I have reviewed every Piotr Szulkin film! You can find the rest here.In my review for Piotr Szulkin's first feature film, GOLEM, I sketched a broad outline of of mid-20th century Polish history. I won't retread that history here; suffice to say that the late 60s until the early 80s in Poland were characterized by waves of dissent against the repressive policies of the the Polish United Workers' Party. While Poland's one-party Communist government was decidedly more liberal and permissive than its Soviet neighbors and many of the other Eastern Bloc states, it remained a totalitarian regime that countered escalating protest with hammer-and-tongs-style force. All of this culminated with the foundation of the trade union Solidarity in 1980, whose membership quickly swelled to 10 million within a year (one third of Poland's working-age population). In response to the strength of Solidarity, the Polish government declared Martial Law in 1981.These socio-political events were intertwined with the development of television broadcasting in Poland. In this era there were two television stations—TVP1, which launched in 1952, and TVP2, which launched in 1970. In keeping with the liberal approach to most aspects of life in the Polish People's Republic (relative to the Soviet Union, at least), these stations mainly focused on non-political content: fictional entertainment with educational and cultural programming mixed in. The focus on news in the broadcast schedule was marginal at best. Following the 1968 protests, the state tightened its grip on television content, increasing the share of news until it dominated the broadcast schedule, and using these news briefs to politicize viewers. Television became the main propaganda arm of the Polish United Workers' Party over the course of the 70s, downplaying the multitude of crises gripping the country and distracting from the various failures of government. Instead, these broadcasts focused on attacking worker and student movements, and criticizing western states. Despite the propagandistic nature of this programming, television remained extremely popular in Poland. In a situation comparable to the United States and other western societies, most Poles still tuned in to their daily shows and scheduled their evenings around their favorite programs. It turns out that it's hard to unglue yourself from the "idiot box" no matter the flavor of propaganda, better judgment notwithstanding. In 1980, the television broadcasts took aim at Solidarity, and continued to blame the trade union for the ills of Polish society even as the government declared Martial Law. What better time to watch TV, than during a lockdown? Television popularity surged into the 80s.With his second feature film, WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY, Piotr Szulkin takes aim at state propaganda and crafts a narrative that was both prescient in predicting the immediate future of Poland in 1981, and more broadly prescient in how television would continue to shape our lives well into the 21st century. The film is set in the final days of 1999, opening 12 days after a Martian invasion in "the southwestern part of the country" (the country is never named—the characters speak Polish but most of the signage is in English.) Despite the dedication to H.G. Wells and Orson Welles at the beginning of the film, it is not an advanced military style invasion à la the original WAR OF THE WORLDS. It is more insidious than that—we are told that mankind is "honored to get in touch with an extraterrestrial civilization" and we discover that the humans are eager to ingratiate themselves with their colonizers. Iron Idem is the host of a television news program called "Iron Idem's Independent News" on the SBB TV Network (“Reality - We Create It!”) and he delivers a daily brief on current affairs, which have recently been supplanted by updates on the Martians. He prides himself on being someone "whom you trust, whom you should trust, whom you have to trust!", but despite his nominally "Independent" bonafides, he begins his broadcast on the 12th day of the invasion by reading off a script that is handed to him by a sinister bureaucrat. He resists the efforts of his superiors to co-opt his show, but when he threatens to scrap their daily missive, the station director tells him "your programme is broadcast live and you are free to say what you want. You could have (broken off) today, but didn't." Idem goes home to his modest flat and enjoys some leisure time in bed with his wife, but the lovers are interrupted by chainsaws slicing through their front door. State storm-troopers bust in with a couple of Martians, abducting Idem's wife (zipping her up in a black body bag while she's still very much alive and carrying her off) and ransacking his suite. They clip his ear with a "Friendship Token", indicating favor with the Martians. When he demands to know why they took his wife, they explain it's because he loves her, and if she's gone he will grow to love the Martians sooner. The Martians are interested in Idem and like seeing him on television, and they want him to tell his viewers how much he likes the Martians. "Rejoice and register as a friend. It's an honor." A storm-trooper with a flat, expressionless