A Modern Fable

The sentence that struck me most as I waded through the text of Rosenberg and Harding’s ‘Histories of the Future’, was…

Of course, these future narratives were also morality tales for the present, but in them the present is materialized through striking kinds of proleptic imagining.

When we look back through our movie archive we can see that this is an accurate observation, even when with every day that passes our possible futures edge closer and closer but seem fewer and fewer.1984 and 2001 were once iconic dates, inspired by visionary books like Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Clarke’s, ‘2001’, A Space Odyssey (and the film versions by Radford and Kubrick respectively) but they now just seem like the dates off of some old calendars discarded in the loft. The concerns of the last century have passed and the moralistic future tales have passed with them.

The nuclear Armageddon of the cold war inspired ‘Planet of the Apes’, the eerie beauty of dystopian ‘Blade Runner’ where man and machine can find true love (while all who can afford it move off the planet), the post modern nihilism of Spielberg’s ‘Artificial Intelligence’ back dropped by a post global warming New York and subsequent ice age, and many more, all now form part of our history of possible futures.

I expect we will see some director’s vision of an artificial urban dystopia where most of the human race has retreated to a network of protective ‘mega-domes’. This will be contrasted with a vision of rural utopia where small bands of hardy but innovative pioneers live in harmony with the land. The interesting thing will be to see just what Hollywood thinks the ‘right’ ending should be.

References

Rosenberg, D. & Harding, S. 2005 Histories of the Future Duke University Press, Durham / London.

Images in order.

‘2001, A Space Odyssey’ http://lookingcloser.org/movie%20reviews/numbertitles/2001.htm

‘Blade Runner,’ www.cyberpunkreview.com/. ../blade-runner/

‘Little House on the Prairie’, http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Little-House-on-the-Prairie-Posters_i275318_.htm

‘Logan’s Run’, http://www.wetcircuit.com/tag/thief-assassin-spy/page/2/