dom.jpg (12030 bytes)

Domed City, closed off from a post-apocalyptic world.

disney.jpg (13729 bytes)

Inside, a Disneylike setting, preplanned and perfectly laid out.

mall.jpg (16140 bytes)

A closer view, still, reveals a mall-like world without anyone who has passed their 30th birthday.

______________________________________________
Logan's Run Home
|Transparency Home | Letters 


Logan's Run:

The Story


In 1976, Hollywood came out with a movie titled of Logan's Run, which offered a vision 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.