ACMI’s exhibition is an elaborate, spectacularly inept, fantasy

Science fiction is stretched to absurd extremes in an exhibition that mixes futurism with a naively benign view of the past.

After the End at the The Future & Other Fictions exhibition in Melbourne. Picture: Eugene Hyland

Humans have sought to foretell the future for thousands of years, whether by observing the flight of birds, examining the entrails of sacrificial victims or consulting oracles and prophetic books of various kinds. But all such attempts at prediction rest on the assumption that the future is already in some sense determined; like a passenger on a tram, gliding along its tracks, unable to see where he is going to end up, but knowing that his destination is in any case already there.

The truth about the future is more disconcerting: it simply doesn’t exist yet. As in the case of weather forecasts, it will be partly shaped by circumstances already present around us, but remains subject to unexpected occurrences that may disturb the anticipated sequence of events. And perhaps most importantly, ideas about the future can themselves have a powerful impact on how things turn out. The most striking, and well-known example of this phenomenon is the effect of Marxism on history; what was intended as a scientific theory turned instead into an ideology that led to violent revolutions and the establishment of totalitarian states.

Science fiction has long imagined future scenarios – particularly in relation to technology – and many of these have, especially in the course of the last century, become realities. Lucian, who wrote a story about travelling to the Moon in the second century AD, is often cited as the forerunner of the genre, but almost a millennium earlier, Homer already imagined the smith-god Hephaestus aided by robotic assistants (Iliad 18, 417-21). Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are the most notable early authors in the modern genre, writing about rockets, submarines and many other things we now take for granted.

Books like these were adapted as motion pictures from the earliest days of the new art form, and in some ways science fiction was made for cinema; the books are rarely literary masterpieces of the first order; the psychology is generic and the emphasis is on imagining alternate realities and environments, which can be tiresome to describe in literary form, but exciting to see.

The Future & Other Fictions. Picture: Eugene Hyland

The ACMI exhibition begins – better than it ends – with displays of posters and a short documentary film that introduces some of the common themes and topics of the genre. One, which as the film points out goes back to the early classic Metropolis (1927), is of the vast modernist city, at once a utopia of advanced technology and almost inevitably also a dystopia of human alienation. The utopian aspect seems largely to do with seamless, frictionless movement, and the film’s narrator wonders, in a joking aside, whether these ideal cities are not ultimately just places that have found a way to abolish traffic jams.

The idea of a frictionless city where everything moves with speed and ease reminds us of Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s monstrously ambitious plans for the new city of Neom, on the Red Sea. The project is almost literally a science-fiction concept, and all of the promotional videos published by the building authority quite openly rely on sci-fi imagery and visual tropes in their evocation of a futuristic urban environment. As in Metropolis, however, an invisible underclass of workers in the basements of Neom will ensure the effortless comfort of its wealthier inhabitants.

In many more recent films, the dystopian nature of the future city is overtly emphasised; in the most extreme cases the city may even be ruined or abandoned. A classic case was the film Blade Runner (1982), and the exhibition contains sets and other documentation of the recent remake, Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Another interesting example was the original Matrix film (1999) – the later ones became increasingly silly – in which the city was not only dystopian but an illusion; the film cleverly played on the seductive dream of mind triumphing over matter by imagining a world in which what we take to be matter is only an illusion programmed into our brains.

We know that ideas like this can have a powerful effect on the way that human minds imagine themselves, their actions and the world around themselves. Political and religious ideas can perhaps have even more powerful and overt effects, but the ideas and attitudes that arise from the relentless assault of visual and imaginative stimuli in cinema, video, television, advertising and perhaps especially video games can no doubt reshape human thinking and rewire the sensibilities of consumers of these media in profound and not sufficiently understood ways.

The Future & Other Fictions. Picture: Eugene Hyland

Science fiction is thus not only about the future, but about the moulding of minds in the present. And that is something implicitly brought out in a second documentary film and the other highlight of the exhibition. This film purports to be an introduction to the world of dystopian sci-fi movies, introducing us to the range of typical urban environments, warning us about men in great-coats and sunglasses, and advising us to confine our recreational activities to places under suitable government surveillance – advice that makes one think of contemporary China.

