Zardoz: Prophecy, Fallacy and Truth

Back in the day, the 70s per se, there were several motion pictures that attempted to predict what the future would be like. The most successful of these was Star Wars. However, one now obscure film had far more influence than is usually known. Zardoz was made by John Boorman, the English director best known for Deliverance and Hope and Glory. Starring Sean Connery, in one of his first departures from the James Bond character that has and will always be his franchise, Zardoz was flamboyant, opulent, and at times intellectually flatulent (no scratch and sniff, smellovision, just needlessly perplexing). However, given that the most successful speculative movies that preceded Zardoz were 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Planet of the Apes and its spawn of driveling sequels, Boorman could be commended for synthesizing these two cinematic speculations into a compelling collision and vibrant debate about the future of the world. Would it be controlled by computers and their super-rational human masters as metaphors for meta-reason or by the atavistic core of human experience--emotional, sexual, and animal?

In Zardoz, Boorman provided a vision of the future which, given the pre-PC anxieties about computers turning everyone into sedentary robots and the Soviets gaining momentum in their methodical slouch toward Orwellian 1984, teetered on the highwire that profundity walks before it falls off into pretentiousness and camp. Even though I mocked it at the time, I saw Zardoz twice. I used to joke that I viewed it once in English and once in French and understood it in neither language. However, the last laugh is on me because recently Zardoz came back to me in a strangely prescient flash from the past as I seemed to be living some of its truth in the present.

As with photography and cinematography, where aperture and shutter speed must come together to create the clear image of truth, revelation requires two factors to synchronize for it to come into being. In this case, I had the two components of Zardoz that made the most impact on me, coinciding in my present life. They are Beethoven's 7th Symphony on the radio and the ubiquitous power of internet chat rooms and blogs in which I poked in my head for a few moments this week to partake of the incesssant and often puerile Democratic primary group spew.

The second movement of the Beethoven's 7th gushes up in the final montage of Zardoz like the Mississippi River out of an underground spring. In that passionate denoument we see our skin-clad savior mating, having children and growing old with his spouse. The music is the sound-track and symbol for the irrepressible, ineluctable surge of human destiny, which coincides with and depends upon the courage, vitality and innate goodness of the eponymous hero, Zardoz, a savage super-hero charged with saving humans from our morbid rationality. Human survival, Boorman maintains, is predicated on the visceral power of sexuality, activity, and emotion that characterize the primitive human. By contrast, the futuristic world of Zardoz is one in which people all over the "civilized" world communicate, vote, fight, judge and condemn via an intricate and efficient system of computers and web-cams that would make Logitech proud and rich.

Fast forward to now. People all over the world at their computers, participating in polls, talking seriously and facetiously about all kinds of topics, spreading rumors, dis-informing and threatening each other like crazy. And there in the midst of it is Beethoven's 7th Symphony--the emotional current that flows powerfully underneath all of the minutiae and the over-thinking and the over-talking and the over-sitting.

Yes, Boorman predicted that future perfectly. But Zardoz contains a major fallacy. The blind spot in the vision of this landmark film, which would be reprised twenty five years later in the Matrix movies, is the decadent romantic notion which Boorman borrowed from DH Lawrence, another Englishman, that modern, hyper-rational society can be saved by a noble savage, a caveman messiah, who can smash our crippling machines and return us to a more authentic existence based on sex, procreation, subsistence, and troglodyte survival. Perhaps, some reactionary religionists from all faiths would agree with this strategy, those who for instance speak of people in democratic liberal societies as "crusaders" and others closer to home who wish to abrogate the theories of natural selection and evolution for the sake of a biblical metaphor.

Such a salvation seems more like a hiccup of frustration than an actual solution to our society's salient ills. To the contrary, whatever vitality we humans seek will need to emerge from these relatively new but well-established accessories to our beings. If we wish to lead more vital lives, and become more in touch with our atavistic cores, we will need to find the courage and energy within ourselves to either break through from our sedentary dependencies on our electronic antennae, or learn to live more fully through them.

There is a Jewish maxim that after the destruction of the Temple the gift of prophecy has been the domain of children and fools. We need to free ourselves from this prejudice and trust again the gift of prophecy, a much maligned intuition that may be as useful as historical knowledge. We can start by acknowledging the accurate auguries of the past. Zardoz did not save us from our futures, but it showed us the way.