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Articles

Vol. 12 No. 1 (2018): Philosophy and New Media

Sense 8 and the Praxis of Utopia

DOI
https://doi.org/10.14288/cinephile.v12i1.198188
Submitted
May 12, 2023
Published
2018-03-01

Abstract

The 2015-18 Netflix sci-fi TV series Sense8, created by Lana and Lilly Wachowski (The Matrix (1999), Cloud Atlas (2012), and Jupiter Ascending (2015)) and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5 (1994-98)), is a grandiose experiment in the content, style, and form of television. Narratively, Sense8 intertwines topics of transphobia, identity, intersectionality, violence, poverty, loyalty, love, memory, and orgiastic pleasures, with mushy melodrama, extraordinary fights, car crashes, psychic projections, and reflections on globalization. In terms of style, the show impressionistically crisscrosses various genres: the aesthetics of sci-fi dramas, conspiracy thrillers, Bollywood musicals, police-procedurals, and European films noir coexist throughout the show’s twenty-four episodes. The creators admit that certain action scenes were filmed in as many as nine different locations, and then were montaged into a single tableau. The result is multiple worlds—visually haunting, yet revealed in a deliberately slow and painterly manner—worlds meant to represent the magnificent kaleidoscope of human experience bridgeable only through unconditional (almost in the religious sense of the word) love. The opening sequence, for example, attempts to show, in Twitter-trending-style aesthetics, the multiplicity of human geography. This is certainly not accidental, inasmuch as through a grandiose utopian cinematographic gesture the show aims to depict a queer, global, multi-gender, post-national community which is on the one hand deeply immersed in the internet world of visual cultures and tactile interfaces, while on the other hand, is linked through psychic energy, body to body, and mind to mind, without the mediation of visual or visible technology. The Wachowskis’ phantasy for the twenty-first century then, seems to be the assertion that the more digitally linked we become, the closer we get to the moment when one’s mind can operate in another person’s body. Thus, in the language of Wachowskis’ phantasy, being more connected means being less alone. In fact, during a political speech toward the end of the series, one of the main characters, Capheus, summarizes the whole utopian kernel of the series: “Nothing good ever happens when people care more about our differences than the things we share in common. The future I hope for is the same as yours. A future in which our children grow up never knowing love as a wall. But only as a bridge.” Indeed, the sensate utopia may be seen, as Alexis Lothian suggests, as “an alternative vision for globalisation” (94) where racial, gender, historical, or systemic injustices could be replaced by a peculiar empathetic bond, one that embraces human diversity, yet resolutely celebrates the full subjectivity of every person.