Fred
geeseandgeesers2007@yahoo.comwrote:
By Annalee NewitzSunday,
January 4, 2009; Page B01
When the present promises only economic hardship and political
upheaval, what does the future look like?
In 2009, it looks like a world of gleaming spaceships filled with
enlightened people who have emerged with their humanity intact after
a terrible war.
They have entered the 23rd century, shed racism, no longer use money,
possess seemingly magical technologies and are devoted to peaceful
exploration.
I refer of course to "Star Trek" and its powerful story of a better
tomorrow, which has been mesmerizing audiences for almost half a
century and returns to movie theaters this coming May with an eagerly
anticipated 11th full-length feature.
But wait.
The future also looks like this: a dark, violent world where a
horrific war between humans and cyborgs leads to the near-
extermination of humanity.
This vision, in the latest "Terminator" movie, is also arriving at
your nearest mutiplex in May.
We imagine the future in places other than the movie theater, of
course.
Still, these two familiar franchises underscore the conflicting
stories we tell ourselves in uncertain times about what lies ahead:
Either we're bound for a techno-utopia of adventure, or a grim,
Orwellian dystopia where humanity is on the brink of implosion.
We've seen this dichotomy before.
Nearly a century ago, Europe was headed toward war on an
unprecedented scale.
Traditional alliances evaporated, shocking new weapons ripped apart
bodies and countries, and a generation of artists such as Picasso
responded with paintings that showed reality reduced to unsettling,
jagged abstraction.
Meanwhile, a pulp writer from Chicago named Edgar Rice Burroughs was
concocting stories about a soldier who wakes up one morning in a
miraculous, futuristic world full of lost cities, advanced
technologies and little green men.
"A Princess of Mars," serialized in 1912, was the first in a long
line of swashbuckling adventure tales Burroughs wrote about his
hero, John Carter, sword-fighting and ray-gunning his way across
Barsoom -- the natives' name for Mars. Carter and his new Barsoomian
companions fought wars like the one the United States itself would
soon be fighting.
But they were winnable wars, against comprehensible, easy-to-vanquish
alien enemies.
Burroughs, who also went on to publish the Tarzan novels, supplied
escapist fantasies of the future to a public weary of the grim,
terrifying present.
It's clear that hard times make audiences yearn for fantastical tales
of a better tomorrow.
During the paranoid heights of the Cold War, they thronged movie
theaters to see Leslie Nielsen conquer the alien technology
of "Forbidden Planet."
But in between the escapist fantasies of tomorrow, audiences also
tuned in to grim tales of techno-fascist futures such as "Brave New
World" and "1984."
The best example of our polarized dreams of tomorrow came during the
Great Depression.
During this period, Americans couldn't get enough of Buck Rogers, a
20th-century soldier who falls into a coma and miraculously awakes in
the 25th century.
The story of his adventures, originally published as two novellas,
became a long-running radio and movie serial and a newspaper comic
strip that ran through most of the 1930s.
Like John Carter on Barsoom, Buck and his comrades are fighting a
war -- in this case, against the Mongols.
But war isn't hell; it's a backdrop for awesome adventures and
astonishing inventions.
Later, the Flash Gordon comics and radio show competed with Buck
Rogers for audiences craving escapism.
Flash found himself on the Barsoom-esque planet Mongo, fighting
the "Han" and swashbuckling his way through weird places filled with
strange natives and sexy queens.
But while Buck and Flash crossed swords on the radio, a very
different idea of the future was being prophesied by British writer
Aldous Huxley, who published "Brave New World" in 1932.
The novel takes place in a 26th century where strife has been
eliminated by means of state-controlled eugenics, mental
conditioning, drugs and various technological niceties.
Like a Buck Rogers in reverse, our hero Bernard finds himself
alienated from the urban world of perfect plenty and promiscuity and
repulsed by the "savage reservations" where unmodified humans live.
In "Brave New World," Buck's shiny future is revealed as an
insidious, high-tech fascism.
The basic question raised by Buck Rogers and "Brave New World" is
whether humans would be more prosperous in the far future than in the
1930s.
The answer?
Humans in both tales live in worlds of seemingly unlimited wealth.
Whether that represents an improvement is a matter of debate.
In the post-World War II period, it seemed as if the wealthier future
had arrived, at least for many in America.
A more bountiful tomorrow was no longer a source of moral ambiguity,
especially in Robert Heinlein's wildly popular young adult novels of
the 1940s and '50s, including "Space Cadet," "The Rolling Stones"
and "Have Space Suit -- Will Travel."
In these stories, nice kids and adventurous families, blessed with a
seemingly endless supply of rocket ships and fuel, romp through the
sprawling offworld colonies of the solar system.
Films such as "Forbidden Planet" splashed this vision of the future
across hundreds of movie screens.
A heroic space captain (played by an earnest Leslie Nielsen) leads
his intrepid crew to a planet where a lone scientist and his nubile
daughter bask in a world of endless riches.
But the astronauts are menaced by an amorphous, deadly creature
which, it turns out, is created by powerful alien technology, buried
beneath the planet's surface, that "manifests" aspects of the
scientist's "unconscious mind" -- savage, invisible monsters that
strive to protect his daughter from the Nielsen character's advances.
In these futures of plenty, the one problem that dogs our heroes
again and again is the power of technology.
In the best-case scenarios, deadly technologies are easily defeated
or are put in the hands of right-thinking people who won't abuse them.
Will the high-tech fruits of the Cold War quest for knowledge destroy
us? These stories say no.
But darker views from the Cold War offer authoritarian futures where
technology wipes humans out entirely (as in the nuclear wasteland
of "On the Beach") or is used to brainwash populations into
submission.
Televisions are among the most insidious technologies depicted in
Cold War dystopias.
The book-burning masses in Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," first
published in 1953, are addicted to interactive, wall-size TVs.
And in Orwell's "1984," published in 1949, the population is both
pacified and monitored by the omnipresent telescreens in every home
and workplace.
While Orwell and Bradbury were writing, the menace of the near future
came from atomics.
But the threat of the far future seemed to emanate from a technology
that destroyed populations by controlling their minds rather than
blasting apart their atoms.
The first wave of the Cold War was temporarily stilled in the wake of
the political and social upheavals of the 1960s.
While previous generations had worried about future prosperity and
scientific progress, far-future stories of this new era asked a
single stark question:
In a world of scarce resources and constant war, would Homo sapiens
survive at all?
Partial answers came in movies such as "Soylent Green," in which
overpopulation and food shortages have forced the world into
cannibalism.
And the far future series "Planet of the Apes" depicts humans as the
new wild animals in a world ruled by hyper-intelligent simians.
These films, and many others like them, blamed humanity's demise on
its abuse of nature.
But this era also marked the beginning of the utopian Star Trek
franchise, which spawned spinoffs, movies, comics, conventions,
subcultures, costume contests and books that are still ragingly
popular today.
Like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, Star Trek has its easy-to-
understand enemies, the alien Klingons and the Romulans.
But wars against them don't undermine the basic message of the story,
which is that humanity has evolved into something better.
Of course, this year Star Trek will do battle at the box office with
Terminator's human-destroying cyborg carnage.
Though their visions of the future are dramatically different, both
movies share one basic premise: Despite hardship, humanity will
survive. Whether that's a good thing remains to be seen.
Annalee Newitz is the author of
"Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture,"
--- End forwarded message ---
