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Soraya Murray, "Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination" (MIT Press, 2026)
01:06:35
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- [00:00]
Eileen Zhou
The best dancers from across the globe
- [00:02]
Soraya Murray
are about to join me for the audition of a lifetime.
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TV Announcer
ABC Mondays. Do they have what it takes to compete and be the next Dancing with the Stars pro?
- [00:11]
Soraya Murray
I'm here to win. Nothing is gonna stop me.
- [00:14]
TV Announcer
Our star judges will decide.
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Soraya Murray
This is what hunger looks like.
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Eileen Zhou
It was 100% a wrong choice.
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TV Announcer
Robert Irwin hosts.
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Eileen Zhou
The next era of ballroom starts right
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Soraya Murray
here on Dancing with the Stars.
- [00:24]
Eileen Zhou
The next Pro.
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TV Announcer
All new Mondays, 8, 7 Central on ABC. Next day on Hulu. This summer, Prime Video takes you back before Legally Blonde, before law school, and into the world of Elle woods in high school. Set in 1995, this Gemini vegetarian knows exactly who she is until her family moves from Bel Air to Seattle. Packed with iconic fashion, 90s nostalgia and a throwback soundtrack, Elle proves one law school was hard. High school was harder. From the world of Legally Blonde, watch Elle, a new original series only on Prime Video. Watch now.
- [01:04]
Soraya Murray
This summer, serve up the cookout classics. Oscar Mayer hot dogs and Heinz mustard. Grill up a dog, add classic yellow mustard or loaded Chicago style. We all know it's not a cookout without Oscar Mayer and Heinz. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:24]
Eileen Zhou
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Eileen Zhou, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Soraya Murray. Soraya is a professor in my home department, Film and Digital Media, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I've had the pleasure of taking Soraya's grad seminar, and I really enjoyed reading her previous work, so it's really my honor to have her on the show. And today we'll be discussing her new book titled Techno Thriller Film and the American Imagination, which was just published by the MIT Press just a few months ago. In this book, Soraya takes us through a bunch of popular techno thriller films that channel our social anxiety and fascination about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weapon and surveillance, etc. Along the way, she shows us the how the imagination of technology has evolved within the American context and how cinema helps shape our understanding of the role of technology in engineering, some of the most profound ideologies of modern life. So, without further ado, let's get started. Hello, Soraya. Thank you so much for joining us on the show.
- [02:43]
Soraya Murray
Hi. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.
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Eileen Zhou
Of course. So, to start off, could you please introduce yourself a little bit to our listeners?
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Soraya Murray
Sure. For those who don't know me, my name is Soraya Murray and I'm a professor in Film and digital media. My training is actually in the history of art and visual culture. And most of what I'm very invested in thinking about as a scholar has to do with how forms of visual culture, like video games, television, film, even advertisements, shape our relations and understandings about ourselves and each other and the world. So I think a lot about ideology and I think about how the visual informs our understanding of the context we're living in and also the past.
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Eileen Zhou
So how did this book start? You mentioned the book, that it actually grew out of the undergrad class you taught. So would you like to talk more about how this book came about?
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Soraya Murray
Yeah, the book came about in this kind of unusual way, actually. I was actually approached by the chair of my department who realized that I needed a fourth course on my schedule for the year before I was going to teach this class for the first time. And I realized there was a book, there was a. Excuse me, there was a course called Techno Thriller on the books that had been dead for many years because the person who had taught it originally, you know, was long gone. And so I impulsively chose that. And then later, when I was developing the class, became completely invested in the subject and really thought about how all of these films, especially films that I had watched and really loved, but that didn't really get the kind of like critical film scholarly love that maybe they should, were actually kind of connected to this topic of the techno thriller. And so I started integrating all of those things as a way of being able to talk and classroom about how our technological innovations intersect with conversations around gender and sexuality and race and class and notions of Americanness and all of these things. And so I found that the techno thriller film was this really approachable way to start to have a conversation with students about really difficult, challenging topics. And because they felt it was an approachable object of study, Right. In these popular films, they were really willing to open up and like, really struggle with the things that they experience in their own lives about technology and the place of innovation and, you know, as a kind of overshadowing presence in everything that they experience as people in the world. Right. But. But maybe couldn't articulate without the sounding board of the film or some kind of approachable object of study to think about this topic in a really effective way. And so I kind of accidentally stumbled into this really incredible opportunity for teaching. And as I found it really started to become a topic that a lot of energy was generated around. I really tried to kind of think about it holistically in terms of how Biotech, artificial intelligence, the idea of the supercomputer taking over the world. Like, all of these topics were actually part of the same anxiety.
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Eileen Zhou
That sounds really interesting. We'll definitely dive deeper into our experience or current experience of high technologies like AI later on when we get into the chapters. And I remember when I took your class, grad seminar towards an Ethics of New Media, if I remember correctly, read your book, I noticed that there are actually quite a few books that we discussed in our seminar. So I'm wondering, in general, how do you see the relationship between your teaching and your research or writing?
