Of Deliberate And Reactionary Paradises: Outer Space And The Citizen Consumer

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.

--Aldous Huxley

                                                                                                                                      

For its themes and dreamy look, Christopher Penfold's "The Guardian Of Piri", one of the more ethereal episodes of Space: 1999 (ITC, 1975-77), fans have long cited influences drawn from Op-Art, Greek mythology and the drug scene of the era. (1)

Oblivious to these observations at the time as a thirteen-year-old, the combination of glowing spheres in a sherbet orange sky and gleaming slabs dotting a pied surface suggested to me nothing so much as the plaza of a typical shopping mall.

Projected And Past Paradises

Only recently did I notice the intriguing similarity in Keith Wilson's set design, down to the the indolent recumbence of its addled characters, to Bruegel the Elder's painting The Land of Cockaigne (1567). (2)

Alternatively known as Luilekkerland (the lazy-lacivious land) in the Netherlands, Cockaigne was a popular European notion of  Paradise in the Middle Ages and Renaissance which mandated of its denizens a hearty dedication to extramarital sex, sloth, gluttony and other indulgences denied under peasant life.

Come to think of it, when considering the various "Consumers' Republics" of the industrialized world, aren't today's malls intended as an earthly equivalent to Paradise?

Suspending Nature...

Certainly Michael Anderson's dystopian Logan's Run (MGM, 1976), from the novel by William F. Nolan & George Clayton Johnson, logistically shared this association, when it used the Dallas Market Center, an actual mall in Texas, for the interior scenes of great domed cities protecting pampered, youthful inhabitants from a polluted 23rd Century. (3)

The Gerry Anderson TV production in its second season, appeared to reference the novel in the time

travel adventure, "Journey To Where", where the crew of Moonbase Alpha comes into contact with the residents of Texas City, one of numerous domed megalopoli on a similarly-ravaged Earth of 2120. (4)

Freddie Jones' (TV's Emmerdale) delivers a quirky performance as Dr. Logan, while his research associate invokes the creepy rationale for this strange civilization when she opines to the Alphans, "Who needs Nature?" This presages by forty-three years the views of former US Transhumanist Party presidential candidate Zoltan Itsvan in a 2019 article Environmentalists Are Wrong: Nature Isn’t Sacred and We Should Replace It. (5)

The dramatized theme of a sanitized positivist existence built along technologically panaceic lines goes as far back as William Cameron Menzies' 1936 film version of H.G. Wells' Things To Come. Its penultimate set piece of Everytown, 1970 (sic) is a Lucite-appointed, mall-like subterranian city, where even natural sunlight is traded for an artificial substitute. (6)

Now, anybody who has worked in an indoor shopping complex for any length of time can attest to how easy it is to lose track of time without sunlight. But then, who needs time, either?

... And Time

The android intermediary between humanity and the Guardian (played with silky aloofness by Catherine Schell (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) explains to the lone holdout among the entranced colonists, John Koenig (Martin Landau), that the perfect state of toilless existence once provided by the machine to its extinct creators, the Pirians and now available to the Alphans, rests on the sirenic supercomputer's ability to "suspend time". 

Even as this is in line with the derivation of the planet's name from Miri and Piri, (7) the co-joined Sikh principle behind the temporal and spiritual aspects of life, modern 

mall management policy in its own way also "suspends" time, discouraging the display of distracting clocks in common areas and stores, the better to promote shopping as an immersive recreational pursuit.

What makes the Piri/Cockaine comparison most relevant since Space: 1999 first aired in syndication is how the traditional mission of the mall is showing signs of failing.

Hargobind Singh Ji,, sixth Silh Guru,
creator of the principle of Miri Piri
(1606)

Remember when Wall Street pundits claimed that the fanciful logic behind the burgeoning New Economy dictated it could "go on forever"?

