Technomania and its discontents
On Zardoz and Against the Vortex
John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974) may be the ultimate example of a film that, if you like it at all, exists beyond the distinction between “good” and “bad” while being demonstrably both. I enjoy Zardoz, silly as its story of plundering false utopias may be. Better to think of the film as a psychedelic science fiction tale with a saving sense of humor and genuine imagination, unafraid to be campy yet not simply a goof. Its characters may not exist at the same level of crafty panache as its visual spectacle, but that’s a natural consequence of what sets Boorman’s fantasia apart: No one makes movies like this.1 It is nuts, in other words. The miracle of the thing is how coherent it feels.
A tale of the far future, Zardoz eschews a polite, professional premise, unlike some pop sci-fi that takes a recognizable industrial-consumerist world and tweaks certain dystopian and utopian variables to produce a fashionably barbed portrait of vice and virtue in politics and culture. No, Zardoz torques what we know into excessive exaggeration. Though distinctly of its time, it avoids the fashionable. In the film’s world, Sean Connery is Zed. Zed is an “Exterminator” who, at the behest of a giant floating stone head named Zardoz which distributes guns to Zed and his compatriots while declaring the penis evil (it makes human beings) and the gun good (it destroys human beings, whose expansion over the earth would destroy it), terrorizes, rapes, and murders an impoverished human society of “Brutals.” That’s what the Exterminators are for; they work as homicidal policemen on a mission of population control. The Brutals exist hierarchically opposite the all-powerful Eternals, who control the floating Zardoz and by extension the Exterminators. Zed discovers the Eternals’ utopian community, called the Vortex, when he grows suspicious about the nature of his gun-show god. He manages to stowaway inside the floating head, shoot its pilot, and crash in the Vortex, like Dorothy in Oz (Wizard of Oz = Zardoz). Though he is interrogated and generally screwed with, Zed by the end of the film has completely undermined and destroyed the Eternals’ society, thereby ensuring a new future in which his offspring (but not he) may have a crucial role to play. A powerful segment of the Eternal community even wanted and enabled Zed to accomplish exactly the destruction he carries out, for their immortality and reliance on an artificial intelligence, the Tabernacle, has sickened and disgusted them. They yearn to die, to be able to die. A farce, a campy adventure, a psychedelic romp, Zardoz is exactly the kind of film that should be written about with the intelligence, clarity, affection, and vision that Anthony Galluzo brings to bear in his book, Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today.
At shy of 70 pages, Galluzo’s book is more a long essay than monograph. Although it constructs a clear argument, the book above all makes available a set of metaphors that model an adventure in thinking. You can read it in an evening, with or without watching Zardoz—Galluzo is adept at the art of summary—and thereafter make profitable use of the term “Critical Aquarian” in your assessment of futurisms past and present, be they techno-utopian or Luddite-liberatory.
Galluzo argues that Zardoz dramatizes the rejection of “hypermodernist” visions of the future. In particular, this argument suggests that “Critical Aquarians” like John Boorman show how left-wing futurisms of, for example, scarcity-based resource management and technologically enhanced self-care (as in the Vortex) reiterate a “lost future” nostalgia for a highly rationalized utopia dependent on aspirationally infinite technological-human control. Against the Singularity, against a sense of social or personal immortality, against accelerationism, against an urge to transcend human limits, Galluzo sees in Zardoz a rejection of god-tending delusions of destructive rationality. No matter that such rational control supposes itself to be well intentioned. No matter that ascendant tech overlords in our contemporary era are in the process of extending such technical, instrumental control in the name of free markets. As Galluzo writes
[Zardoz] challenges us to think utopia and limits together in a way that is inexplicable to those “Star Trek socialists” who cannot distinguish freedom and flourishing from Faustian final frontiers.
That “Faustian final frontier” would be any ideological bargain that trades away a sense of human difference, human objection, political contention, and mortal and ecological vulnerability for an administrative and technological infrastructure dedicated to “rationally” perfecting the inner and outer conditions of human life. The problem of such “technomania” can plague both right-tending and left-tending visions:
Rather than tools or techniques serving human needs and ends, these technological politics entail a process of “reverse adaptation” under which human needs and ends are reshaped in accordance with socio-technological systems—centralized and decentralized alike.