- [06:51]
Soraya Murray
I think for every syllabus I put together, when I'm thinking about my teaching, I go into the classroom, of course, thinking about, well, what does a student need to know to be conversant in a particular topic? Right. What do I want to make sure they don't leave the classroom not knowing about that particular topic? But I think one way that you can really help students understand the stakes of a particular topic is to relate it to their own lives in some meaningful way. Because, of course, they may or may not want to go into the topic that you're particularly interested in as a professor, but you can always give them tools to help navigate and think about their lives and what certain things in their lives mean to them. And given the time and space that we're living in, I think the presence of advanced technology is a huge, ongoing concern, and it's growing all the time. Right. And it's always in the media. And so, you know, I would say the continuity of all my teaching has to do with giving students the frameworks for understanding the presence of technology in their lives and how it shapes what they think, and also to give them tools to have the agency to think about these things in their own way, rather than being fed narratives that determine how they should be thinking about it. And I think that's really important, like giving people agency to think about what's going on, as opposed to passively absorbing incredibly powerful images that can shape how you think about things and how you think about your relationship to those things.
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Eileen Zhou
Definitely, that totally makes sense. And I'm also curious, so what's the relationship between this one and your previous monograph titled On Video Games, the Visual Politics of Race, Gender, and Space? I mean, as a student and reader, I see a lot of connections between these two books, but I'm curious what you think.
- [08:41]
Soraya Murray
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really great question. I think on the surface, one might say, okay, it's a completely different project. Right. One is dealing with video games and another one's dealing with film. But if you set aside the particular objects of study, if you think of them both as investigations of visual culture in slightly different modes, to think about how a technological form shapes the way that we think about culture in the present, the way that we might remediate understandings of the past, the way that particular anxiety points in culture get represented through the visual and then become part of our collective understanding and imaginary about the world, or at least about the culture we're living in. These things are very consistent. So I think in a way, both books have a consistency of approach. It's just that the object of the study is slightly different. But I think that in both cases, you could say that I'm also using forms of mass culture. These are things that lots of people play or lots of people watch. And I'm using these forms of mass culture as a way of providing a common, approachable ground for thinking about really challenging things that we need to contend with in our society.
- [10:03]
Eileen Zhou
And I'm wondering, is there anything special about film? Because I feel like we always talk about, you know, media specificity. So I'm wondering, when you mostly talk about films, especially popular films in this book, why is this some. Is this something special as compared to other forms of visual media?
- [10:23]
Soraya Murray
Well, I've always been a film lover, first of all. So, I mean, I tell students regularly, you know, I. You know, I probably watch at least one film a day. You know, I'm. I'm. I really, really enjoy film. And I also don't have, like, a very haughty relationship to film. I love all kinds of movies, and I watch all kinds of movies, and I especially love sometimes the movies that other people don't think of as, like, the. The pantheon of great film. Right. And. And in a way, I feel like films that don't have that kind of
- [11:01]
Eileen Zhou
cultural
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Soraya Murray
currency are places where filmmakers and the entire team of. Who comes together and makes a film, you know, that they can say things that maybe couldn't be said in the really respected films. Right. And so when you look at genres that are less respected, like the subgenre of the techno thr. Thriller or like the horror or the action movie or, you know, these kinds of things, I think there's a lot of messaging in them that's really interesting and useful for people like me, but we don't always necessarily turn to those forms first. And so for me, like, looking at. Looking at a particular question, like, what do we think about when we think about technology? What do we think about when we think about an innovator? When you ask that question in relation to these films, you get some really interesting answers. And if you think about it also in the context of when these films were made, like a film made in the 70s versus the 80s versus the 90s versus the 2000s, let's say, then you get other really interesting answers as well. So for me, it's like an amazing resource of almost like the dream life of a culture and the things that we think, but maybe don't even realize that we think about culture and technology.
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Eileen Zhou
That's interesting because I remember when you talked about or when you wrote about video games, you were also saying at that moment when you were writing about it, there was still an aspect of uplifting video games or critical analysis of video games as something serious. And do you think it's somehow similar for critical analysis of techno thrillers or other, you know, subgenres as such?
- [12:49]
Soraya Murray
I think that's a really great observation. I mean, I definitely feel like back then, when I wrote my book, which came out in 2018, that that was an argument that needed to be made about video games that I think maybe doesn't need to be made today. I think people understand how important video games are culturally in a way that in that moment, when I wrote that book, I needed to actually, you know, debate with, especially with the scholarly community. But in the same way, I think that there are, you know, certain sub genres of film that people aren't necessarily primarily looking to as a resource of great interest. And I think that it's important to look at everything. I think everything needs to be studied, and I love opportunities to talk about things that other people haven't talked about yet. So that was one of the exciting things about dealing with this topic, actually, was that I could in many ways say new things or bring attention to things in a way that hadn't been done before.
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Eileen Zhou
And let's talk about techno thrillers. What really, what, what, what is it? Or how would you define techno thriller?
