The Films of 2014: Space Station 76

Just about my favorite period of science fiction film and television endured from 1968 (and 2001: A Space Odyssey) to 1976, the heyday of Space: 1999.

During this all-too-brief a span, writers, directors and production designers imagined mankind reaching out -- and sometimes faltering -- on his journey to the stars.

Sometimes man’s technology -- whether HAL the computer, or dangerous nuclear waste facilities located on the lunar surface -- vexed him. Yet despite such crises, mankind was on the very brink of some great awakening about himself, and about the nature not merely of the cosmos, but existence itself. 

This promising future, as presented in films like Moon Zero Two (1969), and Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969) and on television programming like UFO (1970) or Earth II (1972), had crisp, white, minimalist lines and bright lights. It featured talking computers, video-phones, and characters who faced the realm of outer space with a cool, even dispassionate temperament, at least at times.

The new film Space Station 76 (2014) from director Jake Plotnick imagines that this early-seventies vision of the future endured, and then actually came to pass. 

In other words, the seventies never ended.

Instead, we took these visions of the disco decade with us not just to the turn of the Millennium, but into the very “space age” future itself.

Accordingly, Space Station 76 features some intriguing anachronisms. In this future age, for example, gay men are still firmly in the closet. African-Americans don’t get assigned to the most “exclusive” space ships. Astronauts smoke cigarettes. Kids watch recorded entertainment on giant VCR recorders and VHS tapes.  And the latest fashion trends from Earth are displayed not on the Internet (which doesn’t exist…), but on imported-from-Earth GAF View-Master discs.

Yet despite an overt lack of the social and technological progress that we recognize and covet in 2014, men and women in this “future” live on space stations, see robot therapists, and travel the stars together.

So the future is fantastic and…retro.

Space Station 76’s premise is abundantly tricky and fun, and the film’s knowledgeable visuals make it an absolute must-see for fans of 1970s science fiction.  Several sets and ship designs will, certainly, ring a bell for genre fans.

The film also deals powerfully, at times, with its central metaphor that people are like asteroids. They fly together “in space” in close proximity but never touch, and never actually connect on a meaningful level. 

Instead, sometimes they merely collide, smashing into one another with catastrophic force.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s a feeling of widespread malaise among the characters in Space Station ‘76 and a spiritual emptiness too. Not coincidentally, those things are part and parcel of the 1970s aesthetic as well.

Conspicuous consumption arose (as did President Carter’s “crisis of confidence”) in the seventies when many people began to fill the empty places inside with the pursuit of material things, including wealth.  This shift towards material avarice -- which came to symbolize America in Reagan’s Era -- is embodied in Space Station 76 through the overt failure of several adult relationships, and the burning desire of space station residents to move to Starship 8, a destination which features, among other things, a shopping mall.

Unfortunately, and despite all its intelligence and promise, Space Station 76 struggles mightily to find a consistent tone. The film vacillates between grim, The Ice Storm (1997)-like revelations about human relationships and overt physical comedy, But it never finds the right mode for coherently blending the two. Some of the characters, including the vixen Misty, come off as barely-two dimensional cartoons, whereas others, like Liv Tyler’s Marlowe, seem more realistic.

This inconsistent approach to the material and characters means that those seeking a laugh-out loud comedy will be disappointed by the general seriousness of the enterprise, and those seeking a consistent, dedicated story about life in this “retro universe” will find the bows to conventional, crowd-pleasing humor distracting.

Space Station 76 is smart and knowledgeable in its discussion of the 1970s, science fiction visions of that time period, and human nature, so it’s a shame that, in the final analysis, the film doesn’t come together quite as well as it should have.

“Just relax and let the drugs work.”

A new warrant officer, Lt. Cmdr Jessica Marlowe (Liv Tyler), boards Space Station 76 following the departure of the well-liked Daniel, who left because of some secret scandal.

Captain Glenn (Patrick Wilson) has told various crew members different stories about Daniel’s absence, including the lies that he was promoted, and that he suffered a family crisis. The truth is that Glenn and Daniel were lovers, but that Glenn has not yet accepted his homosexuality, even as he finds himself longing for Daniel’s companionship.

Meanwhile, the ship’s technician, Ted (Matt Bomer) is trapped in an unhappy marriage with Misty (Marisa Coughlan), who is having an affair with another crewman, Steve (Jerry O’Donnell). 

Medicated by the station’s therapist, a robot called Dr. Bot, Misty is also the insecure mother of a young child: Sunshine (Kylie Rogers).

As Marlowe settles in, she and Ted start growing attracted to one another, and Marlow befriends Sunshine, to Misty’s chagrin.

Meanwhile, Captain Glenn is unhappy working with Marlowe because of his feelings about Daniel, and Steve’s wife, Donna (Kali Rocha) is looking to move to luxurious and exclusive Starship 8.

