A Spaceship named Delusion (part 1)

A thought exercise and some emotional dump

As an early millennial gay man whose biographical journey forced me to spend way too much time in the closet for my own physical and psychological sake, I relate to but also envy the generation of gay men who could find meaning and identification for their joys but also pain in stage plays and silver screen movies and their coded or not-so-coded characters. I’m particularly found of the attraction/revulsion to Marlon Brando’s seductively cruel incarnation of Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams’ play A Street Card Named Desire. Please, don’t misunderstand me: I’m happy that, unlike those men in the 40s and 50s, I’m allowed to live an open, married life with the man I fell in love with. But the journey that took me here wasn’t neither painless nor is over, and the current offering of fictional narratives that has been shoved my way to allow me to process my existence is essentially unsatisfying, dishonest and even toxic.

The type of fictional narrative I’m referring to exists in every contemporary medium that conveys genre fiction. When shaped like books, they often materialize in that aisle of your local grocery store that is always empty and is filled with book covers featuring either headless or long-haired roided men. Ironically these books target straight women not bodybuilders, and instead of weightlifting tips they feature romance novels which are the backbone of the publishing industry, ensuring a stream of revenue that is the financial key to keep it solvent. Contemporary romance novels offer a standardized journey to their readers that is narratively distanced from its roots in early romanticism and their healthy appetite for the tragic, instead embracing the anti-continental, petit-bourgeois sub-canon popularized by Austen and the two less talented Brontës. Their formula of a narrative that follows a protagonist who goes through hurdles for love and ends with her landing a beau, marrying him and living happily ever after (or HEA, as the cultists of the sub-canon refer to that principle). More recently, certain concessions were allowed: LGBT relationships are possible and, once love is achieved, the narrative doesn't’ necessarily end with the prospect of a stable nuclear family: they live Happy For Now (HFN: yes, they have an acronym for that), which is mostly like if the movie Titanic ended one minute before Jack froze to death. Still, those narratives live under the rule of teleological happiness. The publishers, editors, writers and readers wouldn’t have it in any other way.

Although the understanding I conveyed about the term escapism can be accurately applied to the most profitable and formulaic genre of current literature, it is usually associated with speculative fiction and for a good reason. Both Science Fiction and Fantasy transport the reader to realities disconnected from our own, and the sense of awe evoked by the intricate alternative worlds were the subversion of the rules of our reality or the application of extremely evolved technology. Particularly in recent years, space opera has embraced a formulaic approach that focuses on escapism as a brand, advertising it like some sort of ointment for the souls of the many among us whose upbringing didn’t mirror a Golden Corral TV ad, either because your bad parents were unequipped with the ability to deal with the fact that you were queer, neurodivergent, disabled, or maybe your parents were alright but you just happened to be a helpless fucking nerd.

Mentioning actual works of science fiction which abide by this canon isn’t advisable, as the continually shrinking speculative fiction community is averse to direct criticism - a recent attempt at fending off a well-connected writer’s anger at me for retweeting a tweet that was followed by another one, with I didn’t retweet, with veiled criticism on a stinker of hers, led to my exclusion from forums and discord communities. Hence, I won’t delve in the specificities of fiction works, and will, instead, describe the weird pattern that is present in their supposedly escapist gruel space operas. For some weird reason they all read like a version of A Streetcar Named Desire where Tennessee Williams, after being hit really hard in the head, decided that Blanche DuBois deserved better, much better, and relying on the kindness of strangers somehow always pays off. We follow the journey of a variation of a character that we will call here Blande DeBeers to keep our abstraction more bearable through framing. Blande always comes from a terrible, horrible family that she just wants to leave behind and forget. She gets enlisted in some sort of enterprise in a spaceship named Delusion in some sort of capacity. It’s important for it to be a spaceship, because, with the exception of the DeBeers household, nothing is more dangerous to venture in than the vacuum of space. The narrative always takes place in a spaceship even when it doesn’t occur in a spaceship and the main setting is a remote planetary outpost, a spaceport terminal or some variation of that setting, since the spaceship is an archetypical imagery in the same way any major destructive monster in a high fantasy narrative is a dragon. The metallic confines of the spaceship are cozy and full of denizens Blande can blindly trust. They are her co-workers and Blande happens to be useful and not a deadweight, otherwise they would have spaced her out before they could accept her as one of their own. Not only that, they will provide Blande with the emotional support that her biological family never could.

Blande DeBeers isn’t escaping shit, though. What is sold as escapism in and through speculative fiction is only a projection of a type of life the reader may wish they had (and would if they could), but only because their own is miserable. An authentic escapism would imply actual interest in fellow humans through works that present and report perspectives that have little to do with your own, as we see in the ethnographically informed science fiction of Ursula Le Guin and Ray Bradbury or the positive exploration of liberating sociabilities of Iain M. Banks. That’s not what the advocates and enthusiasts of so-called escapism seek. An otherness that is desirable beforehand instead of discoverable can’t take someone out of the confines of their intimacy. The journey of supposedly escapist genre fiction goes, instead, not only inward, but is also essentially egocentric and, in its consequential dimension, essentially misanthropic. The very opposite of an escape is taking place, as it belongs to the realm of an entrapment within the most intimate idealizations of a reality, through desire and will. Volitive fiction is a an accurate name for the so-called escapist fiction.

