This is the genius of Michael Crichton (Part One). The groundbreaking-but-now-obvious notion that we wouldn’t make human-looking ‘bots for slave labour. God, no. We would use them in a theme park. Like Disneyland. A Disneyland of the future. Oh yes. And just like his dinosaurland-yet-to-come would be afflicted by chaos theory, this elite playground of the bored and safe couldn’t exactly run like clockwork. What Paradise ever did?
As the poster put it, unforgettably: Westworld… where nothing can possibly go worng.
Which brings us to the genius of Michael Crichton (Part Two). In Westworld it isn’t merely a single rogue robot that malfunctions but the whole system underpinning the resort (i.e. society) that flips out. The ultimate dream of escapism turns into a lethal trap, and that’s much more terrifying because nobody knows why. There’s a marvelous moment where one of the NASA-like scientists says to another: ‘We don’t even know how these things work – they were built by other machines.’ Has there been a more chilling line in science fiction? I don’t think so.
But what exactly does go wrong, in this, arguably Crichton’s masterpiece? Only the essential mythology of America. Only Americans’ constructed sense of self: The West.
As a wise old psychoanalyst once told me, the difference between the historical European mentality and that of the United States is that the American directive is always, ‘Go West, go West, go West… but what happens when you get to the West? What do you do then?’ He described this as accounting for the essential neurotic nature of America.
Certainly, the iconography of the Western is idiomatic of the American psyche unequalled by any cultural genre in the rest of the world in terms of defining national character. In many ways the cowboy, proud upright no-nonsense hero, is America, from Gary Cooper to George W. Bush.
Also, in being about the West as we know it through infinite movies and TV shows from High Noon to The Wild Bunch to Bonanza, Westworld is as much a film about cinema as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a novel about books.
As such, though it seems inevitable, the casting of Yul Brynner as the robot Gunslinger was magnificently inspired. The fact that our eye and memory recognise him as the lead character from The Magnificent Seven only adds to the layers of enjoyment. A smile that’s about to be wiped off our faces.
Essentially Westworld is a movie about movie-ness gone bad. When Brynner takes the safety attachment off his pistol, we knew. The movies were coming to get us. The playthings we loved all our lives, the worlds of the imagination that had shaped us, had finally turned against us.
Maybe it was our fault, too, because we loved the movies too damn much and that has to end in tears. Or we’d concocted a false idea of the past via Gunsmoke and Gene Autry. We were loving technology. All those things.
And now we had to pay.
The Gunslinger’s relentless, skull-bald, black-clad unstoppability is Bergman’s Grim Reaper in a Stetson. Macho gone Mechanico. Saviour of the world – hopefully – is ‘nebbish’ Richard Benjamin as the weedy businessman getting over the failure of his marriage with some R&R (escaping from reality into a Hollywood fantasy). In the end this wimpish everyman destroys Yul-be-sorry after the usual incarnation of mythic America, confident alpha male James Brolin (once a cowboy on the telly himself), is shot. For real. Shit. That’s not supposed to happen. Not in the movies anyway.
Said Gunslinger has no feelings on the matter, or any other matter come to that. He’s animate but dead. Unheimliche – and how. His hard gaze is Terminator-esque. He’ll spawn Arnie. But those eyes aren’t blank, they’re mirrors. He feels no pain from bullets. Though they strike him down, he is resurrected, to die another day. He has the numbness of having experienced his own death, endlessly. A numbing of the soul like there is no soul. No guilt. No regret. Seen in a human being, that kind of dehumanisation may be ascribed to trauma. As if the robot, traumatised by killing, itself now kills. The acting is not acting any more. Fantasy hurts – just as reality does.
When I was in art college in Coventry, a friend of mine was so besotted by Brynner’s performance that he used to lapse into doing the slow walk down the corridors to the canteen, thumbs distinctively hooked in the pockets of his jeans. Playing cowboys and Indians is playground stuff. Basic. And sometimes you want to be the one with the gun.
