Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination – October 24
Friday, October 17
12:00 – 2:00 PM
Central Library 211
Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination
a lecture by Soraya Murray
Soraya Murray contemplates the pivotal figure of the Black technologist, also known as ‘Black tech,’ in technothriller films. This work is part of Murray’s forthcoming Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT, 2026), the first examination of popular movies classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weaponry, and digital surveillance. Technothriller traces the changing imagination of technology within an American context and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of modern life. Murray considers beloved but often underrated films from the 1970s to the present, like “The Andromeda Train” (1971), “Westworld” (1973), “Rollerball” (1975), “Demon Seed” (1977), “WarGames” (1983), “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), “Jurassic Park” (1993), “Clear and Present Danger” (1994), “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991), the “Mission: Impossible” franchise (1996- ), “Ex Machina” (2014), “Tenet” (2020), “M3GAN” (2022), and “The Creator” (2023) in order to think through deeply embedded popular beliefs about technology, innovation, and their imaginaries—in other words, the mechanics of power within our technological lives and the troubled, sometimes catastrophic relationships between humans and their innovations.
This event is made possible through the Robert & Lillian Drake Lecture Series endowment.
Soraya Murray studies contemporary visual culture, especially film and video games. Her researches explores visual culture including digital media, film, video, and electronic games; theories of technology and globalization; and media representations of technological and scientific advancement. Her essays are anthologized nationally and internationally, including most recently, EcoGames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis (Holland 2024), Reset (Italy 2023), Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth and Violence in the Video Game West (USA 2023) and Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies (Germany 2022). Murray joined the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies editorial board in 2023, and is a member of the critical/historical game studies journal ROMchip’s editorial group. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space considers video games from a visual culture perspective and how they both mirror and are constitutive of larger societal fears, dreams, hopes, and even complex struggles for recognition. Murray is currently co-editing an anthology on antiracist futures in games and play with TreaAndrea Russworm. She is Professor of the Film + Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds a PhD from Cornell and an MFA from UC Irvine.