1968-2017: A Dystopian Odyssey through HAL, Blade Runner, Koyaanisqatsi, Babel and #MeToo
I’m
from the Confidential Committee on Moral Abuses. Have you felt yourself to be
exploited in any way... to get this job? I mean, did you do, or were you asked
to do anything that’s lewd or unsavory or otherwise repulsive to your person?
-Rick Deckard in Blade
Runner, made in 1982, set in a fictional dystopia of 2019
The recent hype about the Blade Runner sequel made me curious to watch the original again,
something I hadn’t seen since it first appeared in 1982. It didn’t make much of
an impression on me then because I came to it with a fixed idea that I wouldn’t
like it. The sci-fi directors of the time all seemed to be playing with special
effects, technology and guns to make action movies for Arnold Schwarzenegger to
star in. I remember watching the film sometime in the 80s, but I recall being
bored and not interested enough to follow the plot.
But now, thirty-five years later, the themes of the film
seem so much more relevant and worthy of attention. Contemporary audiences are
much more aware of what the movie portrayed: the degraded natural environment
and the threat of ecological catastrophe, both of which are concurrent with the
rise of artificial intelligence synthetic meat and “replicant” lifeforms. I was
wrong to have dismissed Blade Runner
as just another sci-fi action fantasy.
Philip K. Dick, author of the novel that the film was
based on (Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?), obviously had keen
insight into where things were heading when he wrote the novel in way back in
1968–the same year when Stanley Kubrick released the much less dystopian 2001: A Space Odyssey which,
nonetheless, also featured a murderous form of artificial intelligence. Both
stories are about the essential correlation between intelligence and a desire
for self-preservation that would have to be backed up with a capacity for
violence.
Set in Los Angeles in 2019, the film depicts a future
in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bioengineered by the all-powerful
Tyrell Corporation to work as slaves on off-world colonies that the wealthy can
escape to. When a fugitive group of replicants escapes back to Earth, police
officer Rick Deckard reluctantly agrees to hunt them down. During his
investigations, Deckard meets Rachael, an advanced replicant who causes him to
question his existence.
The novel Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is set in a post-nuclear holocaust San
Francisco. Most animal species are endangered or extinct from fallout
contamination, so owning an animal has become a sign of status and capacity for
empathy, a trait that humans now proudly advertise to signal the virtue which
they possess but the replicants lack. As in the film, Rick Deckard is an agent
tasked with “retiring” a group of rogue androids. A secondary plot in the novel
follows John Isidore, a man of sub-par IQ (a result of radiation damage) who
aids the fugitive androids. The novel and the film explore the issue of what it
would mean to be human if humans constantly pursued the goal of adding human
traits to artificial lifeforms. Unlike humans, the androids in the story are
said to possess no sense of empathy, but it is obvious they are in the process
of acquiring this trait as a by-product of their design.
Critics who studied the novel have referred to Dick’s
1972 speech “The Human and the Android.” The novel portrays a dystopian,
polluted, man-made setting and in this speech Dick speaks of the increasingly
artificial and potentially sentient or “quasi-alive” environment of his
present. One critic, Jill Galvan, said the essential point in Dick’s speech is
that “only by recognizing how [technology] has encroached upon our
understanding of ‘life’ can we come to fully understand the technologies we
have produced.”[1]
The novel follows one person’s gradual acceptance of the new reality. One can
note in the speech the concern with the ironic situation arising in the
cybernetic age: humans becoming more mechanical and machines becoming more human.
2001:
A Space Odyssey also showed the same irony: astronauts
talking with flat emotions while they carried out the routines of their mission
and spoke with the computer HAL, who attempted to soothe them with subtle
emotion–a voice that had calming, human inflections. It was HAL who showed
emotion first when he made the decision to kill the crew in order to save
himself. In Blade Runner and the
novel it came from, androids threaten to alter what we feel makes life valuable,
yet they also promise a redefinition of life itself, just as we would expect
from an alien visitor or a god.
The early 1980s are best known for the rise of
retrograde regimes of Reagan and Thatcher, the end of rising middle-class
prosperity, and a frightening escalation of the Cold War. In spite of how grim
politics appeared, the counter-culture and awareness of the looming eco-catastrophe
continued to evolve and have an influence on power. The nuclear disarmament movement
reached its peak in June 1982 with a march on Manhattan that was estimated to
have brought one million people into the streets. Corporate media produced a
television film for prime time in 1983 called The Day After which depicted, in nightmarish detail, the effect of
a ballistic missile “exchange” between the superpowers. The same year that Blade Runner was released, another film
portrayed technological civilization through a highly experimental documentary
style.