In using the robot’s weird POV to both empathise and distance (long before Cameron used it wittily in the Terminator films), Crichton astutely foresaw role-playing game culture with its addictive nature of putting you ‘inside the game’ with the power of life and death, yet, like the robot, devoid of responsibility for your actions. The result of this, as we now know (from Grand Theft Auto et al), is a desensitisation to violence and an objectification of sex – because, yes, sex without emotional commitment is available in the Delos resort, too. Of course it is.
Westworld prefigured a technology-dependent future society’s willing and willful detachment to real, messy, troublesome human contact. One which we are now being warned about by Baroness Greenfield, the leading neuroscientist, in her discussions about the dangers of the internet to the development of the brain.
These are Cassandra predictions by Crichton on screen culture. Not forgetting it’s a screen on which we’re watching this nightmare play out.
Westworld was the future in so many ways it didn’t even understand yet, and that is its abiding, sinister glory. Like all great art, it is both of its time and a critique of its time – and ours.
But fundamentally, the theme of the movie, to me, is nothing less than the hedonism and narcissism of Western (Western) culture. Our rapidly advancing reliance on technology and our concomitant quest for pleasure.
It’s not really about the robots not being human, it’s about us losing our humanity ourselves, if we’re not careful.
Those mirrors in the eyes were for a reason.
Notes:
1: The actual “valley” being in a dip in a graph of positivity of human response against life-likeness of the robot.
2: One small, niggling regret I have about the film is that they didn’t have a line in the dialogue about the robot looking “just like that character from the The Magnificient Seven” - but maybe there were legal reasons for that. Or maybe it’s just smarter not to.
LOGAN’S RUN
(Director: Michael Anderson; starring: Michael York, Richard Jordan, Jenny Agutter, Roscoe Lee Browne - 1976)
Sarah Pinborough
‘You’re beautiful. Let’s have sex.’
I first saw Logan’s Run in the US Marine House in Damascus in 1978. They used to do a Saturday morning once-a-month movie on a proper projector. That was back in the days before VHS and DVD and the Internet and mobile phones, when we clearly lived in a technological dystopia in blissful ignorance. Watching Logan’s Run at the age of six was probably my first real exposure to the genre and it hooked me. When I got home I drew a red ‘lifeclock’ in the palm of my hand and for the rest of the day pretended it was flashing. I liked the feeling of creeping dread it gave me. It was the futuristic version of black spot from Treasure Island – a small circle of colour that declared time had run out.
Logan’s Run, directed in 1976 by Michael Anderson, and starring Michael York as the eponymous Logan 5, was nominated for two Academy Awards and won one of them, and is a sci-fi chase movie set in a vision of the 23rd Century, where life is a luxurious, decadent existence for all within the Dome city – with one drawback. In the city, no one lives beyond thirty – which, given the scanty costumes and lack of underwear, particularly on the female members of this society, in some ways comes as a relief to the viewer. There are certainly no muffin tops or varicose veins on show amongst the slim and beautiful in this apparent Utopia.
Although the costumes – uber-short and very wispy togas – and futuristic setting now seem kitsch, the contrast between the perfection in the life they are provided with and the lurking horror that awaits them as they turn thirty still works over three decades later. It’s a theme t
hat has been used again (Stephen King’s Children of the Corn springs to mind), but the concept that in order for a society to be maintained its members must be executed just as they reach their prime, has never, for me at least, been more chilling than in Logan’s Run. Thirty is the age we come into our own – we learn to question what’s around us, begin to feel comfortable with ourselves. We start families and watch them grow. We start to value life. In Logan’s Run no one has any of these experiences. Unless of course they become a runner and try and reach Sanctuary, which as can be seen from the title is exactly what happens to Logan 5.
