Hollywood and our dystopian future

So I really like watching apocalyptic (28 DAYS LATER; DAY AFTER TOMORROW; THE CORE), post-apocalyptic (THE POSTMAN; WATERWORLD), and Dystopian future (THE MATRIX; JOHNNY MNEMONIC; CHILDREN OF MEN) movies, even when they're bad.
I can watch them over and over and over... probably has something to do with my fascination with history and politics... there's always some fun little detail to pick out that reflects a fear or belief specific to the politics or history of the time in which the movie was made (note the detail in DAY AFTER TOMORROW where a female newsie gleefully points out that Americans are now illegally crossing the border into Mexico, rather than the other way around).

But in the end they rarely move me in a deep and meaningful way because they always seem overwrought. I mean if global warming turns out to be manmade and real, then the Earth is going to very VERY slowly warm up and winters will slowly disappear, farmable land will VERY slowly wither away, and populations will EXTREMELY gradually migrate elsewhere, they will not pack up all their things and become instant refugees, literally overnight. And we're not going to wake up one morning to an ice age that deposits 500 feet of glacial ice on New York City in a single afternoon.

Likewise, I don't see us becoming slaves to a race of machines, or spending the majority of our lives jacked into computer terminals interacting in a made-up world, or living in burned out cities where rich people inhabit gleaming apartments a thousand feet above the slums that have been left at ground level for "everyone else." I just don't think it's going to be as dramatic as the movies need their stories and visuals to be in order to get butts into theatre seats.

That said, I was shocked last night to find that a movie I have consistently made fun of over the years (even though it occupies a special place in my heart because of it's fun goofiness), showed me what I find to be the most plausible dystopian future you'll see in any modern movie.

I watched DEMOLITION MAN (DM) last night.

Most dystopian future worlds you see in the movies are immediately terrifying. If someone dropped you into the world of THE TERMINATOR or THE MATRIX or THE CORE, you would instantly shit your pants. Not so in San Angeles (the city where Sly finds himself in DM circa 2032).

If you woke up in San Angeles tomorrow, your first impression might be "hey, this is kinda nice." The streets are clean, the cars are electric and make almost no noise, the buildings are beautifully designed and built, there are plenty of trees and grass and there are no fast food joints, liquor stores, or billboards. Everyone is polite and nice, no one curses or fights, clothing is relaxed and attractive, as are the people. It looks like a utopian dream.

But San Angeles 2032 is ruled by a government made up of officials that I might call "benign fascists." At some point, it was decided by (presumably rich, well-educated progressives) that the behaviour of average Americans must be legally restricted "for their own good." Sandra Bullock explains the world pretty succintly when she points out to Sly that anything considered "bad" has been outlawed... everything from gas, smoking, guns, and salt, to cursing.

But I say these are "benign" Fascists because there is no secret police force that whisks "criminals" off to the gulag. This fascist government is much smarter than that. Physical threats, jails, and executions breed revolutionaries. If the only thing that happens when you curse or eat salt, is that a machine tells you that you've been "fined one credit for violation of the verbal morality statute"... well that's no so bad, is it? We can live with that... right?

Maybe, but the world in DM is not static, it's still evolving... and maybe today it's a fine of one credit, but governments that seek control MUST maintain that control at any cost. What happenes when one credit is not enough to dissaude cursing... it becomes two credits, then one hundred, and if people are still ignoring the statute, maybe THAT'S where the gulags and the executions come in... remember, when we join the story in DM, the leader of this utopian world has just re-awakened a dangerous criminal whom he hopes will assassinate the leader of an underground movement seeking to restore basic freedoms that have been given up or lost, and he doesn't seem to care how many people die as a result, as long as his goal is achieved. That's a pretty aggressive escalation.

And so, here in 2008 I look around me and I see helmet laws, cigarette laws, CAFE standards, and campus speech codes, and I hear politicians pushing laws to tell you what kind of lightbulbs you can buy (I buy Compact Flourescents but I don't think you should be forced to if you don't want them), or wether or not we should start taxing candy bars and soda... or I read an article like this one, where one side of a political debate on Affirmative Action points out that the only way to win is to keep the issue off of ballots because even though they'd lose in the court of public opinion, they're right and that's all that matters... or note how with each new election cycle, politicians manage to convince us of one more thing the government should have control over in our lives (now it's health care and mortgages... tomorrow it may be whether or not you can have a child and raise it on your own) and I start to wonder if, of all the dystopian future movies ever made, DEMOLITION MAN might be the most prescient, the most plausible, and ultimately, the scariest such movie ever made.

If Americans ever lose our freedoms, it will not be overnight, to force of arms... we will give them away, voluntarily and perhaps happily, over the course of many years, to people who consider themselves "our betters", and we will do so with the best of intentions... and while some things might seem nicer, or safer in the aftermath, we will have made ourselves slaves... make no mistake about that.

In response to which, I can do no better than to quote Denis Leary from DM...

"You see, according to Cocteau's plan I'm the enemy, 'cause I like to think; I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder - "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I WANT high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-o all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal? I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener". "