Thursday July 29, 2004 at  5:55 PM

How Come There's Nothing Funny In the Future?

Appearing in  American Culture

“Three Jewish robots walk into a bar…”

 

Last night I had a chance to go to the movies. Now that might not seem like much to most of you but given that fatherhood has left me with precious few opportunities to attend movies that don’t feature either (a) animation or (b) talking dogs, the pressure was on to pick something good. In the mood for a bit of, shall we say “adult entertainment”, Catwoman initially got the nod. Unfortunately, the movie failed to perform and after a scant 20 minutes I realized that even the tight-clothed gyrations of Halle Berry weren’t going to be enough to keep me seated for the alloted 120 minutes.

Fortunately, this being the age of mega-multi-cineplexes, it was an easy and inconspicuous hop (past the concessions, around the corner, third theater on your left) over to I, Robot.

Without giving anything away, the plot is basically this: the future is full of personal robots and not all of them are as nice as advertised. Will Smith plays a detective who is apparently the only intelligent person left on the planet with even the slightest suspicion of technology or distrust of autonomous robots. Over the course of a few hours he figures out how and why the robots are turning against humans and in the end, is able to destroy the central system that is causing all the mayhem. There’s also a female scientists and his grandmother floating through the plot but they’re mostly included as eye-candy for the heterosexual males in the audience — the female scientist not his grandmother.

All in all it was a reasonable summer flick; lots of action, well-produced effects, serviceable acting, and a story and dialog that appeared to have poured forth from an imagination safely distanced from puberty.

What I found interesting about the movie however, and the reason I’m dragging you through this bit of exposition, is not so much the story or the characters or the effects, but rather the vision of the future that the movie portrays. Like virtually every other film set in the near-term future, Minority Report for example, I, Robot depicts a world built from obvious extensions of current trends: its cell phones are smaller, its guns more lethal, its cars much faster, and its computers much smarter.

At the same time however, it also presents a future strangely unevolved from present time: fashion hasn’t changed, automobiles are still dominant, and people still go to work every morning. In addition, despite three decades of international immigration and mixed-race marriages, most people have managed to retain a certain ethnic purity as either black African-Americans or white Caucasian-Americans. Apparently Asian-Americans fail to become a visible population even in the Chicago or 2030.

But what I found most disturbing is the things that aren’t in the future: trees, food, animals, laughter. What does it say about our collective unconscious that virtually every artistic vision of the future is as ridiculously high-tech and plastic as The Jetsons or as disastrously oppressive and inhuman as Orwell’s 1984?

Why do science fiction writers so often place us in a figurative and invariably literal war with our machines and technology and how do we always manage to win? How come the very people who make their living imagining life 25, 50, or 100 years from now always envision a future so dang violent and depressing?

But mostly, how come there’s nothing funny in the future? Is it that the writers can’t come up with any good jokes or is that the path we’re on is really that destructive and serious?

Just to break things up you’d think they’d throw us an occasional bone. Nothing too distracting from all the plotting and violence just some short but memorable gag. Maybe something along the lines of, “Three Jewish robots walk into a bar…”

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