A sandman himself – a man who chases and kills runners – Logan finds that the softly spoken computer who runs the city has sped up his lifeclock so that instead of having his five remaining years, he is now on Lastday. This is in order for him to complete his mission of finding and destroying Sanctuary. This mission comes at a time when Logan has begun to question his own belief in the ‘renewal’ process (the line fed to society that if they have behaved well and obeyed all the rules they have a chance of being reborn at Carousel – I like to think it isn’t an over-obvious religious metaphor, but I know I’m kidding myself). As he flees with the lovely Jenny Agutter, Logan becomes a runner for real and they escape the Dome – clearly once built to protect the remaining citizens after a global holocaust – and find themselves in the rougher natural beauty of the outside world. I won’t spoil the ending, but I’m sure you can guess how it goes.
Logan’s Run is full of obvious metaphors and overplayed contrasts, but there are certain elements of it that really make the film a great watch. The first is of course the central concept of Carousel. The name implies something fun, a fairground ride which in turn makes the function of Carousel in this context far more chilling, even to me when I watched it first time round at six years old. Watching those on Lastday step into the circular arena in hooded robes before floating skywards to the cheers of the crowds baying for ‘renewal’ before being disintegrated by lasers as they reach the top, creates a mixed reaction: it looks like so much fun – until you hit the lasery bit. That’s the bummer. Carousel sums up the whole of the Dome’s existence – fun, but ultimately clinically terrifying. No one really matters. No one has enough time to matter.
The people in the Dome do, however, spend a lot of time having guilt-free non-committal sex. Internet dating is taken to a whole new level by those living in the Dome who can put themselves on the circuit – a virtual person catalogue – and be chosen by a complete stranger to have sex. This is how our hero and heroine meet. It is during their conversation that Logan first starts to realise that perhaps no one ever did renew and that Carousel simply means death. He had been expecting a quickie and instead got a wake-up call – I guess even in an apparent Utopia things don’t always go to plan, especially where there are women involved. More seriously, there is a great moment when the two are being chased by Logan’s sandman partner and they run into the pre-Carousel area, where all the Lastdays are having a drug-assisted orgy bathed in red light. What should be erotic is made chilling by the knowledge of their impending death, despite the obvious visual metaphor.
Box, the robot gone mad that the two runners encounter as they break out into the outside world, is also a highlight of this film and perhaps an external metaphor for the Dome and the madness of the way the society within is run. Logan destroys Box after discovering the bodies of prior runners that Box has frozen and this foreshadows what will come later.
There is a cameo appearance by the lovely Farrah Fawcett-Majors, amusingly cast as an assistant at a futuristic plastic surgery clinic – when here was a beauty who clearly didn’t need any assistance – and Peter Ustinov is glorious as ever as the eccentric old man, living in the ruins of a library and surrounded by cats, who Logan and Jessica lead back to the Dome.
Logan’s Run may seem dated now and may lack the depth and darkness of other dystopian ventures like 1984, but in an era that is obsessed with youth, modern audiences could do a lot worse than to watch Logan’s Run again and remind themselves that age serves a purpose.
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
(Director: Nicolas Roeg; starring: David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark, Buck Henry - 1976)
Tony Richards
By 1976, intelligent moviegoers were well aware of the films of Nicolas Roeg. There’d been Performance – Mick Jagger’s only good one; Walkabout, which was apparently shot from a script only some seven pages long; Don’t Look Now… the breathless hush which fell over the theatre during the famous sex scene resounds in my head to this very day.
And then he adapted Walter Tevis’ 1963 sf novel. What persuaded the author of The Hustler – a work that immediately marked him out as the natural successor to James M. Cain – to turn to science fiction is anybody’s guess. But turn he did. Tevis described the book as ‘a very disguised autobiography,’ a record of the isolation he felt when forced to move, as a sickly child, from his native San Francisco to rural Kentucky.
