It’s All Been There Before. Denis Newiak

      Figure 1: In Contagion (53), a supposedly unthinkable future already appeared almost 10 years ago, anticipating the horrors of the present with its emergency hospitals, mass graves, and criminal profiteers of crisis.

      Films as an early warning system for crises and intuitive orientation aid for disaster situations

      Against this background, pandemic films and series can also potentially offer orientation in dealing with the realworld challenges that are fictionally played out in them. Cinema films and television series – as phenomena of popular culture with a particularly broad impact – thus not only act as an ‘early warning system’ for possible social ills (for example, fundamentally inadequate preparation for pandemics) and future challenges (for example, coping with a pandemic under these deficient conditions). They also contain (aesthetically implicitly as well as narratively explicitly formulated) suggestions for coping with present and future questions (such as the appropriate social and individual behavior in the case of a pandemic), which the recipients have always used intuitively and often unconsciously to adjust to possible life situations. It is precisely the aesthetic game that, due to cinema’s stylistic differentiation, allows us to distinguish between developments that tend to be more desirable and undesirable: while film and television take a stand with their artistic means, they allow a discourse on whether certain developments are also desirable in social reality or should be avoided.

Science fiction as a method: Preparing for late modern challenges

      State of emergency makes suspicious conditions of society visible

      Against this background, science fiction scenarios are gaining importance and provide important social benefit. Precisely because of their tendency to thematize supposedly ‘improbable’ events, they allow not only an examination of what a society perceives as ‘normal,’ but also of how it reacts to its state of emergency, to the disturbance of social normality. In the sense of GROĬS (2000), it is precisely these critical moments of dysfunction, which first provide information about the true nature of a system that must always remain “suspect’ in the disturbancefree regular operation: in the moment of the state of emergency, previously invisible and suppressed areas of conflict, clashes of interests, antagonisms are revealed, which can only then be effectively dealt with and defused.

      Science fiction allows to deal with hidden and complex issues

      Works of science fiction are known to take up precisely such disturbances of our habits and to play through their effects on the social reality of the fictional characters’ life. Although the genre’s narrative worlds are always fictional realities (in contrast to scientific discourses), in Goodman’s words, “fiction operates in actual worlds in much the same way as nonfiction”: fictional works “take and unmake and retake familiar worlds, recasting them in remarkable and sometimes recondite but eventually recognizable – that is recognizable – ways” (GOODMAN 1978, 104–105). In this sense, the ‘real’ reality of our normal life that shimmers through them, is refracted and only then becomes visible. If the fictions of film and television remain ‘realistic’ enough (i.e. if they are sufficiently similar to our own life reality) so that a society can recognize itself in them, they allow us to deal with complex contemporary issues that cannot be adequately addressed in political, civil society and scientific discourse due to taboos, bias or simply cognitive overload (STEINBORN/NEWIAK 2020). Such filmic fictions “represent an explicitly fictional reality to which the observer can nevertheless orientate himself” and which allows the audience to “navigate better through the real world and the complexity of its relationships” (ESPOSITO 2014, 56). Thus, for example, the images and concepts of future urbanity in science fiction may neutralize problems of cities that already exist today by tapping the reservoir of urban future knowledge, social discourse lines and concrete designs contained in futuristic film cities, so they possibly can be used in local urban planning (KRÄMER/MAIKÄMPER/PÄTSCH ET AL. 2015).

      The visualization of social complexity in film enables rational decisions to be made in reality

      Works of science fiction, above all cinema and television series, refer to a core dilemma of late modernity: today, due to the increasing complexity of social, economic, and ecological dependent relationships, it is almost impossible to make reliable statements about the possible course of the future solely with the help of quantitative-empirical methods to “find a basis for consensus” (LUHMANN 1991, 57). However, parallel to the “growth of causal complexity, i.e. the multiplicity and diversity of causes and side effects” (LUHMANN 1991, 101), in late modernity, “the dependence on decisions and thus the attention value of the future is growing” (LUHMANN 1991, 53): anyone who wants to make rational decisions in the present, in the hope of desirable consequences in the future, is always dependent on knowledge of the coming, because one’s own actions must be measured by their possible effects and outcomes. Film and television with their “subjunctive narrative forms” (KIRCHMANN 2006, 167), their constant question of “what if?,” thus permit a speculative, but in their own way rational, empirical search for the not always obvious connections between causes and effects: film and television thereby reduce the otherwise overburdening complexity of social processes to humanly tangible standards, while at the same time demonstrating them vividly and making clear how actions in the present potentially affect the course of things (NEWIAK 2021). By doing so, they have a special role to play as a dynamic repository of knowledge about the future and action, particularly in view of such a challenging event as a pandemic (see fig. 2). Precisely because the social contexts become less and less transparent with progressive modernization and sometimes appear chaotic and arbitrary to the individual, cinematics can succeed in making social reality readable, at least in certain subareas, with regard to “effects and causes, or problems and solutions, questions and answers” (JAMESON 2005, 14).