affect advises Idem, as the Martians break his possessions and spray-paint over the art on his walls. For the remainder of the film, Idem grows steadily more recalcitrant in the face of these intimidation tactics, as his fortunes rapidly deteriorate and his chances of seeing his wife again dwindle.The Martians themselves are comical to look at. The actors playing them seem to be mostly dwarves, but some of them may be children. Their faces are silver, and they wear big puffy silver bubble-goose jackets, with tight black hoods and clunky black moon boots. They do not seem to be intimidating in a physical sense, and their appearances on screen are relatively scarce—they do not appear to have overwhelmed humanity with their numbers. It's never explicitly stated in the film, but there is a strong suggestion that they are not Martians at all. They may in fact be disguised humans, operating as part of some sort of deep psy-op deployed by the state to pacify and manipulate the population. One of Idem's planted missives explains that there is no need for humans to learn the Martian language, that their phenomenal intellectual powers have enabled them to learn the native language immediately. Perhaps this is meant to be taken at face value, but it's very possible that there is no Martian language at all, and the Martians do not speak it because there is no language to speak. At the end of the film, the Martians leave earth, but our only evidence of this is footage of a departing rocket that looks very much like any of the human-built multi-stage rockets that were used in the American and Russian space programs of the mid-20th century. A flying saucer it is definitively not. At any rate, whether the Martians are real or a ruse, the state and its human functionaries prove to be enthusiastic collaborators and provide most of the muscle for Martian operations. The Martian invasion only lasts a couple of weeks, with the apparent goal of collecting human blood, and Martial Law is imposed in their presence. When they abscond with their precious plasma at the end of the film, their relationship with the state changes, and they are cast as enemies instead of friends. But there is little sense that things are going "back to normal" in their absence. When governments introduce new laws and rules to deal with an immediate crisis, they are often reluctant to overturn those rules when the immediate crisis is over. Much of this reflects real world historical trends: I think of the Taliban, who the west portrayed as freedom fighters in the 80s as plucky little Afghanistan pitched an armed resistance against the big bad Soviet Union, but who were then recast as terrorists in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. And I think of the Patriot Act, which was signed into law a month after 9/11. The Patriot Act was ostensibly meant to create more leeway for the state to fight terrorism, but it had the dubiously convenient consequence of curtailing rights for the individual. It was not overturned, and was in fact renewed in modified form as the USA Freedom Act after it expired in 2015.But one does not need to reach over to American history to find these examples. WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY predicts events that would occur in Poland less than a year after the production of the film. First Secretary Edward Gierek had overseen a rising volume of protests and demonstrations throughout the 1970s. In 1980 he capitulated to pressure from striking workers and signed the Gdańsk Agreement, which opened the door to more democratic input on the individual rights of citizens. The striking workers at Gdańsk demanded the establishment of a trade union independent of Communist party control, and the legal right to strike. Thus Solidarity, a massive anti-Communist trade union, was born. But the Soviet Union was growing increasingly worried with the westernization of Poland, the most populous country in the Eastern Bloc Comecon outside of the Soviet Union itself. A Poland that was bankrupt and indebted to western creditors threatened the bottom line stability of the Soviet Union itself, and the entire project of world Communism in general. Under the terms of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union was entitled to enter treaty countries and suppress violent revolutions if necessary. It did not come to that. Gierek was removed from office and placed under house arrest, replaced by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, and Martial Law was declared (in a televised announcement, naturally) in Poland on December 13, 1981. (Even this is particularly eerie, as Szulkin sets his film on December 28, 12 days after mankind "ceased to be alone". He was only three calendar days off.) Much like the world depicted in WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY, the military enforced order in the streets, the police conducted regular patrols, curfews were imposed, all forms of media and interpersonal communication were heavily monitored and censored, travel was restricted to special permit-holders, and shortages of basic goods were common. Demonstrations were violently extinguished, and protesters were imprisoned and in some cases killed. The state took these drastic