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Soraya Murray
Well, techno thrillers. Well, first of all, I should say that the. The form actually comes out of literature. So if I talk about a techno thriller, then really, I can't be remiss in saying that it does come out of fiction writing and that the moniker of techno thriller as it's applied as a subgenre kind of applies first to the fiction novel. Right. So people debate which is the first techno thriller fiction novel. A lot of people settle on either the Andromeda Strain, which is A Michael Crrichton novel from 1969. Or they settle on Tom Clancy. If they think of Tom Clancy as the king of the techno thriller, they think of Tom Clancy's novel, the Hunt for Red October in the early 80s, 1984. These are two different pathways for a hotly debated kind of set of boundaries around something called a techno thriller. If we're thinking about it in relationship to film, the general way that I like to think about it is a film for which advanced technology and innovation becomes so central a topic that it's almost like its own character. Right. That it's almost like the driving force within the narrative. This intersects with science fiction. It can intersect with other genres. In my book, I didn't really try too hard to draw hard boundaries to say this is a techno thriller. This is not a techno thriller. That wasn't really my interest. My interest was in thinking like, how can we richly investigate the idea that increasingly we see in films this concern that seems to be at the core of a lot of the narratives, which has to do with advanced technology and its central function in our lives. So, as I've told many people, as I think time goes on, it'll be harder and harder to define the techno thriller as a distinct category, because in fact, I think this is an increasing anxiety in our culture right now. And so what is or isn't a techno thriller is going to kind of spread and bleed more and more and more into other areas.
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Eileen Zhou
That's interesting. And then when I mean, thinking about techno thriller films, how did they emerge? Like, what was the social or technological context like back in the 70s or 80s?
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Soraya Murray
Yeah. I think that the moment in which the techno thriller as a film form emerged is really significant to why it is the way it is. And so I think that's a really great question. The first thing is that there were advanced technological innovations, in the American context at least, that were directly tied to our ability to become a global superpower. So military innovations in technology, computational innovations, also other kinds of innovations, like the coming of biotechnological innovations, those were really important as well. There were also these really important national struggles going on. Several of them involved cultural and societal changes, like the gay rights movement in the 60s and the 70s, women's rights, civil rights, all kinds of rapid social changes that I think created a lot of anxieties. But often these things were very tied to innovations like, for example, women's rights being connected to the innovation of the pill and the legalization of abortion. Right. If you think of those as innovations. Right. Then it's very easy to understand the kind of strains and tensions that that would bring to the conversation. And you can see these things in the films themselves. Also, we have to remember the Vietnam War and its ramifications, both seeing for the first time that kind of military struggle being telegraphed right into people's homes every evening on television for the first time ever. Right. And then you have a little bit later, the coming of computers into the home in the early 80s. Right. All of these things are changing things very quickly and creating strains and forcing us to redefine our relationship to particular kinds of things, like the notion of family or, you know, like what constitutes a family or what constitutes a, in the case of Vietnam, like a form of masculinity, militarized masculinity, particularly, that can be respected. Again, I think one of the ways that people talk about Tom Clancy's narratives in particular, and his connection to, like, the techno warrior, the idea of the techno warrior and militarized masculinity and getting back an honored form of the military man, like, who can hold his head high. Again, that's very connected to how things kind of shook down in terms of the Vietnam War and that being perceived publicly as a kind of shaming of the American soldier because of the outcome. Right. Because they were not welcomed back in the same way as in previous conflicts. And so I think that all of those things are very tied up in how the techno thriller is thought of. And I mean, the other thing that's, of course, really, really important is that both of the authors that I in my book attribute to having kind of originated or largely influenced the techno thriller film. Right. Even though they were authors, not filmmakers generally. Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, both of those men grew up in the shadow of the nuclear bomb. And so I think the very deep existential anxiety of the presence of the bomb and our having been the only nation to ever drop one on another nation is underneath the surface of all the other anxieties that go on in the techno thriller genre.
- [20:40]
Eileen Zhou
And I'm also thinking about the overarching Cold War context. I know this book focuses on the American context, but were there any international films you were thinking when you wrote this book as somehow a comparison or a parallel?
- [21:03]
Soraya Murray
Yeah, I was really focusing on the American context. I felt like that would be an amazing next project to kind of, you know, use the stepping stone of what I've identified so far and then think about things like, you know, the obvious one is like, Godzilla or, you know, all these other. All These other narratives that come from other places. But I felt like I was best positioned to talk about the American context. And so I kind of decided to geographically focus on that. Although I do want to say that I think the techno thriller is quite global. Not only an American national phenomenon, that technological anxieties exist all over the world in different kinds of ways, but I felt best positioned to talk about the American context as it's my own context.
- [21:51]
Eileen Zhou
Got it. And actually you just mentioned that in my understanding, technology is not something neutral, is always intersected with social, racial and gender issues. And in your book you wrote, I quote, this is from page 7, techno thrillers encode their technologies as white and male. And I think that's really a powerful argument. I want to ask you, so why has this genre, techno thriller, been such a productive genre for constructing and also reproducing this kind of Euro, Euro American centric, white male, social, technical imaginaries?