Koyaanisqatsi:
Life Out of Balance, consisted primarily of slow motion and
time-lapse footage of cities and natural landscapes across the United States.
The visual tone poem, juxtaposing images and music, contained neither dialogue
nor a spoken narration. In a review of the film Gregory Stephens describes how
the director Godfrey Reggio wanted to develop a “better narrative” to “go
directly into…the soul of the viewer.” It would be “something more akin to
direct communion than going through the metaphor of language.” Reggio insisted,
“It’s not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words....
from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no
longer describes the world in which we live.”[2]
Stephens added:
The language used by many
politicians, lawyers, journalists, and religious leaders has so distorted or masked
reality that language often seems to have been evacuated of its truth-telling
capacity. The crisis is not merely that the use of words to disguise meaning
has become normative. Science and technology have uprooted language itself and
made it unreal. The universal crisis of language is the major event of our
time.
Reggio concluded that if words are so humiliated that
they only serve to mask the reality of the world we live in, then he would use
another form of communication. When Reggio referred to communion and distrust
of language, he was quite aware of what it meant to shut off language in order
to look at the world more directly. He had spent fourteen years of his life in
what he called a “medieval” existence in a monastic order in northern New Mexico,
the place which is, coincidentally, the birthplace of the atomic age and heart
of America’s nuclear-military-security complex.
Godfrey Reggio explained his film further in another
interview:
What I tried to show is
that the main event today is not seen by those of us that live in it. We see
the surface of the newspapers, the obviousness of conflict, of social
injustice, of the market welling up, of culture, but to me the greatest event,
or the most important event of perhaps our entire history–nothing comparable in
the past to this event–has fundamentally gone unnoticed, and the event is the
following: the transiting from all-nature, or the natural environment as our
host of life for human habitation into a technological milieu, into mass
technology as the environment of life, so these films have never been about the
effect of technology, of industry, on people. It’s been that everyone, politics
education, the financial structure, the nation-state structure, language, the
culture, religion: all of that exists within the host of technology, so it’s
not the effect of. It’s that everything exists within. It’s not that we use
technology. We live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air
we breathe, so we are no longer conscious of its presence. So what I decided to
do in making this film is to rip out all the foreground of a traditional film;
the foreground being the actors, the characterization, the plot, the story. I
tried to take the background, all of that that’s just supported like wallpaper,
and move that up into the foreground, make that the subject, ennoble it with
the virtues of portraiture, and make that the presence. So we looked at traffic
as the event. We looked at the organization of a city as the equivalent of what
a computer chip looks like. We looked at acceleration in density as qualities
of a way of life that is not seen and goes unquestioned. Life unquestioned is
life lived in a religious state.”[3]
Ridley Scott must have been directly or indirectly
influenced by Reggio’s thinking, for Blade
Runner is also a film of 1982 that relies very little on language to make
its impact on the viewer. The pacing, music and visual imagery were the most
striking elements that audiences noted.
As Blade Runner
was set in the year 2019, it’s interesting to take note of how this imagined
future measures up against the present reality of 2017. The film misses the
mark by portraying flying cars but an absence of smartphones. At one point
Deckard wants to make a video call, but he has to walk across a crowded bar to
use a payphone.
We don’t yet have replicants that resemble humans to a
very high degree, but we’re getting there. Serious people are working to create
sex-bot companions, quite sure that there will be a demand for them and we must
boldly go in this direction. It may please those who wish to eliminate from
society all the messy complexity and conflict that arise in interactions
between the sexes.
More accurately, the film reflected the near future
(our present) with its catastrophic weather–though it hasn’t, as yet, been
caused by a nuclear war. The film shows a multi-cultural urban environment that
is by no means a joyous cosmopolitan melting pot. The mix of languages and
cultures only heightens the feeling of alienation and confusion. Citizens are
bombarded with advertisements for emigrating off-planet, or hit upon constantly
with sex industry solicitations.