As the holiday season nears, interpersonal stresses on Space Station 76 increase, and a deadly asteroid approaches on a collision course…

“Your whole vibe is stressing me.”

In terms of its visuals, Space Station 76 takes knowing and loving inspiration from the science fiction cinema and television programming of the 1970s. 

The shuttle pod which first carries Marlowe to the station, for instance, looks very much like the Seeker from the Filmation live-action Saturday morning series Space Academy (1977).

Additionally, Marlowe spends much time in the film inside a hydroponics dome, the interior and exterior of which both resemble a similar garden dome on the Valley Forge, from Douglas Trumball’s Silent Running (1972). Domes of this very design later appeared on other productions of the 1970s including Battlestar Galactica (1978) and The Starlost (1973).

Space Station 76 also uses a device similar to an actual 1976 film in one scene. Captain Glenn talks to Daniel on a multi-colored hologram communicator, one that reflects the imagery of Logan's Run (1976) and its hologram.

More intriguingly, perhaps, the interiors for Space Station 76 -- with their white lights and white walls – closely resemble the corridors of Moonbase Alpha in Space: 1999.  

One panel seen in the film -- of three horizontal lighting ellipses -- actually looks like it was transplanted directly from that Anderson-ian facility.

Impressively, Space Station 76’s thematic approach is in fact visualized through this Moonbase Alpha corridor style. Early in the film, we see young Sunshine, replete with a purple crayon, coloring on the immaculate white walls. She scrawls the word “home” on the ivory panels as well.

The moment is not merely a call-back to Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955), but a visual representation of the film’s leitmotif. The purple scribbling on the white wall represents the idea of messy humanity imposing his chaotic nature on an artificial world of immaculate perfection and balance. The characters in Space Station 76 are deeply flawed, even tragic in nature, and they are out of place, and out-of-balance, with their perfectly calibrated environs.

Space Station 76’s robot therapist, Dr. Bot, is also a product of nostalgia for an earlier age of “futurist” imaginings. The robot shrink is actually Tomy’s Verbot, a toy from the early 1980s. The toy was advertised as being a real robot with “a dazzling personality” who would “blink and smile at your request.”

Dr. Bot in the film is not much more advanced than this description suggests, and he offers only off-the-shelf wisdom and platitudes.  In a way, the robot psychologist’s nature as a proverb-quoting automaton may be an oblique reference to the robots in Disney’s The Black Hole (1979), who quoted Cicero and other philosophers. So again, a call back to the disco decade’s space operas.

All these visual touches make one aware that Space Station 76 has been created with a humorous eye towards our historic (and therefore deeply flawed…) visions of the future. When the film adheres to this concept, and crafts jokes based on the fallacies of those historic visions, it is indeed rather funny.  

There’s a scene here in which Keir Dullea from 2001: A Space Odyssey video-phones Marlowe, his daughter, and they share a conversation.  But all the emotional heart of the moment is sacrificed -- thus reinforcing the theme that people talk, but don’t connect -- because Dullea’s character can’t find the right place to sit on camera for the video phone to operate correctly. He ends up half off-screen, a funny moment which makes one grasp, instantly, the impracticality of such a device.

Other moments, such as Glenn’s periodic suicide attempts -- which are prevented by the station’s computer -- don’t work very well at all, and seem downright cartoony compared to the film’s relatively straight-faced exploration of relationship woes. I get the idea, of course.  The late 1960s and early 1970s gave us talking computers that controlled space flight, telemetry, life-support and so forth.  Think about HAL in 2001 or Alpha’s Main Computer on 1999 noting, in a moment of catastrophe that “Human Decision” is “Required.” 

Here, Glenn makes the choice to kill himself, but computer protocols keep overriding his very human decision.

In terms of its overall story, Space Station 76’s inspiration seems to be The Ice Storm (1997), a film based on the 1994 book by Rick Moody.

The novel and the film both concerned an American middle-class family in the 1970s, post-Watergate, and during a time of sexual experimentation. Everything was being questioned in that span, from marriage, to patriotism (because of Vietnam), to the competence of the U.S. Government.  Even marriage -- or perhaps, more accurately -- monogamy, was on the table.  

Space Station 76 deals with similar concerns.  Here families are coming apart at the seams, and there is one galvanizing outside event that serves as a manifestation of their disquiet, not a winter ice storm, but an approaching asteroid on collision course.

Although slapstick humor is always fun, Space Station 76 would have been a stronger film, perhaps had it not strayed so far from the tone of The Ice Storm, which is more cynical and darkly caustic than outright silly. The sillier moments in this retro space film seem out of left field, while the more serious ones, for the most part, are genuinely affecting. Played straight (at least on the surface), the film would have felt more powerful, and less scatter-shot.