- [22:39]
Soraya Murray
Yeah, that's a really good and kind of a challenging question. Because I think that one of the things I discovered when looking around for potential techno thriller films to discuss was that I really noticed more than other genres that I had familiarity with that most of the stories and almost all the directors were overwhelmingly white men. And these films were concerned with their anxieties. And even in the rare cases when there was a self conscious intervention to kind of break that aspect of the techno thriller, that it was really notable when that happened. And it was interesting to see the ways that the techno thriller fell apart or didn't fall apart in certain ways when you replaced like for example, the main character with a black male character instead of a white character, or when you replaced the innovator as a white male genius innovator with let's say a female Asian genius innovator. Right. Like these things, like as soon as you started moving around those pieces and changing things, that certain aspects of the narrative seem to change greatly. And so I think that what I've learned is that it's not that really anyone couldn't occupy that role, but that in moving certain roles into different types of identities, it's really interesting what starts to wobble, you know, in the, in the genre and, and how that kind of tells you how much it's rooted in building up a particular kind of masculinity, that that masculinity happens to be very tied to whiteness. And when I'm saying that, I'm saying like ideological whiteness. Right. And not, I'm not presuming what individual people may have in Their hearts or what they may think about things. But I'm talking about, like, when I'm talking about whiteness, I'm talking about as an ideological form that is very wrapped up in notions, particularly of white male genius. And you see the white male genius, like, appear again and again and again in. In these stories. And so I was really interested in what happens when that's not the case. Or are there any female techno thriller filmmakers that is very hard to find, actually. Like, it was. It was. It is really like a very male. It's wrapped up in maleness, particularly.
- [25:20]
Eileen Zhou
And I'm thinking throughout your analysis of different films, there are some, like, female characters or people of color as scientists, but those characters or narratives still somehow play into this white male ideology, if I understand correctly.
- [25:42]
Soraya Murray
Yeah. One of the things I do across the arc of the book is I look at so many of those stories and try to provide a framework for people who are reading to understand why these films are completely amazing. And also, like how they have images that can be very troubling or that encourage people to lean into a particular point of view around things. Right. Or perhaps even our critiques made on the part of the filmmaker about those things as well. Because there's always the tragic Oppenheimer type character as well, who's like the white male genius. But clearly, if you look at the film critically, you can see that that person is being presented in a less than completely positive light. But the other thing is that toward the end of my book, what I do is I revisit many of those films that I mentioned. The Hunt for Red October, Minority Report, all of these films that come up. And I revisit them in terms of some of the secondary characters that exist around the main heroic character. And often these are people of color, women, and also people like black tech, what I call black tech, or black technological innovators who operate kind of like in a secondary role next to the action hero or main character who's normally a white man. And the kinds of. I do a kind of reading of what some of these characters actually mean in relationship to the main character. Character.
- [27:28]
Eileen Zhou
I remember at some point you actually cited bell hooks, the oppositional gaze. And I'm wondering, do you see your analysis or critique as something oppositional or maybe even subversive to this techno thriller genre tradition?
- [27:50]
Soraya Murray
Well, I did definitely want to take the spirit of that idea of the oppositional gaze and look at the techno thriller for two reasons. One, to see what's actually there. Because I think that sometimes people think that because someone is a central character that that means they're being raised up and validated and glorified when that's not really actually the case in all of these films. I think there's a lot of critique going on. So I wanted to re. Invite the awareness of the critique that might be there as well in the actual film. Right. That's present. Not that I'm imposing upon it, but that is present. And the second thing that I wanted to do is present a viewing of some of these films and observations about these films as maybe not the primary intended audience or the primary targeted audience of these films, but as a person who's watching them and seeing things going on in these films that are really incendiary and useful for understanding our culture, but that you might not necessarily be focused on if you happen to occupy that identity of, you know, the kind of central character. Right. And that central character's ideological presentation. So for me, like, doing an oppositional reading meant thinking about, okay, let's do a background reading of some of the secondary characters. How are they operating in relationship to the main character? A lot of interesting things started to happen, both in the classroom and also in my own writing, when I invited people to start looking at these so called secondary characters and to think about how they might reshape our understanding of the whole picture that's being presented to us.
- [29:38]
Eileen Zhou
That's really interesting and I enjoyed that part while reading your book. So we won't be able to cover all those case analysis in our conversation, but I do encourage our listeners to check out the book. And definitely I would love to dive deeper into a couple of chapters. But before we go into that direction, I'm wondering if you can give us a brief overview or walkthrough of this nine body chapters of your book. And what was the logic behind these nine chapters?
