THX-1138 stands out as an exemplary depiction of a scientific
dystopia; the film puts you right inside the world of the fiction texturally,
visually, and sonically. It is effective, on all these levels, in conveying a
strong sense of technologic-scientific, and disconcertingly weird futurity.
This sense of total futurity is conveyed through the imagery of flawless
ultra-massive ultra- organized structures, the bright-white sterility, the
fluidly efficient machines, the surveillance built into surveillance
superstructure shown through constant cross-cutting, and the mindless
drone-like behavior of everyone in this world. The final scene, when THX
manages to crawl out of a megalith of a duct of some kind, and out onto
the surface where a nightmarishly huge red sun is setting in the sky, is just
one more scene which leaves the feeling of THX's total
ant-like insignificance. It leaves the question open that is this whole
human world happening underground; which is another masterful sci-fi ploy
by Lucas.
The dialogue of the film is predominately left in a state of
suggestiveness rather that almost ever pinpointing exactly what is going on;
which is another device Lucas uses to make the film have a feeling of
seamlessness. It is the same with the continual montage crosscutting of the
cinematography. Sometimes this detracts from the film and can be distracting,
but the images of zoomed-in, digital computer parts, mechanical-biologic,
indistinct imagery cross-cut and combined with asynchronous and suggestive
sounds, leave a strong impression of a totalized scientific futurity where
machines function in a fluidly biological and intelligent way. There is no
attempt to explain how the world got this way, and why human beings
are just barely any longer even human. Lucas just plops us down into this
world and leaves the explanations up to the viewer.
It is obviously a technological totalitarianian world, similar
to George Orwell’s world of 1984 in part by the fact that the film is based
around a member of a highly controlled, ceaselessly under-surveillance,
relatively-upper-class worker who begins to have unignorable doubts about the
premises of the world he is completely and inescapably immersed in. Also, both
Winston of 1984 and THX are somehow insulated official members of the
government, in some way; this is in contrast to those who are outside of this
system, the “teeming masses”, as in the very strong scene when apparently for
the first time THX and the two other prisoners are thrust out of the open door
and out of the white-light nowhere, into the chaos of a mindless stampede of
human beings—the chaos for what reason is never even hinted at, just there
happens to be a stampede of mindless human beings. Which partly conveys the
extent of the monstrous dehumanization of this society.
Also, there is a feeling of horror at the total insignificance
of the individual and whatever feelings they might have in any way, since they
have been reduced almost to less-than-machines, exemplified when THX’s
‘roommate’ is seen on screen, after THX does the computer search in another of
seemingly endless, anonymous laboratories, as reduced to a fetus in a sterilized
jar. After all they had been through, and after all they had meant to each
other, all that is left of her, to add to the feeling of the total
impersonalized scientific-objective cruelty of this world, is being reduced to
something that is almost completely less than human.
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