actions to quell the unrest sparked by the formation of Solidarity. But in a dynamic that echoes Szulkin's film, the Polish United Workers Party's declaration of Martial Law was something done under the pretense of a foreign administrator that had the opportune side benefit of strengthening the domestic administration's interests. While Martial Law officially ended in July 1983, many of these repressive measures remained in place until the end of Communism in Poland in 1989. The Martial Law period was not ruled unconstitutional until 1992. SZULKIN: "I remember that when martial law came, I felt like I had long expected it. The message in my films was always that the students should not throw Molotov cocktails. We are historical subjects, and should not let ourselves be objectified, or manipulated. We participate in History, but cannot always control the political situation. Once, after it was all over, a student came up to me to thank me. He felt like his seeing WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY was the reason he had not ended up in jail... I never had any doubt that martial law was coming. I even bought a shortwave radio to prepare for an emergency. I bought it for something like $50, which back then in my situation was a fortune. I hadn’t stored any canned food, perhaps unwisely, but I had the radio."Szulkin does admit that a first draft of WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY did set out to more explicitly allegorize a Soviet invasion, but he found it too on-the-nose and scrapped it. He ultimately decided that "it is much better if we are not clear about who invades". Regardless, it is something of a miracle that the film was approved and produced at all, because what remains is still fairly explicitly critical of Polish state, and the Soviet Union by proxy. The Minister who approved the film at the development stage was, of course, sacked. The film was accepted into the main competition at Cannes, but the Polish government pulled it before the festival. It was completed in 1981, but its premiere was postponed for two years, until it would not be such an obvious allusion to the introduction of Martial Law. It is somewhat humorous that two years was considered an acceptable delay for its satirical potency to blow over, because it remains an astute allegory even today. TVP is still the public broadcaster in Poland, and in the era of "fake news" it is arguably more of a propaganda mouthpiece for the state than ever before. Many have compared it to FOX News in its promotion of partisan disinformation, and some even credit TVP's biased coverage for the narrow electoral victory of Poland's incumbent right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party (I'm sorry but this is a funny name and acronym for a bunch of fascists) in October 2019. Anchors and correspondents on the station are restricted from critical reporting on subjects like the far right, ethno-nationalism, and international right-wing figures like Donald Trump and Viktor Orban. Even if these specific details did not prove to be so prognostic, WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY has more than just propaganda on its mind. Szulkin puts forward many salient criticisms of television and the media in general. It is not happenstance than Iron Idem is billed as an "Independent" source of media that is actually a mouthpiece for powerful special interests. There are many personalities and programs in our media sphere that purport to be "independent" or generally unbought and unbossed, but in truth, the majority of our media is owned by just six corporations: National Amusements, Disney, TimeWarner, Comcast, NewsCorp, and Sony. These six companies own a collective 430 billion dollars worth of media holdings. When Iron Idem's station director tells him that "your programme is broadcast live and you are free to say what you want", he is confident that Idem will not stray too far from the company line. This faith in rhetorical conformity reminds me of a now-infamous exchange between Noam Chomsky and a BBC journalist. The BBC journalist, flustered by Chomsky's media critique, asked him "how can you know that I'm self censoring?" to which Chomsky cuttingly replied: "I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. But what I'm saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting." The issue is not the "independence" of media personalities, or their ability to say what they want on the air. The issue is the narrowness of the acceptable ideological discourse, which only allows certain approved perspectives to exist within the media ecosystem. Someone who is considered "independent" within these parameters, edgy within tight confines, may even be a boon to the credibility of a news source. I think of Tucker Carlson, who occasionally breaks from standard FOX News ultra-right discourse to highlight class issues, and Chris Hayes, the only MSNBC anchor to eschew mealy-mouthed Russiagate centrism and cover topics like Joe Biden's sexual assault allegations, or human rights abuses in Palestine. The station director tells Idem "I want you to write your texts by yourself... you feel the viewers' tastes." He doesn't want a puppet that simply reads the teleprompter. "I