- [30:17]
Soraya Murray
Yeah, yeah, thanks for asking that question. And no one's actually asked me that. And I kind of think about it like if I could make an analogy to a record album. You know, I was sort of thinking about a whole experience of an album, not just 10 random songs. Right. And so when I wrote my book, I was thinking about taking the reader on a kind of journey first from maybe the most familiar thing that they might recognize toward less familiar things or less familiar thoughts, maybe. And the second thing I should say first as a means of opening things up for the reader, right. To take them from what they know to maybe what they don't. And then the second thing I was thinking about was not only presenting a Critical problem, which is kind of easy to do. It's pretty easy to, like, take some of these films and poke at them and say, well, this is a problem, and that is a problem. And this representation is flawed and that. But I wanted to also spend significant time thinking about other things that people are doing to break the stranglehold of some of these very powerful ideologies through their films. And also I wanted to help people think about how the seeds of other representations are actually in those original films themselves. So when we look back at some of the secondary characters, we can see how, if you're not necessarily the primary intended audience, that you may see a really powerful representation happening in the background of those films which might not superficially present themselves as such. And so, yeah, so the last two chapters are counter visions and counter narratives. Because I wanted to spend a significant time not only pointing to a problem, but also showing how we can both revisit all of those old things in a new way and find new things in them. And also there are people who are self consciously poking holes in these old ways of thinking about things and starting to present other kinds of images that can open up other kinds of world building about ourselves and our technology and our innovation.
- [32:35]
Eileen Zhou
That's really interesting. So we're gonna just get a little bit part of that journey. And I would like to discuss more about chapter two and chapter six, which interests me most. And chapter two, titled Protocols and Hazmet suits the biological techno thriller. So basically you use this film, as you mentioned, the Andromeda Strain by Robert Weiss. And the film is from 1971, and it's adapted from the 1969 novel of the same name. So would you like to introduce this work a little bit and what context it came out of both the novel and the film?
- [33:25]
Soraya Murray
Yeah. So the film Andromeda Strain by Robert Wise, who did, like you know, the Sound of Music and west side Story, like he's a very renowned filmmaker already, at the time that he made it was. Okay. So the filmmaker's interest in Michael Crichton's story, the Andromeda Strain, if history serves, was the attention was drawn to that story. Right. Even before the book came out. Right. So Robert Wise kind of knew about the story, was interested in it as like a kind of critical problem to think about. And so Michael Crichton, he publishes this book. It's very innovative in its form, I would say. Like, it certainly deals with an anxiety around almost like a combination of alien attack in the form of an alien strain that is growing on Earth because it's been carried down by a. It's been carried down by a small satellite that crashed to Earth. But then it's been exposed, you know, it's exposed this alien strain that's killing everyone in the small town. And I think there's a way that there's this great combination of alien attack, bio technological innovation, anxiety, you know, that, that kind of thing, and then a narrative that is all about these so called, you know, genius scientists and doctors trying to innovate their way out of this problem. Right. And underneath it is a really wonderful story, right, that Michael Crichton sets forth, which is all about the kind of uncertainty that we live in in the world with these things that can create existential extinction.
- [35:25]
Eileen Zhou
So how does the film portray the relationship between both the scientists, the human bodies and the technological systems in the face of such uncertainties? I'm curious, what's your read of that representation?
- [35:43]
Soraya Murray
Yeah, well, the book is extremely procedural itself. It's kind of told in the mode of a governmental detailed dispatch around what happened over several days in which an existential crisis was averted. Right. And the film does the same thing, so to speak. And so the film is very, very procedural. And this is the mark techno thriller often that there's a lot of focus and detail placed on the stages of the innovation itself or the steps of the process. Right. And so you see these, you know, specialists being picked up, being brought to the secret underground laboratory facility to study this thing and try to figure out how to, how to deal with this problem. They're very carefully decontaminated before they go into the space. They're forced to wear these uniforms that are color coded to the level of the five story underground center that they're working in. They often don't engage with the material that they're studying directly, but through technological innovation. So robotic arms and sealed boxes, you know, that prevent direct contact. They really talk a lot. To the point where some critics were quite bored with the film because it's so procedural. They say it's so procedural that you kind of start forgetting why you're there and what's going on anymore, because you're being talked at so much in these technical jargon type ways that people were not used to in film. Right. And so, yeah, the form really follows the original techno thriller novel itself very closely. But I think there's a way in which the technological innovation and the placing of these humans in these multi level boxes and enclosures in order to be able to engage with and hopefully stop this alien Strain is really pronounced in this film. And so you hardly see any natural environments. They're almost at for the entire film and these totally unnatural, really alienating environments where they're trying to prevent their bodies from coming into contact with this thing.
- [38:12]
Eileen Zhou
And that at that moment, I remember you mentioned in your book that the reception of the film or the box office was actually not that good, right?
- [38:23]
Soraya Murray
No, it wasn't a film that was lauded. And I think that although when we look back and I think can look back on this film and think of it as very significant for the kinds of conversation it brought to film about our innovations and the way that we choose to inoculate ourselves against potential disaster, that in fact, it was a hard transition for people to be able to accept that kind of narrative storytelling. And not all of them got it right away. I think in retrospect, people kind of understood more what was going on with this film. But at the time it felt very slow and talky compared to what maybe people were thinking about in terms of an anxiety film about technology.
