Thought of the Day: B-Grade sci fi predicts the future of the human race

Wanting to expand my knowledge of science fiction movies outside Star Wars and Star Trek, I recently revisited Cherry 2000; a B-Grade sci-fi from 1987. For those of you unlucky enough not to have seen it, the preview pretty much covers the whole storyline.

The basic outline of the plot is fairly familiar; the setting is a post-apocalyptic world in which society as we know it has broken down.  The environment is in ruins, with the wealthy having access to things like jobs and booze, while the less fortunate scour barren wastelands & forage for food & entertainment.

…really, there must be a sci-fi writers school in which they just publish Chapter One (the setting) for them & let them fill in the blanks from there.

Anyway, Cherry 2000 is interesting for a number of reasons, not least amongst them Melanie Griffith potentially looking attractive.

This may or may not be Melanie's shadow

Aside from that, though, the futuristic world in which Cherry 2000 is set (the year 2017!) is one in which people pick mates through casual encounters that use smart-phone like technology, with portable computers showing videos of their previous encounters for potential mates to judge them by.

I remember being shocked by this part of the film when I first watched it as a young boy, mostly as I had little inclination as to what they were actually suggesting, but also by the frank & transactional nature of what was being negotiated.

For context, I was equally perturbed by the willingness of E.T to dress in drag

The alternate to finding a human mate, which is also the basic story of the film, is to select a cyborg that is readily available and programmable to ones own specifications.  While nailing a robot, even an attractive one, may seem a little creepy to you or I, the essential proposition being made by the film is that it’s a lot easier than developing a relationship.

That being said, creepy gets a bad name sometimes.

The story ends with the hero falling for a non-cyborg (aka. human) lady whom he has developed a relationship with after going through an adventure together.  The message? That human love can still work, as long as you are being fired at with rocket-launchers.

That being said, the advent of  ‘sexting’, Tinder and other mechanisms of recording oneself in various situations and using these to market oneself in the modern world would seem to suggest that modern society is coming close to resembling the rampant and amoral wasteland presented in Cherry 2000.

So what to do? If the options are between getting shot at by foragers or deal with Lauren Fishburne as your lawyer to define how your next human relationship will develop, I dare say the future of cyborg relations looks good.

Just sayin'