1.
Logan's Run: The Story by Ken Sanes
In 1976, Hollywood came out with a movie titled Logan's Run, which offered a vision of the future as a false paradise. In the movie, humanity is portrayed as having destroyed the earth's ecosystem by the 23rd century, through war, overpopulation and pollution, and retreated into a high-tech city enclosed in domes, full of futuristic buildings and public spaces that look like something out of a contemporary shopping mall. Inside, the inhabitants devote themselves to a life of indulgence while a computer with a vaguely seductive female voice controls the city and produces everything they need to live. They know nothing of the outside world, nor do they have any idea how to operate the machines that serve them. As in many similar works, the characters are portrayed as being much like children, dependent on the central computer to shelter them in their gilded cage.
But the characters aren't only separated from the nature outside the city. They are also separated from the natural processes of life. They are incubated in nurseries, rather than being born, and they neither marry nor know their children. It is only natural, in their eyes, for sex to be purely a form of entertainment, unconnected to intimacy or procreation.
Nor do they know anything of the natural process of aging. Because space is limited in the city, the computer simply does away with everyone on their 30th birthday. To lead these lambs willingly to their slaughter, it has given them a ritual and a myth: at the age of 30 everyone participates in carousel and has a chance to be "renewed" -- born again.
Carousel is the ultimate rite of despair and hope. As the ritual begins, the 30 year-old victims stand in the center of a giant auditorium-in-the-round, wearing white death masks that make this ordered world look like a high-tech version of something out of the dark ages. They are then spun around on a circular moving floor until they float into the air. Still circling, but now suspended in mid-air, they move their limbs in a death ballet as they explode one at a time. Meanwhile, an audience of those who are not-yet 30 are packed into the stands, cheering and screaming with excitement "Renew! Renew!"
But not everything is so perfectly controlled. The city also has its version of a slum and a prison, in a dark and dilapidated section isolated from the rest, where violent and rebellious children live lives of barbarism, and kill anyone of their kind older than 15. In addition, the city has a rebel movement, which has created an underground railroad for "runners" -- 30 year-olds who choose to flee rather than putting their faith in the false promise that they will be reborn in carousel. The rebel movement supposedly gives runners a way out of the city, so they can escape to a place of safety referred to as sanctuary, although no one has ever actually come back from sanctuary to tell about it. Unfortunately, most runners never get that far; instead, they are stalked and killed by the computer's police force, a privileged elite of human enforcers referred to as sandmen.
Even if the reader hasn't seen Logan's Run, he or she will probably have already surmised that this false paradise will not endure, after the plot has had a chance to thicken. The snake in this case turns out to be the computer itself, which decides it will have to send a sandman out into the world beyond the city to find and destroy sanctuary, to end what it sees as a threat to its existence. To do so, it speeds up the "life clock" of the sandman Logan Five (played by Michael York), until he prematurely reaches the age of 30, and instructs him to run so the rebels will direct him to sanctuary. Once there, he is to destroy it. Perhaps in an effort to motivate Logan to run for his life, instead of staying in the hope that he can be reborn, the computer also reveals a truth to him that he had wondered about but never really believed: no one had ever been renewed in carousel.
With a female companion named Jessica, who is a member of the rebel movement, Logan, the runner, will now go on a journey in which he will overcome a series of physical threats and challenges. He will also go through an internal change in which everything he once saw as positive will become abhorrent to him, and realities the computer had kept hidden will come into clear view. Complicating his journey will be another sandman and former friend -- Francis Seven -- who will follow him with the intent of executing him for being a runner.
As Logan and Jessica make their escape, one of their first stops is a hiding place where the rebels will show them how to get out of the city, on the route to sanctuary. To get to the rebel hiding place, Jessica takes Logan to a secret door, which is located in a place called The Love Shop, where the inhabitants of the city gather for sex orgies, as they breathe in the vapors of a mind-altering drug. Once this would have seemed to Logan as a place of amusement. Now, on the run, and with the knowledge that the city is founded on mass murder, the orgy room seems like a place of madness. As the two make their way through it, nude bodies writhe in ecstasy and besiege them on all sides, inviting them to lose themselves in pleasure.
Escaping this mass of humanity, the two go out the secret door into a forgotten part of the city, that is dark and unkempt, behind the high-tech walls. Suddenly, the mall-like world Logan has known all his life, with its plaza-like spaces and cultivated plantings, disappears. In its place, the pair find themselves traveling down a long flight of metal stairs and a dimly lit hall, surrounded by bare walls and junk.
In quick order, they survive an encounter with suspicious rebels; they get directions from the rebels on how to get out (head even further down into lost areas of the city); and they escape invading sandmen. They then continue their descent, winding their way through the labyrinthine bowels of the city. A key, shaped like an Egyptian ankh, gets them through a door that blocks their route, as the other sandman pursues from behind. Soon they pass giant aquatic tanks, green with algae, that were apparently once used to breed food from the sea.
