Soraya Murray, Emeriti Luncheon Talk, November 12, 2026
"TECHNOTHRILLER: Film and the American Imagination"
Summary:
In this presentation, visual culture scholar Soraya Murray (Film + Digital Media Department, UCSC) shares her new book, TECHNOTHRILLER: Film and the American Imagination (MIT, Feb 2026). In TECHNOTHRILLER, Soraya Murray reveals how popular American films after the 1960s, in which technology assumes a central role - mainly biotech, military, and computational - channel our cultural anxieties, dreams, and convictions about the power and meaning of advanced technology. Along with iconic adaptations from technothriller novels by Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, such as The Hunt for Red October and The Andromeda Strain, Murray considersWestworld, Rollerball, Demon Seed, WarGames, Ex Machina, Tenet, M3GAN, and The Creator, as well as the Terminator and Mission: Impossible franchises. Through these films and others, she traces deeply embedded popular beliefs about technology and innovation - and then asks what this tells us about the mechanics of power within our technological lives. Her work finds in technothrillers a new way of thinking about the troubled, sometimes catastrophic, relationships between humans and their inventions.
Bio:
Soraya Murray is a Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work explores the visual culture of innovation, advanced computation, and its imaginaries as imaged in popular American films, for which technology assumes a central role. Murray's first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback 2021), examines popular video games like Assassin's Creed, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand TheftAuto as visual culture. Her second book, Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT, 2026), examines the fraught social imaginary around technology and innovation using popular films from the 1970s to the present.