Volitive fiction does answer to a valid urge. There is an authentic need to idealize bonds and relationships as well as project, in fiction, what we wish we had for us in our actual homes and societies or the houses and societies that stand in fantastic landscapes or in the far future. But, in parallel to such an urge to consume an idealized imagery that reflects our expectations affording to not be adjusted to reality for a change, a volitive fiction experience is inherently incomplete if not paired with the urgency to see our pain mirrored and confirmed in the lives of tragic characters, as to confirm that our more painful feelings are emotions are not an aberration rotting in our core, but exists beyond us, elsewhere. That’s what makes A Streetcar Named Desire and pretty much any other work that doesn’t relegate tragedy to the status of past or present transitory hurdles leading to synthetic happiness so powerful.

Those two emotional volitions – for idealized bond and resonating pain - are not contradictory, but complimentary, as they ultimately keep each other viable and stable and the one who experiments with it balanced. Ultimately an idealization is doomed to be confronted by the crudeness of reality, which needs to be projected to others – real and fictional - to be bearable, at least until a certain point, when we need to hope something better for ourselves and others, which leads to a process of idealization that is easier to achieve when moored in the imagination of others, through their fiction. Beyond such a conundrum, idealized bonds and resonating pain dwell in the intersection between the hunger for ontological answers and the thirst for beauty, in what I’d call the experience of a volitive sublime.

Hence I can only loathe the fact that the two components of the volitive sublime are now not only separated in most recent film, TV and mainstream literature, but such compartmentalization happened unevenly, with a deluge of monolithic narratives on idealized bonds, whereas resonating pain is relegated to niches like horror and arthouse movies and literary novels. The entitlement of audiences who can’t stand a deviation from tropes such as the HEA/HFN or found families is interpreted by many as a baby fit or childish entitlement, and it indeed looks like it on the surface: more Marvel movies, more Ted Lasso sappy Christmas episodes in July, more Young Adult novels about friends-to-foes-to-friends-to-foes-to-friends-to-foes-to-fuckers-to-lovers-to-teens who fight a loose dystopia and save the day, and then live HEA.

There is a metaphor that is, in my opinion, more accurate to illustrate the issue than comparing these readers to children. The biochemical key that explains why certain substances are addictive leading to toxicomania often involves not an addition to our neurological activity, but the blocking or numbing of a step in the balance between anabolic and catabolic functions. Audiences today are being offered an overdose of anabolic content without a catabolic answer to give the closure that the process needs. HEA/HFN is a pinnacle, not an end, and compulsively consuming narratives about the expansive, anabolic half-process that culminates in the same high is the behavior not of a child, but of an addict: a fictiomaniac.

That may sound as an exaggeration, after all the fiction romance novels I described at the start of this essay have been in the market for several decades, and maybe why our relationship with them was the prospective pain of the poor, underwhelming assortment of potential romantic partners that life parades in front of us (if compared to our expectations) or, worse, the lack of them altogether through the devastating experience of unrequited solitude. And even within the confines of the fictional narratives of romance novels, potential bad partners often exist, as the edge of the love triangle that doesn’t make the final cut towards monogamy or as antagonists in some less racist, colonialist and elitist variation of Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason. Most romantic novels just aim at being comfort reads, and that’s fine. If some readers seem to have been imbecilized by them, the odd was that the reader in question has always been a hopeless imbecile.

The same can’t be said about supposedly escapist narratives in speculative fiction, as they borrow several formulaic elements of romance novels, and particularly offer a prospect of idealized, seamless existence to a readership/viewership that is often young and socially inexperienced. The ascension of this particular type of formulaic narrative takes place as we observe the downfall of the inherently toxic masculine ideology that permeates the three act structure/hero’s journey and its enforcers in a shrinking feature film industry. Film is currently either trying to reinvent itself or succumbing to streamed TV that conveys, through its shows, narratives that are feminine and proves that there is such a thing as toxic femininity. The hero journey asserted ad nauseam, film after film, that if you have and are a dick (non-literal if you are a heartless girlboss like Jolie’s Lara Croft) and can operate a gun/sword/whip/harpoon/light saber/massive muscles/fists of steel, you can achieve anything you are compelled to. The character journeys from supposedly escapist genre fiction that we described above is episodic and much less task oriented. They convey a narrative where Blanche DuBois would board the streetcar named Desire but never leave it to transfer to the one called called Cemeteries and then ride six blocks to get off at Elysian Fields. Once Blande DeBeers boards the spaceship named Delusion - a massive, metallic uterus or a really cozy forced labor camp, depending on your perspective -, there’s no way out except for a free brief forays with her found family here and there, where Blanche bungee jumps from the uterus still tied to the umbilical chord just to be dragged back if the reality she faces in the hostile outside world happens to be remotely triggering. Blande DeBeers’ found family has their little petty spars, skirmishes and beefs, but  they will never offer Blande drugs that will turn her into an addict. They will never human-traffic Blande. They will never be an actual cult that involves hot-iron branding and sexual coercion. They will never make Blande tear out the fetus of a pregnant Space-Hollywood starlet’s womb. No no. The spaceship is a safe space and the fanatical mentality within its confines will ensure it stays that way.

If a writer doesn’t want to deal with the consequences of offering idealized and sanitized depictions of what social life looks like, that’s in their right, but it would ring less pornographically predatory and greedy if they weren’t patting themselves in the back ad nauseam about how their stories are giving hope, “visibility” and solace to socially marginalized individuals.

In the upcoming second part of this essay I will explore further how we are dealing with a corruption of the conundrum oikos-polis and how writers like Banks and Le Guin offers hints on how to get out of the trap described above.