by Martin McGrath
There are, I suppose, cases to be made for Hollywood seriously
molesting every outcropping of science fiction at one time
or another. But few of the branches on the sf tree can have
been so comprehensively battered as steampunk. Think, for
a moment, of the vast swathes of cash and human endeavour
thrown at the screen in films like Wild Wild West, The
League of Gentlemen, Van Helsing and Atlantis: The
Lost Empire, and recall, if you dare, how little pleasure
there was to be had from any of them.
 None
of these films fail because of a lack of ambition in capturing
steampunk’s aesthetic. There is, in every case, a meticulous
and in some instances almost fanatical eye for cleverly crafted
props. But, for once, God is not in the detail and in the
end these movies are all second-rate edging towards the downright
disastrous because they ignore those basic elements of good
storytelling – smart characters and exciting plotting.
That’s not to say that there have not been good movies
with steampunk influences – and great movies that have
fundamentally influenced steampunk – but finding them
will not be easy.
That’s especially true because I intend to take a relatively
narrow view of what I define as steampunk.
Steampunk takes its aesthetic cues from the Victorian era,
but a Victorian setting alone is not enough to make any work
part of the subgenre. Steampunk’s appropriation of the
exuberant inventiveness of the Victorian era's gentlemen amateur
scientists is not just about the aesthetic – although
that is plainly important. Good steampunk recasts technology
using pneumatics, pistons and brass to make obvious that which
is often hidden behind the slick designs of the twenty-first
century.
The editorial of the first issue of Steampunk Magazine
(www.steampunkmagazine.com)
put it like this:
| Steampunk machines are real,
breathing, coughing, struggling and rumbling parts of
the world. They are not the airy intellectual fairies
of algorithmic mathematics but the hulking manifestations
of muscle and mind, the progeny of sweat, blood, tears
and delusions. The technology of steampunk is natural;
it moves, lives, ages and even dies. |
This is not Luddism, if one casts that movement as a putting
aside of technologies, for steampunk rather loves its machines.
But there is something of a shared longing for a simpler time
– times when how a machine worked could be visibly understood
and the scale of technology easily encompassed. Steampunk
longs for a time when a hefty thwack with a lump-hammer achieved
more than scattering shards of plastic and silicon across
the floor. A time when technology could be touched, prodded,
poked, reconstructed and repurposed.
This, surely, is where the “punk” element in “steampunk”
becomes more than just a hang-over from the literary genre's
appearance around the same time as cyberpunk. This tendency
to take the detritus of Victorian society, the left over threads
and scraps of thought discarded by geniuses and madmen and
the predictions of half-forgotten prophets of the steam age
and reconstruct them as grand theory is essential and is what
defines steampunk as something more than just science fiction
in a Victorian suit of clothes. Like the three-chord rockers
of the late seventies, steampunks takes elements of the cosy
and the safe – what could be more genteel and secure
than the world of the Victorian gentleman – and kicks
them firmly in the bollocks, upsetting our expectations, making
utterly free with the impossible and outlandish and regurgitating
the trash, bile and sewage of an era that was, after all,
built on slavery, exploitation and the raw force of arms.
This is the area where steampunk and its silicon-enhanced
sister cyberpunk intersect. Dealing with moments of enormous
technical transformation, both punkish subgenres find themselves
in the gutter while transformative events take place around
them or, perhaps, dragging the momentous down to the level
of the trash even if it is just for a moment.
So an essential thread in what makes a genuine steampunk story
is that it is concerned not just with how it looks but what
that technology does, how people interact with it and why
it matters. In much steampunk, technology becomes an extended
metaphor for the mechanisms of the exercise of power within
society. Victorian science fiction could contain characters
that were only too aware of the iniquities of their era –
Verne’s implacably anti-imperialist Nemo, Wells’s
narrator of the end of empire in The War of the Worlds
and Haggard’s later, world-weary, Quatermain
– but steampunk highlights the seamier side –
the addictions, perversions and corruptions that these respectable
Victorian gentlemen (both authors and the characters) wouldn’t
(or couldn’t) discuss openly.
As such, the works of Wells, Verne and their contemporaries
– and the more or less faithful adaptations of their
work that have made it into the cinema cannot, for our purposes,
be classed as steampunk.