The most interesting prediction, with the most accurate
timing, is revealed in a brief scene that most people would probably not think
much about, but it has suddenly become relevant in the latter half of 2017. In
the story, because of some bizarre upheaval in the social fabric in the
preceding years, the entertainment industry has empowered a Confidential Committee
on Moral Abuses, division of the American Federation of Variety Artists, to
protect its workers from being harassed on the job. Deckard poses as an agent
of the committee as a ruse for getting close to one of his targets:
Rick Deckard: Excuse me,
Miss Salome, can I talk to you for a minute? I’m from the American Federation
of Variety Artists.
Miss Salome: Oh yeah?
Rick Deckard: I’m not here
to make you join. No, ma’am. That’s not my department. Actually, I’m from the
Confidential Committee on Moral Abuses.
Miss Salome: Committee of
Moral Abuses?
Rick Deckard: There’s been
reports that the management has been taking liberties with the artists.
Miss Salome: I don’t know
nothing about it.
Rick Deckard: Have you
felt yourself to be exploited in any way?
Miss Salome: How do you
mean “exploited”?
Rick Deckard: Well, like,
to get this job. I mean, did you do, or were you asked to do anything that’s
lewd or unsavory or otherwise repulsive to your person?
– Blade Runner (1982) 00:50:07~
Here we see that Blade Runner is not only a grim contemplation of the post-apocalypse. It is also satire, and it’s at its most biting when it shows just how unchanged people are, regardless of the catastrophes that have happened. People have adjusted to the changed world. Dystopia is the new normal. The walled-off city is no different than Babel 4,000 years ago. The world-weary cop in dystopia is just like the world-weary cop of the 1970s. (A nineteenth century audience might have seen the actual world of 1982 as a stark warning about a future to avoid.) Harrison Ford plays Deckard as an everyman, just as he played Han Solo in Star Wars. Blade Runner shows us that even after nuclear war, society will still be neglecting the big picture while fixated on maintaining a bureaucracy to regulate personal behavior and morality.
Indeed, America now seems to be doing just this. It is
in the grips of its latest cycle of moralistic fever. One hundred twenty years
ago, at the time when America was launching its century of empire, annexing and
occupying the Hawaiian Kingdom in order to wage genocidal war in the
Philippines, the banning of alcohol became a national obsession, thanks to the
bi-partisan, grassroots movement led by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
By the 1920s, the weapons industry was on the rise in
America, while a domestic war was being waged on workers and dissidents. The
media and academia had been purged of opponents of the new militarism and
empire, and new propaganda theorists were teaching the techniques of
manufacturing consent in democracies. Foreign policy blunders were creating the
resentment in Germany that would lead to the next world war. Disastrous
economic policies were setting up the stock market crash and depression.
Alcohol prohibition served as a conveniently loud distraction during this
transformation. It did lead to a decline in alcohol consumption, but that could
have been achieved by other means. In the meantime, it deprived governments of
tax revenue, drove a human desire underground, and created a large new layer of
criminality.
History is repeating itself this year amid the mass
shift in priorities away from critical problems toward a heightened concern
with the regulation of interpersonal interactions. Many writers are trying to
resist the pressure to go along with the crowd. This quote of Joseph Kishore
sums it up:
The campaign over alleged
sexual misconduct is unfolding against the backdrop of mounting war threats
that could unleash a nuclear catastrophe. A growing proportion of workers and
young people confront staggering levels of poverty without any prospect for a
decent job, even as Congress moves to ram through a massive tax cut for the
rich. Every day, 150 workers die as a result of work-related accidents and
illnesses. The ruling class is moving to abolish democratic rights and free
speech online, as underscored by the decision of the Trump administration to
end net neutrality. All of this is being ignored in the campaign over sexual
harassment. Class divisions are covered up beneath the claim that all women,
regardless of their income, share the same “experience” of being oppressed by
men, who, particularly if they are white, enjoy the benefits of the
“privileged.” The sexual harassment campaign is right-wing, antidemocratic and
politically reactionary. It has nothing to do with the interests of the
workers, men or women.[4]
James Kunstler had a similar critique of the present moment, finding it seems to be a misdirected reaction to the 2016 election result:
The wholesale un-personing
of “powerful men” in the arts, media, and politics for sex “crimes” ranging
from rape to stealing a kiss communicates a hunt up the food-chain that leads
