Steampunk Film: A Critical Introduction 150133123X, 9781501331237

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Steampunk Film

ii 

Steampunk Film A Critical Introduction Robbie McAllister

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Robbie McAllister, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: Film, Wild Wild West (1999) © Collection Christophel/ArenaPal/ www.arenapal.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3121-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3123-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-3122-0 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Sarah Thomas, whose support and guidance made this work possible For Mum and Dad, with love; through past, present and future

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1

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3

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ix xiii 1

Steampunk Goes to the Movies: The Birth of a Genre Identification and definition Entering the mainstream Steampunk as genre cinema Prototype to archetype: Collating steampunk in film

13

Re-engineered and Repurposed: Steampunk as Adaptation Adaptation and reception: ‘Sticking-Up’ The Wild Wild West Auteur-ity and authority: Inferring legitimacy on the adaptation Adaptation, homogenization and the blockbuster Adaptation and the trans-media ‘mashup’ ‘Steampunking’: Genre as adaptive methodology

43

Dreams of Steam: Nostalgia for an Age of Imagined Industry Spectacular machines: The nuts and bolts of the steampunk skin Technological virtues: The wonders and horrors of mechanical progress Craftsmanship and mechanical mastery Cinematic production and the steampunk object

83

Historical Identities: Representation in the Steampunk Empire Visions of the past: Fashioning a previous century Global industries: Colonialism and national heritage Social problem cinema: Gender and race in steampunk’s histories Mechanical bodies and electric souls: Assembling the steampunk cyborg

13 21 27 36

44 51 58 67 74

84 93 104 113 123 124 134 144 156

viii Contents

5

6

Clockwork Modernities: Tinkering with Time in a Steampunk Age Rationality, reason and industrial fantasies Magical machines and the technological occult Postmodernity and the new real Industrial renaissance: The persistence of modernity Beyond space and time: Exploring alternative modernities

169

Gearing Down: Making the Past Present in Steampunk Cinema

215

Works Cited Bibliography Index

170 178 188 197 206

223 227 248

Figures Figure I.1 Figure I.2

Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3 Figure 1.4 Figure 1.5 Figure 1.6 Figure 1.7 Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4 Figure 2.5 Figure 2.6

‘Punked’ (2010), [TV programme] Castle, Exec Prod. Andrew W. Marlowe, ABC Studios, 11 October April and the Extraordinary World (2015), [Film] Dir. Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci, France/Belgium/ Canada: StudioCanal Machinarium (2009), [Video game] Designer Jakub Dvorský. Czech Republic: Amanita Design Photo of ‘Steampunk Victorian Pump Organ Master Command Computer Workstation’ courtesy of Bruce Rosenbaum Wild Wild West (1999), [Film] Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures 9 (2009), [Film] Dir. Shane Acker. USA: Focus Features The Conquest of the Pole (1912), [Film] Dir. Georges Méliès. France: Pathé Frères Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), [Film] Dir. Ken Hughes. UK: United Artists Around the World in 80 Days (2004), [Film] Dir. Frank Coraci. USA: Walt Disney Pictures Wild Wild West (1999), [Film] Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures Treasure Planet (2002), [Film] Dir. Ron Clements and John Musker. USA: Walt Disney Pictures Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), [Film] Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Japan: Studio Ghibli Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), [Film] Dir. Guillermo del Toro. USA/Germany: Columbia Pictures The Golden Compass (2007), [Film] Dir. Chris Weitz. USA: New Line Cinema Van Helsing: The London Assignment (2004), [Film] Dir. Sharon Bridgeman. USA: Universal Cartoon Studios

3

8 17

19 23 34 39 39 39 45 49 52 57 62 71

x Figures

The Three Musketeers (2011), [Film] Dir. Paul W. S. Anderson. Germany/France/UK/USA: Impact Pictures Figure 2.8 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), [Film] Dir. Stephen Norrington. USA: 20th Century Fox Figure 2.9 The Time Machine (1960), [Film] Dir. George Pal. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Figure 2.10 The Time Machine (2002), [Film] Dir. Simon Wells. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures Figure 3.1 The City of Lost Children (1995), [Film] Dir. Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. France/Germany/Spain: StudioCanal Figure 3.2 Wild Wild West (1999), [Film] Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures Figure 3.3 Steamboy (2004), [Film] Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo. Japan: Toho Figure 3.4 Tai Chi Zero (2012), [Film] Dir. Stephen Fung. China: Huayi Brothers Media Corporation Figure 3.5 9 (2009), [Film] Dir. Shane Acker. USA: Focus Features Figure 3.6 Steamboy (2004), [Film] Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo. Japan: Toho Figure 3.7 Around the World in 80 Days (2004), [Film] Dir. Frank Coraci. USA: Walt Disney Pictures Figure 3.8 Hugo (2011), [Film] Dir. Martin Scorsese. USA: Paramount Pictures Figure 3.9 The American Astronaut (2001), [Film] Dir. Cory McAbee. USA: Artistic License Films Figure 3.10 Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), [Film] Dir. Kerry Conran. USA: Paramount Pictures Figure 4.1 Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), [Film] Dir. Guillermo del Toro. USA/Germany: Columbia Pictures Figure 4.2 The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010), [Film] Dir. Luc Besson. France: EuropaCorp Figure 4.3 Dark City (1998), [Film] Dir. Alex Proyas. USA: New Line Cinema Figure 4.4 Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), [Film] Dir. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. USA: Walt Disney Pictures Figure 4.5 Casshern (2004), [Film] Dir. Kazuaki Kiriya. Japan: Shochiku Studios Figure 4.6 Sucker Punch (2011), [Film] Dir. Zack Snyder. USA: Legendary Pictures Figure 2.7

75 77 80 80 86 90 90 90 97 101 105 112 117 119 127 128 133 137 141 148

Figures

Figure 4.7 Figure 4.8 Figure 4.9 Figure 4.10 Figure 4.11 Figure 4.12 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5 Figure 5.6 Figure 5.7 Figure 5.8 Figure 5.9 Figure 5.10 Figure 5.11 Figure 5.12 Figure 5.13

Stardust (2007), [Film] Dir. Matthew Vaughn. UK/USA: Paramount Pictures Iron Sky (2012), [Film] Dir. Timo Vuorensola. Finland/ Australia/Germany: Energia Productions Steamboy (2004), [Film] Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo. Japan: Toho Treasure Planet (2002), [Film] Dir. Ron Clements and John Musker. USA: Walt Disney Pictures Hellboy (2004), [Film] Dir. Guillermo del Toro. USA: Columbia Pictures Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (2013), [Film] Dir. Stéphane Berla and Mathias Malzieu. France: EuropaCorp Sherlock Holmes (2009), [Film] Dir. Guy Ritchie. UK/USA: Warner Bros. Pictures Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), [Film] Dir. Guillermo del Toro. USA/Germany: Columbia Pictures The Prestige (2006), [Film] Dir. Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), [Film] Dir. Sam Raimi. USA: Walt Disney Pictures Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), [Film] Dir. Sam Raimi. USA: Walt Disney Pictures Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), [Film] Dir. Sam Raimi. USA: Walt Disney Pictures Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), [Film] Dir. Kerry Conran. USA: Paramount Pictures The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), [Film] Dir. Terry Gilliam. UK/Canada/France: Lionsgate Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), [Film] Dir. Brad Silberling. USA: Paramount Pictures Hugo (2011), [Film] Dir. Martin Scorsese. USA: Paramount Pictures Dark City (1998), [Film] Dir. Alex Proyas. USA: New Line Cinema The Boxtrolls (2014), [Film] Dir. Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi. USA: Focus Features Wild Wild West (1999), [Film] Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures

xi

151 154 158 158 162 164 172 177 182 186 186 186 191 193 200 200 200 204 209

xii Figures

Figure 5.14 Tomorrowland (2015), [Film] Dir. Brad Bird. USA: Walt Disney Pictures Figure 6.1 Heartless: The Story of the Tinman (2010), [Film] Dir. Brandon McCormick. USA: Whitestone Motion Pictures Figure 6.2 Airlords of Airia (2013), [Film] Dir. Dirk Müller. Germany: Steam Fiction Film Figure 6.3 The Anachronism (2008), [Film] Dir. Matthew Gordon Long. Canada: Anachronism Pictures

214 219 219 219

Acknowledgements Drawn through a number of years, the research contained in this book could never have been completed were it not for the kindness and help of a great number of people. I owe immense gratitude to Sarah Thomas, for her constant encouragement and the generous support she has provided throughout this project’s entire development. I also owe my sincere thanks to both Paul Newland and Margaret Ames for their guidance and advice, as well as Kate Egan, Thomas O’Malley and Terry Bailey for helping to set this research in motion. I would also like to extend my gratitude to James Walters and the many readers and reviewers whose advice has shaped the work in these pages. It should be noted that this book bridges together debates found in a variety of different articles that I have authored when exploring the qualities that make steampunk cinema so distinctive and significant. Thanks are also given, therefore, to Anna Antonowicz, Tomasz Niedokos, Penny Starfield, Andrea Grunert, Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Eckart Voigts, Mel Kohlke and Erin and Chris Louttit for kindly assisting me when acquiring permissions to reproduce elements from these materials. The combined consideration of topics respectively found within Studies in Literature and Culture: Golden Epochs and Dark Ages. Perspectives on the Past (2016) and upcoming editions of Film Journal: Screening the Supernatural, Victorian and Neo-Victorian Screen Adaptations and Neo-Victorian Studies: Screening the Victorians in the Twenty-First Century was made possible by the gracious support of these editors. Similarly, additional images have been generously provided by Bruce Rosenbaum, Dirk Müller, Matthew Gordon Long and Whitestone Motion Pictures: artists and film-makers who have all helped to make steampunk such a vibrant cultural movement. Finally, but by no means any less significantly, great thanks are extended to my editors Katie Gallof and Erin Duffy, as well as my project manager Monica Sukumar, for their constant patience and guidance in bringing this book to print.

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Introduction

In counterpoint to our fascination with cyberspace and the virtual global village, there is no less a global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for a continuity in a fragmented world. Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defence mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals. Svetlana Boym 2001: xiv Cyberpunk emerged as a genre that allowed writers to look forward – even if only 20 minutes into the future – while what I am calling retrofuturism represented a genre that allowed people to look backwards, examining older myths and fantasies against contemporary realities. Henry Jenkins 2007: 17 June In 1987, the April edition of science fiction magazine Locus printed a letter written by K. W. Jeter in which the author coined the word ‘steampunk’. Jeter’s motivation was to playfully designate himself alongside fellow writers Tim Powers and James Blaylock as propagators of a literary trend: creators of fantastical fictions that utilized historically disjointed nineteenth-century technologies and settings. ‘Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing’, he writes, ‘as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like “steampunks”, perhaps’ (Jeter 1987: 315). From the moment of its conception, the term ‘steampunk’ has been associated with a vision of industrial progress (most frequently Victorian) that has careened off its ‘proper’ historical track – re-engineering period machinery into fantastically anachronistic devices. In the decades that have followed, numerous texts have tinkered with these out-of-time technologies to construct their own steampunk identities: depicting armies of clockwork automatons wielded by megalomaniac industrialists, colossal zeppelins ferrying travelers across the continents and hulking computers that operate using pistons and gears rather than diodes and circuit-boards. Instead of offering science-fictional interpretations of a future

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that leaves the past behind in its wake, steampunk fictions see both the past and future blended into retro-futuristic hybrids. Since the concluding years of the twentieth century, the remarkable speed of steampunk’s proliferation has allowed it to take up a prominent position within pop-culture: a seemingly atavistic antidote to the increased digitization of our world and identities. Rather than acting only as a literary sub-genre of science fiction, steampunk’s cultural significance has been established through its successful traversal of a staggering variety of media. Representative of one of the most widely discussed ‘new’ aesthetic styles and subcultures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, countless artists, designers and ‘makers’ have created an almost endless supply of works that breathe life into the marvellously anachronistic machinery that steampunk has become known for. Stepping into the limelight of mainstream interest, the movement’s industrial aesthetic of clockwork and gears has also become a prominent resource for various commercial endeavours. From 2009’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show (which featured its models dressed as ‘steampunk angels’) to the music video for Justin Bieber’s 2011 single ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’ (where the singer constructs a clockwork dance-partner), steampunk has traversed a great many multimedia boundaries. Within television, the movement was prominently represented in the 2010 episode of Castle (2009–2016) ‘Punked’ (see Figure I.1 for a screenshot of lead actor Nathan Fillion sporting the accoutrements of the steampunk subculture) and similarly played a notable role in the 2014 rebranding of long-running science fiction series Doctor Who (1963–present): images of cogs, gears and antiquated clock dials spinning through the streams of time were added to the show’s titles, accompanied by the metronomic clanking of metal within its theme. Through numerous representations, steampunk’s retro-futuristic fantasies have thoroughly embedded themselves within our contemporary media landscape and proved a valuable resource for those keen to capitalize on the movement’s unmistakable style. No longer a uniquely ‘cult’ enterprise, steampunk’s mainstream recognition has outpaced attempts by theorists to assess its meaning and success, developing rapidly from ‘a half-forgotten science fictional cul-de-sac to a cultural phenomenon’ (Siemann 2013: 9). Through its representations in fashion, video games, crafts, music and more, steampunk has gained a great deal of masscultural traction within arts and industries that have a strong commercial and consumer-orientated focus: becoming a ‘brand’ used to market a vast range of multimedia products. To shed light on many of the ways that millennial life is

Introduction  3

Figure I.1  ‘Punked’ (2010), [TV programme] Castle, Exec Prod. Andrew W. Marlowe, ABC Studios, 11 October.

being ordered through the gearworks of a previous era, this book will focus upon steampunk’s relationship to the medium that has arguably played the largest role in establishing the movement’s romanticism for a bygone age of industry within mainstream consciousness: cinema. As a spectacular technology with its origins set in the late nineteenth century, cinema has a particularly charged relationship with the steampunk movement. From the wondrous cannon-powered rockets and flying steam-trains envisioned by Georges Méliès (A Trip to the Moon [1902] and The Impossible Voyage [1904]) to the special-effects wizardry of the contemporary blockbuster, the steampunk imagination is thoroughly ingrained within an industry defined by its own ability to create lavish celebrations of mechanical wonder and power. This book will act as an introduction to the peculiar phenomenon known as steampunk and consider how an understanding of the movement’s intense filmic proliferation encourages new readings of cinema’s own history, identity and potential futures. It shall be argued that the repeated representation of steampunk’s romanticism for a past age of industry is essential to understanding the creative and industrial forces that have helped shape the medium’s evolution over a period of intense technological change. Over the past decade, the number of academics who have noted the cultural significance of steampunk’s ‘unexpected intrusion of the modern into the historical’ (Van Riper 2013: 255) has increased dramatically: most recently observable through the release of edited collections such as Julie Anne Taddeo and Cynthia J. Miller’s Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (2013), Rachel

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Steampunk Film

A. Bowser and Brian Croxall’s Like Clockwork: Steampunk Pasts, Presents, & Futures (2016) and Barry Brummett’s Clockwork Rhetoric: The Language and Style of Steampunk (2016). However, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the dramatic number of ways that steampunk identities have been articulated, few studies have focused solely upon the movement’s cinematic heritage. This book attempts to remedy this fact by providing an account of the dramatic impact that steampunk has had upon the aesthetics of contemporary genre cinema. Following the release of Will Smith vehicle/TV remake/weird-Western hybrid Wild Wild West in 1999, steampunk’s mass-cultural emergence has been underscored by a variety of major-studio-financed juggernauts that cast the past into a realm of mechanical impossibilities and intense kinetic action. Whilst I will not present the case that Wild Wild West acts as the first steampunk film (far from it, a number of prior productions will also be considered), I will illustrate how this production marks the beginning of an era of intense proliferation for steampunk within big-budget genre film-making that has indelibly left its mark upon both the medium and subculture. By evaluating how the films of this era saw steampunk court mainstream appeal, I will consider how the movement’s retrofuturistic nostalgias have pertinence to a much wider range of audiences than has often been noted; from the interests of the phenomenon’s counter-cultural followers to viewers who, whilst perhaps not recognizing the term ‘steampunk’, would construct relationships to its alternative histories nevertheless. It is worth noting, therefore, that engaging with steampunk cinema means positioning this text within (and in conflict with) a number of cultural hierarchies that have been supported by both academic consensus and much of steampunk’s own fandom. United by their fantastical re-imaginings of antiquated technologies and period landscapes, many of the feature-length films that have most prominently made use of steampunk characteristics hail from Hollywood: big-budget productions that have frequently been considered an anathema to the counter-cultural designs of the movement’s most adherent proponents. By accounting for steampunk’s filmic representations within this book, I hope to highlight the striking parallels that exist between both cinema and steampunk’s heritage and challenge many of the critical and popular discourses that have (as I will go on to demonstrate and refute) derided the movement’s productions as little more than degenerative facsimiles that have appropriated their generic identities from comparative media. To structure this research, I will position steampunk cinema amongst a number of debates designed to explore how the movement’s irreverent dislocation

Introduction  5

of historicized technologies has become a popular means of representing both past and future. Rather than prescribing to one single essentialist theory or perspective, these debates will encourage readings that are not averse to the contradictory and often highly multifaceted workings of industrial and cultural production. At its heart, this book shall act as an introduction to a would-begenre that possesses multiple decades of history; a task that is bound to overlook many important avenues of enquiry. With this in mind, I hope that this text will encourage others to consider and expand upon the threads that I have chosen to unearth and evaluate. Each of the chapters that I shall now introduce offer differing perspectives into the ‘time-slip’ (Bell 2009: 5) and ‘alternative history’ (Falla 2010: 6) that is offered by the movement’s vision of a period of industrial progress that never was. Collectively, these discussions will chronicle the movement’s proliferation within the film industry and question why steampunk has proved to be such a fruitful resource for contemporary film-makers and studios. This book’s first chapter will act as an introduction to the steampunk movement and chronicle its origins as a literary sub-genre through to its prominence as a pop-cultural short-hand that has spread a ‘quasi-nostalgia for an imagined past’ (Cherry and Mellins 2012: 20) throughout a vast variety of multimedia properties. After offering a brief history of steampunk’s development, I shall turn my attention to the films that will act as the main focus of this book and consider how they can collectively be identified alongside the debates that surround genre theory. As well as examining how these texts can be collated within a single steampunk ‘corpus’, I shall also challenge many of the inflexible methods of identification that surround traditional genre theory and instead examine the complex and contradictory processes that surround generic construction. In Chapter 2, I will use the subject of adaptation to take a closer look at many of the films that showcase steampunk identities and explore how the movement’s productions can often be best defined through their re-engineering of past textual materials. From the relocation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) into Treasure Planet’s (2002) intergalactic setting to the recasting of nineteenth-century literary figures such as Sherlock Holmes and Abraham Van Helsing through the generic vernacular of the superhero blockbuster, steampunk films are immediately recognizable through their reimagining of literary classics and ongoing franchises. Just as the movement’s iconic machinery is constructed from the refuse and bric-a-brac of previous generations, understanding how these films act as ‘recyclers’ of past texts, movements and genres will allow me to

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trace their creative and industrial origins. As with my approach to genre theory, I will use the film industry’s adaptation and ‘mainstreaming of the steampunk aesthetic’ (Bell 2009: 5) to challenge many of the derisive cultural dialogues that scorn (as Imelda Whelehan and Deborah Cartmell summarize) ‘popular cinema’s threat to more “worthy academic pursuits” (that is, the ultimate destruction of the book by film)’ (1996: 1). I will, therefore, position my evaluation of steampunk in resistance to popular and scholarly claims that ‘all too often, the study of similarly mediocre films has been carried out under the aegis of adaptation … if we want to learn about the rich possibilities of film art … very little will be gained by studying the worst that has been accomplished’ (Horton and Magretta 1981: 1). Instead, I shall implement the method of approach noted by Robert Stam, who writes that ‘our discussion will be less moralistic, less implicated in unacknowledged hierarchies. We can still speak of successful or unsuccessful adaptations but rather by attention to specific dialogue responses’ (2005: 5). As products of the contemporary film industry, I will argue that steampunk’s backwards-looking nature affords an excellent opportunity to consider the ways that artistic and commercial identities are forged through adaptive practices that traverse the increasingly destabilized boundaries that lie between both texts and their respective media. After considering both steampunk’s cinematic construction and a number of methods of identification, the following three chapters will each offer separate yet correlative evaluations of the textual characteristics that fuel the movement’s fantastical visions of industrial adventure and spectacle. These chapters will each offer differing perspectives on how steampunk films collectively subvert audiences’ understandings of canonical historical progress, respectively placing their attentions on debates related to technology, history and modernity. Chapter 3 will, therefore, address how steampunk films are bound together by their repeated depictions of incredible anachronistic machinery. Whether retrofitting modern electronic devices into clockwork contraptions or constructing piston-powered computers that mimic the effects of their digital successors, this analysis will consider how steampunk’s realignment of scientific advances reflects a dramatic engagement with mechanical materiality. At the centre of this evaluation will be an enquiry into steampunk’s seeming nostalgia for technologies that are constructed from gears and girders rather than sleek circuitry housed in plastic casings. With reference to the movement’s subculture, Rebecca Onion observes that ‘a desire to regain a human connection with the

Introduction  7

machine world underlies the work of steampunk practitioners [who] seek to restore coherence to a perceived “lost” mechanical world’ (2008: 138). My analytical emphasis will synthesize these perspectives through the role that cinema has played in constructing steampunk’s mechanical fetishisms. As director Hayao Miyazaki states of his 1986 (and oft-described proto-steampunk) feature, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, ‘The machines in this world are not the products of mass-production, rather they still possess the inherent warmth of handcrafted things’ (1996: 254). As well as exploring how the movement’s repeated representation of fantastical technologies might be considered to act as a nostalgic rejection of contemporary digitized culture, I will also question how steampunk’s historicized machinery often take on qualities that appear frightening and Other itself: articulating more technophobic responses to period industrialization. Just as Andrew Tudor considers the narrative frameworks that inform the horror genre’s construction (‘a monstrous threat is introduced into a stable situation; the monster rampages in the face of attempts to combat it; the monster is (perhaps) destroyed and order (perhaps) restored’ [1989: 81]), I will evaluate how steampunk films often construct their own generic mythologies through the presence of machines that have become temporally unbound. Set in a world where the French Emperor Napoleon III attempted to create an army of super-soldiers to battle in the Franco-Belgian war of 1870, for example, the fantastical technologies evident in films such as April and the Extraordinary World (2015) highlight how steampunk technologies take on the role of narrative danger and threat. (The film’s distinctive use of technological design can be seen in Figure I.2). In Chapter 4, I turn my reading of steampunk cinema’s nostalgic and retrofuturistic tendencies to many of the most fiercely contested issues that surround the movement’s counterfactual reconstruction of the past: those concerning the representation of history. I will begin by considering the ways that steampunk (and cinema more generally) communicates a sense of ‘pastness’ through visual cues (Sargeant 2002: 199): setting imagined histories to contemporary purpose. Whether aligning with Pierre Sorlin’s somewhat unilateral contention that ‘history is no more useful than as a choice through which to speak of the present time’ (1980: 208) or Robert Toplin’s warning that ‘we should be cautious about stretching the connections [between past and present] too far’ (2002: 45), steampunk’s highly anachronistic nature will be positioned at the very forefront of debates that consider the film industry’s tendency to commodify the past through fashions and styles. Following this discussion, I will explore how the

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Steampunk Film

Figure I.2  April and the Extraordinary World (2015), [Film] Dir. Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci, France/Belgium/Canada: StudioCanal.

movement’s pseudo-historical landscapes participate in an ongoing examination of social injustices both past and present. As will be seen, steampunk films can be considered in conjunction with a subculture that has often been valued based on its willingness to tackle the horrors of a past age, reference the imperialism and social inequalities of Victorian history and ‘repurpose the best of that time while correcting for the worst’ (VanderMeer and Chambers 2011: 15). Placing issues of identity under the microscope, I will consider how steampunk films subvert and/or reject the ideological frameworks that have seen the movement’s historical revisionism touted as a valuable site of protest and representation. Of essential importance to this discussion is an understanding of how steampunk cinema’s spectacular recreations of industrial expansion also reflect numerous cultural and national anxieties that offer correlations between historical and contemporary acts of colonialism. I will, therefore, evaluate how the movement has come to adopt the role played by many genres constructed through period: used to reinforce a nation’s self-image through their production (De Wever 2007: 6). This enquiry will allow me to identify how steampunk has developed into a truly ‘international genre’ (Onion 2008: 141) that has been enacted within a great number of global film industries beyond the reach of both Hollywood production and representations of Victorian Britain. Concluding these discussions of cultural and national identities in steampunk film, I will consider one final topic of debate within Chapter 4: ‘the issue of humanness’ (Neale 2000a: 102) that is uncovered when science-

Introduction  9

fictional movements draw upon cyborgs to represent bodily integrations with mechanical workings at their most intimate. Expanding upon Caroline Cason Barratt’s argument that steampunk deals with ‘anxieties concerning the loss of the human’ (2010: 167), I will identify the ways that posthuman identities are represented through characters that find their flesh grafted with clockwork and stories that see the boundaries between operator and machine break down entirely. Having traced steampunk cinema’s identity through debates focused upon the movement’s dislocation of both technology and history, the final analytical chapter of this book will place the topic of modernity at its centre. By evaluating how steampunk’s ‘nineteenth-century-inspired technofantasies’ (Taddeo and Miller 2013: xv) transform an age associated with scientific rationalism through its fantastical anachronisms, Chapter 5 will argue that the movement’s significance within the film industry affords a means to engage with representations of modernity’s progression. I will call into question how steampunk films repeatedly depict narratives where faerie-folk and supernatural forces are placed in conflict with an increasingly mechanized world shaped by Fordist and Taylorist industrialization. As well as examining the movement’s tendency to dramatize fantastical scenarios where magic and technology collide, I will also use the subject of modernity to explore how steampunk’s playful reconstruction of late-modern industry can be defined through pop-cultural conventions that seemingly conform to postmodern definitions. As Tim Blackmore notes, representations of technology in genre film-making often reflect a seemingly destabilized relationship to history that sees society ‘frantically memorialising (if not remembering) what the past means’ (2004: 14), whilst Charles Taylor similarly argues that a twenty-first-century resurgence in heritage film-making has ‘appeared as we are facing an erosion of our collective cultural memory’ and that the digitization of culture has ‘done much to encourage a belief in the irrelevancy of the past’ (2012: 182). With debates such as these in mind, I will argue that steampunk cinema’s anachronistic rearrangement of technological artefacts acts as a particularly significant means to explore the notion of both modernity and postmodernity’s passage. By turning to the clockwork edifices and steam-powered behemoths that order the steampunk aesthetic, I will conclude this chapter by querying how the movement’s pop-cultural appropriation of industrial iconography affords more than a memorial to modernity’s demise, but can instead be read as a means of engaging with its persistence. The final evaluation in this research will, therefore,

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Steampunk Film

explore how steampunk films depend on their superimposition of twenty-firstcentury anxieties upon a background of nineteenth-century industry: using their spectacular visions of antiquated machinery to reflect both the wonders and horrors of modernity’s past and contemporary presence. Collectively, the chapters within this book will contend that steampunk’s proliferation within mainstream cinema reflects a mass-cultural desire to engage with the machines that we use to organize our own – seemingly modern – world. By drawing together debates that consider steampunk cinema’s adaptive and generic representations of historically reoriented technologies, I aim to illustrate how the movement’s films have collectively imprinted the film industry with their retro-futuristic sensibilities. To summarize, the debates considered within this research will be structured around the following goals: ●●

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Remedy the lack of academic recognition given to steampunk’s proliferation in contemporary cinema. Identify and categorize steampunk films and account for their impact upon genre cinema. Evaluate the role that the film industry has played in developing steampunk from a niche literary sub-genre into a global culture. Challenge autocratic approaches to theory that enforce peremptory distinctions between seemingly ‘low’ and ‘high’ cultural materials. Analyse how steampunk’s depictions of archaic machines reflect contemporary responses to digital technologies. Consider how steampunk’s historical anachronisms confront, represent and potentially whitewash social injustices both past and present. Explore how steampunk films can be positioned amongst debates that define both the passage of modernity and its memorialization. Use steampunk as an opportunity to examine how the changes shaping cinema’s own millennial identity are structured and informed by its industrial history.

Each of the above topics will serve as introductions to a wave of contemporary films that afford a vital means of understanding both the film industry’s commercial practices and a digitally immersed culture that nostalgically turns back to a previous industrial era. Throughout this entire analysis, a number of continuous themes will allow me to argue that steampunk’s films act as intersections for multiple debates of intense social importance. Before I begin my evaluation of these productions, however, I would like to highlight the

Introduction  11

importance of the last of my aims: an exploration of steampunk’s pertinence to the technology of cinema itself. Described variously as ‘a machine for the production of meanings and positions’ (Neale 1980: 19) and a ‘psychological apparatus’ (Lebeau 2001: 43) with an ‘obsession with looking back’ (Neely 2001: 74), the medium has frequently been defined as a mechanical process of reflecting visions of both the past and future. With its origins rooted in the same era of nineteenth-century innovation that steampunk itself fixes its gaze upon, I believe that a discussion of the movement’s cinematic identity is a particularly revealing and necessary one. As Lev Manovich argues, the Industrial Revolution is inexorably connected to that of filmic technologies, with an understanding of pioneering machines such as Charles Babbage’s mathematical engines being fundamentally important to readings of cinematic history itself (2005: 29). By investigating the changing methods of production and craftsmanship that have brought steampunk to screens, my discussion of these films will, therefore, enable me to consider the acts of set-construction, prop-manufacturing, animation and digitization that have fuelled the technological nostalgias that the movement depends upon. It is amongst these debates that I will place steampunk’s filmic significance. Through an examination of the movement and medium’s relationship, I will contend that an understanding of this particularly retro-futuristic phenomenon can be used to reassess cinema’s changing identity in a period of great technological change and industrial uncertainty.

12 

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Steampunk Goes to the Movies: The Birth of a Genre

To understand how the term ‘steampunk’ allows us to define and collate a series of films that all reinvent a past age of industry, I will begin by considering how the movement first emerged and has come to distinguish itself from comparative cultural phenomena. Through its rapid development and growing prominence within multiple media, I will trace steampunk’s rise from a niche curiosity to popcultural juggernaut and use its evolving identity as an exemplar of the contradictions that occur when we attempt to define an ever-diversifying movement into quantifiable terms. Whether used to signify an aesthetic, genre, subculture and even a political ideology, I will turn to the numerous academics, critics, creatives, fans and corporations who have actively labelled and commodified steampunk from a myriad of perspectives. I will then introduce the main subject of this book: a wave of over thirty big-budget theatrical releases that converged with steampunk’s mass-cultural expansion at the end of the twentieth century. Alongside these productions, I will note many of the academic and popular discourses that have surrounded steampunk’s cinematic dissemination: topics of debate that will underscore the chapters that follow. Most significantly, I will question how the movement’s burgeoning identity within film might best be defined and considered alongside pre-existing traditions within genre theory. By the end of this chapter, I will have confronted the problematic question of steampunk cinema’s generic identity and presented the argument that the medium possesses a fundamental connection to the widespread practice of reimagining Victorian industry.

Identification and definition When traced back to the work of authors K. W. Jeter, Tim Powers and James Blaylock, steampunk’s etymological origins might seem to be deceptively

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Steampunk Film

contemporary and straightforward. However, the term’s cultural proliferation can be drawn alongside the traditions of various forms of genre fiction over a number of decades: particularly through the very same Victorian science fictions and dime novel ‘Edisonades’ that the movement so often uses as its inspirations. Jeter’s own Morlock Night (1979), for example, acts as a direct sequel to H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), reinventing nineteenth-century science fiction from the perspective of the twentieth. When Powers discussed his fellow writers’ shared interest in shaping steampunk’s conventions, he claimed that their novels owed a debt to the influence of ‘the cornerstone of Victorian London research work’, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (first published collectively in 1851) (as quoted in VanderMeer and Chambers 2011: 48). Throughout the movement’s development, steampunk’s identity has depended on the recognition of a far-reaching heritage that makes any notion of an instantaneous origin highly problematic. As games designer and author, Frank Chadwick wrote in the blurb of his retro-futuristic role-playing game, Space 1889 (1988), the steampunk universe contains ‘everything Jules Verne could have written. Everything H.G. Wells should have written. Everything A. Conan Doyle thought of but never published because it was too fantastic’ (Chadwick 1988). Within the chapters that follow, I will note many texts that predate the movement’s seemingly late twentieth-century point of origin; yet steampunk’s identity is nevertheless best approached as a particularly contemporary and backwards-looking phenomenon. Just as the movement’s pseudo-histories make no attempt to completely recreate nineteenth-century industry (instead, they are defined by their difference and subversion), it should first be understood that ‘steampunk’ is not a term that traditionally includes Victorian science fiction itself. Instead of being used to collate the many futures imagined from the perspective of ninteenth century writers and artists, ‘steampunk’ signals a response to the past through the lens of contemporary perspectives. Jeter, Powers and Blaylock's resourceful use of Mayhew’s in-depth chronicling of the lives of nineteenth-century-London’s ‘metropolitan poor’ ([1851] 2008: xvii) parallels the characteristics that would become foundational to steampunk’s fledgling identity as a literary sub-genre: a dichotomy wherein anachronistic fantasies court plausibility through the imitation of historical detail. By blending the social and technological structures of the past with fictional impossibilities, steampunk would soon come to be recognized as a method of re-engineering a period of industrial history into new and unusual forms.



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Although I will go on to challenge the received notion of steampunk’s roots wholly being laid in the final decades of the twentieth century, the movement’s remarkable proliferation within this period is unquestionable. Whilst there are many literary works that highlight steampunk’s brand of neo-Victorian science fiction preceding this era (e.g. Michael Moorcock’s Warlord of the Air [1971], Keith Laumer’s Wars of the Imperium [1962] and Ronald W. Clarke’s Queen Victoria’s Bomb [1967]), it is not until the 1990s that both popular and academic accounts begin to recognize steampunk’s consolidation into an accountable literary subgenre. For ‘steampunk’ to propagate throughout popular culture, it first had to be concretized into a form that was both recognizable and coherent: a process that Jeter helped enable with his definition in 1987. Described as ‘putting steampunk on the map’ (Strongman 2011: 37) are a wave of science fiction novels that were released in the decade that followed. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990) became a prototypical steampunk text by depicting an imagined era of social and technological revolution set in the nineteenth century, whilst Paul Di Fillipo’s Steampunk Trilogy (1995) acted as one the first of many subsequent publications to market itself by directly utilizing the sub-genre’s name. Accounts by academics such as Brigid Cherry and Maria Mellins (2012), Kimberley Burk (2010) and Cynthia Miller (2013) (amongst others to be considered within this text) collectively note steampunk’s growing popularity within the mid-1990s, often defining its emergence as a literary phenomenon of the late twentieth century. However, whilst cultural consensus seems to credit steampunk’s proliferation to this rapidly growing number of short stories and novels, the movement’s global significance would reach new heights when applied to an almost endless variety of alternative media: particularly, in the case of this study, with respect to cinema. One of the first theorists to critically engage with steampunk, Rebecca Onion noted that the cusp of the new millennium saw steampunk transition from a niche literary movement into an entire subculture represented within multiple media (2008: 141). A number of projects have attempted to chronicle the movement’s rapidly extending genealogy over this period: Cherry and Mellins, for example, reference one particularly useful source when they write that ‘the possible mechanism by which steampunk has moved from fiction, art and music to style innovation and a full-blown subculture can be seen in the mapping of the genre undertaken on the Steampunkopedia website, a comprehensive list of steampunk fiction and media’ (2012: 9). The dedication with which steampunk followers have charted the movement’s cultural diffusion is also reflected in a growing number of publications that

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Steampunk Film

commodify steampunk’s history and development for consumers to examine. In 2011, two of the first non-fiction publications to delve into steampunk’s identity were released: Jeff VanderMeer and Susan Chambers’s The Steampunk Bible and Jay Strongman’s The Art of Steampunk. Texts such as these would soon be met by a litany of similar publications designed to appeal to both steampunk’s cult readership and a growing number of consumers with an interest in the movement. One of the most notable examples of the movement’s cultural expansion can similarly be found in the 2015 documentary film Vintage Tomorrows, which examines the movement’s growth from the perspective of the many personalities who have fostered its development. Alongside the academic attention that would come to be placed upon steampunk’s rise in prominence, these accounts helped to unify the movement’s diversifying representations into a single, understandable and manageable entity: the transformation of a series of ‘darkly atmospheric novels of a time that never was’ (Taddeo and Miller 2013: xv) into a trans-media phenomenon. Kimberley Burk provides an extensive identification of the types of influences that steampunk has found representation within since the dawn of the new millennium, noting forms ranging from ‘technology modification, clothing, lifestyle, fan-cons, e-zines, craft, sculpture, music, film, video games, role playing games, cosplay, literature, graphic design, interior design, home decor, philosophy/ethos and the variety of re-creationist communities, other allied interest groups, etc.’ (2010: 10). The formation of a unique and instantly recognizable aesthetic would arguably overtake the movement’s literary characteristics as the dominant method through which steampunk took root in our cultural consciousness. Alongside the many literary works that helped to foster steampunk’s identity, the emergence of a visual style that could be enacted within fashion, illustrations, comic books, graphic novels and video games would breathe new life into a movement quickly coming to mass-cultural awareness. Figure 1.1, for example, depicts a screenshot from Machinarium, a point-andclick adventure game released in 2009 that uses its hand-drawn backgrounds to depict a fantastical steampunk world constructed from the refuge of industrial histories. It is worth noting that steampunk’s distinct aesthetic possesses a heritage as lengthy and expansive as its narrative and literary conventions. The period technologies envisioned within steampunk’s visual media draw from the vast wealth of fantastical illustrations and covers that adorned the movement’s science-fictional antecedents in the nineteenth century. Describing a ‘visual



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Figure 1.1  Machinarium (2009), [Video game] Designer Jakub Dvorský. Czech Republic: Amanita Design.

vocabulary that is chronologically marked’ (2016: 253), Rebecca Mitchell draws attention to graphic similarities between the steampunk comic book series Sebastian O (1993) and the work of Victorian artist Aubrey Beardsley, whilst the cover for VanderMeer and Chambers’s The Steampunk Bible directly imitates the fondly remembered aesthetic of Jules Verne stories published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Comic books have played a particularly notable role in establishing steampunk’s visual identity. Brian Talbot’s writing and artistry captured much of the movement’s zeitgeist in his ‘Luther Arkwright’ adventures (1978–1999), whilst texts such as The Amazing Screw-On Head (2002) and Girl Genius (2001– present) are just two examples of many that would similarly cement steampunk as a major presence in the medium. As well as more generally constructing the visual markers that steampunk would become recognized for – from dreadnaught airships to clockwork ray guns – other popular comic book series such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999) and Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (1994) would provide direct sources for Hollywood to adapt in the years that would follow. As Joseph Good argues, the proliferation of such comic book art reflected ‘the salient characteristics of the steampunk movement, not only by offering detailed visual imaginings of the hybrid world of steampunk Victoriana but also by refracting Victorian decadence through the lens of contemporary popular culture’ (2010: 208). Alongside televisual predecessors such as The Wild Wild West (1965–1969) and The Adventures of Brisco County Jr (1993–1994), steampunk’s filmic aesthetic would develop and extend upon visual traditions

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Steampunk Film

that were defined not only by the flamboyance of their historical anachronisms but also by their pertinence as a source of retrospective nostalgia. Beyond the movement’s literary and visual properties, a number of aural characteristics would also become associated with steampunk’s atavism over the following years. Fusing together the litany of historical associations drawn through musical genres ranging from punk, industrial, rock, ragtime, cabaret and music-hall, steampunk’s ‘sound’ has been constructed by a number of self-defined steampunk musicians since the advent of the twenty-first century. Musical duo Vernian Process used Victorian science fiction as an inspiration during their formation in 2003, Seattle-based band Abney Park rebranded themselves within the genre in 2005 (‘reinventing themselves as roving time travelers and airship pirates’ [Lakin Smith 2009]) and The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing took their name from chalk graffiti found during the 1888 Whitechapel murders when marrying grindcore with steampunk’s sense of historical irreverence. This musical identity has developed alongside perhaps the most extraordinary of all of steampunk’s forms of cultural production: a growing number of fairs, festivals, concerts and conventions that showcase the extent of the movement’s popularity on the worldwide stage. Within the year of writing, steampunk will find representation at a variety of events spread across a number of countries: from Tucson USA’s ‘Wild Wild West Steampunk Convention’, Sheffield Australia’s ‘Steamfest’, Paranapiacaba Brazil’s ‘SteamCon’, Pétange Luxembourg’s ‘Anno 1900 – Steampunk Convention’, Buxtehude Germany’s ‘Aether Circus’ and New Malden UK’s ‘Surrey Steampunk Convivial’. (The Airship Ambassador website offers a catalogue of over seventy gatherings during 2018 alone.) The widespread growth of the steampunk subculture has walked hand in hand with the movement’s development as a fashion and style that its adherents and followers are able to participate within. Emerging from the interests of ‘gamers, goths, cybergoths, industrial music fans and punks [who] began to gather together to share their love of the genre’ (Harrington 2011: 6), steampunk has found itself enacted through a vast array of different commercial practices. Typing ‘steampunk’ into online search-engines now brings up a seemingly endless list of stores ranging from specialist ‘emporiums’ catering to the steampunk subculture to a litany of larger companies that appeal to a wider market. Whilst goggles, corsets, bustles and frock coats have become staples of steampunk fashion, it is the movement’s mechanical fixation that separates it from its punk and goth predecessors. Similarly, the subculture’s technological



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focus has led to its strong identification alongside a great number of craft and engineering movements. At the forefront of these projects are recognizable steampunk ‘personalities’: designers, tinkerers and modders who turn neoVictorian technologies into mechanical actuality. Reimagining contemporary devices through a historical lens, the popularity of steampunk’s ‘maker culture’ has had a profound impact on the movement’s cinematic identity. The medium’s retro-futuristic production design has been greatly influenced by the many steampunk machines manufactured by some of the most notable individuals within the movement’s engineering community. Richard Nagy (who worked under the pseudonym Datamancer) provided props for the heavily steampunk influenced television series Warehouse 13 (2009–2013), whilst Jake von Slatt has similarly found recognition for the many inventive and retro-futuristic constructions showcased on his Steampunk Workshop website. Figure 1.2 shows an image of a ‘Steampunk Victorian Pump Organ Master Command Computer Workstation’ produced by Bruce Rosenbaum, who (alongside his wife) owns a design company, ModVic, that makes countless imaginative neo-Victorian objects for commercial and private use. Throughout the counter-culture’s lifespan, steampunk has become associative with a call to DIY activism: a celebration of environmentalism, recycling and a perceived era in which ‘a high school graduate was given the complete set of scientific concepts to fully understand the technology of the age’ (von Slatt as quoted in Brownlee 2007). Taking on ideological and political values, steampunk has become far more than a literary sub-genre, fashion or visual

Figure 1.2  Photo of ‘Steampunk Victorian Pump Organ Master Command Computer Workstation’ courtesy of Bruce Rosenbaum.

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Steampunk Film

style, but a lifestyle that vocally resists corporate culture, hegemonic processes of manufacturing and the disposability of contemporary consumerism. Evaluating the extent that steampunk’s counter-cultural ideals have been transformed or translated through industrialized film-making practices will be a key focus of later debates, with particular attention placed upon the way that these ideologies conflict or potentially intersect. Although seemingly atavistic in nature, steampunk undoubtedly owes its development to the advancement and accessibility of Web 2.0 in the same years that its followers began imbuing digital technologies with historical characteristics. Emerging from a literary sub-genre into a fully fledged cultural movement, the first decade of the new millennium saw the creation of a great number of online communities, ezines and forums designed to chronicle steampunk’s advances (prominent examples include BrassGoggles, The Steampunk Tribune, Steampunk Magazine and Steampunk Empire). Despite these developments, it is not until 2008 that serious academic and journalistic attention began to be placed upon steampunk. However, in this year, the floodgates appeared to have been well and truly opened as interest in the movement developed at an extraordinary speed. Ruth La Ferla’s ‘Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds’ (2008) within The New York Times acted as one of the first of many special-interest articles, as did Caroline Sullivan’s summary of steampunk as ‘a subculture that’s been established in America for 20 years and is finally making inroads here’ in The Guardian (2008). Both Nature and Wired related steampunk to a growing community of hackers, modders and tinkerers in the same year (Zala 2008; Ganapati 2008), whilst Cyrus Farivar defined the movement as ‘a new literary, artistic and design trend that blends modern-day technologies with Victorianera aesthetics’ for American National Public Radio (2008). Steampunk’s cultural impact was further legitimized in 2009, when The Oxford’s Museum of Science held an exhibition of steampunk design and art (the first of many installations, galleries and showrooms dedicated to exploring the movement) and then again in 2010, when the term was officially defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (Higham 2011). By the conclusion of the first decade of the twenty-first century, academic interest in steampunk was beginning to establish itself, calling attention to the movement’s seeming growth from literary roots into a variety of mainstream media. Brigid Cherry and Maria Mellins define ‘an emergence of an interest in fashioning a steampunk aesthetic’ that occurred ‘from 2006 onwards’ (2012: 6), whilst Kimberley Burk describes how this ‘unique, quasi-historic, entirely



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imaginative, quixotic movement … made a deep impression on mainstream media, fashion, and graphic design’, stating that it has done so, only ‘in the last few years’ (2010: 2). Whilst many existing studies have considered steampunk as a subcultural and artisanal practice, few have focused on how the term has become adopted within mass-cultural practices: particularly through a series of spectacular blockbusters that have found themselves take prominent positions within the film industry’s workings. What follows will be an evaluation of these texts, the definitions that surround them, and the manner with which their releases have fostered steampunk’s rise in cultural prominence.

Entering the mainstream As steampunk’s retro-futuristic conventions became more pronounced within an ever-increasing range of media, the movement was quickly put to use as a lucrative means of pitching countless products to consumers. The rapid generation of interest in steampunk was so striking that, between the years of 2011 and 2012, IBM launched a study for a major partner into the movement’s rapidly expanding commercial value. Reporting for Advertising Age, Kate Kaye wrote that the company ‘believes other brands can use the steampunk example to learn how a long-lasting trend develops and how to try to foster one that resonates in the marketplace’ (2013). A comparative study was undertaken by creative agency Backbone, who utilized steampunk’s recognizable characteristics to reinvigorate an independent coffee shop’s identity; exemplifying the movement’s commercial adaptability and ‘showing that even the smallest independent operations can benefit from big, cohesive branding ideas’ (Brown 2014). Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall argue that steampunk’s development has only gone on to rise to new heights in ‘the second decade of this new millennium … in a big way’, asserting that the movement has ‘advanced well beyond its Victorian and literary roots’ (2016: xiii). As this text will go on to argue, the growth of steampunk’s mass-cultural capital is particularly evident in the high number of big-budget and high-profile films that have taken prominent positions within the film industry’s workings. Similarly to the early millennial franchises such as Harry Potter (2001–2011) and The Lord of the Rings (2001– 2003) that exemplify major studio attempts to capture wide audiences through the use of recognizable properties and fantastical narratives steeped in historical nostalgia, a number of steampunk films were designed to imaginatively recast

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Steampunk Film

nineteenth-century settings and technologies into landscapes of spectacle and adventure. Many of the productions I will consider in this book would also be widely recognized as adaptations, with a number (if not most) failing to compete with the high financial and critical successes of their contemporaries. Marking their own depictions of alternative histories through the mythologization of technological progress and industrial revolution, these movies would help to establish steampunk’s identity within mass-culture, deepening ‘the fantastic tones of their source material with steampunk imagery that helped define the subgenre’s cinematic niche’ (Taddeo and Miller 2013: xvi). Wild Wild West (1999) has often been described as a turning point for steampunk’s presence within film. Jeff VanderMeer and Susan Chambers define the production as ‘the nadir of Hollywood steampunk’ (2011: 188), whilst Jay Strongman argues that this ‘landmark film’ allowed steampunk to go ‘viral’ (2011: 38). Whilst this study does not consider Wild Wild West as the first ‘steampunk’ film (a number of earlier examples will be considered), its release undoubtedly acts as one of the first high-profile, multi-million-dollar investments to find itself identified within the boundaries of the movement. Significantly, whereas in previous decades steampunk productions would be relatively sporadic and isolated, the years following Wild Wild West’s release saw the emergence of a continuous wave of commercial blockbusters that owed their identities to the movement. Yet, steampunk’s cinematic development over this period does not reflect an industrial attempt to ‘cash-in’ or appropriate steampunk’s identity from its developing subculture, but a synchronous rise in profile that was born from acts of generic hybridity and adaptation fuelled by the medium’s own internal workings. Despite being a cinematic reimagining of CBS’s television series The Wild Wild West, Wild Wild West bears closest semblance to Men in Black (1997), an action-adventure/buddy-comedy/spy-fi hybrid itself based on the 1990–1991 comics series The Men in Black. Sharing a director in Barry Sonnenfeld and acting as star vehicles for Will Smith (fresh from breakout roles in 1995’s Bad Boys and 1996’s Independence Day), both films depict Smith as a wisecracking hero who is enlisted as a government agent, partnered with an older Caucasian ‘buddy’ (respectively Tommy Lee Jones and Kevin Kline) and tasked with mastering an assortment of extraordinary gadgets and weapons to defeat an array of ‘alien’ and technological monstrosities. However, whereas the threat within Men in Black is extra-terrestrial in origin, Wild Wild West acts as a return to the frontiers of the American West, re-skinning the nation’s historical mythos



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using an ensemble of fantastic machinery. (‘It’s a whole new west’ proclaimed the film’s tagline, taking note of its own irreverent and revisionist approach to its generic sources.) Figure 1.3, for example, depicts a screenshot of the film’s villain, Dr. Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh), operating an enormous mechanical spider with the ability to rain hellfire upon nineteenth-century America. Whilst Wild Wild West was commercially successful, it set a standard that Hollywood’s implementation of steampunk would go on to follow; it failed to live up to the financial performance of Men in Black, was unsuccessful in kickstarting a future franchise and was almost universally derided by critics. Yet, despite Wild Wild West’s apparent failings, the film was followed by a long line of millennial blockbusters that similarly belong within the steampunk corpus: a ‘sub-genre of science fiction, which reinvents history – specifically the Victorian era – based on the idea that future, or imagined technologies were available then’ (Falla 2010: 1). Animated features such as Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and The Boxtrolls (2014) would use a number of production techniques to bring life to steampunk’s whimsical anachronisms, adaptations including The Time Machine (2002) and Sherlock Holmes (2009) would reconstruct historical properties through contemporary perspectives, whilst the likes of The Prestige (2006) and Hugo (2011) would feature archaic and incredible technologies in positions of intrinsic narrative importance. Over the course of this book, I will examine all of these texts (and more) in specific detail, yet the extent that films such as these can be defined as ‘steampunk’ productions must first be considered. Indeed, the questions surrounding their classification has proven

Figure 1.3  Wild Wild West (1999), [Film] Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures.

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Steampunk Film

the subject of countless debates and popular attempts to unify steampunk as a cinematic genre: Emily Donahue, for example, offers a catalogue for MTV that cites The Prestige and Wild Wild West as ‘two of the most popular steampunk movies to date’ (Donahue 2008). Even more discussions have been led by the movement’s fans, who vocally dispute the legitimacy of various film’s positions within their negotiated understanding of an accepted steampunk ‘canon’: ‘I suppose you cannot expect the tens of thousands of IMDB users who voted to really understand what steampunk is,’ writes blogger Renquist Von Reik when collating the ‘Top Ten Steampunk Movies’ (2009) on the online database. Before attempting to consider the most effective ways of organizing and defining the parameters of steampunk film, it is worth drawing attention to a number of debates that have become embedded within steampunk’s cinematic identity. As ‘a culture that now stands on the verge of mainstream recognition’ (Strongman 2011: 12), steampunk’s presence within the film industry has led its component texts consistently finding themselves placed within discussions that enforce conflicts between seemingly mainstream and subcultural identities. When Jeanette Atkinson examines reactions from steampunk adherents finding ‘their culture being appropriated’, she notes ‘how little they appreciate this’ (2013: 279). It is common to see attempts to unify the movement’s representations in cinema centred upon issues of quality: one online discussion titled ‘Are There Any Examples of Good Steampunk Movies or TV Shows’ sees user ‘Granite-M’ claim that ‘unfortunately there are plenty of middling-to-bad and so-bad-it’sgood steampunk movies (i.e. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Wild Wild West, etc.), but there are very few actual good ones’ (‘MLAbbott’ 2014). Whether designed to appeal to inclusive audiences that do not necessarily belong within the movement’s fandom, or simply not being produced to a supposedly high enough standard, steampunk films are frequently collectively defined as degenerative. Reflecting upon accusations that the movement is a ‘shallow’ aesthetic skin that is easily copied within mainstream media, Rebecca Onion notes a perceived absence of ‘what steampunk theorists would see as the more high-minded motivation of recreating a utopic relationship between human and machine’ (2008: 155) within the movement’s most frequently derided works. Concerns that steampunk’s growing popularity has dampened its intellectual nature and political motivations are repeatedly vocalized: ‘When something is as aesthetic in nature as steampunk is, it can get trapped inside its own little tropes. We’re starting to see it happening now with all the goggles, the airships, and the cogs



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that get mindlessly stuck onto anything and everything’, states author Allegra Hawksmoor (as quoted in VanderMeer and Chambers 2011: 205). Steampunk cinema’s maligned status frequently ties into a desire to distinguish between the movement’s aesthetic sensibilities and those that are seen to be more ideological in nature. This interest in exploring both steampunk’s seemingly ‘high-minded’ and ‘vacuous’ characteristics can be attributed to the vast number of ways that the movement has found itself represented in different media. As Kimberley Burk asserts, steampunk has become much ‘more than a simple aesthetic or style’, it is instead a post-postmodern subculture community phenomenon in that it is not defined by a place, a class, a kind, or art form. It is a verb, it is a style, it is a philosophy, more than anything, it as an approach or worldview. It is an intent as much as it is the result. (Burk 2010: 7)

It is no wonder that attempts to catalogue steampunk’s representations have become such a complex affair, nor that the movement has so repeatedly seen its followers actively debate the ‘right’ ways to promote its identity. To understand steampunk cinema, one must consider how its films have often been identified as perpetuating the commodification of subcultural ideologies into a massconsumer-friendly ‘style’. Throughout later debates I will challenge assertions that steampunk’s presence in film is solely aesthetic in nature: defined as a ‘skin’ in opposition to the movement’s engagement with ‘serious social, economic, political, and cultural issues’ (Dvorak 2013: ii). Instead, I will argue that steampunk’s cinematic forms of style (often enacted through its positioning of space, time and spectacle) reflect debates of intense cultural importance. There is a great deal of precedent for an analysis that considers not only the prospective value but also the immense significance of steampunk-as-blockbuster. If, as suggested by Vivian Sobchack, the retro-futuristic blending of future and past in the science fiction productions of New Hollywood allowed utopic visions of ‘technological wonder’ where ‘space and time seemed to expand again’ ([1980] 2001: 226), what ideological significance can be traced through the presence of steampunk’s own provocatively anti-historical fantasies? By placing the movement’s films amongst equivalent debates, I argue that steampunk’s mass-cultural appeal can be used to examine and promote active critical debate, rather than stifle it. It is an understatement, therefore, to claim that steampunk film’s identification has frequently been determined within (and in contrast to) the subculture’s own

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Steampunk Film

development. Dominique Falla writes that ‘the motion picture industry appears to be leading the way in designing some form of definitive steampunk aesthetic’, despite the fact that the film’s designers are seemingly not ‘choosing to serve the genre first and foremost’ (2010: 17). It is here that we can return to Wild Wild West’s significance once more, as Falla goes on to assert that Bo Welch (production designer of Wild Wild West) ‘has never heard of steampunk, he certainly never mentions it as a source when discussing the design process … but whether by accident or design, the film has wound up being one of the shining examples of how good steampunk can look’ (2010: 15). Falla’s argument that there is a seeming disconnect between the interests of both the movement and medium (one that she attempts to resolve as a designer with direct knowledge of the term) can also, in counterpoint, be used to highlight the fundamentally interconnected relationship between both steampunk and cinema. Whilst Welch may not have been aware of the etymology of steampunk, his role as production designer for films such as Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Batman Returns (1992) nevertheless helped to construct the same techno-gothic markers that have played such a strong role in steampunk’s heritage (alongside figures such as the director of these films: Tim Burton). Rather than being imitative of a movement that was broadening in appeal, the development and release of many steampunk films preempts much of both the movement’s subcultural growth and the period wherein the term entered both mainstream lexicon and attention. In fact, the observable distance between subcultural intent and steampunk cinema’s proliferation underlines the significant role that these films have had in shaping the movement itself. As a wave of productions that saw their release begin before steampunk became a mainstream term, their development and distribution places them within the contexts of steampunk’s development, rather than as being plagiaristic responders to it. Their continual presence over the course of steampunk’s cultural rise aided the movement’s mass-media proliferation, and act as a testament to its influence upon contemporary pop-culture. As I will argue over the course of this book, the emergence of steampunk within mainstream genre film-making suggests that the movement’s origins are indebted to far more than subcultural intention, acting instead as a widespread response to millennial change that can be traced throughout numerous media. We might argue that steampunk’s cinematic development outside of (and in concordance with) the counter-cultural practices of the movement highlights the importance of these films, rather than diminishing it. Significantly, the generic



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and industrial circumstances of steampunk cinema’s development also highlight how these films are deeply entrenched in the medium’s own history: enacted through cinema’s own traditions, for its own purposes. To understand how these texts might be defined and evaluated, we will need to separate ourselves somewhat from the movement’s subcultural and literary characteristics, and consider how they can be understood in a way that prioritizes theoretical approaches to film itself.

