89 Minutes, Color, USA, 1972

Written By: Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino & Steven Bochco

Directed By: Douglas Trumbull

Dramatis Personae:

Bruce Dern is Freeman Lowell, resident botanist aboard the freighter Valley Forge, and nature fanatic.

Cliff Potts is John Keenan, red-clad Valley Forge crewmember, and the only one remotely sympathetic.

Ron Rifkin is Marty Barker, smug white-clad Valley Forge crewmember.

Jesse Vint is Andy Wolf, boorish blue-clad Valley Forge crewmember.

Cheryl Sparks and Mark Persons are Huey and Dewey, respectively, Valley Forge service droids, and Freeman Lowell’s only real friends.

Commentary:

As you may have guessed by now, gentle reader, I am not a big fan of the 1970s. You only have to examine my varied ramblings to glean my opinions on that dark decade in American history, that time when good taste died and nobody bothered to bury its body before it started to stink up the place. Granted, I wasn’t there to witness it first-hand, so I fully accept the possibility that I’m just not getting something, but the cultural attitudes and artistic works that came out of that time period just do not appeal to me. The 1960s were more fun, in my opinion. There was this golden time, around 1965 to 1968, where everything was cool, and we seemed to be heading in the right direction. But then everything fell apart. The nobler ideals of personal liberation and exploration of new ideas turned in on themselves, devolving into selfish hedonism. Musicians and artists became disillusioned and unmotivated; no longer dreaming big or making experimental forays, appealing instead to the lowest common denominator. It was a sad time, if you ask me.

But it was an interesting time for Science Fiction. The most enduring Sci-Fi stories have always been the allegorical ones, the ones that tell fables or cautionary tales about the human condition in possible new worlds. And with pessimism and disillusionment as the order of the day, the 1970s were rife for cautionary tales and polemic allegories of where civilization might head if we weren’t careful. By crafting an unfamiliar future world, science fiction artists have the freedom to express ideas that could be seen as controversial in a more contemporary setting. Of course, in such fables, scientific integrity is often sacrificed in favor of crafting an effective image or getting an Important Message™ across. So many of the sci-fi movies made in 1970s are certainly compelling, but just fall apart once you think about them. Silent Running is a perfect example of this trend. The directorial debut of master effects artist Douglas Trumbull – still riding high from his brilliant work on 2001: A Space Odyssey – the movie is certainly visually striking, and the dystopic world it builds is a darkly compelling one. But it is still a deeply flawed picture, with an interesting concept that implodes upon closer inspection, and an Important Message™ that’s too damned pretentious for its own good.

Set in some vaguely defined future – “at the dawn of a new century,” a voiceover explains early in the film – Silent Running takes place aboard the deep-space freighter Valley Forge. In this dystopic future, Earth has been thoroughly domesticated: everything is paved and climate-controlled, and there is no natural greenery left on the planet. The remnants of the lush forests that once grew there are contained in geodesic domes that dot the Valley Forge and its fleet of sister ships as they cruise the outer reaches of the Solar System. The domes are part of a conservation project, an effort to preserve something of the original biomes that once covered the Earth, in the hopes of someday returning and re-foliating the planet. The bio-domes aboard the Valley Forge are cared for by the botanist Freeman Lowell, an odd fellow who enjoys gardening and frolicking with the woodland creatures. His three fellow shipmates would rather spend their free time tooling around the mostly-empty corridors of the ship in quasi-futuristic ATVs (even thoughtlessly plowing through Lowell’s flower beds; ooh, real subtle there, Doug), and as such they regard Lowell as an object of ridicule. Lowell responds to their ridicule with a quiet smugness: as one who communes with nature – or what remains of it, at least – he regards himself as superior to the company drones that are his fellow crewmen. Lowell also firmly believes in the original mission of the project, and hopes that one day soon they will be recalled to Earth and will plant trees again.

This hope is soundly dashed, however, as the next scheduled transmission from the company high command comes in. The fleet has been ordered to jettison and destroy the domes, and return to regular shipping duty. Lowell is devastated, and his feelings are magnified by his shipmates’ apparent indifference to it. The other three men do not share Lowell’s view of the importance of the forests; they’re just glad to be going home after six long months in space. As the rest of the crew busy themselves with setting the bombs, Lowell goes into full denial mode, tending the garden in one of the “temperate forest” domes. As the other domes are jettisoned and blown up around him, his rage and frustration grow to unmanageable levels. So when Keenan arrives to plant the bomb, Lowell snaps and attacks him. The confrontation leaves Lowell wounded and Keenan dead, and that’s enough to finally send Lowell off the deep end. He jettisons and destroys the second-to-last dome with Wolf and Barker still inside, then sets a course for deep space.

