Dennis Biba

Logan is running. He is in a hurry. Holding his hand is a pretty lady whose name doesn’t matter, because her only function in the entire film is to like the sandman at her side – not the fairy tale character of course; the sandmen form a police unit in the film, whose main task is to prevent all other people from running.

But back to the future: Escape to the 23rd century says the title of the German version and even if that seems very futuristic at first, the title should much rather be Escape from the shopping malls of the 1970s to the rural idyll of the 1950s, which admittedly would sound a bit unhandy from a marketing perspective. In this future scenario, which is based on the 1967 book of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, North Americans live under a huge transparent plastic dome. When the film was released in cinemas in 1976, such dome cities were already part of a longer literary tradition: glass or at least transparent domes as designs for urban utopian architecture appear both in H. G. Wells‘ When the sleeper wakes (1899) and in Fred MacIsaac’s The Hothouse World (1931). In the case of Andre Laurie’s Atlantis (1895) or Stanton Arthur Coblentz’s The Sunken World (1928), they even go underwater. In this story, the dome covers a futuristic city, which is very clearly a shopping mall in the real world. The lifestyle of its inhabitants is also consumerist. In light clothing, they stroll from one pleasure to the next and indulge in free love. However, the dark side of the utopia quickly becomes apparent: the city is controlled by a single supercomputer, and its rigorous biopolitics stipulates that the inhabitants are renewed (= killed) when they reach the age of 30. It is therefore not surprising that many 29-year-olds take to their heels and try to escape from the dome. And so does Logan, whose job it is to prevent this. Unsurprisingly, he manages to escape outside, a place where life should not actually be possible. In the ruins of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. however, he meets an old man whose existence proves the opposite.

What in the 1970s could perhaps still be understood as a critique of capitalism in the sense of an ecological counter-culture, creates a dilemma from today’s perspective. On the one hand, there is the dome city, the urban utopia in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wilderness. Protection from the dangers of the outside world is bought at the price of a lack of freedom – the shortened lifespan of the inhabitants only increases the drastic nature of the scenario and makes it easier for the audience to make a judgment, but basically almost all glass dome stories play with the contrast between security and freedom. On the other hand, there is the outside world: a wilderness that is not at all hostile to life, in which one can grow old in peace and enter into monogamous relationships. A clear decision for nature lovers. However, the dichotomy between nature and culture, past and future, or tradition and progress, which is spatially spanned here, must be viewed critically. It is easy to design a dystopian scenario, but it is much more difficult to find serious alternatives to it. In Logan’s Run, the alternative to the dome world is the paleoconservative idea of a free life in the wild, of the marriage between the hero and the supporting actress and the subsequent Christian nuclear family against the historical backdrop of the former United States of America. While the dome inhabitants at least don’t have to worry about the next rainstorm, the life in the outside world propagated in the film has nothing progressive to offer, but rather revels in a sentimentality in which one doesn’t really know which long-gone time one is actually supposed to mourn. The escape into the 23rd century thus also reveals itself as an escape into an indefinable past, not a utopia, but (using a term by the sociologist Zygmunt Baumann) a retrotopia whose escapism is revealing.