Steampunk as genre cinema When considering steampunk’s status within alternative media, theorists have been united in their observations of its so-called genre-slipperiness (Bell 2009: 5). Often described using malleable parameters, definitions of the term as a ‘genr​e-tur​ned-m​oveme​nt-tu​rned-​subcu​lture​’ (Harrington 2011: 6) embrace steampunk’s fluidity and the fact that it ‘resists easy definition’ (Taddeo and Miller 2013: xxiv). Mike Perschon summarizes these issues when he writes that ‘the difficulty in defining steampunk stems from the evolution of the term as a literary sub-genre of science fiction to a sub-culture of goth-fashion, Do-ItYourself arts and crafts movements, and more recently, ideological counterculture’ (2010a: 128). Within this book, steampunk might similarly be defined as either a cinematic genre that marries its period sensibilities with sciencefictional subversion. Indeed, my main aim is to consider the debates that are uncovered if a variety of films that might otherwise be identified differently are considered under the banner of steampunk. However, genre studies have proved extremely complex and often resistant to ad-hoc terminology, no matter how useful it proves in principle. With this in mind, I will now consider the contested status of filmic genres and the enormous artistic and industrial importance that is derived from the methods that we use to organize, collate and understand their categorization. Just as steampunk’s cinematic identity is ordered through debates that attempt to value its legitimacy, so too does the question of its generic belonging bring with it issues of its cultural integrity. Decades of study have seen academics attempt to create a formal method of quantifying film’s shared characteristics. Observations that genres such as the war movie, Western, musical and comedy are ‘uncontested’ (Maltby 1995: 85) are seemingly enshrined in the public’s consciousness. Despite a number of distinctions and exceptions that complicate their definition, the shared

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recognition of these ‘classical’ genres has nevertheless greatly informed how the film industry produces, exhibits and distributes its products. Steve Neale’s statement that ‘different critics will then argue the relative independent merits of at least one of the thriller, the crime or gangster movie, and at last either the horror movie and science fiction as either one or two additional genres’ (Neale 2000a: 116) highlights the combative struggles that surround a genre’s canonization: a privilege traditionally available only to a select few. The question of steampunk’s potential status as a genre is more than a matter of simple semantics, but a means of establishing its cultural importance and the manner with which it has made a substantial imprint on both the film industry and its audiences alike. As Barry Keith Grant argues, ‘genre films provide a means for cultural dialogue’ and are capable of ‘engaging their audiences in a shared discourse that reaffirms, challenges and tests cultural values and identity’ (2007: 30). Similarly, Neale highlights how genres are defined through their audience’s responses, writing that they ‘consist of systems of expectation and hypothesis which spectators bring with them’ (2000a: 31). The notion that steampunk film’s generic meanings are constructed through a process of audience recognition is particularly fascinating considering the numerous cultural hierarchies that the movement has been positioned within. From diehard fans that promote steampunk ‘lifestyles’ to mass audiences who may have little awareness of the term, the movement’s cinematic proliferation has been informed by countless different cultural perspectives. As well as recognizing that steampunk’s generic formation has been dependent on the individuals and groups that have attempted to define (or ‘expect’) its features, we must also note the many different ways that generic categories have themselves been defined. Grant considers a number of criteria through which different genres are identified, writing that ‘crime film, science fiction and the western are defined by setting and narrative content. However, horror, pornography and comedy are defined by their emotional effect on the viewer’ (2007: 23). Grant also provides a list of traits that can be used to describe genre films, including ‘repeated conventions, iconography, settings, characters, actors, audiences, stories and themes’ (2007: 30). The extent that steampunk cinema shares such characteristics will be considered over the course of this book; however, as well as utilizing this methodology, its usefulness shall also be challenged. These generic definitions are far more complex than they might at first appear: horrors often delight and amuse as much as they terrify, whilst the identity of science fiction films depends upon a far greater range of cultural



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markers than its menagerie of aliens, robots and futuristic landscapes might suggest. As ephemeral concepts that often reflect the intentions of their organizer rather than their own identities, it is a mistake to consider genres as independent or uniform categories. Of course, it is not unusual for genre theorists to note the complex interrelationships that allow films to be defined in relation to one another. The majority of the steampunk films that I will evaluate in this book have (as I will soon demonstrate) not only been defined within alternative genres but have frequently been described as hybrids that possess the qualities of one or more recognizable movements. Steampunk’s incongruous mixture of historical referents positions its films at the centre of studies that have attempted to examine genres as multifaceted forms. As I. Q. Hunter states of the industrial period that enabled steampunk to establish itself within popular cinema, ‘Most Hollywood films are “hyphenates” these days, opportunistic fusions of successful formulae’ (1996: 116). Jim Collins presents such viewpoints in his analysis of Back to the Future Part III (1990) (a film that has frequently – with hindsight – been defined as a steampunk film due to its narrative and aesthetic dependence on fantastically atavistic technologies), defining it through a definition of ‘ironic-hybridization’: the mixing of ‘pure’ genres such as the Western and science fiction to make a self-referential hybrid of the two (1993: 242). As with Back to the Future Part III, numerous steampunk films might seem to present themselves most clearly as deviations of period genres (in this case the Western) that are transformed through the inclusion of fantastical anachronisms. Such a perspective certainly aligns with perspectives that steampunk acts as a ‘skin’ that allows films with historical settings to take on many of the sensationalistic science-fictional effects that are common to many contemporary Hollywood blockbusters. However, whilst exploring the notion of steampunk’s hybrid status is useful, an understanding of the movement as a blend of ‘pure’ and ‘uncontested’ sourcegenres remains similarly limiting and relatively arbitrary. It is almost impossible to align steampunk’s conventions with those of any two, three or even four ‘parent’ genres. Janet Staiger highlights how these issues reflect many of the same discourses that I argue have surrounded the production of steampunk films, writing that ‘hybridity always opens up the discriminatory presumptions of purity, authenticity, and originality from which this textual hybrid is declared to be a deviation, a bastard, a corruption’ (2012: 214). The use of many of these pejorative terms are familiar to steampunk cinema’s contested generic status and the many dialogues that surround essentialist categorization. Instead, I suggest

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that steampunk’s generic construction should be approached as a complex system of recognition that is informed by Staiger’s ‘process of comparison’ (2012: 214): an understanding of generic identity that reflects audience’s engaged understandings of repetition and difference. The depth, or perhaps stability, of steampunk’s generic identity can only be fully considered through a study of the comparisons and differences that underline the movement’s films. These are the questions that will structure the following chapters; yet to find an appropriate means of discussing and terming these productions so that such a study can begin, it is worth briefly establishing the wide selection of genres that these productions use as their influences. Most prominently, we can note how steampunk etymological origins primarily suggest that the term may be best considered as a subversion (or ‘punking’) of science-fictional conventions that are correlative to cyberpunk: a movement that similarly acts as a late twentieth-century response to the advancements of information technology. Through cinematic exemplars that include Blade Runner (1982), Ghost in the Shell (1995) and The Matrix trilogy (1999–2003), cyberpunk’s own development offers an interesting comparison to steampunk’s particularly atavistic sensibilities (Jeter’s creation of the term ‘steampunk’ might be thought of as a direct allusion to its namesake, whilst author William Gibson is frequently cited as the co-creator and creator of both movement’s archetypal texts: The Difference Engine and, in the case of cyberpunk, Neuromancer [1984]). Defining both as sub-genres of science fiction, Stefania Forlini writes that steampunk and cyberpunk collectively offer ‘unique opportunities to rethink the human, technology, and morality in a “posthuman” world’ (2010: 72): a notion that is (as will be considered in Chapter 4) centrally positioned within numerous steampunk films. Jason Jones explores how both movements might be considered as a response to similar cultural concerns, and yet challenges the commonly held perspective that steampunk acts as an offshoot of cyberpunk, stating that mainstream readers usually classify steampunk as a sub-subgenre of science fiction, a neo-Victorian outpost within the broader universe of cyberpunk writing. … Yet it turns out that such mainstream assumptions are mistaken: steampunk predates its parent. While cyberpunk is usually dated to 1984, steampunk’s aesthetic, if perhaps not its ideological interest was set as early as 1969 or 1971. (Jones 2010: 103)



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Here, Jones is referring to the numerous texts that were developed before steampunk itself was coined (The Wild Wild West television series being an excellent example); however, one could doubtlessly make the claim that cyberpunk’s own stylistic and ideological characteristics are seeded at least as far back as texts such as Brave New World (1931) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): each of which subverted utopic visions of technological progress with discussions of human individualism and ontological insecurity. As with so many of the cultural discussions surrounding steampunk, questions of legitimacy or originality repeatedly become adversarial, with both theorists and fans considering which sub-genre – steampunk or cyberpunk – is subservient to the other. Instead, attention should be placed on the manner with which steampunk’s generic history (and similarly, that of cyberpunk) draws back much further than its status as a subcategory of science fiction implies. The movement’s frequent focus on the technological revolution of the mid- to late nineteenth century firmly roots it in the social and cultural changes that birthed many of the most widely recognized and popularized genres that are still reiterated by Hollywood today. Just as the generic boundaries of contemporary cinema are loosely defined, so too are many of the works of writers such as H. G. Wells (whose science fictions took on properties of the social-drama and high-fantasy), Arthur Conan Doyle (whose detective stories took on the conventions of the adventure-serial so common to the pulps of the time) and Mary Shelley (whose ‘Modern Prometheus’ acts as perhaps the definitive hybrid, marrying horror and science fiction to unforgettable effect). Steampunk cinema directly draws on the work of authors such as these, as well as the litany of filmic adaptations that followed throughout the twentieth century. From the proliferation of the printing press to the film studios’ own mechanical workings, all genres owe their construction to the heritage of pulp serials, B-movies and modern blockbusters that can be traced to the present. The diversity of generic mutations and variations that are prominent within steampunk film highlights the extent that its cinematic identity is dependent on far more than only its science-fictional heritage. Many of the films that make up steampunk cinema are not positioned primarily within the science fiction movement, if at all. Vidocq (2001), for example, is a French digital ‘heritage’ film that predominantly draws its style and form from the mystery and detective genres, rather than science fiction: reimaging the life of criminologist Eugène François Vidocq if he were to have

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encountered a variety of fantastical machines and supernatural forces. James Austin argues that despite featuring ‘extensive special effects’, ‘Vidocq is not a science-fiction film, but rather is set in the early part of the nineteenth century. It is not, however, just another costume drama’, describing it as ‘part detective film, part thriller, with a good dose of the fantastic’ (2004: 282). Wild Wild West and Jonah Hex (2010) make strong use of their American-frontier settings despite their use of anachronistic technologies (often finding themselves defined as ‘weird westerns’ for this very fact), whilst Tai Chi Zero (2012) hails from the Hong Kong action movie, focused upon a narrative where colonial invaders possess similarly incredible and destructive machinery. Alternatively, Andy Hedgecock specifically identifies steampunk as a contemporary link between science fiction and fantasy in ‘New Wave to Sci-Fi Strange: Thematic Shifts in the SF Short Story’ (cf. 2011), a statement that seems particularly clear in productions such as Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), as well as Hellboy (2004) and its sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008). The notion that steampunk acts as a blend of science fiction and fantasy has particular precedent, as the two genres rely on depictions of alternative worlds that are removed from contemporary credibility and take imaginative leaps into unknown pasts and futures. Despite not alluding to steampunk specifically, Martin Scorsese nevertheless defines his celebrated children’s film Hugo through the movement’s techno-historical sensibilities when considering it in comparison to contemporary fantasy adaptations: The idea of a little boy … sliding in and out of the innards of these clocks …. Well, Hugo is not really a fantasy film. It’s not a Chronicles of Narnia or a Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings type of fantasy. … The fantasy is very real, but it’s in your head and in your heart. It has to do with the mechanisms – whether it’s the clocks, the interiors, the locomotives, the trains, the automaton – with the inner workings of these objects. (as quoted in Bowe 2011)

Scorsese’s statement can be unpacked in a number of different ways, from perceived distinctions between various forms of imaginative fantasy, to the intricacy of the technological constructions that act as the foundations of the steampunk aesthetic. As with Hugo’s own emphasis on visual spectacle, many of steampunk’s archetypal films might seem to be most appropriately defined as ‘action-adventures’. Films like Sherlock Holmes (2009), Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) and Van Helsing (2004) primarily use their period



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settings as a means to showcase a number of fight scenes and chase sequences that regulate their violence to maintain the lucrative PG-13 rating established after the release of generic forebear Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). Barry Langford notes how the ‘action-adventure film’ is one of ‘the least discussed and the least defined’ of Hollywood’s genres, despite its prolific cultural status (2005: 233), whilst Steve Neale similarly asserts that ‘it can at times be difficult to distinguish between horror and the crime film, and science fiction, adventure and fantasy as well’ (2000a: 92): many of the genres that I argue steampunk’s construction depends upon. Within this growing number of generic referents is a genre that has had a particularly significant impact upon steampunk’s developing identity: horror. Possessing an aesthetic that Jay Strongman argues allows ‘Victorian and Edwardian elegance [to] collide with gothic horror and modern science’ (2011: 7), both steampunk cinema and the steampunk subculture possess a particularly palpable mix of the threat and romance often articulated within horror. When depicted at their most monstrous, steampunk’s machines and locations take on qualities extremely familiar to both the broader horror genre and the romanticism of gothic fiction: particularly noticeable within productions such as Victor Frankenstein (2015) and Perfect Creature (2006), where historical style is parsed through postmodern reconstruction. Barry Langford notes this shared heritage when he writes that ‘most accounts agree that what would later crystallize as science fiction themes were mostly incorporated into the gothic imagination’ (2005: 185). Much of my textual analysis of steampunk films will be based on their intensely romanticized depiction of period industrial progress that is as wondrous as it is horrific. Both the heroes and villains of 9 (2009), for example, are mechanical homunculi that populate a post-apocalyptic wasteland that is both threatening and alluringly fascinating in equal measure (see Figure 1.4). The unsettling and uncanny characteristics often shared by both steampunk’s machines and the terrors of the horror genre might be considered as extensions of the brooding influence that Guy Barefoot attributes to ‘gaslight melodramas’ (2001: 5): a term that brings us also to film noir’s own atavistic tendencies. Like the horror, science fiction, fantasy and action-adventure genres, many of the steampunk films already noted share a great many components with film noir’s sense of period style. Yet, noir offers us not only another category through which steampunk’s definition might be traced, but a method of approach that questions the ways that genres are classified and constructed. As the conflicting means of identifying steampunk attests, considering the term as a means to link one,

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Figure 1.4  9 (2009), [Film] Dir. Shane Acker. USA: Focus Features.

two or even three genres together is relatively limiting; it is equally problematic to consider steampunk as a sub-genre of any one single movement. Instead, I argue that a potential answer to steampunk’s generic status can be illustrated via comparative discussions that have been posed by theorists to identify film noir’s own peculiarities. As well as sharing commonalities with steampunk through its unmistakably retro style, film noir is a genre that has similarly found its identification rife with contention based upon its relationship to past texts. In many instances, the language used to consider film noir bears striking resemblance to the arguments that claim steampunk’s generic status is extremely unstable and problematic. However, Steve Neale claims that despite such issues, noir can nevertheless ‘be described and accounted for … it is in one way or another aesthetically, culturally, ideologically or historically important’ (2000a: 152). Such a statement echoes the key intentions of this book: a need to highlight the significance of a movement that, although widely recognized, has frequently escaped the attentions of academic study. The necessity of steampunk’s definition is enabled by the fact that it allows us to draw together numerous different texts that (as I intend to demonstrate) collectively reflect cultural and industrial trends through their shared generic schemata. A comparison between film noir and steampunk also sheds particular light on the ways that both terms have arisen in relative contrast to the direct intentions of the film industry. Just as the classification of steampunk might be argued to be incidental to the interests of its studios or film-makers, ‘film noir’ was a term that was first used by film journalists, academics and fans who noticed stylistic patterns that suggested the creation of



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a distinct cultural category (cf. Altman 1999: 61; Grant 2007: 24). Yet, despite the fact that steampunk and film noir’s terminology did not reflect the direct intentions of the film industry, they both nevertheless act as necessary means of demonstrating the importance of certain cultural patterns when associated with a specific period of production. Whilst many have argued that the lack of specificity surrounding film noir’s origins makes it difficult to consider as a genre (cf. Bordwell 1985: 75), others have asserted that its ‘distinct narrative and visual conventions’ do indeed fulfil the requirements of generic definition (Grant 2007: 28). However, the back and forth of this debate does not necessarily aid the discussion of film noir’s importance, and frequently places the issue of the term’s supposed legitimacy before an understanding of its cultural significance. If we return to Janet Staiger’s assertion that genres depend not only on their traits but on structural recognitions, it can be argued that their definitions are as useful as we collectively consider them to be. Moving forwards, I shall endeavour to avoid terminology that encourages absolute definitions, and instead consider the ways that steampunk’s identity is not only based on the creation of new forms – but new ways of reading past texts as well. As a term coined by K. W. Jeter, further enforced by adherents, fans and casual observers, ‘steampunk’ has proved its use as an essential means of collating together cultural works that share a number of retro-futuristic conventions. With reference to film noir, Elizabeth Cowie offers a comparative view of this perspective when she writes, Whether it is a genre, a cycle of films, a tendency or a movement, film noir has succeeded despite the lack of any straightforward unity in the set of films it attempts to designate … Yet this is matched by a tenacity of critical use, a devotion among aficionados that suggests a desire for the very category and as such, a wish that it exist in order to have a certain set of films all together. (Cowie 1993: 121)

Cowie’s statement reflects a willing enthusiasm and common consensus that has become equally evident in steampunk’s development. Like film noir, it has developed from a cultural phenomenon into a style and genre that is knowingly recreated and constructed within its own specifications. As will be seen throughout the course of this text, steampunk’s identity has made a distinct impression on both public reception and methods of production alike. For example, the term found itself formally incorporated into the marketing materials of Tai Chi Zero, which pronounced itself proudly as an explicit genre mashup: ‘a

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steampunk kung-fu throw down’ (Smith 2013). As Neale himself argues of film noir, any attempt to define all of its constituent parts under one genre is to lead to ‘incoherence, imprecision and inconsistency’ (2000b: 174). In the chapters that follow, there will be a number of inconsistencies and contradictions that will problematize a suggestion of steampunk being an ‘uncontested’ genre. This will be made particularly clear through the fact that steampunk itself possesses many subsidiary movements and generic offshoots that seem to exit both within and outside of its cultural influence. Steampunk has frequently found itself popularly divided into subcategories such as boilerpunk, clockpunk, dieselpunk, mannerspunk, raygun gothic and stitchpunk (amongst many others). Each of these terms have been used to further subdivide the types of technological engagement with which the wider steampunk banner participates, and also possess value when considering how steampunk’s retro-futuristic tendencies have themselves broadened enough to include its own set of pseudo-historical sub-movements. In the case of steampunk’s prospective generic status, I will use its fantastical displacement of historical technologies as a starting point, noting consistencies and contradictions that occur when doing so. Significantly, instead of asking whether or not steampunk is a genre, it may be more suitable to question what cultural discussions present themselves if steampunk is approached as a genre. As this text’s analysis of steampunk cinema unfolds, it will become clear that (like noir) these films can be classified as belonging to a phenomenon, a subculture, an aesthetic, a sub-genre and even a genre itself. Each of these definitions reflect different attributes of steampunk’s representations, and each will need to be used if the total complexity of the movement’s presence in cinema is to be properly assessed. Attention will, therefore, be placed upon how the steampunk genre is generically marked, and how a wide range of productions have collectively come to encompass what can be recognized as steampunk cinema.

Prototype to archetype: Collating steampunk in film As a series of films that draw from a broad enough set of generic histories that they cannot be collated under any other single generic movement, yet remain collectively identifiable through their representations of historically dislocated technologies, I will approach steampunk cinema as if it was – for all intents and purposes – a genre itself. Rather than solely identifying steampunk as a ‘style’, I will also explore how each of the movement’s films display patterns drawn



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throughout their thematic, narrative, ideological and industrial identities. Before beginning the evaluation of this prospective genre, however, I will conclude by offering an explanation of the methodologies that I will use to define steampunk cinema’s boundaries and, therefore, the parameters that will order the texts to be considered. As noted earlier, the complex task of organizing the genre’s constituent films is aided by the wealth of catalogues that have been produced by steampunk’s vocal fan community. There are a great number of fan-led resources available to track productions that draw upon steampunk’s flair for recasting historical technologies into fantastical constructions and reimagining periods of industrial change. However, rather than solely reflecting the choices made by the subculture itself, I will also consider texts that are ordered by both the ‘common cultural consensus’ (Tudor 1973: 139) of a much wider range of critic, academic and public discussions, as well as a degree of a priori identification, testing the boundaries of the movement and considering the variety of ways in which it is represented in cinema. When author and musician Paul Roland cites ‘subversion and invention’ as foundational acts of filmic steampunk’s identity, for example, he argues that ‘genuine steampunk boasts an attitude that would kick the complacency out of anything that was clearly a conventional fantasy romp with extra cogs superglued to it’ (2014: 154). For Roland, as with many within steampunk’s community, many of the productions that I will discuss in these pages can be denied their status within the genre due to their perceived failure to evoke the movement’s more explicitly progressive qualities. My analysis will contend with this perspective and open the following chapters to the value of examining how the movement’s acts of subversion and invention can be traced through aesthetic and narrative traditions that might otherwise be dismissed for seemingly countering the subculture’s interests. One governing rule will apply: the films to be considered will all possess a substantial focus upon the depiction of pre-digital technologies and machinery that are reconfigured through contemporary attitudes to take on fantastical and/or anachronistic qualities. Yet, as mentioned previously, distinguishing between steampunk’s irreverent reimaginings of Victorian progress and genuine attempts to envision the future that have been made from historical perspectives is a complex process. We have already established that steampunk is defined by its backwards-looking characteristics, yet cinema possesses a vast history of creating incredible scientific spectacles that draw from nineteenth-century invention. If this study was to repeat the popularized assertion that the genre’s cinematic birth occurred in the

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final years of the twentieth century, an arbitrary and abstract limitation would be imposed upon a complex generic legacy. Using Wild Wild West’s release in 1999 as a starting point for steampunk cinema may prove useful as signposting, but risks simplifying the genre’s development into an instantaneous birth, rather than as part of an evolutionary process. Drawn from cinema’s earliest years, there are many films that might be categorized as steampunk with hindsight, whilst others may depict a number of the movement’s generic attributes in germination. Figures 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 are screenshots from three different films that stretch across almost a century of cinema's history. Whilst each possesses notably different cultural and industrial perspectives, they collectively evoke a joy for the wonders of mechanical invention that are informed by their similarly imagined flying machines. Prominent examples of predecessors to steampunk’s mass-cultural proliferation range from Frankenstein (1931), Young Frankenstein (1974), Time after Time (1979), Return to Oz (1985), Biggles: Adventures in Time (1986), Cronos (1993) and many more (some of which will be noted within this very book). Collectively, these films encourage a developmental perception of steampunk’s emergence, reflecting the genre’s influences over a far-reaching period. However, this text’s purpose is not to historicize a number of isolated productions that have (with hindsight) been labelled as ‘steampunk’, but account for an explosion in the genre’s popularity and development that has made such a definition not only useful but also culturally necessary. It must be made clear that steampunk is not Victorian science fiction. Although heavily influenced by past representations of the future, the movement is defined by its retrospective nature: imagining alternative worlds that knowingly steer clear of historical actuality. It will be argued that the genre’s importance (and mainstream emergence) is directly tied to a specific era of technological change and cultural uncertainty, a deliberate reconstruction of period landmarks from millennial perspectives. To define the parameters of this research, my identification of steampunk films will begin by acknowledging comparative studies that investigate a similarly retrospective movement: film noir’s cultural successor, neo-noir. Frequently marked as a specific set of films that were produced within the 1940s and 1950s for various social and industrial reasons, film noir’s continued popularity and cultural presence can be traced through neo-noir’s tendency to recall and subvert its most celebrated icons. From the simulacrative qualities of texts such as Chinatown (1974) to the generic playfulness of newer features like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), neo-noir’s simultaneous likeness and difference to its generic



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Figure 1.5  The Conquest of the Pole (1912), [Film] Dir. Georges Méliès. France: Pathé Frères.

Figure 1.6  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), [Film] Dir. Ken Hughes. UK: United Artists.

Figure 1.7  Around the World in 80 Days (2004), [Film] Dir. Frank Coraci. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.

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predecessor offers an excellent means to consider how steampunk is defined by its audiences’ recognition of historical signifiers that have been similarly recalled and reordered. Just as neo-noir revives and disassembles a genre that itself directly adapted the work of noted crime-fiction authors (perhaps most famously Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain), steampunk draws upon both the work of writers such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and also the staggering number of cinematic adaptations that followed to construct its identity: notable examples include William Whitney’s Masters of the World (1961) and Karel Zeman’s The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958). Both steampunk and neonoir exist separately to – and yet are dependent upon – their generic antecedents and act as particularly postmodern and pop-cultural memorials of periods that are now viewed as relegated to history. These two generic movements are also products of the industrial changes that birthed the New Hollywood blockbuster and the sorts of ironic-hybridization that cater to audience recognition and a high degree of stylistic spectacle. Barry Langford argues that these retrospective and allusive modes of film-making are particularly prominent in the ‘porous’ identities of the science fiction genre in particular, a fact that explains how steampunk’s nostalgic sensationalism made an appropriate fit for major studio interests (2005: 185). With reference to the social trends that have birthed steampunk’s cinematic proliferation, we might note Andrew Spicer’s assertion that ‘post-modern cultural practices characteristically employ la mode retro, which appropriates past forms through direct revival, allusion and hybridity, where different styles are used together in a new mixture’ (2002: 150). Interestingly, rather than identifying such postmodern movements as unstable and indistinct, Steve Neale argues that neo-noir’s retrospective tendencies lead it to being ‘much more real, not only as a phenomenon but also as a genre’ (2000b: 174). If considered as a quintessentially postmodern movement (a notion I will explore further in Chapter 5), it could be argued that steampunk’s simultaneous reiteration and subversion of both genre and history positions and validates its own contemporary identity through its similarly nostalgic and ironic practices. As a genre that can be identified through its subversive relationships to past cultural movements – fundamentally retro-futuristic in nature – it is therefore necessary to note how these contemporary productions separate themselves from (yet, draw attention to) a vast variety of texts spread across a century of the medium’s history. Of particular note is the fact that steampunk’s mainstream emergence transformed a series of isolated releases into a full-blown and



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continuous phenomenon: one that is driven, as will be seen, by millennial attitudes to technological and social change. To place this explosion in steampunk's cinematic production under the microscope, I will evaluate many films that are spread throughout the entire breadth of the genre rather than consider a few case studies in particular detail: drawing attention to the many qualities that enable both the movement’s generic unity and diversity. As Wild Wild West’s oft-cited preeminent position within steampunk film’s history might suggest, its release does indeed act as something of a hallmark through which a number of Hollywood steampunk productions can be traced. However, films such as The City of Lost Children (1995) and Dark City (1998) demonstrate the extent that the movement’s contemporary emergence is anything but clear-cut, as each will play a notable role in the analyses that follow. As Rebecca Onion states, The City of Lost Children ‘brought the steampunk style to a larger audience after it became an indie foreign film hit’ (2008: 141), whilst Dark City's marriage of film noir and cyberpunk traditions through a fantastical re-construction of archaic technologies and retro-fashions similarly positions it within the burgeoning steampunk movement. As well as accepting the movement’s dissonant span of releases, I will also consider a number of films that do not fit within the usual classifications of mainstream or blockbuster cinema: international productions such as The City of Lost Children, for example, act as excellent examples of the genre’s versatility, whilst The American Astronaut (2001) acts as a particularly interesting example of the steampunk genre operating independently. For the sake of both cohesion and practicality, this book will primarily concern itself with feature-length productions that received a theatrical release. Whilst a number of vignettes and shorts have been classified within the steampunk genus (for example, Anthony Lucas’s The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello [2005]), I will leave this door open for future research and place my attentions firmly upon ‘full-length’ productions that have been exhibited within cinemas. To conclude, whether through their narrative conventions, ideological meanings or aesthetic sensibilities, I will evaluate how the many distinctive qualities that make up steampunk films illustrate the significance of retrofuturism within contemporary cinema. Such an approach will shun a unilateral method of identification, embrace apparent conflictions and – perhaps most importantly – be capable of seeing the usefulness in doing so. By considering steampunk using a number of differing definitions and methodologies, I aim to illustrate how generic identification is a complex process that is inclusive

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of many distinctive forms. It is the assertion of this research that steampunk reflects cultural issues that span the globe: a desire to re-engage with national histories and technological insecurities in our millennial age. As the following chapter will now demonstrate, it remains the task of this study to evaluate how an increasingly digitized medium has turned its attention back to its industrial history to take previously existing generic material and form it into something ‘new’.

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Re-engineered and Repurposed: Steampunk as Adaptation

As contemporary fantasies that envision alternative histories where industrial progress has taken a different path, steampunk films adapt a vast array of genres, aesthetics, subcultural identities and celebrated texts into forms that seem simultaneously familiar to and removed from what has come before. Shaped through countless re-imaginings, the electrical arcs and antiquated lever-switches that we now associate with Frankenstein’s laboratory may have been absent from Mary Shelley’s original text, for example, but have since become key staples of steampunk cinema’s aesthetic vocabulary. Emblematic of the horrors and wonders brought forth by an age of industrial innovation, the repetition of such imagery has similarly become embedded in the wider cinematic imagination, reflective of the elaborate technological theatrics of the contemporary blockbuster. It is somewhat unsurprising that when 20th Century Fox developed its retelling of the text under the title Victor Frankenstein its production was informed not only by advances in digital effects but also by an increased degree of tonal irreverence and an emphasis on the well-recognized icons of mechanical spectacle that brought this nameless monster to life. However, it may be Frankenstein’s monstrosity itself that offers the most appropriate analogy to steampunk’s construction within film. Reanimated via the allotransplantation of alternative sources, the genre is made up of convoluted – yet unmistakable – patchwork hybrids. In steampunk’s literary antecedent, the life with which inanimate flesh is repurposed is met with revulsion; with steampunk itself, the reconstitution of revered texts into new forms is met with similar scorn. Through industrialized acts of recycling, borrowing and the (potential) robbery of historical artefacts, steampunk films have often found themselves primarily identified through debates that consider the cultural status of such flagrant revision (responses to Victor Frankenstein’s have done little to challenge this tradition). Yet, as I will now demonstrate, steampunk

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has remained one of the primary methods through which the film industry has attempted to reinvent and revitalize past texts for contemporary audiences, enabling twenty-first-century uncertainties to be passed through the industrial smog of nineteenth-century innovation.

Adaptation and reception: ‘Sticking-Up’ The Wild Wild West Although Wild Wild West’s release in 1999 did not make it the first steampunk film to be released in cinemas, its effects-driven spectacle and adaptive characteristics would find themselves standardized within many of the genre’s films that followed. Wild Wild West’s development was indebted to the repeated commercial success of a number of prior adaptations that similarly reinvented 1960s American television programmes for audiences in the 1990s: The Adams Family (1991), The Fugitive (1993), Maverick (1994) and Mission: Impossible (1996) all made impressive box-office returns over the course of the decade. Based on the CBS television series The Wild Wild West, the 1999 remake flaunted a variety of major textual changes that would see it become one of the most recognizable examples of the steampunk genre. The film uses characters that are only loosely adapted from its source text and sets them within a wholly original narrative. Set in 1869, Army Captain James West and US Marshal Artemus Gordon act as the story’s mismatched protagonists, assigned the task of preventing ex-Confederate scientist Arliss Loveless from carving up the newly unified United States of America and dividing the land amongst his financial backers. The extent of Wild Wild West’s revisionary relationship to the television series is most prominently evident in its steampunk characteristics: reinventing the series’ mildly fanciful gadgets into absurd machines that drive a series of elaborate (and largely computer generated) action sequences. Alongside a number of anachronistic technologies crafted by Loveless and Gordon (including a motorized penny-farthing bicycle and steam-powered tank), designs that were merely conceptual on television are turned into literal constructions within the film. A small model of a paraglider featured in the episode ‘The Night the Wizard Shook the Earth’ (1965), for example, becomes a fully functional nitro-glycerinepowered flying machine in the blockbuster successor (as seen in Figure 2.1). As well as generating spectacle through a variety of steampunk technologies, Wild Wild West finds a number of alternative ways to defy the authority of its



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Figure 2.1  Wild Wild West (1999), [Film] Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures.

source. For example, the casting of Will Smith in a lead role previously occupied by a white performer fundamentally reshapes the film’s historicized narrative and places issues of racial identity at the centre of its characters’ interactions. Yet, although Smith’s race may be an act of defiance to adaptive fidelity, it is the tonal shift that accompanies his rising status as a major Hollywood star that most thoroughly fits within the genre’s postmodern sensibilities. (We might note that African American soldiers played a key role in Civil-War-era conflicts.) Placing fidelity secondary to irreverent playfulness, Smith’s status as an actor, producer and hip-hop artist informs much of Wild Wild West’s development and underlines the industrial workings that helped steampunk anachronisms to become embedded within so many Hollywood productions. The film’s score, for example, sees the only use of Richard Markowitz’s theme for the television series remain uncredited, overshadowed by Smith’s tie-in chart release that punctuates the film’s conclusion. Geoff King notes that Wild Wild West’s branding of Smith’s identity was particularly explicit, stating that ‘few more clear-cut recent cases of mutual reinforcement by film and music can be found’ (2003: 62). Smith’s involvement reflects the revisionist intentions of an industry looking for new ways to fit past properties within contemporary sensibilities. During the film’s promotion, Wild Wild West’s director, Barry Sonnenfeld, specifically stated that ‘putting a black man in that role makes the movie different from the TV show, and that was important to me. I had no intention of just doing another episode of the television series’ (as quoted in Koltnow 1999: 92). Sonnenfeld’s comment highlights not only the viability of Smith’s corporate power but also

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a stance to past materials that received outspoken condemnation from critics, fans, and even figures associated with the series’ production. In a radio interview that coincided with the film’s release, Robert Conrad (who played James West in the 1960s series) aired his disapproval when arguing that ‘I thought the film could have been an opportunity for … the aficionados of the show to be able to see the ’90s version’ (as quoted in Reid 1999). Later, in 2007, he admitted that he ‘never saw the film’ but nevertheless argued that ‘the casting of Will Smith would be similar to me being cast to play Martin Luther King. It was just bad casting, and from what I read in the reviews, a bad movie and I lambasted it and would do it again on your show’ (as quoted in Steele 2007). Wild Wild West remains a notable example of creators, reviewers and cultural commentators disassociating themselves from steampunk adaptations of beloved properties. Conrad himself attended the 20th Annual Golden Raspberry Awards and accepted many of the statuettes that Wild Wild West ‘won’ in condemnation of the film’s seeming lack of respect for the original material including ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Screen Couple’, ‘Worst Director’, ‘Worst Screenplay’ and ‘Worst Original Song’. Even more tellingly, Smith himself has since distanced himself from the film’s emendatory approach to its source, making a public apology ten years after the film’s release: I could never understand why Robert Conrad was so upset with Wild Wild West. And now I get it. … So I’m going to apologize to Mr. Conrad for that … I was young and immature. So much pain and joy went into [my series] The Fresh Prince that my greatest desire would be that it’s left alone. (as quoted in O’Toole 2009)

Smith’s decision to reconsider Conrad’s criticisms of Wild Wild West alongside the perceived integrity of his own work reflects many debates of authorial legitimacy that underline the period of blockbuster film-making that enabled steampunk to flourish in the industry. The genre’s retro-futuristic characteristics are particularly well-suited to productions that rebrand recognizable properties for contemporary audiences through their possession of a high degree of cross-media-synergy. Thomas Schatz describes the early years of the new millennium as a period that ‘has proved to be quite distinctive’ with the film industry, ‘due particularly to the combined impact of conglomeration, globalization, and digitization’ (2009: 62): the very same era within which steampunk adaptations began to flourish. Whilst subsequent chapters will consider how steampunk cinema has been shaped by both globalization and digitization, it is worth noting that many of the



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genre’s films have become representational of conglomerate Hollywood’s seeming lack of ‘originality’. For example, one online forum commentator questions what steampunk films might be considered of value, writing that ‘it might be a tall order. … The Wild Wild West film was horrid, but the original series was amazing’ (‘Flick James’ 2011), whilst writer Brian Prisco exclaims somewhat more vehemently that ‘steampunk gets associated with just the worst fucking films … name me one quality steampunk film?’ (2011). As with the traditions of both adaptation theory and popular criticism, reactions to steampunk cinema find themselves organized around Hollywood’s seeming frequent inability to adapt material to a sufficient standard. Within the genre’s reception, terminology is often used that reminds us of traditional condemnations of adaptive practices: those concerning the apparent ‘violation’, ‘vulgarisation’ and ‘deformation’ (Stam 2005: 3) of source materials that are themselves represented through issues of ‘authenticity’, ‘fidelity’ and ‘massification’ (Thompson 1996: 11). However, Wild Wild West’s maligned critical status was informed not only by its lack of reverence for the CBS series but also by the very adaptive characteristics that determine its steampunk identity, and, therefore, its significance within this very book. Michael O’Sullivan wrote for The Washington Post that ‘what worked about the campy old television show was that, despite its unbelievable gadgetry, it still had one foot … firmly planted in historical reality’, describing the film itself as ‘implausibly futuristic’ (1999). Other reviewers similarly described the film as ‘historically preposterous and scientifically anachronistic to a breathtaking degree’ (Ryan 1999) and struggled to pinpoint the film’s generic roots: ‘I was going to say it’s a hi-tech fantasy western, but that’s not really it’ (Bradshaw 1999). Many came closer to signalling the film’s status as a steampunk text, claiming frustration that the show’s ‘gizmos’ were no longer ‘small-scaled and plausible’, nor the product of ‘nineteenth-century minds’ (Boyar 1999), implementing instead a ‘Jules Verne system of design, heavy on gadgetry and industrial fantasy’ (Denby 1999). Wild Wild West’s intense focus on ahistorical technologies would become the genre’s norm, and ultimately give the film its prime source of cultural longevity: remembered and given cult-appeal for its position as a clear exemplar of cinematic steampunk. Significantly, the acts of adaptation that steampunk films would become most frequently associated with depend not only on the transformation of past textual sources but also on subcultural design and intention. Within many of the most vitriolic debates surrounding the genre, steampunk films such as Wild Wild West find themselves positioned relatively to subcultural ideologies that, like punk

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and goth, seemingly reject the ongoing commodification of their movements through mainstream adaptation. As Rebecca Onion directly observes, the reception of these Hollywood productions ‘has been mixed, both inside and outside of the subculture’ (2008: 141). Indeed, followers of the movement have been highly critical of what they have defined as its appropriation within genre cinema, with one Redditt user querying how apparently ‘no movie that lives in a steampunk universe, or has steampunk influences, has ever been a critical success’ (‘Panties Mallone’ 2014), whilst an article for Vice places scorn on the influence of blockbusters ranging from Van Helsing and Sherlock Holmes, stating that ‘for years, it seemed like steampunk was the one subculture that would never be co-opted by fashionistas’ (Martin 2013). The film industry’s mass-cultural adoption of steampunk, therefore, places it at the centre of debates that Sarah Thornton attributes to ‘hierarchies within popular culture’ (1996: 7). The broadening and adaptation of the genre’s subcultural identities seemingly deprives the movement of value, a fact foregrounded by Warwick Frost and Jennifer Laing when they write that ‘subcultural capital is founded on the prestige conferred by hipness or being in the know [emphasis in original]’ (2014: 179). This is particularly true of steampunk, which sees its fanbase ‘involved in policing the difference between their own interest in the genre and that of pretenders’ (Onion 2008: 155). These attitudes (as will be seen) reflect the broader discussions surrounding adaptations and their relationships to canonized materials. The organization of steampunk’s perceived value falls in line with the sorts of subjective tastes and hierarchies that are used to define and mark ‘the high from the low, the sacred from the profane, and the legitimate from the illegitimate’ (Allen and Anderson 1994: 70). The movement of steampunk itself is, for example, frequently accused of being an adaptive facsimile of more ‘worthy’ phenomena. Within a discussion of subcultural capital by sociology professor Lisa Wade, many commenters make note of prejudices that are directed both at ‘steampunk fans … who are looked down by S-F nerds’ and the movement’s own community: ‘If you haven’t even read The Difference Engine what are you even doing calling yourself steampunk’ (‘Elana’ quoted in Wade 2013). Contending with these struggles from an establishment of academics and critics, steampunk films’ acts of adaptation have also seen them placed under the scorn of the very fandom that has enabled the movement to flourish. Beyond Wild Wild West, a great number of high-profile steampunk films have utilized highly emendatory approaches when updating their sources. Treasure



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Planet, for example, saw Walt Disney Pictures use the genre to continue its tradition of adapting past properties into its own library of animated features. Transplanting Robert Louis Stevenson’s high-seas adventure Treasure Island into an interstellar setting, Treasure Planet blends both genres and their associated time periods to create a hybrid that is equal parts space-opera and period swashbuckler. Setting the young hero Jim Hawkins on a quest to find the eponymous Treasure Planet and thwart the mutinous intentions of ship-cook Long John Silver, the film’s steampunk identity is richly presented through the inclusion of alien settlements modelled after eighteenth-century architecture (see Figure 2.2), rocket-powered sailboards, a clockwork android and space suits that utilize antiquated diving helmets. This aesthetic is mirrored in the film’s aural construction, which saw sound designers scour ‘hobby shops and junk stores for antique windup toys and old spinning mechanisms’ that would ‘avoid sounding slick or sci-fi’ (Droney 2003). Alongside its contemporaries, Treasure Planet’s development showcases how steampunk’s realignment of industrial histories was becoming a popular means for major studios to reinvigorate past properties with elaborate and fantastical spectacles whilst capitalizing upon a growing sense of technological nostalgia brought forth by millennial change. Subverting their generic heritage, steampunk films such as Treasure Planet seem easily definable as ‘updates’, a form of adaptation that Thomas Leitch notes is often most evident in ‘their ambivalent attitude toward their original sources in their titles’ (2002: 47). This is most certainly true of Treasure Planet’s transformation of Treasure Island’s name and setting, yet it might equally be

Figure 2.2  Treasure Planet (2002), [Film] Dir. Ron Clements and John Musker. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.

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considered a ‘readaptation’ (a term Leitch also identifies) by drawing upon cultural recognition of the countless trans-media adaptations of Treasure Island that preceded it. Indeed, Treasure Planet was not the first text to rework Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel within a science-fictional setting, as an Italian/ German miniseries Treasure Island in Outer Space (in Italian, Il Pianeta Del Tesoro, translated – once again – as ‘Treasure Planet’) had already done so in 1987. Mirroring development of this televisual predecessor, Roy Conli, one of Treasure Planet’s producers, revealed that the feature was known for a period under the working title of ‘Treasure Island in Space’ (as quoted in Everett 2002), yet Disney’s animated film distinguishes itself from prior adaptations through its retro-designs, imagining a setting that is not wholly science-fictional, but a mix of both future and past that positions it firmly within the steampunk genre. Conli himself states that by blending the aesthetics of the eighteenth and imagined twenty-fourth centuries, the intention was to ‘adapt that classic structure into something new and young and fresh’ and create ‘a true hybrid film’ (as quoted in Everett 2002). Complicating the boundaries between adaptation and remake, Constantine Verevis refers specifically to Treasure Planet as an example of ‘generic recasting’ and argues that altering the title disguises its origins, and highlights ‘the kinds of transformations – aesthetic, generic, ideological – operative in the remaking’ (2006: 130–1). These sorts of historical and textual conversions are intrinsic to the steampunk genre’s identity, and exemplify how its ahistorical sensibilities have gained a foothold in the film industry’s industrial practices. By irreverently updating their sources, steampunk films set themselves up for a high degree of public and critical scrutiny that might otherwise, through the guise of fidelity, allow an adaptation to improve ‘either their financial success or indeed their cultural status’ (Mazdon 2000: 3). As one of the biggest financial failures developed by Walt Disney Animation Studios (and more generally within the wider industry), Treasure Planet’s mixed critical reception saw its identity placed firmly in relationship to its source text: described by A. O. Scott of The New York Times, for example, as ‘less an act of homage than a clumsy and cynical bit of piracy’ (2002). Developed within the context of conglomerate interests, the commodification of recognized classics by corporate giants has been one of the most notable ways that steampunk cinema has proven so prolific (if not consistently critically and/or financially successful) within the film industry. Steampunk’s nostalgic tendencies have proven a particularly appropriate fit for The Walt Disney



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Company’s acquisition of both past histories and texts, resulting in a connection between genre and company that was made explicit when the corporation began producing a range of products titled ‘The Mechanical Kingdom’: redesigning their most recognizable mascots through an adaptation of steampunk’s aesthetic. When reworking their branded identity through the movement’s own retrofuturistic perspectives, merchandise communications manager Steven Miller stated that ‘it was a long process explaining the concept as many folks were unfamiliar with steampunk’ (2010). Whilst it might be tempting to claim that The Walt Disney Company’s adaptation of both past texts and the steampunk movement is a somewhat piratical act of appropriation, literary scholar Mike Perschon argues that ‘Disney cannot be accused of appropriating steampunk … because Disney Studios is arguably very responsible for creating what we call steampunk’ (2010b). Noting the 1954 adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a premier example, Perschon claims that subcultural ire directed at Disney is misdirected due to the large role that the company has played in constructing steampunk’s unmistakable aesthetic. However, whilst I have argued that the genre’s simultaneously retrospective and revisionist nature is responsible for the frequently denigrated status of its films, I will now consider how a number of critically celebrated steampunk adaptations have similarly found their identities positioned within the same discourses of ‘authenticity’ ‘fidelity’ and ‘originality’.

Auteur-ity and authority: Inferring legitimacy on the adaptation Complicating the seemingly linear processes of adaptive authorship, there are a number of studios and individuals who have been defined as originators rather than plagiarizers of their steampunk texts. Often, the cultural success of the genre’s adaptations is positioned alongside the identity of their new ‘auteur’, a transformation that is celebrated rather than derided. An excellent example of this exchange within steampunk cinema can be found in the work of Studio Ghibli, a company that, like Walt Disney Studios, possesses a distinct relationship to the genre that can be traced through much of its history. The movement’s whimsical technologies have become hallmarks of Ghibli’s tradition of creating animated films that support nostalgic ideologies: from the studio’s first feature Laputa: Castle in the Sky to Spirited Away (2002): a production that

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was considered favourable in terms of both ‘originality’ and ‘dazzling artistry’ to its contemporary Treasure Planet (Puig 2002). The relationship between Studio Ghibli and the steampunk movement is particularly prominent within Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), a film that adapts the novel of the same name, written by British author Diana Wynne Jones and first published in 1986. As with Laputa and Spirited Away (alongside many of Studio Ghibli’s other features), Howl’s Moving Castle was directed by Hayao Miyazaki, and reinvents Wynne Jones’s narrative through a number of distinct alterations. Both stories revolve around a young protagonist named Sophie Hatter and her relationship with the eponymous magician Howl after she is transformed by the Witch of the Waste into an elderly woman. However, Miyazaki’s adaptation places a major focus on a war that is only incidentally referred to in the book, repeating a pacifist message that is common to his work, as well as enabling the inclusion of the fantastically antiquated flying machines and warships that firmly positions an equally great number of his films within the steampunk genre. The film’s castle itself is a shape-shifting juggernaut that is unquestionably steampunk in design. Staggering about its landscape on quadrupedal appendages and constructed from a hodgepodge of wrought metals, the eponymous fortress (as depicted in Figure 2.3) is far more mechanical that the fairy tale castle described within its literary predecessor. On the subject of adaptations that wilfully reconstruct their past identities, Thomas Leitch writes that ‘there are several noted film adapters sanctified by the name of auteur’ (2003: 163). As well as garnering significantly more critical

Figure 2.3  Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), [Film] Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Japan: Studio Ghibli.



