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Friday, January 06, 2012

What Happened to Utopia?

I was talking to my friend Gil yester aft, and we wondered why all the films of the future are pretty much dismal instead of happy and bright. Of course, there are religious and evangelical type films which live a pretty much "underworld" existence and which extoll happiness that everything is and will be exactly as we imagined it to be when we were six years old, but I do not catch a lot of those flicks.

(There is a popular book now written by a lad who had a Near-Death Experience in hospital, and he visited heaven, and it was pretty much exactly the way he had been told all his life it would be. This book is being touted in certain circles as the "must read" book for kids... but I suspect that a good number of "groan-ups" are delving into its Paradiso pages, also.
I do not wish to judge the book, but I have pierced a couple of mystic veils in my day... the seven of Salome come to mind, for starts.)

So, back to our question, why are all the cinema visions of the future so gloomy?

Hint: here's an excerpt from Charlie Brooker from The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/01/charlie-brooker-dark-side-gadget-addiction-black-mirror

  It's hard to think of a single human function that technology hasn't somehow altered, apart perhaps from burping. That's pretty much all we have left. Just yesterday I read a news story about a new video game installed above urinals to stop patrons getting bored: you control it by sloshing your urine stream left and right. Read that back to yourself and ask if you live in a sane society.
I think he may have stumbled onto it.
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