Finally, having apparently gone as far down as they can, Logan and Jessica are lifted up a great distance by an elevator platform into a place covered with ice. Here, the two discover the fate of all the runners who fled to "sanctuary" before them -- the runners were frozen by a confused robot (1) that once had the job of freezing food from the sea. As the robot explains, giving us the history of the city's turn into isolation and mass murder in a single phrase -- "The other food stopped coming and they started," they being the runners. For every runner before them, sanctuary, it appears, meant being turned into a frozen dinner for a meal that would never arrive.
Escaping the prospect of being fresh frozen, Logan and Jessica emerge through a cavelike opening into the outside world, which is once again habitable and overflowing with nature. They look at the bright sun, uncertain what it is, a future Adam and Eve expelled from their high-tech paradise into the world of the outside.
Soon they discover what it means to be out in nature. They are exposed to the elements; they feel lost, and they suffer physical discomfort. But they also begin to discover the freedoms and pleasures of being on their own. As they swim in the nude, they discover that the crystal implanted in their left palms (as it is for everyone in the city), which normally emanates a colored light that shows their age, has gone blank. At last, they are free of the computer, which now has no control over their "life clock." Immediately after making this discovery, they make love for the first time, in an act of intimacy rather than random sex.
Soon the pair see the ruins of Washington D.C. in the distance, with the Washington Monument towering over it. Hoping it is sanctuary or, at least, a place with people, they head into the ruined city, and encounter what appears to be its only inhabitant: an old man (played by Peter Ustinov), who lives in what is left of the Capitol building.
Just as they discovered nature, now, through the old man, they discover human nature, namely the reality of birth, marriage, aging and death, which the computer had kept hidden from them. Jessica touches the old man's wrinkles, having never before seen anyone over 30. They look at a photograph of his youth and hear stories about his dead parents, as they take the first steps toward understanding that coupling, raising children and growing old -- not an extended childhood and quick death -- is the natural order of life.
Finally, Logan dispatches the other sandman, who was still on their trail, to his own private carousel, and they bury him, so they become participants themselves in the cycle of life and death. Logan, Jessica and the old man then return to the city to bring the truth of life and death and the outside world to its inhabitants. On the way, Logan and Jessica marry, repeating words they saw on tombstones in a graveyard.
"So people stayed together for this feeling of love. They would live and raise children and be remembered," says Jessica, repeating what she has learned from the old man.
"I think I'd like that, Logan, don't you?"
"Um. Um hu. Why not," Logan responds. (Needless to say, dialogue isn't one of the movie's strong points.)
"Beloved husband," she tells him.
"Beloved wife," he responds. (2)
Arriving at the city, the couple make their way back inside by swimming through underwater vents, as the old man, who can't make it through the vents, waits outside for them to bring the inhabitants to meet him. Once again, Logan finds himself inside the high-tech city. As the inhabitants are going into carousel, walking through one of those large, mall-like plazas, Logan stands above them on a balcony, a mad prophet, trying to convince them that everything they have believed is a lie.
"No," he screams, as the inhabitants stop and turn toward him to see what is going on. "Don't go in there. You don't have to die. Well no one has to die at 30. You can live! Live! Live and grow old. I've seen it. She's seen it.
"Well look -- look -- look. It's clear," he screams, as he holds up his left palm to show them the blank crystal.
Laughter comes out of the crowd as they turn away and continue going into carousel.
Next, the voice of computer fills the space, naming the group of 30 year-olds who will "participate" in carousel that day:
"Last day: Capricorn 29s. Year of the city 2274. Carousel begins."
Finally, Jessica begins to scream at the crowd: "No. Don't go. Listen to him. He's telling the truth. We've been outside. There's another world outside. We've seen it," she screams, as she is grabbed by sandmen.
"The life clocks are a lie. Carousel is a lie. There is no renewal," Logan screams, as he is grabbed, as well.
Logan now finds himself in "surrogation," a debriefing in which the computer will draw his story from him through what look like holographic image surrogates, as he suffers through the ordeal, confined to a chair. During the interrogation, the computer learns that its facts have been wrong and there is no sanctuary, upon which it has one of those classic (and never believable) science fiction nervous breakdowns caused by the inability to deal with contradiction. Between that and the subsequent firing of a gun aimed at Logan by a sandman as he is escaping, which hits a part of the central computer room, and Logan's intentional firing at the computer, the entire system is destroyed. Things start exploding all over the city and large chunks of stone fly in all directions, as the city and its walls are presumably destroyed. The young inhabitants flee from the destruction, making their way passed the walls that no longer contain them and out into the world, where they see old age standing before them, and crowd around to see and touch it.
