- In the absence of images provided by the publisher, the photos of this article are not taken from the film, even though the majority of the film contains real shots taken from documentaries, social networks or whistleblowers. They are intended to illustrate and extend the reflections on the topics addressed by the 2073.
Presented as a world preview at the Venice Mostra, 2073 opts for an angle sui generis, at the crossroads of documentary and fiction. Disaster story par excellence, 2073 proposes to resonate an apocalyptic future and our contemporary era. Like Skynet, who sent a Terminator model in the past to kill human resistance in the egg, director Asif Kapadia overturns the equation and launches a direct address to conjure up the great fantasy collapse. What if the science fiction has become obsolete?
Apocalypse now?
The film 2073 begins with visions of chaos that flow all the way to the screen, from fiction to reality and vice versa. Asif Kapadia makes us go back 37 years before the disaster that is guessed from the ashes of a nuclear Armageddon. It thus alternates between short sequences of fiction (not very happy in terms of d'acting and staging) and authentic extracts from the billionaires of Tech passing through the notorious autocrats of recent years: Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, and Narendra Modī. So many leaders who cultivate the cult of impunity and whose practices are increasingly permeating our Western democracies according to the jurisprudential logic of the worst.
Very quickly the spectator recognizes memory images rooted in our collective imagination, for as little as we are interested in the fate of our contemporaries: the trauma of September 11 which will generate « security decadence » of our societies, Anti-Extradition Bill Protests in Hong Kong, the genocide of the Uighurs, the social credit exported like any other merchandise, the police violence against yellow vests, etc.. This black portrait has only one objective: to seek to demonstrate the determinants of a general collapse to come and materialized by the fictional passages of the 2073. A future ruined by transhumanists, a future governed by libertarians and other self-proclaimed demiurges. Or more prosaically, a return to Hobbes' vision; A war of worlds that the progressives would have lost.
If 2073 is at first glance effective, it does not go through four paths, failing to be subtle. Some will most certainly blame him for his manicheism by refusing to look at the progress of our societies, assuming that it is no longer just an epiphenomenon. His party, which seeks to dispel the fact that science fiction is already there, can only convince environmental activists, human rights activists and more generally anyone who has supported anti-capitalist revolts around the globe. Who protested against the established order knows the taste of the baton or smell of lacrymo in the morning in Chile as in Paris.
And it is probably on this point that the assessment of 2073 will differ according to your commitment and political positioning. I cannot for my part not think of this very real old man who was calling this week from the climate activists of Extinction Rebellion in the vaporetto queue. The old world camped in its positions frictioned with the new. « Terrorista Hey! » The old man was thrown at the two young wolves who tried vainly to reason with him. A well-known stencif, where other direct action activists see these Extinction Rebellion members rather as harmless actors of climate inaction. Like, it's all about reference.
Because of his futuristic angle, 2073 do not hesitate to question its spectator when registering on the screen this question sibyllin for the consumer but deeply trivial for those who have chosen to include their action in the life of the city: « Have you ever demonstrated ? ». This is reminiscent of the success of the late Stéphane Hessel, Indignize yourself Hey! This lapidary text of Buchenwald's deported and escaped resistance defended the idea that indignation is the closing of the « The spirit of resistance ». The book had then received a dithyrambic reception by the press, suddenly inhabited by the revolutionary spirit, as with a whole section of the bourgeoisie more accustomed to putting a bulletin in the urn every five years than to take the cobbles when democracy derails. For the latter who made resistance an ethic, this text had the effect of uttering a strict banality.
An announced tragedy
Far from saying that 2073 is bad, but as an announced work of docu-science-fiction, what he seeks to demonstrate is already tragically struck by the evidence. Surprisingly, despite an undeniable collapsologist speech and criticism of these supposed « elites » Asif Kapadia seems more reluctant to say the word taboo: « Capitalism » and much less that of « class struggle », even if it is too easy to fall into the trap of « they » against « we ». The great conspiracy leap is not far away and it is probably more right to talk about community interests of the ultra-rich rather than to use a lexicon that suggests manipulation. Words matter. Integrating the causes had been more relevant to avoid giving the impression that only windmills were being fought. However, the testimonies of whistleblowers and other persecuted journalists, even brutally murdered like Jamal Khashoggi, remain one of the film's candid successes.