In Boorman’s Zardoz, therefore, we see a neo-Luddite rejection of being-together-in-technological-rationalism, in favor of “flesh and blood struggle” with ourselves, each other, and with the world we are given. Hence the separatist Eternals, pregnant and escaping the ruins of the Vortex, take up with the Brutals in the end. The neo-Luddite position is a rejection both of orthodox Marxism and right-wing digital futures of ever more perfect markets. The Eternals might be able to download their minds and live forever in new bodies, but the result is the immiseration of the Brutals, moral suicide of the Exterminators, and a wish to die on the part of their masters. Nothing is precious in the Eternals’ utopia of technologically undying and well-managed peace and pleasure.
If the Critical Aquarian dismisses both “lifeboat ethics” (we only save a select few) and, in Galluzo’s phrase, “techno-cornucopianism” (we can expertly imagine or make everything we need), what does their implied humility of interdependence look like? I do wonder, for example, if the world in which we already live is closer than one might think to the state of permanent contention that recognizes rather than transcends “human limits.” Could our world, edited perhaps by certain and novel responses to catastrophe, be or become utopian? Galluzo interprets Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous fable, “The One Who Walk Away From Omelas,” as locating utopia in the walking away from a society where the great happiness of all depends on the misery and torture of one child. What would it look like to socialize “walking away”? The ones who walk away from the utopian Omelas are not reformers, after all. They leave, not only to make something entirely else but to imagine it. Does the demand for such imagination make concrete politics of any kind?
Zardoz, as Galluzo suggests, makes a heroic case for mortality and for finitude, that is, for moral heroism being possible only in face not simply of death but in the face of it being possible to die at all—but also it being possible to live, to give birth to other mortal creatures. It’s along these lines that Galluzo defends Zardoz from early critical writing that regarded the film as a misogynist fantasy (not a toothless claim), when instead the final offscreen union of pregnant, separatist “Eternals” and the invidiously named “Brutals” suggests a rejection of immortality and an embrace of the chancy togetherness of masculine and feminine fate. “To truly love life,” Galluzo writes hopefully, “we must accept death.” In an especially fascinating discussion of Freud’s concept of the “death drive” and the idiosyncratic philosopher Norman O. Brown, who revised the concept, Galluzo suggests that
[Human beings] are centaurs who refuse to acknowledge the animal half, who repress and deny the facts of our embodiment, our fragility, and our finitude. And… the human condition that underwrites this centaur condition is exactly our awareness of death. This awareness will remain, alongside a heightened consciousness of embodiment and fragility, in any alternative social arrangement after the other surplus repressions [such as alienation in the Marxist sense] and exploitative arrangements have been overcome.
Part of what is so fascinating and even puzzling is to imagine, if we can, Freud’s drama of desire after the elimination of “the artificial miseries of money and self-preservation.” For the Freudian “reality principle” is already Eros retrofitted for collective life. An adjusted Freudian ego accommodates its appetites to the social fact that it is unable to fulfill its wishes by instrumentalizing others in the achievement of them, whether these wishes are sexual, aggressive, or whatever. Despite the apparent reasonableness of this psychological idea, Freud theorized the conceits of psychoanalysis in a Europe of contentious nationalisms, rising anti-semitic organization, and the advent of World War; his sense of social reality inheres within it a mutually assured destruction avant la lettre. In that case, perhaps we have not yet begun to live by the reality principle; perhaps the accommodation to reality is tainted by surplus repressions, and liberation from such exploitations will mean new accommodations—but still accommodations—to a “real world” where mortality can be embraced free of artificial force multipliers. Then again, the Freudian unconscious is nothing if not a conservative repository of retained impulses, unreconstructed if not necessarily the final word in human behavior. Utopia will not wish away the human mind, however it’s imagined to be.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze says somewhere that philosophy is the invention of concepts. Galluzo’s Against the Vortex seems to me valuable in precisely this way.
Except, I suppose, Boorman’s contemporary, Alejandro Jodorowsky. I’ll never forget the Russian roulette church service in Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970), but Zardoz is a superior entertainment. El Topo and Jodorowsky’s other psychedelic masterwork, The Holy Mountain (1973), are a bit tedious, even if the visuals and imagery can be striking.