Carry On... #Don't Look at Me

Please note that this week's film is rated 12 in the UK, mostly for science fiction-style violence.

When I launched our current series, I promised films that examine various aspects of contemporary society.

All of the films I have screened thus far have been titles that anticipate future trends (sometimes by many decades). Of course no one involved in the making of those films knew just how prescient they were going to be, or if they were prescient at all. If society had happened to veer off in completely different directions, then the freak-show television programming of Network or the fame hungry self-promotion of It Should Happen to You would look laughably dated today. As it happens, both film were closer to the mark than they could have predicted, but that's the problem with extrapolating the future; you have to stand and wait before you see how accurate (or otherwise) your ideas turn out to be.

Hugo Gernsback in 1963, predicting that people would one day experience reality through some sort of wearable television device....


...and Mark Zuckerberg in 2014, proving him right.


This brings us to our next film, which also concerns itself with the impact of social media on modern society. Unlike Nothing Sacred and It Should Happen to You however, this one is from 2009, and looks at where society's dependence on social media might go from here. Just how accurate its predictions turn out to be is a matter for future audiences to decide. If we are still presenting these film evenings in fifty years' time, we can revisit this film to see how it looks in hindsight.


What would society look like if everyone lived their lives exclusively through their social media profiles? What if your online identity was your only identity, and no one ever ventured out of their own homes?


Surrogates presents a near-future society in which almost everyone interacts with the world via a robotic "surrogate" (which can look however you want it to look). The world is thus populated by a never-ending stream of young, perfect super-model specimens of humanity, while the "real" people (the ageing, overweight population with bad skin, receding hairlines and increasing mobility problems) stay locked in their rooms, never to see (or be seen by) other "real" people.




Although Surrogates is very obviously projecting our current fixation with social media just slightly into the future, it ironically owes a great deal to a story written exactly one hundred years earlier.


The Machine Stops is a short story from 1909 that imagines a future society in which the entire human population lives in individual isolated underground cubicles, communicating with each other only through virtual interactive video monitors (it doesn't use the term "video monitor" but it does describe "glowing blue discs" that can transmit images and sounds across the planet). Written by E. M. Forster (the same E. M. Forster who wrote Howards End, Room With a View and Passage to India) The Machine Stops is thought by many (myself included) to predict the internet, video conferencing, remote learning and the COVID lockdown - to varying degrees. The fact that it was written in 1909 makes it not only remarkably but astonishingly prescient.

Many of the elements of The Machine Stops are present in Surrogates: an increasingly isolated and agoraphobic human population who only interact "virtually"; a slow decline in human faculties - both physical and emotional - from lifetimes of inactivity, and most importantly, a sense of incipient panic (spoilers!) as the system that enables this society draws to a close. (There's a reason why the story isn't called The Machine Carries On Working Perfectly.)


Surrogates, however, is very much a product of 2009. Released just two years after the unveiling of the first smartphone, it presents a society that has become completely dependant on a single piece of technology, through which they increasingly conduct their entire lives. And it very adroitly dramatizes the modern obsession with impossible (and downright harmful) beauty standards faced by people who experience the world predominantly through their social media feeds.

The plot of Surrogates (a whodunnit-style murder mystery/conspiracy yarn) may not stand up to close scrutiny, but the film is nevertheless a very timely treatise on the path society is taking as it embraces an "online" existence.

We will screen Surrogates at 7.30 on Thursday, the 19th of October at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

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