On the upper levels of the city, the sky is a little closer. What can science fiction and the movies tell us about the probable settings for our future lives?Ĭohen’s film is set in New York, or to be accurate just above it. I would like in this article to consider the implications of that geography as charted by the cinema.
Ballard has shown that all science fiction must––the geography of the mental landscape of modern man who externalizes his guilts and aspirations into an everyday environment. THE MONSTER AND THE CITY have been symbolic in Larry Cohen’s Q–– The Winged Serpent, 1982, the sort of film normally dismissed with a tolerant smile by critics who would have you consider more serious matters, the essentials of science fiction cinema can be identified more subtly––and more knowingly––than Steve Spielberg and George Lucas, Cohen fingers the exact pulse of fearful speculations that has throbbed in twentieth-century fiction since Mary Shelley conceived it and Jules Verne and H.G.
