Science-fiction movies can serve as myths about the future and thus give some assurance about it. Whether the film is 2001 or Star Wars, such movies tell about progress that will expand man’’s powers and his experiences beyond anything now believed possible, while they assure us that all these advances will not wipe out man or life as we now know it. Thus one great anxiety about the future--that it will have no place for us as we now are--is alleviated by such myths. They also promise that even in the most distant future, and despite the progress that will have occurred in the material world, man’’s basic concerns will be the same, and the struggle of good against evil--the central moral problem of our time--will not have lost its importance.
Past and future are the lasting dimensions of our lives: the present is but a brief moment. So these visions about the future also contain our past; in Star Wars, battles are fought around issues that also motivated man in the past. Thus, any vision about the future is really based on visions of the past, because that is all we can know for certain.
As our religious myths about the future never went beyond Judgment Day, so our modern myths about the future cannot go beyond the search for life’’s deeper meaning. The reason is that only as long as the choice between good and evil remains man’’s supreme moral problem does life retain that special dignity that derives from our ability to choose between the two. A world in which this conflict has been permanently resolved eliminates man as we know him. It might be a universe peopled by angels, but it has no place for man.
The moving picture is a visual art, based on sight. Speaking to our vision, it ought to provide us with the visions enabling us to live the good life; it ought to give us insight into ourselves. About a hundred years ago, Tolstoy wrote," Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen." Later, Robert Frost defined poetry as "beginning in delight and ending in wisdom." Thus it might be said that the state of the art of the moving image can be assessed by the degree to which it meets the mythopoetic task of giving us myths suitable to live by in our time--visions that transmit to us the highest and best feelings to which men have risen--and by how well the moving images give us that delight which leads to wisdom. Let us hope that the art of the moving image, this most genuine American art, will soon meet the challenge of becoming truly the great art of our age.
In the author’’s view, science-fiction movies
A．assure us of the scientific miracles created. B． predict likely advances in human experiences. C．offer invented stories concerning man’’s fate. D．signify human powers to a fantastic extent.