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For Hollywood, Future Holds Little Hope |
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It's January, and everyone is asking me whether 2009 will be a better year than 2008. Let's skip 2009 altogether and ask if the future will be better. Question: Have you ever seen a motion picture that depicts the future of mankind in such a way that the future is a better time to live than the current state of the world provides? Answer: No, not even close. Captain James T. Kirk of "Star Trek" did have a brief respite from restaging the plots of the Greek tragedies in "The Trouble with Tribbles," but beyond that and other farces like "Spaceballs" and "Galaxy Quest," the future according to Hollywood is all gloom and doom. "Blade Runner," Ridley Scott's celebrated film from 1982, ostensibly depicts a future where human leisure can be maximized because replicants (humanoid robots) are manufactured to perform specific tasks. Of course, more leisure time leads to decadency, a social decline that Hollywood directors usually portray with ample scenes of female nudity. But there are a couple of hitches with this robot-manufacturing plan. Replicants begin to believe that they are actual living creatures and revolt against their masters because they have been programmed to shut down after four years of work. Quite simply, they want to live out their lives. And secondly, in film after film, female replicants always have perfect breasts and they do not suffer from PMS. Therefore, it defies logic as to why female replicants would ever want to be human. What drives "Blade Runner" is the plot twist that inorganic, manufactured replicants have become "human" whereas humans have declined to the point of being insensitive robots. The movie ends with the Blade Runner (Harrison Ford) seeking an Edenic hideaway to woo Rachel, the replicant played by Sean Young who, by the way, has perfect breasts. Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" comes to the big screen in 2011. Previously, the story has been done for television. The novel's title comes from "The Tempest" by William Shakespeare: "O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beautious mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in't!" Huxley envisioned his story of test-tube babies unfolding in the year 2540. However, given our advances in artificial (in vitro) conception and gene research, the breakdown of marriage and morality in our current society, and our insatiable appetite for pills of all kinds, one must ask whether Huxley's gruesome prediction of societal dystopia won't be here by 2040 instead. George Orwell's two novels about the future ("1984" and "Animal Farm") were more contemporaneous of his era than you might think. "Animal Farm" depicts the extreme socialism that had already become the vogue in Europe and Asia while "1984" depicted the newly developed medium -- television -- as being an interactive tool for state control of our private lives. Marshall McLuhan predicted that television would control human behavior by the images it presented without need of interactive, or two-way, viewing. Orwell chose to make the telescreen into a camera as well as a display to emphasize the state's desire to peer into our inner sanctums. When considering Orwell's themes, one also must include the film "Brazil" (1985), which is "1984" rewritten in a darkly humorous vein by Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame. And then there is "The Matrix" trilogy. Need I explain that storyline? Movies about the future predict an anti-human bias. The state tries to control every thought and every action of its subjects. Only the metaphors change.
For the subject treatment of all futuristic plots and appropriate metaphors for tyranny, I recommend that you add all of "The Twilight Zone" episodes to your film library. Though the 2006 film "Idiocracy" starring Luke Wilson is set five centuries into the future, I did not consider it a futuristic movie. It does not portray an anti-human sentiment. In fact, "Idiocracy" is quite the opposite of a futuristic film. This comedy pokes fun at mankind's desire to turn everyone into simple-minded, common denominators. So I watched the film as probably intended -- a documentary of current events. I would recommend that you also watch "Idiocracy" as a documentary. It goes a long way in explaining how Hollywood can make futuristic movies that are so incredibly believable.
"For Hollywood, Future Holds Little Hope" originally appeared in the January 9, 2009 issue of the West Virginia State Journal.
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Copyright 1990-2008 David G. Allen |