However, wounded and half-crazed, Lowell isn’t exactly in the best condition to plot the best course. The Valley Forge passes through the rings of Saturn, suffering damage and losing one of its complement of three maintenance droids. But it comes out the other side more or less intact, and this is to Lowell’s favor: after such a rough ride, the company would presume the Valley Forge destroyed, leaving him free to tend his garden in peace. Realizing the need for companionship, he reprograms the two remaining droids with something approaching personalities (and since this is the 1970s, “reprogramming” means hand-soldering a chip the size of an 8-track cassette and inserting it into the robot; quite a feat there), and teaches them to assist him in tending the garden. However, these robots are no substitute for real human companionship, and eventually the solitude takes a toll on Lowell’s sanity…as does the strange ailment that soon strikes the forest, killing it slowly.

I will give Douglas Trumbull credit and say that Silent Running LOOKS amazing. The spacecraft Valley Forge is a wonder to behold, detailed and realistic, looking pretty much how you’d expect a commercial space freighter to look. In designing the model, Trumbull clearly went for the same aesthetic he used in 2001: The Valley Forge has a similar look to the Discovery One, with that elongated “dog bone” shape that makes it look both efficient and delicate at the same time. Basically a long piece of exposed infrastructure, the main body of the Valley Forge terminates in a cluster of climate domes that jut out on all sides like mushrooms. Equal attention is given to the interior sets, which manage to be recognizable as industrial space while still looking suitably alien and futuristic. Small touches remind us that we’re on a spacecraft, like the odd geometric storage crates in the cargo bay and the small circular pool table in the rec room (complete with a robot assistant who racks the balls, but it’s so slow that I don’t really see the point). Seeing as how Trumbull started out as a special-effects artist and model-maker, it would stand to reason that the design would be the best thing about the movie. I’d be disappointed if it weren’t.

As for the rest of the movie….well…

As I said earlier, Silent Running is primarily allegorical. It MUST be, because the central premise of the story falls apart like a wet napkin upon scrutiny. Consider: an Earth without plant life of any kind. That is still a viable, livable environment. A biological impossibility, really. Never mind how you’re going to have oxygen, or food, or an organism to help anchor topsoil; HOW are you going to eliminate all plant life? It just CAN’T be done. We humans have done our fair share of damage to our ecosystem, sure, but such a radical level ecological change is just logistically impossible. CANNOT be done…or at least, not without destroying the whole planet. Granted, all of the film’s action takes place aboard the Valley Forge, and so we never actually SEE Earth. All we have to go on about life there are Lowell’s rantings about it (which are probably not the most reliable things), and according to him, Earth has basically been paved over, and the domes are the only places left where plants still exist at all. Which brings up the second issue with the central premise: while the juxtaposition of lush forest with cold hard space makes for a striking image, there are just several things wrong with the idea of shooting a forest into space and expecting it to be okay. Things obvious to even MY untrained eye, and which frankly should have been obvious to such a professed friend of the forest like Freeman Lowell long before his forest started dying.

So in the absence of hard scientific validity, Silent Running can only be judged as an allegory, with an Important Message™ to get across. And the Important Message™ is…tend the gardens, apparently. The gardens are a metaphor, at least as far as Freeman Lowell is concerned. Life has become too easy on Earth: everything is controlled and manufactured, and humanity has become complacent. Without contact with a natural world, without something alive and beautiful to inspire them, human beings no longer have any dreams or ambitions or aspirations beyond simply staying fed and warm. With the loss of a natural ecosystem and the feeling of a place within it, so goes the very thing that makes us human.

Or at least, that WOULD be the Important Message™, were anyone else but Freeman Lowell delivering it. Because Freeman Lowell is not some saintly dispenser of wisdom. Rather the opposite; he is a deeply flawed individual, smug and unsympathetic almost from the first time we meet him. As portrayed by Bruce Dern, with his long open face and big cow eyes, Lowell is clearly a bit off-kilter long before he snaps and starts killing his crewmates. He WOULD be; a tree-hugger in an age where there are no trees would have to be viewed as odd by society as a whole. Rather than be a sympathetic misfit, however, Lowell is a superior one. He revels in his outcast nature, firmly believing himself to be the only sane person left in the entire universe, because he takes care of the trees. One of his very first interactions with his fellow crewmembers is during a poker game, where he wins, and promptly gloats over his winnings. Granted, he may have some legitimate grievances against his shipmates, but he does not rise above their level. Freeman Lowell is no less selfish than the others; they may be indifferent, but he is prideful, and that can be even worse. Because his smug sanctimony drags down whatever Important Message™ Silent Running had to say, and it becomes simple pretentious hippie nonsense: that progress is a real bummer, man, and we should all just go back to the garden. To the GARDEN, mind you. Not to the WILD; these domes that Lowell communes with so much are hardly wilderness. The animals we see are mainly of the cute and fluffy variety: rabbits, squirrels, frogs. The only predator we see is one lone hawk that seems to live in the forest dome, but what HE lives on we’re never shown. That is something that was conveniently forgotten when the hippies talked about going back to nature; there’s a REASON we created civilization. It’s not all frolicking and gathering fruits and veggies out there. There are genuine dangers to living in the wild, as well as genuine RESPONSIBILITIES. And Lowell is not so good with the responsibilities. His act of killing his shipmates and running away with his garden was an act of irrational, desperate passion, and he is completely unprepared for the consequences of that act – not the least of which is burying the body of Keenan, which he leaves to the drones to do. He can’t even bring himself to face the reality of what he has done, let alone be a responsible caretaker to this last forest. In doing what he has done, Lowell has basically made himself a god, the all-powerful caretaker of the self-enclosed world of the forest dome, and he’s barely a functioning human being.

