I just saw the great classic 1960 sic-fi film The Time Machine again today, and it struck me for the first time what right wing political propaganda the movie espouses. Looking at its futuristic scenario, this can be seen as an allegorical indictment of social programs and their eventual impact upon society. Here's what I mean:
In The Time Machine, Rod Taylor creates a time machine (the eponymous time machine of the film's title), and in it he takes an enormous leap forward in time, traveling ahead to approximately the year 800,000. And upon arriving there, he finds a bunch of willfully ignorant, lazy hippies who just sit around all day and accomplish nothing, motivated not the least bit to build, learn, invent, etc. So then, how do they survive? Well, all their food and clothes are provided for them by the unseen Morlocks, who can be seen as a stand-in for the government. And as we can see, having the government provide everything for them makes them all lazy, rudderless good-for-nothings, incapable of taking care of themselves anymore. Except that we see they are good for one thing: food for the Morlocks! (Yum!)
(A-Ha! This is obviously the end game of all social program provisions: the government is lulling us into a false sense of security while slowly removing our ability for self-preservation so we can't escape and they can eat us! I knew it!)
So, seen from a certain perspective, this movie bashes big government and indicates that a populace that permits the government to provide too much support ends up losing the drive to accomplish, any sense of personal responsibility, and the ability and desire to take care of oneself. In fact, once you see how it can be viewed in this way, it's really hard not to think it was intentional. After all, this was during the most dangerous period of the Cold War, and there is a big nuclear war scene which destroys modern society in the movie. And then to depict future society as a commune where the blindly ignorant populace is wholly victimized and literally bred for the slaughter by those who provide for them; it certainly appears to be a condemnation of communism/socialism, doesn't it?
The thing is, I'm not sure the filmmakers meant to communicate this particular reading of the story. Maybe they did, and maybe they just wanted to make an exciting adventure that preaches nuclear arms control and shows its hero saving a bunch of good-looking youths.* I really only thought about it like this in joking with my sister about how the movie was "obviously made by the Tea Party to warn of President Morlock Obama's evil plan to cannibalize us all." (I like joking about bogus political conspiracies, if you haven't noticed.)
And notice also that the hero of the movie destroys the Morlocks' social programs of feeding and clothing the Eloi, forcing the Eloi to take responsibility for their own future, and forcing them all into wage-slavery! (We don't get to see his free-market capitalist exploitation of this easily manipulated workforce, but I'm sure they were going to show us in the sequel: The Time Machine, Part 2: Exploit the Future.) In fact, the only reason he went to the future to begin with was to find a non-unionized labor pool to exploit in futuristic sweatshop assembly lines to manufacture his products, and then he takes them back in his time machine to sell at below cost, undermining the 1899 union product and breaking the back of the unions so he can solely monopolize industry as the top of the financial food chain! You know it's true! This is the Republican threat of the future! (Why else do you think President Obama pulled the plug on NASA? It was to stop the Republicans' secret anti-union time machine project!)
This is The Time Machine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine_(1960_film)
* (It's difficult to show one unarmed guy saving a whole society when said society can already defend themselves, provide for themselves, think for themselves, etc.; so this part of the plot that can be viewed in a conservative political light may be entirely incidental and merely a lazy plot mechanism that permits the hero to save the day and appear heroic.)