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praise than features like Wild Wild West, the authorial shift from Wynne Jones to Miyazaki was publicly presented far more positively. Wynne Jones was quoted as stating that ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone before who thinks like I do. He saw my books from the inside out’, supporting the director’s decision to rework her text and include a number of narrative and stylistic changes (as quoted in Bradshaw 2005). Described by one critic as ‘a perfect epitome of Miyazaki’s work’ (Biodrowski 2009), the final production reflects how the perceived presence of an auteur (and their recognizability) allows a number of films to dramatically transform themselves whilst shifting identities from one author to another. Hayao Miyazaki can certainly be described as one of the few directors working within the steampunk genre to have adapted past sources into features that have been considered as highly valued ‘authored’ texts. Just as genre cinema contends with a perceptively industrialized identity in comparison to the seemingly ‘artistic’ and culturally valued presence of auteured film-making, steampunk frequently finds its cultural reception dependent on the received status of its makers. Whilst Miyazaki’s adaptations possess the semblance of individualism seemingly lost to many comparative steampunk film-makers, the genre’s presence has nevertheless made a discernible impact on Studio Ghibli’s corporate identity from films and toys to its own museum. Through representations of a great many antiquated machines that litter its marketing materials, Ghibli’s publicized identity uses steampunk designs to fetishize the individualistic ‘maker’ practices that ironically place Miyazaki’s artistry in opposition to the genre’s own systems of industrial repetition. Other directors who have helped to shape steampunk’s presence in film through their adaptations include Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese: both film-makers who saw the value of their work within the genre attributed to their own identities rather than that of their adaptive sources. Nolan’s 2006 adaptation of Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel The Prestige, for example, possesses a neo-Victorian aesthetic that is described by one critic as ‘defying comparison to anything but Nolan himself ’ (Jolin 2008). The Prestige certainly seems well-suited to its Nolanian identification, boasting the dense plotting and puzzle-narratives drawn through the director’s early features Memento (2000) and Insomnia (2002), as well as the blockbuster spectacle of his later features The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014) amongst others. The Prestige’s steampunk identity seems relatively subdued compared to alternative texts within the genre, presenting itself chiefly as a period mystery starring two rival magicians competing for the affections of their nineteenth-

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century audiences. However, the film’s position within the steampunk genre is assured by a narrative that also draws upon the feud between period innovators and industrialists Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, culminating in the creation of an astonishingly anachronistic invention that quite literally teleports and duplicates its user. Changes between the book and film emphasize this focus on the story’s representation of technological implausibility rather than those that are defined through wholly supernatural characteristics (ghostly apparitions and spectres are absent from the adaptation). As with Howl’s Moving Castle, The Prestige’s authorial transfer was met with approval from Priest himself, who drew attention to Nolan’s role as writer, describing what he has read as ‘an extraordinary and brilliant script, a fascinating adaptation of my novel’ (as quoted in Shewman 2006). Similarly, although Martin Scorsese’s celebrated 2011 film Hugo acts as a direct adaptation of Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), its identity is often attributed to its director first and foremost: described as ‘one of Scorsese’s most personal films’ (Kenny 2011) and as a film that ‘sums up what he, as an artist, is all about’ (Deneroff 2011). By retelling and mythologizing the last years of famed film-maker Georges Méliès from the wonderstruck perspective of a young protagonist, both Selznick and Scorsese celebrate cinema’s mechanical history and also the extravagant technologies that Méliès himself incorporated into his works. Hugo’s steampunk status is asserted through a picture-book aesthetic of 1930s Paris and the myriad clockwork apparatus that bring it to life. Defined as an ‘exceptionally personal cinematic gambit’ (Coldiron 2011) and ‘intensely personal statement from Scorsese’ (Singer 2011), Hugo’s public reception placed a great deal of emphasis upon Scorsese as a director with a wellestablished interest in preserving cinema’s rich heritage. Films such as Howl’s Moving Castle, The Prestige and Hugo emphasize how the steampunk genre has become dependent on adapting works that themselves place their own focus on the past, and also disprove the popular assertion that the movement possesses no critically celebrated features (although publicly attributable to their makers rather than genre convention). The elevation of their cultural status through acts of adaptive authorship informs one of the most prominent contradictions inherent to establishing the adaptation’s reception: that the text not only work within the parameters of its audiences’ expectations but also construct an identity that is seemingly ‘new’ and independent. Adapted from the 1998 fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman, Stardust (2007) is an appropriate example of steampunk cinema’s dependency on adaptive characteristics that



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are drawn through a range of mythologies and fairy-tales; through a text that itself offers an ironic and subversive reimaging of narrative histories (the film can be positioned within the genre’s boundaries through its irreverent pseudohistorical aesthetic that includes a fantastical airship). Dialogues surrounding Stardust’s production, promotion and reception specifically noted how the film’s identity concerned the balancing of both the past’s authority and the necessity of originality and invention. Gaiman’s claim that ‘I don’t believe there is any moral high ground in reproducing something exactly, I would hate for people to go and see a version of Stardust that is Stardust the book, only not as good’ (as quoted in Breznican 2007) would foreshadow claims that the film ‘has been impoverished or distorted … as far as features such as depth and educative value are concerned’ (Rusnak 2011: 140). As a public figure who (in his own words) ‘really did want to get very involved’ in the film’s production (quoted in Breznican 2007), Gaiman’s persona and literary work casts a shadow over the ability of the adaptation to simultaneously maintain and revise the identity of its source. Marcin Rusnak’s somewhat oxymoronic assertion that Stardust, and the act of adaptation itself, requires ‘infidelity … if the transformed text is to be successful’ and yet must also not deviate from the ‘the sense, the feeling, the content of the whole’ (Rusnak 2011: 141) acts as an appropriate summary of the conflictions that surround steampunk’s retrofuturistic status: frequently derided for the irreverent misremembrance and wilful transformations upon which the genre subsists. Before moving on from issues of adaptive authorship, I will consider two additional examples of steampunk films that possess an even more complicated relationship between creative identities in conflict: Hellboy and its sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Both films adapt characters and events penned within comics by writer and artist Mike Mignola into productions that were orchestrated by director Guillermo del Toro. The first loosely adapted the narrative found in the comic book series Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, where the demonic protagonist comes face to face with the villainous mystic responsible for summoning him to Earth as an infant: Grigori Rasputin. In counterpoint, its sequel utilizes the world that Mignola had been curating for over two decades as the setting for a story of del Toro’s own invention, similarly incorporating the fanciful pseudo-Victorian machinery that places both texts within the interests of the steampunk genre. From the comics’ depictions of nineteenth-century cyborgs (B.P.R.D.: Garden of Souls [2008]) to the films’ own gilded contraptions and gear-driven weaponry, both media have afforded some of steampunk’s

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most memorable depictions of worlds where past and present collide through the use of spectacular technologies. Del Toro’s own predilection for placing aesthetic and narrative focus on the gothic-mechanical (perhaps most apparent in his earlier production Cronos) made him an apt figure to bring Mignola’s work to the screen, but led to a degree of confrontation as two identities began simultaneously offering their interdependent, yet contrasting interpretations of Hellboy’s pseudo-historicized adventures. Laura O’Connor refers to this relationship when she considers the impact that the heritage of folk tales has had upon the property: Mignola writes that he had been ‘keeping a lot of secrets’: ‘Then along comes this Hellboy movie, and suddenly we have the Ogdru Jahad. … I figured I should show the real version of them in the comic first.’ The tone of mock chagrin contains an edge of real chagrin, as Mignola reasserts his authorial ownership over an original that has been preceded by its movie translation. (O’Connor 2010: 553)

O’Connor’s use of the term ‘preceded’ highlights how, in this case, the adaptation and its sequel had seemingly overtaken the development of the original – a relationship that undermines traditional views of a linear hierarchy between a text and its antecedent. For Hellboy, these transformations are reflected not only by the speed of production but also by the tonal and generic shifts that occur when a text’s key author is replaced. Tony Vinci foregrounds the transitional nature of these two films when he states that ‘while the Hellboy universe utilizes conventions of many genres – horror, detective story and science fiction, amongst others – this particular shift in concentration from the first film to the sequel offers the opportunity to read the film specifically as a fantasy text’ (2012: 1041). Vinci’s statement is particularly clear in Figure 2.4, where steampunk’s industrial technology is translated through the aesthetic of high-fantasy to offset a battle between two opponents of supernatural origin. Hellboy II exemplifies what Carolyn Jess-Cooke describes as the film sequel’s frequent function as an ‘experimental structure’ (2009: 2). Just as steampunk demands the active reorganization of accepted canons to revise its industrial histories, the movement’s playful reworkings of past texts foregrounds the agency of the remake’s adaptive practices: ‘less interested in its fidelity to the original than in the potential of the original to generate further and sometimes unpredictable, cultural production’ (Verevis 2006: 84). Whether drawn from Victorian literature or recent trans-media examples, steampunk’s Oedipal



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Figure 2.4  Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), [Film] Dir. Guillermo del Toro. USA/ Germany: Columbia Pictures.

relationship to its predecessors consistently sees it positioned as a product of metamorphosis rather than pure revival. In the case of Hellboy and its sequel, these changes saw del Toro’s role as adapter celebrated; a fact brought into relief by the ire led by both a number of fans and industry figures when Mignola announced that a reboot had been greenlit and passed onto director Neil Marshall. Alongside actor Jeffery Tambor’s claims that Mignola had failed to pay due respect to the investment of both Ron Perlman (as lead actor) and del Toro in the franchise (Tambor 2017), many cultural commentators noted the franchises’ identity as ‘Guillermo del Toro’s steampunk masterpiece’ and argued that the creative stewardship by these figures elevated the property ‘from just another comic book movie to a respected work of art’, turning Hellboy ‘into a cultural phenomenon’ (Chatterjee 2017). Despite the complexities that surround the perceived cultural legitimacy of adaptations, Miyazaki, Nolan, Scorsese and del Toro nevertheless act as examples of film-makers who have adapted texts from (and sometimes into) steampunk identities whilst generating a range of critically acceptance. With respect to steampunk, we can note how such successes demands the traversal of the sorts of taste-reliant boundaries that Pierre Bourdieu marked between high and low culture (1993: 51). Especially in the case of Hellboy and its sequel, these are films that frequently navigate the specialist knowledges of geek culture, steampunk fandom and del Toro’s own appeal as a cult film-maker. Keith McDonald and Roger Clark specifically argue that del Toro’s adapted texts blur the lines between ‘rarefied elitist artworks’ and ‘ephemeral gutter culture’, re-evaluating ‘received

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notions of taste’ by blending ‘obscure B-movie and comic book references work in conglomeration with painterly references to Goya and biblical allusions’ (2014: 88–9). As well as prioritizing the influence of the individual film-maker over the conventions of genre, McDonald and Clark’s assessment has value when applied to the frequency with which steampunk irreverently adapts from a perceptively ‘low’-cultural well of referents drawn from the penny dreadful to modern-day comic book. Still, the apparent success with which Hellboy marries its visions of technology with referents to Gothic, Romanesque and Baroque design (potentially all the clearer in its sequel) highlights how the many steampunk adaptations that are unable (or perhaps unwilling) to draw associations with either the canons of high culture or subculture are met with more ubiquitous dismissal. Adaptation becomes linked not only to issues of perceived ‘originality’ but also to ‘low cultural production’, positioning the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster ‘in a hierarchical relation to the legitimate culture – that is, (schematically) to the canonized culture’ (Weininger 2005: 101). At stake is a seeming broadening of ‘high’ and ‘sub’-cultural materials into texts that are designed to court the attentions of casual observers. As will now be considered, this has often seen the movement accused of homogenizing its sources into reduced identities that share the need to serve mass audiences through a perceived common denominator of action and effects-driven spectacle.

Adaptation, homogenization and the blockbuster The industrial requirements of the Hollywood blockbuster have predominantly demanded modes of adaptation that cater to wide, inclusive demographics, are subject to ratings and censorship and, most importantly, are developed without the cultural exclusivity which is essential for subcultural determination. Often enacted through big-budget feature films that embody corporate practices through their production and distribution, steampunk cinema has often been primarily approached as ‘one hell of a skin overlaid on movies’ (Jay Lake as quoted in VanderMeer and Chambers 2011: 86): a style that can be implemented by conglomerates to repackage audience recognition of ‘classic’ literary works through blockbuster sensibilities. If we consider steampunk adaptations collectively, patterns begin to emerge; the genre’s anachronistic nature is used to re-engineer past texts through the inclusion of incredible



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mechanical constructions that drive dynamic action-adventure sequences. The 2004 adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days acts as an excellent example of the transformations that come when steampunk characteristics are employed to distinguish a film from its literary source. Designed as a family-friendly and bombastic production based on a recognizable property, Around the World in 80 Days coupled the star presence of Jackie Chan with a range of fantastic steampunk machinery to create a film that saw martial arts action married with neo-Victorian retro-futurism. Greeted by predominantly negative reviews and an enormous financial loss, Around the World in 80 Days was used by Thomas Leitch as an exemplar (alongside its generic predecessor, Wild Wild West) of texts that forego adaptive fidelity and become – according to general consensus – ‘merely entertaining films’ (2007: 2). In an earlier article, Leitch highlights how these condemnatory attitudes have become ingrained within both public and critical responses to the adaptation, writing that such dialogues seek to ‘defend literary works and literature against the mass popularity of cinema, to valorize authorial agency and originality’ (2003: 168). Of particular note are two disparaging commentaries of 80 Days that use the suffix of ‘starring Jackie Chan’ (2007: 2) to title the film; derisively renaming it based on Chan’s assumingly inappropriate involvement (and connotations of martial arts genre-blending). Derision towards Chan foregrounds the perceptively low cultural status of many of steampunk cinema’s most sensational characteristics: those that turn revered literary works into spectacles of technological wonder that drive stylistic action sequences. We might turn back to the characteristics that Marcin Rusnak also uses to condemn Stardust, for example, as he argues that whilst the film’s conclusion is ‘filled with action, tension, and lots of fighting … the filmmakers exchanged one thing for another – in this case meaning for action’ (2011: 144). If we take accusations that steampunk films have often emphasized style above perceived cultural worth at face value, the genre can be positioned within discussions of cinematic adaptation that are embedded within the medium’s entire history. Just as the earlier 1956 adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days had popularized the notion of Phileas Fogg travelling via hot-air balloon (borrowing from Verne’s other text, Five Weeks in a Balloon [1863]), the ‘steampunked’ millennial iteration amps up both the action and degree of mechanical absurdity by recasting Fogg as an eccentric inventor who creates an assortment of incredible technologies to help him complete his journey. This focus on mechanical wonder and power has led to numerous steampunk films being considered not only as

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films of ‘poor’ quality but as acts of commodification that are tantamount to cultural desecration. This is particularly true of steampunk cinema’s adaptation of the interests of a subculture that often – like many others – makes inherent connections between visual media and commercialization. Just as Thomas Leitch highlights prominent fallacies within critical and popular analysis that suggest that ‘literary texts are verbal, films visual’ and that ‘novels are better than films’ (2003: 154), steampunk’s cultural standing has often been determined by the highly recognizable nature of its aesthetic. Lisa Wade’s examination of steampunk’s cultural identity sees commenter ‘Lunad’ state that steampunk is derided because ‘it is seen as shallow. … It embraces the aesthetic and fashion of a subculture, without having a strong literary or film tradition. … The focus is on the purely aesthetic,’ whilst ‘Djiril’ asserts that ‘because it has become popular, there are a lot of people who are only interested in the aesthetic’ (2013). Such claims retain the derogatory perspectives repeated throughout much of traditional film theory that cinema ‘cannot hope to replicate the complex fictive language of feeling purely through the look’ (Orr 1992: 2); an assertion that still remains prolific within both public and academic debates. In the case of steampunk, the adaptation of properties into a genre that is so heavily identified with stylistic characteristics becomes not only a means of signifying mass-culture but also potential low ideological merit and infantilization. Similarly, they reflect the same debates that have seen popular culture derided for its corporate and homogenizing adaptation of ‘loftier’ materials: as Ross Haenfler summarizes of Theodore Adorno’s concerns, lowly entertainments seem to have the effect of ‘turning citizens into docile passive consumers who pursue vacant pleasures’ (2014: 94). However, before beginning to refute these assessments with reference to both cinematic acts of adaptation and (more specifically) steampunk, it is worth noting that all subcultures (whether goth, punk or their many subsidiaries) are highly dependent on their ability to maintain identities that are not only visibly distinct (and therefore immediately recognizable and invested with cultural meaning) but also easily incorporated within commercial and consumer-orientated practices, despite their seemingly ‘counter-cultural’ sensibilities (Markley 2007: 291). The same generic markers that have allowed the steampunk subculture to flourish are those that have similarly allowed steampunk to be so widely implemented by major studios. The image of cogs and gears whirring to automate incredible neoVictorian machinery may often be disseminated without the values championed by subcultural intent, but this does not (as I will go on to argue) strip them of meaning or significance.



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As well as contending with accusations of debasement due to an apparent focus upon kinetic visuals, the negative reception of many steampunk adaptations should also be contextualized amongst the manner with which the mainstream film industry attempts to conflate perceived distinctions in ageappropriate materials into broad categories. Writing that ‘computer effects and action are essential to conglomerate-era blockbusters’, Thomas Schatz describes a set of rules which govern the early twenty-first-century ‘major motion picture’, the first of which being that ‘the film should exploit or expand an established entertainment franchise … a classic children’s story, a traditional fairy tale, a comic book or graphic novel, a TV series, even a theme park ride or a toy line’ (2009: 32). Previously cited franchises such as The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and others such as Pirates of the Caribbean (2003–present), The Hunger Games (2012–2015) and The Chronicles of Narnia (2005–2010) have reenergized the profitability of ‘period’ fantasies that are marketed towards lucrative family audiences (and the transition of the so-called ‘young adult’ literary market to screen) under the banner of adaptation and sequelization. Their production highlights not only an emphasis on historical fantasy but also an attempt to utilize an exhaustive wealth of multimedia tie-ins that engage with ‘the broadest possible audience’ (Kendrick 2009: 14) in as many ways as possible. Alice Bell specifically argues that steampunk ‘started as an adult-oriented genre’, and has become ‘increasingly visible in children’s media’ (2009: 16). As such, steampunk has proven particularly prolific within a number of prospective franchises that are dependent on trans-media identities and designed to appeal to children and their parents. Alongside steampunk productions such as Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (each of which were accompanied by a deluge of multimedia tie-ins and optioned for sequels – with the latter receiving a straight-to-video follow-up), films such as Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), exemplify how the genre’s playful and imaginative production design has been used to adapt properties that are well-suited for continued expansion. Despite enjoying moderate financial and critical success, Lemony Snicket would not see its proposed serialization to fruition (a task that fell to a 2017 Netflix adaptation), setting a pattern that a number of prospective franchise-starters within the genre would follow. Adapted from Jeanne DuPrau’s 2003 young-adult novel, 2008’s City of Ember’s steampunk identity is informed by antiquated production design similar to that of Lemony Snicket, featuring a post-apocalyptic narrative that sees machinery act as both a potential salvation and threat to the protagonists’ existence within subterranean catacombs. Like

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Lemony Snicket, it was also a film that did not see its proposed literary sequel The People of Sparks (2004) enter production. Noting the extent that the film industry is frequently dependent on adaptations that offer enticing visions of the past, Debbie Olson writes that ‘today, childhood as a site of consumerism has united with its romanticized emotional representation to create products that are marketed to both adults, for nostalgic reasons, and to children’ (2015: 175). One of the clearest examples of a major studio using a recognizable steampunk property to court the immense success found in the Harry Potter and latter Hunger Games franchises was New Line Cinema’s reworking of Philip Pullman’s novel Northern Lights (1995) into The Golden Compass (2007). Using the first in Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy (1995–2000) as its basis, The Golden Compass bears many of steampunk’s hallmarks, set within an alternative history resplendent with clockwork gadgetry, antiquated projectors and an art deco airship (see Figure 2.5). As well as its anachronistic style, the film also encapsulates many of the cultural debates that have surrounded steampunk’s adaptive identity: due in part to its source text’s role in articulating a challenge to religious institutionalism. The celebration and derision that Pullman has received from a number of ideological movements and organizations has meant that The Golden Compass’s reception often focused upon its translation of the book’s success in blending seemingly ‘adult’ content within the context of young-adult fantasy. The National Secular Society claimed, for example, that ‘they are taking the heart out of it, losing the point of it, castrating it’ (Thorpe 2007), with other critics argued that ‘the

Figure 2.5  The Golden Compass (2007), [Film] Dir. Chris Weitz. USA: New Line Cinema.



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studio opted to kidnap the book’s body and leave behind its soul’ (Rosin 2007), softening ‘the book’s religious, violent elements to create family-friendlier fare’ (Lee 2007). The director (Chris Weitz) himself stated that by ‘being faithful to the book I was working at odds with the studio’ (as quoted in Grossman 2009) and claimed that New Line created ‘tremendous marketing pressure’ to create ‘an upbeat ending’ (as quoted in McGrath 2007). Significantly, many of the same institutions that welcomed and preferred the filmic adaptation for its alterations to Pullman’s work still identified The Golden Compass as culturally subordinate to its source. When The Catholic League presented its decision to boycott the film, the League’s president William A. Donahue stated that whilst the adaptation had been suitably ‘diluted’, it should still be condemned for drawing readership towards books that seemingly denigrated Christianity (as quoted in Gibson and Nauert 2007). Such responses reflect the traditions of adaptation theory itself, where films are considered to be at their ‘most powerful’ when signposting the importance of their literary predecessors, ‘persuading us to read it if we have not already done so’ and using their visuals to remind us of ‘textual power’ (Orr 1992: 4). Mainstream steampunk cinema exists at an intersection of multiple debates that infer illegitimacy upon associations of childhood, genre and the spectacle of the Hollywood blockbuster. Writing with reference to the growing dominance of the New Hollywood blockbusters that act as steampunk’s cinematic antecedents, Robin Wood notes a ‘disturbing phenomenon of children’s films conceived and marketed largely for adults’ and argues that the action-adventure serials of the 1930s and 1940s upon which they were based were ‘not to be taken seriously on any level except by real children, and then only young ones’ ([1986] 2003: 145– 6). Steampunk’s proliferation within the practices of blockbuster production (as well as its playful historical anachronisms) makes it a ready target for such accusations, not only blending past with present but also adaptive repetition and subversion, ‘adult’ knowingness and ‘childish’ irreverence. More specifically, the movement can be positioned centrally to the growing presence of superhero movies and comic book adaptations that seem to literalize Wood’s fears. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated through what Dominique Falla describes as steampunk film’s intense ‘comic book aesthetic’ (2010: 10) and the wider cultural trends that surround both media and their relationship. Whilst the medium of film as a whole owes much of its graphic language to the scenography and structure of comic books, the steampunk genre has proven particularly dependent on adaptations of comics to construct its identity.

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Developing alongside what Liam Burke identifies as a ‘substantifying process’ for the ‘comic book adaptation’ (2012: 110), many steampunk films act as ‘direct’ adaptations of comic books and their characters: Hellboy, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010), Jonah Hex and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) act as notable examples, whilst others found themselves adapted into comics or manga (i.e. Howl’s Moving Castle), or directly influenced by comic book writers and artists. (Mike Mignola worked as a key conceptual artist for Atlantis the Lost Empire, and his personal imprint on the film’s design is particularly notable.) Steampunk’s aesthetic reworking of the visual splendour of nineteenth-century imagery makes it (as Jason Jones writes) ‘a natural fit for the comics’ (2010: 99) and complimented the rise of the ‘super-hero genre’ that has developed through many of the same key creative individuals who constructed many of steampunk’s most memorable features. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to claim that steampunk’s cinematic development is intrinsically interconnected with the same cultural shifts and figures that enabled the comic book aesthetic to act as one of the guiding forces of late twentieth and twenty-first-century genre film-making. Dark City’s director, Alex Proyas, for example, had previously adapted The Crow’s (1989) stark blackand-white imagery into a hyper-gothic live-action feature in 1994, whilst David Goyer (co-writer of both Dark City and The Crow’s 1996 sequel) would similarly work with The Prestige’s Christopher Nolan when coordinating the DC Extended Universe and authoring the script for Blade (1998) (a film that was itself directed by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s Steven Norrington and granted a sequel by Hellboy’s Guillermo del Toro). Few degrees of separation lie between the figures who have guided steampunk’s cinematic identity and the growing dominance of the comic book adaptation; many more commonalities between the genre's films and the comic book blockbuster could be identified here. The extent of this transmedia relationship underlines many of the debates that make attempts to enforce divisions between ‘low’ and ‘high’ cultural materials. Comic book writer Alan Moore (whose works have made a heavy imprint on steampunk cinema, as will be considered) has offered numerous contemporary statements that mirror those made by Robin Wood almost three decades previously. Describing a ‘worrying’ trend of ‘adults, men and women in their thirties, forties and fifties who were eagerly lining up to watch characters and situations that had been expressly created to entertain the twelve year-old boys of fifty years ago’ (as quoted in Ó Méalóid 2014), Moore contends that a social and commercial obsession with adaptive reiteration has led to a degree of cultural



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degeneration; however, as well as placing scorn upon texts that I contend possess a high wealth of interest and value, both Wood and Moore’s attempts to attribute these developments to recent memory (through the rise of – respectively – New and Conglomerate Hollywood) ignore the vast histories that such adaptations participate within. Just as the popularity of caped crusaders such as Superman can be traced back through the pulp fictions created by writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard (and further through history to the earliest forms of mythic thought), steampunk’s emphasis on technological innovation and historical adventure can similarly be positioned within an ongoing history of cinematic spectacle that draws back (at least) as far as the highly kinetic and inventive absurdities of serialized Victorian literature. Perhaps the most explicit example of this process occurring can be found within Sherlock Holmes and its sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011): two films that actively adapt their literary heroes through the guise of contemporary blockbuster practices. Directed by Guy Ritchie, both films make little attempt to adapt specific canonical texts, and seem at first to only draw upon scraps of generic markers, tropes and narrative references to construct original stories that owe as much to the conventions of the modern superhero franchise as they do the work of Arthur Conan Doyle. Indeed, lead actor Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes recalls the success of his career-reviving role as similarly savant misanthrope Tony Stark (Iron Man [2008]). Propelled into adventures that take a decidedly steampunk twists, each film sees Holmes attempt to solve crimes that have been committed using a variety of technologies that are alien to their turn-of-the-century settings. Unsurprisingly, the generic alterations that see the films take on their steampunk identities were those that were met with derisive statements upon their original announcement. One journalist commented that the film would probably include ‘some horrific steampunk gadgets … knowing the propensity that Hollywood has to mess around with Victoriana’ (Moore 2008, online), whilst another questioned the appropriateness of an emphasis on action and violence, asking ‘What made Holmes join an underground fight club? Where did the nunchucks come from?’ (Leupp 2009). Yet, both films managed to accomplish what few steampunk adaptations before them have done: overcome many of the potential critical pitfalls of reinventing classic literary figures via an emphasis on action sequences, special effects and a postmodern consideration of nineteenth-century technological change. The execution that allowed this cultural shift to take place is reflected in many of the cast and crew’s own responses to the film’s adaptive pedigree.

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Foregrounding the intense action sequences as being a mark of fidelity that had otherwise been ignored in previous adaptations, Jude Law (Dr. Watson) is keen to point out that ‘the physicality, the bare-knuckle fighting, the martial arts are all hinted at in the books. We just hold a magnifying glass over them’ (as quoted in Wloszczyna 2009). By presenting a case for the authenticity of Holmesas-brawler, the shift from Conan Doyle to director Guy Ritchie is presumed to be a natural one. Similarly, the intrusion of incredible steampunk devices acts as a means to highlight the almost supernatural ingenuity of Holmes’ antagonists: men who are able to achieve seemingly ‘magical’ acts by drawing on technologies that would not be available until the twentieth century. By expanding on the sensationalist and pulp identities of the Victorian serials that act as the detective’s origins, Sherlock Holmes and its sequel were able to simultaneously subvert and revere the authorial authenticity that might have been held against them. As, Joel Silver, the producer of the Sherlock Holmes franchise, states, ‘The word of the day is branding. … We are always looking for branded ideas. Audiences are interested in seeing something they know’ (as quoted in Wloszczyna 2009). Steampunk’s emergence within the mainstream film industry – from Wild Wild West onwards – owes more to its usefulness as a means of reinvigorating past properties that it does to the subculture’s correlative development. As major studios attempted to adapt recognizable properties into tent-pole franchises capable of drawing both mass-audience appeal and an array of para-textual revenues, steampunk’s inherent sense of spectacle and technological fixation allowed it to carve a sudden and noticeable prominence within genre cinema, even at its most critically and financially unsuccessful. However, steampunk’s adaptive significance can be extended into a wide variety of films that might not be traditionally classified as adaptations at all, but nevertheless construct their identities from a mix of past referents (cf. Hutcheon 2013: 170). As I will now consider, steampunk films can frequently be defined as ‘mash-ups’ and textual hybrids, part of a process of representation and adaptation that Constantine Verevis considers a part of every film’s construction (2006: 81). By untethering the definitions that surround such cultural borrowings, I will now explore how steampunk’s filmic identity is founded in its reconstitution of past materials and argue that the genre’s texts can be used to complicate some of the most firmly embedded traditions of adaptation theory.



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Adaptation and the trans-media ‘mashup’ In ‘The Narrative Sources of Ridley Scott’s Alien’, Robbie Robertson evaluates the film as an adaptation rather than ‘original’ work, stating that ‘all narratives have sources within shifting complex patterns of memories, associations and reflections’, continuing that ‘since the origin of any text … lies in borrowing from earlier experiences, then it is well to recognize the complexity of this process’ (1992: 171). Despite being positioned amongst a number of more traditionally minded approaches, readings such as Robertson’s have helped to outline the existence of adaptive processes within all films. Through its conspicuous rewriting of both textual sources and histories, steampunk’s generic identity reflects the actions of its own industrious heroes, cobbling together a variety of previously existing components into ‘new’ contraptions. Rather than drawn as a direct generational passage of one text to another, steampunk exemplifies a challenge to ‘static notions of textuality’ (Smith 2000: 1) that exist within a great body of both generic and adaptive revisions. Dark City is a steampunk film that acts as the perfect example of the genre at its most adaptive, whilst not traditionally fulfilling the role of a straight adaptation: or ‘born an adaptation’ as José Ángel Garcia Landa might note (2005: 182). Through its identity as a science-fictional neo-noir hybrid, Dark City possesses a narrative that is itself allusive: set in a world where past, present and future are bound together and ordered by a number of incredible historically marked machines. As well as drawing upon a plot and aesthetic that sees its setting constructed through a retro-futuristic melange of past referents, the film also adapts and builds its textual identity from many other sources: Robert A. Heinlein’s novella, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (1942) (a book also adapted and languishing in development by Dark City’s director, Alex Proyas) and Daniel Paul Schreber’s autobiographical Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) act as direct influences, for example. In their evaluations of the film’s highly reiterative nature, Mark Bould and Sarah Higley also collectively draw attention to Dark City’s debt to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jorge Luis Borges, as well as specific films such Blade Runner, Metropolis (1927), Nosferatu (1922) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) (amongst many other notable texts) (Bould 2007: 238; Higley 2001: 10). As will be evaluated in this book’s penultimate chapter, Dark City’s depiction of a timeless steampunk metropolis that is constructed haphazardly

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from the collective, half-recalled memories of its citizens exemplifies adaptive practices that are embedded within cinema’s entire history. As Dan Harries writes, the film industry subsists on ‘a discourse of intertextuality by recycling, reconfiguring and borrowing from other modes of entertainment’ (2000: 11). These processes are exacerbated by the steampunk genre’s hallmarks of historical subversion and anachronism. Rather than being independently identifiable, both steampunk’s texts and machinery define themselves through structural comparison: the appropriation of products from one time into another. The genre’s sense of timelessness makes its films feel familiar even when not reworking specific past properties. Stacey Abbott describes The American Astronaut (an independent steampunk film that I will consider in greater depth in the following chapter) as being similar to ‘a great deal I have seen before but mashed together in unusual, sometimes surreal, but often comic ways’ (Abbott 2011: 295), whilst Allan Cameron uses Perfect Creature as an example of steampunk’s generic status: depicting ‘a world of grime and imperfection that nonetheless carries with it the romance of new technologies’ (2010: 67). ‘As the postmodern cultural psyche continues to gel’, writes Harries, ‘it becomes increasingly difficult to think of cultural objects and activities which are not imbued with some sort of hyper-textuality; Baudrillard’s infinite spiral of referencing is becoming a clear reality for a culture supersaturated by the ironic’ (2000: 22). From musical examples such as ‘Lady Got Bustle’ (a 2013 reimagining of ‘Baby Got Back’ [1992]) to an amateur production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) renamed The Clocky Horror Steampunk Show (2012), steampunk’s mimetic and frequently ludicrous historical imaginary makes it a prime method of adaptation that is highly satirical. Within cinema, adaptations such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) (both based on texts by author Seth Grahame-Smith) exist on the cusp of the steampunk genre, belonging to a wealth of parodies that rework canonized classics and entire genres into highly ironic forms. Boasting numerous sequences of mechanical spectacle that place it more firmly within the steampunk genre, Sucker Punch (2011) may well act as the first of director Zack Snyder’s films not to be directly adapted from a previously existing text, yet was described by Snyder himself as ‘Alice in Wonderland with machineguns’ (as quoted in Sciretta 2007). The irreverence of steampunk’s historical revisionism is matched by the frequency with which the genre remixes the identities of revered classics: possessing numerous texts that are identifiable first and foremost as exemplars of postmodern pastiche and hybridity.



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The genre’s highly intertextual and self-referential sensibilities have proved an apt fit for the industrial backdrop that has accompanied steampunk’s development. Both Atlantis and Treasure Planet reflect their texts’ sciencefictional settings by directly paying reference to the Star Trek franchise (Atlantis’s antagonist is named Lyle Tiberius Rouke after Capt. James Tiberius Kirk while Treasure Planet’s Dr Doppler quips ‘Dang it, Jim, I’m an astronomer, not a doctor’ in reference to Star Trek’s own Dr Leonard McCoy), whilst Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows uses Ennio Morricone’s score for Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) to highlight the comedic sight of Holmes riding a donkey. Hugo meanwhile finds its train station populated by representations of Django Reinhardt, James Joyce and Winston Churchill, accompanied by a musical reference to Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937) via a timely performance of ‘Frou-Frou’. Diana M. Pho specifically identities steampunk’s tendency to include humorous pastiche through ‘idiosyncratic juxtapositions or allusions to pop culture’ (2013: 193). The parodic nature of these allusions is perhaps clearest within Iron Sky, a steampunk film that peppers numerous references throughout its running time to create a highly satirical identity: allusions to The Great Dictator (1940), Jaws (1975) and Crocodile Dundee (1986) act as but a few of the direct appeals to pop-cultural memory. Through its narrative, Iron Sky ironically reorders history in a way typical to the steampunk genre, imagining a future where a faction of Nazis relocated to a lunar-base during the Second World War and survived long enough to use their retro-futuristic machinery to invade Earth in 2018: a date set six years after the film’s release. Treating both historical and contemporary politics with postmodern detachment, the film depicts the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as a half-remembered monster of the past, and reinvents ex-Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin as a tyrannical US President (fascinatingly, the politician was also parodied in a comic titled Steampunk Palin [2010], an appropriate signifier of the genre’s irreverent reworking of movements, texts and histories). Highly promoted for its intertextual appeal (its marketing materials used quotes such as ‘Independence Day meets Inglorious Basterds’ to catch audiences’ attentions [‘Coffee & Cigarettes’ 2012]), Iron Sky owes much of its referential practices to its predecessor: Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning (2005), a fan-produced film that lampoons both the Star Trek and Babylon 5 (1994–8) franchises directly. Alongside Iron Sky, the kung-fu-mashup Tai Chi Zero also offers an excellent example of what Alice Bell describes as steampunk’s ‘use of parody and disregard

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for either genre boundaries or notions of “high” and “low” culture’ (2009: 5). Drawing attention to both the familial nature of the martial arts genre and the knowledges of its fandom, Tai Chi Zero explicitly provides on-screen annotations that provide brief explanations of its lead actor and cameos’ past performances. Dramatically breaking its fourth wall, the film provides captions, for example, of Andrew Lau’s appearance with a reminder that he directed the Infernal Affairs series (2002–2003). Directly encouraging its audiences to consider the construction materials of its features, steampunk films frequently undermine the notion that they have been constructed as wholly original productions from scratch, instead using their anachronistic representation of past materials to highlight their own complex lineages. Just as Tai Chi Zero draws upon a wealth of references to Hong Kong cinema to form its own identity, productions such as Wild Wild West can have their own histories traced through a wide variety of hypotexts that their sources can also be positioned amongst. For example, creator of the 1960s series, Michael Garrison, had pitched The Wild Wild West to CBS after purchasing the rights to Ian Fleming’s novel Casino Royale (1953), describing the new production as ‘Bond on a horse’ (Reid 1999). Judged as not only an adaptation of a successful television series, but as a blend of spy-fi thriller, western and Will Smith’s own star branding, Wild Wild West possesses a divisive and hybrid lineage that transcends the simplistic definitions of hypo and hyper text so often applied to adaptations. As a product of conglomerate Hollywood, steampunk’s films have not only been adapted from alternative sources, but have also frequently acted as sources for adaptation themselves. As such, nearly all of the steampunk films considered within this study have been accompanied by a large number of ancillary materials. For example, Wild Wild West, City of Lost Children, Lemony Snicket, Iron Sky, Steamboy, Around the World in 80 Days, 9 and The Golden Compass all saw parallel video game releases on various platforms, as did the two Disney productions: Treasure Planet and Atlantis. Proving enormously adaptable through their striking aesthetics, steampunk blockbusters engage in what Carolyn Jess-Cooke describes as ‘a perpetual diegesis with which consumers can engage as many times in as many ways as possible’ (Jess-Cooke 2009: 8), highlighting the sorts of media-convergences that are ensuring contemporary scholars readdress the devolving boundaries that lie between adapted texts. As well as acting as an exemplar of steampunk’s intermedia identity, 2004’s Van Helsing affords an excellent opportunity to consider the genre’s propensity



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to ‘mashup’ its sources into ‘new’ hybrid creations. As a film that reworks Bram Stoker’s literary protagonist in a similar manner to that of the Sherlock Holmes franchise, Van Helsing’s branded distribution across a number of media platforms also foregrounds the role that changing technologies have had in shaping both filmic adaptations and the backwards-looking compulsions of the steampunk genre itself. Adapted into a comic book tie in (Van Helsing: From Beneath the Rue Morgue [2004]), an animated prequel (Van Helsing: The London Assignment [2004] – see Figure 2.6) and video game (Van Helsing [2004]), the film’s sequelization can also be traced indirectly through the re-release of the David Carradine vampire movie The Last Sect (2016) as Van Helsing II, and an American-Canadian television series that similarly adopted the name Van Helsing (2016) to imagine its heroine as a sword-wielding descendant of Stoker’s original character. This plot would be revisited in the Van Helsing vs. comic book series (2015–17), where another descendant is set within a steampunk universe and tasked with dispatching the likes of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and Jack the Ripper. For Costas Constandinides, the 2004 film acted as a quintessential example of characters being ‘transported into a carefully developed visual experience … a revitalized familiar model under the umbrella of the superhero genre’ (2012: 101). Furthermore, Van Helsing (as both adapter and source of adaptation) epitomizes the pseudo-cannibalistic relationship with which postmodern culture adapts across an even greater panoply of graphic media, and the irreverent practices that have allowed steampunk to so successfully take hold in pop-cultural

Figure 2.6  Van Helsing: The London Assignment (2004), [Film] Dir. Sharon Bridgeman. USA: Universal Cartoon Studios.

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imaginations. Alice Bell contends that ‘the increasingly cross- and multi-media nature of contemporary culture’ and ‘an incongruity of diverse combination’ (2009: 7) acts as one of the driving forces of the steampunk movement, a fact that is certainly evident through the great number of the genre’s texts that overtly use millennial technological developments to adapt past sources into new identities. When observing Van Helsing’s highly adaptive identity, Constandinides draws attention to its intrinsically interconnected relationship when arguing that the live-action film was intentionally made to look ‘cartoonish’ to maintain ‘visual continuity with the animated prequel’ (2012: 102). The same can be said of many steampunk productions that were developed on digital backlots and helped to proliferate the widespread adoption of computer-generated imagery: with reference to Vidocq, for example, James Austin refers to ‘a very intense graphic texture, akin to what one might experience if one were to inhabit a graphic novel’ (2004: 282). The steampunk post-apocalypse depicted in Casshern (2004) similarly makes use of a striking historically hybrid aesthetic to merge various trans-media sources. Adapted from the 1973 anime series of the same name and presaging a renewed interest in the franchise that saw the development of a television reboot as well as a number of manga series and video games, Casshern’s eponymous hero is an appropriate reflection of the adaptive practices used to bring him to life. Through its depiction of a protagonist that is a ‘Neo-Human’ hybrid of man and machine charged with saving Earth from an onslaught of robotic forces, Casshern’s adapted outings have married their science-fictional narratives with flourishes of dark, opulent and gothic production design that the live-action film reworks further through steampunk’s industrial aesthetic. Deborah Shamoon observes how the production uses its historicized and digitized construction to blend a number of different media into one malleable entity: Casshern looks like a 1930s Soviet propaganda poster come to life … a golden twilight and deep red–tinted fusion of retro-fascist, goth, and steampunk aesthetics. … He [Kazuaki Kiriya, the writer and director] revels in an animetype fakeness. … Even in the static dialog scenes, he arranges the actors in beautifully staged, CGI-embellished tableaux, like the layered panels of a manga page. (Shamoon 2009: 323)

As Shamoon highlights, the intense development of digital media has allowed the millennial blockbuster to take on the presence of a patchwork collage,



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adapting and blending texts and media with equal measure. Steampunk’s intense historical focus has not only emerged through these developments but helped to foster them and created the generic standards through which they are recalled and repeated. This is something that Alexia Bowler and Jessica Cox note when diagnosing the interdependencies between new-media and the adaptive practices of neo-Victorianism: These strategies – of blending and blurring the boundaries between discrete works of fiction, along with their hyperreal and hyper-stylized visual forms, bear the stamp of twentieth and twenty-first century film and popular culture’s attraction to and adaptation of action and comic book heroes. (Bowler and Cox 2009: 7)

Films such as Van Helsing, Casshern and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (a 2013 blockbuster that sees its heroes wield steampunk weaponry when battling an assortment of figures from folklore) call attention to the mediated relationships that are increasingly destabilizing the boundaries between animation, video games, comic-art and cinema; creating diverse ahistorical landscapes where past works and their remakes are blended together. We might argue, for example, that Van Helsing owes far more to Universal Studios’s own series of filmic adaptations than it does its literary hypotexts, in turn propagating their popcultural memorialization throughout a number of media. Using not only Dracula but also werewolves, Mr Hyde and Frankenstein’s Monster as its antagonists, Van Helsing draws its adapted histories into a shared setting and narrative, regenerating the sorts of ‘mashup’ monster movies (i.e. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man [1943] and House of Dracula [1945]) that have become a model for the contemporary superhero crossover. Before the property was overhauled by a new creative team, director Guillermo del Toro’s professed similar desires to see Hellboy ‘start fighting the Universal monsters!’ and readapt ‘the classic Karloff/Lugosi/Chaney Jr./etc. classics of yesteryear’ (Collura 2006). As I. Q. Hunter surmises, adaptation can no longer be considered as a process that is wholly hierarchal and dependent on the authority of the original: ‘Emphasising intertextuality over fidelity, the best work in the field locates adaptation within a range of long established industry practices’ (Hunter 2010: 8). The film industry’s predilection of converging a variety of hypotexts into postmodern and highoctane playgrounds highlights the suitability of steampunk’s anachronistic nostalgias within mass-cultural and commercial production; yet it also denotes the importance of the genre as a method of adaptation itself: an approach that

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allows sources and histories to be collated and modded through fantastical reinvention.

‘Steampunking’: Genre as adaptive methodology Due to the many cultural and industrial practices that allow the film industry to repeat, reinvent and redistribute its works, it is problematic to prescribe to ‘the received notion’ that films can be defined as ‘closed and self-sufficient works’ (Barton Palmer 2004: 258). Just as I have argued that all films adapt from a vast array of sources and are subsequently propagated through trans-media tie-ins and intertextual connections, I will now consider how the steampunk adaptation may be considered first and foremost as a verb, rather than a descriptive adjective: a process that highlights a generic identity that is defined not through style but through approach. By adapting past works through the specificity of its neo-Victorian and retro-futuristic interests, steampunk can be read as an active means of re-approaching and disrupting mass-cultural recognitions of textual histories. It is my assertion that this reading can be used to address the success of the genre’s proliferation in cinema, as film-makers set about ‘steampunking’ properties into postmodern and millennial variants. In an article named ‘Steam Wars’ (2010a) Mike Perschon considers how steampunk identities have been mapped onto mass-cultural properties through a wealth of unofficial art designed with subcultural intent (specifically, the Star Wars films). These acts of production show how steampunk has defined itself not only through the practice of ‘fan-making’ but also through acts of adaptation and appropriation. This is true not only of Star Wars but a litany of media-products: one could choose any well-recognized property and almost certainly find examples of it ‘steampunked’ online in some form or another. The genre seems to be defined by its ability to recycle the old into the new – to take recognizable products and rearrange them in unpredictable ways. Just as Walt Disney Resorts adapted its characters into a ‘Mechanical Kingdom’, steampunk cinema’s identity as a ‘methodology’ and an active mode of engagement sheds light on the genre’s particularly ‘metatextual or meta-imagistic’ (Mitchell 2016: 238) status within popular culture. To demonstrate this effect within the film industry, we can turn to the 2011 adaptation of The Three Musketeers: a steampunk film that, like many of its generic contemporaries, financially underperformed and was critically regarded as a



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wholly unexceptional production. However, this iteration of Alexandre Dumas’s tale of chivalrous daring-do remains notable for the particular ways that it used its steampunk identity to inform its production. Dramatically culminating in a battle between wildly anachronistic seventeenth-century airships rendered in a barrage of computer-generated effects, 2011s The Three Musketeers uses its steampunk status to directly mark itself as a deviation from historical and textual authority. Instead, by marrying the spectacular requirements of the revisionist blockbuster with its use of fantastical period-technologies, the film arguably becomes most memorable and identifiable through its reiteration of steampunk’s own generic conventions (as demonstrable through the inclusion of its warring airships – as depicted in Figure 2.7). The Three Musketeer’s dirigibles are an unmistakably foreign inclusion (both textually and historically), and express steampunk’s compulsion to adapt its sources’ identities into its own generic heritage: traced back to the graphic work of Bryan Talbot and the many other proto-steampunk texts that have embedded the movement within the public’s consciousness. Like its distortion of history, the steampunk genre offers alternative interpretations of its sources, imagining how they could be translated through its own particular brand of retro-futurism. Both the steampunk adaptation’s maligned cultural status and identity as a process of revision are arguably best illustrated in The League of Extraordinary Gentleman: a steampunk film that one critic cited as the source of their established hatred of the entire genre, stating that ‘I refuse to forget [that] car-crash’ (Moore 2008). Loosely based upon the comic book series of the same name, the film

Figure 2.7  The Three Musketeers (2011), [Film] Dir. Paul W. S. Anderson. Germany/ France/UK/USA: Impact Pictures.

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reworks a narrative wherein multiple Victorian literary figures are brought together through the ‘Justice League’ vernacular of the same contemporary comic book heroes that act as their descendants. Both the film and comic books act as definitive examples of the steampunk genre, using an alternative late nineteenth-century setting as a playground for numerous conflicts driven by wondrous and devastatingly destructive machinery. As an adaptation, the film’s revisions are clear and numerous: central characters are added, a new plot is manufactured and more controversial representations of violence, sex, addiction and rape are written out entirely. Greeted with admonishment similar to Robert Conrad’s public defamation of Wild Wild West, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was publicly denounced by the comics’ writer Alan Moore (alongside many of his adapted works), who admitted in an interview for the BBC that ‘I will never be going to see these films’ and that ‘the perfect result’ would be for the adaptations themselves to fail to begin production before even attempting to translate page to screen (as quoted in ‘HARDtalk’ 2012). When discussing the perceived ‘failures’ and ‘successes’ of numerous adaptations of Moore’s works (and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in particular), Ian Dawe argues that ‘the key element that leads to the films’ relative artistic failure’ is their removal of a ‘sense of the erotic-grotesque’ (Dawe 2011), whilst Moore himself attributed the ‘failure’ of these adaptations to the perception that the source comics ‘weren’t ever designed to be films’ (as quoted in Dent 2009). As with much of steampunk cinema, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen seemingly has its cultural value lowered by its removal of controversial themes and seeming inability to satisfactorily replicate the format of its source, despite also not being allowed to forge a new identity as a millennial Hollywood production. (Lisa Horton makes a similar assessment of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, writing that such a process of neo-Victorian reinvention ‘arguably makes them more relatable for a twenty-first-century audience, [yet,] inevitably destroys their uniquely Victorian nature’ [2014: 182].) With these perspectives in mind, the 2003 adaptation of The League of Gentlemen receives much of the condemnation placed upon adaptive traditions; ‘It seems every movie is a remake … that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book’, Moore summarized in another statement (as quoted in Karlin 2012). However, problematizing Moore’s accusations of the blockbuster’s corporate illegitimacy and unoriginality is the fact that the writer used his ‘original’ comic-series to incorporate, adapt and blend Victorian fictions himself before willingly selling



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the film rights to 20th Century Fox. As evident in Figure 2.8, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen adaptation repeats Moore’s coalescence of numerous literary fictions into a universe where characters such as Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo and The Invisible Man are able to interact. Described by Jason Jones as a ‘a romp through cultural history’ (2010: 101), Moore’s comics not only reimaged some of the nineteenth century’s most wellregarded novels but also were developed into a highly serialized property that was followed by a number of sequels and tie-ins. Like the film, the comic-series’ identity was directly tied into the novelty of reworking high-cultural referents through the graphic and pop-cultural syntax of their media: respectively, the blockbuster and comic book. Whilst The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film can be explicitly identified as a direct adaptation of Moore’s work, the notion of past literary figures being drawn together to form all-star casts (from Van Helsing to the studio-fronted Universal horror mashups that act as its predecessors) is also one that has itself been reiterated a number of times (particularly within the steampunk genre). In 2003, production partners Larry Cohen and Martin Poll sued 20th Century Fox, claiming that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen reworked a screenplay titled ‘Cast of Characters’ that they had pitched several times to the studio in the mid-1990s (Itzkoff 2006). The 2003 adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was, therefore, considered from various perspectives as inauthentic of Moore’s work by some, plagiarism of Cohen and Poll’s by others, whilst remaining a prolific example of the reconstruction of multiple Victorian fictions.

Figure 2.8  The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), [Film] Dir. Stephen Norrington. USA: 20th Century Fox.

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Complicating the matter even further is the propensity with which steampunk has been used as an adaptive methodology to repeat Moore’s collective re-branding of Victorian fiction. Dynamite Comics’ 2014 series, Legenderry: A Steampunk Adventure, for example, transposes a variety of licensed characters that the company has acquired (Zorro, Flash Gordon and The Phantom etc.) into a shared steampunk universe of its very own. Whether considered of artistic worth or corporate hegemony, the incessant revival of Victorian literature through texts such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Van Helsing and Legenderry exemplifies steampunk’s pop-cultural use as a means to revisit the very same penny dreadfuls and pulp serials that have allowed genre fiction to flourish and develop into the forms that we now recognize today. Alexia Bowler and Jessica Cox conclude that neo-Victorianism itself acts as a project of contemporary adaptation, writing that ‘the intertextual networks and resonances, perceived within and between texts, offer a dialogue between works, as well as the potential for renewed or revised perspectives’ (2009: 3). Positioned within such discussions, steampunk can be read as more than a simple aesthetic style, but a means to adapt, re-adapt and re-encounter a number of textual histories. Predominantly articulated through the commercial practices of the action-adventure blockbuster, it is not surprising that so many steampunk productions have been optioned for the sequels and numerous trans-media tieins that have ‘branded’ the movement. Like all genres, steampunk does not exist in a vacuum, but subsists in its audience’s understanding of alternative texts, producing adaptations that subvert accepted canons and their place within history. The interdependencies that exits between seemingly ‘separate’ adaptations are particularly evident in the correlations between Warner Bros.’s Sherlock Holmes franchise and the release of the BBC’s Sherlock (2010): a reimagining of the character set in contemporary London. Instead of the films’ attempts to define their action sequences as acts of fidelity, Sherlock’s creator, Steven Moffat, alternatively argued that ‘Conan Doyle’s stories were never about frock coats and gas light. … The hell with the crinoline’ (as quoted in Plunkett 2008). With each adaptation attempting to offer its seemingly unique perspectives from the perspective of fidelity, it can be argued that each and every variation of Holmes does not act autonomously, but define and promote themselves in relation to their alternates. An even more explicit and self-referential linking of these adaptive variations can be found in the 2015 film Mr. Holmes, where the ageing protagonist finds himself explaining to admirers that the



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deerstalker and pipe (alongside many attributes of his fictionalized personae) were Watson’s inventions. This iteration, performed by Ian McKellen, visits a cinema to understand how his ‘real’ adventures had been turned into popular myths, turning to the iconic performances of Basil Rathbone as the character’s standard-bearer within the public’s consciousness. Working in tandem, and defining themselves through both similarity and difference, each adaptation acts as a complementary and symbiotic work, adversarial relatives that reiterate specific elements of a contended ‘original’: arguing the case for their own fidelity. To focus these debates specifically upon steampunk one final time within this chapter, I draw attention now to an example of the genre that owes its identity to the contexts of both Victorian science fiction and a traversal of the boundaries that lie between both past and future: the 2002 adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Despite acting as a notable example of ‘genetic intertextuality’ (Verevis 2006: 20) between literary source and filmed adaptation (the film’s director, Simon Wells is the celebrated author’s biological descendant), it can be argued that this millennial reimagining ‘owes more to preceding adaptations (especially Pal’s) than to the novel’ (Ruddick 2005: 322). Remaking textual components established by prior adaptations, the influence of George Pal’s 1960 interpretation is perhaps most evident in the repeated designs of the allimportant time machine itself (as seen in Figures 2.9 and 2.10), yet can also be traced through connections found in the character of Filby, the inventorprotagonist’s closest confidant. Alan Young, the original actor, is cast in a cameorole, whilst Mark Addy’s performance is described by Thomas Renzi as ‘modelled after Pal’s ‘Filby’ rather than Well’s redheaded quarreller’ (2004: 44). Like many of the steampunk films considered in this chapter, critics noted an apparent loss of ‘simplicity and charm’ evident in Pal’s version (Arnold 2002) and condemned it as ‘witless recycling’ (Ebert 2002). Yet, rather than acting as a simple remaking, the 2003 adaptation of The Time Machine marks itself as distinct in a number of notable ways, specifically through a thoroughly postmodern identity that wilfully draws direct attention to its audience’s understanding of its adaptive ‘lineage’. Exemplifying this selfreflective identity, the film’s protagonist, Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce), travels to 2030 and discusses the nature of time travel with a hologrammatic librarian known as Vox (Orlando Jones). Vox informs Hartdegen that time travel is impossible and refers him directly to the film’s own Victorian hypotext, noting the science fiction of H. G. Wells and the succession of adaptations that followed. As well as reminding the audience of The Time Machine’s constructed

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Figure 2.9  The Time Machine (1960), [Film] Dir. George Pal. USA: Metro-GoldwynMayer.

Figure 2.10  The Time Machine (2002), [Film] Dir. Simon Wells. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures.



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and adapted status, this meeting is particularly significant due to the fact that Vox not only refers to George Pal’s adaptation but also sings a song titled ‘There’s a Place Called Tomorrow’ from a fictional Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that the film presupposes will be made in the future. By drawing attention to its own identity as one in a long line of alternate adaptations that have been – and will continue to be – produced, The Time Machine literalizes its knowledge that ‘it is the fate of any appropriation to be appropriated again’ (Garcia Landa 2005: 182). Summarizing many of the changes that have redefined adaptation theory over the course of steampunk’s development, Thomas Leitch writes that adaptation studies has] drastically limited its horizons … refusing in consequence to learn what one might have expected to be the primary lesson of film adaptation: that texts remain alive only to the extent that they can be rewritten and that to experience a text in all its power requires each reader to rewrite it. (Leitch 2007: 10)

Leitch’s statement foregrounds many of the cultural issues that have surrounded steampunk’s mass-cultural emergence in cinema. In many of the cases considered here, the privileges afforded to seemingly ‘authentic’ materials have been rife with extraordinarily subjective perspectives. John Thompson writes that ‘we compare the movie to our “movie”, which is in our view the author’s “movie”, and praise or blame, forgive or condemn, as we see fit’ (1996: 14). Adaptation becomes separated from concrete authenticity, and elicits responses that are dependent not only upon memory but, most interestingly, upon nostalgia. It is for this reason that steampunk finds itself so thoroughly entrenched in debates that concern the ‘correct’ way to reanimate past works. It is not an earlier iteration that is valued most highly, but an imagined one (as Liam Burke writes ‘mainstream audiences value fidelity, or at least the idea of it’ [2012: 197]). Like steampunk’s histories, it is not the actual past that is being recalled, but an alternate approximation that never truly existed. Interestingly, therefore, steampunk’s revisionary nature frequently triggers responses that are tantamount to the ‘mourning’ of a deeply personal relationship between viewer and author (Gelder 1996: 33). Yet, we might also note that steampunk has itself become a canonized method of translation itself: a standard that past works are transformed through (observable through the countless dialogues that have attempted to police its legitimacy). Rather than placed upon pedestals where viewers may look, but not touch, steampunk cinema encourages playful and irreverent relationships with sources

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where textual identities can be rewritten and reordered. Richard Butt notes that without such agency, the ‘canonising’ of classic works leads to further cultural homogenization (2012: 166), whilst Pierre Bourdieu similarly contends that when wholly sanctified, our most celebrated works are ‘condemned to fall into the past and to become classic or outdated, to drop into the dustbin of history or become part of history’ (1993: 105). Instead of embalming such classics within the mausoleum, the steampunk genre invites its audiences to take part in processes of re-engineering and reassembly: activities that help to establish their reconstruction as forms that breach the boundaries of both textual and historical fidelity. Whilst steampunk cinema’s corporate and trans-media hybrids might appear to act in stark contrast to the subculture’s underground and ‘alternative’ roots, both movements are united in their shared challenge to the fidelity and authenticity of past histories. As an extension of the frequently ‘pulp’ origins of its canonized sources, the steampunk genre perpetuates adaptive traits that are deeply rooted within cinema’s entire history. Whether for artistic or commercial gain, adaptation acts as a central component of the medium’s mechanical functions: recording, editing and re-projecting what has come before. Rather than existing in a distilled form, film exits as a series of alternates that are reconfigured across media, marketplaces, technological advances and the restorative and archival practices that allow it to be reanimated. Each and every film adapts and acts as an alternate to a litany of history that, like steampunk, asks us to not only to view the past but to use it to construct our futures.

