50 years ago Woody Allen made a movie titled “Sleeper” which was pretty funny and managed to cram profound observations about human nature and revolution into a slapstick dixieland dystopia. I’m not going to call the film prescient or visionary because I believe almost all science-fiction is simply a reflection of the time it is created and NOT the dates chronicled in the book or movie (in this case, the year 2173). The formulation goes something like this : 1948 was 1984, 1984 was Neuromancer, 1999 was the Matrix, etc*. so that makes Sleeper the Nixon Presidency. About 2/3 of the way through the film we learn that "The Leader" has been successfully blown up in a terrorist attack 10 months ago and the nation has been flying blind for the better part of a year. We the People are blissfully unaware of this crisis and simply live as "normal" eating at McDonald's, having our robots do our work and taking a well deserved break in the orgasmatron. The Aries Project is a top secret conspiracy formulated by government scientists to clone a “new” Leader (resurrected) from the cells of his nose recovered from the explosion left by the rebel assassins.
It was a good plan. It needed to be done. Nixon was symbolically “blown up” by Watergate but, at the time, the American people were still unaware that he was vaporized by rebel forces deep in the Intelligence Community. There might have been a few DC technocrats in 1973 attempting to salvage Tricky Dick after the attack but rebel's like Woody Allen stumbled and bumbled our media into a successful “Constitutional Crisis” and flattened Richard Millhouse Nixon like a pancake.
Nostalgic and yesteryear as it is, there are moments in this comedy that ring as true (more true) today than they did five decades ago when they first unspooled on the silver screen. One such scene is when the ingénue Luna (Diane Keaton) recites her new poem about a butterfly transforming into a caterpillar to her dandy companion and, after praising her verse, he gently points out that in nature it is the caterpillar that becomes a butterfly. Luna completely flips out and has a angry tirade explaining that she simply “hates being wrong” and can’t stand the feeling of error regardless of the actual truth of the matter. Is this not the default reaction of todays NPC’s when confronted with a basic natural truth?
- The cars are white blobs of self driving poop.
- The food is genetically engineered garbage.
- The cops dress in body armor and helmets.
- The universities give degrees in Cosmological Sexual Technique in Poetry
Miles Monroe: Right.
Luna Schlosser: So then, what do you believe in?
How did I get here? |
Science-Fiction is not the future; it's the present. |
It's going to take a few more months (maybe years) for this fact to sink into the thick hole-filled heads of rank 'n file citizens and, let's face it, for many people it really doesn't matter because they had no investment in the country before Nov. 3rd. But slowly, day by day, events of the world will unfold in a way that proves my point and those of us who
Comments