Logan's Run isn't unique in telling a story like this. In fact, it is one of a great many works of science fiction that repeat these same elements. Some, such as the short story, "The Machine Stops," and the novel, The City and the Stars, are so similar to each other and to Logan's Run, we seem to be looking at a line of influence. Many others (which also may be a part of this line of influence) mix and match some elements of these stories with others, to give us a number of different kinds of post-apocalyptic fiction.
But Logan's Run does a particularly good job in the way it employs the elements of meaning that are common to these stories, which makes it a good starting point for trying to understood what these stories express about our perception of the world. Lets look at these elements, one at a time, and, ourselves, plumb the depths of the city.
2.
Logan's Run as a Critique of Society:
Sex, Power, Illusion by Ken Sanes
At the most obvious level, Logan's Run is a warning about the dangers that now face humanity in an age of high-technology and extravagance. It takes the world we live in, with its automation, malls, and self-indulgent lifestyles, and exaggerates it to create an image of a future none of us would want to live in.
To understand how it came to offer us such an image, one has to examine the book it is based on, by the same name, which was published in 1967. (1) Logan's Run, the book, was written during a period in American history that saw the rise of the counterculture, primarily among teenagers and those in their twenties, which viewed traditional culture as a fraud, and was identified with drug use and the sexual revolution. At the same time, a parallel political movement opposed the national government, and saw its lies over Vietnam as part of a larger deception at the heart of American society.
The authors took these elements and transformed them into what is, at best, a mediocre book about a society of the future in which the youth movement has triumphed with a vengeance. The inhabitants of this world have turned free love into a life of nonstop sexual license. They routinely take hallucinogens and now it is they, rather than an older and more traditional adult population, who oppose any effort to challenge the system.
In place of LBJ, the book's fictional society is governed by a computer that kills everyone at 21 to guard against overpopulation. In place of draft dodgers, it has runners who flee death at a tender age. And in place of an anti-war movement, it has a political resistance that aids runners and is busy co-opting the computer, so one day a new system will be born.
The book's message, other than that there is a danger of being controlled by computers, is that the youth movement's rejection of age is misguided. As it states, unsubtly, at the end: "The young don't build. They use. The wonders of Man were achieved by the mature, the wise, who lived in this world before we did."
The movie took this story and blended it with themes from science fiction and with images from America in the 1970s, to create the rich mythic world of the city that is folded in on itself. By the time the movie was made, the 60s counterculture had been transformed into the self-oriented lifestyles of 1970s popular culture. And so the movie shows us this world, with a city that is like a giant mall (it even has escalators) and like a singles complex (it even shows an exercise room). (2) But we can still see a vestige of the 60s in the way the movie takes an idea from the book -- that everyone is killed at 21 -- and blends it with the adage "Don't trust anyone over 30", to create the computer's guiding idea: knock everyone off at 30.
In creating this image, the movie is repeating a very traditional message. A decadent consumer society, it tells us, could end up giving us a flattened out culture that is not unlike being stuck in a giant mall for life.
The movie couples this with another image taken from the book, of humanity controlled by a computer, to add a second warning that intelligent technologies could infantilize us, turning us into techno-narcissists who are dependent on machines and unable to do for ourselves. When the movie was released in 1976, the self-oriented culture of the time had not yet gone through another transformation into the age of computers. Thus, the movie's message, that intelligent technologies might wrap themselves around us and become our surroundings, separating us from nature and ourselves, still seemed like it belonged in the more exaggerated realms of science fiction.
The fact that the city exists in a ruined world adds a third element of meaning, turning the movie into one of many post-apocalyptic visions of how technology might destroy us by amplifying the flaws in our character. The connecting link between all of these depictions -- of self-indulgent lifestyles, dependence on machines, and world destruction -- is the image of technology that has run amok as a result of our failure to control its negative consequences. The computer that infantilizes and destroys the people it is supposed to care for; the robot that mistakes people for the food it is supposed to freeze for them; and the destruction of most of civilization as a result not merely of war but of pollution and overpopulation, which are made possible by advances in science and industry -- all these ideas show us unintended consequences in which humanity ends up being sacrificed at the alter of uncontrolled technology.
When you add in the way the computer has to be destroyed at the end to free the inhabitants of the city, it is obvious that the movie expresses a deep pessimism about -- and opposition to -- technology. The vision it offers is Luddite (3) in inspiration, extolling the virtues of a life free from machines. Of course, this is also an idea that was expressed by some in the 60s counterculture.
But this image of technology run amok is only one idea offered by the movie. Seen from a slightly different angle, the movie shows the connection between self-oriented lifestyles and the dependence on technology, on the one hand, and the way power is exercised in contemporary society, on the other. In particular, it shows us inhabitants who play their days away while true power is in the hands (or circuits) of the computer. What looks like a life of ease turns out to be an evasion of responsibility and a form of social control.
