If I could suggest an alternate or perhaps addition to your rule...

Any film that features scifi elements as an inherent or accepted part of the setting counts as a scifi film.

In this definition, Repo Man would be a scifi film, because in that world, aliens exist and one is to be found in the trunk of a car. Additionally, even under the definition you've already provided, Repo Man would count. The B storyline, that of the alien in the trunk, would indeed collapse were the scifi elements removed.

I think that it's important to consider that scifi is a practically a meta-genre, as it plays host to any number of other traditional genre stories, set dancing to a strange beat. Depending on how specific you get with a film, narrowing the definition of scifi to stories that have strictly scifi plot elements would leave a lot of scifi films high and dry. That's why the drop of blood idea seems to dominate, because often times a scifi film is about anything but scifi elements, they just serve as the window dressing for the story.

Sometimes, all that's needed for a film to be scifi is that it be on some level 'genre X film, only in space'.

Meh. First, I would argue that in that particular film, it's supposed to be our world, not an alternate universe in which everyone knows aliens exist, which is why the car is so sought after. Second, the alien is not a storyline into itself, it's the MacGuffin; it's something that helps the plot along. If it wasn't aliens in the trunk, it could be something else that caused the same amount of absurd ruckus. In this respect, the trunked alien is no different than the glowy suitcase in Pulp Fiction.

Third, I'm utterly unsurprised that Repo Man was the film you wanted to argue about. I've seen people nearly get into fistfights about whether it's science fiction or not.

There is a sportswriter for ESPN who has a similar issue regarding whether or not something qualifies as a Sports Movie. His primary argument is thus: If you remove the Sport aspect of the movie, and replace it with something else, will the movie still work? For example, make Jerry Maguire a Regional Sales Manager, do you still have a movie? Probably. Make Rocky Balboa a struggling musician, does it work? No. The same premise should apply to science fiction - if the suitcase in Pulp Fiction were the secrets to Area 51, would it be sci-fi? No.

Just my .02. Back to work now...

- Jeff

I've spent a lot of time pondering this issue as it relates to fiction. This is a really interesting question and one for which (let's admit it) there can be no answer.

Except for mine, of course. Here are a couple of other ways of looking at it.

First off is marketing. If something is marketed in a fashion intended to appeal to SF fans then it's SF. If not, then it's not.

Next is jargon. In many ways the hallmark of SF (and in these dark and elf-infested days, fantasy) as a genre is a shared language -- and the spread of this language through our culture is one of the keys to the mainstreaming of SF. Does the work in question use the words 'blaster' or 'hyperspace'? (That is some darned ugly punctuation and I'm not sure it's correct.) Then it's SF. And if it uses genuine scientific jargon accurately...

Well, that never happens. No point in concerning ourselves with such improbabilities.

Then there's something a little more difficult to pin down. Tone. Flavor. That indefinable smell (frying onions, unwashed dog, flowers on the table) that lets you know on an unconscious level that you're home. Of course on this basis something like the sitcom Spaced could qualify without any fantastic elements at all -- that show was shot and cut like a genre movie and despite its content it's got that vibe to it.

And now you've got me thinking about feedback -- about the way that SF fiction has swapped juices with movie and television SF and picked up some of their flavors.

In my youth, he said sagely and stroked his grizzled beard, I went through a phase where I identified as an SF reader to some degree. During that phase it was important to me to be able to claim works in the name of SF. If it had any element of the fantastic then it was mine. (A Mixture of Frailties by Robertson Davies? It's fantasy -- there's a ghost in it!)

And then I went through a period when I identified more strongly with literary fiction and gave myself a great deal of solitary pleasure (Was that too subtle?) by categorizing anything that was particularly well-written or primarily concerned with human values as something different from and better than genre fiction. (China Mountain Zhang by Maureen Hughes? Clearly a work of literary fiction.)

These days I could care less about whether or not something actually is or is not SF. I think being too caught up in this stuff can badly limit a writer. But thinking about this stuff is scab-pickingly fascinating.

I like you theory. But, I'd like to point out that it makes the Bill and Ted movies Scifi. XD

Do we really want to travel down the Bat Durston trail?

Wouldn't a better definition be more focused on the memes that are passed on in the story, rather than any of the other elements in the story?

Star Wars and Star Trek could be rewritten as Westerns (with really cool special effects).

