"science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable...Once, galactic empires might have seemed a Posthuman domain. Now, sadly, even interplanetary ones are" - Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity 1993.
There is a genre of movie that center on a hyper intelligent, inhuman, or superhuman protagonist. These are not aliens from a distant world, nor even subjects alienated by global capitalism - they are terrestrial aliens; aliens of this world but unlike it. They are unworldly.
These characters have elevated reflexes, can anticipate and predict others' thoughts and strategize in advance, etc.
In Limitless (2011) Bradley Cooper takes a designer drug that makes him fast and smart.
In Lucy (2014) Scar-Jo accidentally takes a designer drug that makes her fast and smart.
In Hitman Agent 47 (2015) Rupert Friend is not taking designer drugs but is himself a designer drug - a designer baby to be precise; a killer genetically engineered and pumped full of drugs and propaganda at birth to make him a android-like murder. His sister, played by Hannah Ware, is like this too - except more smarter.
In Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) there are two characters; they are not 'android-like' but are cyborgs or androids themselves; one a bad guy terminator, one techno-modified heroine.*
*[as an aside - perhaps indicative of cultural trends in media: in 2011, the super-inhuman character is a male, in 2014 a woman, in 2015 and 2019 a man and women - the archetype is complexifying...]
All these characters are supposed to be really smart, and the film goes to great lengths to try and convince the viewer these characters are really smart - the thing is these characters keep doing dumb, boring things. To the viewer they behave in mundane, predictable ways. Cooper, Johansen, Friend, Ware, and the terminator and anti-terminator ultimately just shoot people and maneuver slightly more tactically, efficiently than their opponents.
What this illustrates are the Kantian epistemological and imaginary limits of the human and its attempt to radically think and radically create outside of one's self; the human attempt to create the inhuman; an attempt, and ultimate failure.
In other words, people who aren't themselves inhuman super intelligent beings cannot conceptualize what it is like to be as such. Thus, the end product in these films is a normal person's normal ideas of a nonnormal person's nonnormal ideas. These character's supposed hyper-superior thought and behavior are merely recycled and rearranged milquetoast thought and behavior.
Descartes, in his iconic Meditations on First Philosophy, writes
"...the visions that come in sleep are like paintings: they must have been made as copies of real things; so at least these general kinds of things – eyes, head, hands and the body as a whole – must be real and not imaginary. For even when painters try to depict sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they simply jumble up the limbs of different kinds of real animals, rather than inventing natures that are entirely new. If they do succeed in thinking up something completely fictitious and unreal – not remotely like anything ever seen before – at least the colours used in the picture must be real. Similarly, although these general kinds of things – eyes, head, hands and so on – could be imaginary, there is no denying that certain even simpler and more universal kinds of things are real. These are the elements out of which we make all our mental images of things – the true and also the false ones."
We can't think or create new categories. These hyper-supreme characters are like Descartes's animals - recycle from old, boring parts. And the psyche has a limited primordial grid or series of categories from which it filters and assembles the outside.
Jung, pulling from the likes of Descartes and Kant, refers to this as an archetype which he defines as the way an instinct - or an inorganic geological physical force territorialized and cybneretically birthed into a physiological force within a body (not unlike the Golem myth where mud turns into a creature with some magic...); a deep outside trapped as deep inside. - manifests as a primordial image, or narrative structure. As Fisher points out dealing with similar concepts, Outsideness rips gaps in the fabric of the real which are assembled together with fictions.
In both his first and last book Fisher uses Fredric Jameson to discuss a similar process: science fiction cannot really conceptualize the future - future society, future tech, etc. - as it can't surpass the epistemic wall that cordons off the future in advance; the deep future can only be conceived in and by the tools of the present or near future. To return to the excerpt of Vinge from our introduction, this is because technology develops in nonlinear, unpredictable ways, and because the most interesting high tech stuff is way out there, authors and filmmakers cannot really imagine the future.
Limits cannot be traversed and represented. Real 'limitless' or machine(ic) thought or behavior would be much smarter than boring gunplay - or much more intense, and extreme in its violence. The future, like the hypersupreme, will either be hyper intelligent, or ultraviolent (see the most recent Predator franchise installment which pits an autistic human against a violent alien predator, and the research that relates autism to the dark triad of personality traits...). A highly cinematic 9mm automatic...but without the Oedipal personal theater cinema...
As mentioned, in Fisher's first text Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (1999)
"Gothic Materialism is interested in the ways in which what would appear ultramodern – the gleaming products of a technically sophisticated capitalism – end up being described in the ostensibly archaic terms familiar from Horror fction: zombies, demons...think of it as the continuation of a nonorganic line that is positively antagonistic to progressive temporality. As Iain Hamilton Grant puts it, 'the Terminator has been there before, distributing microchips to accelerate its advent and fuel the primitives’ fears...'
...the nonorganic line as occupied by Gothic Materialism is to be distinguished both from 'the supernatural' (the supposed province of Horror fction) and 'speculative technology' (the home of Science Fiction). For Gothic Materialism, the sublime still belongs to a human(ist) aesthetics of representation (precisely because it fixes what lies beyond representation as the unrepresentable). Gothic Materialism’s aesthetic theory, as we shall see below, derives not from...Kant..." (pg. 3, 14).
In his last text The Weird and the Eerie (2016), Fisher writes
"the vampire and the werewolf...these creatures are merely empirically monstrous; their appearance recombines elements from the natural world as we already understand it" (pg. 15).
They are supernatural, not weird. As opposed to the boring supernatural, the weird and eerie is rooted in the fragmented outer limits of the natural (or hypernatural) - the Lovecraftian outside (pg. 16-18, 20-21); an deep unknowable outside that is only glimpsed through the horror of a deep unknowable inside - the Freudian unconscious (which Guattari deems 'marchinic' and schizophrenic in nature) which lies beyond Kantian categories (pg. 22); A Jamesonian "nostalgia for the present" (48-50).
This genre of movie that centers on a hyper-supreme unworldly character with elevated reflexes, who can anticipate and predict others' thoughts and strategize in advance, etc. - the 'limitless' or limit-surpassing characters fail to really bring in the outside and only suceed in illustrating the limitations of representational imagination and humanist narcissism; the failure of the human to conceptualize the machinic.
It's not all failures though. Like in science, these failures are also an opportunity to precisely explore a positive project; to explore what a film of such nature would be. What would an exploration of the Outside look and feel like? A wash of intensities? Colors?
One comes to mind...
