We Are the Mutants by Kelly Roberts

Author:Kelly Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781914420740
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2022-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

The camera pulls further and further back, revealing that the window Lowell is looking out of is in fact set in the hull of a vast spacecraft, its flank decorated with the United States flag and the American Airlines logo.

This scene introduces the future Silent Running inhabits—a future where, for its protection, the scant remaining plant and non-human animal life on Earth has been gathered up and packed off into interplanetary space aboard a fleet of space freighters, each named after a United States national park. It’s an absurd conceit that immediately tells us the film is far closer to being a tonal poem than anything resembling scientific possibility. In fact, practically nothing in Silent Running makes any sense at all on a rational level, the film’s undeniable power generated almost entirely by the surreal aesthetic world it’s set in, which plays out like a fever dream of techno-fetishism and cosmic ecology colliding.

Lowell and the three other men we’ve met crew the Valley Forge, a descendant of the real-life Essex-class aircraft carrier of the same name (decommissioned during the Vietnam War) in which most of the film’s interiors were shot as a way to cut costs. The spaceship’s exterior is clearly inspired by the Expo Tower at the 1970 Osaka Expo, the work of Japanese architect Kiyonori Kikutake, one of the founders of the postwar architectural movement called Metabolism, which aimed to fuse ideas about architectural megastructures with ideas about organic biological growth. Resembling “horizontal Eiffel Towers attached to gigantic oil tankers,” as Vincent Canby described them in his review in the New York Times,1 this folding of battle-scarred and mothballed military-industrial-complex power inside a superstructure of nominally progressive architecture feels peculiarly apt. The reveal of the ship is an astonishing moment, and introduces the audience to the structures housing the forests: vast transparent domes attached to the terminus of the Valley Forge’s superstructure.

A potent symbol of both domesticity and institutional power across many cultures, domes had sprung up across North America in the preceding decade like the sleek caps of psychotropic mushrooms. Before that, architects like Wallace Neff proposed domed “bubble homes” in the 1940s,2 and one of the first completed works of Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri, creator of the proto-hippy concept of “arcology” (described as “the fusion of architecture with ecology”),3 was the 1948 dome house he built in the Arizona desert. In the late 1950s, ufologist George Van Tassel built his domed “Integratron” near Joshua Tree in California, which he claimed could cause cellular rejuvenation and allow research into anti-gravity and time travel.4 The geodesic dome, however, popularized by the unlikely countercultural guru and self-promoting quasi-grifter R. Buckminster Fuller in his 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, was of a different domain: a restless generation began to see in the shape a symbol of a new kind of future.

Fuller’s signature design was built using a three-dimensional framework of regularly repeating forms made out of strong, lightweight construction materials that were cheap and ideal for rapid assembly.

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