This depiction links Logan's Run with the work of various writers on the left, such as the late Herbert Marcuse, who have asserted that those who govern society in an age of advanced capitalism manipulate its inhabitants with consumer abundance and entertainment-oriented lifestyles. Free sex and television for the masses, while those who control the levers of power do their work in secret, at our expense. In this interpretation, the movie is telling us that the appearance of freedom can mask its opposite.
In this regard, it is interesting that the city has social classes with some similarities to our own. It has the privileged elite of sandmen who keep the public in line for the computer. It has a middle class in the majority of the city's inhabitants, and it has its poor in the wild children who are separated off from the rest in a kind of ghetto, where they are free of the computer, in exchange for which they get no enjoyment of society's material benefits. But all these classes, even the sandmen with power and perks, are ultimately disenfranchised by a larger power, the movie tells us. That message is also an essential element of the philosophy of the left, which sees America's affluent and more modest middle classes, its working class and its poor stuck in crime-ridden ghettoes as all victims of exploitation by the capitalist system and those who control it.
Like Marcuse and others on the left, the movie also portrays its fictional society as being governed by an "instrumentalist rationality" that treats people like objects -- like means toward ends -- rather than as subjects. They are cogs in the computer's mechanism of death, to the point where they have "life clocks" built into them that determine the time of death.
Here is a quote from the book Counter-Revolution and Revolt by Marcuse, published in 1972, four years before the movie came out, which portrays America much as the movie portrays the city. In this passage, it is "capitalism" rather than a computer that is described as instrumentally manipulating the public by offering fake freedoms.
"Capitalism now produces, for a majority of the people in the metropoles, not so much material privation as steered satisfaction of material needs, while making the entire human being -- intelligence and senses -- into an object of administration, geared to produce and reproduce not only the goals but also the values and promises of the system, its ideological heaven. Behind the technological veil, behind the political veil of democracy, appears the reality, the universal servitude, the loss of human dignity in a prefabricated freedom of choice."
One of the things this universe of steered satisfactions produces, according to Marcuse, is "the images of a world of ease, enjoyment, fulfillment and comfort which no longer appears as the exclusive privilege of an elite but rather within the reaches of the masses."
Marcuse even sees in contemporary society "the social steering of sexuality through controlled desublimation," (4) which results in freer sex lives, reducing the sense of guilt and promoting a greater sense of satisfaction. Among its uses, he believed, free sex serves to reduce people's dissatisfaction and thus protect the system.
For Marcuse, all this is in the service of capitalism, which is an idea the movie doesn't explicitly convey. And his central idea that what this system covers up is our capacity to use technology to free ourselves so we will have a sensual and aesthetic appreciation of life, is almost the exact opposite of the movie's stoic vision of a society that has forgotten the meaning of marriage, reproduction and work. But the essential idea that society's controllers use the instruments of rationality (science, technology, administration, and so on) to trap the public in a closed system full of false satisfactions is essential to both Marcuse and the movie. I don't know whether Marcuse ever saw Logan's Run, (hard to imagine as that might be) but he would have immediately recognized the pseudo-benevolent computer that offers its inhabitants a life of trivial pursuits and planned obsolescence at 30. The movie is clearly saying something about us and, whatever it is saying, has important similarities to what theorists such as Marcuse are saying.
Just as the movie includes a critique of the way power is exercised in contemporary society, so it also covertly critiques our contemporary world-view and perceptions. It does so by portraying a culture that isn't merely a physical prison but that also traps its inhabitants by lying to them and "structuring" their minds, to control what they see as normal and deviant. The inhabitants believe the city is the world and its system is the only way things can be. They are convinced that the only hope anyone has of living passed their 30th birthday is to take their chances in carousel. And they view unacceptable desires, such as wanting to run or wanting to know who one's children are, once the seeds for their children's creation have been donated to the city nursery, as sick and strange. Such desires signify that something is wrong with the person, rather than the system. By shaping their minds this way, the computer is able to present a constructed world as if it is the only possible world. As a result, the inhabitants mistake slavery for freedom, falsehood for truth, invention for nature.
The movie conveys this idea in various (not-very poetic) conversations between the characters. At one point early on, for example, the other sandman, Francis Seven, (who will later chase Logan) is bewildered at why Logan would even wonder if those who die in carousel are renewed. And he thinks there is something very odd about Logan being curious about whether a particular baby in the city nursery is his own. When he asks Logan if he also knows who the baby's "seed mother" is, Logan responds: "Of course not. I'm curious not sick." In other words, the desire to know things that the computer says should not be known, is viewed as being as alien to normal life as the world outside the city.
Soon after, Jessica asks him: "Why is it wrong to run."
"You shouldn't even be thinking such things let alone talking about them," Logan responds.
