Reengineering Modernity:

Cinematic Detritus and the Steampunk Blockbuster

Abstract

This article focuses on a wave of contemporary films that envision neo-Victorian pasts, presents, and futures where historical progress is reordered by the anachronistic presence of steampunk- machinery. As the inventors of steampunk fiction scavenge their worlds for the mechanical debris needed to construct their patchwork machines, the genre’s films similarly restructure pop-cultural icons of modernity: reengineering textual and mechanical histories for contemporary purposes. I consider how steampunk’s mainstream emergence coincides with dramatic shifts in cinema’s own industrial identity and has been used to mythologise the technological fears and fetishisms of twenty-first-century progress.