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The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be
I think that must have been the title of one of the reviews of all those books and exhibitions about changing visions of the future in art and literature. It might even be the title of one of my 2006 blog posts.
I do know Fredric Jameson titled his magisterial tome on science fiction Archaeologies of the Future. And the business about "the desire called utopia" is decidedly from Jameson.
John Crowley’s recent request for examples of aesthetics of the future in films of the last twenty years (for a conference) set me to thinking. I haven’t seen enough films of the last twenty years to offer opinions, but I do have opinions about histories of the future (which I think is the title of one of the books of recent years, which I do not own, that not being one of my systematic researches lately). And it seems to me that when it comes to ways of imagining the future, the last twenty years have been, to borrow the punchline of an anecdote about Oxford University, rather exceptional.
Anyway, there used to be regular academic essays about the decline of utopian imagery, whole exhibitions, in fact, on the optimistic invention of futuristic cities in popular media in the 1920s—imaginary cities that looked like the interlocked architectural visions erected by the world’s deconstructivist architects circa 1995, and that some of us see in ever greater profusion to this day.
But the utopian assumption went away long ago: the belief that good architecture would make good human beings and that the secret was to get rid of all the old stuff that was holding us back and rebuild everything fresh.
The dystopians got into the movies in the 1950s, just at the moment when the social visionaries were finally getting to build all the buildings they hadn’t had the funds to construct back in the Depression. (The visions of earlier utopian art, though, didn’t look much like Corbu or the International Style in general, and it was the renunciation of the starkly rationalist International Style that, as I have observed, seems to have brought the old-timey glittering future into our office blocks and shopping districts. The deconstructivists took their cues from a cynical or disillusioned reading of the Russian Constructivist utopians.)
In terms of dystopian visualizations, the original film of Nineteen Eighty-Four, as I recall captured Orwell’s notion that the near future would just be a systematic use of surveillance technology to prettify with rhetoric the grimly obvious dysfunctions of the physical environment remaining from a vanished past.
My oft-discussed Forbidden Planet, on the other hand, took the coolest design of the previous few decades and imagined what a humanistic scholar would do with it if he could start all over with good design on a paradisal planet. Dr. Morbius combined fashion sense with architectural imagination and also designed a more aesthetically pleasing robot than any before or sense. (A book like Form Follows Libido makes me want to go back and look at the film in terms of the Freudian aesthetics of Richard Neutra’s architecture. Neutra made midcentury modernism sexy, as did the set designers for Forbidden Planet.)
It appears that Blade Runner, excited my contemporaries because it presented a realistically imagined future (no all-new buildings every five years). After its impact on cutting-edge imagination, things changed in sometimes puzzling ways. The remake of Nineteen Eighty-Four in time for the real year was a hideous mishmash because it had to imagine, in the actually existing cinematic conventions of A.-Domini 1984, a future that didn’t happen. In the remake, fighter planes that were outdated in the 1930s appeared in cooked-up newsreels on the big telescreens of Oceania’s Airstrip One, and it became hard for this viewed, at least, to imagine the back story that would bring about this particular agglomeration of styles.
But in general, coming off the disillusionment of dreams in the 1970s, it appears that the dystopian set designers took over the movies, except when the art direction was being coordinated by visual fantasists plundering everything from Taiwanese shamans to 1920s fashion illustrators for the Star Wars franchise. (The ethnographic costuming sources of successive parts of the Star Wars saga were, as I recall, much discussed by reviewers.)
Anyway, the oddity is that upscale physical reality is looking more and more like the dreams of utopian visionaries, while the movies have, I gather, stayed relentlessly ugly.
Where I live and increasingly where I travel, the hideous buildings of past decades (and too many of the good ones as well) are being swept away by the utopian taste favored by money. Historic housing projects are demolished and their residents handed vouchers to go find something somewhere, just not here…or occasionally, mixed-use and mixed-income housing really does get built and it does look pretty good.
The vast new development that looks like post-Stalinist housing from Magdeburg circa 1960 is apparently not for low-income folks at all. This is most curious, but it has nothing to do with the visual imagination of the movies.
Atlanta has the complicating factor of a developer who likes Prince Charles’ version of revived classicism, but my regular visits to the same parts of London (not the parts where people live, but the ones where many of them work and shop) has resembled a successive immersion in the earlier science-fiction vision of the future. Districts that in 1969 were redolent with visual recollections of eras from 1890 through about 1937 now consist of nothing but buildings so far in advance of dominant architectural taste in the States that a visit to the pocket park containing remnants of the Roman Wall brings up recollections of old-time visions of the radiant future. The future is here, and for those with a large enough quantity of money, it really is radiant.
All the other poor slobs and proles get to live in the world of today’s science fiction films, apparently.
