outline the definitional and taxonomical problems and debates surrounding sf and noir as distinct from one another.In order to consider the originality, precision and the validity with which a writer proclaims the emergence or renewed importance of a new or mutating generic category, the trajectory of the separate genres under question need to be assessed. Meehan's failure to clearly track the way in which sf and noir might ever have been different, and at which point they collapsed boundaries, leaves the reader sceptical of his contention that these two 'genres' happened to spawn their own sub-genre, renewing the reader's doubt as to whether noir is arguably more of a 'style'. Meehan's endeavour at outlining his project, in an alarmingly short preface, reads thus:Tech-noir represents a purely human dimension of the science fiction film, one that casts light on the dark regions of the heart, and though aliens, monsters and cybernetic brains may occasionally appear, they are not the soul of the plot. The tech-noir genre hybrid is the black hole of the science fiction film, in which the effects of tainted technology cast long shadows over the resident darkness of the human condition. Like film noir, dark sci-fi holds up a clouded mirror in which we may perceive the obscure workings of the soul and discern clues to our ultimate fate. …