Zardoz

Imagine COVID-19 as reflective of desires to keep demographics stratified, with no intermingling amongst different collectives, even though at the moment isolation is paramount.

The title sounded cool and it stars Sean Connery.

I imagine John Boorman didn't like ivory towers much.

Or the politics of the left in the early '70s.

Zardoz expresses such sentiments anyways with blunt instinctual derision.

It's absurd menacing political satire.

Confrontationally conceived.

In a hypothetical future, the elite have sealed themselves off within an impenetrable exclusive zone, where they live immortal lives of plenty, or at least with everything they need.

Outer regions know only chaos in maddening woebegone conflict.

The immortals have struggled to achieve enlightenment and have compiled vast repertoires of scientific knowledge, but some of them have grown restless, bored, tired of the limits of infinite perfection.

Fortunately for them, an enforcer stows away on the giant head that travels between realms, hiding beneath the grain, intent on acquiring wisdom (Sean Connery as Zed).

He introduces a unique element.

Curious carnal contrariety.

The immortals have cast off emotion you see, and live within stoic reasonable boundaries, with no children or families or nurturing, just rarefied rational discourse.

Subversive intentions plaque somnambulistic.

Those in control have qualified everything.

Gross exaggeration pervades the rigid Zardoz, but I still wonder how it was received at the time? I've certainly never heard anyone discuss it and don't recall it ever showing up in rerun.

I imagine it was cutting edge sci-fi for the '70s, at least some of the visuals are quite impressive, not the giant head itself so scandalous, but there are noteworthy technical features.

I still wonder if it was meant to be taken seriously, on some level I don't quite comprehend, but so much of it seems like solemn farce, like barbarians inside the gates.

But what seemed like solemn farce in recent memory is trying to transform reasonable debate these days, and what used to seem absurd is taken seriously, the public sphere in free-fall flux.

If people are currently worried that desires to function self-sufficiently are threatening the proliferation of the nuclear family, perhaps they were in the '70s (and long before then) as well, although I remain to be sure uncertain, even if I'm leaning towards "they definitely were".

A future where people suddenly want to stop breeding, generally, no matter what ideology predominates, seems highly unlikely to me, however.

There's just too much comfort in relaxed recreation.

With agency attached to the conjugally bold.

Nice that the opportunity to not have a family exists though, medieval pressures must have been stifling.

Can't say I recommend Zardoz.

Although it's certainly out of this world.