UC Davis

This dissertation participates in an emerging and exciting discourse on French science fiction. Owing to the well-established relationship between science and science fiction, coupled with our rapidly-increasing reliance on science and technology as the filter through which we think to comprehend the world and our place in it, the excavation of narratives that reflect and participate in that crucial relationship is more important than ever. In this dissertation I analyze three primary science fiction texts across three distinct visual media – Claire Denis’ 2018 film High Life, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius’ 1980s bande dessinée L’Incal, and the recent streaming television series Missions – each of which I read as an aesthetic and narrative representation of a world in collapse. Collapse is a term I use inclusively, to encompass collapses that are external – ecological, economic, political – as well as those that are internal – psychological, emotional, intellectual, corporeal, and spiritual. Despite the (hazy) distinction between outer and inner collapse, I formulate these collapses across narratives as interrelated, where exterior collapse results from, but also perpetuates that which is interior. Ultimately, in my admittedly, but rightfully, pessimistic reading of these texts, collapse comes to be understood as a cyclical process that is perpetually in the works, and which we, as inferred by these science fictions, can never escape. Throughout this study I propose that the science fictions at issue here, and others like them, function as key aesthetic interventions, providing us with accessible platforms from which to confront and to counter the many crises of the contemporary moment. In this aesthetic capacity, I assert that science fiction can help us to grasp the vast complexities of the rapidly shifting paradigms that define reality and that determine just how civilizations function.