Retrofuturism
Sep. 18th, 2004 07:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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dour managed to get me semi-orgasmic over Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, not that I wasn't already all shivery over this film. While it'll likely be a while until I see it... because we have no idea where the local movie theater is, and indeed I think our local movie theater may be a FURNITURE STORE with an IMAX SCREEN in it... and gods, don't ask me why a furniture store has an IMAX, it makes my head hurt...
...where was I...
Oh. Anyway, we don't know where the theater is, so it'll be a while until I see Sky Captain. The problem with that is that it looks like it was designed from the ground up to resonate with me, make me whimper and stare and sigh. I feel almost hurt that it's going to go to national theaters. This is MY MOVIE, you bastards. Get away from it. You'll ruin it by watching it and discussing it and holding it up to logic and then it'll be something unspecial again. Stop it.
I have this sort of heart-aching facination for what I've taken to calling 'retrofuturistic' things. Google shows about 700 hits for that, so I'm late in claiming it as my word, I gues. I don't know if I'm using it like other people do though. When I think "Retrofuturistic" I think "Like people in the past dreamed the future would be like." You can tell if something's retrofuturistic if I can turn tosirkalen and construct a sentence like:
"What in God's name is WRONG with this backwater malformed timeline that we don't have..."
where the sentence continues with something like the following examples:
"...flying cars?"
"...shiny silvery jumpsuits?"
"...beautiful flying machines, like zepplins, floating through the sky?"
"...floating holographic heads?"
"...floating holographic ANYthing? FLOATING HOLOGRAMS GOOD."
"...artifical sentience? God, I'd gnaw on your sadly non-holographic head to have an intelligent conversation with something nonhuman."
"...the ability to put my brain in a jar?"
"...THAT thing!" (Where "That thing" is usually some fantastic, heartbreakingly beepy and flashy and blinky technogizmo unobtrusively taking up space in the background of a sci-fi movie or TV show, and which I will fixtate on for HOURS and scour the background of the set for, forevermore.)
Retrofuturism always strikes me in a very personal place, because it hurts to see that people -had- the idea for a really cool thing back in... oh, 1960, say... and didn't follow up on it. It's the way our present COULD be if someone in the past had only said "The -shape- of this vehicle we've designed is really cool. Let's mass produce it." And it hurts because it reminds me that most people would see something like the shapes in my dreams and just point and laugh, because it looks like something out of a bad sci-fi movie. And it DOES. And that's wonderful to me, and I wish I could open my mind and show everyone why and how it fills me with wonder instead of making me want to mock it.
Maybe I just want a world that looks like the inside of my head. I know it's selfish, but I do. When I stare out of the window, they're in my thoughts. I dream of gently flashing lights and computers with big screw-in lightbulbs to show disk access and curved contoured monitors and chairs that look like an ice cream truck and Sputnik violently mated. I want glittering holograms. I want chromium. I want soft beeps and pings.
I dream of improbable airships sweeping majestically across the dawn sky.
Surely, someone out there has to share that dream, right?
dour managed to get me semi-orgasmic over Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, not that I wasn't already all shivery over this film. While it'll likely be a while until I see it... because we have no idea where the local movie theater is, and indeed I think our local movie theater may be a FURNITURE STORE with an IMAX SCREEN in it... and gods, don't ask me why a furniture store has an IMAX, it makes my head hurt... ...where was I...
Oh. Anyway, we don't know where the theater is, so it'll be a while until I see Sky Captain. The problem with that is that it looks like it was designed from the ground up to resonate with me, make me whimper and stare and sigh. I feel almost hurt that it's going to go to national theaters. This is MY MOVIE, you bastards. Get away from it. You'll ruin it by watching it and discussing it and holding it up to logic and then it'll be something unspecial again. Stop it.
I have this sort of heart-aching facination for what I've taken to calling 'retrofuturistic' things. Google shows about 700 hits for that, so I'm late in claiming it as my word, I gues. I don't know if I'm using it like other people do though. When I think "Retrofuturistic" I think "Like people in the past dreamed the future would be like." You can tell if something's retrofuturistic if I can turn to
sirkalen and construct a sentence like:"What in God's name is WRONG with this backwater malformed timeline that we don't have..."
where the sentence continues with something like the following examples:
"...flying cars?"
"...shiny silvery jumpsuits?"
"...beautiful flying machines, like zepplins, floating through the sky?"
"...floating holographic heads?"
"...floating holographic ANYthing? FLOATING HOLOGRAMS GOOD."
"...artifical sentience? God, I'd gnaw on your sadly non-holographic head to have an intelligent conversation with something nonhuman."
"...the ability to put my brain in a jar?"
"...THAT thing!" (Where "That thing" is usually some fantastic, heartbreakingly beepy and flashy and blinky technogizmo unobtrusively taking up space in the background of a sci-fi movie or TV show, and which I will fixtate on for HOURS and scour the background of the set for, forevermore.)
Retrofuturism always strikes me in a very personal place, because it hurts to see that people -had- the idea for a really cool thing back in... oh, 1960, say... and didn't follow up on it. It's the way our present COULD be if someone in the past had only said "The -shape- of this vehicle we've designed is really cool. Let's mass produce it." And it hurts because it reminds me that most people would see something like the shapes in my dreams and just point and laugh, because it looks like something out of a bad sci-fi movie. And it DOES. And that's wonderful to me, and I wish I could open my mind and show everyone why and how it fills me with wonder instead of making me want to mock it.
Maybe I just want a world that looks like the inside of my head. I know it's selfish, but I do. When I stare out of the window, they're in my thoughts. I dream of gently flashing lights and computers with big screw-in lightbulbs to show disk access and curved contoured monitors and chairs that look like an ice cream truck and Sputnik violently mated. I want glittering holograms. I want chromium. I want soft beeps and pings.
I dream of improbable airships sweeping majestically across the dawn sky.
Surely, someone out there has to share that dream, right?
