Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

So, this is George Lucas’s big debut feature, before his career became all about chasing/maintaining the success of Star Wars. Thanks to Lucasfilm naming their theater optimization standard after this film, it may have one of the highest ratios of name drops to proper discussion of the content in all of cinema. All I know is some vague idea of being dystopic.

After watching the movie:

In the future, conformity is imposed with strict, computer-dictated scheduling and pacifying drugs. Everyone’s head is shaved and they wear white coveralls with their identity badge displaying their three-letter prefix and four-digit number. THX 1138 works in a factory that builds police androids, and SEN 5241 and LUH 3417 are centralized surveillance operators. LUH is also THX’s assigned roommate, and has been switching his drugs to try to clear his head so he will fall in love with her. The change causes THX to fall ill but once he recovers, they make old-fashioned, passionate, criminal love, not caring that surely someone in surveillance knows what they’re doing. THX and LUH plan to escape to the “outer shell”, where there are rumors of “shell-dwellers” who live outside of the city’s order, after THX completes his last shift on this cycle. Before his shift, THX is summoned to meet with SEN, who tells him that he’s made modifications to THX’s program to move him away from LUH and have him for SEN’s own roommate, but THX reports SEN for illegal “pattern change”. THX falters at work without his required drugs and he and LUH are arrested for pharmaceutical, sexual, and emotional crimes. THX is sent to prison, a seemingly infinite white void populated by other social misfits, including SEN, who prattles about building social reform from this asylum. After a brief reunion with LUH broken up just after she tells him she’s pregnant, THX sets out walking into the blank distance to try to find a way out, to find where LUH has been taken, and SEN tags along, making it out to be his own idea.

My biggest thought through the film is that most of the time, the reason why anything is happening is firstly for the sake of being on the screen, and if it makes sense for the world, that’s a bonus. The worldbuilding is very visually stark, but doesn’t feel very deeply thought out. Not everything has to be explained, but the forms the oppression takes seem to be a bunch of ideas that were going around in the 60s and 70s as what everyone suspects the government will be like in the future thrown together for the sake of saying how oppressive it is.

Visually the jail is probably the most memorable part of the movie, which is ironic because it’s just the actors hanging around a large white cyclorama, which is about as generic as it gets, but it’s in some ways less dated than any of the more specific locations. It seems like they saved a lot of design money by going to locations that already looked high tech, postmodern, or white and corporate, even next to other postmodern sci-fi. I feel like I shouldn’t be looking at a scene and saying “oh, obviously that’s an airport basement hallway”.

THX himself is almost entirely a reactive character. He’s freed from the control of the Masses by LUH, endangered by SEN’s conniving, and then immediately arrested. Even when he decides to find his way out of the prison, he needs a new character to show up and tell him the way out, and then it’s all running. The only reason they stop chasing him is because he evades them long enough that he’s too expensive to bother. And even though LUH was his real salvation, he doesn’t get to take her with him, and the realization of that doesn’t seem to do much but free him from the responsibility to do anything but flee. The state cannot be defeated by one person, but there’s barely even a motivation to not be ground to dust on THX’s part. I thought that SEN was going to be a personal-level antagonist from the scene where THX meets him, but he ends up being more of a nuisance, and his pseudo-intellectual ramblings are the closest the movie gets to actually engaging with the politics of the world it’s created.

There are the seeds of something good here. I don’t think it’s fully realized, but I can see the potential just as well as everyone else did. It also underscores that George Lucas has good ideas in terms of aesthetics, but he needs a lot of help fleshing them out. I see that there’s a novelization, and I read a brief summary of the key differences, and it looks like those would go a long way to making the plot feel more crafted. A few more drafts and beta readers may have brought this onto a more confident footing to better stand the test of time.