2073

Ghost lives off-grid in a dystopian New San Francisco in the year 2073. In a fascist and toxic world, where everyone is under constant surveillance and masked police regularly snatch people off of the street, there is no dissent, so there is no freedom, and even a Ghost can’t stay unnoticed for too long.

2073 is a science fiction docudrama by filmmaker Asif Kapadia.

A “docudrama” basically means that it’s a documentary threaded through with some fanciful bits of fluff depicting the fictional story of a woman who is living off the grid in the ruins of an old mall in a near-future hell. The film then uses this sci-fi ephemera to talk about the long slow death of our world, our futures, our hopes, and our dreams, as well as the concurrent birth of an ugly prison world run by a pleonastic oligarchy of evil corporations, greedy tech bro asshole billionaires, and the scumbag pedo libertarians and White Christian Nationalist monsters eager to act as their water-carriers and cruel Brownshirts, all in order to ask the question: How did we get here?

The idea for the film was apparently inspired by Chris Marker's influential 1962 short film, La Jetee, which was of course the inspiration for both the film and the TV show, 12 Monkeys.

What's La Jetee, you ask?

A black and white artistic short film made up almost entirely from still photos, La Jetee (The Pier) is the story of a time loop, due to a time travel experiment after a nuclear war. And back in the 90s, back in the halcyon days of VHS, it was 1/3rd of the Film Head Holy Trinity. This was when 56k modems were bleeding edge tech, of course, so it was not only long before YouTube was even an idea, it was before what we now know of as the Internet even existed. Information, niche experiences, these things were much more dificult to come by back in those days, especially if you lived outside the larger cities. As a result, along with Eraserhead and Tetsuo: The Iron Man, La Jetee was this legendarily obscure film, an inspiration, an ur source, a glimpse of true cinematic vision, unlike anything you could find playing in the multiplexs, and something that was only known to most of the faithful due to occasional vague references made in pop culture magazines, or by the lesser film gods ensconced behind the filthy counters of whatever your local video store was, where it was usually mentioned in a kind of casual off-handed way, all in an effort to flaunt their enviable bonfides. And these films only grew in legend the more people heard about them and wanted to see them, but weren't able to.

Because if you wanted to have that experience yourself...?

TOO BAD!

They were almost impossible to track down on VHS, and you could forget about ever getting the chance to see one of them on the big screen. But if you had been lucky enough to see one of them, most likely on a grainy, heat-warped VHS copy of a copy of a copy while sinking into the couch in the darkened living room of your pothead buddy's patchouli-befouled house, then you, my friend... you were a King Nerd of the highest order, a true film head, an annointed figure, one worthy of both respect... and fear... for you had been blessed, designated by divine right as an cinema authority. You were an elder, a filmic shaman. Speak your wisdom unto us, O' wise Sage of the Nickelodeon, the nerds would plead, and you would, for you were better than them, the great unwashed. If you had seen the Trilogy, you could sneer down upon them from on high, these pathetic hoi polloi wallowing about in the vulgar plebeian mud beneath you, the sad filthy wretches who had not bathed in the holy flickering light of the Silver Screen as you had, who had not seen the things that you have seen, who did not know the things that you now know!

Of course, now you can find all three films online pretty easily, so... whatever.

Anyway, my point is, I’m not entirely sure what the exact line from 2073 to La Jetee is supposed to be (Why, yes, obviously I have seen La Jetee), but perhaps it lies in how the film laments a lost world, while facing the looming threat of the end of everything with a feeling of doomed inevitability.

“I hope someone finds this,” a disembodied voice says as the film begins.

The year is 2073, 37 years after something that called “The Event.” We see trees burnt to charred crisps, the sludgy waves washing junk ashore, and the cracked earth of arid wastelands. We're told that New San Francisco is the capital of the Americas. It's a crowded city, the streets filled with jackbooted, militarized police, the sidewalks crowded with the unhoused, and the skies filled with drones. A harsh cacophony of ads and announcements blare and flash and roar from every surface. One declares “Chairwoman Trump celebrates 30th year in power” while showing a picture of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner from decades ago, when they were young. The entire city is trapped beneath a dome of orange haze that blots out the sun, all save for the towers of glass and steel and luxury that rise above the choking clouds and the stink of the corpse that is humanity.

Ghost lives in the small space behind an old shoe store in an abandoned mall, quietly remembering the stories her grandmother told her of the old world, before the fascists and the oligarchs destroyed everything. Ghost has no voice, she doesn't speak, first from trauma and fear, but now from habit. She scavenges the ruins and the dumpsters for supplies, trying to avoid the vicious police prowling the streets, and their electronic eyes in the sky above. There are many others who live like her, hiding and scavenging, and every day, she notices that someone has vanished.

Eventually, she is tagged by a passing drone. Men in masks show up. They put a bag over her head and drag her away. She is strapped to a chair somewhere, and her re-education begins with a monotone computer voice asking her an endless series of inane questions that she is unable to ever answer, because she has no voice, and there is no one to speak for her.

Name? Where were you born? Where in New San Francisco have you visited? What are tames of relatives and associates? What groups or organizations do you connect with? What is two plus two? Which books have you read? Have you ever participated in a protest? Do you pray? Would you like to self-confess your crimes? Do you have any contact with any illegals in the Americas? Have you ever signed a petition? What are your religious practices? Who are your contacts abroad? Where is your tracking device? What has changed in your mind? Do you have contact with anyone who has been re-educated? What will you do when you are released? What is two plus two? The answer is five. What is two plus two? Incorrect. What is two plus two?