3

Dreams of Steam: Nostalgia for an Age of Imagined Industry

Despite the fact that the steampunk genre’s identity is undoubtedly dependent on the revival of past texts and histories, it is the distinct subversion of historicized representations of mechanical developments that makes it so immediately identifiable. It is, as Dru Pagliassotti notes, ‘the technological aesthetic rather than any historical fidelity that has emerged as symbolically central to the genre’ (2013: 67). Irrespective of their chosen medium, steampunk’s film-makers, writers, engineers and artists are collectively defined by their realignment of the accepted course of technological progress, differentiating the movement from the litany of pseudo-historical genres that it might otherwise be compared to. Turning to the retro-futuristic representations of machinery that mark their identities, I will now question how the genre’s films dramatically reshape our recollections of industrial history and imagine what past eras may have been like ‘if their steam power and clockwork technology was the same as it is today’ (Harrington 2011: 6). To begin this analysis, I will identify the types of devices that steampunk films use when constructing their unquestionably technologically fixated aesthetics. Whether depicted as hulking monstrosities or intricate gadgets and gizmos, I will consider both the mechanical parameters of the genre and the ways that such piston-powered and steam-driven workings are manipulated for utterly fantastic and anachronistic effects. I will then turn my attention to the narrative and ideological roles that these historically dislocated technologies fulfil and evaluate how steampunk machinery is set to either heroic or villainous purpose. To illustrate this point, I will question how a nostalgia for historical processes of manufacturing has embedded itself in steampunk cinema’s representations of craftsmanship and the seeming ‘authenticity’ inherent to handmade designs. The central aim of this chapter will, therefore, be to examine the seemingly

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irreconcilable dichotomies found in steampunk’s depiction of the factory and the artisan – the virtual and the hand-worn – the digital and physical. To conclude these discussions of steampunk’s techno-nostalgias and mechanical obsession, I will draw upon the intensely industrialized identity of the medium of film itself, as well as the millennial blockbusters that have so thoroughly established the genre’s retro-futuristic identity within our popcultural landscape. I will argue that steampunk’s clockwork fetishisms can be traced through many of the changing processes that have shaped filmic production design, particularly the intensity of cinema’s ongoing digitization. By bridging these debates, we can explore how steampunk’s extravagant devices reflect a number of cultural responses towards the wonders and horrors of industrialization and scientific progress, as well as highlighting our understandings of the technologies that we use to mythologize our past.

Spectacular machines: The nuts and bolts of the steampunk skin Retro-furistically rearranging its technologies from their proper historical positions, steampunk cinema’s identity and cultural significance is determined by its playful aesthetic and narrative use of atavistic machinery. The sight of ‘cogs, springs, sprockets, wheels, and hydraulic motion’ that Rebecca Onion uses to define the steampunk aesthetic serves as one of the clearest methods of defining the genre (2008: 139). Through their antiquated production design, the objects, costumes, sets and props that order their films’ identities similarly ensure that steampunk cinema’s relationship to its audiences (as will be seen) is informed by concepts of technological materiality. When at their most numerous, the genre’s pseudo-historical contraptions litter their films’ backdrops, yet many steampunk films may find their position in the genre determined through an intense focus on only one or two ‘foreign’ mechanical centrepieces: objects that usually act as the primary means of signposting the ahistorical nature of their retrospective settings. Whilst Wild Wild West, for example, equips its heroes with all manner of absurd devices (setting its characters upon a steam train that is bristling with incredible brass gadgets and gizmos), The Prestige alternatively constructs its narrative through only a handful of fantastical technologies that nevertheless drive its narrative forward. As will be seen as this chapter develops, many steampunk films have



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their status as cult films cemented by their focus on anachronistic machines or are afforded perceived critical value when otherwise publicly chastised. (Claudia Puig, for example, tempers her relatively critical review of Treasure Planet by stating that the film’s most rewarding feature is ‘the artful way it combines the futuristic and the retro’ [2002].) Indeed, the numerous examples I will cover here showcase how steampunk films’ seemingly most ‘valuable’ commodity is often considered to be their fantastically mechanized props. Marked by their archaic flourishes, steampunk’s reconstruction of past technologies is most frequently defined as neo-Victorian in nature. Placing the movement’s aesthetic centrally to its identity, Brigid Cherry and Maria Mellins argue that ‘the [steampunk] look … involves taking objects from the Victorian period and quite literally ‘punking’ them with modern and futuristic hightech gadgetry’ (2012: 18). Whether adopting a Victorian setting that seems reasonably historically accurate or reimagining a past era that is more notably anachronistic, many of the most prominent examples of the steampunk genre use specific dates attributable to the mid- to late nineteenth century to mark their technologies and settings. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Wild Wild West, Sherlock Holmes, Steamboy and The Time Machine, for example, root themselves respectively within the years 1863, 1869, 1889, 1891 and 1899, whilst the vast majority of their contemporaries similarly position themselves amongst the mechanical advances of Victorian industrialization. As steampunk productions, each text knowingly separates itself from historical actuality via the unmistakably foreign intrusion of Othered technology: evoking a sense of the past ‘rather than slavishly replicating it’ (Perschon 2013: 23). Whether depicting fantastical flying machines, steam-powered dreadnoughts or clockwork automata, steampunk’s suitability for big-budget action-adventure cinema is assured by the film industry’s own interest in recalling historical spectacles and subverting them for contemporary sensibilities. Modern digital devices are transformed into piston-powered contraptions, and conversely, the archaic computers modelled by the likes of Charles Babbage take on the properties and abilities of their twenty-first-century successors. Corresponding with Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies’s description of ‘a late twentieth-century nostalgia boom’ (2010: 182), steampunk’s drastic rearrangement of industrial histories reflects a perceived cultural trend of retrospection that has coincided with the proliferation of the very same digital technologies that the genre so often implements. Steampunk’s development within mainstream film ran parallel to both the subculture’s own rise, and also a

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surge of cinematic representations of millennial change that adopted a historical lens. Many academics have specifically noted a wide dissemination of neoVictorianism within mass-culture; allowing multiple media to superimpose the fin de siècle anxieties of both the nineteenth and twenty-first-centuries upon one another (cf. Vidal 2012: 74; Bowler and Cox 2009: 7). Like nostalgia itself, this is not a remembrance of a century as it was, but of how it might have been. Yet, steampunk machinery stretches its historical associations beyond the limits of Victorian time and distance: from the early seventeenth century (The Three Musketeers), the fifteenth century (designs modelled after Leonardo da Vinci’s conceptual flying machines are utilized in a number of steampunk films including Around the World in 80 Days and Wild Wild West) and the retro-fetishist futures posited by the likes of City of Ember, Dark City, 9 and Casshern. Rather than faithfully replicating nineteenth-century industry, steampunk instead uses Victorian advances as a means to draw together ‘mechanical aesthetics associated with the Industrial Revolution and the white heat of post-war technological change’ (Bell 2009: 15). ‘Association’ is the operative term here, as it is not any specific set of mechanical icons that defines the steampunk aesthetic, but a nostalgic attitude towards machinery that encompasses a number of historical eras. The City of Lost Children, for example, is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where its heroes and villains are constructed from industrial bric-a-brac drawn from a great number of decades that combine its visions of the past with images that suggest a science-fictional future (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1  The City of Lost Children (1995), [Film] Dir. Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. France/Germany/Spain: StudioCanal.



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Utilizing a far more diverse range of technologies than its association with cogs, gears and the steam engine might suggest, steampunk works are bound together by their focus on mechanical innovations that might be defined as ‘pre-digital’. Electronic devices developed up until the mid-twentieth century can find themselves placed in Victorian surroundings, whilst the reverse is also true, where art deco design is mapped onto the nineteenth-century experiments conducted by the likes of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Blending multiple historical eras together in a variety of unique combinations, steampunk coalesces a perceived era of industrial innovation through the superimposition of a litany of generations and civilizations. As others have observed with reference to alternative media, steampunk ‘transcends time’ (Burk 2010: 16) and can ‘encompass numerous decades … to a point when a hundred years of history becomes a single amorphous identity’ (Strongman 2011: 45). Exemplifying the genre’s ‘timeless’ sensibilities are a number of steampunk films that are constructed from a myriad of displaced technologies from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1940s: films such as Perfect Creature and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events are particularly ambiguous, depicting a variety of automobiles, horse-drawn carts, retrostyled telephones, televisions and slide projectors all existing in a cumulative, historicized and ‘retro’ aesthetic. Yet, even though steampunk films draw from a relatively wide range of time periods, the genre’s interest in revisiting analogue technologies allows its texts to be collectively united and distinguished. For example, Hugo’s Parisian landscape is a ‘clockwork invention’ (as Charles Taylor describes it [2012: 189]) of early twentieth-century design, yet is marked by steampunk characteristics through its deep investment in the visual intricacy of eighteenth-century Swiss watchmakers Henri Maillardet and Pierre Jaquet-Droz. Production designer Dick George describes Jaquet-Droz as a major inspiration for the aesthetic of Hugo’s automaton in a Los Angeles Times interview (Lytal 2011), whilst the writer of Hugo’s source text, Brian Selznick, was reportedly instrumental in preserving one of Maillardet’s most remarkable constructions whilst conducting research for The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Fountain 2011). With specific reference to steampunk, Steffan Hantke describes the use of such ‘historical detail’ to give ‘the feel of the real past’ (1999: 246); a means of imprinting the genre’s fantastical deviations with instances of historical fidelity. Like Jeter, Blaylock and Powers’s use of London Labour and the London Poor, steampunk films’ technologies are rife with connections to past advancements

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that allow them to play a major role in bringing ‘the adventure closer to a historical narrative’ (Behrisch Elce 2013: 106). The inclusion of machines that possess historically defined identities acts as steampunk cinema’s binding agent, allowing its films to be instantly recognizable through key iconographical markers. Tim Blackmore, for example, does not use the term ‘steampunk’ when describing Dark City’s ‘technology of memory – represented by the baroque syringes that Schreber wields’ (2004: 27), nor do N. Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Gessler when they draw comparisons between Dark City’s own anachronistically rendered machines and ‘the kludgy technology of The City of Lost Children’ (2004: 487). Yet, identifying the genre through these mechanisms allows us to consider how the genre’s films collectively organize their identities through representations of period industry. Just as critic Roger Ebert noted that The City of Lost Children ‘takes place not so much in the future (or even in the dated but vivid “future” as seen by Verne) as in a sort of parallel time zone, where there are recognizable elements of our world, violently rearranged’ (1995), steampunk’s cinematic proliferation possesses a reoccurring specificity that allows its texts to imagine retro-futuristic worlds where our mechanical pasts and futures collide. The intensity of steampunk’s visual recognizability has often fostered accusations that the genre acts as little more than a form of aesthetic pageantry; however, these same aesthetic markers call attention to the movement’s significance within the film industry. Just as the science fiction and fantasy genres allow their films to showcase a wide variety of incredible effects and aweinspiring spectacles, steampunk productions can often be defined primarily through the powerful presence of ‘fantastic technologies that might not have existed a hundred years ago’ (Hantke 1999: 247). Describing ‘the glistening gears and long, lingering close-ups of larger-than-life mechanisms’, Julie Taddeo and Cynthia Miller argue that Wild Wild West’s design ‘gives testimony to the film’s aesthetic fascination with anachronistic technology’ (2013: xvi). Furthermore, nowhere is steampunk’s suitability for cinematic spectacle clearer than in the many overtly fantastical technologies that fuel the genre’s action sequences. In Wild Wild West case, a towering mechanical spider acts as a domineering presence within the film’s plot and marketing materials, whilst a litany of weapons, anachronistic vehicles, magnetized collars and whirring buzz-saws ensure that the film’s pace never drops too dramatically. Whether through an expedition on board the Nautilus (the colossal submarine in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), a flight across the continents on a fleet of warring



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dirigibles (The Three Musketeers), or a battle against an army of clockwork automata (Hellboy II: The Golden Army), steampunk films make frequent use of spectacular technologies to propel their characters into action. Alongside their ability to fuel kinetic scenes with conflict and adventure, the genre’s machines are often particularly notable for the manner with which they dominate their mise-en-scene: mammoth constructions that possess an impressive scale within both a diegetic and a non-diegetic context. A number of architectural juggernauts act as definitive exemplars of steampunk’s propensity to turn its technologies into ‘a spectacle of light, sound, and power’ (Miller and Riper 2012: 245). The former examples of steampunk machinery all dwarf their landscapes, whilst Howl’s Moving Castle and Steamboy similarly feature ambulatory fortresses that traverse their surroundings whilst spectators recoil in amazement. When revealing its key machines, the genre features numerous shots that place specific focus upon human figures who crane their necks to take in the sight of industrial technologies upon the horizon. Directly reflecting the ‘characteristic blockbustermovie state of open-mouthed amazement’, such individuals act as analogues for the act of cinematic spectatorship itself (King 2000: 44). A particularly apt example of this correlation between audience/character and technology/screen is evident in Tai Chi Zero, a film that centres upon an enormous railway-laying machine that threatens to bulldoze a Chinese village. In a shot also used as a key promotional image, a sole villager stands in confrontation with this seemingly unstoppable mechanical behemoth (recalling the well-known photograph of a lone protestor standing in opposition to Chinese military tanks in Tiananmen Square). Rather than being relegated to the background, most steampunk films feature colossal structures that must be either controlled or conquered, frequently so enormous that they can act as sets that offer labyrinths for their heroes to explore: examples of the machines found in Wild Wild West, Steamboy and Tai Chi Zero can be seen in Figures 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4. Despite the fact that most steampunk films with period settings can be identified as alternative histories due to their anachronistic technologies, the genre’s machines are rarely the ‘norm’ in their respective societies. As I will argue under the following heading, these incredible contraptions are often depicted as exceptional within their own diegetic settings; their ‘out of time’ and Othered identities allow both characters and audiences alike to marvel at their alien nature. Yet, rather than being wholly articulated through their gargantuan stature, steampunk machines can primarily be identified through the subject of scale, irrespective of their particular size. Whether depicted as towering

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Figure 3.2  Wild Wild West (1999), [Film] Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures.

Figure 3.3  Steamboy (2004), [Film] Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo. Japan: Toho.

Figure 3.4  Tai Chi Zero (2012), [Film] Dir. Stephen Fung. China: Huayi Brothers Media Corporation.



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battleships or miniscule devices, steampunk iconography emphasizes machines as being systems constructed from countless components that whir and click in synchronicity. As Barry Brummet considers in ‘Jumping Scale in Steampunk’ (2014), ‘proportion’ becomes the optimal word. The genre finds beauty not only in automated movement and geometric precision but in the ability to render these actions in machines that are intricate, rather than amorphous. In counterpoint to characters reeling from the sight of giant machines, many steampunk films feature notable examples of figures who (like their correlative audiences) peer into even the smallest clockwork timepieces to marvel at their workings. Hugo, for example, features a number of scenes that see its hero inspect the interior mechanisms that bring an automaton to life. Similarly, the recasting of one of City of Ember’s central characters into an inventor of elaborate machines allows the film a number of opportunities to depict complex devices that perform simple domestic tasks. The visual design that orders the ramshackle events of The City of Lost Children is particularly well-suited to the intricacy of its steampunk machinery and further demonstrated by the fact that its directors, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, are well known for their interest in elaborate ‘RubeGoldberg-esque’ devices in a number of their other features. Defined through the depiction of machines that use a number of interlocking components to create intriguing chains of effect, steampunk’s aesthetic is as dependent on the beauty and wonder of systems and mechanical causality as it is the presence of giant technological monoliths. Whether they are large or miniature, the audiences of steampunk films are invited to explore the internal workings of the genre’s retro-futuristic machines. The technologies mentioned in this chapter are rarely depicted completely encased in their coverings; instead, their gears and pipe-works are often visibly exposed and, as Rebecca Onion argues, ‘produce awe from their intricacy … delight, rather than the fear produced by massiveness’ (2008: 154). Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows offers a particularly explicit example of a mechanical process being slowed down and compartmentalized for its audience’s pleasure. Through a rapid montage and numerous post-production effects, the film’s viewers witness the arming of a formidable howitzer that has been temporally relocated into the late nineteenth century. The series of shots that orders this mechanical chain reaction are only broken by extreme closeups of the operators’ faces: straining and grimacing as they prepare it for action through a visual emphasis of effort, utility and most importantly tactility.

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This particular focus on the steampunk machine’s workings is repeated in a correlative depiction of technological scale offered within another of the genre’s films. Taking place in an industrial and apocalyptic cityscape, the final section of the animated science fiction anthology Memories (1995) depicts a confrontation between two civilizations that is fought with enormous retrofuturistic weaponry that dwarfs their skylines. Named ‘Cannon Fodder’, this sequence uses a montage lasting an entire ten minutes to depict entire battalions operating the mammoth machine. Like A Game of Shadows, this mounted artillery is a device that requires arming, aiming and firing; likewise, viewers are able to watch the actions that effect this process, albeit scaled-up considerably. Due to the machine’s gigantic proportions, the camera has no need to shrink into its innards to reveal its workings in motion. In correlation to A Game of Shadows, the scene depicts the laborious nature of each action, as hundreds of workers pull levels, position powder and manoeuvre winches. In both of these scenes, regardless of size, it is the practicality of their technologies’ operation that is foregrounded, as well as their structuring of cause and effect: cogs within machines. The spectatorial relationship that allows an observer to take pleasure from a machine’s workings lies at the heart of the steampunk genre’s aesthetic and can be traced through a number of features that exist on the periphery of the movement. The numerous ‘breakfast-making-machines’ popularized in films such as Brazil (1984), Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Back to the Future (1985) and The Wrong Trousers (1993) offer excellent examples of steampunk’s appeal extending into a number of additional productions that might otherwise lie outside of its generic boundaries. However, as well as arguing that mechanical spectacle has allowed steampunk cinema to proliferate through the blockbuster’s own propensity to recreate historical wonders using technological developments, I will now also contend that these films possess more than a visual ‘skin’ that is transferred upon alternative genres. Mike Perschon questions the value of steampunk’s frequent dependencies on wholly aesthetic representations, for example, writing that while technology is undeniably foundational to the steampunk aesthetic, discussions of steampunk retrofuturism should encompass more than technofantastic anachronisms, automatons, and airships: the ambitions of lateVictorian progressives were more concerned with medical advancements and human rights than with sky dreadnoughts and phlogiston-powered ray guns. (Perschon 2013: 22)



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Indeed, there are many additional components to steampunk’s ahistorical reworking of past events that transcend its interest in spectacular machinery (as the following chapter attests); yet, whilst Perschon’s assertion is a valid attempt to instigate a more socially reflective reading of the genre’s attitudes, I adopt the stance that steampunk’s technological extravagancies inform not only the genre’s longevity and mass-cultural dissemination, but, crucially, its importance. Rather than being exemplars of a willing, politicized and self-conscious culture, this less deliberate, mass-consumptive and transnational wave of films nevertheless points towards crucial understandings of cultural representations of machinery. As will now be asserted, the spectacle and sensation of steampunk’s technologies have direct ideological implications that have all too readily been dismissed: attitudes that define our responses to industrial developments that are pertinent to both past and present.

Technological virtues: The wonders and horrors of mechanical progress Due to the genre’s unquestionable fixation upon anachronistic machines, it might seem a foregone conclusion that steampunk cinema acts as an entirely technophilic movement. However, as with the science fiction blockbuster’s frequent use of cutting-edge special effects to demonize mechanical advancements, the steampunk genre is infused with an irony that allows it to frequently cast technology in a villainous role whilst glorifying colossal acts of industrial destruction. Like the monsters of the horror genre, steampunk’s clockwork gizmos and armoured airships may be positioned as wondrous, spectacular and the subject of fascination, but their Otherness simultaneously marks the genre’s suspicion of technological progress. I will now turn my attention to the ideological function of the steampunk machine and evaluate the ways that these technologies are cast in both heroic and villainous roles, reflecting both a celebration and rejection of the intense mechanical dependencies that have become part of our everyday experiences. The genre’s heroes have battled fleets of militarized airships in Iron Sky and The Three Musketeers, scaled mobile mechanized fortresses in Steamboy, Tai Chi Zero and Wild Wild West, conquered armies of technologically crafted warriors in Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 9, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and

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Casshern and confronted maniacal scientists in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, The City of Lost Children, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Dark City. Setting steampunk cinema’s machines into action are antagonists that are frequently defined by their avarice for industrial power: inventors, engineers and despots who kidnap scientific experts and force them to create new and horrific weaponry. A particularly good example of these repeated narrative conventions is demonstrated in April and the Extraordinary World, where sentient lizard creatures kidnap scientists such as Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, setting them to work on a mysterious rocket that will lead to the destruction of the human race. The overwhelmingly destructive role that technology often plays in the genre’s most spectacular scenes means that steampunk films frequently seem to suggest that (as Tim Blackmore writes with reference to Dark City) ‘technology is a problem that needs resolution’ (2004: 15). However, steampunk cinema distinguishes itself from its science-fictional contemporaries by layering its visions of mechanical destruction with historical representations, allowing the genre’s films to act as a unique means of reflecting technological change. By depicting rampant technologies in period landscapes that are out of time and capable of incredible levels of destruction, both protagonists and audiences are afforded a glimpse of the horrific forms of progress that lay in wait within the twentieth century and the devastation that society’s ongoing mechanization would bring. With reference to steampunk’s literary outings, Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper write that ‘modern readers are instantly alert to the machine’s potential to remake the social order and to the damage they can do in the hands of the reckless and ruthless’ (2012: 238). The same is true of steampunk’s cinematic identity, which often draws upon the iconography and events of both World Wars to extend its representations of turn-of-the-century change to scenes of twentieth-century warfare. Whilst many steampunk features are set within the early twentieth century, few evoke imagery drawn from beyond the mid1940s and, in many instances, these conflicts are used as a cut-off for the genre’s referential interests. Atlantis: The Lost Empire, for example, positions its story in the year 1914, where a Western colonial power is seen using its technologies to conquer a foreign civilization and seize its cultural treasures, whilst Hellboy uses the year of 1944 to open its narrative, depicting the birth of its hero as a result of Nazi conquest and the invention of a machine designed to bring forth the horrors of dormant Elder Gods. Similarly, the otherwise nostalgic ‘dieselpunk’



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reminiscence for the Chicago and New York World Fairs of 1933 and 1939 in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is tempered by a story that sees its allAmerican fighter-pilot hero thwart the mechanical forces of a German foe whilst flanked by a fleet of British military airships. This effect is further literalized in 9, which uses specific visual symmetry to newsreel footage of the Second World War to construct a backstory that sees fascist antagonists create a technoapocalyptic wasteland completely devoid of any living life. Within steampunk film’s narratives, both World Wars represent not only a bookend for the genre’s historical interests but also an industrial loss of innocence, where scientific innovation is evocative of horrific dehumanization. Both time and space are conflated to mythologize the advent of mechanized warfare and a post-colonial, globalized and increasingly electronic era that seems to have banished the notion of technological optimism beyond any rational thought. As will be considered in further depth in the following chapter, the intensity of these representations highlights the striking transnational success of the genre, as many different cultures and nations use steampunk to memorialize their national histories, using early twentieth-century conflicts as their reference. The Extraordinary Adventures of Adéle Blanc-Sec, for example, is one of many French steampunk productions to depict international struggles raging through a Parisian landscape that has yet to see occupation, the Japanese Howl’s Moving Castle uses its imagery to draw parallels between the bombings of rural France and the devastating atomic fires of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, whilst a belated Nazi invasion acts as the central lynchpin to the Finnish and German produced Iron Sky. Rather than simply depicting a period of technological conquest, steampunk’s playful mashup of historical periods plays an active role in representing different stages of industrial development. Many steampunk films can be primarily identified through their relocation of machines and weapons common to both World Wars into the nineteenth century. By disrupting the proper course of history, this reorganization of technologies sees the mechanical advances of the twentieth-century ‘invade’ this earlier time period: a threat that must be combated and resisted by Victorian protagonists. As technologies that are alien to both diegetic and non-diegetic understandings of historical progress, steampunk machines play the role of the monstrous Other noted by Roland Barthes: an otherworldly force that acts as both an insurgent and inoculant to the hegemony of dominant culture (1972: 151). Two steampunk blockbusters that use a remarkably similar approach to depict such a conflict are Sherlock

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Holmes: A Game of Shadows and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Each of these films features Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty as the primary antagonist, a genius industrialist and war profiteer who attempts to instigate a global crisis that foreshadows twentieth-century events. Moriarty’s production of automated weaponry in each film affords scenes acts of kinetic action typical to the blockbuster and allows its heroes to ‘realign’ the villainous disruption of historical and technological canonicity. Through the dislocation of the devastating effects of twentieth-century warfare into the nineteenth century, contemporary audiences are able to recoil from their horror anew. This recognition is often used to mark the genre’s villains’ evil intentions, as they attempt to ‘speed up’ the processes through which mechanized warfare is finally achieved. In Jonah Hex, the spectacle of the blockbuster is similarly orientated around a ‘superweapon’ that is capable of decimating entire colonies in a single volley of shells. Like most steampunk productions, the aesthetic power of these attacks is drawn from the machine’s status as ‘out of time’, as reflected in the villainous Quentin Turnbull’s description of inventor Eli Whitney: After he invented the cotton gin and started the Industrial Revolution, he went to work for the U.S. military … and fairly well singlehandedly invented modern warfare. So, as an exercise they asked him to design a ‘super-weapon’ … but they never built it, because once they realized its potential, they could not conceive of willingly turning such devastation on their fellow man. (Jonah Hex, 2010)

Despite the fact that the film erroneously attributes the cotton gin’s invention to Eli Whitney Senior rather than Junior (his son) and credits the machine as marking the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Jonah Hex’s ahistorical (and potentially misinformed) status uses the past and a bygone age of industry as analogous to nuclear proliferation, marking its narrative through its relocation of historical iconography. One of the clearest ways that the monstrous connotations of industrialization are articulated through the steampunk genre is the repeated representation of perceived natural purity being ravaged by society’s mechanization. Driven by the folly of technological and colonial conquest, idyllic landscapes within steampunk cinema are often desecrated by industrial monstrosities that belch out smoke that blackens the air. From the natural expanses featured in fantasy epics Hellboy II and Howl’s Moving Castle, the developing American West of



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Jonah Hex and Wild Wild West, into the urban metropolises of Dark City and the Lost City of Children, and ultimately the techno-apocalyptic wastelands of City of Ember, Casshern and 9 (see Figure 3.5), steampunk films collectively trace civilization’s development to an inevitable apocalypse brought forth by technological advances. These fatalistic depictions of urban development see the genre’s machines stretch far into the horizon: a visualization of industrialism’s rampant proliferation and desecration of natural environments. A direct nostalgia for pre-industrial ecology is a defining trait within numerous steampunk settings: Perfect Creature, City of Ember, 9, Dark City and The City of Lost Children are all steampunk films that find their retro-futuristic metropoles completely stripped of natural and fertile elements. The City of Lost Children sees its heroes destroy its villain’s scientific outpost, whilst City of Ember, The Time Machine, 9 and Dark City similarly allow their protagonists to literally cleanse their industrial surroundings by enabling the dawn of a new natural age. These representations are extremely prominent in the works of Hayao Miyazaki, many of which are frequently peppered with a wide variety of steampunk vehicles and gadgets whilst simultaneously expressing environmental and pacifistic concerns. Steampunk’s seeming derision of industrialization finds synchronicity with big-budget fantasy productions such as The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002): a film that sees a sentient army of trees overcome the industrial devastation that surrounds the fictional fortress of Isengard. Interestingly, one reporter writes in an article covering the franchise that ‘the mechanized butchery

Figure 3.5  9 (2009), [Film] Dir. Shane Acker. USA: Focus Features.

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[Tolkien] encountered in the trenches’ frames ‘the steam-punk dystopia of Mordor – as did the industrial ruination, as Tolkien perceived it, of England’s Black Country’ (Power 2013). By absolving (yet fetishizing) the perceived sins of the Industrial Revolution, steampunk’s most technophobic tendencies act as an appropriate fit for Hollywood’s own nostalgia for pre-metropolitan ‘frontier’ societies and a privileging of anti-urban ideologies. Yet, steampunk cinema distinguishes itself from many of its comparative genres by emphasizing a complication of industrialization’s lambasted status. Rather than acting solely as a denouncement of nineteenth-century advances, steampunk’s anachronistically Othered machines can also be defined through their deeply alluring characteristics. The aesthetic power and wonder of these creations is without question (the production design of these films is, as will be seen, often their most celebrated quality), underlining how the steampunk genre presents an era of technological innovation as a source of nostalgic reminiscence in itself. As Rebecca Onion asks, ‘How did these technologies, once so reviled, enter back into the cultural lexicon as icons of a new utopian landscape?’ (2008: 139). As well as the wondrously spectacular and intricate aesthetic that underscores their workings, most steampunk films feature heroes who find their survival dependent on their mastery of various mechanical devices. Even when these technologies are the cause of horrendous destruction in the hands of the enemy, they are not so diabolical that our protagonists cannot ultimately possess and control them themselves. This is particularly clear in The Three Musketeers, where the Duke of Buckingham’s dirigible battleship is utilized by the heroes in the final act, and also within Wild Wild West, where the protagonists steal the villain’s giant mechanical spider and ride it into the sunset. The threat of steampunk films may be due to the technological greed of its villains, but this does not mean the genre is unilaterally dismissive of scientific or industrial advances. The fact that many steampunk antagonists are depicted as kidnappers of the scientific elite acts as a form of morality tale that sees technological innocence corrupted by nationalistic and capitalistic desire. In opposition to its villainous characters, the steampunk genre finds virtue in ‘technician-heroes’ (Hall and Gunn 2014: 9), who are defined through a high level of mechanical proficiency and ingenuity, privileging inventor and scientist archetypes that A. Bowdoin Van Riper argues are rarely afforded heroic status in comparative genres (2013: 258). Indeed, The Time Machine’s Alexander Hartdegen, Around the World in 80 Days’s Phileas Fogg and Wild Wild West’s



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Artemus Gordon are all primary protagonists who can best be defined as madcap inventors of extraordinary contraptions that defy their historical limitations. Alongside a litany of ancillary characters (such as Van Helsing’s Carl and Jonah Hex’s Smith), steampunk films also feature a wide variety of figures who aid the primary protagonists by kitting them out with the anachronistic gadgets and gizmos that their lives will depend on. The ability of the steampunk inventor to craft contraptions that are alien to their time period mark these individuals as truly exceptional: gifted with knowledges that are generations ahead of their time. As seen in texts like 9, City of Ember and Hugo (amongst others), the genre’s inventor archetypes often take on the inspirational (and gender-normative) role of the wise-man, acting as father figures who create machines that are placed directly in positions of narrative aspiration as well as visual beauty. In his steampunked blockbuster incarnation, Sherlock Holmes becomes an individual who exemplifies the genre’s depiction of technological knowledge as being a source of heroic, as well as villainous, agency. Just as his franchise’s antagonists – respectively Lord Blackwood and Professor Moriarty – use knowledge of complex gadgets and weaponry to complete their dastardly acts, Holmes himself is also depicted as an early adopter of new technologies. Marvelling at the coming of the automobile, for example, the detective delights in the transport’s ostentatious and noisy clattering over cobbled streets. Watson, too, shows his admiration of this new form of transportation, stating affectionately ‘Not bad though’ when disembarking (Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, 2011). As Alice Bell notes (with reference to Steamboy), steampunk protagonists display ‘a delight in technology and a very innocent belief in science’ (2009: 17). Celebrating the ‘right’ kinds of technological progress, human individualism and control is often championed, as the population of these alternative Victorian worlds must choose how to implement their new-found advances: as harbingers of conquest and subjugation, or as advancers of social equality and improvement. In April and the Extraordinary World’s case, we might note that the world is left in a ruinous state because the world’s greatest scientists, having been kidnapped, are no longer able to advance humanity and improve our species’ standards of living. Even when depicted as dangerous, oppressive and visually grotesque, steampunk frequently represents its technologies as necessitous for human survival. The intricate technological labyrinths in settings such as City of Ember and Dark City may act as a cage for humanity, but they also offer shelter

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from the dangers that lie beyond each civilization’s boundaries. The former’s groaning engines and subterranean passages may seem hostile, but have also allowed mankind to survive nuclear fallout; likewise, the latter’s containment field forbids escape, yet protects its denizens from the cold ravages of space. Just as steampunk mixes technological representations from numerous eras, the genre’s identity is dependent on the contradictory depiction of machinery that is at once both glamorous and grotesque. Owing much to the gothic and Grand Guignol delights of its antecedent genres, steampunk cinema often glories in an industrial aesthetic that is as horrific as it is alluring. This is especially clear within The City of Lost Children, a film that is littered with steampunk technologies that are rusted, neglected and caked in filth. Despite the fact that the film’s industrial romanticism reflects urbanity as being ‘dangerous to innocence’ (Salvi 2012: 244), the film’s mechanical aesthetic reflects a narrative that celebrates freakish individuals and objects that have long been forgotten. These grimy and ‘impure’ visuals cast both its orphan protagonists and discarded technologies as social detritus: ‘Grotesqueries abound’, writes Carolyn Salvi, ‘but they do not frighten, because wonder, not innocence, is the film’s operative term’ (2012: 250). This notion can be extrapolated throughout the steampunk genre entire, as the rubble of industrial wastelands and threat of monstrous machines offer fetishistic fascination. The simultaneous revulsion and romanticism directed at many eras of industrial progress is typical of steampunk’s contradictory nature. Described by Sally-Anne Huxtable as ‘a mass of, seemingly, irreconcilable paradoxes: utopian/ dystopian; craft/industry; surface/whole; immediate communication/gradual handicraft’ (2013: 228), the genre can be defined by its navigation of multiple responses to technological advances. Whilst often depicting historical processes of mechanization as more unclean and ‘gritty’ in comparison to the perceived sleekness of contemporary technologies, steampunk cinema nevertheless finds value in machines that seem hazardous, yet, are simultaneously presented as more ‘authentic’. Rather than consider steampunk as a genre that is unilaterally technophobic or technophilic in its depiction of archaic technology, it is more useful to acknowledge how the historical displacement of its machines allows for a series of mixed responses to a number of industrial eras. This dichotomy is particularly demonstrable in steampunk cinema’s propensity to romanticize technological relationships that are defined through perceived hardship and an excess of physical effort. In Steamboy, for example, the heroic James Ray Steam does not activate his technologies through the mere



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press of a button, but by wading into smog and straining to operate a mechanical lever whilst wiping sweat from his brow. In this alternative vision of nineteenthcentury Manchester, work, endurance and ingenuity are the qualities that will see its protagonist thrive. The entire steampunk genre is rich in examples of films that disregard the shiny sheen of science fiction in favour of grime and grease that evokes more tactile, yet physically threatening relationships to technology (an example of James Ray Steam operating machinery can be seen in Figure 3.6). Steampunk cinema’s nostalgic visions of technological histories frequently mourn an era that is perceived to be raw and untamed, a time directly opposed to the sterility of contemporary capitalism. Although many of Hayao Miyazaki’s films reminisce for a seemingly pre-technological way of life, his steampunk features privilege scenes of industrialization as much as they do the natural wilderness. In Spirited Away, the young protagonist Chihiro finds herself swept into a world administrated by the ghosts of the past and ordered by a number of historical technologies. Like James Ray Steam, emphasis is placed on the effort with which she loads the colossal furnaces of the bathhouse owned by the matriarch Yubaba. Under employment, Chihiro must prove her willingness to become part of her new society’s dehumanizing mechanizations: literally stripped of her name and identity. Yet, the technologies that fuel the bathhouse are nevertheless depicted as preferable to those of the twenty-first century. Susan Napier notes that Spirited Away displays a nostalgic longing for ‘traditionally sanctioned virtues such as endurance and hard work … no matter how burdensome’, evocative of ‘the teachings of the native Shintō religion, one of whose central tenets is the cleansing of pollution’ (2006: 301).

Figure 3.6  Steamboy (2004), [Film] Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo. Japan: Toho.

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Yet, rather than privileging nature over industry, Miyazaki’s subdivision of technologies into those that are ‘old’ and ‘new’ gives Spirited Away its steampunk identity and allows these representations of ‘rugged’ cultural identities to be enacted. We might note, for example, distinctions between the values that are evoked by Chihiro’s hard-fought struggles and the ease with which her parents depend on their credit-card economy and four-wheel-drive to stream-roll over their own obstacles. Anthony Lioi further argues that the ‘environmental philosophy’ of Hayao Miyazaki’s films depends on this contradictory response to industrialization, resisting ‘both American capitalism and radical environmentalism, eschewing the traditions of industrial domination, colonial wilderness protection, and Luddite primitivism’ (2010: 1), allowing for new discussions of ecological preservation and technological progression to take place. When Miyazaki describes his proto-steampunk work Laputa: Castle in the Sky himself, he writes that ‘the story is set in an era when machines are still exciting and enjoyable, and science does not necessarily make people unhappy’ (1996: 253). A fetishism for technology is evident, yet it is tempered with an understanding of the dangers of mechanical dependency and the capability of machines to rewrite our social order. Steampunk cinema’s visions of industrial histories are, therefore, doublecoded through a dichotomy central to nostalgic thinking: simultaneously more and less innocent due to their representations of technological hardships. Despite seemingly opposing conventions of quality of life for their users, the genre’s machinery nevertheless often reflects an era of production that mourns lost communities, forgotten skills and personal struggles. Miyazaki explicitly refers to his memorialization of historical industry as a uniting factor underlying his work when referring to a trip to Wales during the 1984–1985 miners’ strikes. ‘I admired the way they battled to save their way of life’, he states, ‘just as the coal miners in Japan did. Many people of my generation see the miners as a symbol; a dying breed of fighting men’ (Brooks 2005). The desire to return to an age of industry emblematic of hard (and frequently masculine) work offers another opportunity to note a commonality between many steampunk narratives. Just as Ayumi Suzuki comments that Miyazaki frequently depicts his child protagonists as ‘employed workers in a fantasized capitalistic world’ (Suzuki 2009), there are a number of alternative steampunk texts that also cast its child heroes as technologically adept labourers in Dickensian settings. Simultaneously revering and problematizing the notion of a more innocent age of industry, City of Ember, for example, follows its two young heroes as



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they are randomly assigned jobs in a coming-of-age ritual practiced by their subterranean society. One becomes a ‘pipeworks labourer’, maintaining machinery in the cramped and dirty passages that run beneath the city, whilst other child protagonists drawn from comparative steampunk films such as The City of Lost Children, The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box (2013) and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events are equivalently put to work by despotic adults. Whilst it is tempting to argue that steampunk therefore privileges ‘the strong nostalgic tendency’ of an ‘escape to a utopian natural environment’ (Bell 2009: 10) over previous industrial eras, the genre complicates such binaries by foregrounding qualities deemed worthy of recognition, such as communal self-sacrifice, endurance and industriousness. In correlation to the very same concerns articulated by H. G. Wells in his novel The Time Machine, the threat that is implied in much of steampunk cinema is that as society progresses with time, we will forget how to survive. As Svetlana Boym writes, we are ‘survivors of the twentieth century … nostalgic for a time when we were not nostalgic’ (2001: 355), driven by a longing for a perceived era of societal strength, knowledge and utility. Structured through the depiction of fantastic technologies that are far from recreational, steampunk’s nostalgic sense of adventure affords its audience opportunities to confront the perceived dangers and spectacles of mechanical identities. As Rebecca Onion writes, the genre’s ‘authors and creators are often interested in the spectacular failures of various nineteenth-century technologies, viewing these disasters as evidence of the daring of the people of the time’ (2008: 149). Similarly, by inscribing archaic technologies with the qualities of late twentieth-century advances, steampunk is able to foreshadow the horrors of ‘nuclear holocaust, chemical poisoning, global warming, and environmental degradation’ that Amy Bix claims has led to modern audiences losing their fears of ‘nineteenth-century technologies’ (2013: 243). Paradoxically, therefore, steampunk’s machines are marked as dangerous, and yet (potentially) preferable to the dehumanizing effects of latter industrialization. It is this temporal relocation that allows the genre to exhibit a diverse number of responses, encouraging comparisons and oppositions that are simultaneously celebratory and damning of many eras of technological change. Offering a source of nostalgia founded in an age of mechanical industry, steampunk exemplifies Hutcheon’s observation that ‘if the future is cyberspace, then what better way to soothe techno-peasant anxieties than to yearn for a Mont Blanc fountain pen?’ (1998: 196). The desire to re-examine an industrial, pre-digital age is the

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defining element of steampunk cinema, an era of mechanical understanding that Jenny Uglow describes as ‘not utopian but nostalgic … a mourning of the gritty industrial technology of the past’ (1996: 14). Representing not a return to societal innocence, but a period less tamed by the sterility of contemporary culture, steampunk machinery finds comfort and unease with both.

Craftsmanship and mechanical mastery Whether depicted as virtuous or destructive, steampunk’s historically displaced machines and users have made an indelible impact on contemporary genre cinema. These representations of technological production allow steampunk films to confront multiple seemingly oppositional notions: the factory and the artisan – the virtual and the hand-worn – the counterfeit and the authentic. Many of these interests underscore the practices of steampunk’s own maker culture, whilst transforming these ideals for more corporate purposes, gaining mainstream significance and mass-appeal. Whether through counter-cultural intent or the designs of the blockbuster, steampunk texts are immediately identifiable through their material identities, where visible workings and intricately connected gears showcase methods of manufacturing that appear unique and haphazard. Through the bric-a-brac aesthetic that is common to the entire genre (perfectly encapsulated in the machines constructed by the crackpot inventor Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days – see Figure 3.7), steampunk technologies eschew the hermetically sealed designs of modern electronic devices and instead appear far less uniform through their fusing together of numerous disparate components. Piling their mechanisms together into manic structures that often appear unwieldy and chaotic, the recognizability of steampunk designs depends on more than their visualization of mechanical intricacy. Steampunk technologies are accumulative constructions of numerous different parts that are not made to measure, possessing a tendency to appear ‘worn’ and marked by years of use. Though their big-budget outings, the signs of rust and wear that often characterize the genre’s devices are even more prominent in machines that are rendered through computer-generated imagery, given the simulated appearance of a manufacturing history that seems physical nevertheless. The computeranimated contraptions depicted in 9, for example, recall the hand-stitched imagery of film-maker Jan Švankmajer, whose surreal stop-motion creations



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Figure 3.7  Around the World in 80 Days (2004), [Film] Dir. Frank Coraci. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.

are constructed from discarded objects and skeletal remains. Whether virtual or physical, the genre’s machines are given a pseudo-historical presence that lends them the perceived pleasures that are common to steampunk’s aesthetic within alternative media: described by Dru Pagliassotti as ‘unique, man-made, homely (and) personal’ (2013: 67). By emphasizing their seemingly physically hazardous and textile nature, the steampunk genre’s films collectively offer a material aesthetic that fetishizes the implied sense of authenticity and tactility of its ‘things’ in opposition to contemporary production methods. When describing the construction of Treasure Planet’s cosmic setting, for example, producer Roy Conli claimed that the film-makers aimed to create a space that was ‘warm and had more life to it than you would normally think of in a science fiction film’ (Everett 2002); a desire that writer Rob Edwards described as ‘so lush and lavish with the woods, the brasses, and the pewters’ (Lee 2003). Conli and Edward’s definitions of their own aesthetic choices make no allusions to the term ‘steampunk’, yet nevertheless emphasize the romanticism drawn through the heat of the movement’s furnaces and the tactility of it metalwork. Although played out on the shadows of the screen, steampunk films fabricate worlds where it is material construction that orders their societies. These themes of craftsmanship are central components to the ‘the objectbased work’ of steampunk’s fans (Onion 2008: 139). Stefania Forlini, for example, considers the work of Jake von Slatt in ‘Technology and Morality: The Stuff of Steampunk’, outlining the movement’s ecological values when writing that ‘von Slatt insists on sustainable practices, recommending that readers procure their

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component parts from thrift shops, “junk” stores, or even through “dumpsterdiving”, and that they dispose of any chemicals in environmentally-friendly ways’ (2010: 75). In many cases, it is the ethics of steampunk materialism and the ‘treatment’ of these objects that has ordered the movement’s responses to these films. Whilst the ‘alternative DIY approach’ (Cherry and Mellins 2012: 22) exemplified by steampunk’s grassroots communities have often seen its followers reject the industrial workings of the mainstream film industry, the hand-worn and individually crafted aesthetic that underlines steampunk-as-style remains one of the most striking parallels between the movement and its cinematic representations. To understand how steampunk films translate a subcultural celebration of ‘recycling and re-using’ (Forlini 2010: 76) through methods of production that are ‘not available off-the-shelf ’ (Cherry and Mellins 2012: 7) into the realms of mass-cultural interest, one can consider how each of these productions positions themselves within a genre that can be defined as materially orientated. As well as depicting their machines within positions of narrative virtue, steampunk films frequently define their heroes’ identities through intense relationships to technological materials. Whether through Nemo’s incredible submarine Nautilus (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), the eponymous device in The Time Machine or the mechanical marvels created by Artemus Gordon and Phileas Fogg (in Wild Wild West and Around the World in 80 Days), the heroic worth of the steampunk inventor and scientist is reflected in the unique and highly personal qualities that their machines exhibit. Steampunk technologies not only have mechanical purposes but are also a means of identifying self-values; their aged aesthetic evokes lifelong emotional relationships that possess immense narrative importance and value. This is particularly clear in many steampunk films where child protagonists inherit these devices (and the knowledge to use them) from their parents. In City of Ember, Hugo and Steamboy, the atavistic technologies that act as narrative lynchpins allow a new generation to establish or reiterate familial connections through their interaction with these objects. Beyond being mere technologies, many of steampunk’s machines are totems and talismans that evoke lifelong emotional relationships and suggest increased ‘worth’ and ‘value’ in rejection of disposability. Literalized further in 9, the protagonists are machines themselves, hand-stitched into existence through the craftsmanship of their inventor ‘father’; their journey sees them interact with the technologies that they have been left with, following clues left by their creator to complete their mechanical function.



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Similarly, just as steampunk villains are often defined as kidnappers of scientific talent, so too are they frequently identified as thieves who attempt to steal the heroes’ unique and beloved technologies so that they can be commodified for mass-production. 9’s protagonists, for example, find themselves placed in contrast with the mechanical monstrosities that patrol their post-apocalyptic wasteland and subsume materials into their own structures: villains that exist purely to replicate and propagate using industrialized means. These machines are constructed through a mammoth factory called ‘The Fabrication Machine’; their creation is the direct result of a fascist dictator stealing a device devised by the protagonists’ own creator. Such a narrative recalls the mantra that SallyAnne Huxtable uses to title an article considering the steampunk movement: ‘Love the Machine, Hate the Factory’ (2013). The notion of mechanical ‘fabrication’ and theft found in 9 is repeated in both The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows’s plot. Both films cast their variations of Professor Moriarty as industrialists who finance similarly colossal factories where automated weaponry is created en masse. Specifically, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen extends its representations of technological inauthenticity through the fact that Moriarty’s weapons of mass production are literal thefts of the protagonists ‘originals’. Stealing blueprints and blood samples from each of the protagonists, this villain aims to replicate their skills, abilities and personal armaments for his own use, bypassing the individualized material relationships that the genre of steampunk holds in such high esteem. Amy Bix relates such components of the steampunk movement to Victorian concerns that were also common in the nineteenth century: ‘Parallel debates over art versus factory, individual creativity versus mass production … a new artistic taste that fetishized a preindustrial dignity of labour and attempted to recapture the seemingly superior tradition, soul, harmony, and high quality of handmade goods’ (2013: 239). In counterpoint to the highly personal, hand-crafted and relatively haphazard designs possessed by their heroes, the villains of steampunk films are often seen to command an array of corruptible and mass-produced variants. Just as the steampunk subculture uses period difference to underline distinctions between the uniformity of factory-production and individual craftsmanship, the genre’s representations of technology privilege those that are fundamentally personal and handmade. The same can be said of many of the stylistic and narrative devices used to represent technologies that oppose the disposability of contemporary consumerism and are ordered around desires

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to reinvigorate the perceived mechanical knowledges and skills that have been ‘lost’ since the advent of Fordist mass-production. Acting as an extension of film-maker Terry Gilliam’s continued contributions to the steampunk genre (as producer of animated short 1884: Yesterday’s Future [in development] and director of The Brothers Grimm [2005]), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) engages explicitly with such themes. Set in the twenty-first century, the eponymous ‘imaginarium’ is a travelling theatre that is unquestionably tethered to the past: a mechanical construction of antiquated components that is able to create nostalgic dreamscapes for its patrons to explore. Powered by physical cogs, pistons and pulleys, the atavistic nature of the machine sees it positioned in opposition to contemporary processes of mass design and production. Just as the imaginarium itself has aged alongside a corporate world now dominated by shopping centres and skyscrapers, the immortal storyteller and illusionist Doctor Parnassus has similarly witnessed society come to tire of his performances in favour of more modern delights. Drawing direct parallels between Parnassus’ theatrics and Gilliam’s own auteured identity, the film bemoans both the seeming indifference of contemporary audiences and the modern corporations who are implied to no longer be capable of invention or imagination. Literalizing the creative degeneracy of late-capitalistic consumerism, Doctor Parnassus depicts a young boy who aimlessly wanders into the imaginarium, using his portable video game console to ‘zap’ down and destroy the incredible steampunk anachronisms that surround him. A new wave of technological sensationalism is embraced, one that (on surface appearances) embraces the ‘modern, mass-produced, bland designs’ (Pagliassotti 2013: 67) that steampunk, Parnassus and Gilliam are positioned in resistance of. To help Parnassus comply with the desires of contemporary culture, the aptly named swindler and charlatan Tony Liar teaches Parnassus how to market his imaginarium to a new bourgeois clientele, setting up shop in a high-class shopping mall: Tony: The fact of the matter is … the show, the stage, it’s just not. … I don’t know what the word is. Dr. Parnassus: Modern? Tony: Modern! Yes! See, people want modern, they want. … See this – [holds up ‘Ideal Home’ magazine] – this is contemporary.

(The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, 2009)



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Through a romanticism for archaic technologies and historical artefacts that are threatened by the domesticized qualities of Tony’s ‘modern’ redesign, Doctor Parnassus reflects steampunk’s celebration of mechanical individualism and eccentricity over uniformity and hegemony. The same challenge to contemporary commercialism is evident within Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (2007), another film that courts steampunk status through its depiction of a consumer wonderland that is fundamentally atavistic in nature. Magorium’s titular toyshop is, like Parnassus’s imaginarium, an architectural anachronism surrounded by high-rise shopping centres. Rendered timeless and unchanged by contemporary advances, there are no electronic devices to be found in Magorium’s store; instead, the wares on offer rely on springs, magnets and simple mechanisms to function: referents to an era of consumption that still seems to retain the ‘innocence’ of childish wonder. Such approaches offer striking commonalities with the steampunk subculture’s own material fixations, those that invite us to reassess the relationships that we foster with the objects that we surround ourselves with. The ubiquity within steampunk films of commodities that seemingly possess individual and personal histories highlights not only a romanticized depiction of technological production but also the knowledges and specialisms required for their utility. The eponymous heroes of 9 and Hugo, for example, must work out how their forefathers’ machines function to fulfil their respective narrative roles: a direct analogy for a reconnection to the skills and knowledges needed for ‘making’ and maintaining the technologies around us. ‘In the utopian steampunk world’, writes Rebecca Onion, ‘knowledge about machinery would return to the hands of the people, subverting what steampunks see as an oppressive culture of specialisation’ (2008: 151). The intricacy and transparency of the genre’s depiction of mechanical workings may emphasize tactility and physicality, as well as the extent that technological systems can be taken apart and understood: even to the most casual observer. It is, therefore, notable that steampunk films so frequently place the role of ‘fixer’ and ‘engineer’ onto the role of the child rather than adult. The child protagonists of City of Ember, for example, are heroes who exhibit the mechanical know-how needed to activate the colossal technologies that will liberate their society in their film’s conclusion. Likewise, steampunk films such as Steamboy, Spirited Away and The City of Lost Children also centre upon the ability of practical-minded youngsters to wield and repair elaborate pieces of

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industrial machinery (frequently used to thwart the oligarchic rule of their elders). Carolyn Salvi specifically argues that the orphans within The City of Lost Children ‘see the whole world as a set of tools over which they can have mastery’ (2012: 255). The subject of power and authority becomes vital to understanding the assortment of values that steampunk’s machinery is used to evoke. One of the clearest examples of an industrious youngster seizing control of technology – and therefore, the world around her – in steampunk cinema is found in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events’s introduction of its central protagonist: Violet Baudelaire. Described by the narrator (Snicket himself) as ‘one of the finest fourteen-year-old inventers in the world’ (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, 2004), Violet is presented as a character who is able to build ingenious contraptions from anything to hand; a fact that allows her to escape from a great number of scrapes and gives her a degree of power over her alternative-period landscape. Dru Pagliassotti argues that the steampunk genre’s devices are marked as ‘easier to understand’ for audiences and protagonists alike (2013: 67), whilst Stefania Forlini supports this reading by adding that their construction rejects ‘contemporary technology’s lack of transparency for the average-skilled person’, referring to a ‘democratization of mastery’ (2010: 72). The translation of these concerns to cinema highlights one of the key pleasures that has allowed steampunk to propagate and capture masscultural imaginations: a seemingly widespread desire to readdress individual relationships with machines that are presented as spectacularly complex, yet fundamentally comprehensible and approachable nevertheless. However, it is a mistake to consider steampunk as purely nostalgic for historical skills and knowledges. Just as contemporary machines are empowered through their semblance to nineteenth-century design, the intrusion of millennial technologies into period life can also be read as a means to celebrate more contemporary advances. The spaceships, space suits and androids in films such as Treasure Planet may bear stylistic semblance to historical technologies, but their purpose is far more analogous to their current (and hypothetical future) counterparts, as are the hologrammatic effects of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and the array of mechanical tools that make the eponymous hero of Van Helsing seem more of an analogue to James Bond than his literary predecessor. Similarly, mapping twenty-first-century understandings of technology onto past designs and modes of production, the



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wealth of pocket-sized gizmos depicted in the genre reflect the range of abilities and knowledges that modern consumers currently have exposure to. When US Marshal Artemus Gordon discovers his swiss-army-knife-esque device at an opportune moment in Wild Wild West, he exclaims with delight, ‘Oh look! My auxiliary tool kit, I forgot all about it. It must have fallen out of my pocket’; his partner, James West is quick to respond: ‘Your pocket? Why wasn’t it on some spring-loaded contraption that shoots out your ass?’ (Wild Wild West, 1999). West’s comment lampoons Gordon’s dependencies on tools – despite their usefulness – and the absurdity of technologies that are used for surprising and ubiquitous purpose. The playfulness of steampunk’s constructions reflects not only the genre’s prolific status as an adapter but also its narrative and aesthetic focus upon making and borrowing as a form of activity and play that encourages engagement. Steampunk children’s films such as The Boxtrolls, Lemony Snicket and City of Ember, for example, feature numerous characters who find joy in toy-boxes of mixed mechanical components, restructuring disparate parts into ‘new’ devices that are absurd yet nevertheless delightful. The genre’s whimsical nature is particularly apparent in the eccentric names that it gives its texts; the playfulness of titles such as Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus are repeated in the movement’s representations within numerous alternative media: from Greg Broadmore’s 2008 book Doctor Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory to the titling of a fictitious film featured in The Simpsons episode ‘A Fish Called Selma’ (1996): ‘The Contrabulous Fabtraption of Professor Horatio Hufnagel’. This sense of playful irreverence informs not only steampunk’s anachronistic recasting of history but also a production design that is littered with enchanting objects begging to be used and deconstructed. Rummaging through the remnants of the past, steampunk makes an excellent fit for both the collage aesthetic of Terry Gilliam’s work as animator-director in Doctor Parnassus, and also the ramshackle bric-a-brac that is strewn amongst Magorium’s workshop. In Hugo’s depiction of Georges Méliès as a tinkerer and toy manufacturer, the genre uses his stall at Montparnasse station to depict a mise-en-scene scattered with a jumble of playthings that similarly evoke Méliès’s own film-making practices (see Figure 3.8). The devices and technologies that cover steampunk films’ sets recall the vast quantities of historical referents that inform the genre’s nostalgic construction and the unbound pleasure of seeing systems in action and devices in motion.