But the scene that is central to this depiction of a culture that traps its inhabitants in a prison of unknowing, in which they stigmatize and turn away from truths that challenge their conditioning, is the one in which Logan fails to convince the inhabitants that there is no renewal. They are so completely immersed in their mad society that they believe the one who knows the true state of things is the crazy one.
Here, once again, the movie is conveying a philosophy common to the left, which started to win popular attention in the 60s and 70s. Not only does government lie, this philosophy asserts, but our culture and world view may also be deceptions. We have to go outside our society, intellectually and not merely physically, to see the larger truths it obscures.
The first source of these ideas for the movie was, once again, the book, which used them to create a fictionalized version of the domestic battle over Vietnam, projected into the future. In the book, questioning the culture of youth and computer-control is seen as unpatriotic and abnormal, and a bearded protester, with a sign urging people to run, is subjected to name-calling and abuse from onlookers, before he is arrested.
But this idea was coming from all kinds of sources in the 1960s and 70s. It is clearly expressed in the first quote from Marcuse, above, in which he claims people "produce and reproduce not only the goals but also the values and promises of the system." In the book, One Dimensional Man, published in 1964, he similarly writes: "Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual." The result is "an immediate identification of the individual with his society," which is the product of "a sophisticated, scientific management and organization." In this society, he claimed, "ideology is in the process of production itself.... The productive apparatus and the goods and services which it produces 'sell' or impose the social system as a whole." (5)
Another variation on these ideas can be found in the anti-psychiatry movement that challenged definitions of what it means to be normal. And it can be seen in the ideas of Peter Berger, a sociologist (not of the left) who helped popularize the idea that our perception of reality is a social construction. As he put it in the 1964 essay "Marriage and the Construction of Reality": "Every society has its specific way of defining and perceiving reality -- its world, its universe, its overarching organization of symbols."
This social construction is perceived as "the only world that normal men can conceive of." And it is "sustained through conversation with significant others." (6)
Although a full discussion will have to wait for another essay, these ideas have also received a rich treatment in fiction, especially in depictions of other false utopias, such as the ??? novel Brave New World, which traps its inhabitants in another psychological prison of endless pleasure.
The movie takes these ideas and creates a fictional culture that is a good symbol for the entrapping and delusional qualities of culture (and government) in general, and of our own culture, in particular. To a minor degree, it uses these ideas to expose traditional American culture as a fraud, since carousel is an image of the misplaced faith people place in religion, willingly sacrificing for what the movie says is the illusion of a reward after death. But the movie's primary interest is in using the idea that culture can be a delusion against the new way of seeing things that came with the 60s and 70s. Our new fascination with youth and pleasure; our faith in the curative power of machines, and our criticisms of traditional ideas about work and marriage may be a new way of warding off truth, it tells us. Much like the philosophies of the traditional left and right, it eschews relativism, telling us that beyond these misperceptions is a real world and a real human condition that we have lost the ability to see.
The essence of the movie's plot is precisely the discovery of this fact, by Logan, and, ultimately, by the inhabitants, as they realize that what they mistook for objective reality and nature is artifice. When the computer makes a similar discovery, recognizing that its ideas about the world are wrong, it dies. But for humanity, this insight will set it free.
Thus the movie is telling us that self-oriented lifestyles, and the perception that this is the way life should be, are both manipulations. What look to us like nature and freedom are contrivances, it says: they are forms of ideology that have been turned into false pleasures and a misperception of reality. To put it in more obviously Marxist terms, the movie portrays the inhabitants of the city, and, by analogy, us, as suffering a state of false consciousness that causes them to mistake the interest of those in power for their own interest.
Logan then returns to this class of oppressed consumers (who are ultimately consumed), playing Karl Marx to the computer's evil capitalist and dictator-bureaucrat (and Woodward and Bernstein to the computer's Nixon), with a manifesto in the service of class consciousness and liberation. He gets passed the walls of the city, but must still break through the walls inside the minds of the people.
In the end, the movie offers a message of hope, which allows it to serve as a defense against despair and a source of inspiration. Once the truth is made known, it says, something inside us drives us to fight for freedom. (7)
To sum up this first realm of meaning, (and at the risk of repetition) Logan's Run portrays pleasure-oriented lifestyles as a way of losing our selves and our true nature. It warns us that those in power can use these lifestyles, along with dependence on technology and a false world view, as a tool of manipulation to make a prison look like home. It also provides another meaning, in which the computer represents, not society's governing classes, but technology that has run amok on its own, imprisoning us emotionally and physically, and causing us to regress.
The movie offers these truths about society in general; about the society in which it was made; and about a possible future that could evolve from this society. Like all fiction, it uses information about the present as its raw material and it comments on the present by doing so.
But the movie only takes on its true significance with the next realm of meaning, which will be examined in the next section.

3.
