reflections on THX1138

Being a Lucas fan, I really enjoyed watching his first production not because it was that great of a movie, but, as was brought to light in class, because of the risks he took and the doors he opened with THX1138. I am aware that Lucas does not write the best scripts, yet I have always loved his movies (whoever says they didn't love Star Wars is liar). After our discussion last week I understand why people are drawn to Lucas Productions. The sound, light, and elemental imagery Lucas includes in his work creates a foreign, imaginative environment out of everyday materials. In this way, his film THW1138 relates how the future may become a technological, emotionally stifling, prison, but the present we live in already contains the elements of that prison. Therefore, by creating a futuristic scenario, Lucas not only anticipates or imagines the future, but warns or at least presents the reality of the present. If, in the lat 60's technology already promised the type of world Lucas presents in THX1138, his production presented one possibility of a thousand outcomes in the future. By portraying the dystopic effects of technology, Lucas may not be protesting technology (the source of most of his creative expression), but more likely wishes to warn against the impersonal, product driven, faithless direction the present points towards. Technology does not have to create a dystopia, but with the quick production of computers and machines, without warnings or portrayals like THX1138, humanity could forget to stop and appreciate the immateriality of love, intimacy, and faith, or the materiality of the human body in contrast to machines. Lucas, seemingly intensionally, contrasts the vivacity of the human body and the comfort of human intimacy with the senselessness of the white prison-like environment, reminding his viewers of the potential danger of the impersonal relationship technology creates between people and their environment (as I sit at my computer typing this article, rather than joining a friend for lunch). Likewise, most of Lucas' imagery collaborates to create this emotionally stifling, alienating world that seems to convey the message that meaning in life requires that which he portrays as absent from his futuristic dystopia: love, intimacy, individuality, and faith. These qualities can exist along with the production of technology; however, Lucas can convey the lose of these qualities only because their absence already exists in many modes of life at the time the movie was made. What I mean to say is, if Lucas creates these futuristic worlds out of elements already present, then his portrayal of loneliness, "something wrong," in THX1138 points to the already looming presence of this futuristic fate in the 60's and 70's in California, USA.