have dozens of such puppets. You must be different... what I want from you is spontaneity, ardour, faith." Idem finally mounts a personal stand at the end of the film, spitting a venomous screed at a crowd of onlookers gathered for a TV Special farewell event for the Martians:IDEM: "Today there'll be no announcements. No jokes. No news. I hear this is a goodbye to the Martians. I also want to say goodbye to you. But this is no reason to feel sad. Simply, as of tomorrow you will love someone new. Do you know why you like me? The more idiotic my programmes were, the wiser you felt. That was the point. To pick the TV chaos for truths which you thought convenient. You accept only what reinforces your belief that passiveness is a virtue and a must. Because this is what you want to believe in. You cry, you pity yourselves and what then? Then you sit in front of a TV set and you feel you get absolution for your sins, you feel more human than those whom you watch. But you watch humans like you. Hypocrites like you. Feeble like you, submissive like you. Television is created in your image. Stop being a herd of silly blockheads. Can you see this tin plate? Do you think I could talk you into believing it is an honour, a reason of pride, if you did not want to believe yourselves? Now what is it actually? You are stupefied, volitionless. They tell you to donate blood, you donate it. They tell you to go about on all fours, you do it. You sell out your dignity, your honesty, only to buy a larger TV set to get the offal of authority. Each of you wants to rule, but each is a slave. Every one of you is being raped but the only thing you desire is to rape others. How different are you from those you spit at? No different! We are the same!"For his trouble, he is quickly and unceremoniously replaced by a new anchor who hosts a show called "The New Better News." The station director is unperturbed, telling him that he missed "the right feeling", that the crowd "won't remember a thing you said... did you forget what they love us for? For fiction." Idem's statement is scrubbed in "The New Better News" follow-up broadcast, so that it appears that he is a Martian supporter, and that all he said was "passiveness is a virtue and a must". WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY is also an indictment of the TV viewing audience, and in general, unthinking passiveness and acceptance of the surface level respectability of authority. The very first scene of the film depicts Idem walking the streets with his wife, when he encounters two boys playing make-believe. One boy is playing a Martian, and has a collar and leash around the neck of the boy playing a human, walking him around like a dog, kicking him and hitting him with a stick. Idem attempts to liberate the dog boy, but the dog boy protests and defends his Martian captor. He wants to be the subservient captive. The audience's relationship with their television is mostly the same: recall that TVP was still enormously popular even during the Martial Law lockdown, with up to ten million households tuning in on a nightly basis to hear the state propaganda line, even if they intellectually disagreed with it. Idem opens his usual broadcast with the words "I take it for granted that no one compels you to listen." The mindless entertainment of the television is a panacea for our real world problems. It is the narcotic that we crave, even when (or perhaps especially when) the societal conditions outside of our hermetically-sealed living rooms have completely deteriorated. After witnessing Idem's rant, a stranger at the TV Special speaks up and offers Idem advice to just relax and go with the flow. Gesturing around at the beer garden outside the stadium, he points out "don't you see how beautifully they arranged everything here?... What more do I need?"Szulkin designs additional symbolism to make a visual argument that we cannot trust what the television has to show us, depicting a medium where visual trickery achieves persuasive results. Some examples are minor and obvious—Idem wears a blonde Prince Valiant wig to cover his balding head. The most obvious example of this is saved for the very end of the film, when Idem is sentenced to death in a televised show trial. Despite his stubborn rebellion and futile attempts to resist, the state is effectively able to manipulate his image and words to make it seem like he admits complicity in the Martian occupation. He is taken to a warehouse and tied to a post, with a firing squad at the ready. The camera zooms out to reveal a television behind his back. The firing squad takes aim and fires. The Idem on the television screen slumps, dead. But the Idem that we can observe in the warehouse remains alive, and after a moment's pause, shrugs off his bonds. If we interpret this literally, it's not clear why the regime lets him live, and the film never gives us subsequent plot points to aid our speculation. Instead, Idem is shown walking over to the warehouse hangar doors and opening them to reveal a blank white misty exterior, framed in a television-like square. He enters the light, and the film ends. William Gibson opened his novel "Neuromancer" with the line "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel", and this