Depending on whether you are more or less alienated to the mirage of the sacrosanct market and its supposed virtues over our freedoms, 2073 will therefore have a relative effect. No doubt that some of Trump's supporters who led the assault on the capitol and other apostles of fanatical capitalism (and who see communists in every corner of the street) will find more material to push their beliefs by looking at 2073. On the other hand, for those who have been of all struggles to bring down the citadel, no doubt they will remain at their end. We can make the parallel with the media eruption of neologism « eco-anxiety » which reduces the concern for environmental action to a psychic state of emotion, or even disease, rather than a reasoning built on the ravages of neoliberalism. A more convenient shortcut that focuses on consequences rather than causes.
Parallel reality
Yes, science fiction is already there and it is probably the paradox of our time when we can live next door but separate. « Making a company », another expression dear to the novlangue of our politicians, testifies to this aberration. Like these white collars, which are chautted on a fairground ride, the VR helmet screwed on the head in one of the sequences of the film, reality has long been virtual and our beliefs born from universalism of human rights, a legal fiction in the process of extinction. Besides, isn't it said that we live in the post-truth era? At a time when lies have become an integral part of the political system, what is still worth the meaning of a word like fakenews, once popularized under the impulse of Donald Trump's baroque presidency, while this practice is today widely shared (almost) all policies combined?
The postmodern world dispossessed of credible reading is reduced to having to rely on the logic of Fact-checking, another euphemism happy with convalescent journalism. The source of verification is then itself free from criticism, demonstrating the limits of a simple tool in a world in which reference points are lost. The Stampel Then the ministry of truth suffices itself. Don't say « lie »but « counter-truth » as the dedicated verbiage wants. Western democracies have very well integrated the power of language by using fascism-specific roded techniques and widely theorized by Klemperer in his daily logbook to unblock the language of the Nazi regime. Billionaires who inject huge sums of money into the media become king makers. Polls do not represent public opinion but they shape it. And our personal data are the digital gold of the 21st century as it will have escaped no one.
The weight of images, price of indignation
Today, if the present weighs on us, it is because it has rendered SF obsolete. On this point, in a sequence where heroin struggles to find sleep, as haunted in the past, 2073 questions in hollow something interesting: the weight of the images. Never have our companies had access to such a flow of information in real time in which we all participate whether we like it or not. All this affects our mental health and our subconsciousness. 2073 Moreover, succeeds in incorporating very recent images of Gaza, which suggests that the final montage was just a few months ago. But these destructions remain material, human damage is, on the whole, out of the field.
However, the ongoing genocide, even if the word is not spoken (no more for the Xinxiang ugours or even for the pogroms perpetrated by the Indian nationalists under the Modī cut) is a revealing of our humanity that is gradually dying like flaws of the supposed monopoly of the virtue of Western societies. It is enough to open up a social network to see images that are increasingly dreadful in the literal sense of the term. So many testimonies that go beyond the boundaries of our unbridled imagination – even the most morbid – before disappearing into the limbs of a cruel algorithm. Dismembered newborns argue for a fraction of seconds to be in the lead of a macabre Twitter feed, between two advertisements to farm cryptocurrency or buy a Temu product, perhaps even made in a Uighur concentration camp.
Others are so famelic that their bones pierce the little remaining skin that was not burned by the incendiary bombs. Families burst with empty eyes, exhausted by the buzz of drones, mutilated children begging us for flour, others who have become blind and have not yet realized that their blindness is not ephemeral. What to remember from this image of a deceased newborn, with his head embedded in his bust and so covered with sand that he seemed unreal? Or another the skull completely emptied and whose body is shaken like a rag doll by his father? War « clean » and « surgical » is displayed in all its horror in the pure tradition of the imperialist narrative cultivated on both sides of the Atlantic. 2073 remains relatively modest on its relationship to violence.
Comfortably riveted behind our smartphone screen, we are unable to recognize the characteristics of the dismembered human body. Then a disruption, where the brain in search of meaning, begins to completely dissociate these images from the real. It is the image of the ghost by nature invisible and yet there, regularly recalled by a cynical algo, always ready to abound our neuroses. The images are displayed without generating anything but a state of sideration, depriving us of any analytical capability.
