I made a New Year’s Resolution this year to quit the news. And since I live in a small hamlet, I have not heard much about what’s been going on in the Great Wide World. Then, while visiting Mom, I got a glimpse of Fox News. I was amazed at the state of crisis being portrayed. I sat staring, mouth agape, thinking about how close we are to the Edge of the Abyss. Runaway inflation, pipeline panic and a crisis of humanity on our border. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” ― Hunter S. Thompson
Drive-In Classics
I was having flashbacks to the science fiction films of my youth. It felt like I was watching some dystopian science fiction movie from the 70’s. What I was seeing, couldn’t be true. It was like watching scenes from Rollerball, Mad Max or one of the other Drive-In Classics from half a century ago.
In the 50’s and sixties, Drive-Ins were a favorite spot for the early Baby Boomers with a Big Buick, Packard or Chevy. Whether it was Friday date night or take the kids too; the Drive-In was “the spot” in over 4000 communities, scattered about rural America. Then with inflation raging and the gasoline shortage, the car industry started making smaller cars – marking the end of the Drive-In era. No comfortable Packard couch, Mustangs and Camaros were no place for a family to watch a movie from.
Cars got smaller and held a lot fewer people. The Drive-Ins were headed towards extinction. VHS and cable TV had something to do with it too, I suppose. As they were sliding towards oblivion, there was a period in the 70’s where they tried to make a go of it with scary movies, exploitation flicks and Science Fiction. The cinematic masterpieces of the 1970’s were definitely the Sci-Fi films.
End of an Age
It actually started in the late sixties at the beginning of the Nixon-era with the classic; 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Age of Aquarius and the hippie experiment was morphing into the dawn of disco. The Drive-Ins tried to keep the late hatching Boomers coming on the weekends in their 2-door Mustangs, Cougars, Camaros and Gremlins. It didn’t work but it did produce many classic Science Fiction Films, many of which still influence the genre 50 years later. Several predicting fairly accurately where we would end up. A few of my favorites:
- A Clockwork Orange
- Alien
- Andromeda Strain
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind
- Mad Max
- Planet of the Apes Pentology
- Rollerball
- Soylent Green
- Star Wars
Perhaps it is just senility brought on by my advanced age but the plot line of the present moment has a perilous resemblance to the Sci-Fi Fantasies of the 1970’s. Does life imitate art or were they signaling us 50 years ago – what the world would look like without Drive-Ins? The 70’s were a pivotal point in our evolution. It is obvious by almost every metric that we took a left turn.
The Times They are a-Changin’
It was a very volatile period in our history, filled with socio-political discontent – the times, they were a changin’. Anti-War songs on the radio for the first time, racial upheaval and the spirit of revolution in the air. The Kubrick classic, “A Clockwork Orange” takes place in a futuristic, repressive, totalitarian super-State. He described his film as a “running lecture on free will.” Tame by today’s standards, critics and movie goers freaked out over the violence. Britain banned the film for a quarter century.
“Soylent Green” was one of the first big money Sci-Fi Films. They spent around 4 million dollars in production of the film. The story takes place in 2022, in an extremely overpopulated New York City. Society’s portrayed as herds of barbarians living more like animals than humans. Pollution and resource depletion have made finding food for the masses the most important responsibility of society’s leaders.
The “Planet of the Apes” franchise was tarnished by some silly sequels and a ridiculous TV series but the original film “Planet of the Apes” and the sequel “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” are both very good movies, portraying a fascist America. They had to put the actors in monkey suits I guess to tackle the otherwise impossibly controversial issues; the militarization of police, class privilege, totalitarianism, torture, slavery, and the justification of armed revolt.
The Fall of Rome
What’s your favorite Science Fiction Flick? How does the plot line fit with our present moment in the Great Wide World?
- Repressive, Totalitarian Super State
- Pollution and Resource Depletion
- Militarized Police
- Corporate Control
- Mass Poverty
- Dystopia
- Revolution
While it feels like we are on the precipice, life unfolds at a different speed than the 90 minute runtime for a Sci-Fi film. It takes a long time for an empire to fall. The fall of the Roman Empire was slow and painful, lasting over two and a half centuries. So if our fall did actually begin at the end of the Age of Aquarius, we still have two, slow and painful centuries to go – so cheer up.