Logan's Run as a Disguised Account of Personal Development: Family, Mind, Birth by Ken Sanes
In addition to offering a critique of contemporary America, Logan's Run is also a symbolic reenactment of various issues that deal with individual human development. In particular, it tells a story, in disguised form, about what it means to escape a dysfunctional family; what it means to grow out of a neurotic personality; and what it means to be born. Once again, the movie uses these subjects as its raw material and it comments on them.
In the first of these realms of meaning, the city is a disguised depiction of a family. The computer, with the not-young but almost-seductive female voice, represents the classic, overindulgent, entrapping mother who keeps her children dependent and locked away from the world. The computer feeds and houses them; it incubates them; it keeps them in a constant state of satisfaction and it teaches them falsehoods that stop them from going out into the world and discovering the meaning of adulthood. They, in turn, remain children, in a perpetual state of symbiosis with her, until she destroys them when they begin to get too old, and, perhaps, too wise or independent, so she can make way for her next set of children.
The world outside the city is the world outside the home, the world of adulthood, freedom, work and responsibility that the children are sheltered from. It is clearly portrayed as a masculine world, a world that could be brought to them by the father if he were present. Logan and Jessica encounter one such father figure just before exiting the city, in the robot, which is depicted as male in gender. But the robot turns out to be another variation on the mother, consuming the children it is supposed to be caring for. (It may or may not be relevant that the robot's name is "Box," a slang term for the female genitals, conveying the idea that it is a father of the same nature as the mother depicted in the movie).
After Jessica and Logan make their way beyond Box to the outside, they soon see the Washington Monument towering in the distance, which, clichéd as it may seem, announces that they have entered a masculine, phallic world. When they journey to the city that houses the monument, they encounter what there is of the true father, in the old man. He is weak and has little power, and is portrayed as much like a child himself, reciting comic verse from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. He also lives in exile from the family and is excluded from a position in the family network.
But he is still adequate enough to do his job, which is to teach Logan and Jessica the facts about man and woman, and life, that the mother was keeping from them, so they can become adults. Logan then enters into the cycle of marriage, procreation, aging and death, and replaces the mother with a wife. Jessica's role in this is clearly that of an outsider who takes a young man away from his over-controlling mother. Jessica is a critic of the society from the start, and she pulls Logan along as she recognizes that people were meant to marry and create families.
Why did the mother send her son out into the world? Ostensibly, it is in an effort to end all opposition to herself by destroying sanctuary. Although it isn't supported by the elements of the story, we might also see it as a disguised act of altruism.
In any case, after the child grows into adulthood, he is then depicted as enacting one of the classic fantasies of childhood: he returns as a hero who will save the other children in the family. On his return, he is shunned and almost martyred; but in the end he gets his revenge against the persecuting mother, destroys her and establishes a healthier family, with himself as leader and with a wife to complete the set.
It is no exaggeration to say that fiction is full of overthrows like this. No sooner do writers and daydreamers of any era begin to spin out stories then substitute parents are escaped from, revenged upon and overthrown. infantilizing mothers and domineering or distant fathers, wearing the endless masks of fiction, are constantly depicted as keeping their growing children from adulthood and lovers, as a result of jealousy, the fear of competition, or a failure to recognize that their children have grown up. As the literary theorist Northrop Frye shows, the happy ending of comedy often leads to a new, more open, society after a persecuting father who was keeping the lovers apart is overthrown. (1)
Even as the city is a symbol of a dysfunctional family of the kind described by psychoanalytic theory, it is also a symbol for a neurotic mind that is a product of such a family. The computer is the internalized parent, especially the super-ego, that monitors, controls, and punishes. The mall-like public spaces of the city are the ego and the conscious personality, a well-ordered world, overseen by the super-ego. The place where barbaric children run wild is the Id or the repressed unconscious, where the primitive desires of childhood that threaten the ego and flout the demands of the super-ego are exiled and live in a state of anarchy. And the city's walls and isolation is the neurotic mind's effort to defend itself against the truths of life that it refuses to recognize.
The journey down through the labyrinthine bowels of the city, passed ancient, long-dead, machines that once drew food from the sea, is a journey through the ancient, Jungian, collective unconscious, the roots of the mind. The city is now isolated from these portions of itself, just as it is largely isolated from the roots of life. (Although it is still said to draw power from the sea, the source of life, so its isolation isn't complete.)
Logan's journey through this realm is particularly rich with symbolism. As in psychoanalysis and Jungian therapy, the only way Logan can get beyond the artificial world of neurosis and out into the world is through the personal and collective unconscious. The way in is the way out.
So, here, Logan's Run is a story of the end of neurosis, the end of the effort to turn the self into a defended world -- defended from adulthood, and from the truth about men and women, birth and death. Logan, as a representative of the city's ego, gets beyond the fear induced by the internalized mother and delves into the unconscious, where he discovers the eternal truths and is then free to enter adulthood. In this realm of meaning, the old man is an image of the father that exists in the mind, although he can also be a grandfatherly figure who is a Jungian archetype of an old wise man.
