Machines in the Garden: De-Gothicizing the American Pastoral in Tales from the Loop

초록

The television series Tales from the Loop, released in 2022, launches an ambitious attempt to revise the traditional gothic iconography of the violent intrusion of technology into pastoral spaces. Mapping out a spatially and temporally defamiliarized county in the American Midwest, home to an enigmatic high-tech research facility nicknamed The Loop, the series employs an idiosyncratic visual style and a narrative strategy inspired by high modernist fiction designed to foreclose specific thematic options. To the degree that these options provide the foundation for the polarized political discourses, in which the Rustbelt States of the American Midwest are currently framed in terms of right-wing nostalgia or neoliberal techno-optimism, the series’s uniquely creative illustration of Leo Marx’s evocative metaphor of the “machine in the garden” suggests ways of reframing that larger political discourse. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

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