Today on TCM, it’s time to celebrate the New Year and what better way to celebrate than with movies that celebrate time, future, past, and present. There’s Things to Come, Soylent Green, and Time after Time, three movies that either take us into the future or travel back and forth between a distant past and a contemporary time frame. Movies about the future, or travels through time, have always fascinated me and, it would seem from the hoopla over the recent Back to the Future, Part II day back in October, the rest of movie fandom as well. It’s fun and instructive to both imagine the future and see what the future looked like to others once we arrive at their predetermined date. As we all move forward, thinking about the new year and new beginnings, let’s look at time in the movies and what it means to us.
Things to Come and Soylent Green both take place in the future, with Things to Come starting in 1940 and working its way to 2036 and Soylent Green starting and ending in 2022, just around the corner. Both get the details wrong, as movies about the future always do (watch Back to the Future, Blade Runner, Soylent Green, or Minority Report and you won’t see a single smart phone) but the general ideas are well presented and accurate in a broad sense. Things to Come is a perfect example of Orson Welles’ statement that a happy ending is just a matter of where you decide to end the movie. If Things to Come ends with Ralph Richardson’s warlord bringing order to the world through brutality, it’s a Dystopian ending. End it after the Raymond Massey’s fascist organization outlaws independent nations and, well, it’s still a Dystopian ending. End it with the people rising up and asserting their will and still having the exploration of space as a means of progress and it’s a pretty good, if not Utopian, ending.
Soylent Green, on the other hand, is almost completely Dystopian. The world is warming, the homeless and the unemployed are everywhere, and people are unwittingly eating their fellow humans to stay alive. But there are people, in the form of Chuck Heston’s unrelenting cop in search of the truth, who still have hope and still want the world to be a better place.
Time After Time, gives us H.G. Wells himself as a character, played by Malcolm McDowall, and Jack the Ripper, played by David Warner, as friends who travel from their 19th century life to the present day of 1979. It’s not the future Wells had hoped for and, in the end, he travels back with his new found love (Mary Steenburgen) to the 19th century to write stories about the future, without mentioning McDonalds once (I mean, come on, don’t you think he would have mentioned fast food burgers in at least one novel? Or the French Fries? He seemed so excited to eat them).
What these movies all have in common is the theme that there’s no time like the present, just as in The Wizard of Oz, there’s no place like home. By giving us Dystopian futures, they give us a chance to examine those worlds and that way of living without actually being there. A chance to change it before it happens. The year 1984 came and went, decades ago, without the whole world, or at least Oceania, descended into an all encompassing dictatorship watching our every move and policing our every thought. Yes, yes, I know, many people can’t resist pointing out areas where this has, in fact, happened but only in extreme cases, like North Korea, does anything approach the world of 1984.
And so the future in so many movies becomes a warning for the present. Rarely is there a movie about the future in which everything is just fine and dandy. It doesn’t make for edge of the seat drama. Most movies about the future are wary of the future and have almost a Luddite sense of paranoia about technology. They are rarely hopeful, like the end of Things to Come or 2010, because it’s almost as if we don’t want to lull ourselves into a false sense of security about what’s ahead of us. We want to be prepared for the worst and the movies are simply doing their part in preparing us.
It may sound depressing to think of futuristic movies as warnings but, really, it’s just because they want the best for all of us. Logan’s Run has the same kind of Luddite ending of many of these, in which the citizenry overthrow those pesky computers ruining everything for everyone (and killing us off at 30), but the ending is hopeful and the movie’s warning, and the book’s it was based upon, isn’t really about having us all killed off at 30 (21 in the book), but about not letting technology run our lives. It’s a nice thought but not really achievable. I love technology. It’s how you’re reading this right now. I use technology (and unless you live outdoors in a self-made shelter free of all the amenities of the civilized world and hunt for your food with rocks and sharpened sticks, which is itself technology, then so do you) and need it for almost every aspect of my life but I understand what the movies are trying to say. They’re trying to say we should be happy with ourselves and what we’ve got and be the ones who control our own destiny. That’s why, even in their Dystopian landscapes, hope abounds. And that’s a message I can get behind. So, going into the new year, take in some futuristic movies on TCM today and think about the future and all the hope it can bring. Happy New Year!