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Figure 3.8  Hugo (2011), [Film] Dir. Martin Scorsese. USA: Paramount Pictures.

Noting the heritage of the gothic and science fiction genres, Sarah Higley notes that ‘toys and technology overlap considerably, and in Blade Runner, Batman (1989), and Edward Scissorhands we find the manic imagery of dolls and automation. The rise of industrial Europe in the eighteenth century was accompanied by an explosive interest in clockwork automata, to which the miniature is closely allied’ (2001: 25). Steampunk’s period interests make apt use of a history of toy manufacturing and often (like the genres that Higley notes) reconstruct representations of childish wonder into a grotesque affair. There are many instances within steampunk fiction where seemingly innocent toys and dolls take on a malevolent form. In Vidocq, two animatronic puppets are depicted performing sex acts in silhouette, whilst The City of Lost Children opens with a Christmas ritual being twisted into a surreal and farcical nightmare. Toys and gifts lie strewn across the set as the villainous Krank attempts to capture the dreams of kidnapped children whilst dressed as a hideously distorted vision of Santa Claus. Unable to commodify his captives’ innocence for his own purposes, Krank is left infuriated that his malformed mimicry of seasonal gift-giving results in only tears and screams. Whether used to horrify or delight, the genre’s interest in exploring the relationships between antiquated technologies and their contemporary successors underlines steampunk’s entire identity. As I will now contend, it is my assertion that the impact of steampunk’s retro-futuristic machinery on the film industry can most directly be examined through the changing processes of production design and manufacturing that are dramatically altering the medium’s own construction in the new millennium.



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Cinematic production and the steampunk object It might seem oxymoronic that the steampunk movement’s interests in materiality and the aesthetics of manufacturing have become so pronounced in a series of major theatrical productions that rely on highly contemporary and digitized commercial practices. Reading steampunk as anti-modern emphasizes the irony with which the genre depends upon contemporary digital technologies and corporate culture, all the while depicting its villains as the heralds of globalizing manufacturing industries. Yet, steampunk cinema’s depiction of old-fashioned machines through contemporary technological advancements signals how the movement has been able to embed itself so thoroughly within the film industry over a relatively brief period. Developed within an era when digital post-production effects were increasingly transforming the grammar of big-budget cinematic spectacle, it is perhaps no surprise that the genre would so frequently be employed to virtually render landscapes and objects through the familiar aesthetic and seeming material tangibility of period technologies. Criticisms of steampunk cinema’s perceived adaptive legitimacy are commonly articulated through accusations that the genre’s films depend too greatly on digital effects: reflecting the movement’s own tendency to privilege methods of production that seem more ‘real’ and tactile. Wild Wild West was, for example, described by a New York Times critic as representative of modern film-making’s rule by ‘increasingly ghoulish special effects’ (Maslin 1999) whilst The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen similarly found itself defined as ‘Exhibit A in the case against digital effects technology’ (Beifuss 2003). The manner with which steampunk’s visual shorthand – that of cogs, gears and steam engines – has been mainstreamed has often been enacted through cinema’s ongoing digitization, doing little to help foster positive reception of the genre’s films: often considered as facile and oppositional to the movement’s seemingly more anti-modern tendencies. However, considering steampunk blockbusters as devoid of artisanal qualities would be a remarkably reductive perspective. Big-budget productions such as Van Helsing and Hellboy are resplendent with countless props and sets that showcase how the enormous costs of filmic production result in a colossal workforce that encompasses a wealth of skilled craftspeople. The vast production teams required for blockbuster manufacturing might seem to emulate factoryline conditions, but demand the making of countless one-off objects that have been made to measure, offering a direct correlation between the film industry

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and steampunk’s own crafting communities. Sarah Higley, for example, refers to Dark City as a techno-nostalgic ‘metaphor of lunatic set-making’ due to a collection of practical effects that are used in the film to construct ‘fantastic, menacing cities’: ‘every building, high or low, is overused bricolage’, she continues (2001: 12). Production designer Greg Broadmore acts as a particularly useful figure to display the prominent link between cinematic design and the steampunk subculture’s own manufacturing interests. As a self-professed follower of the movement, Broadmore is an artist and designer who has worked for Weta Workshop on productions such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong (2005) and District 9 (2009) and has gone on to conceptualize a number of steampunk contraptions (particularly weaponry) for his previously noted ‘Dr. Grordbort’ universe (through comics, books, memorabilia and games). These artefacts foreground how both film-makers and production designers have played a role propagating steampunk’s maker practices, and also draw attention to the manufacturing industries and material marketplaces that have turned the genre into a booming consumer culture. In counterpoint to the frequently denigrated status of the steampunk blockbuster’s digitally saturated identity, the physical production and design of many of the genre’s costumes, weapons and devices have often generated more positive responses, and therefore been subject to the subculture’s own consumer interests. Interestingly, the genre’s aesthetic of weather-worn and hand-crafted design has enabled it to play a strong role in both breaching and establishing the divides between ‘high-end’ and ‘mass-produced’ movie merchandise (cf. Wasko 2006; Conrich 2006). From replicas valued at hundreds of pounds (such as the Hellboy franchise’s oversized handgun: the ‘Good Samaritan’) to promotional partnerships that see fast-food freebies produced in droves (as was the case with Disney features Atlantis and Treasure Planet), the hierarchal structures that value cinema’s paratexts find striking parallels in the steampunk movement’s own attempts to inscribe capital upon the machines that it is defined by. Indeed, the material objects that are produced to bring life to the genre’s fantasies play a prominent role in structuring its cultural responses. One of the clearest examples of the genre being valued based upon its physical constructions is found within the 2002 adaptation/remake of The Time Machine, a film that becomes a stage for numerous dialogues of ‘object/ material’-orientated cinema. On the steampunk website Brass Goggles, a commenter named ‘Lord Templeton Augustine’ writes that ‘the film is worth



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viewing if just for the re-imagined time machine itself, a truly beautiful construction of brass and crystal’, with another describing the ‘genius’ of ‘all that lovely polished brass, and the rotating disks revamp’ (‘Tiny5th’) (‘Lord Templeton Augustine’ 2008). Whilst these viewers deride the film for being ‘too heavy on the SFX’ (‘Albrecht’), they revere the eponymous device in the very same breath: users ‘Miss. Marin’ and ‘MechanicalMouse’ respectively state, for example, that ‘the machine itself was smashing, the movie nearly drove me to tears by the time it was over’ and ‘nice machine, terrible script and terribly phony-looking Morlock suits/CGI’ (‘Lord Templeton Augustine’ 2008). The steampunk subculture’s admiration for The Time Machine’s production design reflects a broader nostalgia for practical effects that often alleviates the denigrated status of the digital blockbuster. A key promotional message underlining the release of Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015), for example, saw the film’s production designer, Darren Gilford, reflect upon J. J. Abrams’s directorial preference for practical construction wherever possible. He stated, for example, that ‘[Abrams] felt the prequels were flawed by the fact that they had every tool known to mankind and used everything at their disposal. I use the metaphor of disco when the synthesizer came about and everyone was using it in any way possible. And I think J.J. wanted to reconnect with how the original films were made’ (as quoted in Desowitz 2015). Picked up by the franchise’s fandom and carried forth through the production design of subsequent releases (i.e. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story [2016] and Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi [2017]), such attitudes outline the extent that A Force Awakens was designed to capitalize on the near-legendary status of the 1977–1983 trilogy by employing a variety of film-making practices. These same nostalgias order steampunk film’s broader representations of ‘past’ industries that somehow seems to possess a more tactile nature; film production takes on the role of objectifying and actualizing the supposedly more material (and less digital) conventions of a previous age. As a potential means of counter-balancing and even obfuscating the intensity of film’s ongoing digitization, steampunk’s romanticism for old-fashioned methods of production outlines retro-futuristic characteristics that have become thoroughly embedded within the mass-cultural discourses that surround the blockbuster. With specific reference to the genre, props modeller Paul Marsh (whose works include 2010’s The Wolfman and 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) describes his understanding of steampunk design within film as a form of distinction to the ephemeral qualities of modern devices:

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I love steampunk because, for me it harks back to simpler times. Products were created for their aesthetics as much as their function. There is something living about a clockwork mechanism. The movement and sound seem like its breathing. (as quoted in Kress 2013)

The conceit of a ‘living machine’ is central to steampunk’s ideologies, represented through technologies that are not only seemingly accessible and ‘knowable’ but also ‘real’ and authentic in a way that appears to be lost from modern electronic devices. Out of the many steampunk feature films that have been released since the movement’s late twentieth-century rise, no other production exemplifies the genre’s memorialization of traditional film-making techniques to a greater extent than The American Astronaut. Described in its press kit as being ‘opposed to the technology-heavy fantasies of science fiction’ The American Astronaut celebrates conceptions of ‘do-it-yourself ’ masculinity through a vision of outer space that was ‘inspired by McAbee’s memories of his grandfather and father … a guy who could fix absolutely anything mechanical … a holdover from the days when Northern California was still the Wild West’ (McAbee 2001). Fundamentally independent in nature, the film was financed with a limited budget and released without major studio backing in only a selection of arthouse theatres worldwide. A quintessentially steampunk production, The American Astronaut tells the story of a roughneck trader who is tasked with journeying between (as one reviewer describes) ‘a rough and grungy series of planetary outposts filled with outcasts’ that are visualized as ‘aesthetically ragged’ (Abbott 2011: 296). Marrying a love of the 1930s’ Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials with a mechanical aesthetic constructed from pre-twentieth-century technologies, the space ships, ray guns and decompression chambers that litter the film’s sets are all weighty physical constructions that appear to be wrought in steel and maintained with oil. Most notably, The American Astronaut reworks its steampunk conventions through both the style and form of its production: in stark contrast to contemporary science-fantasies that shoot on digital highdefinition cameras and utilize motion capture technologies, this feature (as seen in Figure 3.9) is shot on 35mm film in black and white, and uses a mix of model work, photography and hand-drawn backgrounds to depict space travel in freeze-frame through a selection of graphic intertitles. Through its style and emphasis on practical effects, The American Astronaut acts as perhaps the clearest example of the steampunk genre embodying many of its counter-culture’s most keenly held ideals. The genre’s nostalgia for historical



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Figure 3.9  The American Astronaut (2001), [Film] Dir. Cory McAbee. USA: Artistic License Films.

craftsmanship binds steampunk cinema to discourses of cinematic heritage that can be traced throughout the medium’s entire history. Indeed, the animative model and effects work used within productions such as Georges Méliès’s The Conquest of the Pole (1912) and Karel Zeman’s The Stolen Airship (1966) remain highly celebrated today for their high degree of artisanal skill and imagination. Similarly, film stock finds itself fetishized as archetypal material – an object that can be curated, modelled and engineered through creative invention, as with any good steampunk machine. Rather than being relegated to a purely subcultural ideology, therefore, steampunk’s mass-cultural success highlights the extent that technological nostalgias have permeated widespread understandings of cinema’s practices, and the value of its history. However, it would be a mistake to define steampunk as purely industrially retrospective. Just as both the Star Wars franchise and works of Méliès were constructed through cutting-edge developments and boundary-crossing innovations, so too do steampunk films celebrate modern technological change. A reading of steampunk – whether as cultural movement or cinematic genre – as unilaterally nostalgic for period machinery is both reductive and simplistic. The subculture’s development can be directly attributed to the advent of Web 2.0 and the creation of numerous online communities, forums and ezines that allowed steampunk’s identity to flourish. When James Carrott recalls his developing awareness of the movement, for example, he aligns steampunk’s remarkable proliferation with the release of smartphones in the first decade of the twenty-first century, arguing that the genre ‘tackles the implications of

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rapid technological change on history. Steampunks are imagining different technological pasts. But what I think is really interesting is that steampunk as a subculture exists because of technology’ (Carrott and Johnson 2013: 10). Through such technological advances, the movement has come to celebrate the very democratization of mechanical agency and knowledges that enabled its online proliferation. In ‘Coal Powered Craft: A Past for the Future’ (2011), Ele Carpenter recognizes that the steampunk movement is at its most advanced and complex when considered as representative of philosophies that value engagement with both old and new technologies alike: At best, steampunk can be seen as an aspect of radical craft, a hybrid of the digital and the analog, and an eco-aesthetic engagement with how things work. At worst it’s a post-Goth fetishizing of pseudohistorical artifacts, meant to represent some kind of ‘authentic’ knowledge or relationship with technology, which can only be described as kitsch. But the subculture seems to be moving away from a teenage fashion for gothic rites of passage to a mature fascination with the historical imaginary. (Carpenter 2011: 149)

Carpenter’s description of steampunk as ‘a Victorian hacker culture’ (2011: 149) that is deeply invested in digital technologies is repeated in numerous aspects of the genre’s cinematic production: even those that appear particularly celebratory of old-fashioned practices and craftsmanship. The American Astronaut’s independent distribution, for example, has been aided by streaming services such as Netflix, SnagFilms and Hulu, just as similar projects produced by its makers have been active beneficiaries of crowdfunding websites such as Patreon and Kickstarter. As with the blockbuster, it is impossible to overstate the importance and complexity with which ‘practical’ cinematic nostalgias have been aided and enacted via contemporary technologies, especially within independent productions. Exemplifying the same retro-futuristic nostalgias and generic traditions of The American Astronaut, yet informed by seemingly antithetical modes of production is the steampunk film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. As one of the first films to be shot almost entirely on a digital backlot, Sky Captain acts as a fundamental exemplar of steampunk cinema’s fetishistic adaptation of past referents utilizing contemporary advances. Recreating the graphic and narrative memories of cinema’s adventure serials, the golden age of comic book action and the animated splendour epitomized by the hey-day of Fleischer



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Studios, this highly digitized production may memorialize the glories of past pulp fictions but nevertheless remains unashamedly steadfast in its adoption of new technological advances. The anachronistic and ahistorical nature of both Sky Captain and steampunk’s retro-fashions is foregrounded by the miasmic nature of the film’s aesthetic construction, as isolated live-action objects and performers float amongst a techno-nostalgic backdrop that is rendered upon blue-screens (a screenshot of the film’s virtual and retro reality can be seen in Figure 3.10). However, whilst Sky Captain’s intensely digital production might seem the antithesis of The American Astronaut (so much so that one critic titled their review of the film ‘Digitized to Death’ [Puig 2004]), it is important to note that the film acts as the product of similar independent manufacturing and financing practices. Whereas McAbee utilized ‘traditional’ film-making tools to pay tribute to science fiction’s history, Sky Captain’s director, Kerry Conran, relied on a home computer and commercially available software to construct a short film on a home computer that acted as test footage for the feature. Just as the steampunk subculture exemplifies maker practices that are dependent on digitization, Sky Captain’s construction reflects a new kind of artisanal craftsmanship that steampunk cinema, in both its mainstream and subcultural forms, can also be seen to participate within. Turning to the familiar imagery of our industrial pasts, steampunk’s cinematic proliferation may primarily owe its success to the genre’s popular use as a means to legitimize and weather the changes of modern technological

Figure 3.10  Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), [Film] Dir. Kerry Conran. USA: Paramount Pictures.

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developments. Writing with reference to the French pseudo-historical crime film Vidocq, James Austin argues that the text’s overtly digitized aesthetic and uncanny visuals rendered in post-production react to and attempt to humanize perceptions of new technologies that are considered as ‘flashy, impressive and even fascinating, but ultimately without substance’ (2004: 282). It is no coincidence that many of steampunk’s key films are most notable for the ways that they pioneered digital developments whilst drawing upon their shared interest in anachronistic machinery. Vidocq, for example, acted as one of the first features to be shot fully in HD (beating the release of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones [2002] by a year), whilst Steamboy (which, upon its release was the most expensive feature-length anime film to date) was similarly chosen to spearhead and showcase Bandai Visual’s Digital Engine Framework software, using its fantastical vision of the Industrial Revolution to trail-blaze increased interdependencies between digital and traditional forms of animation. Using new advances to simultaneously order, celebrate and mourn transformations in film-making, steampunk has played an active role not only in shaping cinema’s generic makeup, but its mechanical workings too. This is especially true with regards to the genre’s animated identity (as can be seen through Steamboy), and steampunk’s associative relationship to the perceived degradation of skills and working practices that computerization are seemingly extinguishing. As a film-maker who prominently uses the steampunk movement to dramatize conflicts between traditional romanticism and the sterility of contemporary consumerism, it is unsurprising that Hayao Miyazaki mournfully stated that ‘globally, CG will terminate hand drawing, just as colour terminated monochrome’ (as quoted in Bigelow 2009: 72). Yet, like Steamboy, Miyazaki’s films have also remained fundamentally marked by such technological developments. Spirited Away saw the integration of computer animation, digital processing and use of Dolby Digital sound, simultaneously cementing the studio’s transnational popularity with an unprecedented level of foreign success that would redefine the company’s corporate identity. Outside of the Japanese anime industry, steampunk was similarly used in Western animation to articulate and market the adoption of new technological practices. Using an anachronistic blend of old and new to position traditionally animated characters atop computer-generated backdrops, both Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet (2002) allowed The Walt Disney Company to test the waters of digitized animation through the very same technologically marked aesthetic and narrative signifiers that underline their steampunk identities.



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With reference to Treasure Planet, producer Roy Conli described the film’s special effects as a ‘70%–30%’ blend of two-dimensional and three-dimensional animation: a mix of the ‘old and new’ (as quoted in Everett 2002). Yet, the Walt Disney Company’s foray into steampunk territories did little to help compete with the successes of their fully computer-generated competitors. Instead, it would be Pixar’s Toy Story (1995) and Dreamworks’s Shrek (2001) that would chart the course of the industry’s future standards, becoming emblematic of a seemingly ‘new’ and ‘original’ direction for animated film. In an article titled ‘Treasure Planet and the Failure to Advance Creatively’, Charles Kenny states that ‘Pixar hadn’t so much shifted the goalposts as they had moved to another field entirely’ (2013), whilst Thomas Schatz writes of this period that ‘Disney’s animation division … began a rapid decline while Pixar hit its stride’ (2009: 30). Traced through Walt Disney’s eventual acquisition of Pixar, as well as public discussions that both positively and negatively define Atlantis and Treasure Planet as (respectively) ‘a new-fashioned but old-fangled hash’ (Kempley 2001) and hybrid of ‘swashbuckling spirit [with] computer-age cool’ (Lawson 2002), steampunk’s dissemination coincided with the very same technological upheavals that its texts offered commentary on. It is no surprise that the genre’s retro-futuristic sensibilities proved so popular for an industry undergoing dramatic changes, attempting to appeal to the changing tastes of consumers. Steampunk’s extraordinary proliferation throughout the film industry also, significantly, coincided with the medium’s centenary, approaching an uncertain digital future whilst memorializing its own nineteenth-century birth. It is vital, therefore, to understand how the genre’s emergence in mainstream cinema reflects wide cultural shifts in attitudes towards historical industries, ordered through a technology that was (and still is) undergoing intense technological transformations. Before concluding this chapter, I will consider one last example of steampunk cinema’s simultaneously cutting-edge and atavistic tendencies: those found within Hugo. As a production that was used to pave the path for the adoption of the latest advances in 3D technologies, Martin Scorsese’s reverent (yet revisionist) reworking of Georges Méliès’s spectacular innovations afforded an opportunity to celebrate film history whilst aggressively championing the spread of Digital Cinema Packages amongst exhibitors. With 35mm courting all but complete obsolesce in major theatres, it was not long after Hugo’s release that its distributor, Paramount, announced that many of its major productions would only be distributed digitally (Cheny 2014).

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Heavily promoted for its characteristics as a ‘3D’ film using new digital developments, Hugo uses a steampunked recollection of film’s mechanical heritage to assuage the concerns of both contemporary consumers and filmic institutions. It unquestionably did so successfully, gaining a high level of critical praise and box-office profit, alongside a great number of industryawards. By positioning the spectacular innovations of Méliès alongside new digital developments, Hugo’s utilization of steampunk’s anachronistic qualities helped to legitimize contemporary film-making practices as an extension of the medium’s canonical and revered history. The millennial process of film’s digitization has undoubtedly forever revised the ways that films are both produced and distributed (as well as received), placing renewed focus on a history that has seen the medium continually shaped by seismic technological developments. In the case of both steampunk’s subcultural and mass-cultural proliferation, the movement’s retrospective romanticism has simultaneously enabled a means to celebrate old-fashioned methods of production and the ‘craftsmanship’ embedded within digitized constructions. This conflict and interdependency between ‘old’ and ‘new’ technologies lies at the heart of cinematic steampunk: a means to emphasize and examine popular perceptions of virtual and practical ‘making’ on-screen. Whether digitally or physically orientated, steampunk’s inherent focus on the creation of fantastically anachronistic objects and locations leads these films to act as stages for creative bricolage: worlds that are filled with imaginative design work and effects-laden trickery. Whether sublime or monstrous, their incredible machines are collectively marked as valuable, aesthetically awe inspiring and capable of colossal power. By reiterating definitively millennial concerns through the recognition of decades of industrial upheaval, steampunk cinema has found itself defined through another turn-of-the-century that is driven by fin de siècle uncertainties. Exacerbating and reflecting these concerns, steampunk has been used prolifically within the film industry, but arguably, also with great trepidation; a means to test the uncertain waters of the future whilst clinging to the sense of familiarity that our pasts afford.

4

Historical Identities: Representation in the Steampunk Empire

Steampunk’s inherently counterfactual nature has often led its definitions to place it in opposition to its period referents: described repeatedly as ‘a received idea of Victorian as popularized in movies and elsewhere that has no historical basis’ (VanderMeer and Chambers 2011: 9). In this chapter, I will consider some of the most problematic debates that have accompanied the genre’s nostalgic sensibilities, and examine how steampunk cinema’s obsessive reminiscence can be positioned within the politics of representation and a number of pertinent social issues that have shaped its identity. As Maria Magro and Mark Douglas state, ‘If films about the future can convey the past metonymically, then films set in the past can be decoded as metonymic representations of present cultural and political debates’ (2001: 44). To understand how steampunk’s marriage of future and past possesses the ideological weight of contemporary concerns, I will begin by considering how the steampunk blockbuster approaches history as a matter of style, and the ways that its aesthetic conventions both enable and potentially reduces the proficiency with which audiences are able to engage with the past. I shall then turn my attentions to steampunk cinema’s astonishing success within a number of international film industries and consider how the genre’s ideological significance is informed by representations of both nineteenth and twenty-first-century colonialism. By accounting for steampunk’s proliferation within a number of global markets and cultural perspectives that far outstretch Hollywood, I will use steampunk’s retro-fashions to examine how the genre has frequently been used to represent issues of national heritage within an era of intense globalization. Following these debates, I will then turn to one of the most fiercely contended aspects of steampunk’s atavistic fantasies: its representations of both race and gender. As the movement’s subcultural identity has become increasingly mainstreamed and commodified, steampunk’s historical interests have been placed under scrutiny by those who believe the genre’s neo-Victorian

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make-believe reflects a great number of social concerns that have both regressive and progressive implications. By examining how steampunk films can be positioned amongst the subculture’s own attempts to realign historical injustices, I will consider how the genre represents issues of cultural representation from both historical and contemporary perspectives. To conclude, I shall bring these issues in line with steampunk’s defining attributes: its fixation on atavistic technologies. Exploring the genre’s use of the cyborg, my attentions will turn to depictions of bodies where the relationships between humanity and machine are at their most intimate and destabilized. By paying particular attention to the role that body politics and mechanical fetishism play within steampunk film, I will examine how steampunk’s ‘more intimate relationship and understanding of the material world’ are reflected within narratives that offer ‘dangerous visions of a bodiless posthuman’ (Forlini 2010: 73) and consider how these representations of the human ‘self ’ order the genre’s retro-futuristic worlds.

Visions of the past: Fashioning a previous century The historical details that steampunk films use to mark their period settings are not exclusively technological. An interest in machines and industry may act as the lynchpin of the genre’s identity, but steampunk’s cinematic emergence collates (what Suzanne Barber and Matt Hale define as) ‘multiple temporalities’ (2013: 167) to approach a number of real and imagined histories from a variety of perspectives. Collectively, the genre peppers its locations with countless referents to both genuine and distorted cultural memories. In Steamboy, the impact of industrialization affords cameos from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whilst Hugo depicts figures such as Emil Lager, Django Reinhardt, Salvador Dalí and James Joyce (amongst others) rubbing shoulders at the Gare Montparnasse, which itself is used to recreate the infamous 1895 derailment of the GranvilleParis Express in a dream sequence. As well as granting many historical luminaries brief appearances, many of the films that I have discussed so far within this book give such figures central roles: including those of Nikola Tesla, Ulysses S. Grant and Grigori Rasputin to name only a few (featured in The Prestige, Wild Wild West and Hellboy respectively). The inclusion of historical personages into central (and ancillary) roles affords frequent opportunities for the steampunk genre to register audience recognition,



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yet also positions these films within the canons of heritage cinema, playing a negotiated, yet nevertheless (arguably) educative role in dramatizing a historical diegesis. This is particularly clear in texts such as Hugo and Vidocq, steampunk films that depict their primary point-of-view protagonists as investigators who attempt to uncover the reality behind real historical figures: respectively, the criminologist Eugène François Vidocq and film-maker George Méliès. Yet, whilst an understanding of historical actuality is foundational for the genre’s construction (on the part of both film-maker and viewer), the delivered history lessons are undermined by repeated acts of irreverent anachronism that divert each text from accepted canons: ‘Hold it … the Nazis invaded Scotland?’ writes The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw (2004) of Hellboy’s historical playfulness, for example. The uneducative qualities of the steampunk blockbuster’s use (or even misuse) of history rewards recognition and attention with ironic knowingness, frequently defined by a shared understanding that events have been sent reeling from their ‘correct’ historical track. It also allows a reading of the genre that demonstrates how steampunk’s revisionary attributes are not always exclusively marked by the rearrangement of technologies. Mirroring the sensibilities of films such as Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), steampunk’s development and proliferation reflects the growing popularity and development of a number of postmodern heritage films. It is here that we see steampunk connect to a much wider variety of productions that deviate from the genre’s sciencefictional inspirations. Both Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter are monster-movie hybrids that retell historical events in high-concept settings that might be termed ‘steampunk’ were it not for their absence of notable mechanical referents. Described respectively in scholarly discussions as ‘more intensely historical than a run-of-the-mill costume drama’ (Austin 2004: 285) and ‘most effective in its adoption of a pseudo-historical aesthetic and rhetorical tone’ (Fitzpatrick 2010: 22), both films highlight a trend that steampunk participates within: where intensely stylized ‘pasts’ balance seemingly oppositional depictions of both historical credibility and absurdity. With reference to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, it is noteworthy that the steampunk movement has frequently turned to depictions of Abraham Lincoln to simultaneously revere and parody the man’s indelible political legacy within both history and myth. The genre’s misrepresentative retellings of Lincoln’s life are evident in a wide variety of artworks, cosplays and fictions: notably, a comic book series titled Time Lincoln (2010) and life-sized statue of a ‘Steampunk

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Lincoln’ that was unveiled in Lockport, New York, United States, as part of the city’s ‘Visionaries’ event in 2014. Stylistically, steampunk cinema’s depictions of the past are unmistakably contemporary in origin, demanding an ‘excess of spectacle’ (Pietrzak-Franger 2012: 272) that (as James Austin writes of Brotherhood of the Wolf) redesigns ‘anything too authentic that might displease a modern aesthetic sensibility … recreating history through style’ (2004: 286). Combining contemporary design with period elegance, steampunk’s growing prevalence as a retro-fashion has played a large role in shaping the genre’s development as a cinematic aesthetic. Mirroring the revisionism typified within Eiko Ishioka’s Academy Award winning costumes for Francis Ford Coppola’s gothic-romance Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), the proliferation and commodification of steampunk-as-style is often as associated with the designs of its fashions and accessories as it is its mechanical components. It is notable that a great number of steampunk films display their lineage to the anachronistic fashions popularized within gothicism through their adoption of sunglasses. Emblematic of twentieth-century celebrity culture, steampunk’s use of such accoutrements marks its characters and performers as ‘out of time’ trendsetters that reflect their audience’s contemporary knowledge in historical contexts. Although in the previous chapter I argued that it was the gear and cog that acted as steampunk’s most notable icon, an argument could also be made that the genre’s aesthetic is most immediately identifiable and pronounced through its use of goggles. As visual markers that are frequently stylized with fantastical and unusual attachments, these often absurdly extravagant eyepieces signal their films’ generic identities, as well as their frequent departure from historical fidelity. Often playing a central role for both character and narrative alike, even the simplest set of steampunk goggles are used by mad scientists when conducting experiments and by daring protagonists as protective equipment: acting as both fashion and tool to help their wearer master the historical technologies and landscapes that surround them. When attempting to find an elusive troll market within Hellboy II, for example, the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence unboxes a collection of atavistic and complex mechanical eyepieces that are designed to uncover hidden faerie-folk. Explaining their origins, the scholarly Abe Sapien notes that ‘in 1778, Emil Schufften, a good friend of Benjamin Franklin, designed these optical sets with the intent of photographing fairies in England’ (Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 2008), giving the devices a faux-historical record rooted in imaginative fantasy (see Figure 4.1).



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Figure 4.1  Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), [Film] Dir. Guillermo del Toro. USA/ Germany: Columbia Pictures.

Steampunk cinema’s visualization of the past as ‘sepia-toned and somehow timeless’ (Cason Barratt 2010: 175) underlines the nostalgic properties that are fundamental to the genre’s identity. The graphic grammar of steampunk is rich, vibrant and often modified through post-production to take on a stylized aesthetic that more accurately resembles a picture-postcard of history than a realist reconstruction. The visual density of Hugo’s reimagined setting of the Gare Montparnasse railway station acts as a nostalgic playground for its protagonists’ youthful antics, glamorously rendered in pastel colours as an aweinspiring realm that our contemporary world cannot compete with. Steampunk’s vibrant reconstruction of past eras uses the cinema screen as an opportunity for its spectators to acts as temporal tourists, where history is gentrified to fit the needs of the consumer. Through films such as Around the World in 80 Days and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (the latter of which includes a literal trip to the mythic utopia of Shangri-La), the steampunk genre offers numerous opportunities for audiences and characters alike to take whistle-stop tours of numerous exotic transcontinental locations in an age of colonial expansion. The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec exemplifies steampunk’s nostalgic tendencies, beautifying its visions of history through a cornucopia of dazzling settings, costumes and objects. The film possesses an aesthetic fixation on Adèle’s appearance in particular, placing her in direct opposition to the disfigured and aged villain, Professor Dieuleveult. Narratively, Adèle’s lavish and seemingly morally righteous traversal of North Africa counters the ugliness of Dieuleveult’s

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own Franco-colonial activities, rewriting a problematic past into a more attractive form (see Figure 4.2). Steampunk might be considered to act as an extension of what John Gardiner terms ‘Theme-park Victoriana’ (2004): a spectacular museum of fantastical fashions, objects and vistas where the wonders and terrors of history are encountered safely and stripped of their potentially hazardous qualities through their intensely stylized curation. This tendency is seemingly typical of the steampunk genre. When defining the movement as an offshoot of literary scientific romances, Andreea Verteș-Olteanu writes that ‘Nostalgic Steampunk is the mythologized Victorian Era, the 19th Century as it ought to have been. It revels in the elegance and the spectacle of the Empire. It chooses to close its eyes to the squalor and imperialism of this same Empire’ (2014: 220). Setting aside my contention that steampunk’s historical disruptions traverse far more eras than that those defined by Victorianism, Verteș-Olteanu’s statement highlights how the genre has often been criticized as a means to whitewash the atrocities of history. In these instances, steampunk’s aesthetically orientated nostalgias are seen to undermine the movement’s potential to act with greater social responsibility: a means of rectifying ‘certain historical wrongs’ (Bowler and Cox 2009: 5). With reference to a medium intrinsically connected to the blockbusters I consider here, Jason Jones argues that ‘the verve with which comic books illustrate steampunk or neo-Victorian worlds potentially downplays the conceptual interest of such fantasies’ (2010: 101). More specifically, when Rebecca Onion discusses ‘Hollywood steampunk productions’, she describes

Figure 4.2  The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010), [Film] Dir. Luc Besson. France: EuropaCorp.



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them in contrast to the more political aspects of the movement which desire to put ‘the punk back into steampunk’ (2008: 142). Steampunk’s anachronistic reconstruction of history has often led to it literalizing concerns of ‘historical ignorance’ that have underscored numerous cultural debates over the course of the genre’s development: issues problematized by I. Q. Hunter as ‘one of the defining qualities of our alleged postmodern malaise’ (1996: 115). Described by Linda Hutcheon as ‘an inadequate present and an idealized past’ (1998: 198), it is nostalgia that acts as one of the best means to both identify how steampunk constructs its sense of period and also question accusations that the genre sanitizes history. Arguably designed to appeal to broad categories of consumers and seem palatable for commodification, the steampunk blockbuster’s nostalgic identity lies at the centre of its perceived infantilization of complex histories, and the maligned status of nostalgia itself. From its original definition by seventeenth-century scholars as a ‘neurological disease of … demonic cause’ (Routledge 2013) to contemporary criticisms of nostalgic reminiscence as a perceived ‘betrayal of history’ (Atia and Davies 2010: 181), nostalgia’s repeatedly lambasted nature affords an essential means of considering the cultural significance of steampunk’s insistent reimaging of history – not as it was, but how we wish it to be. Whilst the period glamour inherent within films such as Hugo and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow renders their historical settings as relatively welcoming (though not necessarily completely non-threatening) arenas for adventure, many steampunk films directly translate more unsettling acts of historical violence and conflict into incredible spectacles that are designed to provoke awe from their audiences. Both Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Sucker Punch exemplify steampunk cinema’s propensity to translate cultural memories of horrific conflicts into spectacular action sequences. Drawing on imagery associative of twentieth-century warfare relocated into the Victorian era, A Game of Shadows sees Holmes, Watson and (notably) a supporting cast of Gypsy companions flee from a German arms factory whilst avoiding the barrage of shells unleashed by fundamentally out-of-time weaponry. This sequence is perhaps one of the film’s most memorable, using a range of visual effects to depict bullets and bombs tearing through bodies and trees in hyper slow motion, an exhilarating example of historical memories translated (and perhaps reduced) into a panorama of cinematic spectacle. Jaime Wright argues that the frenetic energy of Guy Ritchie’s millennial adaptations have definitively rhetorical meanings that stretch beyond

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sensationalism, enabling ‘a participative audience [who is] carried along the storyline by fast cuts, jump cuts and handheld cam shots’ (2014: 106). Wright’s acknowledgement of the franchise’s shifts in style and emphasis on speed and sensation allows us to consider how cinema’s formal characteristics are used to create an interpretation of Holmes that places the hero’s relationship to mechanical systems at its centre: ‘Ritchie’s construction of Holme’s as supernaturally fast, both in body and mind, presents a Sherlock unaffected by the system of objects’, he continues (2014: 107). Similarly, Sucker Punch turns to the trench warfare of the First World War to depict a battle between American protagonists and German forces. Equipping its heroes with a bipedal tank that possesses devastatingly powerful Gatling guns mounted upon each arm, Sucker Punch’s fetishistic reimagining of historical conflicts is particularly evident in the bright pink rabbit face that has been painted upon the mech’s hood: a marriage of sexualized playboy bunny and Hello Kitty design that perfectly encapsulates the film’s highly visualized and irreverent reconstruction of historical referents. Whilst such flagrant stylization of violent events might seem overwhelmingly reductive, I nevertheless argue that even at its seemingly most exploitative, steampunk cinema’s playful reassessment of the past is worthy of critique and evaluation, rather than dismissal. A correlative example of steampunk’s translation of period horror into cinematic spectacle might be traced through Japanese pop-cultural reflections of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. From the atomic fury of Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla (1954) to the techno-apocalypse of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988), the film industry has a storied history of mapping historical events through the guise of consumer media and pop-cultural branding. The particularly evocative visualization of atomic chaos recalled in these examples is echoed within the steampunk film Casshern, which blends its concluding conflict with action, spectacular violence and, most prominently, actual archival footage of victims of war in intense torment. Deborah Shamoon argues that despite its visual eccentricities, ‘The real context of Casshern is World War II and the expression of collective guilt over Japanese wartime atrocities, in this case, vivisection and the slaughter of civilians’ (2009: 325). Shamoon’s reading is particularly pronounced in these sequences, where archival footage is spliced into the film’s final action sequence and confrontation between hero and villain. In this instance, historical documentation is encountered and confronted as well as collaged and diffused within the film’s computer-generated landscape. It could be argued that Casshern’s ‘anti-war’ imagery sensationalizes acts



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of extreme historical violence by using footage of atrocities as yet another of its spectacles; yet, such a consideration eschews the complexity of the many ways that mass-culture attempts to engage with past events. As with the genre’s technologies, steampunk cinema’s nostalgic fixations extend not only to ‘innocent’ representations of the past but also to those that are undeniably dangerous and unsettling. Verteș-Olteanu opposes her definition of ‘Nostalgic Steampunk’ by noting the genre’s tendencies to represent history through far more brooding and dour sensibilities, terming such a category as ‘Melancholic Steampunk’ (2014: 221). This category of steampunk, she argues, is more willing to encounter past horrors and expose viewers to historical injustices. Verteș-Olteanu’s terms have definitive value in understanding the wide tonal diversity that can be demonstrated in the darker and less sanitized aesthetics of steampunk productions such as 9, The City of Lost Children and Dark City. However, I contend that there is a great overlap in the attitudes informing this perceived distinction between melancholia and nostalgia, as it is not always easy to distinguish between the genre’s inherited sense of gothic romanticism for representations of history that are capable of inspiring responses of both wonder and horror. Steampunk films are frequently at their most memorable (and potentially subversive) when taking the form of the Victorian freak show itself, allowing audiences to examine history as a grotesque window of horror and peril from the safety of their homes and theatres. Even in its most glamorous forms, it can be argued that steampunk’s nostalgias offer a degree of resistance to historical atrocities all the same. Like the definitions that surround nostalgia, steampunk’s histories distinguish themselves from period accuracy: recognized and organized by the fact that they are clearly deviations in some form. Whilst we might accuse a wealth of steampunk films of side-stepping the responsibilities that the representation of history entails, it is not true that they ignore past horrors entirely. Instead, the seemingly utopic and white-washed histories that are (arguably) depicted in such high-concept blockbusters such as Wild Wild West, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Around the World in 80 Days depend on their audiences’ understandings of their allohistorical nature. Their ahistorical revisionism actively reminds us that to create palatable reconstructions of period adventure, these histories must be rewritten and approached with contemporary sensibilities in mind: their steampunk anachronisms depend on a collective understanding that our genuine pasts are far more complex and problematic than presented in these texts. As I will explore further in this chapter, this reading does not exempt

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the genre’s more populist features from criticism, yet allows us to nevertheless question an absolute dismissal of their nostalgic and sensationalistic properties. Most significantly, I contend that the steampunk genre can fundamentally be positioned within many of the debates (occurring through both cultural and scientific fields) that are currently reassessing and complicating readings of nostalgia as an inherently perverse and damaging process. Just as the field of adaptation studies has shifted in the period of steampunk’s development, many scholars and theorists have made convincing arguments that nostalgic reminiscence is a ubiquitous and essential characteristic of personal and societal self-recognition (cf. Mitchell 2010; Cook 2005; Wildschut et al. 2006; Routledge 2013). As a period of contradiction where the ethereal, half-forgotten and misremembered past takes on a veneer of authenticity and tactility that seems lost to the present, the fabricated nature of these histories makes their nostalgic traits all the more bittersweet (and melancholic). Encouraging relationships to the past where history is felt and needed yet held at arms-reach and separated from our contemporary lives, the dichotomy of steampunk’s nostalgic reminiscence is exacerbated by the commingling of nostalgic romanticism and ironic distance: the longing for an era that we understand never was. Direct examples of steampunk films that represent imagined histories that lie forever out of reach include Spirited Away, a film that ‘privileges the (literally) ghostly past as an alternative to the mundane present’ (Napier 2006: 293). However, like nostalgia itself, the film’s nostalgic vision of Japanese history offers little stability for the heroine, Chihiro. Although the past might appear more tempting than the capitalistic greed that Hayao Miyazaki associates with the present, Chihiro must nevertheless leave this spiritual realm behind to fulfil her future. Similarly, in Dark City, the ghosts of history offer little tangibility, despite their emotional resonance. Whilst Murdoch, the film’s hero, might long to return to the falsified memory of his childhood that is recalled on a literal postcard to the fictional ‘Shell Beach’, he can never re-experience the past, only use its power to inform his present and future. Murdoch nevertheless uses his recollection of this imagined location to actualize a future that bears the semblance of his fabricated memory. Whilst Murdoch, the film’s hero, might long to return to the falsified memories of a childhood spent at ‘Shell Beach’, he can never re-experience the past, only use its power to inform his present and future (see Figure 4.3). Before moving on to another point of discussion, one of the clearest examples of nostalgic attitudes being encountered within steampunk cinema can be found



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Figure 4.3  Dark City (1998), [Film] Dir. Alex Proyas. USA: New Line Cinema.

in the 2002 adaptation of The Time Machine. Unlike Wells’s original narrative, this iteration is a neo-Victorian (rather than directly Victorian) text, and so its audience must first travel back to the machine’s nineteenth-century point of origin before journeying forwards. In contrast to both Wells’s and George Pal’s iterations, the hero, Hartdegen, builds the machine not only out of scientific enquiry but also in the feverish hopes of rescuing his lover from her untimely death. Constantly reliving the moment of her demise through the use of his incredible invention, Hartdegen’s character is defined by his nostalgic yearning. Unlike his forward-thinking predecessors, his expedition into the future is driven only by the desire to relive and recapture his past: ‘What is time travel but your pathetic attempt to try to control the world around you?’ asks the Overlord Morlock, ‘I can look inside your memories. … You’re a man haunted by those two most terrible words: What if?’ (The Time Machine, 2002). Instead of re-enacting the past, steampunk’s collective association of visual cues and signifiers can be thought of as a means to use or evaluate the past. ‘The very name steampunk suggests a playful will-to-anachronism’, writes Jason Jones, ‘steam is obsolete, whereas punk, certainly at the time of the term’s coinage, resonated as deliberately modern and contemporary’ (2010: 102). By drawing on its audiences’ understanding of historical canons, steampunk films celebrate what Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen describe as ‘an active role in using and understanding the past’ that allows viewers to become more than ‘passive consumers of histories constructed by others’ (1998: 25). The genre’s representations of history, no matter how aesthetic in nature, are not passive and demand engagement from an active audience in a far more discursive fashion.

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Hayden White terms this act as a process of ‘historiophoty’ (2006: 23), and I content that it is this invitation to viewers to imagine alternative depictions of the past that has enabled steampunk to flourish so prominently within the medium of cinema. It is also my assertion that those who have chosen to decry steampunk’s historical reminiscence have done so from two perspectives: a denouncement of an ironic irreverence that is seen to devalue the past and/or a nostalgic longing that romanticizes it. Continuing into the debates that follow, however, I contend that by considering how steampunk does both simultaneously (‘contrary to common sense, irony is not opposed to nostalgia’ [Boym 2001: 354]), the genre’s value as a method of historicization becomes clear. In fact, steampunk’s obsessive reminiscence coupled with its sense of detachment is an apt means of approaching not only the creation of its fundamentally alternative historical spaces but also a field of enquiry that defines the notions of irony, nostalgia and postmodernism as ‘key components of contemporary culture today’ (Hutcheon 1998: 192): facets of a ‘backwards-looking’ society that looks to its past to determine its future.

Global industries: Colonialism and national heritage Through the exploits of daring adventurers caught up in conflicts of international scale, steampunk’s narratives often find themselves as informed by an understanding of geographical space as they are their temporal rearrangement of technologies. Drawing upon a heritage of science-adventure fiction, the genre’s fixation upon historical industrialization fundamentally connects it to both representations of national identity and the acts of ‘colonial expansion and imperial rivalry that had already fuelled a tradition of exploration stories, adventure stories, and stories of territorial conquest’ (Neale 2000a: 100). As with the genre’s depiction of historical violence, steampunk has frequently been identified as both a means to examine ‘the exploitation and domination of far-off lands and their inhabitants’ (Miller 2013: 147) as well as potentially romanticize what Julie Taddeo and Cynthia Miller describe as ‘the darker side of Eurocentric colonialism and hegemonic patriarchy’ (2013: 29). Steampunk scholar Diana M. Pho has acted as a prominent proponent of the movement’s potential ‘to rewrite the typical white, male-orientated, Europeandominated past to reflect voices that have been silenced, ignored or oppressed’



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(as quoted in VanderMeer and Chambers 2011: 152). Whether used to valorize historical acts of colonialism or provide a voice for cultures that have been subjected to marginalization, steampunk’s global popularity is indebted to its success in representing contemporary reflections of national heritage. To begin understanding how steampunk films can be defined by their representations of period nationalities, I will first turn to the ways that the genre has been used by Hollywood studios to celebrate a particular brand of American Victorianism. Defined by Paul Green as ‘tales set in the Old West that incorporate Victorian technology and inventions’ (2009: 13), steampunk Westerns act as a continuation of mainstream American cinema’s propensity to mythologize both the birth of its nation and the taming of the frontier so common to genre cinema. As such, it is unsurprising that Hollywood would formalize its interests in the steampunk genre through the release of Wild Wild West, a film that tells of a threat to disassemble the historical union of the United States of America. Financed by the empires of France, Britain and Spain, the Mexican government, a number of Native American communities and confederate survivors from within the United States itself, the villainous Loveless intends to not only seize control of American land for himself but also distribute it amongst his cabal of investors. As a confederate scientist who has been literally crippled by his losses within the American Civil War, Loveless is determined to divide the states that have been newly united: ‘The wrongs will be righted! The past made present! The United – divided!’ he bellows in a suitably megalomaniacal monologue (Wild Wild West, 1999). By casting its villain as a traitor who is attempting to steer America away from its historical trajectory, Wild Wild West use its anachronisms to reassure its audience of the country’s national virtues and its seemingly legitimate status as a contemporary power, enlisting its primary protagonists in roles of institutional (and presidential) guardianship. Unlike Wild Wild West’s positioning of its heroes as protectors of historical establishments, there are a number of steampunk films that depict their protagonists as individuals who are attempting to reject or restructure the nefarious actions of their empires. The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box is a British steampunk fantasy film that is set in 1885 and sees both its heroes and villains use incredible technologies to uncover and retrieve historical monuments that have been seized by the British Empire. The film’s young hero, Mariah Mundi, finds himself recruited by the ‘Bureau of Antiquities’: a division of the British Government dedicated to preserving cultural artefacts. However, rather than belonging to a genuine historical organization, this bureau acts as

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an imagined self-regulating agency that attempts to stop ‘the plundering and theft of historic relics from around the world’ by its own nation’s profiteers and colonialists (The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box, 2013). The Adventurer uses this conceit to separate its heroes from villains, depicting a stark conflict between those who attempt to seize historical treasures and those that attempt to restore them to their culture of origin. Hinting at his villainy, for example, is the fact that Mariah’s father gives a speech that opposes the bureau’s activities, providing the argument that the London Museum’s removal of objects is justified by the fact that they might not otherwise be preserved. Similar motivation is used to fuel Atlantis: The Lost Empire’s depiction of steampunk technologies: machines that are implemented to support both colonial expansion and invasion. When anthropologist Milo Thatch embarks on an archeological expedition to find the eponymous lost civilization, he is placed in direct confrontation with Commander Lyle Tiberius Rourke, a selfproclaimed ‘adventure capitalist’ who is determined to pillage the incredible technologies of Atlantis’s indigenous population. As with The Adventurer’s revelation that its hero’s father is complicit with colonial activities, Atlantis makes specific familial links between the actions of its protagonist and the horrors that are hidden behind seemingly benign historical adventurers. Milo is shocked to discover that his associates are more interested in the financial boon of Atlantis than its educative value, and a photo of the group is revealed that depicts Milo’s own grandfather happily smiling on an expedition with problematic intentions (see Figure 4.4). Milo is assured that an investigation into the team’s activities will unearth a number of unpalatable facts: ‘Trust me on this one. You don’t want to know’ replies one of his companions when he begins to press for details (Atlantis: The Lost Empire, 2001). Like The Adventurer, Atlantis uses the morally questionable connotations of the colonial collector to articulate its values: as Rourke himself states, ‘Academics, you never want to get your hands dirty. Think about it: if you gave back every stolen artifact from a museum, you’d be left with an empty building’ (Atlantis: The Lost Empire, 2001). Despite the occasional dramatization of acts of cultural decimation that are facilitated by the genre’s fantastical machinery, it would be a mistake to argue that such examples provide a particularly convincing resistance to historical atrocities. Rather than foregrounding indigenous characters, the vast majority of steampunk heroes in such colonialist narratives align with their texts’ national origins and rarely afford an opportunity to explore their period landscapes from differing cultural perspectives. Instead, they may be seen to reflect many of the



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Figure 4.4  Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), [Film] Dir. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.

same concerns that Linda Hutcheon observes of ‘imperial nostalgia’: narratives that ‘puts us, as viewers, into the same position as the very agents of empire … a nostalgia (again, paradoxically) for more simple, stable worlds – such as those of the putatively static societies they destroyed’ (1998: 201). Steampunk’s simultaneous nostalgia for both the industrial technologies of colonial empires and the perceived utopic primitivism of subjugated cultures infuses many of its films’ narratives with the faux-liberal ideas that many major post-colonial productions use to both assuage the collective guilt of its audiences whilst enabling them to participate in a celebration of imperial power nevertheless. We might also note that many of the genre’s films further disassociate themselves from past atrocities by filtering their antagonist’s actions through an Othered nation frequently historically villainized. For example, Atlantis implies that Rourke’s aim is to sell his captured technologies to Kaiser Wilhelm II (a significant detail, considering the film’s 1914 setting), whilst The Adventurer’s villain goes by the conspicuously Germanic name of Otto Luger (a surname that is famously associative of weaponry employed by German forces in both World Wars). Steampunk features such as The City of Lost Children, Vidocq and The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec can also be coupled with quintessentially steampunk animated films Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (2013) and April and the Extraordinary World to demonstrate the frequency of the movement’s enactment within contemporary French cinema. Whilst The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec uses its story of wondrous

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museums and treasure hunters to directly dramatize French colonial history, steampunk as a whole has also been used to represent contemporary French identities (and the French film industry itself) in opposition to Hollywood filmmaking and the impact of globalization. For example, just as their narratives depict industrial superpowers reshaping the world through technological force, French steampunk cinema lies at the centre of debates that consider how national film-making is being restructured through the ubiquity of seemingly ‘American’ processes of digitization. French film-makers such as Luc Besson, Pitof, JeanPierre Jeunet and Christophe Gans have all helped to shape the steampunk genre within their nation’s industry through productions that display the same sorts of negotiated national identities that have defined their own careers. In addition to helming French steampunk features, each of these directors have also made blockbusters for major American studios and become recognized as propagators of the so-called cinéma du look: a wave of film-making that is perceived as imitative of Hollywood’s seemingly ‘superficial’ and ‘popularist’ conventions in contrast to ‘the canons of ‘high culture’’ (Mazdon 2000: 109). Lucy Mazdon argues with specific reference to Besson that his works, heavily influenced by comic books, advertising and music videos, can be defined as ‘at once French and not-French, American and not-American’ (2000: 113): a description that could equally applied to many international steampunk films’ relationship to Hollywood genre cinema. Criticisms of the cinéma du look echo those directed at steampunk’s own irreverent visualization of history; Charlie Michael argues that such contentions stem from their possession of ‘a modern visual style largely indiscernible from Hollywood and advertising, a practice that reputedly represses historicity and “Frenchness” altogether’ (2005: 56). Yet, whilst steampunk’s emergence within the French film industry might seem to reflect the monopolizing and ethnocentric reputation of both Hollywood and America’s commercial power, they can also be attributed to a growing number of national cinemas adopting digitized and globalized film-making techniques to construct lavish period adventure films that are not dependent on financing from Hollywood studios. Steampunk’s elaborate blending of fantasy and history makes it an appropriate format for a wave of highly sensationalistic productions that attempt to celebrate icons of national identity and historical origins in an era of perceived cultural homogenization and globalization. As James Austin writes of French features such as Vidocq, Brotherhood of the Wolf and Adèle Blanc-Sec, their non-Anglophonic and period identities act as ‘a sort of purifying fire through which the American digital effects must pass’ (Austin



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2004: 284). Reflective of both the growing global availability and accessibility of digital technologies, as well as the increasing interdependencies of a number of international film industries, it is not surprising that steampunk has been adopted as a form of memorializing colonial mythologies that centre upon industrial change and the encroachment of technology. The intensity of these international relationships has seen steampunk cinema traverse a great number of boundaries: through the seeming divisions that separate both ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures and a number of global identities. This is particularly prominent in features such as The Three Musketeers, Iron Sky and Around the World in 80 Days: stories of globe-trotting adventure that are themselves constructed and financed through a number of different national production companies. Whilst these examples blend European histories and industries, Perfect Creature acts as an example of a transnational steampunk production crossing the hemispheres. As a co-production between the United Kingdom and New Zealand, Perfect Creature is a hybrid in many definitions: a sci-fi/horror/thriller that sets itself in a pseudo-historical depiction of New Zealand named ‘Nuovo Zealandia’. As with steampunk’s adoption of traditions associated with the cinema du look, the threat of both contemporary globalization and historical colonialism looms large within this production. Telling a periodinflected story of vampirism, Perfect Creature’s narrative heavily depends upon discussions of both genetic cross-breeding and eugenics. Defining the film’s cultural diegesis as ‘at once too local, and not local enough’ (2010: 57), Allan Cameron argues that the ‘mixing’ of national ideologies and concerns are both enacted and reflective of the industrial circumstances that underscore the film’s construction: The vampires appear to function like an aristocratic order, and largely speak in English accents … an analogue for the English aristocracy, overseeing an antipodean colonial populace. However, the particularities of casting mean that both Silus and Lilly are played by British actors, while some of the vampires are played by New Zealanders. The national map and the generic map thus do not line up perfectly. (Cameron 2010: 67)

Constructed through strange and unexpected national hybrids, steampunk cinema’s representation of cultural identities are facilitated by – and in turn facilitate – a wide range of responses to the shifting borders that separate both time and distance. Whilst the above examples are framed from Western

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perspectives (despite New Zealand’s geographical placement), there are many steampunk films that represent issues of national upheaval and identity from a much wider distribution of cultural backgrounds. The movement’s remarkable success on a global scale highlights steampunk’s cultural significance and can be traced through the many individuals, organizations, festivals and texts that utilize the genre to mythologize a past age of industry from a vast range of cultural perspectives. As Brigid Cherry and Maria Mellins write, ‘Whilst the steampunk aesthetic does foreground a certain type of ‘Britishness’ … there are now a number of significant online communities for steampunks, as well as face-to-face groups, outside of the UK in urban locations in the USA, Japan, Europe and elsewhere’ (2012: 9). Diana Pho’s article ‘Punking the Other: On the Performance of Racial and National Identities’ (2016) acts as an example of these issues being placed in direct focus, as does her website ‘Beyond Victoriana: A Multicultural Perspective of Steampunk’, an excellent resource for tracing steampunk’s traversal across countless national boundaries (guest authors include Yakoub Islam, who uses steampunk as a means to combat Islamophobia and explore the aesthetics of pre-modern Islamicate science, for example). As with its subcultural development, the prominence of steampunk cinema’s presence within a number of international film industries acts as one of the clearest ways of identifying the genre’s cultural significance. Nowhere is the genre’s pop-cultural blending of both histories and geographies clearer than in its remarkable success in East Asian cinema. Through arts exhibitions such as ‘Art of Victorian Futurism’, ‘The Steampunk Manifesto’ and ‘Steampunk: Time Capsule’ (held in South Korea, The Philippines and Thailand in 2014, 2016 and 2017 respectively) and the annual ‘Steam Garden’ events that ran in Japan from 2011 to 2017, steampunk has proven to be a popular resource through which multiple East Asian cultures have depicted anachronistic representations of Occidental imperialism and national industrialization. Specifically, I turn now to steampunk’s prominence in many of the manga, anime and spectacular tokusatsu properties produced in Japan. The notable reiteration of steampunk’s conventions in Japanese features such as Casshern, Memories, Howl’s Moving Castle and Steamboy (amongst many others) offers a unique opportunity to consider the genre’s articulation of national concerns. ‘Japanese texts associated with steampunk’, writes Elizabeth Birmingham, ‘are highly critical of the rationalist modernism that shaped both the colonial enterprise of the Victorian era and the global fascism that erupted between the world wars’ (2014: 62). Additionally reflective of processes of



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Westernization that can be drawn from the forced opening of the country’s borders to the monumental consequences of the Second World War and the nation’s subsequent occupation, steampunk’s mythologization of industrialism has allowed the movement to become a preeminent method of cultural discussion and expression within Japan. Just as Hayao Miyazaki spoke fondly of his regard for Welsh mining communities, the director visited the picturesque French towns of Colmar and Riquewihr as a reference for the landscapes in Howl’s Moving Castle (Cavallaro 2006: 167). Both locations survived the violence of two World Wars to become icons of European architectural heritage and are used by Miyazaki to offer a correlation between Western aerial bombing raids and the fires that similarly decimated Japanese towns and cities during the Second World War. Directly evoking images of historical devastation into transnational locations that are only loosely bound by space and time, Casshern also finds its historicized vision of warfare constructed through a highly stylized blend of period visuals from numerous nations. Alongside its anachronistic machines, Russian, SerboCroatian and Bosnian referents are used to depict a world where both the warring states of the ‘Eastern Federation’ and ‘Europa’ have merged Eurasia into one single polluted wasteland devastated by their conflict (see Figure 4.5). Casshern’s perceived horrors are evocative not only of industrial destruction and mechanized violence but also of a vision of Earth where cultural boundaries have completely disintegrated. Susan Napier argues that these same concerns are a predominant characteristic of Miyazaki’s works, participating in ‘a significant

Figure 4.5  Casshern (2004), [Film] Dir. Kazuaki Kiriya. Japan: Shochiku Studios.

