THX 1138: Director's Cut
For someone wanting to get noticed as a filmmaker, George Lucas couldn't have done much better than "THX 1138," his 1971 feature debut that starts a limited run today in a new director's cut. Set in a grim totalitarian future, the film imagined a world where men and women live underground in a haze of mandatory sedatives and sensory deprivation. Privacy is nonexistent, sex illegal, and their work consists of building the very machines that enslave them.
The studio noticed Lucas, all right -- they hated the film and demanded a new cut. The production company, Francis Ford Coppola's newly born American Zoetrope, nearly went under in the chaos. And when it finally was released, uncomprehending theater owners sometimes programmed it as part of horror double bills.
Lucas left the future behind with his next project, "American Graffiti," and with "Star Wars," set in a galaxy long ago and far away, everyone forgot about depressive little "THX." But flash forward 28 years. The very same studio, Warner Bros., puts out a film set in an underground society where neither privacy nor sex exist, for we're all inhabitants of a virtual world controlled by computers. Our work consists of powering the very machines that enslave us. It was called "The Matrix" and made $456 million worldwide. Lucas's film, whose budget was a symbolic $777,777, never looked so good.
Unlike some director's cuts imposed by studios for marketing reasons -- a "1984"-ish scenario if there ever was one -- the revised version of "THX" is an improvement over the original. While not significantly longer, scenes are put back in what feels like the right place, generally subtle effects are added, and the cleaned-up print glistens malevolently. All together, the film now makes something approaching sense -- or as much as its director wanted it to. Lucas described "THX" as "an artifact from the future," and we're supposed to struggle for understanding. That's part of its hypnotic undertow.
We see THX 1138 (Robert Duvall) assembling surveillance robots. He's being watched on a grainy monitor by what turns out to be his roommate, LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie). She in turn is tracked by SEN 5241 (Donald Pleasence), who from the look of him knows he's being watched himself. Fatal accidents are all in a day's work, but having lived through their shifts, LUH and THX go home, gulping tranquilizers at the slightest tremor of feeling. LUH has been switching THX's pills, however, and without the sedatives, he soon realizes what he's been living with: not a three-letter, four-number code, but a woman. Their joy is brief, the fall crushing.
For a film set in the future, "THX" is easily read as a product of its era. The rebellion against all authority, the seriocomic exaggeration or inversion of existing values, the simplistic quest of a lone man against a killing system. And yet time has been kind to the film too. It's minimalism is like a cool glass of terror after the latest crop of overstuffed comic-book extravaganzas, and its future-past technology -- punch cards, tape decks, bluish scanners, endless banks of circuits -- now seems even more otherworldly and threatening than it was back in 1971. And yet it was all off the shelf, and the more horrifying for it: evil at its most banal.
Dovetailing with the film's look was its sound collage, created by co-writer Walter Murch. Words and phrases come pinging in, even as you're trying to understand what you're looking at. "New dendrites are only 47 credits. Buy now," a soothing voice commands. "Look at this, I cut myself," an unseen technician complains. "What's the real dope with the cortex bond, anyway?" someone else asks. A sonic web of unease, it's the talk of control, of commerce, of authority -- and of their breakdown.
Lucas, a child of the California flatlands who'd once wanted to become a drag racer, ends the movie the way that came most naturally: with a car chase, and one of the more thrilling ever committed to film. But as is so often the case with his work, from "THX 1138" to "American Graffiti" to the once-dazzling and now interminable "Star Wars" saga, there's no end, just flight. What exactly THX does beyond the reach of robotic overlords, Lucas doesn't seem to know. The question plagues him still, and seems to be the one thing he can't escape from himself.
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