A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State Read Free

monitoring their communications and activities.
    George Lucas' directorial debut THX1138 (1970), presents a somber view of a dehumanized society totally controlled by a police state. The people are force-fed drugs to keep them passive, and they no longer have names, but instead are known only by letter/number combinations such as THX 1138. Any citizen who steps out of line is quickly brought into compliance by robotic police equipped with "pain prods"–electro-shock batons, or in modern terms, tasers.
    Director Stanley Kubrick presents a future ruled by sadistic punk gangs and a chaotic government that sporadically cracks down on its citizens in A Clockwork Orange (1971). This film may accurately portray the future of Western society that grinds to a halt as oil supplies diminish, environmental crises increase, chaos rules, and the only thing left is brute force exercised by the police and other governmental agencies.
    Soylent Green (1973) takes us to the year 2022, when the inhabitants of an overpopulated New York City depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation. A policeman investigating a murder discovers the grisly truth about what soylent green is really made of. The theme is chaos in a world ruled by ruthless corporations whose only goal is greed and profit.
    Taking a Philip K. Dick novel as his guide, director Ridley Scott introduces us to a twenty-first century Los Angeles in Blade Runner (1982), where a world-weary cop tracks down a handful of renegade "replicants" (synthetically produced human slaves). Life is dominated by megacor-porations, and people sleepwalk along rain-drenched streets. This is a world where human life is cheap, and where anyone can be exterminated at will by the police (or blade runners). This film questions what it means to be human in an inhuman world.
    John Carpenter's bizarre sci-fi social satire action film They Live (1988) assumes the future has already arrived. John Nada is a homeless person who stumbles across a resistance movement and finds a pair of sunglasses that enables him to see the real world around him. What he discovers is a monochrome reality in a world controlled by ominous beings who bombard the citizens with subliminal messages such as "obey" and "conform." Carpenter makes an effective political point about the underclass (everyone except those in power, that is): we, the prisoners of our devices, are too busy sucking up the entertainment trivia beamed into our brains and attacking each other to start an effective resistance movement.
    The Matrix (1999) centers on computer programmer Thomas A. Anderson, secretly a hacker known by the alias "Neo," who begins a relentless quest to learn the meaning of "The Matrix"–cryptic references that appear on his computer. Neo's search leads him to Morpheus who reveals the truth that the present reality is not what it seems and that Anderson is actually living in the future–2199. Humanity is at war against technology, which has taken the form of intelligent beings, and Neo is actually living in The Matrix, an illusionary world that appears to be set in the present in order to keep the humans docile and under control. Neo soon joins Morpheus and his cohorts in a rebellion against the machines that use SWAT team tactics to keep things under control.
    Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick and directed by Steven Spielberg, the setting for Minority Report (2002) is 2054 where PreCrime, a specialized police unit, apprehends criminals before they can commit a crime. Captain Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the chief of the Washington, D.C. PreCrime force which uses future visions generated by "pre-cogs" (mutated humans with precognitive abilities) to stop murders. Soon Anderton becomes the focus of an investigation when the precogs predict he will commit a murder. This film poses the danger of technology operating autonomously.
    V for Vendetta (2006) depicts a society ruled by a corrupt and totalitarian government where