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current debate concerning globalization’ that has become associative of both American film-making and ‘an all-encompassing tidal wave of hegemonic and homogenizing uberculture’ (2006: 288). Both The Walt Disney Company and Studio Ghibli have constructed steampunk narratives that focus on colonial aggression and the industrial conquest of utopic civilizations, yet each corporation has approached the notion of national isolationism from distinct perspectives. Whilst Atlantis: The Lost Empire sees its hero stay in Atlantis for the benefit of the culture’s well-being, Miyazaki’s earlier steampunk film Laputa: Castle in the Sky sees its heroes muster the strength of will to abandon their historical paradise entirely so that it may be hidden from colonial gaze. Another Japanese film, Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends (2015), ties these themes even more explicitly to its representations of steampunk technologies. After assisting the Meiji government’s overthrowal of the Tokugawa shogunate, the villain positions his ironclad battleship off Tokyo Bay in a manner that echoes the actions of the US Navy when they similarly displayed their military might in the same location in 1853. Roger Clarke notes steampunk’s role in reflecting upon this period of Westernization when he describes how the industrial ship houses a courtesan that ‘has lost her trade and identity thanks to imported western ideas’ (2015: 84). These historicized issues can similarly be traced through forms of cultural hegemony that have impacted the transnational production of many of these films; since 1996, for example, Disney has helped shape Studio Ghibli’s entrance into the Western market as the company’s international distributor. ‘Changed by the institutions they pass through’ (Henderson 2010), alterations made for the seeming interest of American audiences have often been scorned by the company’s fandom. Miyazaki himself noted such conflicts when considering Disney’s proposed changes to Princess Mononoke (1997), ‘I did go to New York to meet this man, this Harvey Weinstein, and I was bombarded with this aggressive attack, all these demands for cuts. … I defeated him’ (as quoted in Brooks 2005). As noted previously, however, it is a mistake to use only Japan as a means to examine the diversity of East Asian steampunk cinema, and the complexity of its representations of global boundaries. For example, Tai Chi Zero is a Chinese production that also exemplifies the genre’s articulation of concerns surrounding national heritage. Placed in confrontation with an English engineering company that is using enormous steampunk constructs to plough through a quaint rural village, Tai Chi Zero casts its hero as an outsider who must earn the trust of the villagers so that he can gain their community’s knowledges: relying on



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ancient and local martial arts traditions to defeat this overwhelming barrage of industrialization. Despite the hordes of Caucasian figures who besiege their homes, there are no central Western characters in the film; instead, the film’s antagonists are Chinese individuals who are depicted as traitors to their own countrymen: shunned and socially ostracized for their American and European educations. Played by Mandy Lieu, a model and actress of American, Malaysian and Chinese descent, the character of Claire Heathrow is the most direct presence of Western identity within the film’s narrative: her mixed ethnicity, name and the pronounced English accent used when speaking Mandarin represent her as a foreign presence in the film’s setting. As a Chinese character who is defined by her adoption of European and American customs, Heathrow is not Othered like the nameless English goons who operate the film’s steampunk machinery, but nevertheless remains a cautionary tale for those who would turn their back on their heritage and culture. However, as a kung-fu movie that possesses a generic heritage founded in the Hollywood-inspired martial arts films that arose within colonial-ruled Hong Kong, Tai Chi Zero possesses a fundamentally transnational identity. Directed by Stephen Fung, the film showcases the same sorts of international interdependencies that have informed the French cinema du look. Just as Hollywood has drawn from and appropriated global mythologies into its own commercial workings, steampunk’s science-fictional retro-futurism highlights the sorts of cultural borrowings that are used to construct national identities worldwide. Whilst Atlantis: The Lost Empire’s steampunk identity, for example, is often seen as a plagiaristic reworking of the animated Japanese series Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990–1991) (Patten 2004), both texts similarly draw from the French Jules Verne’s imagined expedition in the literary Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). The genre’s digitally immersed landscapes often make the project of distinguishing both cultures and histories a complex endeavour. Such negotiated identities are particularly evident within American steampunk films that repeat stylistic conventions of Japanese anime and manga. The same might be said of the contexts surrounding their productions: Sucker Punch, for example, is a feature that possesses notable input from Asian creative talent (including the film’s cinematographer, editor, co-screenwriter and two lead performers). It is my assertion that steampunk’s industrial and cultural proliferation on a global stage is indebted to the genre’s translation and hybridization of contemporary concerns through discussions of historical events. Often used

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as a means to promote nationalistic ideologies and the threat of cultural homogenization, the genre has also afforded an opportunity to construct numerous transnational mythologies: blending time and space within productions that are heavily dependent on an exchange of talent, culture and markets. Each film positions itself within the contexts of these struggles, and whilst their successes in navigating such complex discussions are often highly debatable, their anachronistic natures actively allow them to engage with notions of both heritage and cultural identity that are marked by intense industrialization. Through such conventions, steampunk cinema becomes far more than a movement defined by its historicized aesthetic: but a transnational mythos of mechanical development that renegotiates the boundaries both of its collected film industries and the national identities of its audiences.

Social problem cinema: Gender and race in steampunk’s histories To understand how steampunk cinema’s historical revisionism is charged with ideological weight, I turn now to the ways that the movement has often been defined by its followers not only as an aesthetic style, but a method of cultural critique worthy of the title ‘social retrofuturism’ (Perschon 2013). An excellent example of steampunk conceptualists’ attempts to address both historical and contemporary social injustices can be found within works that relocate marginalized figures into traditionally Caucasian, patriarchal and heteronormative roles. Dru Pagliassotti argues that this change came about as steampunk evolved from a science-fictional sub-genre into a full counter-culture with specific agendas, identifying ‘the sexist nature of those earliest works of steampunk’ in comparison to ‘what might be called the third generation of steampunk, works written in the early 2000s’ (2013: 66). In many of these works, bittersweet nostalgias are created of past landscapes that are more open and accepting than either our contemporary or historical societies allow (steampunk becomes a safe historical space with which to express and transgress), whilst other fictions enable direct attacks on past injustices by having seldom-represented protagonists actively confront the patriarchal and ethnocentric structures that order their societies. Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius comic book series acts as a notable example, blending the genres of fantasy, science fiction and romance with irreverent humour, as does the work of



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Gail Carriger, an author whose literary series The Parasol Protectorate (2010–12) and Finishing School (2013–15) are definitively neo-Victorian adventures that feature female protagonists navigating worlds ordered by fantastical machinery, supernatural forces and high-society etiquette. As with all debates centred around the cinematic translation of steampunk subculture, the massification of the movement has frequently been accused of superficiality and ‘missing an opportunity to investigate social possibilities’ (Perschon 2013: 35). ‘A true understanding of the past and its inequalities, especially for women, the poor and racial minorities’, write Julie Taddeo and Cynthia Miller ‘sometimes takes a backseat to the thrill of dressing up’ (2013: 48). Constructed through the juxtaposition of commercial practices and counter-cultural ‘punk’ sensibilities, the filmic steampunk genre is rife with opportunities to explore the perceived failures and successes of socially progressive representation, yet are perhaps best defined through their complexity, inconsistency and, often, surprising dichotomy. One of the most prominent examples of mainstream steampunk cinema’s convergence with the movement’s tendency can be found in examples where female characters are placed in positions of period-authority. Perhaps surprisingly, considering the corporation’s reputation for aggressively reworking historical identities through its own political and commercial interests, it is Walt Disney Company’s Treasure Planet that offers our first example. Within this animated adaptation, Robert Louis Stevenson’s temperamental Captain Alexander Smollett is reimagined as a female alien-humanoid named Captain Amelia. This process of ‘gender bending’ (or ‘gender fucking’ as originally termed by Christopher Lonc in the article ‘Genderfuck and its Delights’ [1974]) recalls the etymology of steampunk itself, the desire to subvert, change and re-evaluate. Possessing a name that evokes the pioneering spirit of Amelia Earhart as well as Stevenson’s literary figure, Captain Amelia might be considered an apt cinematic example of counter-cultural steampunk’s frequent practice of positioning women into otherwise denied roles of power and authority. However, this transgression of social norms is negotiated through traditions common to major Hollywood productions, with Amelia playing a supportive role designed to motivate her male companions to action: kidnapped, rescued and then concluding the film in both a romantic and matriarchal role despite the fiery and independent demeanour she displays towards her suitor. However, Disney’s use of the steampunk’s genre to adapt a literary classic nevertheless places Amelia in contrast to the more passive roles occupied by

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many of her ‘Princess’ predecessors and is perhaps most notable for the ways in which her representation has been mimicked, articulated and furthered by a wide selection of fandoms as an icon of feminist empowerment (both through followers of steampunk and Disney itself). A popular figure for cosplayers, fanfic authors and fashionistas alike, Amelia has been described by a number of fans who have attempted to discuss feminism and Disney’s corporate identity as ‘the ideal Disney feminist … strong and powerful in her own right and is equal to, if not superior to, men’ (Torres 2012). Noting the character in Good Girls and Evil Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation, Amy Davis describes Amelia as a ‘possible exception’ to Disney’s seeming lack of animated feminist characters (Davis 2011: 219). Whilst I would contend that it is problematic to describe Treasure Planet’s depiction of Amelia as a ‘feminist’ act (Davis herself notes the character’s continued supportive role), the film highlights how mainstream steampunk’s representations have been actively used and engaged with by a number of communities, allowing static and often relatively hegemonic identities to court the sensibilities of the genre’s progressive roots nevertheless. Based on a text that seemingly encouraged readers to take note of its ‘revisionist approach’ to history and ‘consider how far, or even whether, gender equality has actually progressed’ (Jones 2010: 102), the filmed adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is another exemplar of subcultural representations coming into confrontation with the mainstream film industry’s corporate intentions. In her article ‘History Reinvented: Steampunk Literature and the Graphic Novel’ (2013), Claire Nally explores the differences between the comic and film adaptation, arguing that the original’s subversion of historical sexism had been drastically sanitized. Indeed, as well as having her leadership role appropriated by the male Allan Quatermain, Mina Murray no longer actively pursues a provocative romantic relationship with this older companion and is instead the subject of desire for the film’s younger male characters. Additionally, evidence of severe scarification on Mina’s neck is replaced by the more traditionally provocative and attractive puncture wounds associated with vampiric attacks (Nally 2013). Yet, the film’s adaptive changes do not wholly shift a progressive text into one with an absence of social value. One might note that Moore’s depiction of Mina also places a great emphasis on her sexual identity (both graphically and narratively), whilst cinematically, the character spurns all interest placed upon her by the film’s male characters: making her one of the few heroines in steampunk film to retain a degree of autonomy by avoiding being placed



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in a romantic pairing. As with Amelia, Mina’s characterization highlights the consistency with which many major Hollywood productions place female roles in reductive positions, yet also problematizes the notion that such texts possess no points of interest in comparison to their sources. Steampunk film’s gendered approach to period revisionism is perhaps most clearly enunciated through the genre’s use of a hallmark often associated with gothicism and neo-Victorianism more generally: the corset. Synonymous with discomfort, sexualization and the ‘modification’ of the female form, steampunk cinema’s repeated adoption of this garment seemingly exemplifies a form of male gaze that runs counter to the subculture’s utilization of the ‘more active, even unisex, clothing … preferred by many female steampunks’ (Cherry and Mellins 2012: 22). From Kate Beckinsale in Van Helsing, Milla Jovovich in The Three Musketeers and Megan Fox in Jonah Hex (amongst a great number of others), the lead actresses of the steampunk adventure film are frequently placed in positions of visual fixation through corsets and bustles designed to accentuate the bust and hips whilst reducing the span of the waist. Yet, equipped with garters that conceal blades and pistols, it is a mistake to argue that these figures are inherently passive and innocuous, or that their costumes act wholly as a form of social subjugation. Julie Taddeo, for example, argues that such dress embodies a diverse range of connotations, and that whilst ‘feminist scholars typically have regarded the corset as a metaphor for the straightjacket of femininity … the steampunk corset is an announcement of a woman’s place in the public sphere, clad for battle alongside, or against, men and cyborgs’ (2013: 45). Whilst such an explicit marriage of armour and undergarments seems oxymoronic and little more than an excuse for the genre to position its actresses’ bodies on display, it is also reflective of the sorts of heroic archetypes that can be drawn from mainstream Hollywood to the Victorian circus itself. From the iconic image of underwear worn over tights that now exemplifies the skin-tight leotards of superhero fiction, the aesthetics of the Victorian strongman have come to prominently mark genre cinema’s admiration for action and bodily spectacle. As underwear masquerading as public attire, the sexually transgressive and expressive representations of the corset have made it a prominent icon within a number of subcultures, arguably implemented as a form of sexual empowerment rather than submission that actively questions ‘the gender assumptions of the Victorian era’ (Barber and Hale 2013: 177) rather than simply reiterating them. The steampunk blockbuster’s corseted heroines exhibit similar cultural contradictions, albeit positioned through far less critical or inquiring perspectives.

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Perhaps the most explicit discussions of exploitation and empowerment being framed with respect to steampunk’s historicized settings are evident in Sucker Punch: a film that has been described by some critics as a ‘fantasia of misogyny’ (Scott 2011) and met with accusations that ‘the existential poetry slam bookending Sucker Punch suggests that all this objectification of women makes them stronger’ (Persall 2011). Kitted out in an assortment of thighhigh boots, corsets, school-girl skirts and leather straps (see Figure 4.6), Sucker Punch sees its ensemble of action-heroines attempt to free themselves within a dystopian vision of extreme patriarchy through an assortment of lavish dance and fight sequences that are directly orientated around both spectacle and sexual fetishism. Narratively, these pseudo-historical displays act as the stage for the film’s heroines to liberate themselves from the subjugation enforced by their male captors, and yet the film seems to encapsulate and reiterate many of the most regressive and demeaning representations of femininity perpetuated within Hollywood genre cinema. As Monika Bartyzel writes in a journalistic report on the film titled ‘Faux Feminism’: The leading ladies of Snyder’s latest are nothing more than cinematic figures of enslavement. … Instead of empowering their female brethren, the women of Sucker Punch work as warriors protecting the male gaze and male authority. (Bartyzel 2011)

However, I also argue that Sucker Punch (and much of cinematic steampunk) can tentatively be used to consider a more complex reading of the ways in

Figure 4.6  Sucker Punch (2011), [Film] Dir. Zack Snyder. USA: Legendary Pictures.



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which cinema exploits the female form for its own commercial purposes. Just as movements ranging from blaxploitation to pre-code Hollywood have depicted their marginalized subjects in an overwhelmingly sensationalistic manner, they also offer some of the most explicit and subversive commentaries within the mainstream film industry. Likewise, Sucker Punch’s narrative depicts characters who are trapped within an oppressive system from which there is no easy escape (the main protagonist concludes the film lobotomized, captive and under continued threat of sexual abuse), and acts as a damning example of how superfluous the agency of women has become in much of mainstream cinema (and the accepted canons of geek culture). James MacDowell offers an analysis where he describes the film as flawed, yet ultimately, ‘The most consciously feminist action movie Hollywood has ever produced … primarily concerned not to find strong, positive role models, but rather to draw attention to what it sees as intractable problems within gender relations and gender representations’ (MacDowell 2011). However, despite the potential value that may be found in Sucker Punch’s cynicism, the film ultimately exacerbates the very same ideologies that its villains perpetuate; rather than dismantling the cultural limitations it observes, they are ultimately celebrated. The film’s director, Zack Snyder, makes this point himself in one interview, stating that ‘the girls are in a brothel performing for men because men are the audience. … We are the people in the brothel who want the girls to perform for us’ (as quoted in Yamato 2011). Snyder’s comment is troubling for a number of reasons, not least because it presumes the film’s audience is solely male and heterosexual. Yet, whilst Sucker Punch may be complicit with such exploitation – making no attempt to offer a solution to the social concern’s it raises – the film can still be used to engage with much needed debates nevertheless. The same might be said of the (often problematic) luminaries that Mike Perschon argues exemplify the ‘new forms of femininity’ that inspired the literary works of steampunk authors such as Gail Carriger: Instead of creating a nineteenth-century suffragette, Carriger has created a character who has … the sort of agency necessary for her to appeal to twentyfirst century readers who are used to female protagonists portrayed by Sigourney Weaver in the Alien film franchise (1979–1997), Sarah Michelle Gellar in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series (1997–2003), or Trinity from The Matrix (1999). (Perschon 2013: 27)

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However, we might similarly note how many of these same celebrated exemplars of agency possess a number of conventions that are bound to pop-culture’s misogynistic tendencies: placed in positions of heightened sexual fetishism where their identities are highly dependent on the voyeuristic perspectives of male characters, the audience and in some cases, those of monstrous villains. Although it is easy to dismiss the seemingly reductive depictions of female protagonists within steampunk cinema, heroines such as Commander Francesca Cook (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow’s primary representative of military authority) and Adèle Blanc-Sec (star of her own eponymous feature) offer representations of femininity that are, like those noted by Perschon, somewhat more complex than those depicted in many of the genre’s films. The same might be said of the number of industrious female child heroes who populate steampunk cinema: alongside the central characters of Spirited Away, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, City of Ember and The Golden Compass, April and the Extraordinary World defines its protagonist as a girlgenius inventor who exits in a world where science never advanced beyond the use of coal and steam. When discussing steampunk’s potential to ‘subvert gender dress codes and allow transformations of style’ (2014: 43), Mary Anne Taylor notes that such potentially altruistic intentions encounter problems when contextualized amongst fixed representations of gender binaries. This is particularly true of a great number of steampunk productions that use their acts of neoVictorian dress-up as opportunities to depict male characters in clothing that is traditionally associative of femininity. Set in an ‘alternative nineteenth-century England’ (Cahill 2010: 6), Stardust, for example, knowingly subverts the rugged and hyper-masculine star image of Robert De Niro through the revelation that his notorious pirate character, Captain Shakespeare, is a crossdresser. The transformative qualities of this figure – seen applying a heart-shaped beauty spot and adorned in a pink dress resplendent in frills – is steeped in self-reflective and satirical tones: ‘Ever tried to get bloodstains out of a silk shirt? Nightmare!’ he exclaims (Stardust, 2007 – see Figure 4.7). Yet, despite the character’s narrative value and heroic virtue, Shakespeare’s representation arguably remains Othered and the subject of humoured distance, afforded only a knowing wink to a potential romantic male partner whilst the heterosexual main protagonists are canonized as King and Queen in the film’s concluding scene. These themes are repeated directly in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, which sees Holmes intrude upon Watson’s honeymoon disguised in lipstick,



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Figure 4.7  Stardust (2007), [Film] Dir. Matthew Vaughn. UK/USA: Paramount Pictures.

eye-shadow and a dress and bonnet. Holmes’s ability to overshadow his partner’s marriage is an explicit component of the film’s narrative, used frequently to foreground the franchise’s homoerotic sensibilities (a bare-chested Holmes binds his legs around Watson as they tussle on the ground, eventually lying beside each other as if in post-coital exhaustion). Still, like Shakespeare, this relationship is never explored explicitly, with Holmes’s transformation acting primarily as a humorous distraction and both characters positioned with female romantic partners nevertheless. Wild Wild West uses two separate occasions to transform its lead male characters through drag-acts during its running time, the first of which sees inventor Artemus Gordon use heavy make-ups, prosthetics and a dress to infiltrate a brothel, whilst Jim West later does similarly when dressing up as a belly dancer to slip into the villainous Loveless’s industrial complex. West and Gordon’s experimentations in gender role-play are practices not only of ridicule, but more troublingly, specifically serve the purpose of fooling unknowing men who are unaware of their gendered identities. Other examples in the steampunk genre include The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which features a lead character forced to wear women’s clothing as part of a performance under duress, and The Boxtrolls, whose male villain adopts the female guise as ‘Madame Frou Frou’ (again, an act defined by its absurdity and unquestionably deceptive nature). Whether transphobic, transmisogynistic or a light-hearted and selfreflective desire to draw upon a heritage of music-hall culture, Hollywood steampunk film displays a surprisingly frequent tendency of exploring gender

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ambiguities in its historical alternates, although it would be a fallacy to argue that such representations did so without resorting to comedic reduction. Similar issues present themselves when considering steampunk cinema’s representations of race, as characters who do not fit within the mainstream film industry’s ethnocentric interests are consistently relegated to the background, if appearing on-screen at all. There are, however, some steampunk films that offer notable exceptions to this trend, choosing to represent historical events that evoke struggles for civil rights and self-determination that continue from their past settings to this day. Existing on the peripheries of the steampunk genre, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter uses the American Civil War and abolition of American slavery as its driving narrative force. However, the film’s interests in these issues are primarily used to frame its eponymous hero as a white-saviour figure through acts that can be interpreted as attempting to assuage both national and racial guilt. Rather than reflecting upon the events that led the country’s sixteenth president to issue the emancipation proclamation (or why doing so was considered, by many, such a contentious act) the film is more content to stage kinetic scenes of white salvation; one such example sees Lincoln personally rescue a young Black child from a savage beating, for example. By depicting its vampiric antagonists as the propagators of the slave trade, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter comes close to presenting an interesting generic variation of Southern-Gothicism, especially in its opening and closing narration: ‘History remembers the battle, but forgets the blood’ we are reminded (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, 2012). Yet, despite the value of genre cinema’s ability to reassess historical events through pop-cultural spectacle, the film remains far more interested in the blood-sucking debauchery of these undead rogues than it is does the atrocities perpetuated through its period setting. As a supernatural force of evil, there is little threat of connecting the traders and their profiteering to the moral accountability of contemporary America. Despite its denigrated critical and academic reputation and undoubtedly brash approach to numerous cultural issues, Wild Wild West remains one of the more interesting examples of a steampunk blockbuster approaching the issue of racial representation. As noted previously, Wild Wild West may be considered as particularly memorable for its casting of Will Smith, an African American star, in a role that reorients a character previously occupied by a white performer. A descendant of enslaved peoples who was subsequently raised by Native Americans, Jim West’s struggle to combat the conspiratorial social elite reflects many of the steampunk subculture’s most prominently historically



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revisionist aims. Yet, despite such characterization, it is difficult to claim that Wild Wild West acts as a radical resistance to traditional conventions: as David Magill highlights, ‘The film deals with race mostly through jokes that note the racist stereotypes while misdirecting us from the movie’s liberally racist portrayals’ (2009: 131). The script is repeatedly ordered through irreverent allusions to West’s (and therefore Smith’s) heritage, with examples including Loveless exclaiming at one point ‘Mister West! How nice of you to join us tonight and add colour to these monochromatic proceedings’ (Wild Wild West, 1990). The following exchange sees Gordon attempt to persuade his companion to wear a disguise when infiltrating a high-society gathering of Southern aristocracy: Artemus Gordon: What’s your plan? Capt. James West: I thought I’d go as a government agent who’s going to shoot and kill General Bloodbath McGrath. Artemus Gordon: An armed Negro cowboy costume in a room full of white, Southern, former slave-owners. You’ll win first prize.

(Wild Wild West, 1999) Will Smith himself stated of the film: ‘I’m not sure I ever got completely comfortable with the race thing … the [scene] where I’m standing by a noose really pushes the envelope’ (as quoted in Koltnow 1999). The sequence in question reframes a lynching into an action-escape-scene rife with comedic undertones, as a hangman’s noose is elasticated through the absurdity of steampunk invention so that West can be launched to his freedom. Like Abraham Lincoln, such acts of violence are appropriated into safe environments where the virtues of our protagonists – who embody seemingly contemporary attitudes – are never called into question. Industrially, Smith’s role in Wild Wild West reflects the broader trend in millennial Hollywood that saw his image as both hip-hop star and actor commodified as a ‘containment structure of black hipness coded onto normative white standards of masculinity’ (Magill 2009: 120). Such associations are asserted in language used by Wild Wild West’s director, Barry Sonnenfeld, himself: ‘I wanted to do something hip and cool and Will would make this movie hip and cool’ (as quoted in Koltnow 1999). Yet, whilst Wild Wild West’s confrontation with a noose may seem crude, the film does have historically transgressive value, as both a signifier of the power that Smith’s presence would command at the box-office and also a means to confront a predominantly white historical mythos of the American west.

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Similarly encountering representations of Black identity through its historically dislocated identity is the steampunk satire Iron Sky. Through the genre’s typical irreverence, Christopher Kirby plays the film’s protagonist, an African American model named James Washington who is chosen by the farright president of the United States to lead a new Moon landing in the year 2018. Reflecting the antagonist’s political exploitation of race for her own jingoistic purposes, the film revels in the role that Washington’s identity has come to play in the fictional president’s re-election campaign: depicting a staged publicity tour for the mission with posters that state ‘Black to the Moon’, for example. Captured on a secret Nazi Lunar outpost and ‘Aryanized’ using an ‘albinizing’ chemical, Washington’s skin pigmentation is bleached and Kirby himself spends the rest of the film in ‘whiteface’ makeup (see Figure 4.8) until reverted in the narrative’s conclusion. This transformation is entirely characteristic of the film’s anarchic, yet potentially troubling, sense of humour: ‘Remember me? The moon spook you turned into a snowflake?’ Washington states when reunited with his Nazi kidnappers (Iron Sky, 2012). The film’s reinforcement of racial stereotypes and fetishistic fixation on Washington as Black archetype is negotiated through its deeply parodic identity and an exploration of a principle character who has been robbed of his racial identity and forced to demean himself within a culture of fascism. In a scene that embodies popular culture’s simultaneous ability to both subvert and reassert ethnocentric ideologies, Iron Sky uses the historically dislocated nature of steampunk to depict a group of Nazis recoiling from an

Figure 4.8  Iron Sky (2012), [Film] Dir. Timo Vuorensola. Finland/Australia/Germany: Energia Productions.



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interracial kiss between Washington and his white romantic partner. After their embrace, the heroes scoff at how much the temporally displaced villains have to change if they are to understand twenty-first-century culture. Although such a statement might seem to distance the evils of the film’s period-antagonists from the apparent virtues of contemporary society, Iron Sky’s otherwise deeply satirical depiction of America’s modern political landscape also highlights how unaccepting both steampunk cinema and the mainstream film industry are of biracial romance. The 2002 adaptation of The Time Machine is another steampunk production that depicts its lead protagonists within a mixed-race relationship; in this case, using a transformation of attitudes to race between the nineteenth and twentyfirst centuries to underscore its identity. Confronted with the explicit themes of societal degeneracy, Darwinism and the eugenic pride evident within its literary source, the millennial adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel racially recasts a number of its characters to explore social attitudes that have shifted since the book’s publication in 1895. Reworking a morality tale that saw its author remind his turn-of-the-century readership of their responsibility to uphold both racial and societal responsibilities, this contemporary retelling takes on new meaning through its depiction of humanity’s evolution into two distinct races. In both narratives, the Victorian protagonist travels to a future populated by the passive and primitive Eloi and the savage cave-dwelling Morlocks: the helpless former race acting as the prey of the latter. However, whilst George Pal’s 1960 adaptation visually represented the Eloi as an Aryan race defined by blue eyes and blonde hair, the 2002 film represents them through a mix of indigenous performers of Asian, African and South American descent. Similarly, whilst all variations depict the Morlocks as primitive cannibalistic monsters, the millennial adaptation invents a new sub-species of Uber-Morlocks as the primary villains. Played by Jeremy Irons, the leader of this race is depicted as a mechanically proficient intellectual who desires to enslave the Eloi, visualized with a deathly white complexion and peroxide-blonde hair. In an attempt to align The Time Machine’s narrative with modern sensibilities, the racial inversion of the Eloi and Morlock transforms a cautionary tale of social degeneration (that we should not regress into either race) into one that places criticism of extreme social hierarchies at its centre (one race should not enslave the other). Yet, this representation of race and class brings its own concerns with it. As well as troublingly blending numerous racial identities into a single amalgamated ethnicity, the film depicts the Eloi as an ethnically

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indigenous race who are defined by passivity and must be saved by the agency of the white protagonist. Similarly, due to the film’s blockbuster sensibilities, the 2002 adaptation sees its time traveler completely exterminate the Morlock race in an act of genocide. By distinguishing both races through binary oppositions of good and evil, this twenty-first-century narrative drastically departs from Well’s utilization of the Morlock’s animalism and the Eloi’s passivity to reflect the internal struggle of one single race. The film’s positioning of marginalized communities with the oppressed Eloi heroes is further undermined by their representation as ‘noble savages’ who use the English language as an intellectual curiosity and adopt a social structure that can be reshaped by the Caucasian lead. Like many Hollywood productions, the Eloi’s non-industrial way of life offers a natural utopia that its urban white male hero can find acceptance within. Whilst it might seem easy to claim that steampunk’s cinematic texts do not exhibit the progressive tendencies of their comparative subculture, I do not believe it is fair to dismiss them entirely. Rather than ignoring or whitewashing issues of representation and identity, many of the genre’s key films directly confront such discourses, actively re-examining and realigning conventional perceptions of historical canonicity. Whilst I have problematized many of the representations within these oft-described ‘low cultural’ and commercialized products, I would also assert that the same could often be done of numerous texts that have been canonized and held as exemplars of both seemingly righteous and ‘high-cultural’ standards. It remains my belief that many of the most subversive and valuable debates encountered in cinema often come from the most unlikely (and oft-described ‘low cultural’) sources and should be dismissed only by those unwilling to test the parameters of their own ideologies. To conclude this chapter, I will now examine a debate that brings these questions of social representation full circle to steampunk’s inherent interest in anachronistic technologies: that of posthumanism and the steampunk cyborg.

Mechanical bodies and electric souls: Assembling the steampunk cyborg Although steampunk cinema’s representations of identity are often enacted through period detail and historical excess, its close relationship to the science fiction genre has led to the creation of numerous cyborg characters that are defined by the intense and intimate convergence of user and machine.



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Reconstructed from wrought iron and clockwork rather than the steel and chrome panelling depicted in films such as The Terminator (1984) and RoboCop (1987), steampunk’s cyborgs are nevertheless used to similarly explore narratives where the divides that separate humanity and device have broken down. As with the genre’s depiction of technological progress, the steampunk cyborg has been used for a variety of narrative purposes, both heroic and villainous. For example, both Treasure Planet and Steamboy depend not only upon their marriage of traditional animation and CGI to depict technological change but also upon strikingly similar narrative conflicts that arise from characters who have been bodily restructured by industrial developments (see Figures 4.9 and 4.10). Dividing representations of its cast using separate animative techniques, Treasure Planet’s Long John Silver plays the role of an antagonist who finds his mechanical appendages (an arm, leg and parts of his face) computer generated whilst his flesh remains rendered (as with his human shipmates) by hand. Steamboy’s villain, Edward Steam, similarly finds the very same body parts replaced with technological implants: a transformation enabled through an accident caused by avarice for scientific knowledge in place of Silver’s desire for monetary wealth and fortune. Both characters represent a loss of humanity brought forth by sin: the price paid when the ‘relationship between man and machine becomes unbalanced’ (Blair 2010: 197). Named after the respective ‘treasures’ that have led to their fall from grace, Steam and Silver’s disfigurements place them in stark opposition to the physical purity of the protagonists that they both act as father figures for. The young heroes of Treasure Planet and Steamboy are undoubtedly proficient with machines, yet the unchanged status of their bodies remains representative of distance between tool and user. Their biological ‘innocence’ is showcased through their use of spectacular and anachronistic flying machines: a mastery of body and device that offers a counterpoint to their antagonists’ industrial corruption. Despite the nefarious roles that they play in their respective narratives, both Steam and Silver ultimately choose to rescue their protégés rather than claim their bounty when presented with the choice in their films’ conclusions. Despite their seemingly monstrous transformations, both cyborgs are able to readdress their physical mutations and find a degree of salvation by readopting humanistic values. Their physical Otherness is not quite so vile that they cannot be considered of social or familial worth. It is, however, worth noting that Steamboy and Treasure Planet still depict their ‘malformed’ characters as individuals in need of redemption all the same. Furthermore, until the project was cancelled,

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Figure 4.9  Steamboy (2004), [Film] Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo. Japan: Toho.

Figure 4.10  Treasure Planet (2002), [Film] Dir. Ron Clements and John Musker. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.



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Treasure Planet’s prospective sequel was due to feature a far more reprehensible antagonist who was fully cybernetic, having replaced all of his original human body parts with mechanical replacements to represent a further fall from grace (Armstrong 2014). In opposition to negotiated representations of revulsion towards the genre’s cyborg characters, Wild Wild West makes a more dramatic depiction of antagonists that have become physically amalgamated with their own technologies. Troublingly, Loveless’s villainous nature is defined through both the technological and biological deformity that has resulted in disability: a wheelchair bound paraplegic that allowed (as Sally-Anne Huxtable argues) the ‘idea of melding the body with steam or clockwork technology’ to enter the mainstream (2013: 220). Compensating for the loss of his legs, Loveless uses the image of a spider as a symbol of his power (reminding us of his inhumanity), engineering a wheelchair that can sprout eight mechanical legs for him to walk upon. Unlike Silver and Steam, there is no redemption afforded to Wild Wild West’s mechanized antagonists. Alongside Loveless, the film presents a number of villains that are marked through technological modifications: ranging from a surgically attached ear trumpet, an iron stake embedded in a skull and skin that has been grafted with metal and bolts reminiscent of Frankenstein’s Monster. As confederate survivors who have each been wounded in the American Civil War, the film treats these veterans with both disgust and overt voyeurism. Wild Wild West’s interest in the cyborg is particularly reminiscent of the Victorian ‘freak-show’ itself: spectatorial and sexually inquisitive. Connections between steampunk’s depiction of cyborgs and wounded soldiers has a similarly historical precedent identified by Kirstie Blair, who describes a Victorian ballad titled ‘The Steam Arm’ wherein ‘a onearmed Waterloo veteran, beaten by his ‘arrant scold’ of a wife … determines to get even with her by replacing his lost arm with a mechanical steam-powered limb’ (Blair 2010: 196). Just as with West’s unbridled masculinity (characters are seen to stare in fascination at his exposed genitals), the film places an equal focus on the eroticism of its cyborg villains. Loveless defines his own sexual competency at one point, revealing a phallic mechanical piston in full motion whilst crowing that ‘having witnessed my use of mechanology thus far don’t you think I’d devise something for my lower body that was hard-pumping and indefatigably steely?’ (Wild Wild West, 1999). Similarly, when West kicks another Frankensteinian assailant between the legs, he reacts in both horror and disgust upon hearing only a metal clang.

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The tone with which Wild Wild West explores disability and posthuman identity is in keeping with the film’s fetishistic and potentially reductive explorations of sexuality and race. The film’s titillated responses to its neoVictorian ‘freaks’ extend upon fears that Jenny Uglow associates with falling in love with the modern, mechanical Prometheus (1996: 14); similarly, Claudia Springer describes common concerns that, if left unchecked, both technology and sexuality ‘could rampage out of control’ (2005: 75). Steampunk’s generic blend of gothic romanticism and science fiction often leads to representations of technological interest as a form of promiscuity that is reviled and yet simultaneously eroticized. The explicit nature of such sensibilities can be directly noted through the playful titling of such Mills-and-Boon-esque publications as Carnal Machines: Steampunk Erotica (D. L. King 2011), Kidnapped by a Sky Pirate (C. Mistry 2012) and The Airship Captain’s Daughter (S. Del Ray 2012) (amongst a number of others). Questioning the extent that many of the characters considered here are able to represent issues of disability, Kathryn Crowther argues that whilst they ‘feature elaborate devices, these films fail to connect the prosthetic with the concept of disability. Instead the prosthesis stands in symbolically for larger questions about the modern subject’s relationship for technology’ (2016: 81). Crowther’s assessment that these transformations instead reflect ‘augmented power’ (2016: 80) is evident in many of the sexualized representations of machinery that are perpetuated within both genre cinema and society more broadly: as notions of technological power and mastery are framed around masculine identities. Referring to steampunk as a DIY movement, Caroline Sullivan (2008) writes in a Guardian article that the genre’s ‘emphasis on gadgetry explains why so many steampeople are male’: a sweeping statement that utterly fails to account for the huge female and transgender following that has played an enormous role in constructing the movement’s identity. Yet, these are conventions that Hollywood cinema and the genre of science fiction have traditionally found difficulty in overcoming (cf. Jeffords 1993; Doane 2004; Hathaway 2004). Wild Wild West’s repeated associations of scientific advancement with the phallus and male sexual performance are literal manifestations of mass-culture’s more general representation of machinery as ‘outward thrusting’ and ‘violently masculine’ (Napier 2004: 206). The ubiquitously male identities that are applied to the steampunk genre’s cyborgs reflect issues that are thoroughly embedded in the steampunk movement’s representations of gendered craftsmanship, despite the attempts



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of many of its fans to democratize mechanical knowledge and expertise. Jay Strongman, for example, argues that steampunk’s ‘spirit of do-it-yourself ’ extends from the seeming ‘need and desire amongst men to be able to fix and repair things’ (2011: 11/43), whilst Jeff VanderMeer and Susan Chambers claim that the genre’s antecedents similarly acted as celebration of intellectual patriarchy: ‘The boy geniuses of the Edisonade are rich in intellect alone … providing, for white males, an affirmation of a can do attitude’ (2011: 41). With reference to the genre’s cyborgs, it is significant that none of the technological homunculi I consider in this debate, whether heroic or villainous, are female. Susan Cahill applies this reading directly to the 2007 adaptation of Stardust, writing of the opening scenes: ‘It is an overwhelmingly male perspective that we are exposed to … we hear a male voice and see an image of a room filled with nineteenth-century gentlemen scientists’ (2010: 60). Cahill’s recognition of both science and technology’s gendered representations is literalized in many of the masculine bodies featured in steampunk cinema that act as direct analogues of utility and mastery. Alongside Steam, Silver and Loveless, Spirited Away’s Kamaji represents a somewhat more benevolent patriarchal figure in the possession of augmented limbs. Although not technological in nature, Ayumi Suzuki writes that Kamaji’s operation of the bathhouse’s colossal boiler ‘presents him as new machinery that enables minimization of paid employees – not unlike robotics one might see on a production line’ (2009). In counterpoint to the female Yubaba’s matriarchal control of the spirit realm’s social hierarchy, Kamaji’s commitment to his role as caretaker is a relatively explicit celebration of selfsacrifice and seemingly masculinized representations of hard work. Yet, Spirited Away’s nostalgias also foreground concerns that are typical to the cyborg: fears of complete mechanical assimilation and a loss of human individualism. At their most acute, the gear-and-girder machinery that animates the steampunk cyborg take on the conventions of biological structures, creating thematic links between anxieties that were prominent at both ends of the twentieth century: Recent fears about furiously quick, networked technology recall the probably mythical Ned Ludd’s panic over early nineteenth-century Britain. The more we weave machines into our nervous systems, introduce them under our skins, and work inside them; the more nervous we become. (Blackmore 2004: 41)

Although Tim Blackmore does not refer specifically to steampunk when making this assessment, many of the genre’s anachronistic settings can be

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directly identified through their explicit depictions of such technological integration. In Hellboy, for example, the horrors of the Second World War and humanity’s perceived mechanization are brought into focus in the character of Karl Ruprecht Kroenen, a Nazi scientist and assassin whose body is composed primarily of clockwork. Hermetically sealed within a uniform and gasmask, Kroenen’s decayed body is – when revealed – truly monstrous, offering an aesthetic comparison between muscle tissue and motors connected to gears (see Figure 4.11). Yet, despite the obvious terrors inherent in the notion of flesh being subsumed by mechanical apparatus, these potentially grotesque images are also capable of being a source of fascination and beauty. Countering the genre’s many representations of cyborgs as abhorrent monsters that act as cautionary tales of human folly, steampunk films offer many depictions of mechanically Othered bodies that are a source of both misunderstanding and heroic intention. For example, the clockwork automaton featured in Hugo possesses a high level of biological verisimilitude: its internal mechanisms make it appear to possess similar workings to our own bodies, with metal networks taking the place of ligaments and bones. Similarly, Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart uses its late nineteenth-century setting to tell the story of an infant whose death is prevented with the creation of a mechanical heart. Rather than separating Jack from his humanity, this clockwork organ must instead be cared for and treated properly if its owner is to survive. Arguing that steampunk’s mechanical aesthetic encourages engagement with both technological and biological understanding, Rebecca Onion considers the similarity of the genre’s machines to human anatomy as ‘central to the steampunk philosophy’ (2008: 145):

Figure 4.11  Hellboy (2004), [Film] Dir. Guillermo del Toro. USA: Columbia Pictures.



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The moving parts of the machine are analogous to the moving parts of the body, making visible what, in the actual flesh, remains hidden behind a smooth, iPod-like surface. This visibility empowers the human mind, which seeks to be reassured that the functions of the body have a visible, comprehensible … logic of their own. (Onion 2008: 149)

Representing a humanistic desire to understand and master technology, many steampunk films complicate their cyborgs’ inhuman natures by creating narratives where mechanized protagonists heroically seize conscious and willing control over their identities. Whilst the legion of behemoth automatons in Hellboy II: The Golden Army is primarily utilized for villainous purpose, the film’s central theme of human control is used to give both its mechanized and demonic characters redemptive characteristics. The origin of these anachronistic androids is dramatized in an opening scene that takes the form of an elaborate steampunk puppet show: a sequence that establishes the film’s interest in inanimate objects taking on the characteristics of human individuals. Recalling the narrative of Pinocchio, Hellboy’s own internal struggle with self-identification is reflected in the horror with which he reacts to his surrogate father’s description of ‘Howdy Doody’ as a ‘wretched puppet’: ‘He’s not a puppet!’ the young Hellboy responds, ‘Howdy Doody’s real!’ (Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 2008). The film’s final confrontation between hero and antagonist fittingly allows Hellboy to seize control of a magical crown that allows him to become puppeteer of the automatons. Rather than placing value on appearance or the circumstances of birth, both Hellboy films promote humanistic ideals and associate heroism with individualism: ‘What makes a man a man?’ asks the human John Myers when considering his supernatural partner at the conclusion of the first feature, ‘Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don’t think so. It’s the choices he makes’ (Hellboy, 2004). Rather than defined as exclusively villainous or heroic, many of the steampunk genre’s cyborgs can be defined through their relationship to representations of ‘self ’ and ‘control’. As Charles Taylor argues with regards to Hugo, an investigation into animatronic bodies and industrialized identities is often articulated through quintessentially humanistic ideals: ‘a close-up of Hugo peering out at us from behind an enormous clock, establishes that, wherever we travel, we will end in the realm of the human’ (2012: 189). We might consider, for example, how the steampunk genre often reflects a ‘traditional appeal to the heart’ (Milner 2004: 274) through its depiction of characters that must learn to wield technologies

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for the benefit of loved ones. This is explicit in Steamboy’s finale, when Edward Steam’s father states that ‘the heart comes first’ (Steamboy, 2004) in an attempt to guide his cyborg son from his mechanically mercenary motivations. The same narrative cue is repeated in Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart, when the eponymous hero must choose between life and love: his mechanical heart is too fragile to bear the brunt of such an extreme emotion (see Figure 4.12). Yet, as Stefania Forlini argues with respect to steampunk’s unique brand of retro-futurism, ‘Recovering their idealization of mastery risks re-inscribing the values of liberal humanism onto posthumanism’ (2010: 72). Indeed, it is worth paying attention to a number of steampunk films that complicate a perceived celebration of human empowerment by representing individuals who have been transformed more thoroughly into definitively posthuman beings. For example, whilst Murdoch, the hero of Dark City, concludes his adventure by placing his hand upon his breast as a means to highlight his emotional identity, there is little doubt that his quest has utterly redefined his humanity. Gifted with powers that enable an almost Godlike mastery of the alien technologies that surround him, Murdoch possesses a connection to his urban landscape that makes the boundaries between both man and city indistinguishable, a figure who has been completely transformed by his utilization of machines. The same can be said of a number of characters that have their worth defined in opposition to the more sinister and monstrous qualities associated with our species. These mechanically modified figures may be fundamentally inhuman,

Figure 4.12  Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (2013), [Film] Dir. Stéphane Berla and Mathias Malzieu. France: EuropaCorp.



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yet understand the dangerous connotations of associating self-worth and selfidentity upon the human form. The City of Lost Children’s L’Oncle Irvin, for example, is a brain in a jar that uses technological attachments to interact with the world. When Irvin’s grotesque appearance is highlighted, he responds by noting that the villainous Krank’s seemingly human visage does not necessarily mean that he possesses a soul, to which Krank replies: Krank: Because you believe you have one? You don’t even have a body. The one who created us made us all monsters. L’Oncle Irvin: No Krank, you’re wrong. You are the only monster here.

(The City of Lost Children, 1995) Irvin’s statement is reiterated in a number of steampunk films where characters are defined as inhuman, and yet possess valued identities nevertheless. Hellboy II uses a retro-fashioned mechanoid named Johann Krauss to invert its predecessor’s fearful depiction of the cyborg Kroenen’s Otherness. Like Kroenen, Krauss is a German individual who has been radically transformed by machinery, and yet he is instrumental in allowing Hellboy to overcome both his overtly racist characteristics and scepticism for posthuman identities. Whilst Hellboy frequently mocks this new recruit and compares him to Howdy Doody, the puppet of his past, Krauss eventually earns the respect of his teammate and hints at a past romance that defies Hellboy’s expectations of his mechanical nature. There are, however, two steampunk films that develop these representations further still, basing their entire narratives upon worlds where humanity has been replaced by cybernetic and posthuman successors. Casshern’s protagonist is a genetically enhanced soldier that has been reborn into a retro-futuristic post-apocalypse and must combat a group of similarly transfigured cyborgs who claim to be ‘Neo-Sapiens’. Rather than depicting this new race of technologically transformed humans as wholly villainous, Casshern instead represents its antagonists as a societal underclass that prefers to identify with a robot army rather than the species of humans that created them. Like The City of Lost Children, these mechanical homunculi are flawed, unique and physically fallible; a correlation that Diana Pho associates with the steampunk genre itself when she states that ‘steampunk machines are based on imperfections and mortality, two extremely human qualities’ (2013: 188). In Casshern, humanity’s egocentrism and failure to treat its discarded technologies with care undermines the species’ moral standing. The same can be

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said of the post-apocalypse envisioned in 9, which depicts its heroes as mechanical successors to the race of humans that have left their world a wasteland ravaged by war. The film’s scientist narrator (significantly, played by Alan Oppenheimer, a voice-over artist and cousin of J. Robert Oppenheimer – ‘father’ of the atomic bomb) describes the setting succinctly: ‘Our blind pursuit of technology only sped us quicker to our doom’ (9, 2009). Although scientific advances have led humanity to its demise, as with Casshern, 9’s posthuman protagonists (fabric puppets possessing mechanical innards) act as the means for humanity to be redeemed; left with the task of cleaning up and inverting the destruction that has been unleashed. ‘They’ve left us nothing. Nothing’ exclaims Christopher Plumber’s 1 in fury, ‘Why do we have to right their wrongs?’ (9, 2009). Literally stitched together from mixed materials and imbued with spirit and life, 9 offers the most explicit example of the technological Promethean as a protagonist within steampunk cinema, placing value in its heroes as lovingly crafted puppets. Yet, this romanticism of technology is also evident in the large amount of steampunk productions that evoke Mary Shelley’s thematic use of lightning as a symbol of natural power in her literary influence. Heralding the animation of the inanimate body in adaptations of Shelley’s work, the steampunk genre is inundated with images of unchained electricity arcing between Tesla coils and acting as the ‘life-force’ of technology. As will be explored in the following chapter, the genre frequently blends ‘magical’ incomprehension with technical expertise to evoke the wonder of life being brought to inanimate historical objects. Spirited Away’s ghosts can be interpreted not only as the human departed, but Kami of the Shinto religion, the souls of objects and landmarks that might otherwise be considered as ‘inanimate’ or ‘non-sapient’. This is true of a great number of steampunk productions, where both electricity and steam are used to depict energy, life and literal consciousness being transferred into mechanical bodies. As with Casshern’s Neo-Sapiens, the ghosts of Spirited Away and 9’s ‘stitchpunk’ heroes, Tony Vinci argues that the elven race depicted in Hellboy II is representative of a human need to foster ‘interconnective (and potentially intersubjective) relationships with the nonhuman’ (2012: 1044). The specificity of steampunk cinema’s interests in anachronistic technologies highlights the genre’s romance for objects that are (like the subculture itself) ‘as emotionally laden as relationships with people’ (Pagliassotti 2013: 68). Collectively, steampunk texts place a high degree of ideological worth on machines that, like Krauss, 9 and Casshern, act as the receptacles of spirits that are worthy of both



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care and attention. Many of the genre’s films depict relationships to technologies that approach familial surrogation: objects that are treated as being of equal (or even greater value) than those that are biological and ‘human’. I believe that steampunk’s cinematic representations often align with Rebecca Onion’s own observations that the wider movement possesses significance by ‘affording machinery more respect and dignity’ (2008: 147). These representations depict not only the responsibility we have to care for our technological creations but also the identities that have been invested in them. Despite their non-human and thoroughly Othered nature, steampunk’s machines become meaningful not only as objects but also, as I will argue in the following chapter, as vessels for the ghosts of history to persist within contemporary society.

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Clockwork Modernities: Tinkering with Time in a Steampunk Age

Science is not an occult enterprise. It is not for nobles or royals in their palaces or monks in their cathedrals. All the suffering of humanity, the ages of misery and darkness, science can change that. But what use is it if we don’t bring its power to everyone? Mankind everywhere is in desperate need. They are waiting for the blessing of science. The entire world is waiting for the power of Steam Castle! (Steamboy, 2004) Delivered by Steamboy’s Edward Steam, the above monologue encapsulates a great deal of the playful absurdity that the steampunk genre uses when mythologizing an era of colossal change. Edward Steam’s maniacal drive to industrialize the world around him acts as a product of the genre’s representations of the long nineteenth century as a turning point for humanity: the birth of both a modern world and all of the horrors and wonders that are associative of such an age. Rather than recalling a quasi-medieval era of feudal conflict, myth and legend, it is the project of modernity that lies at the centre of steampunk’s uchronia: defined through fantasies driven by urban expansion and scientific innovation. In this penultimate chapter, I will draw together the genre’s technological and historical identities to consider how steampunk’s fin de millennium success is reflective of a mass-cultural desire to readdress and explore modernity’s place in our past, present and future. To begin this investigation, I will examine how steampunk’s anachronistic settings are used to ‘bookend’ a pop-cultural reading of modernity and the processes of social mechanization that have seemingly continued into the twenty-first century. I will also link these debates to the genre’s representations of conflicts where magical impossibilities dramatically collide with scientific reasoning, and argue

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that major studios and film-makers alike have used steampunk as a means to celebrate the perceived wizardry of special effects and cinema’s own history as a form of mechanical prestidigitation. I will then question how steampunk’s counterfactual representations of history align with discussions of modernity’s passage and the means with which the ‘modern’ experience is defined through temporal characteristics. This will involve evaluating the steampunk genre’s relationship to postmodern acts of self-reflection and reminiscence: as a memorial for an age of industry that seems lost to history. However, as well as identifying how steampunk films mark their identities through an ironic and reiterative depiction of modernity that is relegated to the past, I will also consider how the genre can be defined as a call to recognize the impact of modernity’s authority within the twentyfirst century. Having examined how steampunk films can be positioned within both the contexts of modern and postmodern criticism, I will put forward the argument that steampunk (and its impact upon the medium of film) may best be considered through less linear perspectives of modernity. I will, therefore, conclude by examining how steampunk’s patchwork historical constructions carve alternative paths through history, presenting significant value to debates that attempt to understand how a period of temporal upheaval has been ceaselessly ordered and segregated within popular and critical discourse.

