CRITERION release among things to come on 6/18/13

Well, the mob isn't a character (outside of Shakespeare!), so it's sort of cardboard-by-nature, but you're onto something in that the characters of 2036 are all basically one-dimensional. Cabal Jr. comes across as a humorless fanatic and the rest are all pretty much un-complex types. But this may have been quite deliberate on Wells's part: he was, after all, writing more about ideas than individuals (with whom he had little concern, other than in a generic, mass sort of way -- wanting to save lives and benefit humanity but not actually having anything to do with actual people -- the way socialists always spoke of "the masses" and "the proletariat", or as Harry Lime said in The Third Man, "the suckers and the mugs -- it's the same thing"). The characters in ET36 represented different forces at work in that world, not people as such. The mob, like all mobs, may be acting in one, unthinking, mind, but then so are the individual characters we meet. There's not much there there.

Odd that Wells, so much more concerned with people en masse than with individuals per se, should concoct a mindless, reactionary mob as a negative "mass' protagonist in TTC. Yet it's also curious that the only fully-realized individuals in the film are the people of 1936 and those of 1970. There's much more character, and characterization, in Passworthy, Dr. Harding, Roxanne, The Boss, even early Cabal, than anything you find in Wells's glittering new Eden. I wonder whether this aspect escaped Wells. Even though you can draw some broader parallels between his 20th-century characters and various ideas or types (e.g., Passworthy with his insipid optimism and refusal to face realities, compared to the widespread head-in-the-sand attitude of much of the real-life public in 1936), these people are still real, complicated individuals. Their successors in 2036 are not.

You caught the drift of my disdain about the so-called "gas of peace", which is indeed an exceptionally Orwellian concept. But asking Wells to be more candid (forthright is the word I'd use) in just what he was contemplating would have required that he admit that his ideal world resorted to force when threatened, just as the old one had, and with no true difference in justification -- self-preservation and power.

This is why I have a problem with this euphemistic "gas of peace": it's just another form of control by the elite. I would prefer the candor, or honesty, of tear-gas to an anesthetic that keeps the population docile, or at least controlled. Besides, I doubt any society would meekly submit to being repeatedly gassed and knocked unconscious by its rulers, no matter how pretty the life they're otherwise permitted to lead. Sooner or later they'd realize it's nothing but a form of control, wielded by people who have power, don't share it, aren't called to account for it, won't yield it voluntarily, and cannot be dislodged from it. The gas of peace is benign only when compared to Zyklon-B.

This connection with Orwell is an important one, even though Wells wrote TTC thirteen years before "1984" was published in 1949 -- a book he never lived to read, as he had died three years earlier. (Wells died the year Orwell's "Animal Farm" was published, so I doubt he ever read that either.) I first read "1984" when I was about 10 and have re-read it several times. Each time I find the book more and more prescient, principally in its discussion of language. Orwell's appendix on "The Origins of Newspeak" is fascinating, and I hope you read that and his other after-chapters, which in many ways are more insightful, and certainly relevant, than the novel proper.

But even when Orwell wrote the book there were already further real-world examples of his dystopia's double-speak. For example, the United States had already changed its Department of War to the Department of Defense (echoed in Oceania's "Ministry of Peace", which, as Orwell wrote, "concerned itself with war"). Totalitarian dictatorships styled themselves "Republics", "People's Republics", or best of all, "Democratic People's Republics", when there was nothing remotely either democratic or republican (small d, small r) about them, and, like Everytown, were certainly not run by or for "the people".

In the years since we've seen hundreds of such examples from government, corporations and pretty much any organization you can name. We are awash in euphemisms, increasingly so when a primary motive is to lull people to sleep intellectually, placing nice- or innocent-sounding names, or using terms which are just out-an-out deceptions (usually laying claim to something opposite to their true nature), on some pretty harsh, unpleasant or difficult concepts. Many conservatives (and also some liberals not in love with bogus forms of expression, such as Bill Maher) carry on about "political correctness", but they often have a point, though they make it solely against those they dislike ideologically, not their own allies. We live in a society which often prefers soft denial and comforting phraseology that neither offends nor informs, to the truth. Orwell saw it all coming, and would I think not be at all surprised (though perhaps, still, dismayed) to see how all-pervasive such linguistic constructs have become.

Humanity of course does not live in a "1984" world (outside of North Korea), but while I take your point that some aspects are closer to Huxley's "Brave New World" than "1984", we shouldn't overstate that simile either. Such parallels as do exist are evident mainly in the western world, where comparative luxury is most widespread, but the vacuous absence of intellect, the drugged-out compliance, seen in "BNW" doesn't pervade our societies -- yet. Given another hundred years on some of the courses we're following, who can say? Huxley's future is indeed much closer to Wells's (though Wells would have been appalled at the comparison), but it's not by any means identical. Lulling people into submission by giving them material luxury can be an effective means of control, but only to a point -- witness the increasing restlessness in China, where a newly prosperous society is stirring against its authoritarian leadership. This is why Orwell's much darker vision, of that "boot stamping on a human face -- forever", of total control without any hesitancy to commit murder or torture to stay in power, may in the long run be a more effective way for elites to sustain their position. They can try the velvet glove approach, including a gas of peace, but in the end even Everytown's mob would boil over in resentment. That's when the right to speak on municipal telescreens is closed off and bullets replace gas.

And with that, we're closer to Metropolis than either 1984 or "Brave New World"...and in the same cycle of governance mankind has seen throughout the ages. There are morally distinguishable relevancies to each of these, but any of them leads to the subjugation of one's fellow man.

One note on the 1984 version of Nineteen Eighty-Four: I liked the look of the film and how close it superficially resembled the world conjured by the novel, but in watching it my chief feeling was of how the film's early promise ended up either missing much of what Orwell conceived (for instance, in the book the Ministry of Love's cells were a gleaming, clean facility, not the grungy rooms in the film, which completely eviscerated Orwell's point of the differences between the rulers and the ruled), or -- in the final irony -- employing its own Orwellian concepts to subvert the author's purpose. Nowhere is this clearer than in the writer-director's decision to substitute Orwell's very explicit (and explicitly explained) use of the term "Comrade" as a form of address, for the more innocent -- and less politically-charged -- "Brother". Obviously the filmmaker decided that saying "Comrade" would be seen as an anti-Communist statement (which was Orwell's intent), and, good British leftist that he was, changed it to something meaningless and ineffectual. Life, it seems, does imitate satire.

I'd also be happy to chat on the board for either film version of the book -- either the 1984 film (whose title is technically spelled out, as above) or the 1955 British film, 1984, which overall isn't as good (or certainly as explicit) as the book or later film but which does in many ways stay truer to the Orwell. By the way, if you haven't read "Animal Farm", do so. It's a short book (about 2-3 hours to read), but there's an enormous amount you can get out of it as well.