Tomorrow isn’t what it used to be, part 3

If you were born, say, in 1974, it would be logical for you to believe that our culture had always been suffused with cynicism. But to be a child in the 1960s was to be bathed in an aura of hope, and a sense — never again to be repeated in the ensuing half century — that technological progress and the creation of a better, kinder world were mutually compatible ideals.

Children in 1964 looked at the many flags of the United Nations and saw a promise of peace and unity. To that generation of young minds, the futuristic architecture in post-war comic books came to symbolize an ideal of universal well being and friendship among nations.

Strange as such a thought might seem in today’s world, the fantasy utopia suggested by the gleaming cityscapes of Jor-El’s planet Krypton were understood by children to be aspirational — a shorthand for our own inevitable march of progress.

Tomorrowland begins by dangling this iconography of a better tomorrow, hinting that the ideal the world had so long ago given up on might somehow still exist. Bird may be revising his own childhood memories here. He is just old enough, having been born in 1957, to have experienced first-hand the sense of optimism that had suffused the 1964 World’s Fair. Perhaps he was originally motivated to explore that vision.

But much of the audience for a major commercial Hollywood film in 2015 would never have experienced that sense of shared optimism. Most moviegoers today grew up in the shadow of Watergate, of our bombing of Cambodia, of tales of the peace movement having turned bitter and violent, of the cynicism that descended as our nation started turning inward to nurse its wounds.

I think the key phrase here is “turning inward”. More tomorrow.

4 thoughts on “Tomorrow isn’t what it used to be, part 3”

  1. That’s quite surprising. It’s interesting that just after the Cuban Missile Crisis there wasn’t a bit more pessimism about the more imminent threat of nuclear war.

  2. Pete: By 1964 it was clear to most U.S. political observers that the successful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in November 1962 had been a significant positive milestone in the relations between the the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

    Khrushchev and Kennedy began working together to institute a number of safeguards designed to minimize the chance that such a crisis would be repeated.

    Among the many new political instruments established in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the installation of a “Moscow-Washington hotline”, which allowed the leaders of the two superpowers to talk with each other directly by phone.

  3. Yes, I agree — both the space program and Star Trek continued on into the 1970s in some form.

    Although to be fair, both the space program and Star Trek were launched in the 1960s. By 1970, both the first moon landing and the cancellation of classic Trek were already history.

    So if any decade is going to get the lion’s share of credit for inspiring that generation of science and tech nerds — by virtue of both the space program and Star Trek — it’s the 1960s.

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