Rationality, reason and industrial fantasies The boundaries of modernity are widely contested, yet are most often drawn to mark an age that, following the Reformation and Renaissance (Habermas 1987: 5), would seemingly be driven by the knowledges, innovations and forms of cultural expression that emerged from a new degree of scientific rationalism. As I will consider as this chapter develops, the industrial and cultural associations of modernity are often traced up until the effects of post–Second World War globalization and an emerging plastic economy that would herald the beginning of an apparently ‘post’modern age (Lyotard 1984: 3). Such terms are used to mark not only periods of history but also modes of thought that are associative of such eras: from the aspirational heights of high-modernism to the knowing pastiche of postmodern irreverence. The etymology that surrounds modernity recalls the birth of an age that has defined our own ‘modern’ world, yet is frequently exiled to history as ‘post’ nevertheless.



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Steampunk’s seemingly sporadic and often unpredictable blending of numerous periods gains a sense of cohesion when one notes that the continued focus of the genre’s films lies upon referents that are popularly associated with modernity’s rise and fall. This is particularly true of steampunk cinema’s fixation upon the mid-nineteenth century as an era of industrialization that has become emblematic of both modern progress and new modes of experiencing and understanding the world around us (Harvey 1989: 12). Furthermore, the steampunk movement’s millennial emergence in mass-culture synchronizes with a ‘commonplace’ trend that Linda Hutcheon observed in 1998: a use of the nineteenth century as an analogue for contemporary progress and an interest in mapping our own social, economic and political identities through a century of change (1998: 205). Yet, unravelling its neo-Victorian roots to encompass historical representations that stretch further throughout the long nineteenth century, steampunk’s interests also lie in disrupting the boundaries that seemingly remove us from our historical antecedents. ‘In the course of the nineteenth century’, writes Jürgen Habermas, ‘there emerged … [a] radicalized consciousness of modernity which freed itself from all specific historical ties. … We are, in a way, still the contemporaries of that kind of aesthetic modernity which first appeared in the midst of the nineteenth century’ (1981: 4). In the case of steampunk films, the ‘ubiquitous Victorian sticker with which we plaster everything’ has been used to collate numerous historical periods into spectacular productions that mythologize the birth of our modern world (Catherynne M. Valente quoted in VanderMeer and Chambers 2011: 60). Wild Wild West, as has often been the case, exemplifies the genre’s conventions by drawing together its histories to depict dramatic turning points where nationalized modernities are seemingly born and/or threatened. In Wild Wild West’s case, the villainous Loveless abducts US President Ulysses S. Grant at his officiation of the ‘golden spike’ ceremony at promontory point: an act that disrupts the joining of both the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads. Grant’s attempt to hammer in the last stake of the railroad represents the urbanization of the American frontier and the genesis of its audience’s ‘modern’ landscape in a celebratory and sensational manner typical to the millennial blockbuster. Similarly, the inventor archetypes that populate the steampunk genre are defined not only through their possession of technological proficiency but also as rationalists who are able to use mechanical knowledges that typify ongoing processes of scientific standardization. Significantly, when reimagining

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its eponymous detective through steampunk’s anachronistic sensibilities, Sherlock Holmes pits its hero in direct conflict with Lord Blackwood, a selfproclaimed master-of-the-occult who has seemingly risen from the dead to seize control of the British Empire. In his own requisite evil monologue, Blackwood states that ‘tomorrow at noon, we take the first step towards a new chapter in our history. Magic will lead the way. Once the people of England see our new-found power they’ll bow down in fear. … We will remake the world. Create the future’ (Sherlock Holmes, 2009). However, rather than depending upon black magic, Blackwood utilizes steampunk gadgetry to complete his seemingly impossible acts. Pentagrams give way to technological realignment, and Holmes’s intellect is showcased via the incredible deductive abilities that he uses to uncover machines that would not see widespread use until the twentieth century. The film’s final confrontation acts as the culmination of a conflict between two scientific intellects struggling for power and, in no small measure, ego. Duelling atop an incomplete Tower Bridge in London, the camera sweeps around both Holmes and Blackwood to reveal the skyline of a modernizing cityscape that hangs in the balance below them (see Figure 5.1). The spectacular nature of Holmes’s final battle is repeated in a number of steampunk films that set their finales upon such edifices, including d’Artagnan and Rochefort’s climactic duel atop Notre Dame Cathedral in The Three Musketeers and Steamboy’s repeated use of The Crystal Palace for similar purpose. The latter’s function is particularly prominent in a film focused upon

Figure 5.1  Sherlock Holmes (2009), [Film] Dir. Guy Ritchie. UK/USA: Warner Bros. Pictures.



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the construction of fantastical technologies, as this colossal cast-iron and plateglass structure was built to house The Great Exhibition: an enormous celebration of modern culture, industry and commerce that was attended by members of the Royal family, as well as figures such as Charles Darwin, Lewis Carrol, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens. In Sherlock Holmes, both Holmes and Blackwood are defined by their ability to understand the relationship between modernity and theology. Holmes, it might be argued, is cast in the light of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘modern hero’ ([1846] 1982: 18): kitted out in funereal frock-coat and reflecting the very same gentrified depiction of urban modern life that has made such a great impact on the fashions of the steampunk subculture itself. In Sherlock Holmes’s narrative, Holmes’s investigation into Blackwood’s charlatanism literalizes modernity’s perceived opposition to ‘the irrationalities of myth, religion, [and] superstition’ (Harvey 1989: 12). By affording its twenty-first-century audience the privilege of hindsight with regards to the possibilities of technological development, enjoyment is found in revisiting the fin de siècle optimisms and anxieties of a historical era where the boundaries of magic and science were being redrawn. Shining a light into the darkness of the occult, steampunk’s protagonists are often marked by their pursuit of knowledge, reason and many of the primary tenets that David Harvey attributes to the ‘the modern project’: the desire to use ‘the accumulation of knowledge generated by many individuals working freely and creatively for the pursuit of human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life’ (1989: 12). Mirko M. Hall and Joshua Gunn describe what they term as steampunk’s ‘rule of dis-enchantment’ (2014: 9), wherein the heroic status of the genre’s protagonists is dramatically demonstrated through their ability to reveal the scientific nature of seemingly supernatural acts (citing Sherlock Holmes and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow as examples). Spread throughout the breadth of the genre, such acts of ‘dis-enchantment’ are also evident in Vidocq and Brotherhood of the Wolf, two steampunk films that also feature central characters who are the finest intellects of their age, tasked with rationalizing seemingly impossible events. In the former, historical figure Eugène François Vidocq puts his status as the forefather of modern criminology to use by uncovering crimes committed with an array of fantastical steampunk machinery: chiefly, a nineteenth-century lightning cannon used by a mysterious figure known only as The Alchemist. Similarly, Brotherhood of the Wolf sees late-modern change enacted through the quest of its hero: the biologist and naturalist Grégoire de Fronsac. On the trail

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of a monstrous beast rampaging through eighteenth-century France, Grégoire is motivated by a desire to refute the notion that this terror is a supernatural form of penance for the heretical advancements of science. This rationalization of a fantastical ‘monster’ is also repeated in The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box, when the young protagonist braves confrontation with a demonic guardian only to discover on closer inspection that this seemingly supernatural visage is cast by a giant steampunk drilling machine – the fires of its engines acting as its eyes and maw. Yet, as Peter Childs writes of the fin de siècle cultures that steampunk reiterates, ‘There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair’ (2000: 17). Like the representations of technology that steampunk depends upon, modernity is not exclusively portrayed as virtuous; indeed, the genre’s films are populated by a number of narratives that depict its advance as a threat to our quality of life. The nefarious activities of characters such as The Alchemist, Edward Steam, Dr Arliss Loveless and Lord Blackwood, for example, demonstrate how the antagonists of steampunk cinema are rarely of supernatural origin. Instead, they are predominantly human individuals who champion the advances of modernity for their own purposes (even when casting the illusion of a magical appearance). The steampunk genre’s repeated representations of technological power can be directly attributed to the medium of cinema’s own interests in articulating society’s fearful responses to modernity. Such cultural memories are foundational to Hugo’s own reconstruction of industrial spectacle, as the film directly reiterates mythologized responses to screenings of the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895). Repeating cinema’s legacy as a technology of both wonder and horror, the effect of an unstoppable mechanical juggernaut driving head-long into an unsuspecting audience is recalled through Martin Scorsese’s own arsenal of visual effects: reimagined through the advent of ‘new’ 3D technologies that themselves recall the stereoscopic effects of the medium’s history. Yet, although I have so far focused on steampunk’s representation of modernity from the perspectives of scientific reasoning and secular rationalities, it is a mistake to claim that the genre does not feature events of supernatural origin. The genre may be more often set within industrialized landscapes than it is the magical realms of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth or C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, but it often remains resplendent with numerous characters and objects that can



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be defined through their fantastical characteristics. Vidocq’s deductive skills, for example, offer little explanation for the incredible mask that grants his opponent immortality: a mirrored instrument that allows its wearer to drain the souls of virgins. Indeed, many of the genre’s most direct representations of scientific progress specifically depict conflicts where spiritual and supernatural acts are threatened by both modernity’s advance and the industrial technologies that the genre’s heroes wield. With respect to Stardust and the broader fantasy genre, Martin Rusnak, for example, identifies a narrative ‘retreat of magic’ (Rusnak 2011: 144) that can prominently be traced throughout a number of steampunk films. Hellboy II: The Golden Army repeats this theme particularly clearly, directly dramatizing a conflict between the clinical reasoning of modernity and the ancient wonders of the occult. Both comic book originator Mike Mignola’s interest in Eldritch horrors and director Guillermo del Toro’s fairy tale romances culminate in Hellboy II’s depiction of a war between humans and elves that takes place on a quintessentially steampunk stage. In the film, an elven race acts as representatives for a whole host of whimsical and fantastical creatures that have been uprooted from their homes in the wilderness due to the encroachment of humanity’s industrialization. Left to scavenge and eke out an existence in the underbelly of ever-expanding metropoles, these trolls, nymphs and faeries are positioned as victims of humanity’s modern avarice: defined by Tony Vinci as ‘honourable, sincere, and purposeful’ in opposition to the ‘materialistic, powerhungry, fearful’ and ‘ignorant’ humans (2012: 1045). Yet, despite being represented as violent, wild and an unquestionable threat to modernity, Hellboy II depicts these pre-modern species as a source of fantastical wonder that contemporary rationalism is unjustly extinguishing. This is explicitly addressed in a sequence where Hellboy and his colleagues battle an enormous elemental behemoth that is ravaging the city of New York. However, although the Forest God’s destructive rampage lays waste to all in its path, Hellboy takes little pleasure in vanquishing the beast: ‘This is what you want, isn’t it?’ exclaims the vengeful Eleven Prince, ‘Look at it. The last of its kind. Like you and I. If you destroy it, the world will never see its kind again’ (Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 2008). Cradling a human infant threatened by the elemental, Hellboy chooses to save his city, and yet the price of modernity (and humanity’s survival) is nevertheless depicted as a bitter pill to swallow. Even in the beast’s death, it has the ability to transform the colourless urban streets into a place of beauty and wonder; its corpse engulfs cars, streetlights and pavement

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in vegetation, scattering pollen through the air in a moment of peaceful serenity that the film’s heroes witness in awe. As with many of the genre’s more apocalyptic representations of modernity, such depictions of natural wonder reflect Vivian Sobchack’s assertion that ‘traditionally, America’s spatial mythology has privileged the non-urban and has been, indeed, anti-urban’ (2004a: 80). Alongside both Hellboy films, there are a number of steampunk productions that depict the fantastical and impossible wonders of history coming into conflict with modern industrialism. Stardust, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec all focus upon narratives where the excavation of pre-modern fantasies acts as a central theme. However, it is perhaps the steampunk work of Hayao Miyazaki that articulates these concerns most prominently. Spirited Away’s segregation of both a modern world and spiritual kingdom (populated by ghosts who ‘no longer wish to coexist with humans in this highly industrialized world’ [Suzuki 2009]) can be traced throughout many, if not all, of his films. As Susan Napier observes, Miyazaki’s interests lie in ‘setting up a contrast between a materialistic and deterritorialized modern Japan and a more authentic indigenous Japan’ (2006: 299): a vision of a nation that seemingly still possesses its historical identity and soul. Yet, as with many of the contradictory and multifaceted representations of industrialization that steampunk depends on, the genre’s films rarely depict the divide between technology and magic as absolute. Instead of yearning for a complete abandonment of modernity, steampunk films fetishize an imagined stage of modern industrialization that still seems capable of evoking the perceived supernaturalism of primordial history. For example, despite Hellboy II’s supposedly oppositional segregation of ‘urban’ and ‘natural’ settings, the film complicates its confrontation between past and present through its steampunk qualities. The film’s races of elves and faerie-folk are depicted as mechanically adept users of multiple steampunk devices, leaving the gulf between the elven forests and human cities far from clear-cut. As well as their frequent use of metallurgy and numerous clockwork gizmos, the endangered elven royal family relocate themselves, not to the remaining wilderness, but to a derelict machineworkshop and furnace-room that lies at the border of the human’s cityscape. As well as being representative of the mechanical conquest of the faerie kingdom, these industrial technologies offer a correlation to their struggle as an ‘outdated’ and ‘forgotten’ community. The elf king’s throne is embedded in the pipe-works of a colossal furnace whilst the heat of its port-hole halos and accentuates the monarch’s ethereal and magical identity (as seen in Figure 5.2).



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Figure 5.2  Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), [Film] Dir. Guillermo del Toro. USA/ Germany: Columbia Pictures.

Acting as a sanctuary for this disregarded race, the rusted metals of these industrial machines bear semblance to the earth tones and tree barks of woodlands that have similarly been abandoned. Positioned between both the elven and human realms, the industrial steampunk machines of a past age are represented in a privileged position that is both bound to, and simultaneously separate from, contemporary modernity. Typical of the atavistic production designs associated with del Toro’s oeuvre, Hellboy II exhibits a romanticism not only for the fading wilderness, but for a ‘lost’ representation of modernity that is still capable of exhibiting magical characteristics. The film’s particularly steampunk nostalgias are humourously reflected in a conversation where Hellboy’s partner, Liz Sherman, points out his habit of retaining outdated technologies: Liz Sherman: You have the same album on CD, LP and an 8-track. An 8-track! Hellboy: You can’t listen to Al Green on a CD, you just can’t. Oh, and eight-track was the way to go. One-day mankind will realize its mistake.

(Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 2008) Hellboy’s idiosyncratic preservation of archaic devices reiterates steampunk’s romanticism for an era of modernity that has not yet lost the thrall of magic to the rationalisms of contemporary industry trends. Representing both a threat and means to reclaim our spiritual heritage, the technologies within steampunk films invite us to imagine an age of mechanized modernity that has passed into the realm of nostalgia and is still capable of being informed by the beauty and dangers often attributed to ‘magical’ heirlooms and artefacts.

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Before concluding this section, it is worth turning to Howl’s Moving Castle for another particularly pronounced example of the genre’s interconnected representations of both magic and industry. The self-titled edifice that acts as the film’s centrepiece is a quintessentially steampunk amalgamation of brickwork, cast-iron struts and smoke-belching chimneys; yet, despite the structure’s overtly technological appearance, it is a spirit named Calcifer that keeps it in operation. Inhabiting the castle’s central furnace, this supernatural fire elemental provides the necessary energy to set pistons, gears and mechanical workings to motion. By commingling representations of both supernaturalism and mechanical causality within its machinery, steampunk texts such as Howl’s Moving Castle and Hellboy II (as well as many others) explore alternative modernities where ancient races of elves and spirits are still able to imbue technologies with their magic. The threat of modernity is not technology itself, but processes of globalization, capitalism and cultural homogenization that have seemingly led society to lose its sense of wonder and awe.

Magical machines and the technological occult Blurring the boundaries that lie between mechanical rationalism and the fantasy genre’s appeal to our suspension of disbelief, steampunk films often use modernity as a landscape to explore the nebulous boundaries that order our understanding of the world around us. The genre’s entire identity depends on the double coding of its technologies as mechanical constructions that are utterly impossible and fundamentally out of time. Both the ancient machinery and arcane feats within steampunk film recall science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s frequently cited adage that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ (Clarke 1973: 21). Tempering their representations of scientific and historical actuality with their fantastical characteristics, steampunk technologies foreground their impossibilities so that audiences can acknowledge their fundamentally anachronistic identities. Whether through the creation of clockwork cyborgs or the many dreadnought airships that populate steampunk’s skies, the genre’s scientists distinguish themselves from their populaces by reinventing the parameters that their audiences’ use to rationalize their world: constructing alternative paths of technological reasoning that diverge from our own. Informed by their spectacular visual presence and narrative functions, many steampunk machines



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possess ‘magical’ workings that complicate the generic boundaries that we use to divide science fiction from fantasy. The absurdity of steampunk’s technological designs run counter to our fundamental understandings of causality and efficiency, yet are all the more marvellous for their superfluous natures. Alice Bell, for example, defines the invention of the ‘steamball’ within Steamboy as ‘semi-mystical’ (2009: 16) whilst Tim Blackmore describes the retro-futuristic machines within Dark City as ‘apparently magical’ (2004: 15). Similarly, in Treasure Planet, we understand that a wooden sailing ship does not possess the required characteristics needed for space travel, and yet that knowledge makes the film’s anachronistic flair all the more delightful and intriguing. One of the clearest ways that steampunk cinema conceptualizes scientific advances that seemingly still possess supernatural qualities is through its films’ repeated representation of the mythos of flight. The genre’s narratives frequently set their characters airborne to depict a turning point for modernity’s advancement where a primal human fantasy becomes reality. These aircraft often play a literal narrative role as a deus ex machina, enabling the heroes’ salvation and injecting a dose of exhilaration into the genre’s high-concept action scenes. Like the space-faring protagonists of Treasure Planet, the heroes of films such as Stardust, The Three Musketeers, The Golden Compass, Wild Wild West, Around the World in 80 Days, Steamboy and Howl’s Moving Castle soar upon airships, gliders and steam-powered rockets that differ greatly from our contemporary understandings of the science of flight. With their non-aerodynamic designs and unnecessarily convoluted workings, these machines bear more resemblance to infamous referents of failure than of successful innovation: black-and-white newsreel footage is recalled of multi-story frames collapsing upon themselves, winged-bicycles plunging from ramps and, of course, the Hindenburg swept in flames. As representations of the endeavour and imagination of modernity’s conceptualists, steampunk cinema positions its films’ millennial audiences amongst characters that are reorganizing their understanding of what modern advances have made possible. With reference to steampunk’s sensationalistic characteristics, Cynthia Miller associates the ‘magical’ spectacle of the movement with ‘the rise of technologies of flight … both as response to a collective yearning for magic and magical in its own right, casting scientists and engineers as modern-day magicians’ (2013: 155). Similarly, it is not only machines that take on magical qualities within steampunk films, but also the abilities of their users. This is certainly true of the many steampunk protagonists who coast the divide between sorcerer and

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scientist. The ‘mad’ inventor archetype is expanded and inverted to represent steampunk’s polymaths as veritable ‘techno-mages’ who are capable of constructing impossible machines dreamt off in wild flights of fancy. From the mockery placed upon Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days by London’s scientific elite to the incredulous attempts to dissuade Alexander Hartdegen from his research in The Time Machine, the genre’s characterization of mechanically gifted protagonists is often parsed through obsessive qualities and a wild erraticism that has seemingly little to do with reason. As eccentric proponents of the scientific–fantastic, steampunk’s historically dislocated identity allows its mechanical innovators to achieve extraordinary feats that are as wondrous to nineteenth-century inhabitants as they are to twenty-first-century audiences. Although all steampunk films depict worlds where technological advances seem (through their incredible properties and anachronisms) at least partly indivisible from magic, The Prestige is perhaps the clearest exemplar of the genre’s ability to investigate the interconnectivity of fantasy and reason. As a predominantly neo-Victorian production, The Prestige does not at first present itself within the contexts of the steampunk movement. Telling the story of two rival nineteenth-century stage-magicians, Alfred Borden and Robert Angier, the film’s conventions ally much more closely with the millennial heritage film and period drama than they do the fantastical absurdities of the steampunk blockbuster. Yet, as the narrative develops, The Prestige takes on the characteristics of a science-fantasy when mirroring the confrontation between its lead illusionists with that of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison: ‘wizards’ of an alternative ilk. In an attempt to uncover and mimic a trick that allows Borden to seemingly transport himself instantaneously from one space to another, Angier commissions a machine from Tesla that will allow him to also complete such an act. Described by Ann Heilmann as a ‘quasi-Frankensteinian electrical apparatus’ (2009: 18), the mechanical cabinet constructed by Tesla allows Angier to miraculously create an exact duplicate of himself in another location, and is the only device in the film to be presented as overtly fantastical and deliberately counter to its audience’s expectations of the scientifically (and historically) possible. Witnessing a wonder that is presented as an ‘authentic’ vision of technology’s unbound potential (titled ‘The Real Transported Man’), both Angier’s Victorian spectators and the film’s own twenty-first-century audiences find their expectations shattered by the machine’s ability to relocate a human body with seemingly no performative subterfuge required. As Cynthia Miller and



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A. Bowdoin Van Riper state, ‘The powers [steampunk’s] extraordinary machines exhibit are so far beyond the capabilities of contemporary technology as to seem purely magical’ (2012: 247). The Prestige’s meaning is generated through both the synchronicity and divorcement of its diegetic and non-diegetic audiences’ understandings of scientific rationalism. Whilst Angier’s patrons marvel at an act that is in many ways correlative to the incredible experiments showcased to the turn-of-the-century public, twenty-first-century viewers find Tesla’s technology completely at odds with their understandings of historical accuracy and the generic conventions of the period genre itself. Interestingly, the strong juxtaposition between the film’s relatively plausible historical credibility and an unexpectedly steampunk turn led to a number of critical responses that were both confused and indignant: Roger Ebert described the film as ‘a disappointment – nothing but a trick about a trick’ (2007) whilst R. J. Carter claimed that ‘I love a good science fiction story; just tell me in advance’ (2007), for example. I have already argued that the increased visibility of the steampunk machine’s internal components act as a celebration of technological knowledge and a desire to understand the causality of cogs and pistons whirring and clicking in motion. Similarly, the genre’s preference for ‘physically accessible workings’ over those ‘that hide technology’s inner operation’ (Pagliassotti 2013: 67) also emphasizes the absurd rationalities that allow steampunk devices to produce their fantastical effects. As such, the impossible qualities of H. G. Wells’s adapted time machine, for example, are foregrounded by the exploded view of rotary motion and gilded sprockets that bring it to life on-screen (in both 1960 and 2002 iterations). Represented as wholly the product of scientific processes, yet simultaneously defined as being ‘real magic’ by both the inventor John Cutter and theatrical agent Ackerman, the incredible cabinet in The Prestige acts as an exemplar of the steampunk genre’s visible presentation of interconnected systems that provide utterly impossible results. This is particularly pronounced when Angier invites his period audience to step inside his machine to determine if it is concealing any hidden function. Both diegetic and non-diegetic viewers are invited to marvel at Tesla’s cabinet, stripped of its shell, a mass of uncoiled wires and electrodes laid bare on stage (see Figure 5.3). Like Angier’s performance, the steampunk genre depends upon atavistic devices that are designed to showcase their workings, yet create mechanical causalities that we know are unlikely to lead to such impossible and fantastic effects. The Prestige positions itself in the midst of such discussions, articulated by the technologically minded Cutter when he describes the processes that allow his audiences to approach his own mechanical slight-of-hand:

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Figure 5.3  The Prestige (2006), [Film] Dir. Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures. John Cutter: The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.

(The Prestige, 2007) By highlighting the sense of awe and wonder that can be constructed through the playful disordering of an audience’s technological reasoning, The Prestige’s apparently magical cabinet becomes the film’s most important ‘prop’. It also becomes an allegory for processes of film-making and spectatorship, a fact that underlines yet another reason that steampunk has come to make such a profound impact on the aesthetics of the twenty-first-century blockbuster. ‘In both magic shows and cinema’, Ann Heilmann writes, ‘the audience is aware of the artificiality of the act, yet judge the quality of the performance by its ability to deceive and mystify us’ (2009: 18). As a technology that owes many of its own traditions to Victorian stage magic and the scientific spectacles of the late nineteenth century, cinema possesses a performative heritage that is fundamentally connected to steampunk’s interests. Placing the role of film-maker in the position of conjurer, we might similarly note how steampunk’s technological anachronisms have allowed a unique means for the film industry to foreground the power and wonder of contemporary specialeffects wizardry. The genre’s retro-futuristic nostalgias have not only been used to make digital advances in production more palatable to consumers, but have also played a role in celebrating technologies that are ordered through their



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relationship to modernity: those that can be rationalized, and those that are fundamentally unknowable. The implied transparency and physicality of steampunk’s cogs and gears are often placed in opposition to seemingly ‘magical’ machines that are depicted through the seamless and ‘invisible’ qualities of digital effects. A number of examples of this process can be observed within steampunk cinema, articulated through narratives where protagonists use their own quintessentially steampunk technologies to uncover even more ancient machines. In Atlantis: The Lost Empire, for example, the hero’s boon is ‘the heart of Atlantis’, a mysterious technology that acts as the source of power for a civilization that has survived for thousands of years. As a translucent crystal that possesses no internal workings and instead radiates a powerful blast of incredible light to perform its miracles, this alien tool bears far more semblance to the occult heirlooms of the high-fantasy genre than it does the fundamentally mechanical steampunk gizmos utilized by the protagonist thus far. Yet, as well as representing a force of primordial supernaturalism, the heart of Atlantis can also be read as an analogue for twenty-first-century digital effects that seem equally incredible in comparison to the physical and intricate (albeit anachronistic) workings of steampunk’s gear-and-girder technologies. Mixing traditional animation techniques with its digitized components, Atlantis uses its steampunk identity to encourage its audience to engage with new forms of film-making and animation as a rekindled form of ‘magic’ that can be traced through pre-modern history to Disney’s own cinematic ‘imagineering’. In The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box, the villainous Otto Luger similarly uses his own array of steampunk devices to acquire an ancient technology that, like the heart of Atlantis, radiates unearthly light to perform seemingly impossible tasks. Luger’s antique weapon looks more science-fictional than historical: an energy blaster of sleek gold that is a far cry from the colossal rotating gears, pipeworks and engines that surround his neo-Victorian setting. Like the effects of both Atlantis and The Prestige (with its digitally composed arcing electrodes), The Adventurer’s seemingly magical machine is brought to life through the same millennial technologies that its appearance reflects. Aesthetically opposed to steampunk’s typically anachronistic machinery, these ancient technologies represent not only the nineteenth-century’s mythical past, but the futures that modern audiences now inhabit: neo-Victorian magic has become twenty-firstcentury fact. Applying Don Slater’s understanding of modernity and consumerism to a history of cinematic prestidigitation, Geoff King writes,

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Modernity … [Don Slater suggests] ‘chases magic from the world’ in a project of scientific disenchantment. … The world is reduced to the realm of empirical facts. … For the audience [of eighteenth century scientific demonstrations], such spectacles are experienced as quasi-magical, rather like cinematic special effects. The powers of science and technology appear to be a new form of magic. (King 2000: 56)

The steampunk blockbuster’s celebration of modernity’s mechanical wonders is an apt fit for a medium and industry that has so frequently defined itself as both a product of the industrial revolution and a form of magical spectacle: a ‘cinema of attractions’ (Gunning 1986: 63) defined by scientific wizardry. To conclude this debate, I will turn to a steampunk film that, although not mentioned so far within this study, exemplifies many of the discussions considered in this chapter: Oz the Great and Powerful (2013). Like most steampunk features, Oz the Great and Powerful demonstrates how the genre has been used to repurpose, adapt and reconfigure recognizable properties into prospective franchises. Although a financial success, the film repeated the genre’s tradition of generating a relatively lacklustre reception: Cinema Sight’s Wesley Lovell, for example, scathingly stated that ‘commercialism doesn’t care what greats it diminishes as long as it makes a quick buck’ in reference to its release (2013). Yet, despite this denigrated status, Oz the Great and Powerful exemplifies how the steampunk genre has been used to dramatize the arrival of cinematic technologies as both a scientific and pseudo-magical means of comprehending modernity. Directed by Sam Raimi, and commercially identifiable as a successor to Walt Disney Pictures’s computer-generated/live-action adaptation Alice in Wonderland (2010), Oz the Great and the Powerful uses its steampunk identity to position both director and studio alike as masters of mechanical wizardry. As one of many major features to promote new forms of 3D and digital distribution, this 2013 adaptation echoed the techno-fantastic aesthetic of Disney’s earlier feature Return to Oz to define itself within the steampunk movement, and uses its mixed methods of mechanical production to present the medium of cinema as a technological method of making dreams an industrialized reality. To understand such industrial self-promotion, we can observe the eponymous hero himself: Oscar Diggs, a protagonist who in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) is regarded as the finest and most sensational mage in all the land. Of course, Diggs’s magic is revealed to be fraudulent: he is presented as more of a scientist than sorcerer. Whilst ‘true’ magic is, however, quite common in L. Frank Baum’s fantastical realm – with the villainous



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Wicked Witch of the West proving to be perhaps the most impressive user – it is ultimately Diggs’s humanistic reasoning that allows the heroic Dorothy and her companions to see their quest to its completion. Oz the Great and Powerful acts as a prequel to these events, depicting the origin of this charlatan-magician and drawing upon a particularly steampunk vision of cinema as a mediator between science and magic as it does so: a sensationalistic machine of prestidigitation and obfuscation. Emphasizing the presence of cinematic craftsmanship from its opening moments, Oz depicts its titles through physically constructed signs that are held aloft upon poles amongst sets that resemble those of film’s early history. Repeating and extending its predecessor’s shift from black and white into colour, this 2013 prequel also uses both its 3D technologies and an expansion from a 4:3 ratio to 2:35:1 widescreen to separate the mundanity of Kansas from the magical wonder of Oz. Yet, it is the character of Diggs himself that most clearly draws upon steampunk’s traditions: a figure who uses his turn-of-the-century knowledge of machinery to achieve acts that seem miraculous to the denizens of this fantastical land. Diggs’s technological proficiency makes him paradoxically extraordinary in a world that depends solely on magic, and when the Wicked Witch of the East’s supernatural forces lay siege to the Emerald City, Diggs finds himself having to modernize and industrialize his new home if he is to repel the invading forces. For both the people of Oz and Raimi’s own contemporary audience, technology must be reenchanted and take on the presence of magic itself. Equipping himself with steampunk’s most recognizable accoutrements, Diggs draws down his goggles and sets about industrializing this magical city, putting the population to work in Fordist production lines. The women sew and stitch the bodies for animatronic scarecrows, munchkins construct explosives (‘sulphur rock, nitrate of potash and charcoal’ we are reminded) and the ‘makers’ (the aging intelligentsia) are given the plans to a projector that ‘allows you to project the image into space’: ‘impossible’ one of the makers scoffs (Oz the Great and Powerful, 2013). The result of Diggs’s efforts is the construction of a giant projector that he is able to house himself within. Unmistakably steampunk in origin, this machine utilizes a cornucopia of gears, levers and pulleys that allow Diggs to simultaneously act as projectionist, performer and director, marvelling at the editing tricks and lenses that bring him in and out of focus. Diggs’s contraption mimics and magnifies the imagery of the film’s 1939 predecessor, projecting the showman’s visage upon the backdrop of Emerald City’s skyline: an urban performance of truly metropolitan scale (see Figures 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6).

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Figure 5.4  Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), [Film] Dir. Sam Raimi. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.

Figure 5.5  Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), [Film] Dir. Sam Raimi. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.

Figure 5.6  Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), [Film] Dir. Sam Raimi. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.



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Diggs’s spectacular show of technological force is unquestionably designed to draw upon memories of both cinematic production and the textual qualities of the film’s predecessor. Both Disney and Raimi, as studio and auteur, use steampunk conventions to remind audiences of the power of their performances and legitimize new technological advances by drawing upon the canonized mythology of their origins. Emblematic of the role that steampunk has come to play in twenty-first-century cinema, Oz the Great and Powerful embodies a prolific romanticism within both the genre and industry for historical theatrics reimagined through blockbusters that similarly demand technological upheaval for the creation of their extravagant spectacles. Writing of Karel Zeman, a film-maker whose science-fictional adaptations act as precursors of the steampunk movement, John C. Tibbetts states that the director ‘envisioned the film apparatus itself as a kind of steampunk machine, whose mechanism of intermittent movements, interlocking cogs, gears, and escapement, transforms through the agency of light and chemistry Verne’s printed page into celluloid fantasies that move and dream’ (2013: 126). Tibbett’s portrait of Zeman as a steampunk tinkerer and incredible illusionist bears remarkable similarities to the representations of Georges Méliès offered within Hugo, a film that, like Oz, uses the anachronistic conventions of its genre to position cinematic technologies as a meeting point between modern invention and the wonders of magic. As Brigitte Peucker writes of cinema’s early history, ‘Méliès presents himself repeatedly as a conjurer or illusionist, often in conjunction with machinery of various kinds, thus drawing attention to a need to situate himself within the spheres of technology and imagination that together define cinema’ (1995: 21). Similarly, when describing cinema’s founders, Niepce, Maybridge, Leroy, Joly, Demeny and Lumière as ‘do-it-yourself men … ingenious industrialists’ ([1946] 2004: 17–18), André Bazin poetically stated that ‘thus the myth of Icarus had to wait on the internal combustion engine before descending from the platonic heavens. One could say the same about the myth of cinema’ ([1946] 2004: 22). It is my assertion that within conglomerate Hollywood, steampunk has repeatedly afforded a means for studios to utilize their audience’s understanding of film history to legitimize their contemporary endeavours. In examples such as The Prestige and Oz the Great and the Powerful, the genre’s impact is acute and unmistakable, yet the fantastical properties of steampunk’s imagined age of industry embed these ideals throughout the breadth of its productions. We might note that when the fictional Diggs discusses his own dreams and aspirations

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in his film’s opening, he activates a zoetrope, casting the image of a dancing elephant upon the walls that surround him. It is the technological mythology of cinema that is recalled when he states: ‘I want to be Harry Houdini and Thomas Edison all rolled into one’ (Oz the Great and Powerful, 2013). As well as drawing attention to the ‘glaring historical ignorance’ (2014: 13) of Diggs’s idealistic description of Edison as a ‘great man’ and bastion of imaginative ingenuity, Mirko M. Hall and Joshua Gunn reassert the inexorable connection that binds both the film industry and steampunk’s histories: ‘the cinema is a Fetish Machine par-excellence’, they write, ‘generating an experience that we know is the product of a complex, technically administered mode of production that still has the power to enchant us and make “the impossible” real’ (2014: 14). From the perspective of both past and present, steampunk’s wondrous machines reflect the cultural mystique that surrounds a technology of sound and vision that has been used to package our dreams and sell them back to us on an industrial scale. Yet, steampunk cinema’s representations of modernity go beyond its explorations of mechanical rationalisms and impossibilities. As I will now demonstrate, the historical irreverence of steampunk films can be used to test the very definitions of modernity itself, and the extraordinarily diffuse methods that have been used to separate our understanding of the past from the present.

Postmodernity and the new real From the point of the term’s conception in 1863, poet and writer Charles Baudelaire used modernity as a means to describe the ‘transitory’, ‘fugitive’ and ‘contingent’ elements of cultural production that signal change and impermanence rather than continuity and eternity ([1863] 2004: 40). To discuss how steampunk cinema represents modernity as an era of industrial and cultural change, the complex qualities of its passage and potential abandonment – in addition to its birth – must similarly be considered. Just as steampunk’s historical and technological referents draw together a number of signifiers to mythologize modernity’s nebulous origins, so too do they reflect the hugely contended status of modernity’s perceived end and postmodernity’s beginnings. Although a number of theorists have positioned postmodernity’s origins as far back as the seventeenth century and compared its development to the Victorian age itself, its popular associations as ‘a phenomenon of the 1960s and



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thereafter’ (Wright 1997: 82) ally it closely with steampunk’s generic interests. Used as a means to chronicle the rise of a ‘contemporary’ landscape informed by the ‘technological prerequisites’ forged within the Second World War and the emergence of late capitalism (Jameson 1991: xx), the steampunk genre might best be defined as a quintessentially postmodern means of recalling (and in many ways, anachronistically undermining) a past age of modernity. It is my assertion that steampunk’s cultural relevance becomes clearest when considered alongside such debates: as a means to organize distinctions between the way things ‘were’ and the way things are ‘now’. As with modernity, however, a postmodern world is defined not only through its perceived historical boundaries but also through a number of attitudes that are seen to characterize the particular ideologies of the era. The steampunk genre is informed by the post-classical forms of film-making that emerged alongside the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster: ‘practices of interpolation, intertextuality and hybridisation that typifies postmodernism, gesturing towards the mash-up practices heralded by the advent of new media’ (Bowler and Cox 2009: 7). Similarly, steampunk cinema exemplifies postmodernism’s apparent ‘impulse to copy’ (Dika 2003: 1) through a fundamentally anachronistic identity that sees historical validity and empirical certainty restructured through its ironic, reiterative and parodic nature. Many of these qualities have been highlighted repeatedly within prior chapters, often with respect to the genre’s denigrated status, as steampunk films borrow the ‘look and feel’ of the past whilst ahistorically recasting it (Dika 2003: 10). Steampunk cinema’s dependence upon nostalgic reminiscence (a ‘defining characteristic of the postmodern age’ [Atia and Davies 2010: 182]) also allows the genre to act as an apt means of considering how our contemporary media landscape reflects upon the half-remembered era that preceded it. Steampunk’s notably postmodern interests shed yet more light on the reasons for the genre’s success within mainstream cinema. Svetlana Boym argues that postmodern popular culture is defined by its use of contemporary technologies and special effects ‘to recreate visions of the past, from the sinking Titanic to dying gladiators and extinct dinosaurs’ (2001: xiv). Steampunk’s continual fetishism for fantastical historical machines acts as an extension of such conventions, as well as tying into major studio interests in capitalizing upon the film industry’s own heritage. As effects-laden productions that adapt past properties whilst attempting to construct new franchises, many of steampunk’s key films can be placed within the steady stream of Hollywood blockbusters that have insistently

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revised action-adventure films, B-features and science fiction serials throughout postmodernity’s history. Described by the BBC’s Neil Smith as a ‘retro-reality’ constructed from the vestiges of ‘Saturday morning serials, monster pictures and WWII adventures’ (2004), Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow acts as one of the clearest exemplars of the steampunk genre’s quintessentially postmodern qualities. Utilizing its ground-breaking technologies (as summarized earlier, the film was amongst the first major productions to be filmed on a digital backlot), Sky Captain’s setting acts as a collage of pop-cultural referents threatened by a scientific megalomaniac armed with retro-futuristic machinery. Whilst some of the film’s references to cinema’s history act as mere allusions, many play a more fundamental role in constructing the film’s diegesis: a screening of The Wizard of Oz acts as the film’s backdrop at one point, for example, whilst another scene sees an alarmed journalist describe a robot invasion of New York through dialogue appropriated from Orson Wells’s radio drama The War of the Worlds (1938). Whilst defined as a ‘new’ release rather than a straight adaptation, little of Sky Captain’s identity seems unfamiliar to the viewer; instead, the film resembles a recycled entity made from conflated and ‘pulped’ pop-cultural references. Sky Captain can be positioned amongst many steampunk productions that similarly stitch together multiple past texts and histories into their postmodern settings (i.e. Stardust, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, Van Helsing and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen amongst others), and sees its reiterative nature take on even more simulacrean characteristics in the casting of its villain. By manipulating past performances of Laurence Olivier, Sky Captain is able to cast the posthumous actor in the role of its antagonist: Dr Totenkopf (a name that itself recalls death, the skull and crossbones, and the Nazi party’s SS division). Using a retro-futuristic form of holographic projection, Totenkopf is able to spread his deadly influence from beyond the grave in a way that parallels both Olivier’s own computer-generated presence and the reiterative fetishisms of Sky Captain itself (see Figure 5.7). Employing la mode retro, steampunk’s muddled historical referents play a role in perpetuating both postmodern culture and also the film industry’s predilection of constructing new identities through processes of allusion, revival and hybridity. The genre’s adapted literary heroes, for example, are not only recast as blockbuster action adventurers but also positioned alongside contemporary star personalities that engage with their own representational baggage. Sean Connery’s past performances as James Bond become as important



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Figure 5.7  Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), [Film] Dir. Kerry Conran. USA: Paramount Pictures.

to understanding Allan Quatermain as an agent of the Empire returned from the cold (or in this case colonial Africa) than recognition of either Alan Moore’s work, or indeed that of H. Rider Haggard. Both Jackie Chan and Steve Coogan’s star identities similarly impact Around the World in 80 Days through the film’s emphasis on martial arts and both actors’ comedic personae. Chan’s role as the valet Passepartout specifically draws on the audience’s understanding of this mimicry, as the character is reinvented as a Chinese imposter named Lau Xing pretending to be a Frenchman for his own ends. Alongside the genre’s highly intertertextual sensibilities, steampunk’s continuous use of ‘postmodern referentiality’ (Bignell 2000: 10) celebrates its construction as a system of borrowed referents and anachronistic histories. Just as 80 Days’s audience is invited to enjoy Lau Xing’s (and Jackie Chan’s) mimicry of the French Passepartout, steampunk films collectively recognize their pasts as a construction of falsities, inauthenticity and, often, explicit lies. Characteristics of pretence and/or deceitfulness are definitive markers of steampunk, as the genre’s pleasures are constructed through its audiences’ navigation of historical and technological fabrications. The subculture’s own interests in acts of role-play that strain credibility are evident in projects such as ‘Boilerplate’, a faux-historical robot conceptualized by Paul Guinan: the centrepiece of a hoax where images of an antiquated android are superimposed onto photographs of Teddy Roosevelt, period boxing matches and numerous world fairs (a website and book chronicled its adventures, whilst it was also optioned for a film by J. J. Abrams). Within cinema we might similarly note that

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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was originally developed to resemble a ‘lost’ production excavated from the 1930s and 1940s (Richards 2015). Obfuscation of the past frequently acts as a narrative cue, observable from the absurd histories offered by Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Hellboy and Iron Sky, to more specific cases where steampunk protagonists are placed in direct conflict with the fabricated worlds that surround them. It is significant that April and the Extraordinary World’s original French title is Avril et le Monde Truqué, a phrase that can be translated not as representing the hero’s world as wondrous, but as a fake and trick: a fabricated reality that its audience can recognize as a corruption and deception. It is also particularly significant that steampunk’s development synchronized with a range of Hollywood productions that presented destabilized views of truth and certainty, allowing steampunk’s industrial nostalgias to position themselves within a greater wave of films that represented historical certainty as an ephemeral concept. These concerns are prominently apparent within Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a film that offers an explicit example of steampunk’s vocalization of postmodernity’s unstable and historically dislocated nature. From the time travel escapades of Time Bandits (1981) to the ontological disorientation of Brazil (1985), Gilliam’s auteured identity is marked by numerous texts that treat both past and present visions of modernity as unstable constructs. Despite being constructed from antiquated technologies that seem opposed to the sterility of contemporary machines and consumerism, the function of Parnassus’s imaginarium is nevertheless explicitly postmodern in nature: an unquestionably ironic and satirical reconstruction of Victorian pageantry. For Gilliam’s contemporary audiences, the theatre’s dreamscapes are depicted as phantasmal computer-generated collages, and for Parnassus’s patrons they act as nebulous and wildly unstable manifestations of their amoral fantasies. Rather than positioned as ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ experiences, both acts of spectatorship draw attention to the mimetic relationship of worlds within worlds and the reconstruction of history-as-performance. The fictive nature of these imagined pasts presents them as highly unreliable environments; the film’s dramatic conclusion sees the imaginarium’s visions collapse and tear apart, as blue-screen backdrops similarly fragment and shatter into nothingness (see Figure 5.8). No matter how much Parnassus and Gilliam may want to reanimate the glories of history, their technological reconstructions are ultimately defined by their wonder rather than stability.



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Figure 5.8  The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), [Film] Dir. Terry Gilliam. UK/Canada/France: Lionsgate.

Whilst the Belle Époque and fin de siècle cultures of the late nineteenth century explored the wonders and horrors of modernity’s ‘new’ possibilities, steampunk’s postmodern status is articulated through characters and settings where ‘newness’ is a truly illusory concept. Like their anachronistic machines, steampunk films are products of recycling that depend on reanimating the past into constructions compiled from historical detritus. They might (most alarmingly) be considered as definitive examples of Fredric Jameson’s warnings of a postmodern perpetuation of, what he termed, ‘the enfeeblement of historicity in our own time’ (1991: 130). Such a reading highlights postmodernism’s supposedly hazardous impact upon cultural production, and underlines the argument that steampunk’s proliferation may reflect a millennial desire for modern certainty, technological tactility and historical legitimacy. As a quintessentially retro-futuristic genre, steampunk might be thought to literalize Jameson’s concern that postmodernism encourages an ‘impoverishment’ of imagination that leads the present to insistently turn to the past when envisioning the future: only able to reiterate, never create (1982: 147–58). Conflating numerous historical ages into inherently nebulous and often highly digitized environments, the visual density of steampunk’s retrofuturistic histories acts as a testament to its postmodern identity. These are concerns that have perpetuated steampunk’s aesthetic construction and also informed narratives that highlight – as author Bruce Sterling argues with respect to the genre – ‘the instability and obsolescence of our times’ (as quoted in VanderMeer and Chambers 2011: 13).

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Dark City, for example, is a film that I have noted a number of times in the context of its steampunk technologies. Yet, by representing a dystopic future where aliens have created a cage for humanity from historical bricolage, its concerns are perhaps clearest when considered as a means to explore postmodernism’s retrofuturistic tendencies. Over the course of the film’s narrative, the heroic amnesiac (and as considered in Chapter 4, eventual posthuman), John Murdoch, is placed in confrontation with both the artificial nature of his world and the fabrication of his personal history. As Mark Bould observes, ‘Postmodern memory is literalised in Dark City when the Strangers gather from a production line the various wallets, watches, and other paraphernalia they need … reducing full lived experiences to a series of clichés that can then be injected as a memory/identity’ (2007: 239). ‘Drawn from disparate eras and architectures, now the thirties, now the forties’ (Higley 2001: 10), Dark City’s disjointed representation of history is used to present modernity as a nightmarish metropolis where the tangibility and authority of history is mourned, and the very concept of a foreseeable future is lost to the past. Like the denizens of Plato’s cave who have little awareness of the world outside, Murdoch’s struggle reflects the illusory qualities that are so common to many of the steampunk genre’s anachronistic landscapes: products of ‘an age’, as Jameson’s accuses, ‘that has forgotten how to think historically’ (1991: vii). However, just as steampunk cinema actively celebrates both nostalgic reminiscence and the digitization of contemporary film-making practices, the genre’s films can similarly be used to contest postmodernity’s frequently maligned status. The genre’s ‘cannibalizing’ of modernity glories in a renewed sense of activity that replicates the steampunk subculture’s own affection for ‘punking’ Victorian artefacts into new forms. Parnassus’s constructions bring his audiences delight, Murdoch’s fictional past acts as the foundation of his posthuman future, and the misremembered landscapes typified in productions such as Around the World in 80 Days promote their fantastically impossible technologies as sensational attractions. Through a number of narratives that promote wonder and imagination in opposition to historical authority, steampunk films explore many of the positive qualities that postmodernism’s more anarchic forms of retrospection afford. The genre acts as a descendant of proto-steampunk works such as Gilliam’s own The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), where misremembered histories and technologies afford fantasist-protagonists an opportunity not only to rail against empirical rationalism, but the authority of history itself.



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Describing neo-Victorianism itself as a ‘sub-genre of postmodernism’, Ann Heilmann writes that, ‘at its most sophisticated’, the movement is ‘self-referential, engaging the reader or audience in a game about its historical veracity and (intra/inter)textuality, and inviting reflections on its metafictional playfulness’ (2009: 18). With specific reference to steampunk, Jeanette Atkinson similarly argues that the movement’s fabricated histories play an active role in challenging ‘traditional representations of history and what constitutes authentic heritage’ (2013: 273). Even though steampunk cinema does not always seem to ally itself with traditional representations of cultural sophistication, the genre’s entire wealth of productions consistently take part within and develop this dialogue: re-evaluating and re-interpreting the past, rather than re-creating it in a utilitarian fashion. Whereas Jameson reflects upon postmodern reiteration as a referential barrier that prevents genuine historical reflection, Marcia Landy argues that postmodern criticism affords ‘a sense of indeterminacy where the boundaries between the real and the imaginary blur. Instead of the monumental hero, the protagonists have become falsifiers, counterfeiters, somnambulists, and even children’ (2009: 46). The ‘silliness’ of steampunk’s mechanical and historical constructions exemplifies the pleasures that the genre’s experimentation and chaotic absurdity afford, as well as the frequency with which child protagonists are depicted fighting against systems of authority enforced by their elders. Whilst existing on the periphery of the steampunk movement, the fantastical and anachronistic methods of manufacturing celebrated by Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium encapsulates the joy with which the genre disrupts the credibility of its industrial histories. When a straight-laced accountant named Harvey Weston is tasked with valuing and ordering the mad-cap Magorium’s toy store, he finds himself aghast at the absurdity of its archives: ‘I need your help explaining this “history” that Mr. Magorium has fabricated’ he states to the shop’s assistant when discovering an IOU written by Thomas Edison. Like Magorium’s emporium and Parnassus’s imaginarium, steampunk cinema displays a negotiated relationship to postmodern consumerism; celebrating contemporary materialism, capitalistic structures and historical anachronism through its generic and industrial identity whilst offering a number of opportunities to remain cautious of the disposability and ephemerality of postmodern excess. Opening with a knowingly saccharine fantasy titled ‘The Littlest Elf ’, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events uses its own self-referential identity to quite literally lambast the vapid sensationalism of

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contemporary media branding. After the cherubic elf happily acknowledges the trademark that winks into existence above his corporate logo, Snicket’s narration warns his viewers that ‘If you wish to see a film about a happy little elf, I’m sure there is still plenty of seating in theatre number two’ (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, 2004). It is not postmodernity’s reiterative or self-reflective nature that is derided, but the empiricism with which our media, culture and technologies are reprocessed, promoted and consumed. With its historical and technological gaze set predominantly upon a period of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial upheaval, the notion of steampunk being a means to sort through and organize the effects of late modernity from the perspective of postmodern thinking is relatively convincing. However, the genre’s representations of the potential values and dangers of postmodern ideologies also act as a direct means of challenging and destabilizing the historical boundaries that have been used to isolate their influence. For example, whilst Vera Dika discusses postmodernity as a means to define ‘generations’ of films that separate the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster from their classical predecessors (‘better understood as copies whose originals are often lost or little known’ [2003: 11]), I argue that steampunk’s insistent conflation of histories encourages an understanding of how postmodern characteristics are drawn throughout the film industry’s entire history. By examining a wealth of historical periods through a pseudo-Victorian aesthetic and adapting so exhaustively from an ongoing history of genre fiction, steampunk encourages us to consider how much (or indeed, how little) the ‘modern’ (or even postmodern) experience can be termed as a singularly linear affair. As Sally-Anne Huxtable notes with specific reference to steampunk, ‘Tinkering with history is not a new thing. For centuries people have imagined or reimagined the past in order to re-form the present and shape the future’ (2013: 228). Just as the Victorians used past Greek and Roman civilizations to reflect upon their own Empire, the out-of-time nature of steampunk’s incredible machines highlights correlations (as well as differences) between our own millennial society and that of the nineteenth century. Steampunk’s mapping of modern advances onto historical settings reminds us that the concerns that define our contemporary identities possess vast histories that are ubiquitous to the human condition. David Baron notes that contemporary concerns of technology’s ‘inauthentic’ status can be drawn through all of human history, from Plato’s assertion that written texts were shadows of their spoken counterparts to Henry David Thoreau’s defamation of



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the speed of the telegraph (2009: x–xi). Under the following heading, I will argue that steampunk’s presentation of late-modern figures as users of incredible, complex technologies allows us to consider the ways that a past machine-age offers correlations with our own: an assertion literalized in Tom Standage’s appropriately titled The Victorian Internet (1998). Instead of exploring how steampunk depicts an era of modernity that is segregated from our own times, I will now consider how the genre draws comparisons between millennial advances and those that shaped the long nineteenth century: signalling a direct continuation of a modern project that is far from being ‘post’.

Industrial renaissance: The persistence of modernity Although steampunk’s retrospective characteristics might seem quintessentially postmodern, the genre’s representations of a past age of industry can also be positioned within the same processes of historical self-actualization that are emblematic of modernity itself. As an epoch used to mark urban existence, modernity is defined in relation to an understanding of time’s passage; relating itself, as Jürgen Habermas states, ‘to the past of antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition from the old to the new’ (1981: 3). As I will now examine, the antiquated technologies that define steampunk cinema are not only reflective of historical industrial production but also signifiers of mechanical processes of standardization that have continued into the twenty-first century. The focus on steam engines and railways found in films such as Wild Wild West and Tai Chi Zero, for example, mythologize the forms of temporal reorganization that more contemporary technologies still have the power to evoke. David Harvey discusses how the seeming ‘annihilation of space and time’ caused by ‘the coming of the railroads’ (2003: 47) became emblematic of modernity and its associative characterizing of urban life as a fleeting experience. Harvey’s observations find parallel not only in steampunk’s tendency to condense time but also in its folding of space, ‘collapsing near and far’ (Miller 2013: 145). Many of steampunk cinema’s more fantastical devices are used to literalize the conflation of both time and geography that technologies such as rail-travel and the telegram facilitated; both the matter-replication and time travel machines featured respectively in The Prestige and The Time Machine, for example, subvert their period identities by transporting their Victorian protagonists through space and time.

