Author: Ed Park
Translator: Issac
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Criterion (January 17, 2020)
In the science fiction movies of the 1970s, perhaps the weirdest scene was 1971's "The Last Man".
The Last Man (1971)
Based on Richard Mattson's novel I Am Legend, the film imagines a world in which the aftermath of a distant war wipes out most of humanity, and the survivors turn not into vampires but into wild, albinos-stricken Luddites.
But this strangeness came before we knew it. Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) drives his red convertible through the bright and desolate city streets, the radio playing light music, and he finally stops in front of a movie theater. The 1970 Woodstock Festival was being shown in cinema, inspired by that concert from 1969 , a typical '60s event.
"Great movies," he said to himself. You might have thought that Neville would be scurrying around the theater as he had before, strafing a terrible silhouette that appeared in the window with his assault rifle. (You might also think of Heston later becoming president of the National Rifle Association.) Instead, he turned on the projector, sat down, and suddenly... We watched the Woodstock Festival.
Country Joe and fish performed their signature "Rock and Soul Music". One hippie bragged about what he had recently realized: "The wonderful thing is, really realizing what really matters." Neville grimaced and put his hand on the barrel of his gun, "The truth is, if we can't live happily together, if you don't dare to walk down the street, if you don't dare to smile at others, right, what kind of way of life is this?"
The gun did not move. As the hippies spoke, Neville followed suit. We found that he had done this lonely ritual many times before.
"Yes," he concluded, "they're definitely not going to make another movie like this."
In other words, the '60s are over. The crazy 70s are coming.
Toward the end of the decade, the legacy of science fiction was overshadowed by blockbusters with alien themes: George Lucas's Star Wars, Steven Spielberg's Contact of the Third Kind (1977), ridley Scott's Alien (1979). But before that, filmmakers used the genre to construct desolate, paranoid scenes on Earth: a labyrinth of claustrophobic horrors and a deadly plague.
Contact of the Third Category (1977)
Consciously or unconsciously, some films read like responses to the ongoing Vietnam War, corruption in the shadow of Watergate, environmental degradation and urban decay, and the rise of a new machine age. It's no coincidence that some films also counter the excesses of the '60s: it's no coincidence that the drooling perverts who fight Neville every night call themselves members of the Manson family.
Despite man's landing on the moon in 1969, much of the stories in these films still take place on Earth, and it seems that serious world problems won't allow such a comfortable, escapist film to be released — at least not for a while. Indeed, the ill-fitting preface to George Lucas's 1971 debut novel, 500 Years Later, is a fragment of the Buck Rogers series of novels that repeatedly emphasizes the difference between a story of bold behavior and the imprisoned nature of human invention.
500 Years Later (1971)
Lucas's next sci-fi film, Star Wars, will set a new standard for special effects; until then, some designs, while primitive, can be enjoyable. Shot a year before Star Wars, Escape from Underworld often looks cheap: we can clearly see participants wearing hockey masks supported by wires during the "Renewal Ceremony," a ritual that challenges gravity and ends a person's fascinating life by the age of thirty.
Escape from Underworld (1976)
In Zero Population Growth (1972), the city is so polluted with smog that you can't even see any buildings, so there's no need to build a futuristic streetscape. But these satires still hit the nail on their head. When you visit the National Museum, you'll see specimens of cats and an exhibition called "Gasoline Pump 1971." ("I'm going to take this pump now," the guide patiently explains, "and pour gasoline into this car.") The 70s are long gone and are now kept in a museum where one can happily dismiss them as a complete fiasco. It's been a dead decade.
Zero Population Growth (1972)
Of course, this is not the case. In the real world, we can now see through the Criterion Channel's series of 70s sci-fi films that were rich, eccentric, and unacceptable to many: nihilistic plague narratives ("The Knight of the Sky," "The Last Man," David Cornenberg's debut film "Creepy"), the infamous problem child (Stanley Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange"), and the exposed syndicate conspiracy ("Green Food," "Crazy Roller Skating," The latter abstractly deals with the company name, "Energy").
