I just recently watched THX 1138 for the first time, the movie George Lucas wrote and directed before he made Star Wars. Like all good science fiction, it is thought provoking, especially once one gets to the ending. If you’ve never seen it and plan to, consider this a spoiler warning. Go watch it.
The movie depicts a future in which life is strictly controlled. Everyone takes drugs in prescribed doses to control their libido, their sleep and their work efficiency. There is further technology to meet sexual needs, and simply having sex with another human being is considered perversion. It is considered a drug offense to not take one’s drugs.
It would be easy to consider such a future implausible – why would anyone accept it, why would any society develop into something like this? The answer comes at the end, when Robert Duvall’s character THX 1138 escapes the city, and we glimpse the barren wasteland of Earth in the light of the setting sun which is expanding and on its way to becoming a red giant. Suddenly the low budget robot police and the concern about how much it will cost to apprehend a renegade make sense, and their statements “We’re only trying to help you” become plausible with hindsight.
Society’s rules, in a best case scenario, are for the “greater good”. As Spock said, “The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few”. When making the most of dwindling resources, and thus cost and work efficiency are crucial, and willy nilly procreation could lead to disaster, what, if anything, would make it wrong for society to move in this sort of direction? Wouldn’t reckless procreation (bringing into existence more mouths to feed than the society can accomodate) become the equivalent of theft? What will morality be as the sun expands and threatens to engulf the Earth? Will right and wrong be defined in the same way by any living things still around as the universe approaches heat death?
Sci-fi is great because it helps us think about big questions, about the nature of right and wrong, cultural relativity, and context. Human beings have always made trade-offs, accepting restriction of freedoms for the sake of our collective survival, by means of law, custom and/or culture. Science fiction allows us to take such aspects of real life to their utmost extreme, and to explore them in future or far-away settings that somehow make them seem less threatening, even if at the same time often all the more shocking and provocative.
And of course, we all knew already that in the future we’ll all be bald and wear white jump suits. Somehow that’s just a given.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In