I think that must have been the title of one of the reviews of all those books and exhibitions about changing visions of the future in art and literature. It might even be the title of one of my 2006 blog posts.
I do know Fredric Jameson titled his magisterial tome on science fiction Archaeologies of the Future. And the business about "the desire called utopia" is decidedly from Jameson.
John Crowley’s recent request for examples of aesthetics of the future in films of the last twenty years (for a conference) set me to thinking. I haven’t seen enough films of the last twenty years to offer opinions, but I do have opinions about histories of the future (which I think is the title of one of the books of recent years, which I do not own, that not being one of my systematic researches lately). And it seems to me that when it comes to ways of imagining the future, the last twenty years have been, to borrow the punchline of an anecdote about Oxford University, rather exceptional.
Anyway, there used to be regular academic essays about the decline of utopian imagery, whole exhibitions, in fact, on the optimistic invention of futuristic cities in popular media in the 1920s—imaginary cities that looked like the interlocked architectural visions erected by the world’s deconstructivist architects circa 1995, and that some of us see in ever greater profusion to this day.
But the utopian assumption went away long ago: the belief that good architecture would make good human beings and that the secret was to get rid of all the old stuff that was holding us back and rebuild everything fresh.
The dystopians got into the movies in the 1950s, just at the moment when the social visionaries were finally getting to build all the buildings they hadn’t had the funds to construct back in the Depression. (The visions of earlier utopian art, though, didn’t look much like Corbu or the International Style in general, and it was the renunciation of the starkly rationalist International Style that, as I have observed, seems to have brought the old-timey glittering future into our office blocks and shopping districts. The deconstructivists took their cues from a cynical or disillusioned reading of the Russian Constructivist utopians.)
In terms of dystopian visualizations, the original film of Nineteen Eighty-Four, as I recall captured Orwell’s notion that the near future would just be a systematic use of surveillance technology to prettify with rhetoric the grimly obvious dysfunctions of the physical environment remaining from a vanished past.
My oft-discussed Forbidden Planet, on the other hand, took the coolest design of the previous few decades and imagined what a humanistic scholar would do with it if he could start all over with good design on a paradisal planet. Dr. Morbius combined fashion sense with architectural imagination and also designed a more aesthetically pleasing robot than any before or sense. (A book like Form Follows Libido makes me want to go back and look at the film in terms of the Freudian aesthetics of Richard Neutra’s architecture. Neutra made midcentury modernism sexy, as did the set designers for Forbidden Planet.)
It appears that Blade Runner, excited my contemporaries because it presented a realistically imagined future (no all-new buildings every five years). After its impact on cutting-edge imagination, things changed in sometimes puzzling ways. The remake of Nineteen Eighty-Four in time for the real year was a hideous mishmash because it had to imagine, in the actually existing cinematic conventions of A.-Domini 1984, a future that didn’t happen. In the remake, fighter planes that were outdated in the 1930s appeared in cooked-up newsreels on the big telescreens of Oceania’s Airstrip One, and it became hard for this viewed, at least, to imagine the back story that would bring about this particular agglomeration of styles.
But in general, coming off the disillusionment of dreams in the 1970s, it appears that the dystopian set designers took over the movies, except when the art direction was being coordinated by visual fantasists plundering everything from Taiwanese shamans to 1920s fashion illustrators for the Star Wars franchise. (The ethnographic costuming sources of successive parts of the Star Wars saga were, as I recall, much discussed by reviewers.)
Anyway, the oddity is that upscale physical reality is looking more and more like the dreams of utopian visionaries, while the movies have, I gather, stayed relentlessly ugly.
Where I live and increasingly where I travel, the hideous buildings of past decades (and too many of the good ones as well) are being swept away by the utopian taste favored by money. Historic housing projects are demolished and their residents handed vouchers to go find something somewhere, just not here…or occasionally, mixed-use and mixed-income housing really does get built and it does look pretty good.
The vast new development that looks like post-Stalinist housing from Magdeburg circa 1960 is apparently not for low-income folks at all. This is most curious, but it has nothing to do with the visual imagination of the movies.
Atlanta has the complicating factor of a developer who likes Prince Charles’ version of revived classicism, but my regular visits to the same parts of London (not the parts where people live, but the ones where many of them work and shop) has resembled a successive immersion in the earlier science-fiction vision of the future. Districts that in 1969 were redolent with visual recollections of eras from 1890 through about 1937 now consist of nothing but buildings so far in advance of dominant architectural taste in the States that a visit to the pocket park containing remnants of the Roman Wall brings up recollections of old-time visions of the radiant future. The future is here, and for those with a large enough quantity of money, it really is radiant.
All the other poor slobs and proles get to live in the world of today’s science fiction films, apparently.
