The previews for the remake of Total Recall (I’m not going to bother seeing the whole thing) show a city near the end of the twenty-first century—for the sake of this essay, let’s just say it’s 2092. The city of the future has all the things you would expect: flying cars, robot cops, and buildings that seem to hang in midair. At first, 2092 sounds pretty far off. It seems plausible to imagine our cities will have been drastically transformed by then. But it’s actually just 80 years away. How much is going to change in that amount of time?
Take another example: Blade Runner, made in 1982, opens with flying cars, flaming industrial wastelands, monolithic skyscrapers, and a sky totally obscured by smog. The title card says it’s the year 2019. A lot could happen in the next seven years, but I think it’s fairly safe to say Blade Runner’s art directors were pretty far off the in how they imagined the future.
It’s a problem in most films set in the future, even those that really try for something plausible. The creative team imagines many highly visible changes to our reality: cars that drive up the sides of buildings, wholly synthetic food, homes made out of clear plastic. But the truth is that technological changes are rarely so high-profile. Most of the important ones, in fact, are nearly invisible at first glance.
Thinking again about the timeframe established in the new Total Recall, what would be most shocking to Americans of 1932 if they could see footage of “the future” of 2012?
Imagine showing New Yorkers from 1932 a low-altitude flyover shot of the city of 2012, at a scale where they couldn’t see people, cars, or advertisements. There might be nothing at all to shock or impress them, other than that the city had gotten bigger. It would look quite familiar, just the way a city ought to look. The urban flyover is a commonplace of films set in the future. We always see a cityscape transformed beyond recognition. But New Yorkers of the past would find plenty to recognize in the New York of 2012.
Now imagine moving in to a smaller scale and showing them footage of a walk down Fifth Avenue. The first things they’d notice would probably be the changes in fashion and the changes in car design. Men are going out in jeans and hoodies and driving streamlined cars made in Japan? No doubt these things would genuinely shock them, but clothing and automobiles aren’t recent technological developments. They had those things in 1932, just in different forms. They also had neon lights and recorded music, so an average urban street scene would not impress them, as far as technology goes.
It would only be when we started to show things in higher resolution that they would see the most important technological changes in the last 80 years. A quick stroll down Fifth Avenue might not be that impressive, but if we began poking into coffee shops along the way, looking at laptops and iPhones and explaining the internet, then even the most worldly viewer in the 1930s would have to be impressed.
It takes a bit of digging to see these technologies, yet they’ve done more to change our lives than a flying car ever could. Compared to the internet, a flying car is kind of boring. The latter changes only how we commute. The former changes how we communicate.
Business, socializing, and information exchange have all been revolutionized in the past 80 years. But these things are hard to show visually. They don’t translate well to film. What do translate well to film are the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, around the turn of the last century. That revolution took place on a huge, visually awesome scale. Accordingly, these are the changes from which filmmakers extrapolate their depictions of the future.
The tech revolution (if you want to call it that) doesn’t work that way, though. It takes place on a physically small scale—smallness being one of the revolution’s chief tenets. But within that small scale, buried in chips and code, are abstract concepts that dwarf even some of our greatest industrial achievements. Our cities may look nearly the same, but our lives are very different.
It’s possible our technological advancement will continue down this path—becoming smaller and less visible, yet changing our lives even more. If that’s the case, films depicting the future will probably get to be even further off the mark.
