One of the funniest articles I ever read in TV Guide magazine was about a program that ran on a local television station in Spokane, Washington, back around 1976.
For those old enough to remember 1976, (and our ranks are already thinning, alas) that was the year that the United States of America celebrated its 200th birthday.
Television was, of course, in the forefront of all the hoopla. Remember the Shell Oil Company's famous "Bicentennial Minutes?"
For those who don't, every single night, starting on July 4, 1974 and leading right up to the big day, July 4, 1976, a celebrity would appear on your TV screen around 8 p.m. and rattle off some important event in the American struggle for independence from England that had occured 200 years ago that night. (With "Yankee Doodle" playing in the background, as I recall, you know, the way that song would suddenly start playing on the soundtrack of Green Acres whenever Eddie Albert launched into one of his windy diatribes about the greatness of The American Farmer.)
By the time all of this wrapped up, 729 Bicentennial Minutes later, comedians were making jokes about it.
Local TV wanted to do its bit as well. Everywhere a local public television outlet could afford it, documentaries and dramatizations popped up about American history. Some of them, if not most, were woefully low-budget, and that's where the fun began.
The author of the article I read had been involved in the filming of one such local history program, this one for the PBS audience in Spokane, Washington. (A great little city, by the way. My personal favorite city in the whole country.)
Because these programs were low-budget, utilizing local actors and a local production crew all working for low pay if any, production sloppiness inevitably got into the act. Of course nobody caught any of these bloopers until the rushes were being viewed. The article listed three doozies that I remember:
- In a scene where an Indian brave was sneaking through the underbrush, preparing an ambush upon a group of unwary settlers, no one noticed that the Indian brave was wearing sunglasses.
- In another scene, in which the settlers and the local Indians were having a meeting together, nobody noticed that the Indian chief was wearing a digital wristwatch.
- And in one big battle scene, no one (including the camerman) noticed that right in the middle of the action, the camera had captured a pickup truck passing in the background.
pro·lep·sis
1. Rhetoric . the anticipation of possible objections in order to answer them in advance.2. the assigning of a person, event, etc., to a period earlier than the actual one; the representation of something in the future as if it already existed or had occurred; prochronism.
3. the use of a descriptive word in anticipation of its becoming applicable.
4. a fundamental conception or assumption in Epicureanism or Stoicism arising spontaneously in the mind without conscious reflection; thought provoked by sense perception.
5. Pathology . the return of an attack of a periodic disease or of a paroxysm before the expected time or at progressively shorter intervals.
Origin:
1570–80; < Late Latin prolēpsis < Greek prólēpsis anticipation, preconception, equivalent to prolēp- (verbid stem of prolambánein to anticipate ( pro- pro-2 + lambánein to take)) + -sis -sis
I have in mind here, specifically, Definition #2.
I've been thinking about this, don't ask me why, unless it has something to do with my lifelong movie-watching and reading habits. Prolepses and anachronisms prop up all the time in literature of course; I think even in Shakespeare. Isn't there a line in Julius Caesar about it being "eight O'clock" or something? The Romans didn't have clocks, only sundials.
But I was thinking the other day about my 1982 telephone interview with Ray Bradbury, the legendary science-fiction author (and one time purveyor of prunes for Sunsweet, if you remember those ads.) . I told him that my favorite among his short stories was There Will Come Soft Rains, from his great 1950 collection, The Martian Chronicles. This story, which takes its title from a poem by the American poet Sara Teasdale, depicts with wrenching poignancy, the more so for the fact that there are no human characters in it, the aftermath of a supposed nuclear war on Mars, waged between...well, you know. The earthlings who colonized Mars and brought along their bad habits.
Bradbury complimented me on this choice. He said it was his own favorite among his stories. "You have very good taste, young man," he said to me. I was 26 at the time and still qualified as a young man.
