Post-Futurism, Now!

Culturally, we're in the throes of a time slip. We're losing the present. In film and fiction, the present day is increasingly represented as the future, while current films are more often set in the past.

Firstly, the current past. In The Sydney Morning Herald (11 January, 2008) Joe Queenan observes that more new films are set in the past because technology is ruining suspense in storylines. With mobiles, the Internet and GPS tracking, the good guys get real-time information on the whereabouts of killers and help is instantly at hand. So, present day films lack the suspense of old-fashioned thrillers.

I agree with this up to a point. However, a series set very much in the present, 24, manages to be immensely thrilling. But it does have to work bloody hard to be so. It's a paradigm of multi-threading, with multiple plots and subplots unfolding concurrently. To achieve close to the same level of tension as, say, Hitchcock's Psycho, it has to be ultra-complex. From Lost to Heroes, multithreading is a clear trend in TV.

I believe that what films set in the past offer is suspense and simplicity. (Incidentally, the Coen Brothers' new movie No Country For Old Men, set in the late 70s, is awesome - the slow, slow pace of it, the entire lack of music, which makes it so oppressive. At one point, the Sheriff visits an elderly relative. I got the sense that the old guy had been sitting there in his dilapidated house, on the far side of dusty nowhere, with no company but smelly cats, since time immemorial. I loved it; others may feel they've been sitting in the cinema since the beginning of time.)


No Country For Old Men trailer


Now, back to the present future. The fantastic science fiction blog io9 recently posted a feature entitled Why is science fiction going back to near future?. The article points out that cyberpunk guru William Gibson, who coined the term 'cyberspace', now writes fiction in the present day because, he claims, 'reality has become science fictional'.

Science fiction is now closer to real life, so the genre is mainstraming, or rather, sci-fi ideas are creeping into literary fiction. I've read several such books recently by mainstream authors, including Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Tobias Hill's The Cryptographer, both set in the near future. Cormack McCarthy's The Road, which I would unconditionally recommend, is set in a post-apocalyptic world, which seems to loom before us, as storms and drought ravage the world.

Science fiction is no longer so outlandish. The fact is, we simply don't need to look to the distant future to conduct the 'thought experiments' of sci-fi. We already have the capability to destroy, or redeem ourselves through technology. Much of the work being conducted in breakthrough fields like nanotechnology and AI won't be commercialised for many years, but there is a research lab, somewhere, where mankind's technological nemesis lurks. It's post-futurism, now, baby!


www.postfuturism.org