is the future that Idem ventures out into. Perhaps television is the "real reality", and Idem is dead. Perhaps the white frame he walks into is his own oblivion, the immortal eternity of televised infamy.Similar to GOLEM, the film is chock-full of additional thematic motifs and visual metaphors, some of which seem more like texture than substance. Friends of the Martians are given ear tags, which make them seem cattle or perhaps a sick reversal of the arm-banded Jews of the Holocaust. These tags are "Tokens of Friendship" that are meant to confer special treatment on those who wear them, earning them a "Quality of Life Permit". But if Idem is any indication it is mostly a decorative honor. Like in GOLEM, blood is a significant plot device. The Martians are ostensibly after human blood, plastering the town with signs that say "Your Blood Is Wanted", and structuring their collaborationist hierarchy around blood donation. Citizens are coerced into blood donation, first for compulsory blood group marking and identification and finally for the withdrawal itself. Idem is evicted from his apartment and forced to bed down at a flop house, where he is told that he must "donate blood voluntarily". Those who don't donate, don't eat. If you don't eat, you can't donate. And if you don't donate, you're kicked out of the flop house. (You can see how this qualifies as "voluntary".) Donors are rewarded with concert tickets to the big TV Special, but even that reward is a bit of a hoodwink—the blood drive employees are shown arguing with donors about how many tickets they're entitled to. Are the Martians vampires? What do they need the blood for? It's never explained. Two references are made in the film to "candy". Once, when Idem pleads with the station director, using "candy" as a metaphor for the wife that he so desperately wants back, a little reward that will lead him to cooperate. The station director tells him that it's it's not true that you get things by wanting them like hell. "To get something you must be scared as hell. Are you scared enough to get candies?" Later, Idem brains a Martian with a lead pipe in the television station bathroom. As the Martian's pulsing brains spill out on the floor, it mutters the dying words: "Friend, give a candy, a red candy." The words "red candy" evoke a side character, a blonde whore who looks strikingly like Idem's wife, who wears a red dress. Idem declines to sleep with her, and later finds her dead in a bathtub. All of this "red" symbolic business—blood, candy, dresses—might be a conscious allusion to Communism, "the reds". Or maybe Szulkin just likes the color, it is never made explicit. Also like in GOLEM, there's a recurring visual motif of paper being stuffed in mouths. The thematic purpose of this visual is more clear here, tying into the censorship idea, than it is in GOLEM. Television sets are ever-present: mounted on poles in the streets and blaring in all directions, playing pornography on lunch-counters, even provided in Idem's jail cell as he awaits his execution. Idem visits a church at one point to make a confession, begging for the priest to grant him some sort of human connection. When the priest doesn't respond, he pulls back the curtain, revealing a TV with his own image on it. This visual metaphor is not subtle: television is the new source of spiritual guidance in man's search for meaning. Many of the same actors from GOLEM return in small roles, and the shitty rock band that played before an imaginary composite audience in GOLEM returns here, calling themselves "Instant Glue".Stylistically, WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY is a stark departure from GOLEM. While GOLEM's sepia tones and labyrinthine plot evoked Kafka, German Expressionism, Godard and Fellini, WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY is closer to Marshall McLuhan, NETWORK, and the nightmarish social commentaries of THEY LIVE and VIDEODROME. I'm also reminded of the Strugatsky Brothers' "The Second Invasion From Mars". My memory of this novella is hazy, but it also deals with a peripheral Martian invasion and its bureaucratic results. Szulkin's own cited inspirations are misleading. He dedicates the film to H.G. Wells and Orson Welles, but the story does not resemble the Wells novel at all. If I thought it would have been relevant to re-read the Wells novel or listen to the Welles radio broadcast I would have—but I don’t expect these efforts would have shed any light. In interviews Szulkin has also mentioned THE MALTESE FALCON as a source of inspiration, but I’m completely thrown for a loop by this. It would be a stretch to call WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY a noir film. The plot is straightforward—absurdist but easy to track—and the subtext and symbolism only enriches the basic movements of the story. The cinematography is bright and colorful, a departure from the yellow decay of GOLEM, and it begins Szulkin's expert use of garish key lighting. The look of the film is saturated in fluorescents and neons, and the film's post-Christmas temporal setting helps to infuse it with a rainbow of artificial color. Szulkin's next film is his masterpiece. I can't wait to dive back in to O-BI, O-BA: THE END OF CIVILIZATION.
