Individual and Collaborative Labour in the Space Crisis Movie: From Apollo 13 to The Martian

Abstract

<p>Like so many space crisis dramas, both fictive and historical, articles attending to the scientific credentials of The Martian (Dir. Ridley Scott, 2015) prefigured its release, and the publicity they generated informed attendees' experiences of the film.Footnote1,Footnote2 It is always interesting to note when science fiction films are heralded with a publicity narrative of technical "accuracy," yet it is even more intriguing to scrutinize the values floated alongside notions of accuracy" there is a more forceful and subtextual narrative running throughout The Martian, and it concerns the ownership of science innovation. This article compares the depiction of scientific labour across space crisis movies, and critically evaluates the way such films attribute intellectual innovations either to individuals or to teams, in particular focusing on readings of The Martian and Apollo 13. Drawing from materials in the John Sayles Archive at The University of Michigan I take a close look at John Sayles's uncredited screenwriting work on Apollo 13, including correspondence with Ron Howard that emphasizes the importance of representing collaboration cinematically.Footnote3 Readings of secondary films, including Space Cowboys (Dir. Clint Eastwood, 2000) and Hidden Figures (Dir. Theodore Melfi, 2016), also help isolate some of the gender and racial politics of these texts – and space fantasies at large. I then broaden the scope of these studies to examine Hollywood's interest in selling films as the work of auteurs and prodigal artists, ultimately asking why film scholarship has had trouble intervening against these sole authorship narratives. I make the case that the cinematic representation of intellectual labour, conducted into vivid dramatic scenarios across space crisis films, is a place where we feel our collective future at stake, and so these films are apt for investigating common fantasies of human advancement.</p>