- [39:12]
Eileen Zhou
That's interesting. So in retrospective, what do you think the film tried to do? Like what kind of emotions or in your own word, quote unquote, political affective intensities try to bring out?
- [39:33]
Soraya Murray
Well, I think. I think mainly what the film does really well is it shows the bodies of these innovators and genius level scientists and doctors being put through physical challenge. Right? Physical duress, Right. To move into a space that is technological. Right. That is, that is, you know, that is basically an enclosed lab. Right. But I think it's a way of ratcheting up this tension, which is fundamentally about how we live in an increasingly technologized world where the stakes are very high because we can completely destroy the entire Earth, you know, and it shows you the physical duress of engaging with and living inside of that strain. Right. So I think that their physical turmoil and even being able to engage with this problem and then the anxiety of the nuclear threat that comes toward the end of the film because I guess it's okay to give a spoiler alert from a film from the 1970s, but you know, at the end it's like the lab might be compromised. Right? And so the fail safe in that case is that it will be destroyed by nuclear explosion to, you know, to annihilate any potential. The Andromeda strain to get out. Right? And that's the plan. Maybe not a good plan, but that's the plan. And so there's a threat toward the end of the film in which you know, nuclear explosion is the ultimate kind of anxiety that they have to stop. They have to stop it before it happens. Right. And so, and so like all of these anxieties, right, about the alien incursion, about living in a technologized space, contending with what that means for the body, figuring out how to navigate this existential situation, you know, of potential total annihilation. All of that is tensely represented really effectively in this film.
- [41:53]
Eileen Zhou
Yes, I really like the idea of the technologized world. And I think that's actually what we're experiencing every day more. I mean, every day more intensely. So from there I would love to move on to chapter six, titled Power Fantasies of the Supercomputer. I think it's really relevant to what we're like everyone is experiencing nowadays. But actually you were looking at Films from 1970s and 80s that visualized supercomputers and artificial intelligence. So how were they depicted back then?
- [42:38]
Soraya Murray
Yeah, in this chapter I did a comparison of three films and I was thinking about the way that the so called supercomputer is represented across time. And I thought that there were three films that were really great examples. The first one was Colossus, the Forbin Project, which is a Joseph Sargent film from 1970, but really has like the strong 60s feel because it's based on a book from the mid-60s. And so, you know, it really, even though it technically came out in 1970, it, it does. Anyone who watches it, you can immediately see the kind of 60s feel to the whole thing. And then there's a film called Demon Seed, Donald Kamel from 1977. And the third film is the John, John Badham film from 1984 that most people will probably have at least heard of called War Jams. Right. And I wanted to think about the shifting relationship between the so called supercomputer, or now we could kind of think about it as AI. They didn't really use that term so much back then. But think about like the trouble of having innovated something that then immediately gets out of our control and seeks to make decisions either on our behalf or to dominate us. When I say us, I mean human beings, you know, in the course of the narrative and across time, how maybe their relationship of anxiety to that scenario might change. And so Colossus is a pure anxiety narrative that doesn't end well. Like it doesn't present any kind of relief from the supercomputer's domination. Right. Again, it's like very bound up in nuclear power. And the first thing that happens is as soon as the computer goes online, it decides it wants certain things. And in order to coerce human beings to do those things, it uses the potential of nuclear threat. That's what it does. Right. And so the Colossus computer and the Russian counterpart to the American Colossus computer join forces and control the nukes and force people to do what they decide is best for humanity. Right. That's the first narrative. And so you have this kind of, like I said, a tragic Oppenheimer genius named Forbin, right, who's innovated this thing and is almost immediately denigrated and subjugated by that thing.
- [45:21]
Eileen Zhou
It sounds like somehow similar to Frankenstein, like the kind of innovation and then being disrupted.
- [45:30]
Soraya Murray
Yeah, it's very tied up in that as well. Right. And then with Demon Seed, you could say. Yes, it's very similar. It takes place in the 70s. Again. It's the innovation of this. This incredible computer that I think immediately cures. Finds a cure for leukemia, like, in the first couple hours of its existence, you know, but then quickly it determines that it supersedes, like, human knowledge that it knows what's best for humans, and it starts. It turns around and begins subjugating its maker. Right? And in this film, what's really, really interesting in this 70s film is that the form of subjugation that happens is extremely emasculating. It's like what it presents is the computer Proteus, right? The computer is named Proteus. So Proteus insinuates itself into the smart home of this innovator, right? And immediately traps his wife in the home. In the smart home. And using the tech tools that exist in the smart home, robotic tech tools and innovations around the home, forces her to bear its child, right? So the. The married couple, they're separated, right? So. So the husband is. No. Is kind of out of the home, but she's living in the home. And so he doesn't immediately notice this because he's not actually living in the home, but he comes to an awareness, right, eventually, that this is going on. But most of the film is about the subjugation of this woman, that the computer intelligence is softening up into being willing or at least to submit to the process of burying its child so that it can be born into the world because it wants to know what a human existence is. So. But this is very, you know, this particular kind of narrative, it's really kind of bold and, you know, it's kind of, you know, it shreds into this, like, emasculation area. That I think is really interesting because the first film doesn't do it quite so directly.
