Editorial: visiting the past's future.(Editorial)

IN DIRECTOR WILLIAM CAMERON MENZIES'S FILM THINGS TO COME (1936), which was based on a terrible "novel" (and I use the term generously) by H. G. Wells entitled The Shape of Things to Come, the contemporary viewer is offered a real treat at seeing how the future was regarded back in the mid-1930s. Of course, in 1936, the film-makers of Things to Come envisioned a future thought to be radical, modernistic, and utopian in its celebration of technology. Today, the past's future as depicted in Menzies's film seems quaint, naive, and forever locked in time and place in a historical celluloid fantasy that never made it past the production design of the movie and into actual existence.

But viewing 1936's Things to Come in 2004 is fascinating, nonetheless, and what makes it fascinating for film lovers today is its embodiment of the "retro-future," or that paradoxical intersection in science fiction when a story written in the past predicts a future that never actually comes into being, and thus it becomes, from our presentistic point of view, a contemporary anachronism. William Gibson, the acknowledged inventor of cyberpunk SF, wrote about this narrative paradox in his early short story "The Gernsback Continuum" (1981). In this story, the past's idealized future (as developed in utopian pulp-magazine science fiction of the type championed by pioneering SF editor and writer Hugo Gernsback) intrudes into the narrator's present-day world in a series of surrealistic episodes. Gibson's point is that the invented past is disturbingly irreconcilable with the present, but that the past's imagined future and the actual present do exist simultaneously. How the future was invented in the past affected, to a greater or lesser degree, how the present was created.

Looking at a number of classic science fiction films, from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) to George Lucas's THX 1138 (1971), the filmmakers' use of retro-history is entirely unintentional, but in more recent motion pictures, such as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and Tim Burton's Batman (1989), the clash between the past and the future is deliberate, and done to underscore a point: that the past utopian dreams have created a present-day dystopian nightmare. The cityscape settings of Blade Runner and Batman are simultaneously high tech and low gothic, an otherwise insane combination possessing disturbing qualities of contrasting thematic opposites, thus creating a sense of postmodern unease about the perceived relationship between the present and the future.

A similar unease was embraced in writer/director Kerry Conran's visually stunning motion picture, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), which, at the writing of this editorial, is still in theatrical release. Conran's creation of an animated film featuring live ...