Guilty pleasures: Zardoz

And you, poor creatures.
Who conjured you out of the clay?
Is God in show business too?

Arthur Frayne, Zardoz

19 September 2010 (Desdemona Despair) – One of Desdemona’s guilty pleasures is Zardoz, the much-maligned 1974 film by John Boorman. Desdemona was going to add a comment to last week’s NPR post, but it ballooned into this essay.

In the early 1970s, as society came down from the high weirdness of the 1960s, film dystopias became fashionable. We had Logan’s Run, Westworld, Soylent Green, Silent Running. The failure of the Hippie social revolution portended a grim future.

Boorman took a different approach, imagining instead a future in which the Hippies succeeded. Zardoz embraces assumptions from the Hippie counterculture: industrial civilization is doomed, so youth should start a new society by re-colonizing Earth with a return to folk ways, enhanced by selected technology. Boorman extrapolates to the year 2293, and Timothy Leary’s SMI²LE program has been fully realized (SMI²LE: Space Migration +  Intelligence Increase + Life Extension). The result is a society of immortal über-Hippies with crystal-enabled telepathic powers. These meta-humans, Homo eternal, live in small communities named Vortexes, which are essentially the distant descendents of Hippie communes. (“Vortex” may be a reference to the concept of ley lines and energy vortices, where New Agers believe that magic, UFOs, and various weird phenomena are amplified.) The vortexes have survived the expected apocalypse, but the majority of unevolved humans – the “Brutals” –  suffer in squalor outside of the vortexes’ protective force fields.

The utopian culture of Vortex 4 is disrupted as Zed (Sean Connery), a Zardoz worshipper and one of the Brutals, inexplicably appears among the Vortex dwellers. While the community decides what to do with “it,” Zed is given a tour of the Vortex by Friend (John Alderton), the cynical renegade. Friend reveals that Vortex life, although serene and beautiful, is a dystopian prison from which even death affords no escape. The Space Migration element of Leary’s SMI²LE program is dismissed in passing with a short exchange between Friend and Zed.

Friend: All of this technology was to travel to the distant stars.
Zed: Did you go?
Friend: Yes. Another dead end.

The Intelligence Increase element pervades Vortex society. The Eternals are cybernetically enhanced with crystalline brain implants that provide access to the entirety of human knowledge, which is stored in a supercomputer, named “The Eternal Tabernacle”, as well as psionic powers. Boorman imagines that New Age ideas about crystal power and auras have been quantified by science and engineered into devices and social interactions.

The Eternals are scientist/mystics, but there is nothing left to study. They waste time with meaningless projects; Friend uses the immense computational capacity of the Eternal Tabernacle to analyze “design growth across all makes of car.”

Boorman saves the real dystopian satire for the Life Extension element. The Eternals are immortal because of crystal-based technology that borders on magic. Their crystalline brain implants record all of their experiences and upload them to the Eternal Tabernacle. When they occasionally die, due to accident, the Eternal Tabernacle reconstructs them. More than anything else, it is immortality that makes vortex life miserable.

Zed: So what’s to stop you killing yourself?
Friend: I do now and again, but the Eternal Tabernacle simply rebuilds me.

Friend asks Zed, “Would you like to see immortality at work?” He takes Zed to see the Renegades, a bedlam of Vortex dwellers who have been artificially aged, the only form of punishment: “condemned to an eternity of senility.” Zed then visits the Apathetics, Vortex dwellers that have withdrawn into catatonia. Friend explains that this is a disease that’s slowly creeping through all the Vortexes. “Apathetic or Renegade: Make your choice.”

Worse yet, all of the Eternal men are impotent. Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) explains that despite the techno-mystical advances of the Eternals, the connection between consciousness and potency remains mysterious.

Of course, we all know the physical process involved, but not the link between stimulus and response. There seems to be a correlation with violence, with fear. Many hanged men died with an erection. You are all more-or-less aware of our intensive researches into this subject. Sexuality declined probably because we no longer needed to procreate. Eternals soon discovered that erection was impossible to achieve.

Consuella, Zardoz

She espouses a radical feminist rationalization: “We are no longer victims of this violent, convulsive act which so debased women and betrayed men.” Consuella harbors an immediate hatred of Zed, arguing that “it” should be destroyed as a threat to social order. In a public experiment, she aims to demonstrate that Zed’s ability to achieve erection is a purely animal reflex, but he undermines her by controlling his erection and making it clear that Consuella is its inspiration.

Consuella’s lover, the geneticist May (Sara Kestelman), sees Zed as a superior mutant and the savior of the Eternals. She believes that the only way to keep the Vortex system going is to birth new children, and she wants Zed to provide the seed. To win his agreement, May promises to reveal the secrets of the Eternals, but only if he reveals how he entered the Vortex: “You must give the truth, if you wish to receive it.”

Boorman portrays the transmission of mystical knowledge as a penetrative act of sexual intimacy that inalterably changes the recipient; knowledge of the true nature of the world leaves a scar. May warns Zed: “It’ll burn you,” but Zed is fearless: “Then burn me.” (Fans of Boorman’s later film, Excalibur, will recognize this exchange from the showdown between Merlin and Morgana.)

May extracts Zed’s memories and learns of the conspiracy to use Zed to destroy the Vortex. The final paradox comes into focus: With eternity ahead, the only interesting project that remains is to end eternity. May discerns that Friend and Arthur Frayne have undertaken this project.

Consuella discovers May and Zed in psionic congress. She flies into a jealous rage and hisses at May, “For this, you’ll be aged 50 years, no less!” This moment defines the final schism in the society of Vortex 4, which is now split among those who want to save the existing Vortex order by killing Zed, led by Consuella, those who want to renew Vortex society by breeding him, led by May, and the original conspirators who contrived to destroy the Vortex system and put an end to eternity.

May and her followers get to Zed first and transmit the sum of human knowledge by “touch-teaching.” Again, Boorman portrays the transmission of occult knowledge as a sexual act – in return Zed provides his genetically superior seed.

Zed receives the entirety of human knowledge in an orgiastic congress of mystic über-Hippie sex. But May’s plan to save the Eternals by creating a “better breed” is doomed. She has given Zed the knowledge to hack the Eternal Tabernacle, and Zed’s motivation is vengeance. May pleads with Friend to let her plan unfold.

May: Don’t destroy the Vortex! Let us renew it. A better breed could prosper here. Given time–
Friend: Time? Wasn’t eternity enough?

Boorman sides with Zed and the conspirators: the Vortex system must fall, because of its egregious moral failings. The Eternals long ago discarded the Hippie ideals of universal peace and love in favor of a cruel isolationism. Not only do they callously ignore the suffering of human survivors outside of the force fields, the Eternals actively slaughter them; as a Zardoz worshipper, Zed has been bred by the Eternals to be an Exterminator who kills humans with guns provided by his god.

Ultimately, Vortex 4 falls, in an extended grand guignol. Desdemona can’t hear the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 without remembering the coda of Zardoz.

You can see how Desdemona would have a weakness for this film. It has all the elements: looming apocalypse, desperate measures that are ultimately futile, and bare-breasted Hippie women. If you’d like to see one of the most thoughtful dystopias in cinema, give Zardoz a chance.