"You maniacs! You blew it up! Oh, damn you! GOD DAMN you all to hell!"
Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 35 years, you probably recognize these fateful words from the final scene of 1968's Planet Of The Apes, wherein Charlton Heston (after enduring 90 minutes of torture at the hands of talking, fascist apes) realizes he's not on another planet, but in Earth's own post-nuclear holocaust future. In this moment, the Dystopia film was born.
There have been dozens since, from Stanley Kubrick's hoity-toity A Clockwork Orange (1971) to Robocop (1987) and 2003's 28 Days Later -- but none of them match the paranoia and out-and-out cheese level of the classic '70s variety. Soylent Green, Logan's Run, A Boy And His Dog and Westworld were perfect paranoid fictions for the Nixon era -- films that were ostensibly aimed at the counterculture audience, but created by an establishment that feared the '60s revolution and all it meant.
For this reason, Heston was the perfect leading man for the genre. Though he'd made a career of portraying upright, mythic heroes (Moses, El Cid, Ben Hur), Planet of The Apes and Soylent Green gave Heston the opportunity to play gamely, hilariously against type. In Apes, Heston's Taylor is no hero; he's a misanthrope who yearns to escape humanity and find "something better" elsewhere in the universe. As a result of his hubris, he loses his freedom and ability to speak (the film's most sledgehammer metaphor), and finds that the apes who now run the show are no better than the creeps he left behind. He cannot escape humanity -- his own, or the fact that humans, in their willful ignorance, are the agents of the post-nuclear "madhouse" he has landed in.
In 1973's Soylent Green, Heston is Thorne (girdled, bewigged, and dressed like Fred from Scooby Doo's father), a cynical cop in the overpopulated New York of the early 21st century. Everything's as peachy as life without food, trees, wildlife or breathable air can be -- until Thorne investigates the murder of a bigwig at the Soylent corporation, makers of the world's favorite generic foodstuff (Soylent Green, Orange, Red). Thorne suspects something fishy is up, especially when his crooked boss warns him against looking any deeper. A toddler could see the film's "twist" ending coming from a mile away. When Thorne's kvetchy roommate Sol is voluntarily euthanised, he follows the body to a processing plant where thousands of corpses go in one end -- and Soylent pops out on the other. All that's left is a classic bit of Chuck Heston scenery-chewing ("Soylent Green is peeeeeeeeeeeepuhll!") as he is hauled away by his police comrades, who know the truth, but choose to stay silent and maintain the status quo. As campy as Soylent is, its message is as relevant now as in '73, simply because the future it depicts isn't that far removed from reality.
The dystopia of 1973's Westworld was unique in that it was presented as an amusement park gone wrong. Blane (James Brolin, hero-stud) and Martin (Richard Benjamin, wuss-sidekick) are city businessmen out to live their childhood fantasy in Westworld, a high-tech resort where lifelike androids recreate the experience of the Old West. Per the Asimovian I Robot code, the androids are incapable of hurting humans -- or are they? Dorky Martin manages to incur the wrath of one particularly nasty customer, a black-clad gunslinger played by Yul Brynner. When Brynner kills the seemingly capable Blane, nerdy Martin discovers that the androids have killed their human creators and taken over -- leaving Martin to deal with the Yul The Robot Menace himself. You know the rest; in confronting his fear, nebbish taps inner resources he never knew he had, kills the bad guy, and becomes hero. The subtext of course, is the pure paranoia of '70s dystopia cinema -- technology is the enemy.
1975's A Boy And His Dog remains one of the few dystopia films with a genuine understanding of the counterculture zeitgeist. Vic (Don Johnson) is a feral youth wandering the post-nuclear deserts of America in search of food and loose women, accompanied by his dry-witted talking dog, Blood. He eventually hooks up with Quilla June (Susanne Benton), a spacey nymphette who convinces him to leave Blood and his vagabond life behind for dependable poontang, three square meals and the security of an underground city. The underground "paradise" is, of course, the real dystopia -- a Capra-esque surface hiding fascism and mind control by a Draconian "committee" who plan to use the ever-horny Vic as a sperm donor to propagate the species (not the old fashioned way, either, but by means of a bizarre "milking machine"). Vic escapes to the surface with the increasingly shrewish Quilla in tow, only to find Blood starved and near death. What's a best friend to do? Kill the girl, feed her to the dog, and live happily ever after, of course! Freedom, even in an apocalyptic wasteland, is preferable to the entropy of suburbia, marriage, and the straight life.
Logan's Run (1976) took the opposite position -- that the hedonism of the hippie generation could be even more of a dead end than traditional values. In Logan's 23rd century, humans live in a hermetically sealed city, where everyone is young and sexed up, and old age is a thing of the past. Michael York plays Logan, a swinging bachelor and "Sandman", the government agents who gleefully terminate "runners" -- those who refuse to go to "Carousel", a 30th birthday ritual where folks are vaporized and reborn in new bodies (not). When his own number is up, Logan has a change of heart and decides to run himself. Abetted by his hot girlfriend (Jenny Agutter), he leaves the cocoon of the City to find "Sanctuary", a mythic place where people grow old -- which turns out to be the decaying remains of Washington D.C. There they find an Old Man (Peter Ustinov), a relic of the time when people aged and died under their own steam. Realizing his whole world is a lie, Logan and company return to tell everyone the truth about Sanctuary. When the computer that controls the City fails to break Logan's will in an interrogation, it self-destructs -- blowing up the city and forcing the na•f-like citizens to go outside for the first time and face reality, in the form of Ustinov's old man. The message again is clear, and fraught with the paranoia of adults who felt they were losing their children: hedonism is an illusion of freedom, and dying traditional values (Washington D.C., in decay) are the only salvation. Despite its creepy, jingoistic subtext, Logan delivers a rarity in films of the genre -- a happy ending. For once, telling the truth sets the people free.
Logan's Run was the apex of the '70s dystopia film, though the genre itself refuses to die; Mad Max (1979) and Escape From New York (1981) are classics, and even Kevin Costner's abysmal Waterworld (1995) helped ratchet up the cheese level a bit. But despite some cool effects and art direction, these latter-day dystopia flicks lack the soul and the bite of their '70s counterparts. For all their corny dialogue, ham acting, and dated synthesizer scores, Soylent Green, Westworld, et. al. said something significant about human nature and the times in which they were made, which is why they still resonate in America in 2004. Like Taylor at the end of Planet Of The Apes, we're back where we started: to the paranoia of the Nixon era, where freedoms are diminishing, leaders wantonly despoil the environment, the richest few have the most to live for, and man is increasingly his own worst enemy.
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