But it got me thinking about what a tightrope-act the writing of science fiction, or futuristic fiction of any kind is. Unlike most mainstream fiction, sci-fi and futuristic fantasy go out on a limb in predicting -- or assuming -- the sort of world we might find down the road. In 1950 the U.S. was developing the hydrogen bomb, and the USSR was getting ready to steal the information it needed to develop one. Rockets going into space were still a cartoonist's (or a sci-fi writer's) dream. By 1952 the H-bomb would be a reality, and by 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, rockets going into space were also part of contemporary life.
But earthlings have not reached Mars, let alone colonized it. We reached the moon in 1969, but there's no colony there either, just some junk we left, and one American flag. (Oh, yes, and the late Alan Shepard's golf ball -- in 1971 he became the first, and so far only, man to hit a golf ball on the moon.)
Contemporary history has been, by and large, a disappointment to authors who have indulged in crystal-ball gazing. Yes, we have artificial intelligence (sort of), and robots and computers that can do many of the things that kids used to laugh at on The Jetsons. But more often than not, writers who have gone out on that limb and tried to show us what they hoped --or feared -- life would be like in their future, or their children's, have been either sold short or just turned out to be dead wrong.
Countless books have been written imagining future dreams or nightmares that didn't pan out quite as predicted. Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward, 1887-2000, written in 1887, thought we'd all be living in the perfect Socialist Worker's Paradise by 2000. (We may have a form of socialism these days, but it ain't no paradise.) Aldous Huxley had us all going off to the "feelies,"the form of popular entertainment that would succeed the movies in his Brave New World. No, or not yet, anyway, Aldous. (Although the last I heard, the mad scientists working on "virtual reality" were trying to figure out a way for us to have "virtual sex" with holograph-figures -- natch: it was probably the first techno-kink they thought of. All I can say is, God help us when and if the government tries to get mixed up in that.) And while illegal drug use is flourishing as never before, "soma" has not yet replaced booze as the opiate of the masses.
Those are classic examples that everyone thinks of. How about The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler's post-WWI jeremiad that got just about everything wrong? (But is still a favorite in some quarters, including, not long ago, Vladimir Putin's Russia.)
I can think of some more examples from popular culture. Let's go back to Ray Bradbury for a minute. His conceit in the novel Fahrenheit 451 was that in the totalitarian nightmare of the future, books would be illegal. The novel's protagonist, Guy Montag, is a "fireman." Irony in the job description: Montag's job isn't putting out fires, it's starting them. He and his minions, whenever they get a tip off that someone somewhere has books, those dangerous purveyors of ideas that might threaten dictatorships, they go roaring off in their "fire engine" to incinerate the books in question. The story ends on a hopeful note, as a subterranean "priesthood" of wandering scholars called "living books" appear. These are people who have memorized books and will repeat them to those who want to hear, since nobody can get their hands on actual books any more.
When Bradbury published the 1951 story that he later expanded into a novel, he of course could have no idea that books would somebody become, not banned but obsolete, as some are declaring them now. In the world of the Internet and such gizmos as Kindle, books have not been banned but superseded by forms of communication lighter, faster and easier to carry. I have a friend who refuses to touch a book anymore. He prefers to live on the cutting edge of technology with his Kindle, which holds the digital equivalent of...what, 5000 books? Something like that. In 1951 Bradbury feared books would become outlawed. Instead the opposite has happened: you can carry an entire public library in your pocket.
The late British filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, in collaboration, first with sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke and then later with novelist Anthony Burgess, gave us some highly publicized pieces of dire prediction that went awry in the face of duller reality. In his classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, (1968) Kubrick, from the vantage point of the mid-1960s, gave us a glimpse of what he thought the world would look like in 2001.
He got some well-deserved kudos in later years for the way in which some of the film's special effects, most notably those involving spacewalks, (Extra-Vehicular Activity or EVA, as they're known in the bureaucratic gobblydegook of NASA) predicted accurately what the spacewalk videos of the space shuttle program would look like.