- [47:52]
Eileen Zhou
It's actually not a single case. I think in your book you discussed that this kind of narrative pattern comes back again and again, the victimization of.
- [48:02]
Soraya Murray
Yeah, it's a very strong narrative. That is interesting that the first thing that the supercomputer does when it achieves consciousness is it goes after a female primary character in some kind of way. Right. It's interesting to think of both as maybe a critique of the kind of consciousness that's been put into this thing, or the kind of value system or ethics that's been put into this machine.
- [48:32]
Eileen Zhou
Right.
- [48:33]
Soraya Murray
That these innovations are no better than ourselves in a way, perhaps more powerful in some ways, but effectively no less, no more ethical. Right. And that all the flaws of ourselves are only magnified in our innovation. That's kind of interesting if you think about these narratives as not necessarily celebrating the central maker. Right. Imaged in the film, the third film that I mentioned, War Games is very interesting though, because it changes things a bit. Right. Instead, there's still a tragic Oppenheimer innovator who makes a supercomputer, but the supercomputer is more like, well, meaning about the preservation of humanity, but mistaken about how to deal with it. And it falls to a young teen hacker to educate the computer ethically. Right. About the fact that the nuclear strike isn't necessary, or that in the end of the film that the best way to deal with the play of global thermonuclear war is not to play in the first place. So, you know, the narrative changes, but like the supercomputer moves from totally nefarious entity, you know, slowly across time. I would say if there's a kind of trajectory, it moves more towards something that lacks an ethic, lacks an ethics, but can be taught in ethics with intervention.
- [50:14]
Eileen Zhou
But that kind of anxieties or dread about advanced technologies is something always there, hunting. And then I'm curious how. How do you make out of it, especially thinking what we're experiencing now, like with all this anxieties, fear or even euphoria surrounding new technologies, especially AI.
- [50:45]
Soraya Murray
Well, one of the films that helped me think about that was the creator from 2023, which is a more recent film that also deals with the presence of AI, and it does call it AI. It's kind of like, you know, the central kind of struggle of the film is that AI apparently attempted to destroy humanity with nuclear destruction. And then you come to learn that that narrative is not the true narrative and that the, the presence of AI in the world is a presence that merely wants to live alongside humanity, but not necessarily dominate humanity. This is a very interesting counter vision and I think it opens up a possibility to kind of think about these things in other ways. I'm not saying that that narrative is the right narrative, but I was very struck in the film by the fact that it effectively presented another scenario which almost never happens. You know, almost everything follows the kind of Terminator scenario where it's like as soon as Skynet goes live, it tries to annihilate us. Right. In this case, it was a different kind of scenario where there's a possibility of coexistence, there's a possibility of, you know, other, like another set of values being imbued into our technologies. And so that's to me, an interesting way of thinking about or starting to have a conversation with students and with readers about, well, what other, like what stories have we told ourselves? Why do we keep telling ourselves these stories? Why do we need them so much? Are there perhaps not other things we can tell ourselves? Right. And I think that's a really good message for today because I think there's are two main narratives going on when I think about, like the social imaginary around AI. One is don't let it go live. It will destroy us. Because of course, that's what all the movies say. And that's mostly, I think, where people get their messaging. And the other is that we are in this arms race to have the best and most powerful AI. And I think that's driven by, you know, the desire to be the leading nation. Right. In this, in this area. Right. And so there's struggling interests. One is this deep anxiety founded on many other stories from before, but also kind of real anxieties about when we innovate, but we don't ethically innovate at the same rate of our actual innovation, what that leads us to. And on the other side, there's just present no friction to innovation. Just innovate, innovate, innovate. Because that's how we're going to maintain our power in the world.
- [53:27]
Eileen Zhou
So. Well, I do want to remind our listeners that this chapter, chapter six is currently available for free download on Soraya's website only for a limited time. So if you're interested in, make sure to check it out on sorayamore.com but actually I wanted to ask you to pick up on what you just said. So what, what are some of the alternative futures or social imaginaries you can think of or you hope the readers to take away or start thinking about after reading this book.
