Marx wrote, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living," but he neglected to add that it is the nightmare of traditions that weighs the heaviest in moments of crisis. Ever since 2016, we have seen a revival of some of the darkest moments of the imagination, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower has made the best sellers list, and 1984 has been reread, made the subject of a documentary, which I have not seen, and also to some extent remade, as The Draw, which I did see.
It is more than a little unfair to call the film a remake of 1984; it can be viewed uncharitably as a mashup of several dystopian fictions, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, etc., but that is what I meant by the nightmares of the past weighing on the present. The dystopian novel, especially 1984 and Brave New World, are in some sense the most influential works of twentieth century political philosophy, at least in the English speaking world, all the more influential because they are works of fiction. One could even argue that they make up two political positions in themselves, depending on if one fears the ability of the state to surveil and monitor or its ability to distract. Given that the latter, the ability to distract and entertain, is generally understood to come not from the state, but from capital, from industry, the two works of fiction end up being their own version of right and left, depending if one is persuaded by the anti-communism of 1984 or the inchoate anti-consumer society elements of Brave New World. Or maybe the reason these two books have such a lingering effect on the contemporary imagination has less to do with their own power, and the reading lists of high school English courses, than with the fact that surveillance and the spectacle have become the two faces of modern power. The book titles are then just stand ins for our own society.
The Draw takes place in the not too distant future in what appears to be the UK, given the accents and weather. In this future the dominant technology is the Eye-Light, a device worn on the temple that allows people to alter what they see and ultimately how they are seen. People create "avatars" basically more attractive, fashionable, even interesting versions of themselves, these are what people see and interact with. As we see in one date scene that opens the film, this essentially reduces people to nothing more than the fleshly substrate of their projected fantasies--sort of like if our social media selves could walk around the world with their filtered and edited version of who we are. Or, perhaps that is not right, since the Eye-Light shapes what one sees, everyone interacts with a fantasy of what they would like to see. In any case there is no actual relation, just a projection of what one wants to see.
The film centers on Alec, who works as an avatar engineer, helping people create their perfect avatars and outfits. There is some irony in this, because he is extremely dissatisfied with the avatar world. He is at first vaguely frustrated and disconnected, daydreaming at work.
In some sense the alienated individual is the formal precondition of the dystopian fiction in the same way that the foreigner is to utopian fiction. In the latter case, the foreigner is a necessary condition for the exposition that the utopia needs while, in the former, in dytopias, the vague sense that something is wrong is a necessary condition to begin the action. Each of these functions as a kind a limit, in the case of utopias, they are, as Fredric Jameson argued, places where nothing ever happens, all of the major sources of conflict, man versus man, nature, society, etc., have been eliminated. Exposition must then take place of action, and the only thing that can happen is a foreigner can be shown around and told how society functions. In the case of dystopia, the fact that there is some alienation, some dissatisfaction, suggests that the dystopia is not complete, that resistance persists, even in the inchoate feeling that things could be better.
In the case of The Draw, Alec begins to live a life of quite rebellion. He first begins to take pictures on an old 35 mm camera. Analog media is outlawed in the future because it cannot be updated or transformed by the filters of the Eye-Light. His rebellion is shared by Jade, a coworker. Their relationship, a relationship by two people who see each other as they are, no filters violates the norm. Later, we learn that marriage has been made illegal, and they violate that norm as well. Their relationship has elements of 1984 in terms of its dynamic. He dreams of some actual escape from their society, whereas she is just looking for a few moments of escape. In one of the funniest visual scenes in an otherwise door film, she figures out how to escape the social pressure to be constantly connected to the Eye-Light, by connecting hers to a sort of coach potato scarecrow of clothes watching television. The only way to avoid surveillance is to appear to be watching the spectacle. That their violation is a marriage in a society defined by a kind of onanistic hedonism, where people are dating each others fantasy images, carries with it echoes of Brave New World. In the first it is a matter of finding authentic rebellion, while in the latter it is a matter of authenticity as rebellion.
One of the best scenes of the film concerns the idea that everyone's right to their fantasy space is enforced. It presents us with a society of people who prefer to interact with their images of people than the messy, complexity of actual people. I could not help but think of the stories I have heard about AI interactions, and the friendliness of chatbots. The film is definitely more concept than execution, but that has always seemed to me to be one of the pleasures of science fiction as a genre, the concept is more important than the execution. The effects of the movie remind me of episode of Doctor Who more than anything else, in which an austere office building can stand in for the future.
I was happy enough to find out about it. I should mention how I found out about it. I happened to read about it in the New York Times Five Science Fiction Movies to Stream. I have noticed that they run these every once in awhile, with different genres, horror, action, etc. They are a way to find out about films that my own algorithms on streaming services rarely shows me. Which is another reminder that the world of The Draw, in which we are trapped in a world defined by our own preferences, in which nothing interrupts our own daydream, is not so far off.
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