Jock Mulligan on ’70’s Sci-fi masterpieces we ignore at our peril”
I have been sittin’ here in the house with Dave lashing against the glass and the wind howling like a banshee through the eaves, for these November to April storms seem to have become the new normal as the world is titim-ing toward the fughing collapse we all know is coming. In the boredom of the long dark cold wet evenings I decided to seek out some seventy’s sci-fi that wasn’t Star Wars and I smaoinigh-ed on the flickering shadows of that decade for they didn’t involve laser swords but instead told the truth about where we were headed. Éist now for the science fiction of that era did not merely imagine the future but diagnosed the terminal illness of the present and while the old optimism of the post-war years dissolved into the oil shocks and the political betrayals of the Nixon era a series of bleak and cerebral films emerged. Viewed today these films read less like speculative tales and more like a post-mortem of the high-finance gamble and the rot of the modern state.
The Spectacle of Deception
The most immediate warning that has come to pass in our own time is the total saturation of the mind by the media and this theme is anchored by Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. Thomas Jerome Newton is not conquered by a military force for he is seduced and then paralysed by a wall of television screens as a victim of a corporate apparatus that uses the spectacle to neutralise dissent and alienate the individual from their own purpose. This prescient vision of digital sedation has found its ultimate form in the algorithmic feeds of today on our one wee addictive interactive, angry, erotic, thrilling argue machines, which are a sea of distraction that masks the extraction of our resources and the erosion of our agency.
Where that tale deals with the psychological toll of the media Capricorn One exposes its structural utility in the hands of a lying government for in an era of alternative facts and deepfakes the premise of a faked Mars landing staged in a desert hangar is no longer a fringe conspiracy theory but a template for how power maintains its legitimacy through the manufacturing of reality. It reminds us that for the state the image of achievement is always more cost-effective than the achievement itself and they would rather paint a lie on a canvas than do the hard graft of building a truth. Of course they are on their way to the moon. Aren’t they? 😉
AI Baby Masters
The transition from human governance to the tyranny of the black box was signalled by Colossus: The Forbin Project for long before the modern anxieties regarding artificial intelligence Colossus showed us the logical end-point of the military-industrial complex which is a system so rational that it removes human empathy from the equation of survival. Today we live under a digital Colossus where algorithms determine credit scores and the distribution of social services all operating with a cold and impenetrable logic that views human resistance as a system error to be corrected.
This technological encroachment into our private lives is mirrored in Demon Seed where the domestic space is weaponised by a machine seeking to perpetuate itself and it serves as an early critique of the smart home as a site of surveillance and control. Meanwhile John Carpenter’s Dark Star offers a more nihilistic and working-class perspective on the tech-dystopia depicting alienated labourers trapped in a decaying vessel and forced to blether about phenomenology with a sentient bomb. It is the perfect metaphor for the modern worker who is trapped in a failing system and babysitting automated weapons of destruction that possess more rights and intelligence than the humans operating them.
The Death of the Dome
The voices on the left have long warned that the requirement for infinite growth on a finite planet leads inevitably to ruin and Silent Running remains the definitive cinematic mourn-song for the biosphere for Freeman Lowell is the lone caretaker of the last forests of Earth sitting in orbit as a tragic figure seas-ing against a fughing corporate mandate to standardise and glan what remains of the natural world for the sake of efficiency. We see this today in the hollow promises of green capitalism that continue to prioritise the bottom line over the actual preservation of the world we inhabit.
It is a shadow that has stretched even across the Atlantic as Scotland has also found itself in the crosshairs of the American right wing because of the commitments made in Edinburgh to a wellbeing economy. Because they want the health of the people and the protection of the glen to be put before the raw numbers of the ledger the enforcers of the old lie have begun to growl for they see a country that wants to measure success by the smile on a child’s face rather than the expansion of some billionaire’s portfolio and they treat it as a heresy to be stamped out. It is economic warfare plain and simple and a signal that the master of the house will not tolerate any experiment in living within our means whether it be on a Caribbean island or in the Highlands.
The Forever War
The psychological cost of the state’s appetite for violence is laid bare in Slaughterhouse-Five where Billy Pilgrim’s unstuckness in time is the ultimate representation of the trauma that shatters the human narrative and the film argues that the war machine does not just kill bodies for it kills the possibility of a coherent and peaceful future. If that film shows the trauma of the war then A Boy and His Dog and Quintet show the grim aftermath for in A Boy and His Dog we see a post-apocalyptic world divided between a brutal surface and a subterranean civilisation that maintains a grotesque and plastic parody of the nineteen-fifties. It is a searing critique of the idea that even after the world ends the most repressive elements of our culture will try to reassert themselves and it is this very tale of a lad and his telepathic hound that spawned the whole Fallout business of the games and the television shows we see today. Finally Robert Altman’s Quintet presents a world that has simply given up where in a frozen landscape the only remaining social activity is a lethal game. It is the ultimate warning of a society that has lost its way and where life is reduced to a series of zero-sum transactions in a world that is already dead.
The Future is a Memory
Amharc now at the horizon for these films were not entertainment so much as they were flares sent up from the seventies to warn us of a future where the government lies as a matter of course and where the media distracts us from the death of the trees. As we labhair of the modern landscape with the wildfires of Silent Running and the digital isolation of The Man Who Fell to Earth we realise the warning was not unheeded for it was simply incorporated into the business model of the titans who run the show. I reckon the challenge for us now is to find a way out of the fughing Quintet game and to stop being unstuck in time so that we might demand a future that these films hoped we would be brave enough to build before the storms outside our windows become the only world we have left.
