The opening credits disperse, revealing a city. What city? A future city. This is an SF film, and we may not yet know the rules of this speculative world—whether there are space colonies, or authoritarian governments, time travel, or amazing future weapons—but we are already getting a taste through the thick world-building of the urban setting. Through the smogged out skies and the burning rubbish bins, or conversely, the spotless flying cars and the gleaming spires of impossible structures, we learn what kind of fictional world into which we have been dropped.
But these fictional cues are not all ray gun fantasies. Much of our depiction of future cities is taken from our non-fictional world, from our real cities that we must live in on an everyday basis. It is in this world where our speculation comes home to roost. Our ideas for the future of the city are of course born in the present, and even the most fantastical exploration finds its kernel in the foundations of our established metropolises. When we look at the future city, we are really looking at our own city. We just don’t know it yet.
Cities bring symbolic monuments, identifiable aesthetics, indicators of dystopia or utopia, and figurative geography to SF film. These serve a purpose to the narrative, a tool to the plot designers, not unlike the glorious turns of phrase in the manifestos of the Futurists, the “multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals.” But the familiar aspects of today’s cities we see in SF also become a reflection, as we see our own image in a mirror, though disguised by different clothing. As the denizens of the current cities from which SF cities are woven, what do we want our actual city to be? What sort of city would we design to live our futures through, not just to tell a story? And who will make this actual future city, if not filmmakers?
In Children of Men, the dystopian city streets are burning. The trains windows are covered in cages to protect the occupants from thrown rocks, not to present symbolic vistas. Bombs explode, prisoners are abused. This is not the urban space of the future; it is the city of today. It is not London, New York, or Shanghai, but Aleppo and Kirkuk. This is the other side of futurism. As F.T. Marinetti wrote in the original Futurist Manifesto,1 “set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded!... Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!” At one point in the film, the protagonist goes to London’s Battersea Power Station in a fortified “Green Zone,” which has been turned into a heavily secured depository for the world’s great works of art, scavenged from the collapse of civilization.
- 1. Ref: http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/manifesto.html