The original ‘man who fell,’ from whom Tevis got his title and his theme, was the mythical Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and was destroyed. Another, no less pervasive, source of heat is portrayed as the melting, destroying force in Roeg’s cinema version. It is human nature, and human sexuality in particular, the co-mingling of eroticism and violence, passion and possession, a subject that the director has revisited time and again. And Roeg pulls off the same stunt that he managed in his debut film, persuading a rock star to play himself. Or rather in this case, getting David Bowie to play his latest adopted persona, the androgynous and distant Thin White Duke.
The Duke becomes a lone visitor from another world who takes on human appearance and the name Thomas Jerome Newton. Innocent, pallid, visually almost sexless, he is here to fetch back water to his home world, where his family are dying (might already be dead) from a drought. It is a simple enough desire, but he doesn’t understand the human race at all. For this most common of the world’s commodities, he makes the mistake most uninitiated naïfs make of offering too much in return – in terms not only of new technology but of power and prestige for those few people he collects around him. And no one fails to take advantage of his generosity. There’s a fast buck and free lodgings to be had from this guy.
A megalithic corporation is formed, and Newton becomes engulfed and isolated at the centre of it; another mythic figure, Howard Hughes, this time. He is impressive on paper, but in reality powerless and lacklustre in the face of the needs and desires of even a burnt-out university professor (Rip Torn) and a none-too-bright chambermaid (Candy Clark), his two closest human allies. The only occasion in the film where he holds real sway over anyone is when he scares Clark witless by revealing himself in his true form. And then her terror is short-lived, quickly replaced by a probing and, yes, sexual curiosity. Newton lies there passively, seemingly bewildered and uncertain how to respond.
At this point Roeg and writer Paul Mayersberg start trying to build in, unsuccessfully, political undertones in the form of a Big Government conspiracy. It’s an idea that seems fuelled by the paranoia of the times; we now all know that such feelings were justified.
On the night when a rocket ship, its construction funded by Newton’s accumulated wealth, stands ready to take him home, the alien is kidnapped by shadowy federal agents, confined, experimented on until he is damaged… and finally abandoned. It’s a weak point in the movie, since it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why didn’t this happen earlier? Does absolutely no one notice that he’s gone? But then, Roeg never was much of a political realist.
The harm has been done, however. Ground Control has finally got its claws into Major Tom. The experience changes Newton for the worse. Totally embittered by the realisation he will never get back home, he is reunited with Clark to indulge his newly found nihilism in a bout of violent sex-play – complete with toy gun – a million miles away from the tenderness of touch and sensitive eroticism we saw him sharing with his wife in earlier flashbacks. And
a paradox becomes apparent at this point. Our race is shown as vicious and perverse, but eminently watchable. Newton’s race is gentle and serene… and ultimately rather dull.
Alcoholism, despair, and a brief career as a rock star mark the final stages in the visitor’s descent. By the end, he has become, simply and rather pathetically, just an ordinary human being.
All the standard Roeg trademarks are here. A sweaty sex scene inter-cut with flashes of oriental ritual fighting; a wall of television sets, each screen giving a different but curiously interconnected view of our seething, madhouse world. But Roeg’s real brilliance – and he started out as a cameraman, remember – lies in his depiction of Earth as a world of hazy deserts, luminous lakes under the moon at night and jigsaw puzzle skyscrapers: Earth as a visitor would see it, as an alien planet.
Perhaps his ultimate message is that we are all ‘men who fall to earth,’ ultimately crushed by forces beyond our control. After all, Clark and Rip Torn both become seedy and bedraggled too as age sets in and their bad habits start taking their toll. They have become a couple by this time, a pair of nonentities chattering away in their cramped apartment, and there’s something touching about the sight of it. That, and their vague concern for Newton’s well being – his born out of scientific fascination, hers out of simple affection – provide the only truly redeeming views of humanity in this brilliant, eerie gem of a movie.
STAR WARS
(Director: George Lucas; starring: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing - 1977)
Nate Kenyon
In the summer of 1977, at the tender age of six years old, I became convinced that I was the one saviour of the Republic.
Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Page 11