거대과학의 기술적 공상과 할리우드영화의 디지털모더니즘

Abstract

This essay investigates the cultural implications of digital spectacles of contemporary Hollywood cinema in light of the technological imaginary with which the public invest modern science, and postcolonial theories. Noting that the digital spectacles visualize what transcends human's experiential realities, this study finds their affinities with the space science which arose as part of the American Cold War politics, promising that the space technology would revolutionize human understanding about the unknown universe. It suggests that both the digital spectacles and the space science gratify the technological imagery, the collective confidence the public holds in technological solutions to the problems of human culture and existence. Therefore, it is argued that the digital spectacles inscribed in film narrative are designed to promote the spectator's technological imaginary, which as a modern myth still subscribes to the ideological imperatives of the Cold War politics such as Western hegemony and neo-colonial domination. To prove this point the present work offers three critical discussions. First, it probes the ways in which the Hubble Space Telescope was developed as a major product of the postwar US space policy. It shows how the popular desire and its ideological bounds projected onto Big Science like the Hubble laid the groundwork for latest digital imageries. Second, it reinterprets the Hollywood blockbuster Avatar (2009) to point out that although the movie concedes the failure of the West's technological developmentalism and advocates an ecological world view, the narrative still rests upon the myth of the technological imaginary. The oxymoron 'realistic imagination' is proposed to indicate the way in which the aliens and their living environments in Avatar are visualized and narrativized. It is further argued that the realistic imagination constitutes the central character of the digital spectacles of Hollywood blockbusters. The final discussion examines whether the realistic imagination may also inform the narrative mode of big-budget, non-digital Hollywood movies of the globalization era. To do it the Hollywood movie Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) is compared to Pierre Loti's travelogue Madame Chrysenthème (1887). While the latter prefigures the nonlinear narrative and stereotyping of Western modernist literature, the former mobilizes realism and fairy-tale spectacles in order to deconstruct the elements of the modernist narrative. Such a double narrative upheld by realism and fairy-tale imagination is in line with the realistic imagination of the digital spectacles. This study conclusively proposes the term 'digital modernism' to account the situation in which the digital spectacles mediate between realism and imagism so as to visualize the new identity politics of the globalization era.