This leads us to the world evoked in the video game Cyberpunk 2077, which is like a pastiche of all the grimiest and most lurid aspects of the dystopian sci-fi genre. It is a world in which everyone is alone in a shattered society and a frightening urban environment, ruled by violence and corruption; where everyone is a thug, a harlot, an oppressor or a victim, and where the only thing everyone has in common is a desperate narcissism that expresses itself visually in ever more extreme forms of kitsch in costume and makeup.

When you play these games, you not only watch and identify imaginatively with characters as in a movie, but actually assume one persona or another. This raises interesting questions about the effect on a person’s psyche of spending hours enacting such a persona and role, and especially of living like a lone wolf in the environment of a broken-down social order, surrounded by constant threats and paranoid fantasies like those of online conspiracy theorists. For that matter, popular American films have for decades now relied on scenarios in which a solitary hero struggles against an evil conspiracy which turns out to involve almost all the other characters around him. It is hard not to see the repeated use of such narratives as encouraging a paranoid world-view in its audiences.

Unfortunately – and although this is by no means clear on ACMI’s website – the exhibition is essentially an occasion to promote something only tangentially associated with the core concerns of science fiction and the best work in this genre. Almost from the beginning we are introduced to “Indigenous futurism” which, as a wall label informs us, “envisions worlds where First Peoples reclaim sovereignty, challenge colonial narratives and reshape the future …” etc. Much is made of so-called “Afrofuturism”, of which the most prominent example seems to be the Marvel film Black Panther. All one can really say about this is that the absurd and grotesque kitsch of the Marvel Universe is no less egregious for being set in an African world. Afrofuturism is promoted in another section of the exhibition with a video and a set of posters.

Birth of Dawn. Picture: Eugene Hyland

There are a couple of Australian commissions by ACMI, apart from the two documentary pieces already mentioned.

One is a short film titled Birth of Dawn, in which several female performers with some Indigenous background evoke pregnancy and birth, swim in the waters of a river, dance and lie around together. There are poetic moments, but it is largely self-indulgent. The label outside is unintentionally amusing: first of all we are told that the film explores the experience of “the femme body”, presumably because to use the word “woman” today would awkwardly remind viewers of the ineluctable link between womanhood and motherhood. This would clearly be unnecessarily hurtful to men who have decided to identify as women but will never be able to do what only women can do.

We are also told that this is a world in which no objects exist – apart from the costumes the performers wear – and also that, although this is set in a time when humans have not yet begun to make objects, they have already “evolved past language” and communicate through telepathy and intuition. This is why the women spend so much time lolling around on each other; clearly this must be their mode of communication.

The absurdity of this production is nothing, however, compared to the fantastical work with which The Future and Other Fictions concludes. After The End is projected on the enormous surface of the wall in the last room of the exhibition. It tells us that everything was idyllic in Australia before the arrival of the wicked white men in their ships almost 250 years ago. Then the wicked settlers began to dig up the Edenic countryside and soon land and sea were covered in a plague of oil rigs.

But somehow these will all go away and the Indigenous people will reclaim their land. Some of the oil rigs will sink into the sea and become reefs. The reefs will grow into islands, and presently they will be covered in thriving cities and houses with water views – clearly, just as there were before the arrival of the wicked white men. There is certainly no suggestion of returning to a life of hunting and gathering. But that’s not all. Some of the oil rigs and other wicked infrastructure will be melted down and turned into rockets so that the new Indigenous society will be able to explore the heavens and send space capsules containing records of ancient stone age wisdom into orbit. The whole thing ends with a sequence of presumably Indigenous astronauts dancing in colourful space suits.

All of this is so utterly idiotic that it should be a spoof; but there is no joking with sacred cows in Australia today. It must really have escaped the producers that their whole vision of a better future is predicated on continuing to enjoy the benefits of modern technology, unless they imagine their rockets will fly on the hot air produced by “acknowledgements of country”. It is remarkable that the things they particularly emphasise in their utopian future – modernist cities and space travel – are the most closely dependent on the technologies they profess to despise.

But even if we could overlook the incoherence of its whole premise, the film is also questionable as an example of the genre to which it ostensibly aspires. The best science fiction imagines future scenarios that cast a critical light on the present, often evoking a dystopian future imagined as already latent or nascent in our present world. After The End is in no sense a remotely conceivable future world; instead of a critical perspective on the present, it proposes an elaborate but spectacularly inept wish-fulfilment fantasy.

The Future and Other Fictions

ACMI, Melbourne, until April 27

The Future and Other Fictions
ACMI, Melbourne, until April 27