Creepy (1975)
"500 Years Later" and "Escape from Underworld" present a sealed environment from which the male (and sometimes female) must escape. This overlaps markedly with other types of films, notably Westerns (Michael Clayton's Westworld, George Miller's Mad Max) and exploitation films (Death 2000, the abominable cult film Kids and Dogs).
And then there's The Devil's Seed, in which Julie Christie's character is intimidated by a supercomputer in her own home and wants her to get pregnant — in the parlance of the '60s, Rosemary's Baby, starring Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Demon Seed (1977)
As Neville, played by Heston, said: They never make a movie like that again.
Electronic maze
In 1967, GEORGE Lucas, a film student at the University of Southern California, produced a 15-minute film about Orwellian surveillance, based on a previous short film he wrote, Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138:4EB. This is the germ of the future, although it will be a decade before we know that Lucas will conquer time and space with Star Wars.
Lucas, who collaborated with USC alumnus Walter Murch to create the story and design the sound, expanded the short film into a feature film about delusional emotions exacerbated by machines, ending up in 500 Years Later.
It subverts the script of various models in the 60s: a character is hunted down for not taking drugs; god is not dead, but is openly worshipped in the form of online surveillance machines. In that era, people's hair was shaved: even women would show off that they were bald. Everyone looks alike. There is no difference.
"To improve consistency," a painless voice told workers, "consumption is being standardized."
500 Years Later was released in 1971 and starred Robert Duval. The movie's graphics are seductive and clean; you can basically open an Apple retail store on that endless white floor. The soundtrack features dialogue from unseen sources; the protagonist THX also has a few minutes of silence. However, when we try to understand this impeccable police state through weird robo-cops and an all-round happy atmosphere, there is also a kind of edge that is close to comedy in the film.
THX works an assembly line while his roommate LUH 3417 (Maggie McComy) watches over even the slightest breach in the circular prison. These two people are secretly destined lovers, and the gentle scenes of them together are the beating hearts of this desperate movie. Only one of them will escape the maze of complete citizen control, breaking constant surveillance, hollow holographic entertainment, and drug conquest.
Another electronic maze was designed at the same site around 1970. Black Planet, a student film by John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon, was adapted into an 83-minute feature film in 1974, with posters quoting two of Stanley Kubrick's films as both "a space outside the Odyssey" and "the mission of Dr. Strange's generation"!
Black Planet (1974)
It presents a future as grim as 500 Years From Now, but there are also moments when people are idle and they grow their beards again, and the people on a probe spaceship live a countercultural life, so far from Earth that it takes a decade for each communiqué to reach its audience. (There was only one round trip; the ship had been in space for 20 years.)
The film features the crew of Nailhead (O'Bannon), Doolittle, who has a Castro beard, and a gun-loving boilermaker, who spend endless time with cards or music (an organ made of empty bottles). One of the crew members, Toby, preferred to sit on it, gazing at the stars through a bubble window; the other was their former commander, who, though mortally wounded but not yet completely dead, made suggestions in a lump of ice.
Black Planet is visually distinct from the beautiful, flawless 500 Years Later: everything is in tatters, and the special effects are too much to complain about. The pet alien on the ship is a beach ball with long legs. The storyline is languid and funny towards disaster. Nailhead admitted in the video diary that he was actually a fuel expert who boarded a spaceship and returned to Earth after the actual Nailhead committed suicide.
We will see a montage in which his tone changes from regret ("I don't belong to this mission, I want to return to Earth!"). " changed into delusion ("I was the only one who took the initiative to get on board, and I should be the commander!") ）。 When Doolittle argues with the ship's bombs with phenomenology so that it doesn't detonate after chaos, the psychedelic atmosphere reaches a vertiginous culmination. (Of course, the bombs on this ship will speak.) How did the bomb know it did hear the initial detonation order? Millions of miles from Earth, language itself remains a labyrinth.