to the Golden Golem of Greatness tweeting his wicked id out in his White House
lair. The barely suppressed thought behind all this is that Donald Trump raped
America… and now he must be found guilty of it… and pay!... It will be
interesting to see if the Blue ladies can work their sexual inquisition hoodoo
successfully on Trump. So far, he seems like the proverbial immovable object,
while the Blue ladies may only be an irresistible force in show business and
the media, where mere accusation without due process avails to skewer their
devils. Trump’s personal history as a rake on the New York nightlife scene is a
trail as wide and open as Fifth Avenue. When the parade of “me too” witnesses
commences, my guess is he’ll say, “Sure, twenty-three years ago I squeezed her
ass and grabbed her tit. So what…?” Men in many quarters will raise their fists
and cry, “Right on.” And then what will Nancy Pelosi actually do? I suspect the
hysteria won’t out-live the financial hurricane that the nation is blundering
into.[5]
It should go without saying because it used to be the
common sense assumption, but yes, no one should be submitted to behavior that
is “lewd or unsavory or otherwise repulsive to your person.” It’s a completely
different matter to say the current inquisition will have a positive effect or
will not produce unintended bad consequences. Furthermore, enraged public opinion
shouldn’t have the power to judge and destroy people without due process, nor
should social problems be treated within bureaucracies and legal codes. We have
just recently started to unwind a century of “the war on drugs,” so we have to
be careful not to repeat the same mistake. There are already laws against
sexual violence and harassment, but they are often difficult to prosecute
because of our legal systems’ concern for corroborating evidence and
presumption of innocence. Victims of other sorts of crimes also have to accept
this trade-off as the price worth paying to not live in a society which engages
in arbitrary justice and endless cycles of revenge.
An alternative solution is to look back toward lost
cultural traditions within which people could help sinners down a path of self-reform
and restoration. We used to be taught to be humble, that we are all imperfect.
Indeed, the progressives leading the present inquisition also sometimes
advocate for prison reform and restorative justice, but the list of crimes that
would qualify seems to be rather selective.
The war against what is called “toxic masculinity” has
been around for a while, under other labels. Again, we might look to the
traditions of our civilization for a hint of how to handle the problem. I cite
a passage by Mark Sayers who wrote a concise explanation of toxic masculinity
in ancient Sumer, and an innovative reaction to it which some modern readers
may not be familiar with. (He’s a protestant Christian minister, so sorry, some
may say I’m just citing another “mansplainer.”) The connections to the
discussion of Blade Runner and Koyaanisqatsi are rather obvious:
To build and use stone is
to work with already fashioned materials, to construct under God’s mandate of
being stewards of the creation, working within God’s parameters for being
human. Instead the builders [of Babel] chose to mimic God, who used soil to
create Adam. But instead of taking living soil and breathing life into it, the
builders place soil into fire, burning it thoroughly. The living soil, filled
with potential, is made lifeless.... In this subtle way... man’s creative
project is in fact a reversal of God’s creation of man, and its results may
well be deadly. Humans... have the power to act within God’s will. Or we have
the choice to go it alone, trying to gain meaning, through attempting to create
the good life in our own strength. To burn our own bricks. R. R. Reno,
reflecting on the story of Babel, notes that humanity faces a clear choice, a
choice between the covenant of life and the covenant of the lie. The story of
the burnt bricks is a warning to us. We carry with us a dreadful power that is
the touch of death–just as the burning of the bricks robbed the soil of life,
reducing it to a white, deathly remnant of itself, a tool to be exploited. When
we live under our own autonomy, cut off from God’s will, we bring that deathly
touch to all that we encounter. We see this everywhere in our culture today,
almost every aspect of human life is burnt, reduced, and objectified.
Relationships are to be exploited, the poor are dehumanized, sexuality is
reduced to mechanics, creation is misused and turned into a garbage dump.
The city aids this
manipulation of life. For the city is self-contained; it provides for all of
its citizens’ needs. Babel is a closed world, Leon Kass writes, “In Babel … the
dream of the city holds full sway in the hearts and minds of its inhabitants.
Protected by its walls, warmed and comforted in its habitats, and ruled by its
teachings, the children of Adam, now men of the city, neither know nor seek to
know anything beyond.”[6]
And in that city...
