This journey is perhaps best begun within a terrarium of sorts, a towering glass structure with golden beams and linings, a world of strange colours and creatures within. Let us begin here, in this unfamiliar jungle governed by mysterious laws. There is much to be learnt.
In this curious reality our senses are confounded and delighted, this scrambled dream world of familiar phenomena unfamiliarly rearranged. Our mind is challenged to move beyond its everyday, a practice in creativity and empathy, one which draws us closer to the underlying understandings and universal fixations of our minds. Through enriching empathetic escapism, we are given the ability to come to terms with struggles in our own worlds, the allegory being a brilliant human tool for tackling reality.
But how exactly does this process of expanding and empowering our imaginations take place? Let us explore these processes in terms of anthropology. Perhaps the most applicable models for what here occurs are those of van Gennep’s rites de passage, and Lévi-Strauss’ Structural Anthropology.
Arnold van Gennep, an early 20th century anthropologist is principally remembered for his Les Rites de Passage, a comparative study of an array of coming-of-age, transitional rituals. These rituals are identifiable by three stages: 1) that of separation of an individual from their previous identity 2) the initiate’s state of liminality in which said identity is broken down 3) and the final aggregation phase, wherein the initiate is reintegrated into society with their new status. During liminality, the initiate is understood as invisible, but come initiation, personages adorn themselves in animal hides, masks, and costumes, brightly coloured in extreme visibility; the foundations of reality previously ignored in the shadowy realm of liminality, now altered and disrupted through symbolic artistry. The rearrangement of human and animal, and physical and metaphorical forms, overturns reality, a new version of which is come to terms with in this alternate ritualistic realm. Both real and fantastic associations of the natural realm are drawn into question, stimulating both our senses and our capacity for reasoning. Familiar elements are disordered and made unfamiliar, yet are still approachable through both underlying relatability and sceptical boundaries.
When we examine the phrase ‘science fiction,’ we are met with a fruitful, poetic comparison to this form of ritual. Science, our empirical understanding of the natural realm and the rules which govern it, is pulled apart, rearranged, and made fictitious. Yet, still this world is familiar, its elements having derived from those of our own. Our empirical realities are hung in suspension, our elements and observations are shuffled about into fantastical orders, our ‘science’ as we know it, plants, animals, and rules of the universe, are rendered irrelevant, made silly, or utterly baffled in the creation of new worlds, new creatures; strange terrariums which still somehow retain enough resemblance to our own world for us to understand their meanings. We are introduced to new characters, that despite their lack of immediate familiarity are easily understood, recognized, and felt for. Our senses are confounded and delighted, our reasoning self-deprecated and stimulated by the decipherable unfamiliar, the creative, and the metaphorical. Despite the foreign physicality, universal truths, love and hate, good and evil, run through our world and into the next, confirming the veracity of our passions on these matters and allowing us more creative room for their exploration.
In Lévi-Strauss’ Structural Anthropology, we are met again with this reordering of reality, this time explicitly through myth and fantasy. In relating an account of the childbirth rituals of the Cuna in the Panama Republic, Lévi-Strauss likens the shaman’s singing to the practice of Western psychoanalysis; in both, the medium of understanding physical and emotional experience is abstracted to language and conquered in this new realm. A similar process of abstraction and consolation is experienced too in our journey into the fantastical realm of science fiction and fantasy.
Film presents us with an especially unique medium by which we can render these fantastical realms reality. It provides us with the opportunity for the concrete realisation of the creative impulses of ritual and myth. Science fiction and fantasy as genres, in turn, offer film enough room for the unhinged exploration of these creative impulses.
Through fiction and fantasy, artists are given free rein to employ the full potential of their creative abilities. George Lucas, Jim Henson, and Frank Oz, ingeniously collaborated at various points across their careers, imagining, mastering, and making real innumerable creatures and realities from Star Wars, to The Dark Crystal (1982), to Labyrinth (1986). Terry Gilliam created world-within-world in the fantastic daydreams of Brazil (1985) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). In Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Dune (David Lynch, 1984), and Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), we witness the creative exploitation and defiance of the laws of physics which we have grown so accustomed to experiencing in our world. We encounter exotic colours, fashions, and living things in that unlimited realm only approachable through fantasy. But again, despite the infinite forms which creatures might take, in this realm we are met with comparable challenges and satisfactions to our own. Through profound allegorical metaphors such as ‘the Force’ or ‘the Spice,’ our minds are exercised in situating ourselves within universally applicable narratives, often based on moral rightness and wrongness. Beneath the illusion of material difference lies universally applicable truths.
Some instances are less subtle than others. In The NeverEnding Story (Wolfgang Petersen, 1984), Atreyu’s only friend is drowned in the ‘Swamps of Sadness’ on their quest to stop their world from being destroyed by a powerful, evil force, ‘the Nothing’. Riddles and challenges of self-reflection are encountered along the way, as similarly to in The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987), the storyline is brought to life only through a reader in the film. In these self-conscious narratives, the importance of the audience’s creation and engagement with imaginary realms is further emphasised.
In a late 1970s Parkinson interview with Star Trek: The Original Series’ leading man, William Shatner shared a moving story from a fan, who alongside ten other soldiers had been captured in the Vietnam War. Driven to the point of almost madness and death through the horrors which they experienced, the only thing that united them in their struggle was their unlikely mutual love of Star Trek, the characters of which they would imitate, rehearsing episode dialogue in effort to keep their sanity, saving many of their lives. There could perhaps be no more profound direct example of the importance of human imagination in making reality accessible, and fictional narratives in providing us with aspirational goals and role models.
Science fiction and fantasy films, in their requirement of our own momentary suspension of belief, alongside their ingenious rearrangement of the natural sciences of our familiar worlds, are rich sources for creative inspiration and practices in empathy. Through their resolving consolidation of the infinitely foreign and the universally relatable, they are unmatched in their ability to provide us with the tools we need for abstracting and coming to terms with our own struggles and impulses, especially when seeking aspirational guidance.