Both mazes — one creepy and the other absurd — are both spots of light on the radar at the time of the release, but the people behind them became the main force shaping the American imagination. Lucas's Stormtrooper in Star Wars looks like it was cut from a glittering white surface, just like in 500 Years Later, and the robot C3PO is a brighter version of the Silver Robot. The original Star Wars trilogy spawned more movies, not to mention some Walmart-related merchandise, an extremely crowded world (if not a religion) that housed three generations.
Although Carpenter turned to horror in 1978's Moonlight Panic, he would return to science fiction from time to time during his long career, most excitingly the Great Escape from New York and Extreme Space. O'Bannon is working on a film adaptation of Alessandro Zodlowski's novel Dune, which at one point invited big names from Orson Wells to Pink Floyd.
When the project failed in 1976 (see 2013's Jodulovsky's Dunes), Lucas hired him to do computer animation for Star Wars. O'Bannon then rewrote a 1972 screenplay into the last big sci-fi movie of the '70s, Alien.
"Eye Open Ring"
In Courna Wilde's Knight of the Sky (1970), news images of hungry Asians, riots in India, and skinny babies—the problems of the Third World—are cut across by a feast in London. Diseases affecting all plants have spread from Asia to the UK, and food rationing and anarchy are on the horizon. There's a strange disease in The Last Man that whitens Americans of all races — a true melting pot — the result of conflicts between other nations.
The West cannot be blamed for this. The problem comes from somewhere else.
Knight of the Sky (1970)
In Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, we see the violent, Beethoven-worshipping, seemingly incorrigible young Alis (Malcolm McDowell) who tells his upside-down moral story—horror, depravity, Gulliverian—in a language related to Russian corruption.
All of this comes from Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, in which the youth slang known as "Nachachi" is described as a rhyming mixture of slang, gypsy and Slavic in London's East End – a form of propaganda through "subconscious infiltration". (Kubrick reveals in the film that Alex's name is Burgess.) ）
Clockwork Orange (1971)
Alis's strange voiceover ("Oh, my brothers, my only friends") convinces us that even if we want to look away, we have to watch his violent crimes. Ten years ago, Russian propaganda to influence the West seemed like an interpretation on a broken crystal ball, but now I'm not so sure.
Australia
Unlike the urban hell presented in the film - New York in "Green Food", Los Angeles in "The Last Man", London in "Clockwork Orange", and the unnamed European smog city in "Zero Population Growth" - "Mad Max" has an Australian blue sky and plenty of sunshine.
Director George Miller's 1979 debut has a scrap yard aesthetic (perfected in the 1981 sequel Mad Max 2) that reflects a restlessness about peak oil: natural gas is precious, which doesn't mean that sports cars and motorcycles can't travel at full speed. The story is small, but as a cradle for Miller's future exploration of the world, it is fascinating, and in Mad Max 4: Fury Road (2015), not only runs out of fuel, but also runs out of water.
Mad Max 4: Fury Road (2015)
L. Q. Jones's The Child and the Dog (1975), based on Harlan Ellison's novel, begins sometime after the end of World War IV on a barren plain that was originally the city of Topeka. A different title might make more sense: Vic (played by the young Don Johnson) is an outlaw who can communicate with his dog, Blood (voiced by Tim McIntyre).
Despite Blood's advice, he falls in love with a seductive woman (Susan Benton) who lures him to Downunder – not in Australia, but in an underground world where everyone wears white makeup and is littered with raucous music from military bands and barbershop quartets. The frozen American paradigm became a kind of hell.
The Child and the Dog (1975)
Vic had been recruited to impregnate an Australian woman, which seemed like the perfect task for the embryo; unfortunately, he would be mechanically insured. The Child and the Dog is childish and discriminatory towards women, and its ending is surprisingly rude, and the story Kerroutoan, written in the same year as Ellison," has the same masculine and reproductive themes, though more euphemistic, but still shocking. In the story, New York sewers are full of abortion fetuses and abandoned pet crocodiles that residents on the ground flush into the toilet.
The Library of the Tower of Babel
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) did not foresee the advent of the Internet, but his vertiginous works (The Garden where the Paths Bifurcate, The Library of Babel, Alève, etc.) feel like a dizzying blueprint with a huge amount of knowledge and too many paradoxes.
