Futures Past

Toward the beginning of Logan’s Run, Michael Anderson’s film about life in the twenty-third century (in fact, just after the credits have been attended to in very unfuturistic, up-front fashion), we are plunged smack into the middle of 1939. A cityscape panorama confronts us, just as shots of a World-Trade- Centerless New York skyline used to prelude action-packed sagas about Big Town, U.S.A., the camera then zeroing in on one particular tower, then on one particular window, and finally through it to the desk of one particular hardhitting journalist, industrial tycoon, gritty hat-on-the-back-of-head private eye. In Logan’s Run there’s no sign of the Chrysler Building, but instead we get Buckminster Fullerish domes of artfully convincing super-Houston proportions, connected by steeply angled ramps up and down which glide, like mercury bubbles, twenty-third century conveyances. But if this is the twenty- third century, how come it looks so much like a General Motors Futurama display hype left over from Flushing Meadows circa middle Fiorello La Guardia? And why do the people on those transportation belts, once we see them up close, wear those all-purpose antiquity-inspired jersey drapes pioneered by Buster Crabbe?

The answer may lie partly in that the design squad of Logan’s Run had no especially gifted view of the future. (It is true that all visual aspects borrow heavily from ideas better carried out by other filmmakers; for instance, the ruins of the Capitol and the glimpse of the vine-covered Lincoln Memorial in the Peter Ustinov sequences descend shamelessly from that half-submerged Statue of Liberty which shocked Charlton Heston and us so electrically at the end of Planet of the Apes.) Yet the reason behind these stylistic references to the past goes deeper than a simple want of creative imagination, for they tell us immediately what the narrative subsequently goes to painful lengths to explicate: that the past is a far better place in which to dwell than is the future. But for Logan’s Run and, by generic necessity, for all so-called sci-fi films, the past is our present; so instead of the nostalgia for a cute Great Depression that we get these days in almost every comedy Hollywood attempts—nostalgia for days that never were—we are presented with a hankering for a late 1970s that never is.

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Toward the beginning of Logan’s Run, Michael Anderson’s film about life in the twenty-third century (in fact, just after the credits have been attended to in very unfuturistic, up-front fashion), we are plunged smack into the middle of 1939. A cityscape panorama confronts us, just as shots of a World-Trade- Centerless New York skyline used to prelude action-packed sagas about Big Town, U.S.A., the camera then zeroing in on one particular tower, then on one particular window, and finally through it to the desk of one particular hardhitting journalist, industrial tycoon, gritty hat-on-the-back-of-head private eye. In Logan’s Run there’s no sign of the Chrysler Building, but instead we get Buckminster Fullerish domes of artfully convincing super-Houston proportions, connected by steeply angled ramps up and down which glide, like mercury bubbles, twenty-third century conveyances. But if this is the twenty- third century, how come it looks so much like a General Motors Futurama display hype left over from Flushing Meadows circa middle Fiorello La Guardia? And why do the people on those transportation belts, once we see them up close, wear those all-purpose antiquity-inspired jersey drapes pioneered by Buster Crabbe?

The answer may lie partly in that the design squad of Logan’s Run had no especially gifted view of the future. (It is true that all visual aspects borrow heavily from ideas better carried out by other filmmakers; for instance, the ruins of the Capitol and the glimpse of the vine-covered Lincoln Memorial in the Peter Ustinov sequences descend shamelessly from that half-submerged Statue of Liberty which shocked Charlton Heston and us so electrically at the end of Planet of the Apes.) Yet the reason behind these stylistic references to the past goes deeper than a simple want of creative imagination, for they tell us immediately what the narrative subsequently goes to painful lengths to explicate: that the past is a far better place in which to dwell than is the future. But for Logan’s Run and, by generic necessity, for all so-called sci-fi films, the past is our present; so instead of the nostalgia for a cute Great Depression that we get these days in almost every comedy Hollywood attempts—nostalgia for days that never were—we are presented with a hankering for a late 1970s that never is.