by Andrew Hultkrans

We are all interested in the future–for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives… and remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future!

–Criswell, introducing Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Despite his circular logic and notorious talent for stunningly inaccurate "predictions," Criswell was right. We are all interested in the future, for it is where we are going to spend the rest of our lives. From the 1924 Soviet silent Aelita: Queen of Mars to this year's Star Wars prequel, film has provided a fascinating outlet for this cultural obsession.

In terms of the popular imagination, we were never more interested in the future than in the 1930s and 1950s (the vote is still out on the 1990s). Those decades saw a cultural groundswell of technological utopianism, manifested in the pulp science fiction published by Hugo Gernsback and illustrated by Frank R. Paul, the Usonian architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the speculative futuramas of Norman Bel Geddes, and the Dymaxion design of Buckminster Fuller.

This heaven-bound trajectory launched in the late 1920s surely would have continued its course straight through the '50s had it not been for the unexpected detour of the decidedly down-to-earth 1940's–an era marked by a pressing wartime present and an anxious postwar readjustment period mirrored by the alienation and paranoia of the film noir. Discounting the aberrant, war-torn '40s, during which the whole world seemed to be on hold (advertisements during wartime promised many a streamlined commodity "in your future!" once the war effort was over), it is possible to read the period beginning in the late '20sand culminating in the early '60s as one unified epoch under the sign of glorious, inexorable progress–a near-religious belief in technology as panacea.

While much of the giddy Jetsonia envisioned in these decades seems impossibly silly today (particularly Gernsback and Paul's Amazing Stories brand of science fiction and Norman Bel Geddes' "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair), many of its proponents in architecture and industrial design were quite serious about their ideas, and in the cases of Le Corbusier's regimented panopticon cities ("machines for living") and Fuller's Dymaxion House and Car ("dynamism plus efficiency"), even polemical.

The implied fascism of these technocratic designs were occasionally taken to task–the French Communist paper L'Humanité called Le Corbusier on the reactionary agenda of his "Contemporary City for Three Million," and Siegfried Kracauer saw the spectre of Nazi iconography foretold in Fritz Lang's Metropolis–but, by and large, such gleaming visions of the future were greeted with a sense of wonder by the general public. There was, in fact, a widespread appetite for outlandish prognostications on the future. Important figures such as Winston Churchill were invited to prophesy in the pages of hobby magazines, the influential futuristic cityscapes of Hugh Ferriss graced department store windows and magazine ads, and Buckminster Fuller's flamboyant press conferences and lectures attracted standing-room-only crowds.

Despite their status as retrofuturistic kitsch today, artifacts of the techno-utopian past remain compelling, largely due to their gloriously unhinged design aspects. As ideological texts, past visions of the future occupy a unique and privileged position, functioning in much the same way as time capsules do for their future recipients (time capsules were an actual component of our futuristic past–at the 1939 World's Fair, Westinghouse buried a Brancusian torpedo of a time capsule containing microfilm, newsreels, and other artifacts, to be exhumed in 6939 A.D.). Retrofuturistic texts, instead of offering us a long-forgotten past, present us with impossible futures that never were, outrageous predictions concerning our comparatively drab present. The glaring discrepancies between these techno-utopian visions (many describing late 20th-early 21st century America) and our own precarious situation create a cognitive chasm through which a disturbing ideological map of the 20th century American mind becomes clear.

Over coffee, Cohen produced a fat manila envelope full of glossies… I saw a dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson Wax Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the employees of the Johnson's Wax must have felt as though they were walking into one of Paul's spray-paint pulp utopias. Wright's building looked as though it had been designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite sandals… The designers were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.

–William Gibson, "The Gernsback Continuum"

In his 1981 short story "The Gernsback Continuum," William Gibson describes the vertiginous terror caused by this cognitive chasm between the present and a retrofuturistic utopia. A commercial photographer on assignment to photograph retrofuturistic architecture across America for a British coffee table book, Gibson's narrator suffers hallucinations of an actual Jetsonia straight out of Frank R. Paul's pulp imagination. Even more unsettling than the space-age city itself were its inhabitants:

They were both in white: loose clothing, bare legs, spotless white sun shoes… He was saying something wise and strong, and she was nodding, and suddenly I was frightened, frightened in an entirely different way… They were the children of Dialta Downes's '80s-that-wasn't; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, of foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world… It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda.

Through his evocation of a fascist Aryan playground, Gibson perceptively unpacks the "dream logic" of the actual technocratic visioneers of the early 20th century, an unacknowledged agenda which promised further alienation of the working class, racial segregation, and dehumanizing architectural strategies for surveillance and control alongside the gleaming skyscrapers, hovercrafts, and fully automated kitchens.