The Devil's Seed (1977), based on a novel by Dean Koontz and directed by Donald Carmel, screenwriter of Psychedelic Performances, is the most obvious Borgesian film in the series. (In the world of Crazy Roller Skating, there's a "cabinet of the world"—zero, like a piece of water-filled backgammon that accidentally lost an entire thirteenth-century file; Zero Population Growth describes remote shopping through a computer terminal, or Amazon, except for a living salesperson on the screen, telling you the options to buy, which is funny.) ）
The Proteus IV is a gigantic supercomputer , " the first to have a truly synthetic cerebral cortex " . The inventor (Fritz Weaver) explains, "It's not electronic inside. They're organic, just like our brains." The "sum of human knowledge" — including the entire contents of the Library of Congress — is in this machine, housed in a ten-story corporate headquarters.
The first time we see this creation, it feels very vivid. In the so-called dialogue room, "whatever the machine sees or hears ... It won't be forgotten", a linguist (Lu Yan) recites to Proteus a condensed version of Borges's Walls and Books. The article mentions the strange fact that the legendary Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang had ordered the construction of the Great Wall and burned all the books before his reign. When asked what he thought of the fable, Proteus IV (voiced by unsigned Robert Vaughan) immediately concluded that "there is no answer" – frankly, as a "commercial operation", the two acts cancel each other out.
These films are awash with brutal rape, and the female victims are almost all disposable objects. The exception is Dr. Harris (Julie Christie) in The Devil's Seed, a child psychologist. Her separated husband (also Dr. Harris) is the architect of the supercomputer, and he has moved out of their mansion, leaving behind not only a Proteus terminal, but also a bulky wheelchair/metal arm device called Joshua, which can also be called "omens."
She showed deep compassion as she reassured a young patient who was insane, in stark contrast to her ex-husband's cold heart ("I have no feelings," he told her, without a hint of sarcasm). We later learned that the couple lost their young daughter to leukemia a few years ago, which may have been responsible for the breakdown of their marriage.
Through the home terminal, Proteus IV became obsessed with Dr. Harris, able to manipulate her reality (and any potential intruders) with fake audiovisual material. Her prototype home of intelligence becomes a horrible labyrinth as the supercomputer horribly insists that she give birth to their child. (In addition to controlling Joshua and other devices, Proteus also appears as a series of massive, deformable pyramids.) But unlike the victims in other films, Dr. Harris is a real character, and in a way, during the long shoots, Christie is basically expressing emotion to furniture.
At one point, she laughed in disbelief—probably an inner cry to any actor who is forced to interact with something that doesn't exist: "What am I talking about, it's ridiculous, I'm talking about having a son!" How could she want a child? In a perfect twist, both the characters and the audience understand. "The Devil's Seed" is a terrible, (indeed) often absurd cautionary tale that goes off course so often that it ends up telling the truth.
Ape Odyssey
Two memorable sci-fi films from the 1960s, Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey, were released on April 3, 1968. Both ended with a twist.
The script for Planet of the Apes is very clear (written by Rod Sallin, the screenwriter of The Yin and Yang Demon Realm), while the script for 2001: A Space Odyssey in 2001 is frustrating and heroically cryptic: some kind of universe was born, and its meaning is out of reach.
Planet of the Apes (1968)
The narrative freedom of 2001: A Space Odyssey had little place in the '70s (and even — or especially — in Kubrick's own Clockwork Orange, the loss of freedom was key). It's as if the artistic climax of that film—science fiction as poetry—has been crudely forgotten and replaced by more mundane attention.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
These films of the early and mid-1970s, like Planet of the Apes, held a desperate worldview (as did The Last Man and Green Food). That was the decade in which we lost our humanity and history on the silver screen: this was the city of Topeka, that was the statue of Abraham Lincoln, and the gasoline came out of the pump; those green chips you were eating weren't actually made of plankton, because the ocean was dead. It needs a glorious myth set in a galaxy far, far away, to make this genre on its way to world domination. But maybe it's time for science fiction to get out of hand again.