A Fantasy Of Suburbia (Hugo Cinema 1991)

This blog post is the thirty-fourth in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.

All Hugo Award winners receive the same “rocketship” trophy, regardless of category. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the cultural norm of ranking some Hugo categories as more prestigious than others has extended to the presentation of the actual trophy.

Paul Verhoeven was shortlisted for the Hugo Award
three times for classic movies that critique capitalism,
but he never took home the trophy.
(Image via IMDB)

At the Chicago Worldcon in 1991 — as had happened at several previous conventions — the chrome rocket portions of the trophies arrived at the convention with minor imperfections. After a careful examination, the one with the fewest scratches and dents was used for the Best Novel trophy, while the second-best went to the Best Novella trophy.

In some previous years, Best Dramatic Presentation had received the worst trophy. But in 1991, it received the ninth-best trophy, with the most damaged ones assigned to Best Fan Writer and Best Fan Artist. This could be taken as a measure of the increasing prestige of the Best Dramatic Hugo.

More than 800 people voted in the category, as there were strong feelings expressed about the top two contenders. Paul Verhoven’s Total Recall had been the standard-bearer for fans of hard-edged classic science fiction, while Tim Burton’s gothic fable Edward Scissorhands was beloved by the more whimsical factions of fandom. The winner was decided by just six votes — a margin of less than 0.7 per cent. The shortlist was rounded out by the top-grossing movie of the year, Ghost, a well-liked sequel to the Hugo-winning Back To The Future, and The Witches, the last theatrically-released movie from iconic puppeteer Jim Henson.

In File 770, Mike Glyer noted that, “The Dramatic Presentation category clearly generated the most ardent feelings… on the other hand, the category was also far and away the highest in number of “No award” votes cast.”

There are some notable omissions from the shortlist. The time-loop movie 12:01 P.M. — adapted from a story by Richard A. Lupoff — earned a spot on the Academy Award shortlist for best live-action short film. Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch remains a cult classic and is filled with charm. And the big-screen debut of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles earned rave reviews and became the highest-grossing independent film of all time. It is also worth noting that one of the most well-remembered Star Trek episodes “Yesterday’s Enterprise” did not make the final ballot.

The weakest link on the shortlist is Disney’s The Witches, which eked on to the ballot with just 27 nominating votes, and earned less than 10 per cent of the first-place votes on the final ballot. Based on a story by Roald Dahl (who died shortly after the movie was released), The Witches follows a Norwegian child and his grandmother as they uncover a plot by an international cabal of witches. It’s a wildly uneven affair, with extraordinary puppet effects used when the child is turned into a mouse, and an excellent performance from Rowan Atkinson, but the pacing is off base and the whole thing is filled with drawn out, boring sequences featuring Anjelica Huston mugging for the camera. The gender depiction is painful for modern audiences. In addition to being extremely condescending, there are mean-spirited generalizations throughout, such as the dictum that every woman without children or who wears comfortable shoes is villainous. It’s a leaden movie that probably didn’t deserve recognition at the Hugos.

The final Back To The Future film returns to many of the same tropes that had been explored in the first two movies, this time sending Marty McFly (Canadian Michael J. Fox) to the 1880s. There’s the tried-and-true plot of having engineering challenges to overcome in pursuit of returning home, the requisite romance arc, and the time constraint that must be overcome. Variety magazine praised the film for its exuberance, for giving Christopher Lloyd a chance to take centre stage, and for letting the series go out on a high note. It’s all very entertaining, and a tight script, but the story doesn’t stand on its own, and it’s difficult to argue that it was worthy of Hugo Award recognition.

The iconic pottery scene from Ghost
is one of the most memorable moments
in all of 1990s cinema. 
(Image via Youtube)

Ghost, a romantic supernatural drama starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore was the top-grossing movie of the year and earned five Academy Award nominations — including best supporting actress for Whoopi Goldberg. It remains entertaining and charming, though many of us had forgotten just how silly the movie is. The movie stars Patrick Swayze as Sam, the ghost of an ethical investment banker who must protect his former girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore) when she is pursued by Sam’s former colleagues. Despite relatively solid special effects, we found the idea of a Wall Street investment banker who is ethical to be largely unbelievable.

Although the broader public flocked to see Ghost, the leading two vote earners at that year’s Hugo Awards were Total Recall and Edward Scissorhands.

The second of Paul Verhoeven’s trilogy of Hugo-shortlisted science fiction movies about capitalism, Total Recall was an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” On a Worldcon panel a couple of years after the movie’s release, Daniel Kimmel complained that the movie strayed too far from the original story. The film was released at the peak of Arnold Schwarzenegger's action star era, with the Austrian bodybuilder taking on the role of Douglas Quaid, a blue-collar worker whose reality becomes unglued during a memory-implant holiday. Made with directorial panache and clever use of Mexico City’s brutalist architecture as a backdrop, it’s a surprisingly good action movie with interesting commentary on colonialism, power, and the construction of self. Total Recall quickly caught the attention of academics, including Donald E. Palumbo, who wrote about the film’s use of ambiguity, deception, and illusion in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Despite the prevalence of bare breasts in the movie, the female characters have agency. “Total Recall reveals surprising intelligence and humor beneath the muscle. It has a sharp, witty script. The plot is sinewed with ingenious twists,” wrote Brian Johnson in MacLeans magazine. For most members of our cinema club, it was the best screen science fiction of the year.

Tim Burton’s oddball Frankenstein knock-off Edward Scissorhands was praised by fans for the director’s rococo directorial style and lead actor Johnny Depp’s soulful performance, but the mainstream reaction at the time was more negative. In the Hollywood Reporter, Duane Byrge compared the movie to a Saturday Night Live skit gone wrong, and wrote “Seemingly trying to hack out a sort of Capraesque fable from its crudely welded parts, Scissorhands never imparts any sort of glowing, humanistic message.”

It is not lost on us that Edward's only value to most
members of normative society is as a worker or servant.
His ability to tend to yards, groom dogs, or cut hair
is the only value that middle-class citizens find in him.
(Image via IMDB)

The movie follows an artificial human constructed by an inventor who didn’t have time to finish his creation, leaving the title character with eponymous scissors for hands. Given the name “Edward,” he’s taken in by a suburban family and impresses their neighbours with tricks until his presence threatens existing relationships, after which his oddity becomes a focal point for social exile. Australian fan Alan Stewart praised the movie’s “rich commentary on suburbia,” and others suggested it was a parable about how fans are excluded from mundane society.

Although several members of our group did not care for Edward Scissorhands, at least one found the movie meaningful as a metaphor for neurodivergence. The protagonist of the movie has difficulty expressing himself verbally and emotionally. He often says very little, and people misinterpret his intentions, which can be interpreted as a reflection on how many neurodivergent people struggle with typical communication styles, are misunderstood despite good intentions, and may express care in nontraditional ways.

One aspect of the film that most of us felt has aged poorly is its approach to gender representation. In Burton’s depiction of society, every woman is a gossiping shrew, and every man is emotionally stunted. For some, this made the movie unpalatable, though others defended it as representing the social estrangement felt by some people with autism.

Contemporaneous discussions of the Hugo Award race for Best Dramatic Presentation put in stark relief the tension within fandom between those who prefer whimsical speculative fiction and those who yearn for high adventure with spaceships and jetpacks. It was a year where the standard-bearers for each side of the debate were very clear, and the vote was extraordinarily close.

Much as had occurred when the vote was taken in 1991, the tension between these two visions of speculative fiction continued to inspire strong disagreements.