Page - 179 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

179 #Hallstatt The Future: We’re Not in Kansas, Anymore “[T]he image (as always) goes before the word, foreshadowing the future if only we knew how to read it. It is the older sign, the archaic sign, the ‘first’ sign, as C.S. Peirce would put it. That is why images not only ‘have’ a future related to technology and social change, but are the future seen through a glass darkly.” —Mitchell (2009, 140) “[F]rom farther away we look mechanically reproduced / […] I am not your object of study / and I am not here for you.” — Polyck-O’Neill (2018) Critics have had no trouble identifying the ideological coordi- nates of the Jurassic universe. Like most action blockbusters, it is a form of left melodrama, which, as discussed in the introduc- tion and as we also saw in the culture-clash comedies, makes us, on the one hand, conscious of “the fundamental antagonisms that structure our society” while at the same time encouraging us to live out the possibility of revolution and even reconciliation “as mere entertainment” (Tompkins 2018, 90). That is why Juras- sic World can present itself as “anticapitalist, antimanagerialism, and anti-GM” while also remaining, as Richard Dyer draws our attention to, “anti-feminist, racist, species-ist, and decidedly not queer” (Dyer 2015, 19). Nothing fundamental has changed in terms of the Jurassic universe’s ideological coordinates since Crichton’s original, in which, as Briggs and Kelber-Kaye point out: “[w]hat is interesting — and anti-feminist — […] is the story of reproduction he links it to, one in which ‘good’ repro- duction takes place in white nuclear families where gender roles are properly adhered to, and ‘bad’ reproduction takes place in Third World families” (Briggs and Kelber-Kaye 2000, 97).15 In 15 As a corollary to the Frankenstein parallel, it is noteworthy that in Fallen World, both human and dinosaur relations revolve around motherhood: Blue, the good velocirapter that ends up saving them, is brought from the island to serve as a mother so that the deadly new weapon clones can imprint on her, while it is the young granddaughter, who turns out to be