Capitalism's Death Pulse
In the book The Obsolescence of Man, written in 1956, well before the advent of the digital age, the German philosopher Gunther Anders (and husband of Hannah Arendt) develops a similar reasoning on the consequences of the industrial revolution. He takes the example of the mismatch between our feelings and our actions with the example of the hydrogen bomb. He explains that « we are able to make the hydrogen bomb but we cannot figure out the consequences of what we made ». It thus develops the concept of « Promethean offset » :
« The increasing synchronicity every day between man and the world he has produced, the larger gap that separates them every day, we call it promethean shift. »
Despite the fact that our current consumption patterns are uniformed by the phenomenon of social networks in particular, the feeling of indignation seems to be partitioned and reduced to a simple Pavlovian reflex, without initiating the process that would lead to action and rise up against the superstructures who oppress us to use Marxist vocabulary. On this subject, Asif Kapadia also parallels the industrial revolution and the digital revolution which each transformed modern man. A change whose impact is still difficult to assess, not on our consumption patterns, but above all on this autophagous company denounced by Anselm Jappe, writer and philosopher specialist of Guy Debord.
Anselm Jappe thus departs from the Greek myth of Erysichthon, where the king self-devored because nothing could satisfy his hunger because of divine punishment for contempt of nature. This anticipation of a society dedicated to self-destructive dynamics is the starting point of our modern society. In a rigorous demonstration, he beats the forged idea that the subject is a free and autonomous individual to highlight the fact that he is in fact the fruit of the « internalisation of the constraints created by capitalism, and today the receptacle of a lethal combination between narcissism and fetishism of the commodity ». The representation of the world considered as without finite limit leads to what Anselm Jappe defines as « the death impulse of capitalism ».
She is the one who rushes away from the anthropocene era and it is she who should have been targeted in 2073. By remaining at the state of indignation against the tares of the present without considering the sociological, economic and political structures is the carcan of capitalism that prevents any « anthropological mutation », Asif Kapadia confines itself to feeding this single machine unable to upset the balance of the world. We consume images, we feel the thrill of indignation and then we are invited to take our destiny in hand without showing us the path to follow.
The world war will not take place
How come the cliché of « the little girl burned at Napalm » Could have jostled the Vietnam war and that torrents of otherwise more raw images today are causing the most total indifference, even though a reversal of victims and executioners is taking place? Same for this dead child drowned and stranded on the beach with his head buried in the sand and appearing in 2073. After the major speeches in the salon, nothing but a non-exhaustive record of nearly 63 000 deaths in the Mediterranean Sea, which became a cemetery by the EU and our Turkish and Algerian partners. Migration has become a weapon of blackmail, if not obsessive panic in the image of the media. The parallel reality dear to the SF is perfectly contemporary and that Asif Kapadia understood very well.
On this point too, this pessimistic aside has a meaning by demonstrating the almost vain nature of the use of images. 2073 Maybe we should have gone further. Another popular success, but less bourgeois than Hessel's essay, Don't Look Up proposed an allegory of collapse with this meteorite approaching the Earth obscenely. This assumption is similar to IPCC reports whose prognosis is exceeded each year. If images were not enough for themselves, perhaps the right words should have been chosen. Demonstrate radicality by returning to the etymological basis. As the writer and critic sums up Mathieu Jung about successful Netflix superproduction Of which Look Up :
« What Don的t Look Up reminds us cruelly, but we only know too well, is that the media representation, the distortion if not the occultation of the truth, is now indisputable, hegemonic. It works for the permanent drilling of the well, but also for the immutable manufacture of assholes. »
The fiction of 2073, it too, is finally very pale in view of the state of the real place. So how can we get out of this impasse without staying at the simple indignation stage that rhymes too often with resignation? Unfortunately this ode to Asif Kapadia's revolt is not radical enough to change the deal. 2073 He found himself tied between his insufficiently critical documentary side and his superficial fiction part. Even if it is pushed by this electroshock at the edge of the real, the film merely reproduces the mechanisms of the society of the spectacle denounced by Debord. 2073 is lost on an uncertain ridge line leaving us unanswered. Where does indignation begin and or end resilience?
Passionate, as usual! So much to do a lot of movies and readings... and very nice text!
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