Alien, could be rewritten in the theme of an Indian abduction story (a small band of prospectors out in the middle of nowhere...). Wasn't the "acid blood" more of a reason to keep the characters from being able to shoot their way out of the problem, rather than a unique science fiction concept?

If science fiction depends on whether the science fiction elements are crucial to the plot, what does that leave us with? What movies are science fiction?

I expect to see your answer in your next article, with at least three examples :)

I have to say, I like this definition, mainly because it means Cloverfield is no longer science fiction. The creature that destroys the city is similarly a macguffin - any natural disaster would have sufficed.

(In case it wasn't obvious, I didn't like Cloverfield. I was expecting a "giant monster destroys a city" movie, and I got a bunch of whining kids and a shaky-cam. bleah.)

Your theory doesn't hold up.

Lost in Space is about a family finding a way to bond.
Star Trek II is a revenge tale.
Bladerunner is a private eye film noir.
Gattaca is a murder mystery.

SFerrell:

Well, no. Each of these films may be about those things, but they don't work without the science fictional element. Even the weakest of these examples, Lost in Space, uses the science fictional element in an integral way to advance the plot and story. Just saying "Blade Runner is noir," which it is, doesn't mean it's not also science fiction, since at the center of the story are the replicants, whose short lives compel them to earth, and Deckart to find them. And so on.

Damn you Scalzi - I just came up with that exact same theory a few days ago*, and now you're going to get all the credit!

I was pondering why I think that Yiddish Policeman's Union isn't sci-fi, but Man in the High Castle is, when they're both "alternate histories". Your (I mean, *my*) theory captures it quite nicely.

(*Actually, I think my wife came up with it, and I stole it from her...)

By your argument, of course, the original Star Wars isn't skiffy, because it's basically a pure Western in drag.

But my favorite science fiction movie remains The Man in the White Suit, and it almost never is even considered as belonging in the genre, probably because it's presented as a pure contemporary satire. It wouldn't work at all without the science elements.

Scalzi, I love you man! And typically I agree with most everything you write. But this… THIS mean’s the Chicken Little Movie = Sci-Fi. I mean, take out the flying saucers and alien race and the sky does not fall. And then what? Chicken Little is actually crazy! We can’t have that. We destroy the alternate history ending to a classic bedtime story. The movie is ruined and our hero is humiliated in front of the entire town. Children cry.

And yet we CANNOT have Chicken Little Movie within the SciFi camp. A line must be drawn, I say.

Why? I dunno. No argument. I got nuthin. It just cannot be. I mean, c’mon. We are talking about Chicken Little. I can’t have it. I suspect as a fellow Heinlein fan you must agree? No? I need to be proven wrong here. Please. You have the skills. Set me back on track.

Well, except that the parts that were pure 30s science fiction serials, 40s war films, 50s Kurosawa characters and 60s hippie mysticism. And by my argument, it's definitely science fiction, since you take away the science fiction in that story, and what you have is bunch of actors woodenly intoning in scenes that are even more disjointed than the actual movie.

Also, just as a rhetorical point, I dislike people using the phrase "of course" as a way to suggest people are silly to disagree with them. In this particular case, there's not much "of course" here.

I'm not sure that I buy it. It depends very much on a subjective judgment about what is essential to the plot. For example, if you asked me to summarize the plot of Goldeneye, I would have said something along the lines of "James Bond and a beautiful Russian scientist team up to stop the villain from using an EMP satellite on London."

If the plot is described that way, the SF element was essential. You can't have an EMP satellite threat to London without SF. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that the villain was a former 00 agent and friend of Bond was merely interesting character stuff, not essential to the plot. You could replace him with Mad Russian General #2 or Crazy Islamic Terrorist #27 and still have essentially the same story about someone trying to pulse London.

If you try to abstract the plot more by saying, "Well, it doesn't really matter that the villain was trying to use an EMP satellite on London, because any other sort of threat would do as an excuse for Bond to go after him," then Moonraker is also out of the SF realm: It doesn't matter that the villain wanted to release a toxin that would kill off humanity, because any other sort of threat would do as an excuse for Bond to go after him.

Abstract any plot enough, and nothing is SF. Alien is about only one member of a ship's crew surviving an attack by a deadly creature. So is Moby-Dick. The Abyss is about a man overcoming deadly obstacles in a confined setting and finally getting back together with his estranged wife. So is Die Hard.

