Oh, but the first few minutes of Babylon AD seem so promising.
Our hero awakes in a partially destroyed apartment, an ambitious DIY project apparently abandoned after initial demolitions. Plastic sheeting forming its notional walls. But beyond the collapsed appartment – a collapsed world. Tehran’s anti-America murals adorning an eastern European housing block.
Street markets hawking nothing but guns. The fashion cues are part military, part Snow+Rock – windbreakers and light body-armour. But this is a shopping trip for food, and all that’s on offer is freshly caught rabbit.
Deftly skinned, sliced and sautéed. Our hero prepares to eat the meal accompanied, surprisingly, with a glass of red wine. The rugged mercenary showing a touch of sophistication. An odd touch of elegance that may betray the director’s nationality, and perhaps a nod to how the actor’s name must sound to french ears. The juxtaposition of refinement and utility: Le vin et diesel.
For a brief moment the movie looks to offer a tantalising exploration of grim meathook cuisine.
(Of course within the next 60 seconds, Vin’s quipped beligerantly before shooting someone in the head. By halfway-through, the movie has descended into unintelligible Golden Child/cyber-messiah nonsense.)
In Vin’s spartan quarters – makeshift bed, improvised gym, etc – there is an interesting inclusion. A couple of Google-branded net devices, one a half-screen sized touch-screen PDA and media centre combo, the other a wall mounted TV-style display. Naturally it’s sporting 27 channels of rolling terrorism alerts and civil unrest footage. While Demolition Man prophesied that all restaurants would be Taco Bell, dystopian movies suggest that all future television will be Fox News.
Nicely encapsulating the life-support priorities of future generations – the world may have turned to crap, but as long as I’ve got a fast net connection I’ll be OK. Maybe that’s even becoming true of today’s youth? Given a choice of hot running water or “facebook”, net access may be seen by younger people as the more essential of the two.
I mention it because I’ve had to go without Internet for a few weeks recently. And then, not long after it returned, I’ve had to go without hot water. Not as a direct result of some weird Hobson’s choice, obviously. Just things falling apart. (Such as the breaking of whatever it was dampening the washing machine’s violent seizures, triggering a bold and destructive bid for freedom, cut short by its own cruel reliance on electricity.)
Things failing used to be just mundane inconveniences. Now they’ve somehow become temporal echos heralding future disaster.
I feel like I’ve been psychologically primed, if not quite girded, for massive institutional collapse. When an extreme weather event hit London last week (i.e. slightly more snow than we were eqipted to deal with) it interupted the collection of domestic refuse in the area. I immediately began to fantasize an inevitable path from a mounting backlog, to disease, to rioting.
(As it was, the rubbish was mysteriously gone by Thursday. Sudden out-of-schedule collection is disturbing – it may cause you to reassess your previously low opinion of the council’s logistical competence.)
My recent internet outage was countered with a return to something like the old-school pre-Friaco batch-download internet technique. Take the laptop into a free wifi area, sync the off-line email and feed apps, then process through everything offline. It’s not quite cold turkey for my Info Freako, but it has forced me to be more discerning in my consumption. For the first time in years I’m not running a unread backlog in my feeds.
And now the hot water is gone. Get used to the icy showers, I told myself, warm water is a luxury of more carefree times. At least while we’re awaiting a part from “bunny boilers” (an unfortunate mnemonic for Vaillant, from a logo featuring a cartoon rabbit). But then I started getting up earlier in the morning and making use of my gym’s showers and getting in a (previously rare) work-out while I’m at it. Any longer and it may become a habit.
Both positive outcomes from annoying situations.
I’m quite a fan of those near-future dystopia tales – essentially a genre in which the miseries of the real world are visited upon anglophones (Brian Wood’s current comicbook DMZ is highly recommended). One of the trends in UK-set futures (seen in the likes of V for Vendetta and Children of Men) is the weird idea that while things are grim, they’re far grimmer everywhere else. The fiction that, all things considered, Britain adapts surprising well in a crisis.
While America’s national survival myth might be of the self-sufficient rugged frontiersman, Britain’s is “Blitz Spirit”. When the secret words are invoked a magic lightning bolt infuses the public with the super-powers of stoic bloody mindedness and temporary submission to the state’s Woolton pie paternalism. Keep calm. Carry on.
But maybe that’s a wartime-only deal? Every new British government has a stab at fostering peacetime patriotism, or as they usually put it “a sense of national identity”. A difficult concept to a nation that largely considers its own flag out-of-place when seen anywhere but a sporting event.
Apparently the Brown government was looking for a motto to push this forward. Something displayed on public buildings, such as the French “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”. Of course the idea tof coming up with a motto to etch into the stonework of new British post offices is stymied by the inability imagine there ever being new British post offices. Most of the publicly submitted suggestions were sarcastic at best.
The only suggestion I could possibly support as a summation of British values (and the Gilliam-esque absurdity of it actually being used would amuse me) would be a latin translation of “It could be worse” (“in deterius cadere potest“?).
This is why I fail at blog. I can’t just moan about my broken boiler – I have to bury it in some larger rambling context. Better perhaps to cultivate a style of the twitterish précis: “Still no hot water; mustn’t grumble.”
