Yesterday Looks At Tomorrow: THINGS TO COME (1936)

Oct 7

Oct 7 Yesterday Looks At Tomorrow: THINGS TO COME (1936)

“I have recently seen the silliest film.
I do not believe it would be possible
to make one sillier…It is called Metropolis.”
-- H. G. Wells, 1927

“Challenge accepted.”
-- H. G. Wells, 1936

H. G. Wells so intensely disliked Friz Lang’s Metropolis he participated in the production of Things To Come, based loosely on his 1933 book The Shape Of Things To Come.

On the positive side, it’s larger in scope than Metropolis and as equally impressive visually, made by stellar talents on par with Lang. It covers a much broader range of concepts and offers far more challenging ideas.

For many years it remained a great favorite of science fiction fans, partially because the only available versions of Metropolis had been hacked down to nonsense, but primarily because it offered a vision of the future where sci-fi fans would dominate.

While Metropolis is an overly Christian film (seriously, take a look at their use of religious symbols throughout and the arguments Maria makes to both sides re their responsibilities to one another), Things To Come is pretty blatantly socialist bumping into communist.

Small wonder, since Wells hizowndamsef was an avowed socialist, a member of the Fabian Society who believed the world would be better off run by a samurai elite (his term) that dispassionately guided the rest of humanity for our own good.

One needs to understand that in the period between the two world wars, in Europe and America being a communist marked one as outré but not an overt threat to humanity.

After Stalin’s rise to power and purges, after World War Two, after the Iron Curtain crashing down, communism became the official whipping dog of Western capitalism, blamed for anything and everything.

Even today dim bulb politicians appeal to even dimmer bulb constituents by labeling anything and everything they don’t like as “communist” or “socialist” without any real understanding of those terms.

And not to whitewash the crimes of the Soviet Union, but when you stop thinking of the USSR as communist but rather as czarist Russia under a new banner, you see those crimes are less communist in nature and more culturally Russian.

“Same circus, different clowns”
as Russians are wont to say.

Likewise, the myriad crimes of Things To Come are less about socialism, and more about old fashion English classism.

As science fiction fandom took off in the 1920s and 30s in the US and England, many fans were socialists or communists of one stripe or another.

Those interested can dig into the history of science fiction fandom online and see the waves of anger and arguments over the best way to reorder society, and the retaliation by those who liked the status quo just fine, thank you.

These were the earliest enthusiasts for Things To Come.

What appealed to them in Wells’ vision was the same thing that appeals to Ayn Rand’s followers today: A deep rooted belief that they are constrained by society and if only they were in charge everything would be so much better.

That their stated goals are mutually exclusive is unimportant. In both cases the fans of those authors / beliefs saw themselves as naturally belonging to the ruling elite, not part of the lumpenproletariat doing scullery work at the bottom.

In that sense they’re very much like believers in reincarnation who were always kings and queens, priests and priestesses in previous lives, not crippled beggars or enslaved pit workers.

In Things To Come, the lumpenproletariat in Wells’ scheme of things provide no input into the way things are done or the goals set and established. Wells, long hostile to religion, saw any sort of spiritual belief as antithetical to human progress and happiness, and saw eliminating that aspect of humanity as crucial.

The problem is he has nothing to replace it with, other than some vague commandment to “go out and all of you be geniuses now.”

As crappy as the lives of Lang’s workers were in Metropolis, they feel richer and far better than the pampered masses in Things To Come.

And it needs be noted in the book The Shape Of Things To Come that his “open conspiracy” of “samurai” are almost exclusively English speaking western Europeans, with one token Chinese and one token African among their ranks. The idea that they could shut down a billion or so adherents to Islam without any resistance is ridiculous even in the era as anyone who read T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars Of Wisdom could tell Wells.

The most entertaining portion of the film is the middle third, the post-apocalyptic world before the Airmen saviors arrive. It’s like a dry run for Mad Max movies mashed up with a zombie flick (seriously!).

The big conflict in the last part of the film involves the ruling elite wanting to launch a spaceship to the moon and the rest of humanity going, “Really? Can’t we just enjoy what we have?”

There’s a race to launch the spaceship before a mob descends to destroy it, and the film ends with the protagonist Cabal (as in literally “cabal” a secret conspiracy trying to control things) speaking to common citizen Passworthy (how’s that for a condescending name?), uttering the famous “Which shall it be? The universe or nothingness?” speech.

That closing scene fired up science fiction fans in the 1930s and 40s, but by the 1960s and 70s we came to realize the universe is going to have the final say in the matter, like it or not.

Of the three films we’re discussing, Things To Come ages the worst. It’s certainly worth seeing (I recommend the colorized version as that gives it a nice pulp sci-fi palette) but the core message is not merely dated, it’s repugnant.

How well did it predict the future?
It guesses the start of WWII pretty closely, and hints at nuclear warfare in an ambiguous shot of a mushroom cloud long before the first A-bomb exploded. Its world war just peters out, however, with all sides bombed back to the stone age and awaiting the arrival of black clad saviors in giant airships to set things aright. The film skips over a century of rebuilding in a pretty impressive montage of miniatures at work, then resumes a century in the future with the descendants of the 1930s characters fighting ennui. Considering they live underground in well lit but featureless terraced apartments, wearing what looks to be woefully impractical clothing it’s no surprise this is the one concept Things To Come got spot on. The phrase “amusing ourselves to death” existed as a concept long before Neil Postman used it as a book title in 1985 but Wells & co have it on full display here.

Is it a Big Film with Big Ideas?
Yes, clearly the biggest of the three we’re discussing. It also offers the flattest, most paper thin characters. Raymond Massey is simultaneously commanding and wasted in his dual roles as John Cabal and grandson Oswald. Massey was in the even more repugnant Sante Fe Trail as John Brown and holy shamolley, even though Warner Brothers tried to paint him as the villain of the piece John Brown towers over both Cabals as an ethically and philosophically grounded character. Even so, it’s a film about humanity as a whole, even if conceived by someone who seemed incapable of writing about them humanistically.