From the postapocalyptic world of Blade Runner to the James Cameron mega-hit Terminator, tech-noir has emerged as a distinct genre, with roots in both the Promethean myth and the earlier popular traditions of gothic, detective, and science fiction. In this new volume, many well-known film and literary works—including The Matrix, RoboCop, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein —are discussed with reference to their relationship to tech-noir and one another. Featuring an extensive, clearly indexed filmography, Tech-Noir Film will be of great interest to anyone wishing to learn more about the development of this new and highly innovative genre. Emily E. Auger is the author of Tarot and Other Meditation Decks and Tech-Noir Film , as well as the editor of Tarot in Culture . She has taught art history in Canadian and American universities for more than twenty years. Tech-Noir Film A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres By Emily E. Auger Intellect Ltd Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-84150-424-7 Contents Foreword by Gary Hoppenstand, Preface, Introduction, Chapter 1: Method and Models, Chapter 2: The Promethean Message, Chapter 3: Tech-Noir, Appendix 1: Charts, Appendix 2: Tech-Noir Films by Date, Appendix 3: Tech-Noir Films by Type, Bibliography, Filmography, Index 1: Film Titles, Index 2: Film Motifs, CHAPTER 1 Method and Models Mythology is the prototypical form of discourse from which popular genres developed and Oedipus is currently the most frequently cited exemplar of a specific myth influencing popular genres in literature and film. The structural relationships between the genres of gothic, detective, science, and tech-noir fiction, like those between myth and other narratives, can be shown by the identification and ordering of constituent units or elements in a manner that brings forward content that may not otherwise be apparent. Vladimir Propp (1928) addressed fairy tales and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958) revisited Oedipus in this manner. Similarly, Jack Burnham (1971) has shown how the structurally defined "myth" of the avant-garde in the visual arts involves the treatment of cultural elements, such as tube paints and spray guns, as "natural" elements and then "culturalizing" them by processing with choices and decisions about application and arrangement. The structuralist approach taken here demonstrates the association of primary fields of discourse – psychology, sociology, science, and aesthetics; with realms of experience – the symbolic, the real, the imaginary, and the simulacrum; and with specific genres and their constituent elements (Chart 1). Discourse, realms of experience, and genres are all somewhat artificially compartmentalized to facilitate the identification and understanding of their presence, relationships, and dynamics. Any discourse may develop in any realm of experience, but specific areas of discourse take on conventionalized roles in relation to specific realms of experience, the constituent elements of popular genres, and individual popular genres. In other words, areas of discourse are articulated in the experiential realms and constituent elements of popular genres: characters; relationships between characters; the crime, mystery, or social issue at stake; its detection; and its resolution. This structural arrangement of areas of discourse, realms of experience, and constituent elements facilitates charting of the characteristics that historically distinguish individual genres and mark their cumulative development. It is demonstrated here in relation to the Oedipus myth and, more specifically, to exemplars of popular genres: Horace Walpole's gothic The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Tale (1764), Arthur Conan Doyle's detective fiction "The Speckled Band" (1892), Arthur C. Clarke's sciencefiction Against the Fall of Night (1948), and William Gibson's scifi-cyberpunk Neuromancer (1984). Realms of experience and genre Prometheus is undisputedly the Titan of technology and, by association, of tech-noir; but the Oedipus myth, not that of Prometheus, is the most commonly cited template for Western literature in general, and the inspiration for numerous structural and psychoanalytic analyses of narrative. The story of Oedipus, as compiled, summarized, and popularized by Robert Graves (1955) from sources including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, is as follows: Oedipus is abandoned as an infant by his mother Iocaste because of an oracular prediction about the future damage he will do and is thus raised by adoptive parents whom he later abandons because of a similar oracular prediction. His travels bring him to Thebes, a city tormented by the Sphinx sent by Hera as punishment to Laios, Oedipus's biological father, for abducting a boy. Not knowing him to be his father, Oedipus kills Laios in a fit of temper. He then answers the Sphinx's riddle and is rewarded for this accomplishment with the c