by Andrew Hultkrans
Page 3

Before leaping further into the future with Flash Gordon, it would be remiss not to mention two other techno-utopias of the pre-war period, Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924) and Just Imagine (1930). Aelita, a Soviet silent film, is a piece of high Communist cinema interrupted by a science fiction plot, in which an alienated engineer dreams of flying to Mars and falling in love with its queen, only to find that, like all monarchs, Aelita is a treacherous, tyrannical exploiter of the masses. He kills her, and "returns" to Earth and his good Communist wife. Like Metropolis, the film is shot through with heavy-handed symbolism and subtexts, including many parallels between the decadent futuristic feudalism of Mars and Tsarist Russian society, and like Lang's film, it boasts a staggering design aesthetic. The opulent chambers of Mars are beautifully disorienting Kandinsky-like compositions–all oblique angles, swooping arcs, and asymmetrical forms. Anachronistic costumes abound, blending ancient Roman styles (the soldiers sport centurion helmets) with exotic Egyptian motifs.

Just Imagine is a misguided attempt to marry the big budget Hollywood musical to the techno-utopia film. Set in the New York City of 1980, known as "Gotham," the film is a cliché love story, but its skyline, which cost a quarter of a million 1930 dollars, is visually impressive, marked by overgrown conflations of the Chrysler Building and the European cathedral, aerial bridges and skyways, and bizarre personal aircraft.

Techno-utopian science fiction serials were immensely popular in the 1930's, as youngsters breathlessly awaited the next installment of the exploits of such space swashbucklers as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Overbrimming with patriotic American ideology, the Flash Gordon series (1936-1940) emphasized rugged Yankee pluck in the face of the thinly veiled "yellow peril" threat of the cartoonishly Orientalized Ming the Merciless. Though Ming is a futuristic caricature of a diabolical ancient Chinese emperor, his uniform quotes 18th century European ceremonial military dress, complete with epaulets. His palace on Mongo blends European castle design with Middle Eastern parapets, and his soldiers wear mutant Roman centurion helmets with welding shields and silly feather dusters on top. And, despite his unmistakable Far Eastern aspect, Ming regularly enjoys Mid-Eastern belly dancing from his throne, to an Arabic soundtrack. Although the cliffhanger plots of Flash Gordon are consistently flimsy, the relentless parade of alien planets, spaceships, ray guns, robots, and atomic pistols keep things lively, and prefigure the proliferation of space-age technology in 1950s science fiction films, which would abandon the city of the future for Jetsonian space travel (and invasion) narratives.

After Hiroshima, the nuclear peril and the dawn of the Cold War shifted the discourse of the future away from unbridled optimism to an often hysterical and paranoid uncertainty. Speculations on the mysterious effects of atomic radiation gave rise to a subgenre of mutated monster films such as Godzilla (1954) and Them! (1954), embodying a kind of "return of the repressed" created by collective guilt over humanity's hubris in unleashing the promethean powers of the atom. Earth found itself under attack by hostile aliens in War of the Worlds (1953) and Invaders from Mars (1953), and occasionally, by patronizing, disciplinarian beings, as in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Given the potential for such violent retribution, the future, more than ever, seemed to lie in outer space.

Paradoxically, while Hollywood was churning out science fictional allegories of Cold War anxiety, industrial design and advertising continued to exploit the notion of a high-tech consumer paradise, with streamlined "dream cars" designed to look like they could take to the skies at any minute, and ultra-convenient automated kitchen appliances which would allow overburdened housewives limitless leisure time. The conflation of this consumerist techno-fetishism with the Cold War sci-fi narrative reached its highest expression in Forbidden Planet (1956), a true "space opera" loosely based on Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Set in the year 2200, Forbidden Planet tracks the relief mission of the C57D, piloted by a young Leslie Nielsen and his square-jawed crew, to the planet Altair 4. Upon arrival, they find that the only survivors are an aging linguist, Morbius, his fetching daughter Altaira, and Robby the Robot, a housewife's dream of a metal manservant. An evil, murderous force haunts the planet, which is later revealed to be a projection of Morbius' subconscious desires. The engine of projection for these "Monsters from the Id" is an impossibly massive machine designed by an ancient race, the Krel, who had achieved the convenience society dream of ubiquitous technology.

An endless network of Constructivist machinery–all cones and cylinders–buried deep underground instantly makes manifest the desires of the planet's inhabitants. (Much is made by Morbius of the unimaginable energy the machine generates, clearly linking it to the awe-inspiring volatility of nuclear power). Of course, the Krel forgot their own primal subconscious desires for violence and predation, and killed themselves off. The immediate appeal of the Krel wish machine to '50s consumer society is obvious, as well as the friendly, seemingly limitless service potential of Robby the Robot, who in one telling sequence, reproduces a truckload full of booze from one sample, labels and all, at the request of the ship's mischievous cook. Nevertheless, the film's message, which, like the radiation monster series, condemns human hubris in harnessing incomprehensibly powerful technology, counters the tantalizing creature comforts of Morbius' space-age bachelor pad, which are ultimately destroyed, along with Morbius himself, in a self-inflicted supernova. It would be a shame to let all that convenience technology go to waste, however, so Nielsen takes Robby the Robot (as well as the mini-skirted Altaira) back to Earth, where he will surely fit right into someone's thoroughly modern self-cleaning kitchen.

In the early '60s, Hanna-Barbera, the creators of The Flintstones, figured their successful Honeymooners-in-the-Stone-Age concept could be transposed into the future, and so The Jetsons were born. A mild satire of the '50s preoccupation with space-age convenience lifestyles, The Jetsons nevertheless retained the techno-utopian optimism of 1930s visions of the future. In an obvious nod to Buckminster Fuller, the Jetson family and their neighbors live in advanced versions of the Dymaxion House covered by individual Geodesic Domes–large circular structures mounted on a central mast, which in the Jetsons' era can be raised automatically to escape an ubiquitous layer of smog (apparently an acceptable side-effect of Jetsonian progress).

Despite their futuristic environment, everything about the family suggests the '50s suburban middle class–George works 9-to-5 at Spacely's Sprockets, Jane is a perfect housewife, Judy is a typical teenybopper, preoccupied with rock stars, shopping, and the telephone, and Elroy is a somewhat more docile Dennis the Menace. The blissful domestic tableau is completed by a loving dog, Astro, and a more ascerbic version of Robby the Robot–Rosie the maid–who is not above speaking her mind during her appointed rounds. The bulk of the humor is generated by the malfunctioning of the family's high-tech convenience appliances, usually at the expense of George, who will find himself molested by an over-eager tooth-brusher, or trapped on an out-of-control treadmill excerciser. By humanizing the technocratic future, The Jetsons functions as an apologia for the more unhinged techno-utopias of the 1930s, assuring us that while the future may be dominated by technology, it will still be just like home.