There’s so much going on in Space Station 76, and I don’t mean to give the impression that the film is a failure.  I admire it quite a bit both for its canny knowledge of the films and TV shows I love, and for the manner in which its visual form -- asteroids and malfunctioning video chats -- represent interpersonal alienation. 

But the over-the-top jokes tend pull the whole affair back down to Earth.

Cult-Movie Review: Enemy (2014)

(Watch out for spoilers)

Jake Gyllenhaal stars in Enemy (2013), an intriguing and often disturbing adaptation of Jose Saramago’s novel The Double (2002). 

The film, from director Denis Velleneuve involves -- on a surface level -- an introverted history professor named Adam Bell (Gyllenhaal) who makes the bizarre discovery that he has a doppelganger: an actor named Anthony Claire (also Gyllenhaal). 

As Adam grows more and more curious about the stranger who shares his face, he begins to make disturbing discoveries about him. 

For one thing, Anthony has cheated on his pregnant wife, Helen (Sara Gadon) more than once, and for another, Anthony not only looks like Adam, he has the same scar on his torso. 

They aren’t just alike, therefore, but duplicates, or, perhaps, mirror images.

When the two men finally meet, Anthony also proves to be Adam’s polar opposite in terms of temperament.  He is deceitful and dangerous.  

And worse, Anthony demands that since Adam has already met his wife, Helen (by chance, on campus), he deserves to spend the weekend with Adam’s girlfriend, Mary (Melanie Laurent). If Adam lets him do that, the two men can part, and never meet again, Anthony promises. 

Fearful for his life, Adam acquiesces.  And he doesn’t tell Mary about the switch.

But with his girlfriend gone for a weekend away with his exact duplicate, Adam decides to pay Helen a visit in Anthony’s apartment.

When Mary determines that Anthony is not Adam, she argues with him, and they both die in a car accident, leaving Adam to replace Anthony as Helen’s husband.

But the more things change for Adam, the more things stay the same...

One key to understanding Enemy and its sub-text involves the classroom lessons it features. 

At least twice during the film, Adam, a college instructor, is seen lecturing before an auditorium-sized gathering of students, a black-board behind him.  

Adam discusses, explicitly a “pattern.” 

He gazes at human civilizations throughout history and sees the same repeating truth; that free societies becoming increasingly controlled until they are dictatorships, ones owned and dominated by the elite and powerful.  

The entrenched power in these free societies, over time, limit culture, reduce spending on education, and curtail individual liberty.  

“This is a pattern that repeats throughout history,” he notes.  “It’s about control.”

Almost immediately after audiences witness the disheveled Adam deliver that lecture once, he delivers it a second time (ostensibly to a different section) in the same classroom, without much variation.  

A powerful point is made visually here when Adam repeats his own words. Because Adam repeats his lecture on the “pattern,” it is impossible not to reflect that he is trapped in a kind of cycle or pattern of his own as well.  

But just as citizens in free societies tend not to be aware of the abrogation of their liberties over time, so does Adam fail to realize his place in the scheme of things.  

He too is trapped in a cycle, one that, as yet, is not entirely plain. To quote the film's opening card "chaos is order yet undeciphered."  

For Adam this means his life seems to falling into chaos when, in fact, the opposite is true. He is slowly beginning to decipher a new truth about himself, and his world.

Specifically, a viewing of the film “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way” (recommended by a co-worker) leads Adam to the discovery of his doppelganger, Anthony.  

The film reaches an apex of creepiness when this unsettling discovery is made. The realization occurs in a half-asleep daze, and there's a weird, dream logic to it.  

We wonder: has Adam discovered Anthony, dreamed up Anthony, or revived the memory of Anthony (and his very identity) from some past schizoid episode?

As he begins to learn about Anthony’s life, the film follows Adam through a modern metropolis (Toronto, I believe), and the viewer gleans a strong sense of a de-humanized, impersonal place.  

Many buildings feature reflective window glass panes, for instance, and they reflect only other buildings, other opaque structures. The people inside, and the realms they inhabit are not visible. There’s a strong sense, in all these sequences, of a colorless, life-less, unhappy place. The architecture seems to overwhelm the people, seems to outpace individuality. 

The movie poster, pictured at the top of this post, recognizes the importance of the urban landscape to Adam's psyche.  It casts a palpable shadow, or places a powerful weight, over his life, over his identity.

On a deeper level, and going back to that school-room lecture, one might suggest that Adam lives in a modern world (our world) in which culture and education are being bled dry by budget cuts, and personal liberty is being eroded (thanks to the surveillance state, and lack of privacy encouraged by the Web 2.0 age.) 

Accordingly, Adam“loses” the very thing that makes him special in the film: his identity. His individuality. 

As he loses freedom, and as society loses its knowledge of history (via education) and the arts (or culture), Adam becomes so unimportant as an individual human being that he finally encounters a man who, down to a perfectly-placed scar, is him. The very things that make him special to himself no longer matter. He has become part of a faceless, distinction-less herd.