Logan's relationship to the other sandman -- Francis Seven -- is one of a number of keys to understanding the meanings that refer to family and mind. Throughout the first part of the movie, Logan and Francis are inseparable: they stalk runners together, they enjoy women together (2) and they share their thoughts with each other. In this relationship, Francis is clearly the more dominant and aggressive of the two, putting Logan on the spot and deciding how they will use their time together.
Then, after Logan becomes a runner, Francis clearly feels betrayed and he stalks Logan in an effort to kill him. When Francis catches up with the couple, he grabs Jessica and, while holding her prisoner, he talks to her like a spurned lover talking to a rival:
"What did you do to him? You know what he was? He was a sandman. He was happy. You ruined him. You killed him."
What we see here is obviously two love triangles: the primary one in which Logan leaves the mother for a life outside with Jessica, and a second one in which he leaves Francis for Jessica.
In terms of psychoanalytic symbolism, this is a variation on a classic story about neurosis and growth, told in disguised form. Logan is kept imprisoned by his seductive mother, who infantilizes him, makes marriage to another woman taboo, and separates him from his weakened father. His desires for intimacy are then directed to another man, either because he is still a child or, if we see him as an adult, because his interest in women and/or the mother are being displaced. But Logan escapes the mother's clutches, learns the facts of life from his father, abandons his homosexual "object choice" and takes a wife, in which intimacy and sex will be brought together for the first time.
Just as the movie includes these disguised accounts of family and mind, so it also includes the unmistakable symbolism of birth. According to the psychiatrist Stanlislav Grof, birth involves four stages. First, he says, the fetus is in the protected environment of the womb, which can be an idyllic world of constant satisfaction, although it can also involve intrusions or noxious elements. Second, the uterine contractions begin, closing in on the fetus, even though the uterine cervix is still closed, creating a "no exit" situation for the fetus. Third, birth begins as the fetus is pushed through the birth canal. And finally, there is birth, into a life of separation, openness, the end of the constant satisfaction of needs, and a new vulnerability.
Grof believes we experience all this as we are born and re-experience it later in life, usually in disguised form, in all kinds of feelings and ideas about oceanic ecstasy, paranoia, entrapment and so on. He also believes we can remember it directly under certain conditions, which seems unlikely, although not impossible.
What is interesting, here, is that the first part of Logan's Run reveals all four of these stages in a distinct form, suggesting that, in addition to everything else, the movie is a disguised depiction of the process of birth. First Logan is in the protected womb of the city, living a life of constant satisfaction, but one that is also intruded on by a few moments of doubt. Second, his life clock is speeded up and he suddenly experiences anxiety, paranoia, and a desire to escape, but without a way out yet being visible. Third, he and Jessica journey through the labyrinthine bowels or rather, the birth canal, of the city, still anxious and suffering paranoia because of the pursuit of the other sandman. Grof says that when this third phase of travel down the birth canal is being depicted, it often involves scatological images, and images of great releases of energy that, among other things, can involve machines and floods. Logan and Jessica's journey out of the city includes all of this -- they are carried away by a flood of water; they encounter a technological infrastructure, and they travel through places with grime and junk. Finally, in phase four, they emerge into the outside, a world full of light, separation, vulnerability, and a new independence.
There are all kinds of more specific references along the way that also convey these ideas. At one point, for example, Jessica temporarily takes off her clothes and Logan his shirt, ostensibly because they are wet and cold. This is partly an excuse to show us Jenny Agutter, who plays Jessica, undressed. But it also takes place just before they meet the robot "Box" and then emerge into the outside. Like all infants, they will emerge out of their mother without clothes. (They actually end up putting their clothes back on before exiting, since it would have looked a little odd for audiences to see them emerging into the outside, in awe of the sun, ready for a new beginning, standing there with all their parts hanging out).
Another evidence of birth symbolism can be seen soon after they exit to the outside. As they skinny dip (the clothes are off again), Jessica shows Logan that the crystal implanted on their palms is no longer lit up, which, as noted earlier, means they are no longer connected to the computer, and it no longer has control over them. In other words, the umbilical cord has been broken.
When Logan and Jessica return to the city and swim through the underwater vents, to plant the new idea of freedom and engender a new society, we are given a disguised depiction of insemination. As a result, the egg of the city breaks open (or the mother dies in birth, if one wants to stay closer to the imagery of human birth) and the inhabitants are born as free men and women.
