Garbage: The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of: Response to Michael Shanks, David Platt, and William L. Rathje

Abstract

Garbage appears in science fiction cinema with notable frequency, whether in the retrofitted future Los Angeles of Blade Runner (1982) or the post-Holocaust bricolage of the Mad Max films or The Bed Sitting Room (1969). Whole cities can appear in ruins in the "future archaic" subgenre; think Logan's Run (1976), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), or the more recent A. I. (2001). These futures give us a tingle. In the future, the past, our present, will exist only as stubborn traces, debris that doesn't quite disappear. It was not always thus: in Things to Come (1936), scripted by H. G. Wells, the future-archaic Everytown is simply bulldozed in an unparalleled paean to the technological sublimity of its gleaming white city. A city, we note, without a trash can in sight (perhaps they use disintegrator beams, like Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet [1956], or Daffy Duck in Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century [1953]). This white city points back to the mock permanence of the White City at the heart of the 1893 World Colombian Exposition in Chicago, monumental halls whose stolid presence denied the fragility of the stuff in which they were clad.