Things To Come

This may be just about how Iowans are experiencing the night before the Caucus:



In all seriousness, I saw Things To Come for the first time in quite a few years when Turner Classic Movies broadcast it last night. Artistically it holds up better than I recalled. Seeing it now, I'm especially impressed by the rapid-fire editing in the sequence you can see above. Thematically the film has always been an oddity. The latter utopian part is quite campy, but H.G. Wells did seem to be on to something, anticipating a reactionary sort of aesthetic objection to a society bent on progress for its own sake. As represented here, Wells's vision is not unlike Gene Roddenberry's, as his heroes take Captain Kirk's side in favor of perpetual striving against lotus-eating stagnation.



Sadly, the hopeful vision of a possible future presented in this 1936 film probably reminds people more of the totalitarian fantasies of Hitler or Stalin than of Wells's beneficent ideal. The majority today, one suspects, has bought into the view of the movie's artistic reactionaries who see the technocratic government merely imposing its will and its values on everyone else. But the idea that there is ever social progress without coercion of some kind is even more utopian than anything Wells ever wrote.