I remember seeing Silent Running (1972) as a kid and getting creeped out. People were becoming sensitized to the fragility of ecosystems, and this film nailed it on the head.
Sometime in the future, humans have wrecked Earth to the extent that freighters have been launched into space to keep plant species alive in large pods. Even creepier, at one point whoever is still in charge orders the pods to be destroyed due to budget cuts or new thinking. Bruce Dern plays a rogue ecologist astronaut who determines to keep his ship going. He ends up fighting his human crew members and turning to his little drone assistants (played by quadraplegics rather than little people) for help and companionship.
An all-around disturbing movie, I've never seen it since -- but it does seem timely these days. Douglas Trumball, the director, also worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey and other SF films, including Blade Runner (1982), yet another cautionary cheerfest.
By the early 1970s, a sense of human damage to the earth began permeating everything from horror films (Frogs, 1972) to popular music (Marvin Gaye, "What's Going On?" and "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)," 1971). The artists had it right well before the politicians, though Richard Nixon created the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. After Jimmy Carter's attempts to get even more serious about things, there were those ridiculous red herrings like Nancy Reagan's "Pennies for Pandas" campaign; now, even worse, we have G.W. Bush's "Pesos for Polar Bears." (I'm thinking, Go back to Crawford, Bozo.)
Eerily similar to the idea of Silent Running, there's a new "Noah's Ark" being constructed by the Scandinavian countries (particularly Norway) set for completion as early as September 2007, called The Global Seed Vault, that will be bored into a mountain for storage deep below the permafrost layer on the Norwegian Arctic island of Svalbard. It is sometimes called "the Doomsday vault." And it's really happening.
Today's Rune: Wholeness.
Run Silent, Run Deep!
4 comments:
Believe it or not, I actually own a copy of this movie. It also showed up briefly in an episode of "Six Feet Under" - for those who watched that. It was a weird flick - the almost one-man show by Bruce Dern, the quadraplegics playing the robots, the score performed by Joan Baez...very much a period piece.
Wow, that is so weird. I can totally see that happening though, sending plants into space then some dumb ass politician would order them destroyed for "budget cuts". I really don't like politics!
I remember "Silent Running" with fondness, although Dern was perhaps a bit too weird for the role he played. I used to imagine living on such a ship. I also remember "The Frogs." It was pretty goofy, as you could see that folks offscreen were throwing the frogs into the attack scenes.
Thanks, y'all, for the comments! Cool, Ev. Sheila, I don't either, but they like us ;) Charles, too funny on Frogs.
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