For example, the year 1970 in Things to Come:
The year 1980 in Just Imagine. The opening scene of New York's flying car traffic inspired imitations in later movies and cartoons:
The weird mix of hits and misses in 1999 A.D. (intro only in this clip):
And, of course, the various adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four over the years, along with 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel set in the year 2010.
A number of other movies made ~25-40 years ago portray life in the next few years:
Rollerball (set in 2018).
The Running Man (set in 2019).
Blade Runner (set in 2019 as well).
And the one I watched the bulk of late last night on TCM: Soylent Green (set in 2022). Something about the year 2020 acted as a kind of attractor for many of these films made in the 1970's and 1980's.
And a bit further out, Things to Come does double duty by showing a kind of utopian life in the year 2036 towards the end of the film.
I haven't watched Soylent Green in years, and several things about it struck me. One, it has the look-and-feel of cyberpunk without the cyber, because it doesn't mention or show computers in 2022. Old book-oriented scholars, rather than computer-hip youngsters with tattoos and other body mods, play a role equivalent to hackers in the cyberpunk genre. Yet like in cyberpunk, Soylent Green shows a dysfunctional, if not failing, technological civilization dominated by a mega-corporation which has the monopoly on the main food supply.
Its view of street life also reminds me of what I read about living conditions in the former Soviet Union, where ordinary, shabbily dressed and probably unwashed people have to stand in line much of the day for food rations of dodgy quality. The men wear European-style caps and the women wear scarves, just like you would probably see now on the streets of Russian cities.
The movie's view of social inequality seems a bit off to me. The richest people live in apartments with 1970's middle class conveniences like air conditioning and hot running water, along with sex workers called "the furniture" who come as part of the deal (apparently these guys don't have wives or children), and these tenants have the money and connections to buy scarce goods like liquor, soap, and real food but in small quantities. The courtesan of one of these rich men brought home a piece of beef, which would make about two small steak dinners, as a special treat for her master. Apparently normal agriculture and animal husbandry still function somewhere on the planet to supply this market, but the movie doesn't show how or why that works.
In other words, everyone in the world in 2022 must have gotten poorer in absolute terms, not just relatively, if the so-called rich men have to live like 1970's urban bachelors of the sort Hugh Hefner marketed to with Playboy magazine, but subjected to food rationing as well. That makes for an interesting contrast with all the propaganda lately defaming the so-called "one percent."
Hollywood doesn't seem to produce these kinds of movies so much these days, perhaps as a result of the decline of the idea of "the future" in Western thinking; we especially don't see portrayals where people endure bad stretches of "the future" to reach better living conditions and a happy ending, like in Things to Come. The Star Trek franchise seems to have fallen on hard times as well, though Gene Roddenberry created it as secular humanist propaganda decades before the "New Atheism" phenomenon should have made it seem more relevant, not less. I get the impression that the culture lately resists transmitting speculative portrayals of "the future" in general, good or bad. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy writes of the educated men in the Roman Empire during the rule of the Antonines that they "looked to the past for what was best; the future, they felt, would be at best a weariness, and at worst a horror." Have we gotten to a similar point in our history?
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