Oh yes, the Christian parallels are unsubtle and hard to miss. The long-haired Lowell does his gardening in bare feet and a long brown robe, and when he reprograms the two remaining drones to be able to assist him in the dome and to be able to play poker, he is basically remaking them in his own image. Again, this would be all well and good if Freeman Lowell were even a halfway decent human being, but he’s not. He’s smug, selfish, and borderline crazy. It’s very telling that as Lowell’s long lonely vigil starts to drag on, he begins to deliberately AVOID the dome, instead subsisting on the artificial food from the ship’s galley – the very food he once railed against as having no flavor or value – and driving one of the futuristic ATVs to pass the time. It’s kind of a metaphor for the Counterculture Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Lowell made this fateful decision that changed everything, and immediately regretted it when he realized how hard it was to live with the consequences. Unable to take it all back, he lost himself in base pleasures and left his garden in other hands. In a sense Freeman Lowell is a tragic figure, but of the Classical Greek mode: his fall is entirely his own doing, and while you can sympathize with him to a point, there’s no doubt that he brought it all upon himself.

It’s interesting to contemplate what Silent Running might have been if Douglas Trumbull had had a bit more experience as a filmmaker. Perhaps there might have been a more cohesive story, or more realistic character development. As it stands now, Silent Running still has its well-deserved reputation as a cult classic, as well as its status as a curious artifact of another time and place, when Science Fiction told different fables and held up a mirror to a different age.

Things To Look For:

- Douglas Trumbull apparently took another lesson with him from 2001: product placement. Everywhere around the Valley Forge are stuck subtle little corporate logos, mostly on the storage crates that line the cargo bay. Apparently both Coca-Cola and DOW Chemicals will survive into this mythical “dawn of a new century,” and will become products of choice for American Airline’s space fleet. I suppose that’s a bit more believable nowadays than Pan-Am’s moon shuttle, and a Howard Johnson’s space station hotel.

- The robot drones are certainly memorable little creatures, well-designed and able to project a good bit of personality with no faces or appendages to speak of. It helps that these are actually suits: there are people inside them, giving them a level of performance that a puppet or a model simply could not. Although it does make for some unsettling moments; there are times when the drones’ movements are a little TOO organic. It’s made all the more unsettling by the knowledge that Cheryl Sparks and Mark Persons (and the others who played assorted random drones) are AMPUTEES. These are people with no legs, wearing suits and walking on their hands. I mean, they do a good job, and I’m sure they weren’t being exploited like circus freaks or anything, but….it’s still kind of creepy to think about.

- I find myself wondering about the chain of command aboard the Valley Forge. Who’s the captain of this ship, exactly? And further, why does every crewmember seem to have his own unique uniform? Sure, if you want to be cynical about it, you could argue that since the other three crewmembers of the ship are all dead within the first half-hour and we don’t really get a chance to get to know them at all, giving them each a unique color helps you tell them apart. But I wonder if it goes deeper than that, and maybe there was a hidden meaning to each crewman’s color. Keenan wears red, the color of passion, and Keenan is the most sympathetic of the three louts, even reaching out to Lowell in something approaching friendship. Barker wears white, the color of purity, and his distaste and disrespect for Lowell is of a purely malicious nature. Wolf, who wears neutral blue, is less actively mean as Barker. His boorishness is unrefined, purely reactive in nature. Yeah, maybe I’m just reading things into it, but I do wonder…

- The soundtrack. Gah. There’s very little music to be heard in Silent Running, but one particular song just got stuck in my head, to my everlasting regret. Joan Baez warbles her way through some flower-child anthem called “Rejoice in the Sun.” It’s basically one of those “teach your children” songs, with a theme quite appropriate to the Important Message™ of the film. But it’s just so…Joan Baez-y. I really wish I could just un-hear it. It’s going to take about sixteen straight hours of Death Metal to take care of that, I fear.

Written words (c) 2008-2010 Tim o'Brien. Not to be used without permission. Other content, including images, is intended as a Fair Use pursuant to 17 U.S.C. sec. 107.

Date Posted: December 16^th, 2008

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