[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Future is Rated "B"

[Bill Totten]

by Dmitry Orlov

Club Orlov (September 13 2010)


My voluminous fan mail has made me aware a curious fact: many of my
readers seem persuaded that the future is either Mad Max {1} or Waterworld
{2}. As far as they are concerned, there just aren't any other options.
What's more, some people have even tried to venture a guess as to which of
the two it shall be by watching what I do. I live on a boat, and that is
apparently an indication that the future must be Waterworld-like. But I
have also been seen rattling around town on a rusty old motorcycle, and
that is taken as an indication of a more Mad Max-like future.

It saddens me that so few people bring up the film Blade Runner {3}, and
it is even more sad that George Lucas's THX 1138 {4} or Jean-Luc Godard's
Alphaville {5} are almost never mentioned, because these particular films
have in many ways proven to be predictive of the present rather than just
the future. Take THX 1138 for example: it is about some people who live in
a sealed-off climate-controlled environment, are on a compulsory regimen
of psychoactive drugs, are assigned their mates by a computer program, and
watch pornography that is piped into their living rooms in order to relax
after work. When they refuse to take their meds, they are abused by
robot-like police armed with electric cattle-prods. When one of them
escapes into the wilderness, it turns out that the police lack the budget
to hunt him down. That may have seemed a bit exotic and futuristic back in
1971 when Lucas filmed it, but now describes the people who live down the
street. Alphaville, on the other hand, is vaguely reminiscent of some of
my more interesting business trips.

People seem uncomfortable with the idea that works of fiction can predict
the present, because the present is supposed to be reality, not fiction.
The future, on the other hand, is fair game, because it is supposed to be
purely fictional: it is common wisdom, you see, that the future is
unknowable. The artists are free to paint the future any color they like,
while the more scientifically-minded approach it by formulating
alternative scenarios. It is useless to try to tell them that there is
just the one scenario, apparently written by some incompetent hack, and
that, even though it stinks, it is high time they stopped flapping their
gums about alternative ones and started auditioning for a role in this
one, since it happens to be the only one that is actually being produced.

For the benefit of those who believe that the future is fictional but that
the present is real it may be helpful to point out that the present is
largely fictional as well. Here's a perfectly good example: do you
remember those valiant freedom-fighters who expelled foreign invaders from
their ancient land - the mujahideen? What do you think happened to them?
Well, they've been rebranded as the Taleban, and are now evil. Same
Pashtun tribesmen (or their sons) toting the same AK-47s and carrying out
the same missions against strangely similar infidel invaders are, by the
simple act of renaming, transformed from valiant warriors to cowardly
fiends.

The people whose job it is to write the fiction that we are expected to
accept as our one real and true present don't seem to have much of an
imagination. They also seem to have had a rather short reading list and
lift their ideas from just a handful of slender volumes. George Orwell's
1984 {6} and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World {7} are their particular
favorites, along with Franz Kafka's The Trial {8}. Take, for instance, the
cult of Osama bin Laden as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks: it is an
image of the perpetual enemy of the state lifted straight out of Orwell.
Osama was a sickly CIA operative who succumbed to renal failure a long
time ago and who was posthumously demonized using some grainy amateur
videos and some muffled audio tapes featuring some other CIA operative.
For years now Osama's restless and lonely ghost, clad in white robes and
towing a broken dialysis machine across rugged and bare mountain passes of
Waziristan has been relentlessly hunted by a swarm of endlessly circling
Predator drones. The war in Afghanistan is currently costing the US a
billion dollars a day. Sorry to bring up yet another "B" movie, but how
much did Ghostbusters {9} charge per visit?

I have no wish to debate these topics, and would urge you to shy away from
them as well. There are just a few people who know enough about them, and
they generally have no wish to debate them either. There is nothing in it
for them - or anyone else. Just about everyone else is either wallowing in
blissful ignorance or has been subjected to a mind control process used in
advertising: proof through repetition. Here is a contemporary example: a
purely fictional phenomenon from the 9/11-season of 2010 known as "The
mosque at Ground Zero". The kernel of truth behind this mainly fictional
story is the proposed Islamic cultural center, not a mosque, to be built
at a location that is nowhere near Ground Zero, but we now live in a realm
of compulsory fiction, reinforced through repetition in the echo-chamber
of the media, which makes truth irrelevant. Once the media start ranting
and raving like that, it becomes hard for them to stop, and next they trot
out some obscure evangelical pastor from Florida who wants to burn a stack
of Korans, and they cannot for the life of them stop talking about him
either. When in response violent demonstrations erupt in already violent
places that are patrolled by US soldiers, that just adds spice to this
already wonderful story. I hope that you are beginning to see a pattern
here: first a country goes a little bit senile, then noticeably demented,
then completely stark raving running-around-naked-smearing-feces-all-over-
yourself insane. Then it hurts itself. Individual insanity is rare, but
group insanity is, unfortunately, the bane of societies that are nearing
their end.

It would seem that, if you are a certain kind of popular author, a good
way to ensure that the future comes to resemble your worst nightmares is
to write a novel about them. This has certainly worked for Orwell, Huxley
and Kafka. But there is also an alternative: compose your own fiction
instead of accepting anyone else's, then go ahead and turn it into
reality. A good first step might be to write a short story. It can be very
short, and it doesn't even have to be particularly interesting. Something
as trivial as this might do for starters: "The next morning she woke up
and, instead of having a bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee for
breakfast, she fasted until sundown". And then, the next morning, she woke
up, and something curious happened: this short story came to life, and so
it came to pass. Next came other stories, each a bit longer than the
previous one, bridging the present and the future in new ways, and
eventually spanning decades. And as these decades rolled by, these stories
too came to life.

This, as I see it, is the best way forward in a depressed and increasingly
demented and accident-prone country that is heading straight for collapse,
where the present (reality, what people think is going on, common notions
of the state of things) is degenerating into useless noise - the clamor of
clueless but self-important people desperately begging you to continue
giving them your attention, so that they can stuff your head with more
"B"-rated trash. But if you ignore them long enough, they will go away.
Don't hope, don't wish, don't dream, but do write your own fiction and use
it to create a present that works for you. Invent places for yourself and
for those you care about in your stories about the future, and then go
ahead and live in them. You don't have to settle for anyone else's
"B"-rated nonsense. And don't let anyone tell you that you are crazy or
that you are living in a dream. It's not a dream, dammit, it's a work of
fiction!

Links:

{1} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_max

{2} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterworld

{3} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner

{4} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138

{5} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_%28film%29

{6} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

{7} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

{8} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial

{9} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/09/future-is-rated-b.html

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