If Repo Man isn't science fiction then it is to SF what magical realism is to fantasy.

But I do think it is SF because I don't think it does take place in our world. Cox's Edge City is no more Los Angeles than Godard's Alphaville is Paris. The dystopia is a bit more subtle than your Mad Maxes and such, but it is still a world where crews of hazmat-suited men load irradiated corpses found on the street into garbage trucks, where cross-border military actions against refugee camps in Mexico are unremarkable, where the stores are filled with generic products and where crazy ladies with metal hands hunt real live dead aliens.

Plus the film ends with the alien infested car taking off into space and/or time with Miller and Otto aboard in a sort of Percivelian ode to innocence... that's kind of integral to the plot (such as it is) and hard to square with the similar macguffins in Pulp Fiction and Kiss Me Deadly.

But it is questions like this that make Cox's films so interesting. Take a look at his follow-up, Strait to Hell, and tell me what genre THAT film is in. Is it a western or a precursor to the Tarantino-esque crime thrillers of the 90s? Or is it just a Coxian freak-fest?

i go to write something about why Repo Man is definitely sf, at least in the "structural fabulation" sense, and i find that Sarcastro has already written what i might've, and better than i would have.

also, let me second the idea that, under your proposed definition, Mr. Scalzi, Star Wars would not be sf. it can, after all, be pretty accurately described as a rewrite of The Hidden Fortress, which is a samurai film. if the same story can be told as a samurai film, then the science-fictional elements are clearly unimportant to the plot. thus, not an sf film, QED. obviously, though, this is an absurdity, since the film is quite clearly an sf film. what are we to do?

And a second comment, to add to the first two things: 1) a test drive of my icon/avatar/whatever-you-want-to-call-the-little-picture-that-accompanies-my-posts-here; 2) to give a special appreciation to Sarcastro for mentioning Alphaville in concert with Repo Man.

This is actually something Stanislaw Lem said years ago (about books) - he said that if all science fiction elements can be taken out of a book and the book still makes sense, it's not actually science fiction.

Forgot to mention - in Polish fandom this is commonly referred to as "Lem's razor".

John Scalzi:

I suppose I shouldn't have wandered away for so long! So easy to lose a train of conversation.

It doesn't matter what the characters know about their world. It matters what we as the audience know about it and what is internally consistent to the film itself. We have a setting where aliens do exist because that's the setting the audience is being offered. It is in no way important that any of the characters in the film be aware of this fact.

I see now that in saying accepted before, it might've sounded like I was saying that the film and its characters accept this, and no, that wasn't the case. I'm talking about how Repo Man tells us about a world in which aliens exist, and is therefore a sci-fi setting, whereas in The Man Who Wasn't There, the sci-fi elements are purely the domain of a dream sequence, something we don't take as part of the reality of that setting.

Furthermore, it is true that you could replace the alien with something else, something that could kill, that people could lust over, and something that could create the sort of stir that you see at the end of the film. But then again, you could do this with pretty much any sci-fi film, and thus turn it into another comedy, drama, or mystery film, whatever have you. The Day The Earth Stood Still? I'm pretty sure we could spin that as a story about conflict between two very unequal powers on Earth, no Klaatu necessary. Gattaca without its gene-aware setting is just a story about racism. Just because we could replace that part of the film with something that wasn't sci-fi doesn't mean that it isn't a sci-fi film.

Finally, I'm shaking that you'd be surprised that I brought up Repo Man as an example. It's the example you chose in your post, I was simply replying to it. I'd be happy to play this game with another film if you like.

Your theory isn't one I'm comfortable with because it doesn't mesh with what I see when I look at sci-fi as a whole. What is important, on a critical level, in defining this as specifically as you have? Seems like we're just discussing your opinion, rather than something really useful to the analysis of sci-fi film.

The Man Who Wasn't There has UFOs? Is this a joke about the fact that nobody has seen this film, so you can tell them anything about it?

I'm fairly certain Cox himself doesn't consider Repo Man to be a sci-fi film... I just finished reading both his biography, Alex Cox: Film Anarchist, and his autobiography, X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker and recently joined the ranks of contributors to his wife's e-zine, so my head has been firmly immersed in Coxian space for the last month or so. Suppose you could ask the man yourself.

I don't think he'd object to it being called sci-fi, but I don't think it was really his intent either.