Beltane New (Early Growth) Moon
Dystopian cinema has a long history. Think back to Mad Max which featured the rise of an unknown, Mel Gibson. I know it goes further back than that, Planet of the Apes, for example, and Blade Runner and Soylent Green, even Metropolis in the way back, at least as far as cinema goes. The Road. Minority Report. Pleasantville. Stepford Wives.
I saw Dredd last night, a remake of a terrible Sylvester Stallone movie, Judge Dredd. This one posits 800 million people living in an enclosed mega-city stretching from D.C. to Boston, the rest of the US an irradiated wasteland. Just why the key corridor of power and population remained more or less intact is not explained.
It’s a not unfamiliar story of police trapped inside a high rise controlled by the dark powers, in this case, Ma-Ma, a female maker and distributor of slo-mo, a drug that makes the world slow waaay down, and matriarch of the Ma-Ma gang that runs this 200 story apartment block. The Raid: Redemption, a recent Indonesian martial arts film, features the same plot line. This is a much better movie.
It is, in a sense, Vishnu against the dark side of Siva, order trying to rest stability out of chaos. This type of entertainment might puzzle a viewer who questions the need for this kind of story. What’s the point?
(Pleasantville)
It can serve a conservative political outlook, highlighting the stakes our contemporary world faces when attempting to maintain order against the forces of social entropy, whether terrorism, drug cartels or low hemlines. It can serve a liberal political outlook: see what happens if we don’t address social injustice while we have the resources and stability. They remind us of the dark impulses struggling in our own souls, the urges toward incoherence that each of us manages, more or less, each day of our lives.
Darkest of all, of course, they serve notice that the second law of thermodynamics will tear apart everything we love. Time, that silent executioner, works with it.
(On the Beach)
When we watch these movies, contained in an hour or two of story, of course, we get the pleasant sensation of boundaries to the destruction. Its story finishes, we turn off the TV or leave the cinema and it’s all over. In this sense these movies are the opposite of what they seem, a pacifier stuck in the mouth of our infantile desire to live forever.
