A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

effectively cut off from that possibility. 287
This is a tempting conclusion to draw and one that
has been drawn in a variety of contexts. Constance Penley suggests that the “dystopian tendency
in American science fiction indicates an atrophy of the utopian imagination, our cultural
incapacity to imagine the future.” 288 Jodi Dean’s work on abduction argues that the dystopic
nature of abduction points to a sense of powerlessness and disengagement.
Since people feel unable to act meaningfully, since they regard themselves as vulnerable
victims of a technology beyond their control, they displace agency onto an alien
other…The technological achievements once seen as the sign of progress and agency, a
particularly masculine sign to be sure, are revealed as the very causes of human
incapacity. The connection between masculinity and technology, moreover, could explain
why men's abduction narratives are so explicitly sexualized. Terrified of losing their grip
on their tools, they displace their fear of loss of control onto their own bodies, now
feminized. 289
M. Keith Booker argues that the paranoid fantasies of cold-war SF indicate an emergence of a
post-utopian vision—a vision he claims achieved hegemony in what he calls “the long 1950’s”
(1946-1964) and maintains this dominant position to the present day. 290 A more oblique reading
of the communication breakdown evidenced by abduction yields different results.
As material and social elements of past utopian dreams have come to pass—
unprecedented material wealth, a relative increase in rights of minorities and sexual freedom—
visions of perfection have receded into more obtuse ideals of freedom, largely freedom from the
287 For an engaging discussion of the ways in which abduction speaks to an increasing skepticism vis-à-vis the
public sphere, see Jodi Dean. Dean touches on similar themes to those treated above, but does so in a way that
claims a temporal specificity for the alien that I would dispute. “I am interested in discourses like that of ufology
where participants think they speak and reason like everyone else, but everyone else finds what they are saying
incomprehensible and irrational. I’m interested because this is the situation of America at the millennium.” (Dean,
6) Of course I argue that the application of the tools of the Enlightenment to matters irrational is an ongoing
project—abduction is only the latest of such moments.
288 Constance Penley, “Time Travel, Primal Scene, and Critical Dystopia (on The Terminator and La Jetee)” in The
Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989) 121.
289 Jodi Dean, “Theorizing Conspiracy Theory” in Theory and Event V.4 #3
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v004/4.3r_dean.html (accessed November 6, 2005); For an extended
discussion of the emasculation of the American male, see Susan Faludi, Stiffed: the Betrayal of the American Male
(New York: Perennial, 2000)
290 M. Keith Booker, The Post-Utopian Imagination: American Culture in the Long 1950’s (Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press, 2002).
200