Yesterday's Tomorrow

It's always interesting to look back at yesterday's future.  Watching, as I do, lots of creaky old science fiction films, (not to mention old science fiction stories), I frequently get to see yesterday's interpretation of what the future would look like.  It is, more often than not, quaint.  More often than not it is simply the 'today' of when the movie was shot, with a few added bits of technology.  The other day, for instance, I caught part of an episode of the old Republic serial Radar Men From the Moon (1951). - its future looked remarkably like early fifties USA, except that people were building their own rocket ships and jet packs.  There was no real attempt to imagine how else society might have to change to utilise these things - people fly rockets to the moon wearing their regular street clothes (the latest fifties fashions, of course) and trilby hats.  One only has to wear a leather jacket to safely use a jet pack (and, to be fair, a clunky looking helmet with a full face visor).  While it isn't surprising that a low budget cinema serial might well not be keeping up with the way technology was portrayed in contemporary science fiction magazines, (Radar Men From the Moon was essentially a standard Republic action serial with a few science fiction trappings in order to cash in on the genre's growing post-war popularity), it is interesting that the experiences of high altitude flying during World War Two don't seem to have been taken into account, with nobody wearing a pressure suit, let alone a space suit.  Mind you, this isn't a production which adheres to any aspect of scientific fidelity: the moon's surface looks remarkably like those bits of California where Republic shot their western serials and has an atmosphere, meaning that nobody needs a spacesuit.  Not even the lunar inhabitants, who wander round in medieval-looking gear, (probably costumes adapted from an historical serial).

But, of course, it wasn't just low budget serials that portrayed versions of the future that would quickly look antiquated.  Most of the studio productions of the fifties and sixties that presented visions of the future gave us bland-looking colour schemes - lots of whitewashed walls - flashing lights and collar-less unisex fashions with bright colour palettes.  These futures had little or no connection, visually, to our present, as if, at some point in history, everything - fashions, architecture, interior design etc - had just been abandoned and replaced overnight by this new future.  In reality, the future evolves from the present and things change at different rates - fashion tends to change slowly, for example, while technology can leap ahead in great bounds.  Past and modernity live side by side in the present - my house is Victorian, but has central heating, a much later innovation, electric lighting and is full of technology like the TV, washing machine, microwave, laptops, tablets and the internet.  Those latter things would have been unimaginable to the original occupants, just a hundred and twenty years ago, but now we take them for granted, yet the house itself remains essentially the same.  Even compared to the house I grew up in during the seventies, everything is the same but different - back then central heating was still a novelty to proles like us and the most advanced technology in the living room was the TV - a huge thing with a tube and valves - but it was, in essence, not that different from my current living room, even though it was a sixties-built house.  The point I'm stumbling toward is that the future tends to creep up on us, in small increments, so that we only noticed that it has happened in retrospect.  Which is why, in a curious way, Radar Men From the Moon, with its trilby-wearing rocket ship pilots, got the future right.