Metamorphosing Worlds in the Cinema of the Fantastic

Abstract

In his article "Metamorphosing Worlds in the Cinema of the Fantastic" Juan Gonzalez Etxeberria reads fantastic films as appealing products of both unconscious psychological and institutionalized sociological anxieties. A result of the binary opposition of rhetorical strategies that shaped modern culture, the genre is an open door to other worlds where to dream of uncertainties and to indulge in our traumas. Its transgressive indeterminacy against the Cartesian system is traced from the origin of creative filmic language to postmodern disturbing fantasies about the unknown, having social control and individual free will as the only limits of its imaginary trips across time and space. Technical and financial restraints, on the one hand, and mystical and revolutionary ambitions, on the other, have configured a genre that has lately become an even more polysemic and polymorphic universe, where computer-generated simulations fulfil human desires and seek pleasure through a new vision of the body, a site where natural and cultural orders fade away. Resemblance to actual places or to persons living or dead, especially the latter, is never coincidental.