History, Nostalgia, Hauntology: The Uses Of Fantasy

"Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate." 

- Edward Said Culture and Imperialism 1993

"Then I looked behind me and saw the city. The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things To Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect's perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters...

I closed my eyes tight and swung around in the seat. When I opened them, I willed myself to see the mileage meter, the pale road dust on the black plastic dashboard, the overflowing ashtray. "Amphetamine psychosis," I said. I opened my eyes. The dash was still there, the dust, the crushed filtertips. Very carefully, without moving my head, I turned the headlights on. And saw them. They were blond. They were standing beside their car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine and smooth black tires like a child's toy. He had his arm around her waist and was gesturing toward the city. They were both in white: loose clothing, bare legs, spotless white sun shoes. Neither of them seemed aware of the beams of my headlights. He was saying something wise and strong, and she was nodding, and suddenly I was frightened, frightened in an entirely different way. Sanity had ceased to be an issue; I knew, somehow, that the city behind me was Tucson a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, entirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me.

They were the children of Dialta Downes's `80- that-wasn't; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world."

- William Gibson 'The Gernsback Continuum' (collected in Burning Chrome) 1981

"He thought, We can only hope. And try. On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components."

- Philip K. Dick The Man In The High Castle 1962

(...)

Brian Walden (Weekend World, ITV 1983):

"All right, now you know, when you say you agree with those values, those values don’t so much have a future resonance, there’s nothing terribly new about them. They have a resonance of our past. Now obviously Britain is a very different country from the one it was in Victorian times when there was great poverty, great wealth, etc., but you’ve really outlined an approval of what I would call Victorian values. The sort of values, if you like, that helped to build the country throughout the 19th Century. Now is that right?"

Margaret Thatcher:
"Oh exactly. Very much so. Those were the values when our country became great, but not only did our country become great internationally, also so much advance was made in this country. Colossal advance, as people prospered themselves so they gave great voluntary things to the State. So many of the schools we replace now were voluntary schools, so many of the hospitals we replace were hospitals given by this great benefaction feeling that we have in Britain, even some of the prisons, the Town Halls. As our people prospered, so they used their independence and initiative to prosper others, not compulsion by the State. Yes, I want to see one nation, as you go back to Victorian times, but I want everyone to have their own personal property stake."

"Finally—and this is not limited to this analysis, though it seems especially relevant—there is the evidence of just how ideological transformations and political restructuring of this order (ascendancy of the New Right) is actually accomplished. It works on the ground of already constituted social practices and lived ideologies. It wins space there by constantly drawing on these elements which have secured over time a traditional resonance and left their traces in popular inventories. At the same time, it changes the field of struggle by changing the place, the position, the relative weight of the condensations within any one discourse and constructing them according to an alternative logic."

- Stuart Hall 'The Great Moving Right Show' 1979

Witness (1985)

Peter Weir’s 1985 thriller "Witness", while in many ways a conventional Hollywood thriller, was notable for introducing to the outside world the insular culture of the Pennsylvania-based Christian Mennonite sect known as the Amish. While the major plot elements of the film are familiar, it is the contrast between the homeostatic, rural culture of the Amish, who voluntarily arrested their social development in the late 19th Century, and the violent, unstable world of the "English" (the Amish term for all other Americans) that provides the crux of the film.

When young Amish boy Samuel Lapp witnesses the murder of a police officer in Philadelphia station, while in transit to his aunt in Baltimore with his recently widowed mother Rachel (Kelly McGillis), he identifies the killer to investigating detective John Book (Harrison Ford) as being fellow police officer John McFee (Danny Glover). After Book is betrayed by his corrupt boss, the predictably silver-haired WASP Schaeffer, and shot and wounded by McFee, he flees with the Lapps to their farm in the Amish heartland of Lancaster County.

The wounded English with a gun (the Amish are resolutely non-violent) causes deep concern among the be-whiskered Amish elders who, realising the danger to the Lapp family, allow him to stay and be cared for by both Rachel and her father-in-law, the irascible but decent Eli. Weir attempts to portray the Amish life as a kind of Rembrandt-esque dreamworld of muted browns and yellows, as oil lamps highlight the Amish characters in their traditional hats and bonnets against the bare walls of their dwellings. Maurice Jarre’s tentative score, that seems to suggest an awakening that will never materialise, highlights the dreamlike ambiance, as though Book can live in, but never quite "get", the foreign-yet-familiar world that surrounds him.



At the time of the film’s creation, with the New Morning in America, the Amish really could seem a curio, a fossilised culture whose resistance to change was both quaint and ultimately hopeless. Nowadays, this assumption seems far less secure. Indeed their decision in the 1860’s to favour tradition over progress, and homeostasis over metastasis, seems rather prescient and shrewd. After all, there are few communities in the Western world more thoroughly prepared for peak oil and the collapse of credit-based Capitalism than the Amish. The values that the Amish cherish, such as fellowship, honesty, stability and humility, are among the ones that our own moronic culture most despises, which is no doubt why they’re subject to the occasional missile and mocking documentary. Nevertheless, the barn-raising scene in "Witness" shows the awesome potential of collective human organisation, and demonstrates why anyone still hanging on to the cult of individualism when the energy subsidy of fossil fuels is withdrawn will only be hastening their own extinction.

Book recovers and volunteers for work on the farm, allowing Ford to demonstrate his real-life carpentry skills. Book’s continuing presence is a source of tension within the Amish world, his hand gun a metaphor for the violent potency of Anglo-Saxon America, and the sexual potency that draws Rachel ever closer to him. Eventually he gives himself away when, joining his Amish fellows on a trip to the local town, he engages in a fist fight with abusive local yahoos who don’t expect an Amish to hit back. When the local sheriff hears of it, it is not long before Schaeffer and his accomplices arrive to silence Book for good.

Rachel fails to consummate her love for Book, and so loses her only chance to leave the narrow Amish world for the expanding consumer realm of fad diets, granite counter tops and Wal-Mart salad shooters. Alas, that realm is disappearing before our very eyes now. We will have much to learn from people like the Amish in the harsh decades ahead. We had better hope that they are willing to teach us.