A world is easy to imagine whose beasts surpass us in their desire to be human.
In Omnividivence, Part 1, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s naturalism is channeled through Ross, the animal wrangler of “Catching Trouble,” to make a point about the relationship between emerging technology and what it means to be human, what it means to be conscious and alive.
E.M. Forster and the emerging technology of the television are discussed in tandem.
Undersea Kingdom updates Edwin Abbott’s idea of “omnividence” with its imagining of an omnivident screen.
The Screen Age: How Mystery Science Theater 3000 Taught Me to Stop Relaxing and Love Ward E uses the T.V. show Mystery Science Theater 3000 to recount the 20th century as chronology. Its principal conceit is to delve into the movies the show lampooned, one year after the other, alongside discussions of their historical context. This culminates in the millennial bacchanal that coincided with the show’s cancellation.
The principal theme connecting the book’s various historical vignettes is the change that’s come over the collective human psyche as society traverses the Screen Age, this transition from the text through the image to the interactive screen. Here I amplify and expand on the concerns of cultural critics like Marie Wynn, Neil Postman, and Mark Crispin Miller that the primacy of the image and the screen and corporate control of popular media have conspired to make modern life isolated and dysfunctional. But The Screen Age aspires to more than just polemic. The last few decades have been arguably the strangest, bleakest, and most wondrous in human history, and the movies of MST3k prove to be a quirky but fruitful way of organizing and recounting them.
