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The ghost in the machine, the nerd in the New Hollywood labyrinth, "electrically-generated realities and all that." Alphaville name-drops Flash Gordon, George Lucas dutifully opens with a snatch of Buck Rogers and dives right into the technocracy. A sterile normality, half-mall garage and half-dentist's office, in it toils THX 1138 (Robert Duvall) shorn and neurasthenic like all wonks in the underground city. Radioactive mishaps at the assembly line, at home mandatory suppressants and the Police Brutality Channel on hologram TV. Controlling intimacy is key to controlling perception, love and sex with the roommate (Maggie McOmie) are punishable by banishment to a blindingly blank limbo. "Sometimes a little adjustment can make all the difference." The whiz-kid's involved screen: One moment it's metallic, solarized and splintered, the next it's as blanched as La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. Prodded by the android Gestapo, the protagonist prays for answers in the robotic confession booth but the voices from above belong to nitwit programmers, sending him into spasms of agony while futzing with the equipment. ("Yeah, I seem to be overloading it...") Aldous Huxley, Fahrenheit 451, a sci-fi filter for Bay Area indie filmmaking (vide Chicago in Jack Shea's The Monitors). The comedy of how far one goes to avoid bunking with the Nixonian weasel (Donald Pleasence), the stark realization that revolt means getting up and wandering into the void while everybody else discusses philosophy. Technicolor and Techniscope, "sound montages" by Walter Murch—a dense layering of bleeps and hums, baleful muzak and "invigorating rhetoric." 2001: A Space Odyssey is extensively mined for the denouement, Allen in Sleeper notices the Harold Lloyd jest behind it all. (Lucas' subsequent digital augmentation is its own Orwellian signpost, "buy and be happy" as the prophet says.) Cinematography by Albert Kihn and David Myers. With Don Pedro Colley, Ian Wolfe, Marshall Efron, and Sid Haig.
--- Fernando F. Croce |