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The physicality of steampunk’s clockwork gadgets is similarly indicative of an era of temporal standardization that has only been exacerbated by digital technologies. As Mary Ann Doane argues, ‘At the turn of the century time became palpable … felt – as a weight’ (2009: 77). Possessing body parts replaced by clockwork components, many of the cyborgs considered in chapter four literalize concerns of urban anxiety and the power with which modernity reorganizes our bodily identities: ‘characterized by the impulse to wear time, to append it to the body’ (Doane 2009: 77). Depicting an era of mechanical reproduction defined by corporeal representations of time and clockwork, many steampunk films see their heroes consumed by colossal gears and gigantic timepieces that engulf entire sets. In Hellboy II: The Golden Army’s conclusion, for example, the eponymous protagonist rides and rolls amongst enormous cogs whilst duelling his enemy, whilst Wild Wild West similarly sees its hero make his last stand within the belly of a mechanical leviathan, surrounded by turning gears that threaten to ensnare and trap him. The genre’s mechanical iconography echoes many cinematic memories that underline the role that the medium has played in articulating the pressures of modernity: Safety Last! (1923), Metropolis and Modern Times (1936) all feature well-recognized imagery of humans entwined or enveloped within clockwork constructions. As Ben Singer writes, ‘Social observers in the decades around the turn of the century were fixated on the idea that modernity had brought about a radical increase in nervous stimulation and bodily peril’ (1995: 74). The pressures of living under modernity’s watch acts as a notable fixation of steampunk cinema; the reconstruction of such iconic imagery within masscultural cinema suggests that these late-modern anxieties still reverberate through our contemporary lives. At first glance, steampunk cinema’s pop-cultural reflections of modern standardization seem overwhelming oppressive to human identity. However, as with the genre’s negotiated representations of industrial technologies, the majority of steampunk texts heavily idolize modernity’s key icons and depict protagonists who are empowered rather than dehumanized through their presence. This is particularly notable through the wealth of characters that take up positions of comfort and sanctuary amongst the gears of the colossal clocks that act as their homes. In Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Snicket himself sits within an enormous clock as he provides his narration; its face affords the window through which the author can observe the world



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beneath him (Figure 5.9). The grinding of the gears and ticking of the clock’s hands act as a metronomic accompaniment for the clacking of the keys on the writer’s similarly atavistic typewriter. Another immense timepiece acts as a cradle for the eponymous child-hero in Hugo. As with Snicket, Hugo resides within an enormous clock that (through its ‘whirring gears’ and ‘perpetual flickering light’ [Taylor 2012: 190]) also acts as an analogue for the mechanical processes of cinematic projection. Hugo’s setting affords him an opportunity to take stock of the Parisian metropolis that lies beneath him: a postcard of modern-romanticism that celebrates his position within a greater technological structure (Figure 5.10). Taking pride in his role within the whirring components of societal technologies, Hugo expresses his own virtue via an ability to fix its components and keep its gears in motion: ‘I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine,’ he states. ‘If the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason’ (Hugo, 2011). Whereas Hugo finds a degree of solace in the embrace of modernity, Dark City’s depiction of Murdoch’s posthuman transformation sees the character become a more literal clockwork messiah. Seizing control of a retro-futuristic machine (‘a huge clock, hidden behind a classical Greek mask’ [Blackmore 2004: 27]) that lies at the centre of his film’s metropolitan landscape (Figure 5.11), Murdoch levitates into the air and spreads his arms in mimicry of both a crucifix and, significantly, the clock-hands that lie behind him. The positioning of these heroes within clockwork mechanisms reflects steampunk’s interest in representing time as a manageable entity: a product of modernity that affords the ability to control, comprehend and perhaps even re-sequence its motion entirely. In previous debates, I have considered how the steampunk genre romanticizes and reassesses industrial advances that are typically evocative of natural destruction and the decimation of national spiritualities; yet, fetishism is also found in representations of cities as urban labyrinths and machines that engender modernity. Even when depicted as smog-laden and technocratic landscapes, steampunk finds itself at the heart of what Neil Gerlach and Sheryl Hamilton argue is a millennial tend of ‘rethinking the metropolis in both popular culture and social theory … reconsidering urban squalor as a site of productivity as well as oppression’ (2004: 115). Although the cities depicted in films such as The City of Lost Children, City of Ember Steamboy, Dark City and Perfect Creature are rife with class segregation and even poverty, they also evoke wonder and beauty nevertheless. The opulence

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Figure 5.9  Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), [Film] Dir. Brad Silberling. USA: Paramount Pictures.

Figure 5.10  Hugo (2011), [Film] Dir. Martin Scorsese. USA: Paramount Pictures.

Figure 5.11  Dark City (1998), [Film] Dir. Alex Proyas. USA: New Line Cinema.



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of imperial airships and skyscraper-fortresses may often act as the dwelling of antagonists, but the value of their magnificence is without question. The same might be said of the cities’ lower levels, where winding streets and subterranean tunnels are engulfed by refuse, cacophonic noise and ceaseless movement: but nevertheless act as spaces of intense fascination. In The City of Lost Children, urban modernity has led to a life on the streets that is hard and ruthless for its protagonists, yet is also a hive of sensation that houses the oppressed, freakish and orphaned. Similarly, whilst Hellboy II’s elven royalty take shelter in a machine-workshop, the mythological traders and black-marketeers find refuge in a ‘troll market’ that is utterly urban despite the supernatural origins of its denizens. Opting for alleys, stalls and cobbled streets rather than the expanse of the wilderness, the social mechanics of the crowded market is celebrated through the words ‘Unus Mundus’ written above its entrance: the term that Carl Jung connected to his theory of the ‘collective unconscious’ and the manner through which individuals are seemingly connected – and will return – to all that has come before them. It is a dark, yet romanticized view of urban modernity that is common to the steampunk genre, founded in the dichotomies typical of both gothic and science-fictional dystopias, where responses of both wonder and horror find themselves entwined. Collectively, the genre mirrors Charles Baudelaire’s own interest in discussing the sublime nature of urban existence; ‘the life of our city is rich in poetic and marvellous subjects’, he wrote in the mid-nineteenth century. ‘We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvellous’ ([1846] 1982: 18). Whilst many of the cities depicted in steampunk’s alternative histories are fictitious constructions (such as the metropolitan namesakes of Dark City and The City of Lost Children), it is notable that the genre so often finds itself set within Paris: a location that has frequently been defined as ‘a capital of ambivalent modernity’ that is perceived to embrace ‘the impurities of modern life’ (Boym 2001: 23). As a geographical centrepiece featured in an extraordinary range of steampunk films (for example, Hugo, Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Three Musketeers, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec, Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart, Around the World in 80 Days, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and April and the Extraordinary World), both Paris and, more specifically, the Eiffel Tower have become prolific emblems of steampunk cinema’s interest in exploring the impact of modernity. Texts such as David Harvey’s Paris, Capital of Modernity (2003) remind us of the

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strong associations that bind the city to representations of modern life within contemporary culture, whilst the fierce historical contention that surrounded the Eiffel Tower’s erection foregrounds criticisms of modern advancement that also lie at steampunk’s centre. Unlike Martin Scorsese’s romanticized postcard of French history, for example, the Eiffel Tower’s construction was met by fierce objection from many key figures within France’s arts establishments who believed this urban icon was culturally degenerative and emblematic of industrial dehumanization. Agnes Rocamora recalls statements that condemned the ‘wild … mercantile imaginations of a machine builder, who had produced a structure that was useless and monstrous, a threat to art and … French history’ (2009: 155). It is particularly worth noting that April and the Extraordinary World marks its history as ‘alternate’ through the fact that its Parisian skyline is dominated by two Eiffel Towers rather than one, keying audiences into a narrative where modernity’s hallmark industries and technologies still order its world. Discussing the work of Jacques Tardi (the artist and writer whose comic albums are adapted with The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec) Michael Cuntz describes the Parisian setting as a ‘colonial metropolis’ that possesses ‘horrible, bizarre and fantastic secrets hiding in the underground, in secret caves, tunnels and subterranean activities are linked to creatures or idols from the past’ (2010: 107). Cuntz’s contention that ‘there is a vertical dimension’ to the city (2010: 107) exemplifies how steampunk presents a vision of contemporary urban life that can be used to actively excavate the past if one is to burrow deep enough. The marvellous connotations of the metropolis possess not only a richness that is defined by the hubbub of the present but also a sense of historical depth through the collected urban refuse of past eras. It is here that I contend steampunk’s most unique and intriguing representations of modernity can be encountered. This is a reading of steampunk’s reflection and enactment of modern bricolage; allowing the movement and genre to create new technologies and identities from the wreckage of a prior generation. Instead of postmodernity’s ephemeral depictions of modernity, many of steampunk’s most ubiquitous icons are defined by their hands-on approach to historical referents that can be re-engineered into new and contemporary forms. The aptly named Baudelaire children in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, for example, act as exemplars of steampunk bricoleurs. The young siblings’ story begins with them picking through the ashes of their family home, yet the macabre tragedy of their situation is tempered by their skill in reorganizing the



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surrounding rubble into objects that will prove essential for their survival. ‘In a world of abandoned items and disregarded materials’, states Snicket in the films’ opening, ‘Violet knew there was always something’ (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, 2004). The inventiveness with which the Baudelaire children construct their futures from a wasteland of late-modern rubble exemplifies the heroic representations of bricolage that Claude Lévi-Strauss applied to patterns of mythological thought: The bricoleur is adept at performing a number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with whatever is at hand. (Lévi-Strauss [1962] 2004: 17)

The steampunk genre defines itself through the qualities that Lévi-Strauss outlines in the above quote, celebrating the ingenuity of characters who work with limited materials to ‘make do’ with the refuge that has been inherited from a past industrial era. Rather than a postmodern world that no longer produces and only communicates in past allusions, steampunk’s more apocalyptic characteristics instead offer startling depictions of a continued modernity that sees society drowning in the ceaseless refuse of cultural and industrial production. This a vision of materiality that has suffocated our modern era; the genre’s most celebrated heroes are, therefore, those who possess the ability to navigate and excavate this wreckage. As well as depicting their urban settings as devoid of natural foliage and light, steampunk productions such as The City of Lost Children, Perfect Creature, Dark City, City of Ember and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus all visualize their characters wading through environments that are littered with the waste of materialistic production. Considering the extent that modernity has been associated with both object-worship and modern materialism, it is not surprising that so many authors associated with the era (e.g. Fyodor Dostoevsky and T. S. Eliot) have helped canonize its development as pseudo-apocalyptic in nature. The vision of wreckage and decayed spiritualities in Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), in particular, is often termed a quintessentially modernist exploration of ‘an urban and imperial apocalypse’ (Bloom 2007: 45). However, although steampunk cinema undoubtedly can be positioned amongst the craft-orientated politics of anti-modernism, the genre’s depictions of civilizations that are

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swamped by the wreckage of industrialization remain highly romanticized. Like the Baudelaire children sifting through the rubble of their family home, one of steampunk’s most intriguing projects is its celebration of ‘junk-yard’ modernity, where the city’s detritus provides the materials required for the genre’s ‘making’. This is particularly clear in both 9 and The Boxtrolls – two animated steampunk films that depict groups of small non-human protagonists that are scavengers, builders and engineers. Relocated into respectively post-apocalyptic and neoVictorian settings, both features expand upon the dumpster-diving antics of children’s characters The Wombles to use discarded waste to craft wondrous machines. The wreckage of modern production acts as a treasure-trove for resourceful characters in need of parts that might otherwise be cast away and disposed of. As seen in Figure 5.12, The Boxtrolls are creative bricoleurs whose stop-motion appearance and cacophonic habitats invest a sense of value in modernity’s trash; a society of hoarders that, in a turn typical to the genre, finds an enormous clockwork edifice stood at its centre. Similarly, The City of Lost Children features a deep-sea diver who survives by collecting the refuse of his industrial over-world, whilst many other steampunk films (such as City of Ember) feature societies equivalently crowded by clutter that its heroes are able to put to good use. The appeal of steampunk cinema’s scrap-yard aesthetic is exacerbated by its ‘cobbled together’ production design. As well as showcasing machines that appear to be constructed from various mismatched parts, the films’ sets are also often littered with piles of forgotten objects. The genre’s practice of trawling

Figure 5.12  The Boxtrolls (2014), [Film] Dir. Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi. USA: Focus Features.



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through the industrial detritus of history can be read as a means of engaging with modernity’s physical, and perhaps dormant, status within contemporary life: remnants of the ‘functional laws of economy and state, technology and science’ that Jürgen Habermas argues we have inherited from a previous century (1987: 3). Rather than relegating the modern project to the past, steampunk’s retrofuturistic principles encourage a reading of modernity that questions whether its antiquated machines might be reignited or still possess ‘any power left to inform and inspire contemporary thought and action’ (Harvey 1989: 13). Just as Habermas questions modernity’s typically denigrated status (cf. 1983) and both Lois Cuddy and David Hirsch consider how Eliot’s wasteland may act as a less contemptuous criticism of urban life than is popularly considered (cf. 1991), steampunk’s reflections of ‘modern’ detritus is multifaceted and incorporates responses of both wonder and fear. Marrying anti-modernist philosophies of recycling and environmentalism with its interests in both consumer-style and trans-media dissemination, bricolage becomes an apt means to consider how steampunk’s identity has been salvaged from a number of previous cultural constructs. As explored by Dick Hebdige, subcultures (similarly to genres) do not possess isolated forms and are constructed through the accumulation of numerous antecedents (1979: 102). ‘If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined’, writes Jacques Derrida, ‘it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur’ (1967: 360). The allegory of modern bricolage that I offer here is intended to highlight not only the ways in which steampunk’s narrative and aesthetic focus lies upon technological detritus and reformulation but also the processes through which the genre is itself constructed from prior textual identities. Recalling associations of Eliot’s own modernist wasteland where ‘all the bric-a-brac of an exhausted civilization’ is drawn into ‘one giant, foul rag and bone shop’ (Lewis 2007: 131), the steampunk imagination acts as a call to delve into the refuse of modernity that, whether inherited or persistent, still surrounds us. Affectionately referred to as junk-punk by a community of recyclers, artists, makers and writers (and exemplified within a 2015 television series, Steampunk’d, that asked contestants to manufacture objects from recycled parts for a cash prize), steampunk’s culture of bricolage has helped to foster its proliferation as both a movement and genre within a variety of media. In this book’s final evaluation, I will turn to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s description of film-maker Georges Méliès as ‘scientist’ – ‘engineer’ – ‘bricoleur’ ([1962] 2004:

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17) to consider how the film industry itself has constructed its history through the accumulation of industrial detritus over a century of change. Significantly, I will evaluate how cinematic technologies possess many correlations to steampunk’s own distortion of geographical and temporal logic, and argue that both the genre and medium make it increasingly difficult to categorize modern progress through historical definitions. Rather than contend that steampunk cinema is defined by its representations of either modernity or postmodernity, I will conclude by offering a perspective that considers how the genre’s alternative histories afford an opportunity to complicate the notion of modernity’s passage as a strictly linear affair.

Beyond space and time: Exploring alternative modernities Throughout this chapter, I have evaluated steampunk cinema through a variety of terms that are often traditionally considered to be diametrically separated; yet, I contend that the cultural pertinence of the genre’s films is indebted to their simultaneous celebration and criticism of numerous modern, anti-modern and postmodern perspectives. In this final debate, I will explore how steampunk’s dislocated histories can most clearly be explored through Jean-François Lyotard’s claim that ‘neither modernity nor so-called postmodernity can be identified and defined as clearly circumscribed historical entities’ (1991: 25). Conflating farreaching representations of modernity and the long nineteenth century into its own amorphous and retro-futuristic identity, steampunk’s vision of Victoriana draws our Anthropocene age from its birth to the present: an era of industrial and technological advancement that has set both society and our environment on a path of potentially irreversible change. However, the onwards march of progress does more than propel us into our future; it links us to the generations who set modernity’s wheels in motion and allows us to consider how all periods in history have defined themselves through the ironic and nostalgic retrospections that we often erroneously claim are fundamentally contemporary phenomena: as Lyotard states, ‘Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’ (Lyotard 1984: 79). Before concluding with an evaluation of steampunk’s pertinence to such debates, I will argue that both our understandings of modernity and the tools that we use to navigate its boundaries are inextricably bound to cinema’s own technological identity. By taking to rail, sky and sea, and even crossing the flow



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of history itself, steampunk characters’ technological conquest of space and time offers an appropriate parallel to the film industry’s role in ordering the modern experience. For Charles Baudelaire, art possessed a responsibility to explore urban life, and the emergence of film as a new medium and technology would see itself inseparably bound to modern industry: a ‘plastic art’ and mechanical process of reproduction (cf. Baudelaire [1846] 1982; Bazin [1945] 2004; Benjamin [1936] 1999). As a ‘new scientific and technical marvel’ (Neale 2000a: 100) that was born from the innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution, cinema’s origins in the late nineteenth century are also linked to the proliferation of populist ‘low cultural’ media that so many of steampunk films and comparative genres owe their production to. As well as the standards of studio-enabled massmanufacturing pioneered by the likes of Thomas Edison, cinema equally owes its heritage to the dissemination of newspaper serials, pulp magazines and penny dreadfuls that was afforded by the steam-driven printing press: a technology that enabled an unprecedented era of literacy, bulk publishing and a new wave of populist genre fiction to reshape modern culture. Opposing the seemingly reiterative and degenerative ‘technological modernisation’ of ‘modern mass-culture’ in comparison to the ‘purity of high art’ (Huyssen 1986: 163), many of the contemporary criticisms directed at steampunk films are foregrounded by concerns that were common to modernist thinkers of the nineteenth century. Like the steampunk genre’s rearrangement of historical periods, cinema’s serial-nature and practices of both editing and trick photography also mark the medium as more than a product of modernity, but as a method of reorganizing its passage. For millennial audiences recalling modernity’s perceived origins, cinema signifies both the beginning of a ‘modern’ way of receiving the world and a technological means through which history can be excavated. The steampunk genre’s interest in collating a period of industrialization is reflected in film’s own identity as a mechanical method of capturing temporal sequences and ordering them over a century of modern development. The proliferation of steampunk in genre cinema coincides with what James Austin describes as a wave of digitally immersed blockbusters that ‘were conceived of and in pre-production in the period between the centennial anniversary of the cinema in 1995 (commemorating the Lumière brothers’ invention of the cinema), and the millennium in 2000’ (2004: 296). The late Victorian era can be read not only as a desirable period of reference for Hollywood’s self-aggrandizing nostalgias but also as a period of modernity that has been concretized and

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preserved within photographic memory. If steampunk can be thought of as a practice of bricolage that draws upon past referents to construct new forms, then cinema might be thought of as the defining archive through which its cultural materials are collated. ‘The modern world almost seems to have begun with the birth of film’, writes Mike Chanan, ‘at any rate in retrospect’ (1980: 16). The preservative abilities of nineteenth-century technologies may (like the steampunk machine) seem archaic to contemporary sensibilities, yet few could deny the power of their persistence; as Alison Landsberg asserts when she writes that ‘modernity makes possible and necessary a new form of public cultural memory … prosthetic memories’ (2004: 2). ‘Photographed and therefore saved from death’ (Thompson 1996: 24), cinema’s industrial identity has afforded a past era of modernity a physical presence that is lost to the generations that preceded it. It is notable that, as Brain J. Robb writes, Hugo ‘brought steampunk cinema and television back to Méliès’ (2012: 123). As well as acting as a central character within Scorsese’s nostalgic celebration of celluloid, a mythologized depiction of Georges Méliès also plays a vital narrative role in Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart; allowing both films to use their steampunk aesthetics to celebrate the gear-and-girder technologies that are associated with cinema’s invention. As argued many times previously in this book, the scientific–fantastic flourishes that have come to define the steampunk genre are simultaneously embedded within the industrial history of film. With regards to the inventions of electrician Robert Paul, Thomas Renzi describes a patent that epitomizes the ties that bind both cinematic technologies with steampunk’s fantastical reorganization of modern life: ‘Rigged with gears and cranks [the machine] could be vibrated and rocked to mimic movement. Then [Paul] would flash slides and films depicting scenes from various time periods, their sequence creating the illusion of forward and backward passages through time’ (2004: vii). Cinema, in this case, becomes an industrial and theatrical technology that collates and reorganizes its patrons’ understanding of modern continuities: a figurative time machine capable of transporting its audience. John Tibbetts connects steampunk directly to film’s heritage when he writes that cinema is a ‘fabulous apparatus’ that ‘magically traverses time and space … as all steampunk fantasies should do’ (2013: 139). It is little wonder then that steampunk films so frequently depict neo-Victorian cinematic technologies as tools for characters to take part in historical excavation: analogues for contemporary audiences’ own remembrance (or misremembrance) of past



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spectacles. In a number of the steampunk films featured in this book, bodies are depicted to have internalized filmic projection, where cinema becomes (quite literally) a method of mechanical sensory experience. 9, for example, sees two animatronic archivists act as receptacles of information, able to project historical visions from their eyes by entering a trance like state. In Wild Wild West, Artemus Gordon hypothesizes that the last observed image of a human will be burned into the retinas of its corpse upon death. In a sequence that glories in scientific misunderstanding, a decapitated head is used as a make-shift projector and then rotated and given spectacles so that the image can be brought into focus (Figure 5.13). Similarly, The City of Lost Children repeatedly uses a fish eye lens to represent the mechanical Uncle Irvin’s point of view. As a disembodied brain, his sight is enabled by a camera mounted to his tank, whilst two phonographs act as his ears. From its nineteenth-century conception, cinema has been defined not only as a means of chronicling modernity but also – like steampunk’s own contraptions – as a mechanical act of bricolage that allows cultural materials to be collated and reorganized into new forms. From Jean Baudrillard’s assertion that ‘cinema plagiarises itself, recopies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths’ (1998: 48) to Gilles Deleuze’s claim that the medium repeatedly ‘shoots and reshoots a single fundamental film, which is the birth of a nation-civilization’ (1989: 64), the film industry has relied on highly reiterative and mechanized practices. Similarly, when Laura Mulvey describes cinema as ‘growing up into the youthfulness of modernity’, she notes how the medium has continually been

Figure 5.13  Wild Wild West (1999), [Film] Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures.

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driven by a compulsion to repeat and restructure itself from the remnants of history (2006: 51). It is my assertion that both cinema and steampunk’s practices of cultural recycling reflect one of modernity’s most prominent dichotomies: the processes through which the present immediately passes and is defined through its continued relationship to history. As David Pike asserts, the continued ability of steampunk’s neo-Victorian cityscapes to frame contemporary thought ‘levelled a reproach at the modernist narrative of progress and gave the lie to postmodernist claims for the end of history’ (2016: 8). Whether through the ‘timeless surreal cityscape’ of Dark City (Wilkerson-Barker 2007: 2) or the ‘melange of Jules Verne and cyberpunk’ (Cameron 2010: 66) offered in Perfect Creature, steampunk films can be identified through their representations of modernity where numerous historical periods are superimposed upon one another. Through their conflation of numerous ‘modern’ periods into hybrid histories, the steampunk genre reflects not only modernity’s seeming progression but also its coalescence and accumulation through the cultural bric-a-brac that surrounds us. Therefore, rather than being reflective of industrial histories that have passed, steampunk’s retro-futures represent the very real and tangible impact that history still imprints upon our lives. By actively drawing upon and rearranging icons of modernity that have been compiled and collected throughout numerous generations, steampunk may be considered as a means to engage with the historical detritus that technologies such as cinema have provided us with. Attempts to consider how modernity eschews linear definitions and has amassed a historical presence within our contemporary times can be traced through multiple avenues of critical thought. Steampunk cinema’s coalescence of various periods into timeless landscapes recalls the ‘inherited language’ used within T. S. Eliot’s own heavily allusory prose (Lewis 2007: 131). As the author himself stated, The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. (Eliot [1920] 1996: 40)

Eliot’s statement rings true of both steampunk and film’s paradoxical relationship to a past that is carried not only as a burden but as a tool with



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which futures are forged. The mechanical wonders of steampunk productions fill cinema screens with their spectacle, reminding their audiences of the cultural presence of history that is enabled by technology. When Walter Benjamin refers to Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus as an analogy to the modern condition, he describes ‘a catastrophe which piles wreckage upon wreckage’ rather than ‘a chain of events’ ([1942] 1999: 249). Like Eliot’s waste land and Jameson’s vision of a wholly reiterative culture, Benjamin’s words may not tout optimism, but are powerful and poetic descriptors of a world where history accumulates into dangerously unwieldy constructions. Making sense of this rubble are the steampunk heroes, film-makers and audiences who are tasked with the responsibility of cataloguing the remnants of the past: making history a lived experience that we all participate within. Friedrich Nietzsche similarly argued that the contemporary production of history afforded enormous political power for modern purpose, describing the world as a monster of energy without beginning, without end; a firm iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not extend itself, but only transforms itself … a sea of forces flowing and flushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back with tremendous years of reoccurrence, with ebb and a flow of its forms. (Nietzsche [1885] 1967: 549)

Nietzsche’s proposal of a ‘will to power’ that sees the past manifested, forgotten and/or controlled by modern parties has been subject to a great deal of criticism; echoing the concerns that question how history is equally vulnerable to manipulation for political purpose if given contemporary form. Robert Rosenstone’s argument that history is ‘a construction, congeries of data pulled together or constituted’ (2001: 50) reminds us of the ideological connotations of both institutional and personal attempts to control the past for our own benefit. Yet, these same discussions highlight the active nature of historical engagement that all genres and cultures participate in; a practice that has arguably increased exponentially in the same period that saw steampunk infiltrate mass-cultural consciousness. Through ongoing processes of digitization, contemporary technologies offer an increasing means to relive, re-experience and potentially rewrite the past. Little of our twenty-first-century lives ‘passes’ or is ‘lost’ without some form of preservation. We are, more than ever, submerged in the ever-expanding technological detritus of modernity and reminded of the persistence of history.

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As Andreas Huyssen claims, ‘The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present’ (1995: 253). Steampunk’s millennial proliferation ties into the availability of new technologies that (much like the Victorian telegraph and cinema itself) increases the erosion of the boundaries between past and present. As this chapter has noted, steampunk’s simultaneously deeply sincere and ironic engagement with such historical referents makes a traditional segregation between modern and postmodern thought highly problematic. The retrospective practices that I have identified over the course of this book instead exemplify the ‘oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment’ that Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker associate with ‘metamodernism’ (2015: 309): a series of nostalgic, yet simultaneously hopeful perspectives that they identify within millennial culture. Approaching the concept of retro-futurism with both a degree of historical detachment and devoted engagement, steampunk films offer windows into alternative modernities where the past can be encountered as a simultaneously removed yet parallel experience. As well as quite literally depicting alternative realities that can be explored (such as in Spirited Away, Sucker Punch and the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), the collected genre also uses both the cinema screen and its representations of history to offer what James Walters defines as ‘Potential Worlds’ that exist dimensionally separate from our own accepted continuity (2008: 10). The mixed jumble of period references that steampunk films draw upon affords a cross-sectional perspective of history to be observed: an amorphous and shifting landscape that contains numerous eras, rather than the linear series of events that is normally used to define our modern world. Steampunk realms, it could be argued, encapsulate Ovid’s observation that ‘everything must change: but nothing perishes’ (Ovid [8] 1922). The genre’s adaptive playfulness ties into this identity, creating a shared cultural universe that allows Long John Silver to sail across the galaxy, Abraham Lincoln to confront an army of vampire confederates and Allan Quatermain to battle Professor Moriarty. Steampunk’s cities similarly resemble Sigmund Freud’s analogy of Rome as a psychic construct that collates all of society’s ‘urban’ and ‘modern’ referents into a single cityscape: a metropolis ‘where everything was preserved, like thoughts in the unconscious, and new structures coexisted with the old’ (Brendon 2008: xvii). I conclude these debates by proposing that steampunk’s cumulative representations of various historical periods highlight what Svetlana Boym defines as ‘off-modernism’: a



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need to ‘explore side shadows and back alleys rather than the straight road of progress’ (2001: xvii). ‘Off-modernism’ is a useful term to note how steampunk turns inwards (or, as Boym notes, sideways) to construct modern industrial landscapes where past, present and future converge. As a final example of steampunk cinema’s representations of modernity as a historically dislocated and Othered realm that is set aside from temporal continuities, Tomorrowland (2015) acts as the last of the genre’s major productions I will consider in this book. Set within a contemporary landscape that is teetering on the brink of countless ecological and social disasters, Tomorrowland asks its audience to remember the science-fictional visions of a bygone age to regain a sense of control over the future. The film’s narrative suggests that late twentieth and early twenty-first-century civilizations have forgotten how to look forward, embodying Fredric Jameson’s fears of a society incapable of originality or initiative. Commodifying the past into a beacon of imagination and potential is Tomorrowland itself, a definitively retro-futuristic utopia where the hypothetical future envisioned by history’s scientific elite is available to access for those with the correct technology. Like Oz the Great and Powerful, Tomorrowland was produced and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. If the former can be defined as an endorsement of The Walt Disney Company’s cinematic heritage, then the latter is best defined as a celebration of the similarly titled collection of rides and attractions featured at numerous Walt Disney parks and resorts worldwide. Despite being predominantly ordered by what might be described as an ‘atompunk’ aesthetic (sourcing its referents from a space-race era in comparison to steampunk’s earlier interests) Tomorrowland takes on an unquestionably steampunk identity when depicting the boundaries that lie between contemporary Earth and the self-titled fantasy-land itself. As the characters set forth on their quest to ‘relearn’ how to engage with the future in a way that only our predecessors seemed able, they travel to Paris – the capital of modernity itself – and enter an apartment hidden within the Eiffel Tower: a location that was once used to entertain the scientific elite. It is here that the film supposes that the tower’s ‘real’ purpose was to act as a launching station for a nineteenthcentury rocket-ship created by Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Gustave Eiffel and Jules Verne. Definitively steampunk in design, this neo-Victorian spaceship and its controls are archaic (see Figure 5.14), but nevertheless offer the only means of transportation into a land of tomorrow that is overlain upon our own. As a method of breaching into an ‘offmodern’ world that is neither future nor past, but set aside from time’s passage, it is apt that the Parisian rocket-ship reverses

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Figure 5.14  Tomorrowland (2015), [Film] Dir. Brad Bird. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.

its course when propelled into space and instead takes a sidestep into a realm superimposed upon our own present. Steampunk’s retro-fashions are used to mark the ‘lost’ project of modernity that has lain dormant in an alternative world, and also afford a means for a conglomerate industry to package its own mechanical history through an ideology of awe and wonder. For it is cinema, as a steampunk technology, that acts as Tomorrowland’s analogy for the nineteenth-century Parisian rocket-ship appropriately named ‘The Spectacle’: the price of the future is set as an admission ticket to The Walt Disney Company’s fairground-ride extravaganzas. As cinema becomes increasingly digitized, steampunk’s hybrid representations of potential pasts, futures and alternative presents have assured the genre’s cultural and corporate value. Highly intertextual methods of media production and consumption have also played a role in establishing a cultural landscape that has fostered the genre’s predilection of excavating and reorganizing the social and technological detritus accrued by modernity. Steampunk films reflect a desire to engage with the historical construction materials that we have inherited and encourage passage across many of the nebulous boundaries that we use to trace industrial progress through numerous past eras. As such, each of the genre’s productions offer playful diversions of modernity that enable opportunities for an industry reeling from technological change to reconcile its historical and contemporary identities. In the following - and final - chapter, I will summarize the arguments presented within this book and consider the ways that steampunk cinema’s explorations of alternative modernities reflect a cultural influence that necessitates – and is worthy of – continued academic engagement.

6

Gearing Down: Making the Past Present in Steampunk Cinema

When beginning the research for this book, it was my intention to account for the remarkable number of contemporary films that used their depictions of anachronistic technologies to play a role in bringing the steampunk movement to mass-cultural attention. Although my aim has not been to construct an absolute defence of the genre’s somewhat denigrated status, I position this work amongst those that challenge the many academic and cultural hierarchies that attempt to order critical discourse based on values and ideals that serve little purpose outside of their own canonization. Rather than acting as a vulgarization of either a subculture or the many esteemed classics that the genre adapts, steampunk cinema’s atavistic visions of period technologies have played a vital role in shaping the blockbuster aesthetic of the new millennium and articulating the fin de siècle concerns that have accompanied its advances. Operating predominantly outside of the subculture’s influence, I have identified over thirty major productions that can be positioned within the genre’s boundaries (although more undoubtedly exist both within, and on, these peripheries), all of which have been released since the concluding years of the twentieth century. Collectively, these films act as a testament to steampunk’s impact upon both contemporary genre cinema and the broader imagination of mainstream culture. Perhaps the first lesson learnt from an inquiry into these productions has been the failure of traditional genre theory to account for the varied and complex ways that films are categorized and reflective of specific industrial and cultural conventions. Steampunk’s inherent ‘genre-slipperiness’ (Bell 2009: 5) makes it an appropriate term to explore a more discursive understanding of generic identities and the countless formal interdependencies that can be traced from cinema’s earliest origins. The same contentions can be made of the genre’s adaptive identity, wherein steampunk may be read as an active process of reinvention that subsists on re-engineering previously existing works into

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new forms. Rather than being defined and legitimized through pre-conceived notions of originality, authenticity and fidelity, it is my contention that steampunk films offer valuable challenges to what Iain Robert Smith defines as ‘static notions of textuality’; instead traversing ‘endless circles of intertextual borrowings and hybridity’ (2009: 1) that bind it to both its textual and historical referents. By turning to steampunk cinema’s representations of period machinery, I have argued that the genre can most prominently be defined through its embodiment of numerous debates that underscore our relationship to technology. Through their anachronistic rearrangement of scientific progress, each of steampunk’s films interact with concepts of mechanical materiality, craftsmanship and transparency, drawing both correlation and difference between various eras of industrialization. Positioning the genre amongst discussions of heritage filmmaking and the ‘historical imaginary’ (De Groot 2008: 249), I asserted within chapter four that steampunk cinema is reflective of an active engagement with historical events that is ‘not something absolutely contained in the past, entire unto itself, but is made, tested and remade in the present’ (Monk 2002: 189). Noting the significance of the genre’s historical agency, I continued by questioning the ideological issues that surround steampunk’s anarchic rearrangement of our cultural pasts, and concluded that the movement can be positioned centrally (although often problematically) within many discourses that surround issues of gender, race, nationality and posthumanism. Most significantly. I have questioned how steampunk cinema’s representations of technology and history converge under the subject of modernity, allowing the genre’s films to act as a popular means of mythologizing modern progress and the industrial advances of the long nineteenth century. As an accountable and reiterative form of genre film-making, steampunk has presented itself within an era of intense technological change that has seen our media and devices make, as Linda Hutcheon notes, ‘the past simultaneous with the present in a new way’ (1998: 197). Throughout each heading, I have asserted that steampunk cinema’s dissemination within mainstream culture acts as a vital means of exploring how the film industry is itself reordering its identity amongst ongoing processes of globalization and digitization: a means of celebrating cinema’s historical origins whilst embracing new technological transformations. The atavistic worlds imagined in steampunk’s films act as differing responses to the concerns articulated within its partner movement, cyberpunk, where, ‘immersed in media experience, conscious of mediated experience, we no longer experience any realm of human existence as unmediated, immediate, natural’ (Sobchack 2004b:



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225). In counterpoint, steampunk’s frequently whimsical and romanticized visions of period industrialization explore alternative worlds where we have not lost our sense of mechanical wonder and still use analogue technologies to engage with the physical world that surrounds us. Steampunk’s retro-futuristic lens has become a major marker of twentyfirst-century cultural expression, and nowhere is this clearer than in the numerous effects-driven features that marry their technological identities with a nostalgia for anachronistic machines. As I conclude this research, I am left with the question of the genre’s future. Only the years to come will tell whether steampunk’s romanticism for reinventing the machinery of a previous era possesses the longevity exhibited within its own nostalgias. As argued many times within these pages, steampunk cinema’s interests can be traced throughout the film industry’s entire history. Whilst the genre’s terminology may be pinpointed to relatively recent years, its seeds were sown in the industrial revolution and explosion of genre fiction that marked the nineteenth century. The fact that a great number of steampunk’s most intriguing films have been released within the period of this research’s completion imply that the intensity of steampunk’s popularity throughout the dawn of the twenty-first century will prove to be more than a passing fad or trend. As Svetlana Boym writes, ‘We live under a perceptual time pressure. The disease of this millennium will be called chronophobia or speedomania, and its treatment will be embarrassingly old-fashioned’ (2001: 351). Rather than being relegated to the past, I believe that the charms afforded by the genre’s steam-driven airships and clockwork automata will remain continually pertinent to the nostalgias and backwardslooking tendencies that are so common to contemporary society. Furthermore, I contend that as filmic technologies continue to develop and seemingly old-fashioned methods of production and distribution are increasingly retired, the allure of steampunk’s mechanical anachronisms will take on new meaning for both present and future generations. Nick Rombes description of digital film-making can be used to reflect the genre’s own interests in celebrating technological tactility and the breath of life that its antiquated qualities imbue upon machinery; he notes a ‘strange side effect’ of such contemporary advances: A nostalgia for the less realistic special effects and stunts of analogue cinema, which look more impressive than ever. … A film that ages and that shows its age with missing frames, pops, hisses or graininess is a reminder of the history and material foundation of film’s creation. (Rombes 2009: 9)

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It is my assessment that steampunk’s millennial representations of archaic technologies synchronizes directly with ‘a new age of reproducibility that has had as profound effect on global visual culture as film and photography had in [Walter] Benjamin’s day’ (Russell 2004: 81). As the skills and knowledges needed to collect, maintain and screen past cinematic technologies become increasingly dependent upon a limited number of specialists and aficionados dedicated to preserving the medium’s history, the conservation of traditional methods of projection and celluloid is a pressing concern. We are fast approaching (and arguably inhabiting) an era where numerous cinematic technologies will see many film-makers and projectionists court identities as steampunk practitioners themselves. Yet, the genre’s mass-cultural prominence has also reflected an ongoing desire to celebrate and engage with technologies in a way that is far from niche or inappreciable to modern audiences. With respect to cinema’s mechanical workings and the magical spectacle of its history, I believe that the genre may only have greater relevance to the medium in the years to come. The same might be said of the genre’s significance to debates of academic interest. As an introduction to a great number of films and a summarization of many complex topics that are foundational to understanding steampunk’s cultural and industrial identity, this book has opened up many tangents to be unravelled and many paths untraveled that future research will be able to consider in greater depth. I hope that this text encourages others to consider steampunk’s cinematic influence and continue to explore the ways that genre cinema has become imprinted with its retro-futuristic perspectives. It should also be noted that whilst I have focused almost entirely on major theatrical productions that have put steampunk’s beguiling and grotesque creations to use, the genre has had a much broader impact upon film-making than such research might suggest. Accusations that cinematic steampunk solely represents the conglomerate appropriation of an exploited subculture can be refuted by the immense number of independent shorts and features that continue to bind the genre and medium. Showcased online and at an ever-expanding number of steampunk film festivals, examples of productions include Nickle Children (2010), The Wars of Other Men (2013), Valiant (2014), Aurora (2011), The Fall of Erebus (2011) and Cowboys and Engines (2015). From the adaptive retelling of L. Frank Baum’s mechanical protagonist in Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man (2010) (Figure 6.1), the spectacle of airship fleets in Airlords of Airia (2013) (Figure 6.2) and the alien strangeness of a giant mechanical squid featured in The Anachronism (2008) (Figure 6.3), the technological extravagancies of steampunk cinema have acted as a rallying



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Figure 6.1  Heartless: The Story of the Tinman (2010), [Film] Dir. Brandon McCormick. USA: Whitestone Motion Pictures.

Figure 6.2  Airlords of Airia (2013), [Film] Dir. Dirk Müller. Germany: Steam Fiction Film.

Figure 6.3  The Anachronism (2008), [Film] Dir. Matthew Gordon Long. Canada: Anachronism Pictures.

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call for fans and recognizable film-making talent alike. Each of these short features demonstrates how the steampunk movement’s affinity for artisanal and craft-orientated production has found a home in the medium of cinema, and collectively lend weight to the conviction that as long as steampunk’s grassroots communities remain active, the genre’s continued enactment in film is assured. In the years that accompanied the cinematic productions considered within this book, steampunk has found itself implemented within projects ranging from the musical Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds: The New Generation (2012–14) (reimagined to ‘seamlessly fit with the modern day phenomenon of steampunk’ [Harrison 2014] to video games such as Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. [2015]) (an interactive text that sees characters – both real and imagined – such as Abraham Lincoln, Tiger Lily and Dorothy Gale battle the grimoire horrors created by H. P. Lovecraft). Prominently represented within Academy Award nominated short films Death of a Shadow (2012) and Mr. Hublot (2013), as well as Danny Boyle’s 2011 stage production of Frankenstein, steampunk’s generic malleability and durability has only become more pronounced since its millennial emergence. A number of proposed feature films in development at the time of writing give cause to believe that steampunk still lies in the interests of film-makers and studios. Whether languishing in development hell (such as Dodge and Twist, an ‘action-oriented steampunk sequel’ to Oliver Twist [1837] [Han 2015]) or on the verge of release (an adaptation of the ‘steampunk post-apocalyptic future’ [White 2017] envisioned in Philip Reeves’ literary franchise-starter Mortal Engines [2001] looms around the corner in post-production), it seems that steampunk will continue to play an important role in shaping genre cinema for the foreseeable future. Rather than only possessing the characteristics of a stylistic veneer, my concluding assertions lead me to argue that steampunk’s proliferation within mainstream cinema acts as an extension of a cathartic cultural need to engage with historical technologies that has international significance. The genre’s success within the film industry pertains to uniquely cinematic concerns and reflects corporate culture’s continued attempts to historicize the past and commodify it for public consumption. Whilst steampunk is a term that (in the year of writing) emerges from its thirty-year anniversary, academic discourse has yet to scratch the surface of its unique and often ramshackle constructions. Participating within an ‘increasingly destabilized distinction’ between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art (Cartmell and Whelehan 1996: 2), I believe that ongoing attention to



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the genre will be well-rewarded, and open a wealth of opportunities to discuss cultural responses to the technologies that surround us. Most significantly, an understanding of the genre’s nostalgias encourages us to explore the very role that cinema has come to occupy: a tool with which we chronicle the ‘modern’ experience and a machine that allows us to organize our dreams of past, present and future.

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Works Cited ‘A Fish Called Selma’ (1996), [TV programme] The Simpsons. 20th Century Fox, 24 March. ‘HARDtalk’ (2012), [TV programme] BBC World News, 10 April. ‘Punked’ (2010), [TV programme] Castle, Exec Prod. Andrew W. Marlowe. ABC Studios, 11 October. ‘The Night the Wizard Shook the Earth’ (1965), [TV programme] The Wild Wild West, Exec Prod. Michael Garrison. CBS, 1 October. ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’ (2011), [Song] Justin Bieber, Under the Mistletoe. Island Records. 9 (2009), [Film] Dir. Shane Acker. USA: Focus Features. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), [Film] Dir. Timur Bekmambetov. USA: 20th Century Fox. Airlords of Airia (2013), [Film] Dir. Dirk Müller. Germany: Steam Fiction Film. April and the Extraordinary World (2015), [Film] Dir. Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci. France/Belgium/Canada: StudioCanal. Around the World in 80 Days (2004), [Film] Dir. Frank Coraci. USA: Walt Disney Pictures. Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), [Film] Dir. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. USA: Walt Disney Pictures. B.P.R.D.: Garden of Souls (2008), [Comic-book series] Mike Mignola, John Arcudi and Guy Davis. Dark Horse Comics. Back to the Future Part III (1990), [Film] Dir. Robert Zemeckis. USA: Universal Pictures. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), [Film] Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. USA: Columbia Pictures. Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), [Film] Dir. Christophe Gans. France: StudioCanal. Casshern (2004), [Film] Dir. Kazuaki Kiriya. Japan: Shochiku Studios. City of Ember (2008), [Film] Dir. Gil Kenan. USA: 20th Century Fox. Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. (2015), [Video game] Intelligent Systems, Nintendo 3DS, Japan. Cronos (1993), [Film] Dir. Guillermo del Toro. Mexico: October Films. Dark City (1998), [Film] Dir. Alex Proyas. USA: New Line Cinema. Doctor Who (2014), [TV programme] Exec Prod. Steven Moffat. BBC Wales.. Frankenstein (1931), [Film] Dir. James Whale. USA: Universal Pictures.

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Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013), [Film] Dir. Tommy Wirkola. USA/Germany: Paramount Pictures. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), [Film] Dir. Chris Columbus. USA/UK: Warner Bros. Pictures. Heartless: The Story of the Tinman (2010), [Film] Dir. Brandon McCormick. USA: Whitestone Motion Pictures. Hellboy (2004), [Film] Dir. Guillermo del Toro. USA: Columbia Pictures. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), [Film] Dir. Guillermo del Toro. USA/Germany: Columbia Pictures. Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), [Film] Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Japan: Studio Ghibli. Hugo (2011), [Film] Dir. Martin Scorsese. USA: Paramount Pictures. Iron Sky (2012), [Film] Dir. Timo Vuorensola. Finland/Australia/Germany: Energia Productions. Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (2013), [Film] Dir. Stéphane Berla and Mathias Malzieu. France: EuropaCorp. Jonah Hex (2010), [Film] Dir. Jimmy Hayward. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures. Legenderry: A Steampunk Adventure (2014), [Comic-book series] Bill Willingham, Sergio Davilla and Joe Benitez. Dynamite Entertainment. Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), [Film] Dir. Brad Silberling. USA: Paramount Pictures. Machinarium (2009), [Video game] Designer Jakub Dvorský. Czech Republic: Amanita Design. Memories (1995), [Film] Dir. Kōji Morimoto, Tensai Okamura and Katsuhiro Otomo. Japan: Madhouse. Mr. Holmes (2015), [Film] Dir. Bill Condon. USA/UK: Miramax. Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (2007), [Film] Dir. Zach Helm. USA: 20th Century Fox. Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), [Film] Dir. Sam Raimi. USA: Walt Disney Pictures. Perfect Creature (2007), [Film] Dir. Glenn Standring. New Zealand: 20th Century Fox. Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends (2015), [Film] Dir. Keishi Ōtomo. Japan: Warner Bros. Pictures. Sherlock (2010), [TV programme] Exec Prod. Steven Moffat. BBC Wales. Sherlock Holmes (2009), [Film] Dir. Guy Ritchie. UK/USA: Warner Bros. Pictures. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), [Film] Dir. Guy Ritchie. UK/USA: Warner Bros. Pictures. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), [Film] Dir. Kerry Conran. USA: Paramount Pictures. Spirited Away (2001), [Film] Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Japan: Studio Ghibli. Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015), [Film] Dir. J. J. Abrams. USA: Walt Disney Pictures. Stardust (2007), [Film] Dir. Matthew Vaughn. UK/USA: Paramount Pictures.



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Steamboy (2004), [Film] Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo. Japan: Toho. Steampunk’d (2015), [TV programme] Exec Prod. Kimberly Belcher Ehrhard, John Ehrhard and Jennifer J. Duncan. Pink Sneakers Productions. Sucker Punch (2011), [Film] Dir. Zack Snyder. USA: Legendary Pictures. Tai Chi Zero (2012), [Film] Dir. Stephen Fung. China: Huayi Brothers Media Corporation. The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box (2013), [Film] Dir. Jonathan Newman. UK: E-Motion Pictures. The American Astronaut (2001), [Film] Dir. Cory McAbee. USA: Artistic License Films. The Anachronism (2008), [Film] Dir. Matthew Gordon Long. Canada: Anachronism Pictures. The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895), [Film] Dir. Auguste and Louis Lumière. France: Société Lumière. The Boxtrolls (2014), [Film] Dir. Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi. USA: Focus Features. The City of Lost Children (1995), [Film] Dir. Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. France/ Germany/Spain: StudioCanal. The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010), [Film] Dir. Luc Besson. France: EuropaCorp. The Golden Compass (2007), [Film] Dir. Chris Weitz. USA: New Line Cinema. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), [Film] Dir. Terry Gilliam. UK/Canada/ France: Lionsgate. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999), [Comic-book series] Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. DC/Wildstorm. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), [Film] Dir. Stephen Norrington. USA: 20th Century Fox. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), [Film] Dir. Peter Jackson. New Zealand/ USA: New Line Cinema. The Prestige (2006), [Film] Dir. Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures. The Three Musketeers (2011), [Film] Dir. Paul W. S. Anderson. Germany/France/UK/ USA: Impact Pictures. The Time Machine (1960), [Film] Dir. George Pal. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Time Machine (2002), [Film] Dir. Simon Wells. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures. The Wild Wild West (1965–69), [TV programme] Exec Prod. Michael Garrison. CBS, 1 October. The Wizard of Oz (1939), [Film] Dir. Victor Fleming. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Tomorrowland (2015), [Film] Dir. Brad Bird. USA: Walt Disney Pictures. Treasure Planet (2002), [Film] Dir. Ron Clements and John Musker. USA: Walt Disney Pictures. Van Helsing (2004), [Film] Dir. Stephen Sommers. USA/Czech Republic: Universal Pictures.

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Victor Frankenstein (2015), [Film] Dir. Paul McGuigan. USA: 20th Century Fox. Vidocq (2001), [Film] Dir. Pitof. France: Lionsgate. Vintage Tomorrows (2015), [Film] Dir. Byrd McDonald. USA/Canada/Czech Republic/ UK: Magical and Practical. Wild Wild West (1999), [Film] Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures.

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Index Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter  68, 125, 152 action adventure  32–3, 58–9, 66–7 adaptation: authorship  51–8 legitimacy  6, 46–7, 58, 59–60, 62–3, 64, 76–8, 81–2 The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box  103, 135–7, 174, 183 Airlords of Airia  218–19 The American Astronaut  116–18 The Anachronism  218–19 animation  71, 120–1 Around the World in 80 Days  39, 59, 98–9, 104–6, 180, 191 Atlantis: The Lost Empire  61, 64, 69–70, 94, 114, 120–1, 136–7, 143, 183 Back to the Future Part III  29, 92 blockbuster production  21–3, 45, 58, 61, 63, 89, 184, 214 The Boxtrolls  111, 151, 204 Bram Stoker’s Dracula  126 bricolage  114, 202–6, 210–11 Brotherhood of the Wolf  125–6, 138, 173–4 Casshern  72, 97, 130–1, 140–1, 165 Castle  2–3 childhood  61–4, 101–3, 109–10 cinematic technologies  3, 11, 174, 182–4, 187–8, 206–10, 217–18 City of Ember  61, 91, 97, 99, 102–3, 109, 111 The City of Lost Children  41, 86, 88, 91, 97, 100, 109–10, 112, 136, 165, 201, 204, 209 clockwork  87, 162, 198–200 Code Name: S.T.E.A.M.  220 colonialism  127–8, 134–44 Conan Doyle, Arthur  14, 31, 65–6, 78

crossdressing  150–2 cyberpunk  30–1, 216 cyborgs  156–67 Dark City  41, 64, 67–8, 88, 97, 99, 114, 132–3, 164, 194, 199–200 dieselpunk  36 digitization  20, 113, 115, 117–22, 211–12 disability  159–60 Doctor Who  2 environmentalism  96–8 The Extraordinary Adventures of Adéle Blanc-Sec  95, 127–8, 137–8 fantasy  32, 174–5 magic  175–88 femininity  144–50 film noir  33–5 neo-noir  38, 40–1 flight  38–9, 44, 75, 179 French film  137–8 genre theory  5, 27–9, 36, 215–16 The Golden Compass  62–3 Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters  73, 190 Heartless: The Story of the Tinman  218–19 Hellboy  32, 55–8, 94, 125, 162–3 Hellboy II: The Golden Army  32, 55–8, 126–7, 163, 165, 175–7, 198, 201 heritage cinema  7, 31–2, 124–6 horror  33, 100 Howl’s Moving Castle  52–3, 89, 95, 140–1, 178 Hugo  32, 54, 69, 87, 109, 111–12, 121–2, 124–5, 127, 163, 174, 187, 199–200, 208

Index

249

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus  108–9, 111, 151, 192–5, 203 intertextuality  29, 67–73, 78–81, 190–1 Iron Sky  69, 154–5

The Prestige  24, 53–4, 180–2

Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart  162, 164, 208 Japanese film  140–2 Jonah Hex  32, 96, 147

science fiction  30–1, 156–7 Shelley, Mary  31, 43, 166 Sherlock  78 Sherlock Holmes  32, 48, 65–6, 76, 99, 172–173 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows  65–6, 69, 96, 99, 107, 129–30, 150–1 Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow  32, 95, 118–19, 173, 190–2 special effects  72–3, 89–90, 113, 115, 119, 182–4, 187 Spirited Away  51, 101–2, 109, 120, 132, 161, 166, 176 Stardust  54–5, 59, 150–1, 161 Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens  115 Steamboy  89–90, 99–101, 106, 109, 120, 140, 157–8, 164, 169, 172–3 steampunk: aesthetic  16–17, 24–5, 49, 86–93, 104–5, 124–31, 162, 181, 204 comics  17, 55, 63–4, 71–2, 75–8 commercial value  2, 21, 50–1, 214, 220 literature  15 origins  1, 13–14, 38 production design  19, 104–5, 111–22, 204–5 reception  24–5, 46–8, 113–15, 145 subculture  15–16, 18–21, 24–6, 48–9, 105–6, 144–5, 218–20 Steampunk’d  205 Stevenson, Robert Louis  5, 49–50, 145 Sucker Punch  68, 129–30, 143, 148–9

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999)  17, 75–8, 146 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)  24, 64, 75–8, 96, 106–7, 113, 146 Legenderry: A Steampunk Adventure  78 Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events  61, 110, 195–6, 198– 200, 202–3 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers  97 Machinarium  16 masculinity  150–2, 160–1 materiality  104–6, 113–17, 167, 202–6, 210–11 Méliès, Georges  3, 54, 111–12, 117, 121–2, 187, 205, 208 Memories  92, 140 meta-modernism  212 modernity  9, 169–70, 197–206, 206–14 rationality  171–4 Mr. Holmes  78–9 Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium  109, 111, 195 neo-Victorianism  78, 85 nostalgia  85–6, 101–4, 115–17, 127–34, 217–18 off modernism  212–13 Oz the Great and Powerful  184–8 Paris  201–2, 213–14 parody  68–9 Perfect Creature  68, 87, 139, 210 posthumanism  8–9, 30, 163–7 postmodernity  188–9 postmodernism  40, 68, 188–97

race  143, 152–6 Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends  142

Tai Chi Zero  32, 35, 69–70, 89–90, 142–3, 197 technology: causality  92, 178, 178–9, 180–3 destruction  7, 93–8, 129–30 knowledge  98–9, 109–10, 173–4 tactility  7, 100–3, 104–8, 116–17

250 Index The Three Musketeers  74–5, 86, 139, 147, 172 The Time Machine (1960)  79–81 The Time Machine (2002)  79–81, 97, 103, 114–15, 133, 155 Tomorrowland  213–14 transnationalism  95, 138–44 Treasure Planet  49–50, 61, 69, 85, 105, 120–1, 145–6, 157–9, 179 urbanity  97, 197–202, 203–6 Van Helsing  48, 70–2, 73, 78, 110, 113, 190 Verne, Jules  14, 17, 40, 47, 59, 88, 143, 187, 210, 213 Victor Frankenstein  43

Vidocq  31–2, 72, 112, 120, 125, 137–8, 173, 175 Vintage Tomorrows  16 The Walt Disney Company  49, 50–1, 120–1, 146, 184, 213–14 warfare  94–6, 129–31, 141–2 Wells, H. G.  14, 31, 40, 79–81, 103, 133, 155 western  32, 135 Wild Wild West (1999)  4, 22–4, 26, 32, 44–7, 70, 88–90, 98, 111, 113, 135, 151, 153, 159, 171–2, 209 The Wild Wild West (1965–9)  17, 44–7, 70 The Wizard of Oz  184, 190

 251

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