If any of this seems familiar to you, it's because there is a strong Kafka-esque feel to the story vetted in Enemy. Adam wakes up one day not as a cockroach (as in The Metamorphosis [1915]), but as a person who has nothing and who is nothing. The world has taken away anything that could have marked him as different or notable. Anthony takes his girlfriend and takes his life without so much as a by-your-leave.  

The larger message (one in keeping with The Trial [1925] and Josef K’s plight) is that Adam is lost in an inhuman system where he has no freedom, and worse, no real value.

Leaving behind this complex socio-political reading of the film, it’s possible to gaze at Enemy in another, more overtly psychological way, and again, some of the symbols help audiences to do so.

For instance, throughout the film Adam is haunted by imagery of spiders, and spider-human hybrids. Seeing this, I again thought of Kafka, and the cockroach transformation in The Metamorphosis.

The first spider is seen early in the film. Anthony is visiting an underground sex club, and a spider is (a bizarre) part of one very kinky act.  

Later, we witness a naked woman with a spider’s head and compound eyes.  Adam sees her in a long, dark hallway.

 There’s even a bizarre shot of a giant spider astride the impersonal city I mentioned before.

Enemy's final shot, even, is a call-back to this nightmarish, grotesque imagery.  lovely, sweet Helen inexplicably goes silent in another room, and Adam goes searching for her.  

When he turns a corner, he sees not the pregnant woman he was expecting, but a giant, coiled spider clinging to the wall.

What does the spider mean, in context of the film’s story of doubling? 

It’s a little complicated, perhaps, but it also makes a kind of emotional or psychological sense. So, follow me, if you will, from the beginning.

Isabella Rossellini plays Adam’s mother in the film and her (thoroughly unpleasant and cruel) character gives up the game at one point, confusing Adam’s taste in food for Anthony's.  

What this slip-up means is not that there are twins in the film, but that Adam and Anthony are one in the same…a single person, perhaps undergoing some kind of schizoid experience.  

They share an important family photograph, for example.  Each personality has the same photo (of Adam/Anthony and his wife) in their separate apartments. 

They also share a scar, of course, and a nearly identical taste in women. Significantly, Helen and Mary could be doppelgangers too (though they aren’t).

What are to conclude, then?  

One possible answer is that Anthony is the part of Adam’s personality that can’t be faithful; can’t be true. He has cheated on his wife before, visited sex clubs, and is keeping an apartment and girlfriend in another apartment, on the side. 

And so when Mary realizes the truth (by noticing the shade of skin on his wedding ring finger...), she must eliminated by Anthony.  This is exactly what happens via (intentional?) car accident. 

So where does the spider fit in?

In general and historic terms, spider imagery has been interpreted in many ways. It has been, in many circumstances, considered feminine (!), representative of cunning, or even symbolic of the fact that we each spin our own fate (as a spider spins its own web). 

All those interpretations come into play here.  

The spider Adam sees is his bad behavior regarding women made manifest, the persistence of his lack of marital fidelity. Put another way, the spider is his illicit sexual desire.  

When Adam encounters the spider, it is explicitly a reminder of his life as aggressive Anthony, living by cunning and deceit.  For example, Adam unexpectedly encounters the spider at the end of the film because he has discovered a key to the underground sex club that Anthony visited, and he knows he won’t be able to resist the temptation to go.  

His wife -- trusting, beautiful, kind Helen -- is therefore replaced by the symbol of Adam's bad behavior: the spider.

The Anthony part of his personality will re-assert itself, and he will again act badly. That's what the film's final shot reveals, in hideous detail.  

Now, he may not intend to relapse into infidelity, but he is going to.  There will be many more “Anthonys” to intrude in Adam's life as he steps out on his wife, again and again.

In whatever way -- political or psychological -- one chooses to parse Enemy (2013), it is a remarkable and thoughtful film. 

An air of doom, of amorphous dread, hangs over the enterprise like a shroud.  We don’t always know precisely what we should fear, but we know something bad is going to happen.  In this manner, perhaps, the film’s form reflects its content. Adam learns that either his very identity is slipping away in a totalitarian state, or that he has become viscerally disconnected from his morality and responsibilities to his wife. 

Either way, the future bodes poorly for him.

Enemy is a challenging film -- obsessive, strange, and surreal -- but one entirely worth the journey, especially if you happen to be someone who appreciates visual symbolism, and isn’t seeking easy or direct answers to a mystery.  

The best way to approach Enemy is with an engaged intellect, and with the movie's own inaugural words. 

Images that at first may seem chaotic are strange are actually just order as yet "undeciphered."

I encourage you to decipher the film -- and its visual clues -- in your own way. 

Movie Trailer: Interstellar (2014)