But look at the bloopers of pure assumption that Kubrick slipped into this film. First, there is the most obvious: he envisioned a fully-colonized moon by 2001, with regular shuttle service provided to and from the lunar colonies. And look who provides that service! When Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) travels to the moon in 2001, he's "flying" on Pan Am. On his way to the moon he meets and chats with a small group of Soviet scientists. It is implied that Cold War tensions have extended themselves to the celestial sphere when one of these scientists refers to "our bases" on the moon as opposed to "your bases." When Floyd places a phone call home to earth and talks with his daughter, (played in the film by Kubrick's real-life daughter) he places the space phone call via Bell Telephone.
In the 2001 we all remember now, the real one, there were no colonies on the moon, and the Soviet Union, Pan Am and the Bell System had all three long since gone belly-up.
In Kubrick's next film after 2001, A Clockwork Orange, (1971) we were served up one more nightmare vision of a future that failed to materialize. When Anthony Burgess wrote the novel A Clockwork Orange in 1962, the global power and prestige of the Soviet Union were at apogee. Russia would never again be either as powerful or as influential globally as she was in the 12-18 months before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Some intellectuals of the time, Burgess among them, looked at the future and assumed it would be Russian. Hence, the young hooligans of Burgess' futuristic nightmare-Britain in A Clockwork Orange spoke a slangy patois among themselves called "Nadsat." Nadsat consisted almost entirely of words borrowed from Russian, since Burgess assumed that Russian, i.e. Soviet culture was going to lead the way into the 21st century. In Clockwork Orange milk is "moloko," money is "deng," young women are "devotchkas" and their breasts are "groodies;" blood is "krovvy," and the hero's friends are "droogs." Eyes are "glazzies," and to see something is to "viddy."
And then there was the topper of them all: anything considered very good was described as "horrorshow," a play on the Russian word "Хорошо," (pronounced "chorosho") meaning "good." All of these "Nadsat" slang terms came from the Russian language.
Wrong again, prognosticators. It's English that dominates the global discourse in modern business and political affairs. In fact, now that school children in the former eastern European satellite countries that made up much of the Soviet empire are no longer forced to learn Russian, relatively few people are bothering to learn it at all. The beautiful Русский язык has little use outside Russia these days unless you're dealing with the import and export of Stolichnaya vodka, or doing business with the Russian global mafia, a more potent and more vicious force in the modern world than the imaginary Russian-spouting teenage gangs of Burgess' and Kubrick's futuristic "London" ever were.
Which is not to say that the crystal-ball crowd is always wrong. A couple of years ago the Internet burbled briefly with news of a short film, 1999 A.D., supposedly made in 1967, which gave a snapshot of life in what was then the imagined techno-future. Among other things, the documentary short in question seemed to predict -- somewhat eerily, perhaps even suspiciously...the Internet. It showed a very wired young family performing such chores as ordering lunch and shopping through the use of a computer interface. In fact the film seemed so prescient that many people suspected it was a hoax. 'Net surfers flocked to Snopes.com for confirmation of the trickery. But one of the actors in the documentary was a young, then relatively-unknown fellow named Wink Martindale. An early '60s southern California radio personality, Martindale later went on to a high-profile career as a TV game show host, appearing on such shows as Gambit, Debt, High Rollers and Tic-Tac Dough. Still alive and well in the early 21st century, Martindale was inducted on to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2006.
Interviewed after 1999 A.D. came to light, Martindale assured one and all that the film was indeed a genuine product of the 1960s. (Some saw confirmation of the film's legitimacy immediately in its quaint touch of sexism -- Mom calls Dad and Junior to lunch, and decides what she'll order for them to eat. Also, Mom handles all the shopping.)
Someone scored a lucky hit. More power to them. But I still say it's a dicey proposition at best, trying to predict the future face of life. There are just too many variables -- and surprises -- in history for anyone to get too smug about how we'll be living in 50 or 100 years. Personally, I'm having enough trouble adjusting to change from one month to the next to worry much about the year 3535, in which a rock music duo named Zager & Evans declared --way back in 1969, the year we reached the moon, -- that we would see all of our daily thoughts and sensations available in pill form.
Sorry, but I can't resist the obvious retort: I'm not swallowing that.
Not without a stiff shot of soma, anyway.
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