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Darker Cities

Urban Dystopia and Science Fiction Cinema

First of all we should say that Andrew Milner discusses two important theories, Darko Suvin’s navum theory and Raymond William’s cultural materialism, in his article. Then he analyzed three urban dystopian science fiction films; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Alex Proyas’s Dark City.

According to Milner, “Metamorphoses of Science Fiction” by Darko Suvin is a cornerstone because of its Western Marxist Theorical approach and comparative literature on its disciplinary orientation. Milner has also noted that Suvin explained science fiction as literature of cognitive estrangement. Here cognitive estrangement is most debated concept.

The other theory of Milner’s used in his article is Raymond William’s cultural materialism. According to William, cultural materialism is a theory of culture as a productive process and of specific practices of arts as social uses of material means of production. Milner has explained William’s work as social scientific rather than literary critical in character and wholly theorical. Milner also has made clear that there are three phases of William’s thought. These are left culturalist, cultural material and postmodernist. The first one was characterized by a polemical rejection of utopianism and dystopianism, the second one the intent of the analysis was not so much to take sides and best represented by The Country and the City. The third one entailed a positive revaluation of utopianism, especially of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. For Miller, William has been discussed relationship between utopia and science fiction in his Science Fiction Studies which is first published in 1978. William’s “science fiction argument” was a distinctly modern form of utopia and dystopia. There are four characteristic types of each; he argued the paradise or hell the positively or negatively externally altered world, the positive or negative willed...