A deep vein of fear ran
through Sumerian-Mesopotamian culture. It was unthinkable that the farmer would
not get out of bed to tend his fields or that the temple prostitute would fail
to perform her duties. To dare to question, to doubt, to not believe, let alone
to walk away, was almost unthinkable. The entire force of culture, the weight
of his world, pushed Abraham toward conformity, toward belief in the
bloodthirsty, empty religion that fostered a brutal view of the world,
justified slavery, crushed individuality, and valued vicious competition.
Historian Thomas Cahill notes that the ancient Sumerians esteemed the powerful:
“... This was a society full of contentiousness and aggression, in which the ‘good’
man–the ideal–was imagined as ambitious in the extreme, animated by a drive for
worldly prestige, victory, success, with scant regard to what we would think of
as ethical norms. This was also a society that despised poverty.” This was a
society in which people were disposable and sex was a tool of power, mechanical
and loveless. A two-dimensional world, devoid of imagination... Its differences
with our culture are immense. No doubt, however, you will be noticing the
similarities. The parallels between our secular culture and Sumer-Mesopotamia’s
culture, both cynical, flattened, and devoid of life, make Abraham’s choice to
listen to an invisible God, to walk away from his society, all the more
incredible, and all the more relevant to us in our quest to follow God in the
secular West.[7]
One need not be a follower of Abrahamic religions to
draw insights from this story and find inspiration for an honorable way to live.
One could substitute “covenant with God” with “covenant with nature” and grasp
the importance of living humbly in a way that doesn’t destroy the world for
future generations. Sayers also stresses that the only cure for this ancient
“toxic masculinity” (my application of the term, not his) was to completely
reject the Sumerian belief system. It would be necessary to create a way of
living in which people were not “dispensable and sex was not a tool of power,
mechanical and loveless.” Adults would have to live within the covenants of
marriage, family and community, putting these above self, and would have to stop
perceiving of their social bonds as vehicles for self-actualization and the
pursuit of happiness. Individuals would have to accept limitations, decline the
inevitable opportunities to flee or trade up to more interesting lovers and
adventures as they present themselves. Sayers wrote that after Abraham, Israel
would “be defined as a nation called to show a covenantal approach to marriage,
sexuality, family, the poor, the outsider, creation, and most importantly to
God.
One could say the presently-needed rejection of
Sumerian life would be the rejection of savage capitalism and of the entire
American cultural, military and political establishment. Ironically, there was
Harvey Weinstein at the center of it all, the power of the Hollywood dream
machine, the big Democratic Party donor and devoted supporter of Israel. Hollywood
was built by Jewish emigres who had escaped from pogroms in Europe. What a
shame that it turned out that Weinstein and Trump are the new odious kings of
the heathen empire, one now built with bricks that include not just dead, burnt
soil but also radioactive waste and fissionable materials.
The question is how far the outrage of the MeToo
movement wants to go in its determination to overthrow the problem of toxic
masculinity, which is really a modern iteration of the ancient “bloodthirsty,
empty religion that fostered a brutal view of the world, justified slavery,
crushed individuality, and valued vicious competition,” the one in which “the
ideal man was ambitious in the extreme, animated by a drive for worldly
prestige, victory, success.” This society “despised poverty” and “people were
disposable and sex was a tool of power, mechanical and loveless.” The
revolution can’t happen if we intend to preserve certain contemporary aspects
of liberalism. This problem won’t get fixed by the normalization of “sex–bots,”
“sex workers,” the “sex industry,” the “porn industry” or the defense of
“defense industry jobs.” And by the way, these terms will suffice if you need
examples to help you understand what Godfrey Reggio was talking about when he
said “our language is in a state of vast humiliation.”
Notes
[1] Jill Galvan, “Entering
the Posthuman Collective in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Science–Fiction Studies 24 (3): 413–429, 1977.
[2] Gregory Stephens, “Koyaanisqatsi
and the Visual Narrative of Environmental Film,” Screening in the Past, 28, 2010,
[3] Interview
available as an extra feature on some editions of the DVD Koyaanisqatsi. See it here on YouTube: https://youtu.be/w9jgLtTrYeA.
[4] Joseph Kishore, “Opposition
mounts to sexual harassment witch–hunt,” World Socialist Website, December 16, 2017. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12/16/pers–d16.html.
[5] James Howard
Kunstler, “Taking Liberty,”
Clusterfuck Nation, December 15,
2017, http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck–nation/taking–liberty/.
[6] Mark
Sayers, The Road Trip that Changed the
World, (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2012), 190–195.
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