Well, as one of the once unassailable bulwarks of this absurdity through the 1990s, the indoor shopping mall has been dying in sufficient numbers across the country over the last decade or so to warrant several online pictorials of abandoned complexes, with at least one dedicated website. (8) 

The End Of The Consumers' Republic

In fact, the massive South Norwalk Collection in my area of Connecticut, following five years of stalled funding and two owners ended up the only new indoor shopping center in the entire Northeast upon completion in 2019. (9)

This trend-bucking persists in this year's mayoral race in neighboring Stamford, where both "pro-jobs" candidates made it a point to do what they could to keep the local economy-siphoning leech, the 41-year-old Stamford Town Center, in operation. Up for sale just two years ago before its owner began shifting gears abruptly in service to the lifestyle needs of a higher-end crowd (including a ballet school), post-lockdown saw the STC's launch of a rather grotesque poster campaign raising shopping to a maniacally transcendent experience. (10)

What does this have to do with a British '70s space opera or the dreams of medieval serfs? Though each vision might reflect distinct economic origins, I think they're connected to the consequences of a misplaced idea of how things ought to be, based on a sometimes misplaced idea of how they actually are.

Yesterday's Oppression, Today's "Unfreedom"

Up to now, the difference is that the materialist idyll of industrial society is built generally on the overabundance of contrived appetites (to the numbing point that appetite, itself dies, as on Piri); the imagined Paradise of the 1500s is built on the overabundance of fundamental appetites, in reaction to the extremity of privations on safety, liberty and economic self-determination under serfdom.

Thus far, today's latest vacuous multiplex thriller, that pair of over-marketed sneakers, or gourmet cookies continue to  serve as superficial, compensatory--rather than necessary--benefits meant to offset the imposed insecurities surrounding employment, health care, housing, etc. of the outside society by which the mall and its tenants profit.

In this way, the often unacknowledged contradictions between the wasteful social and globally atomizing effects of modern life (outsourcing, insatiable market expansion, pollution) and the ephemeral excesses it supports philosopher Herbert Marcuse referred to as the "unfreedoms", which help ease the psychic burden of living in "administered" society. (11) 

Human Beings Cannot Exist On Pirian (Nor Schwabian) Terms

In view of the siloing effect of social media, British essayist/novelist E.M Forster's 1909 short story, "The Machine Stops" makes use of prescient features like instant messaging, Zoom conferencing and shallow discourse. This makes the scenario a fitting intermediate step between today and some Piri-esque endpoint, wherein Forster's characters live in individual cubicles, all needs provided through an advanced mechanical god. (12)

E. M. Forster (1879-1970)

Depending on how ample the resource base and the economics to exploit it, the main difference between this and Penfold's Piri is which fails first, the people, or the massive instrumentality they 

created that serves them at the ultimate cost of their humanity? 

Incrementally working toward putting all nations under the panoptic thumb of global finance since the end of World War II, policy operations like The Council On Foreign Relations and Zbigniev Brezinski's Trialateral Commission have become overshadowed by Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum as to which way things may go.

Towards A Digital Feudalism

"You must conform."

The latter's "Global Reset" program, (13) promising the imposition of a digital currency, implantable chips, human/machine interfaces and other schemes right off of Isvat's plate are being pushed with every bit the same unyielding conviction as that of Schell's Servant of the Guardian.

How ironic, then, that while the Pirians perished from a wont of spiritual drive after all material needs were fulfilled through fantastic technology that, in today's world, to save capitalism from its excesses, Big Tech's first move is to remove the individual right to material property in a society that has already been long conditioned to neglect the spiritual.

I wonder what would Pieter Bruegel think, following the total economic/social subjection of the masses before the church and state of his day, if he saw its computerized resurrection under a universal corporate state nearly five centuries later?

___

References:

1. https://www.amazon.com/Space-1999-Episode-Petter-Ogland/dp/1312585935

2. https://www.wga.hu/html_m/b/bruegel/pieter_e/10/18cockai.html

3 .https://ascmag.com/articles/logans-run-and-how-it-was-filmed

4. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0706327/

5.https://zoltanistvan.medium.com/environmentalists-are-wrong-nature-isnt-sacred-and-we-should-replace-it-b5a0de6444cb

6. https://www.criterion.com/films/27552-things-to-come

7. https://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Miri_and_Piri

8. http://deadmalls.com/

9. https://therealdeal.com/tristate/issues_articles/all-eyes-on-sono/

10.https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/elections/article/Stamford-s-mall-is-struggling-Both-mayoral-16521437.php

11.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/one-dimensional-man-herbert-marcuse/1122986302?ean=9780807014172

12. https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/the%20machine%20stops.pdf

13.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/shaping-the-future-of-the-fourth-industrial-revolution-klaus-schwab/1129040296?ean=9781984822611

Things To Come's 1936 vision of 1970

Stamford Town Center, 2021