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| Gattaca is beautiful and horrible |
A favorite trope for sci-fi movies is the Dystopian future. Movies as various as The Matrix, Elysium, Surrogates, Brazil, and Metropolis ( and Blade Runner!) build their narratives on a future that turns out to be unpleasant. Scientists do not become saviors; technology does not free us to become even more human. Regardless of the variations among all these movies (near future, distant future, awful future, slightly less awful future), these films and many, many more, operate mostly on the level of entertainment.
In other words, the dystopic vision of the future is not a serious extrapolation of current trends. Instead, the cityscape or the building interior or the laboratory or the robots or the genetic freaks serve primarily to move the action forward. In some cases, such as a serious film like Blade Runner, the dystopian city serves as a metaphor that reflects deeper issues beyond just the excitement of the surface narrative. But this is rare, and even here the imagined city is not supposed to be a literal future. In most cases, the awful futuristic landscape almost never really helps us think about the real dehumanization of technology or ideology. The visuals of a trashed out environment, or errant technology, or tyrannical government or technological control nearly always bends toward entertainment.
This is curious. It is something like most horror film. Terror induced by faux supernatural phenomena is purely for fun. Most people who watch movies about demons care nothing about reflecting on genuine supernatural realities. In such film, the intrusion of the demonic results in a simulation of terror that is supposed to be enjoyed for the duration of the viewing. In real life, if one were to encounter a genuinely demonic entity, the resulting terror would probably paralyze you. The buzz that comes from watching simulated demonic possession is understood by the viewer to be an aesthetic experience only.
So too, the picture of a future that has gone horribly wrong serves little purpose other than a narrative jolt, just for the fun of it. Watching either version of Total Recall results in a mild buzz of enjoyment for a couple of hours. The futuristic images do not provoke any serious reflection on a potentially trashy future. So here is the irony: we are entertained by images of a depressing future. Rather than being depressed, we enjoy the temporarily giddy feeling of an awful future coming our way because we know the images are not serious. We see a vision of human debilitation, and we say, "that was so cool."
What happens if we want to tell or see a serious, provocative, reflection-inducing narrative of a genuinely dystopian future? We are mostly out of luck, it seems. Only rarely in film do we encounter a story of a plausible future that we do not want. One example is Gattaca. This film portrays a future in which enhanced genetic engineering is plausibly portrayed. The resulting two-tiered society--those who can afford genetic medicine and those who cannot--is convincing, giving rise to a feeling of despair about real life and perhaps prompting one to think a little more about the ethics of genetic experimentation. The movie is aesthetically compelling, but the movie is more than "just" entertainment, unlike, say, Elysium, which on the surface seems to be saying something serious about immigration and health care, but which in fact is totally bogus. Elysium uses a veneer of current event anxieties to tell what is really an action film story. Gattaca moves beyond the level of mere entertainment, and the dystopian trope becomes a vehicle for further reflection, even though we are entertained while watching the movie.
Watching sci-fi films is theologically interesting because it says something about our spiritual dislocation. We enjoy simulations of horrible living conditions. We do not enjoy actual horrible living conditions. For a few hours we escape from our lives by imagining a future that would be too horrible to actually live in but which we "enjoy" living in through the surrogacy of actors--people who are not who they are.
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| Pretend slum from Elysium is fun to watch |
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| Real slum from Africa is not fun to watch |