Review: THX 1138 (a film by George Lucas, 1971)

THX 1138, a science-fiction film by George Lucas, takes place in the 25th century, but already looks like a lot of urban interior spaces of our current 21st century. Rather than this presented dystopia being frightening, the film instead offers us a way in which to view, albeit from an SF-oriented lens, the structure of bureaucratic systems driven by technology and industry, with the organic and biological hardly anywhere in sight.

One can't be sure what the workers are doing, exactly, what exactly their jobs are. From what is shown, however, all of the duties are ruled by endless chains of command, orders, algorithms, and inhuman calculations that leave little room for qualitative judgements or subjective understandings of the world.

The secular itself is hardly mentioned but arguably exists everywhere despite the narrative's insistence on a religious God. When the main character - THX 1138 - doesn't feel one-hundred percent functioning, he sits and talks to an enlarged image of what seems to be Jesus. Eerily, the only voice that speaks back to him is automated, giving him generic, off-time answers, completely soulless, rigid, flat, and blank. At the very end, the machine only says, dully: "Keep up the good work and prevent accidents."

The basic motto of this white-walled, cubic, synthetic, and sanitized dystopia is thus: Work Hard, Increase Production, Avoid Accidents, and Be Happy. Those who deviate, even at a bare minimum, are rigorously questioned, given more pills to take, and disciplined by inhuman police with steel plates for faces. Everyone is seen as a cog in a machine; a machine that knows not what it is working toward, knows not to what end.

A crucial point that this film makes is that this place is not at all a prison, it is simply the world itself, the world as it is. Ultimately, for the laborers, the world itself becomes a prison which must be escaped, transcended, broken out of. The machines, and other, more disciplined and obedient workers, ask unmeant questions such as "What's wrong?" over and over again, never taking note of what actually is wrong, and only making sure that the workers stay "healthy" enough to do continuous labor unthinkingly. They coldly tell them, "Everything is fine," trying to keep a sense of normalcy and calm in a constructed world that is squeezing out every bit of creativity, nuance, complexity, and, perhaps most interestingly, emotion and sensory pleasure. In reverse, when those qualities do appear, as natural and organic qualities seem to do, those bearing them are met with violent punishment.

"For more enjoyment and for greater efficiency," the machine voice-over says, "consumption is being standardized." And, "Buy more. Buy more now. Buy and be happy."

Yet the only thing that gives THX 1138 some solace and reprieve from the relentless day to day anguish of meaningless and vacuous "work" is his lover, LUH. There are tender moments between them, though these moments are completely deprived of luxury and comfort, with their every move watched by some hidden audience, their need to ingest libido depleting medicine, their romance stamped down by some chain of command. THX mentally beats himself up for even caring about another, as if caring for one person violated some vital law.

One of the most striking scenes in the film is one in which a handful of workers are set aside for misbehaving in some way. They all seem to go mad... one mumbling an illogical philosophy, another playing a child's game, another repeating a story over and over, and a man who decides they should form a coalition to escape. THX himself gets so angry that he throws the chairs at the others and storms away... but one man follows him, and they walk endlessly into a blank whiteness that shows nothing at all, wondering about the possibility and existence of anything beyond. The story climaxes as they meet a black escapee - who, oddly, turns out to be just a hologram who can't do math - and all three attempt to leave that world forever.

What can this film teach about our present circumstance? Maybe it's this: that if to accept the world as it is presented means to ignore, repress, and disavow all our grievances, sicknesses, and deepest desires, then there's nothing left for the hope of life - real life - besides laboring for something else - laboring to reconfigure another world so a perspective, a lens, a tiny glimpse can be accessible; so that a vital tectonic shift (or indeed the continuous shift) of the intellect can occur... one in which subjects, or laborers, workers, whatever you'd like, can actually participate in the practice of thinking. It is this freedom of thought which is at stake in the film, and by the end, the audience may understand better the oft stated the only way out is through.