Although all this birth symbolism is perceived in its own right by audiences (mostly outside of awareness), it also deepens the symbolism about family, mind, and society. Leaving one's family, the movie says, is a second birth. We are born physically, once into the world, separated from our mother's womb, and a second time into the world of adulthood in which we separated from our mothers' arms and become truly independent. But the separation we undergo can't merely be a physical separation; it also has to be in ourselves. The other sandman leaves the city, as well, but learns nothing about what it means to be "outside", and so he has to die.
Meanwhile, the old man isn't far from undergoing the final "birth" of life, into death, and he gets Jessica to promise to bury him after he dies. Before they are born into the world, the inhabitants of the city experienced none of this, and so they were never exactly alive.
Once we see all this psychoanalytic symbolism, we can link it up with the social criticism described in the previous section, to provide one possible meaning of the movie. Here, the movie portrays the generation that came of age in the 60s (or failed to come of age) as one whose mothers spoiled and sheltered them to hold on to them, and whose fathers didn't have the strength to offer an alternative. This element of meaning is clearly an act of blame. The self-indulgence, lack of masculine virtues and endless childhood of the 60s generation, it tells us, is the fault not of that generation, but of mom, who feminized the culture and infantilized her children. With this idea, the movie offers us a psychological interpretation of the 60s generation that helps that generation deny its own responsibility in shaping society and itself, although there is undoubtedly some truth in it, as well, about the indulgence of parents, if not only of mothers.
The movie can also be perceived as a more general critique of culture that uses ideas about family and gender. Ours is a feminized culture without fathers, it says, which treats its inhabitants like children. Others have said these same thing in the more direct language of social theory and criticism.
Beyond this, there is a more interesting message -- that to be free and truly mature, we have to separate from our culture and society, just as we have to separate from our mothers in the act of being born and growing up. This message will be discussed in the final section.
Now that the elements of meaning referring to family, personality and birth, and of society and culture, have been offered, one might wonder precisely where all this symbolism resides. Is it inherent in the text, waiting to be discovered?
The only answer that makes sense is that all or most of it was initially put there by those who gave the movie and the book their shape. Some is put into the movie consciously and deliberately, some is put in without the authors being aware they are doing so, and some is partly perceived. The authors derive their material from emotionally-invested schemas of the self's relationship to significant others and to life, that is embedded in their minds as a result of their own upbringing. As we will see, all kinds of other images, of society, culture and myth become incorporated into these models, and draw much of their emotional force from them.
These meanings are then picked up by audiences, whose personalities are constructed out of the same kinds of emotionally-invested cognitive schemas. Precisely what meanings audiences are aware of; how they present it to themselves; and what they respond to will depend on the psychodynamics of each person and on the culture they share.
This means that the authors are communicating information to the audience, and either side may send or receive parts of the message consciously or outside of conscious awareness or anywhere in between. So all of this is a communication, just as much as the more obvious elements of the movie are. It is just that the authors and audience experience various degrees of denial about what is being said. Put another way, all of this is the movie, and all of it contributes to the aesthetic experience of the audience.
Of course, this is a communication with a number of communicators. These ideas are contained to one degree or another in the book. But those who shaped the movie took these elements, and adapted and reassembled them, to tell a more coherent and detailed story about the meaning of freeing oneself from limits imposed by internalized parents. (3)
This explanation isn't unique to movies. All human communication and all the representations we create involve overt and covert messages. And as many social scientists have shown us, those covert messages are often about our relationships, and about the essential issues of life. Not infrequently, various people will collaborate, each shaping a part of a larger communication that ends up telling one coherent story.
It should also be noted that none of this means the authors were necessarily reading books on psychology or human development, or on Herbert Marcuse, Peter Berger, anti-psychiatry or Marx. (Not having interviewed the authors or read accounts of their lives, I don't have access to information that might help answer that questions.)
What it does mean is that the authors derive their ideas, first, from basic human perceptions, about power, freedom and illusion, that both they and all those theorists draw from. All of these ideas -- about neurosis, health and development, about the illusions created by those in power, and the social construction of our world view -- are already contained in the cognitive schemas of the min, waiting for the authors to express them in disguise or in more obvious ways. This assertion is confirmed by the fact that stories that were written long before these theories were formalized convey the same ideas. In addition, of course, these ideas were also in the air at the time; they were part of the cultural environment the authors drew from in creating their story.
Trying to determine if the authors were engaged in a conscious or unconscious communication is further complicated by the fact that Hollywood has also taken these ideas and used them deliberately and with conscious intention, in an effort to manipulate audiences. Some movies contain such obviously contrived psychoanalytic symbolism, for example, that it is obvious the creators are consciously trying to play to the unconscious of their audience. Interviewing the creators of movies and other forms of story-telling, and gathering information about them, (which may invade their privacy) would also provide information but, in many instances, it would probably fail to settle these questions, due to all kinds of limitations imposed by faulty memory, deception, self-deception and difficulties drawing lines of cause and effect when the cause isn't observable.