Hollywood

HOLLYWOOD PREDICTS THE FUTURE Since the dawn of mankind, the art world has had a predominately mimetic flavor to it. In other words, art usually imitates life. Through out the centuries that always held true all the way up until the late nineteenth century. With the invention and acceptance of cinematography as a new genre among the arts the opposite seems to be taking place and for the first time life has started to imitate art. For the last one hundred years or so the motion picture industry actually seems to be predicting our future. Oscar Wilde was probably the most famous person to publicly agree with the ideology that life imitates art and he stated so in an essay called “The Decay of Lying.” Art mimicking life dates back as far as the stone age when primitive man first started adorning his cave walls. He painted hunting parties, animals, landscapes and even his own tribesmen. He had discovered a new way of communicating but due to his limited life experience and imagination that is as far as it went. He painted what he knew. As time went by man became more refined and so did his creative skills. He began to expand his artistic horizons and started using more imagination in his art. He started painting images of what he thought something he had never seen before should look like. He started painting pictures of his gods and of course, his demons, too. All of what civilized man calls “fine art” almost always depicts very unimaginative objects that were around the artist. Beautiful woman, landscapes, images of children playing and of course the bowl of fruit. Some artists painted the stars and sunsets and while these works were very beautiful and awe inspiring, they were still mere copies of something the artist had seen before. This trend continued for hundreds of years until the literary arts finally broke the cycle. At that time most books were about the same comfortable topics. Love stories and epic tales of heroism were the fodder of the times. Apparently man had yet to look to the future and wonder what life was going to be like. There were a few artists that thought outside the box and speculated about the future and things of that nature. A few even used their artistic mediums to tell the world about it. One of the first was Jules Verne, a pioneer of science fiction in the 1800’s. Eventually other writers joined in and started publishing their own speculative views on the future. The earliest film about space travel was a silent film released in 1902 called “A Trip to the Moon.” It was inspired by two different novels that were popular at the time. One by Jules Verne called “From the Earth to the Moon” and the other by H.G. Wells titled “The First Men in the Moon.” Film making was still in it’s infancy so the special effects were quite primitive and a bit cartoonish but it did have vision. It predicted that man would make it to the moon. Space travel to the moon in a rocket and alien beings from another planet had not been a popular theme in any art form until 1902 when this film was released. The satellite and space technology that we have now makes everything predicte by the movies back then look primitive and clumsy. Yet they did predict its coming. And although the science has exceeded Hollywood’s expectations producers can still lay claim to the prediction itself. They showed us a glimpse of the future and it came true. Another noteworthy film that truly speculated on the future was a silent film called “Metropolis” which was released in 1927 by Fritz Lang. This movie was quite innovative for its time because it was the first time we got an actual visual glimpse of what the future might look like. The movie was set in an ultra industrial city and it introduced us to such things as the first humanoid robot and the first mechanical prosthetic or bionic hand. Fritz’s vision has already come and gone and the industrial age is actually dying during our own lifetimes. We are now in the transition period between the industrial age and the information age and Fritz’s vision from almost a hundred years ago has been seen by us all. In the thirties and forties movies about flying saucers became popular in theaters all over the world and still are today. Of course the reported sightings grew in popularity soon after that. Even though there may have been rare reported sightings before film, it wasn’t until the movies made the idea popular that it started becoming true. With countless reports, photographs and videotapes can we conclude that they are all fakes and lies? Either thousands of people went mad in just a few short years, all having very similar hallucinations or there actually have been visitations. The odds dictate that at least one of all of those accounts be real. If man usually depicted what he saw in his art, why isn’t there any evidence from past eons of visitations? Because it wasn’t until the movies predicted we would be visited that it happened. There is a whole myriad of appliances and gizmos that were introduced in the movies that are now our everyday reality. Instantaneous video and wireless communication was just cool idea in science fiction just a few years ago. The stun gun, the robot vacuum cleaner, hands free telephones and the microwave oven are just a few of the cool toys we now have. One of the ideas that came alive in the movies long before actually being invented is the laser beam. In the movies aliens and superheroes were blasting each other long before an actual working laser was produced in 1960 by Theodore Malman and even then it was hardly more than a fancy light. It definitely would not have knocked a spaceship out of the sky or cut an alien in half. Today we have lasers commonly used in manufacturing settings the will cut thru thick metal within seconds with pin point accuracy. We even have robots fitted with their own metal cutting laser beams. And let’s not forget the flying car of tomorrow. Although they haven’t been perfected it yet, we already have flying car prototypes and we have had them for years.It’s just a matter of time before we are all flying to work and causing fiery accidents all over America’s skies. The idea of ultra mechanized cities filled with these gadgets has come and almost passed. We’ve imagined space travel and although we haven’t mastered it we still have been there many times and are advancing rapidly in the technology. We even have manned space stations now. We will be traveling to other planets and teleporting in no time. Conquering the obstacle of long distance space travel will of course open the door to crossing the time barrier. From there we will be able to time travel also. Of course with the good things the movies have brought us they have brought us the bad tidings also. Terror movies of today or so horrifically realistic that it scares us to think about it. For every well known monster from the movies there is a human counterpart walking our streets at this moment. Statistics show that there are at least ten serial killers active in our country at any given moment. That’s a lot of Freddy Krugers on the loose. The brutality of some of the crimes committed in real life are sometimes far worse than that of the movies. In the movies it’s usually horny teenagers being killed, not innocent toddlers walking with their parents in Walmart. The psychopathic killers on the loose today are just movie monsters without their masks. Of course the increase of the macabre in our everyday news can be explained away to larger population. But never before has it been so unsafe for our kids now that Hollywood has brought the Boogeyman to life. They may not have invented him but they certainly perpetuated and glorified his existence in our everyday news headlines. So what does all this mean for our future? In the last few years the movie industry has started a new wave of predictions. In the last twenty years or so, there has been an onslaught of apocalyptic films depicting the world’s demise from one evil or another. The movies about alien visitations and invasion vastly outnumber even those. There are of course even movies who’s themes center around alien visitations that culminate into our apocalyptic demise. With the unrest in the middle east and the remainder of the world killing each other over borders, is it so unfathomable that the wrong people will start pushing the wrong buttons? There really are plenty of power hungry dictators in the world that have access to some pretty big bombs. And a lot of them are seemingly quite mentally unstable. There’s been plenty of movies built on that premise also. The end, as they tell it, will come either in a hail of missiles, meteorites or alien spaceships. We’ve raped and plundered this rock into irreversible submission and sooner or later, if allowed the time, we will finally use up it’s natural resources. We will suck it dry until it’s nothing but a hollow shell and then we will move on or perish. Maybe humanity in general is a cancer and the aliens will come here and wipe us out before we are able to spread. Either way, no matter what we do for the planet, it’s still too late to repair the damage we’ve done to mankind itself. We’ve built our very own Frankenstein and now it’s too late to kill it. The end is near and this must be true because Hollywood has shown us this on the big screen, and so far they have never been wrong.