The majority of 2073 is spent answering the question of doomsday. What happened and why? When and where did it start? What political, technological, social, and economical events have to happen for the end of the world as we know it? Using clips of movies mixed with real world footage, the film traces events that have happened in our world, or are about to happen, or probably will happen, that is, if other events are allowed to happen first, all to illustrate how we are currently on the timeline to destruction. It speaks to journalists who walk us through the rise of social media harassment, of fascism and white nationalism, of state-sanctioned surveillance, corporate malfeasance, and religious zealotry, as well as the deep well of unregulated data being gathered, and its use to control our lives, all while those in power disappear critics and political rivals all over the world. The film points to many, many signs that we are well down the road to ruin, and it uses modern day images of brutality and violent oppression to highlight this.

Of course, the truly terrifying part of all this is that it's clear this film has been in the works for a while now, so most of its warnings are for things that have already come to pass, some of them long ago even. This not only makes 2073 all the more terrifying, at the same time, it ends up seeming quaintly out-of-date, like it's just a bunch of alarms that are now finally kicking on, sounding way too late. That's the overall feeling while watching 2073... it's all too late.

And the same can be said of the fictional side of the film too. There’s a lot of familiar ideas presented here, a lot of old school cyberpunk tropes. The central point of the entire film is the idea that there won't be one single thing that will be able to take total credit for our eventual/inevitable Armageddon. The idea is, if we survive this era well enough to be able to accurately remember history better than just holding a square frame up over a series of fire-lit cave paintings while shouting "'Member this? 'Member this?", that there won't be an Archduke Ferdinand that historians can point to and say "This. This right here. This was the start of it all." Instead, the film postulates that the end will be due to a series of concurrent and interlinked events.

That's what they're talking about when the talk about The Event.

The Event is clearly inspired by The Jackpot, an idea from the novels of William Gibson, the father of Cyberpunk, that featured prominently in one book that was adapted into the TV show The Periphreal. Sure, sure, William Gibson may not have been the original source of this particular idea, but he is most well-known for it. Also, if Asif Kapadia was inspired by La Jetee, then the biggest sucker bet in the world would be to bet that Kapadia's Cyberpunk Docudrama WASN'T almost entirely inspired by the works of William Gibson.

Anyway, in his books, The “Jackpot” is a concept used to describe a series of interlinked crises... climate change, pandemics, economic inequality, political instability, small wars, blah, blah, blah, the cumulative nature of which gradually devastates the world, eventually reducing the world population by 80 percent over the second half of the 21st century. It's described as...

"It was nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves."

It's the kind of idea that is at once astoundingly simple to understand, while also shockingly easy to see is already happening simply by looking out the window, and is not only scary as fuck, but depressing as shit. Especially as the idea was put forth by the same guy credited with coining the term "cyberspace," who envisioned the internet before it even existed, so... he's basically got a track record for seeing the likely future before it sets in. Also, he wrote about this idea over a decade ago, and it's clearly something that we're in the middle of right now, so... fuck...

Right?

Unfortunately, the film has no answer to fix any of this shit, but that's because there is no answer to be given, or at least, there isn't an easy one, or at least, there isn't one that Americans want to hear, especially white Americans, because it all boils down to the same thing...

All of you cruel idiots and selfish assholes out there have to stop listening to the racist old wrinkle-bag fuckstick white men, the wormtongue Centrists, the Mens Rights Steroid freaks, the creepy billionaire weirdos, the insane Christian zealots, the rabid TERFs, and all of the idiot wellness grifters, or whatever pro-raw milk, anti-high fructose corn syrup, loneliness epidemic blaming, anti-DEI, anti-trans, George Soros and weather weapon obsessed sovereign citizen snakeoil salesman du jour that you assholes are currently obsessed with, and start actually being an actual good person. You need to start being the kind of person who no longer thinks of themselves first, last, and always, and start being someone who thinks about the rest of the world. You need to make sacrifices, big and small. You need to push back on the bullshit. Loud and often. You need to clean up your own house, and deal with the bigots and nazis and monsters who live there and enjoy your comfort and care. You need to confront all of the kneejerk hatreds and fears within your own chest and reject them. Most of all, you need to do this constantly now, and forever, and without any promise of a reward or any acknowledgement, nothing, you will get nothing for this, save for knowledge that you are doing the right thing, and that has to be enough for you. Anything less means being a villain.

That's it. That's the answer.

Unfortunately, when it comes to most Americans, and to the majority of white Americans especially, the idea of confronting their own complicity is seen as an attack, and they will respond in kind. They do not like hearing this kind of shit at all. No way. No how. In fact, they are willing to build concentration camps just to ensure that they don't have to hear any of it.

So you'll excuse me if I'm unwilling to hold my breath waiting for that particular change to come. Especially when you consider the fact that the current dominate culture in America is the one that is primarily and directly responsible for the shit hole garbage heap world we all live in now, right?

Still, I'm reminded of one of the many football games our absolute loser high school football team was getting trounced in, way back in the day. I'm reminded of a time when, somewhere in the deep fourth quarter, while we were losing horribly, and were climbing off some poor JV squad sophmore alternate halfback we had just angrily smeared across the field, some poor kid who had been rotated in by the other team just so they could get some playing time in a varsity game (because it's not like the team was in any danger of losing at that point), only to get their bell rung by us because their Offensive line were basically all chubby freshmen from the JV squad by then too, and hearing the ref say: "Yep... all you can really do at this point is punish 'em with your hits..."

I'm reminded of this because 2073 does have some good truths in there, some things to remember and to hold close to your heart…

“Our duty, as people who care about other people, is to oppose those who don’t care about anyone except themselves. Because if we do nothing, we face mass extinction.”

The fight is all you're gonna get, so embrace it.