Rollerball (1975)
At first glance, Norman Jewison’s 1975 film Rollerball is easy to pin down. The film is based around three games of an ultraviolet future sport in which two teams, dressed a bit like (American) football players, roller-skate around a circular track, trying to put a shiny chrome ball into a goal. This is a contact sport, in which players wear studded gloves and are free to use quite a bit of force on one another. There are also players on motorbikes, allowing players to build up speed by hanging on the back, which make things even more interesting. This is the kind of fast paced action that audiences today want. Sport and violence rolled into one. Yet the depiction of these games is cold, almost detached. There is no soundtrack emphasising tension, just the voice of the commentator. The use of music is reserved for only a few moments, most dramatically in the film’s opening. Rollerball begins by showing an empty track, gradually becoming more busy with activity until the game starts. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue plays over the scene as a portent of the dramatic violence to come and the piece returns to close the film. Other classical works add texture throughout, while Andre Previn who conducted the LSO for the soundtrack recordings, wrote a futuristically funky piece to convey the mood of a decadent party scene.
In between the games, the tone of the film is muted. Things happen slowly, dialogue is terse, often quiet, almost mumbled by lead actor James Caan. A theme quickly emerges. Rollerball provides distracting but grotesque entertainment for a society that is different from that of 1975 but that exaggerates tendencies to be found there. This is always a good thing to look for in science fiction, a quality that can help to distinguish the more interesting examples of the form from the rest. It was also often a characteristic of Hollywood science fiction films before the release of Star Wars in 1977. Rollerball reframes certain kinds of sport as forms of brutal mass distraction, drawing attention to the corporate and commercial interests involved in sport as an entertainment industry. It also, with not too much subtlety, depicts the rise to power of corporations, who in the future of Rollerball now run the world entirely. There are no more wars, only corporate rule and mass entertainment. The ruling class are defined as executives, suited men who have access to luxury, privilege and power. Women are treated as property, desired and owned by executives. The protagonist of the film, Jonathan E, has led a long career as a hero of the sport but has now been asked to resign. Reluctant to comply, we as the audience become aware, as Jonathan does, of the eradication of history, of the digitisation of books into edited versions of truth and the totality of the loss of knowledge through the totality of a new and universal regime of power.
I still find Rollerball a really interesting piece of science fiction cinema, bold and unusual in approach, while totally dedicated in creating the different facets of the depicted future. We almost don’t see nature in the film, except as a sort of picturesque backdrop but there is one scene that depicts how the natural world is valued in this future regime. A party is held, in a huge country house, in honour of Jonathan E, or rather as an opportunity for members of the executive elite to view the broadcasting of a TV special highlighting the brilliant violence of the player. However, it turns out that this party is actually supposed to be the occasion of his retirement announcement. For Jonathan, the party is a series of encounters that make his position seem increasingly precarious, while strengthening his resolve to continue playing against the wishes of the corporations who run everything. After a night of partying, the remaining guests head out into the grounds of the mansion, one of them holding a small silver pistol. As Jonathan, back in the house, is confronted by Bartholomew, chairman of the Energy Corporation, the group of partygoers move through the ornate grounds of the house in the soft twilight before the dawn, the colours somehow reminiscent of the sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. The women in the group — those who lack agency even among the elite in this future — take it in turns to use the silver pistol. It turns out this little weapon (an innuendo?) possesses a surprising capacity for destruction. They take it in turns to destroy a row of coniferous trees (pine, I think). One shot from the weapon is enough to incinerate an entire tree. Before this moment, the party, although decadent, was relatively sedate in comparison. This is the moment it appears to become orgiastic in some way, albeit as an orgy of destruction. The faces of the women show a temporary joy and ecstasy in the act of destruction. Only one, the former wife of Jonathan, taken away from him by an executive, finally shows remorse as the trees burn. The scene ends with the image of the six trees in a row, smouldering skeletons. Director Jewison and screenwriter William Harrison take the time to point out that this darkly familiar future includes a desensitised and destructive approach to the natural world. The trees, so old in this future that they probably date back at least to our own time, are victims of a society saturated by greed, avarice, callousness, boredom. Somehow this act of violence is as powerful as any of that seen in the brutal game itself.
