A Film Canon

 

 

This film posesses the intensity of an extended prophecy, giving the impression that every moment is momentous, and drawing constant attention to its status as an affronting announcement, most explicitly in the form of the newspapers, billboards and intertitles that flood the first act. These are gradually robbed of their signifying potential, and magnified into looming, portentous monstrosities, producing the most elegant combination of cinematic and written language that I have seen to date, as well as a pervasive de-signfication whose narrative corollary is the anonymity of the threat with which the denizens of 1940s 'Everytown' are faced. It feels as if this reified 'War' is primarily an encounter between machines, with men merely caught in the cross-fire; or, more accurately, the point at which machines finally acquire full autonomy, and the industrial age reaches its logical conclusion, its pathologies finally diagnosed as the pervasive "Wandering Sickness". Hence the interminability of the 'War', which comes to stand more for an historical epoch than a discrete event, as well as a conspicuous technological sublime, according to which tanks are always emerging over mounds, and planes over banks of cloud. In this light, the mechanical Communism advocated one hundred years later, by the "Wings Over The World" movement, is little more than an attempt to complete H.G. Wells' evolutionary dialectic from human parasitism, to mechanical parasitism, to symbiosis, producing a post-industrial age that, in the Marxist apocalyptism from which Wells derives much of his tone, is figuratively equivalent to the end of the world, here ambivalently enacted as the exploration of the cosmos. It's this scenario that finally distinguishes Things To Come from Metropolis as the prototypical science fiction film, not simply because it spurs a series of foundational costumes and sets - including the first rocket interior in a feature-length production - but because its ambivalence is ultimately generalisable beyond the issue of whether a post-industrial age is also a post-scientific age, concluding with the more enduring question of whether the scientific apparatus that allows man to look at the universe can also allow him to see it - a question that effectively is the subsequent science fiction genre, turning, as it does, on the extent to which science itself is an enabling fiction.