- [54:07]
Soraya Murray
Yeah. In the last two chapters, I think about a few things. One thing I want to mention is my chapter on what I call the Black tech, which is based on some previous research that others have done also. But what I do is I go back to those films that I've talked about that have all these anxiety narratives and think about the presence of usually a black male innovator who's present and actually completely essential and often the ethical voice within the narrative, who may either do the right thing in the critical moment when that needs to happen, or help the main character understand how to do the right thing in the critical moment. Right. And so one thing I do is think about how we can look back at these films and do alternative readings around the presence of these other people. Right? These other people, these other characters in these stories who are actually really important and can feed a more nuanced understanding of how we think about these things. They're there. They're always lying, wait in these stories, waiting for us to notice them. And that's true of some of the female characters as well, and queer characters. They're all. They're in there, you know, and they were always there. And they were put there for a reason. And I think it's important not to ignore them. So I invite rereadings of these older stories, considering some of these under considered characters and under considered scenarios. That's the one thing. And the other thing is that I really look at some films like Tenet, Christopher Nolan film from 2020, and some other stories, and kind of think about how the filmmaker seems to be speaking back to these narratives in very specific kinds of ways and trying to push forward into new things. So I don't want to ever like, and I try not to do this in the book, not, not presume what the director was thinking when they made something. But, you know, once the film goes out into the world, you know, it takes on its own meanings. And so I feel like it's fair to interpret them, but not to put words in the mouth of the director, so to speak. But I do think that it's very clear that people like Gareth Evarts and people like Christopher Nolan are thinking about our innovations and technologies, but also trying to introduce other potentials. If we go back to the creator again, one of the things I talk about in the book on the chapter of the creator is how the filmmaker seems to very self consciously shift from the image of a white male genius Innovator and an AI innovation that is either a kind of son or daughter that wants to immediately kill him. Right. Like that's a paradigm, you know, like the son wants to kill the father immediately. And we can see this in films like Alex Garland's Ex Machina or in the Alien films that have David the character, you know, the character of the synthetic human David in them. These kinds of things where there's a kind of desire to destroy the maker, destroy one's father. So the creator shifts it to a paradigm of a female innovator. And there's a lot of attention given to the degree to which she puts care and love and ethics into her innovation, which is in the form of a daughter. And I think just shifting that opens a lot of things up. Right. Just doing that and presenting that as an image, as a counter image is really significant. So this is the kind of thing I see happening and that I try to draw attention to in my book as a way of like giving us other ways of thinking about things.
- [58:03]
Eileen Zhou
Interesting. And it sounds to me that techno thriller, or probably any genre is never static or never changing. They're also evolving all the time along with, or changing social sentiments or changing technological landscape.
- [58:23]
Soraya Murray
Yeah. And one of the main kind of things that you see in arc of the film of the creator is that the main character in the film who thinks one way, who kind of believes the diegetic kind of ideology around AI in the story, completely shifts his thinking by the end of the film and sees things in a different way. Right. And in fact gives his life for the sake of what he now believes. Right. That's significant. Right. And that was a very significant counter image. Also that character, that actor who they chose is a black male character. So the central kind of action character at the middle of that film, if you want to call it a techno thriller, if you want to call it a sci fi narrative, I think it can be both at the same time. You know, is, you know, is a black male character, which is also something that you immediately starkly notice. That points back to the fact that most of these characters and most of these stories put white men at the middle of that narrative.
- [59:31]
Eileen Zhou
I have to say that techno thrillers or sci fi is not really my genre. And I haven't watched a lot of films you mentioned in your book. But I'm really looking forward to watching more and learning more through this genre. And before I let you go, I'm wondering what you are working on now. Any exciting projects, either teaching project or writing research projects. You would like to share with our listeners?
- [60:01]
Soraya Murray
Yeah. Well, first of all, I want to say thank you for what you just said because one of the things that I really wanted to do with this book is draw a lot more people's attention to these stories. And I think they are great. Even the ones, even the so called bad ones. Like, I think they're actually really great and I love them and I want people to watch them and to think about them and to use them as a way of starting to think about technology in their own lives. And so, you know, it makes me feel really great to hear you say that. And as far as future projects, there are many things that I actually couldn't fit into the book. I had to make decisions because, you know, there's a word count to hit and everything. So there are some projects that I'm really excited about that are connected to. Like for example, I was really focusing on film specifically in this book. And so there were some choices I made not to include certain series. So there are like television series I'd really like to talk about, which I'll do in forthcoming essays. I'm also really interested in thinking about social media. And so I have a kind of fantasy chapter in my mind called Death by Social Media that thinks about the intersection of almost horror or thriller with social media, like the ghost that exists in social media or social media killing people or taking people over. I like those kind of narratives a lot and I feel like there's a lot to say about that that I'd like to get into that I couldn't fit into my book. And then like you mentioned early on, I do think this is a conversation that can exist on a much more global level. And so I'm starting to think about if I revisit this particular set of critical questions about technology and innovation and stories we tell ourselves. If I can think about it in a more global way, I'm really interested to expand this research to think about the way that, that other cultures might have determined like particular kinds of relationship to particular advanced technology, computation and biotech innovation.
- [62:15]
Eileen Zhou
All of those sound so interesting and I can't wait to read more from you. And thank you so much, Soraya, for your time and for being on the show today.
- [62:26]
Soraya Murray
It's my pleasure. Thanks for such great questions.
- [62:29]
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