 It
may well be that Rod Taylor’s time machine, with its
pointlessly spinning wheel and beautifully crafted brass and
crystal-topped control rod, is a thing of beauty that cannot
fail to appeal to those who love Victorian style, but, as
a film, George Pal’s The Time Machine is too
conservative, too nostalgic and too respectable to qualify
as steampunk. And the same can be said for the familiar adaptations
of Verne’s work – such as William Witney’s
Master of the World (1961) with a script adapted
by Richard Matheson – a personal favourite – or
the Disney-produced, Fleischer directed 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea (1954).
These films and many others made throughout the 1950s and
1960s clearly belong amongst the influences that contributed
to the foundations of steampunk – but to include them
within the genre would, surely, be to extend it beyond meaning.
Also strictly outside the genre, it is possible to find steampunkish
motifs in a spate of recent films – the air-pirates
in Stardust, Tesla’s fantastical workshop in
The Prestige, Eisenheim’s “magical”
contraptions in Neil Burger’s under-rated The Illusionist,
Ichabod Crane’s investigative devices in Tim Burton’s
Sleepy Hollow and the Wild West contraptions of Back
to the Future III. Is the dissemination of steampunk's
unique aesthetic into an ever widening scope of material indicative
of anything more than the fact that a group of art directors
are enamoured of a certain style? I think not, no more than
the sight of the vast turbines of the Titanic in Cameron's
berg-infested venture – a flashing shot, beautifully
realised, meticulously researched and instantly dismissed
– qualify that movie as steampunk.
So, having cast aside tonnes of chaff, are we left with anything
that might reasonably be called stampunk cinema which is worth
watching?. I think so, although my choices are few and some
might even be regarded as perverse.
Brazil
Brazil is, of course, not a steampunk movie and
yet it is also the archetype for what every great
steampunk movie should be. The story of a powerless
minion trapped in a bureaucratic dystopia struggling
for even fleeting moments of freedom is prototypically
punkish. And, while the technological milieu owes
more to the 1930s and 1940s than to the Victorian
era, Gilliam’s agenda in imagining a stylized
technology that is at once familiar and terrifying
– to highlight the alienating effect of vast
machines – is one that is fundamental steampunk. |
|
The City of Lost Children
From the distinctly Dickensian environs of the city
to the freakish brass contraptions created by mad
scientist Krank, The City of Lost Children
is the most convincing and frightening realisation
of a steampunk society committed to celluloid. Caro
and Jeunet’s nightmarish story of kidnapped
children, circus strongmen and stolen dreams once
again pits the impoverished against the powerful
but it is the style and depth of the world building
that makes this a truly memorable film. |
|
Steamboy/Castle in the Sky/Howl's
Moving Castle
Steamboy, Kutsuhiro Otomo’s
long-long-awaited follow-up to the seminal Akira
seemed too bright, too glossy and too simple
to many when it was first released. It is only with
later viewings that this synthesis of Japanese love
for Victoriana (all that rigid social hierarchy
and tea ceremonies presumably feeling familiar)
and their ambivalence towards technology (embracing
it but only too aware of the great suffering it
can bring) reveals its greater depth. The same steamy
aesthetic and technological ambivalence can be found
in many of the films of Hiyao Miyizaki, although
Miyizaki tends to place his technology in opposition
to mystical, natural forces to highlight their alienating
effect. |
|
Vidocq
Under normal circumstances there is nothing that
could persuade me to recommend Vidocq,
which wastes talented actors and talented artists
on a story that is flattered by being called inane.
But so much of steampunk is inseparable from appreciation
of the way things look and if Vidocq has only one
thing going for it, it is the beautiful visuals
created by former special effects supremo turned
director, Pitof. It’s a film that all fans
of steampunk will want to look at if not, necessarily,
watch. |
|
Time After Time
I hesitate to include this because I’m not
entirely convinced it counts as steampunk –
though the setting and the counterpointing of Victorian
values for smart social commentary – genre
essentials are both present and correct. It’s
not a wholly successful film – the actual
plot of Wells as hero hunting Jack the Ripper through
time is, frankly, ludicrous. But it does have value. |
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