Present future(s)
Code 46 (2003), Michael Winterbottom
“The future
is already here, it’s simply unevenly distributed” – William Gibson
Code 46 refers to the article forbidding any ‘unlawful’
unselected reproduction between two individuals in director Winterbottoms’s vision of a near future. The film tells the story of an
insurance investigator, who travels to Shanghai to trace a smuggler of travel
documents, or “papeles”, required to pass from the desert ‘outside’ to the
urban ‘inside’ and from one urban ‘inside’ to another. The futuristic world is essentially
composed of mega cities and exterior wastelands, riddled with a network of
checkpoints and borders limiting people from the ‘outside’ from getting into
the cities.
Winterbottom chose a number of locations to shoot
the film, weaving them together intelligently to achieve what Mark Tildesley, the film’s set designer, calls a “creative geography”:
the urban interior is shot in Pudong, the hypermodern part of Shanghai (built
in just over 15 years), and the desert ‘outside’ in Dubai, India and Rajasthan.
The different locations were chosen to achieve a maximum contrast in landscape,
and yet to trick the minds of the audience into believeing the genuine
closeness between locations. Its effect is deeply poetic yet troubling, as Western
society’s knowledge of Middle Eastern geography is fragmented.
The film does not simply
appear to be a moral judgement of a dystopic world, but more a relfection on
the love between two characters within it. One can’t help but to think of the
jazzman Herman Hupfeld’s words throughout the story : “The fundamental things apply,
As time goes by.”
the desert "outside"
the urban "inside"
The world of CODE 46 is essentially composed of
mega cities and desert outsides.
To borrow a few words from Geoff
Manaugh, the film’s credibility derives from a “weaving together of insides and
outsides, cores and peripheries”At no time do we perceive a progressive transition
between the two. The checkpoints and barriers play the role of entering one
space and exiting another. The claustrophobic feel
that the film sometimes gives the viewer can interestingly enough be compared
to another of Winterbottom’s works : Road to Guantanamo. In this film,
Winterbottom recounts the true story of the Tipton Three and their capture by
the US army. However, the point of comparison can be created as the three men
seem to drift from place to place with virtualy no barriers stopping them.
Code 46 projects the ultimately globalized future, where people
speak a mixed language composed mainly of English, but with additions of
French, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, Farsi and Mandarin, a futuristic ‘newspeak’
of sorts.
Although
changes have crept into human society, such as the legalisation of genetic
manipulation concerning ‘wanted births, (closely
reminding us of Gattaca) and the
government routinely erasing memories for a
greater good, very few’science fiction type’ transformations exist. In other words, Code 46 manages to create a future made from a
more authentic use of present day objects and locations.
sea front view of Pudong, Shanghai
sea front of Pudong, Shanghai
street view inside Pudong
inside of Lloyds by Richard Rogers
However,
a question arises : Can a film
like this only exist in a very narrow time-gap in history?
Does our belief in its realism come from the
unfamiliarity of the locations used? We have notions of what Shnaghai looks
like, but not of what its periphery does. What is it about the actual context
of urbnanisation that allows us to see these cities as possible futures? One might recall that Dredd is partly filmed in
Johannesburg, Cape Town, for example.
Many sequences blur together landscapes,
buildings, and infrastructures from different cities-yet this unfamiliar new
place to which we’ve been introduced might very well exist. Novelist William Gibson’s famous line goes, « the future is already here, it’s simply
unevenly distributed ».
This also appears to be true in the context of
architectural form and urban landscapes.
At
this moment, it would be interesting to bring Kenneth Frampton’s thoery of
architecture into the picture. He proposes that « the building invariably
comes into existence out of the constantly evolving interplay of three
converging vectors : the topos, the typos and the tectonic ». Topos
refers to the site, the environment and the context in which a building is
constructed. Typos refers to the function or purpose of the space that a
building defines. And finally,tectonics refers to the hysical construction of
the building, the assembly of its elements. If one were to take topos, or the
site, out of the formula, what were to happen ? If we began building city ‘types’
or ‘units’ that could be airlifted into any place in the world, how would the absence
of connection based on topological or even historical meaning, affect the
attitude of its inhabitants ? Indeed, it appears that Code 46 poses the question
of cities bui in places without history and therefore rendering the city itself
incomprehensible. If we were to look at the
example of Dubai, we see a concentration of architecture without connection to
the earth it stands upon. Built in an otherwise inhospitable environment, the
city requires desalinisation plants to supply 98,8% of its water. Dubai has
become symbolic for its skyscrpers and high rise buildings ,although,
originally, the skyscraper was created as a response to stop Chicago’s
horizontal sprawling, and seek a vertical densification. The BLDG BLOG phrases
a nice description, and one that I’d like to associate with a city like
Dubai : “Cities now erupt and linger; they are both too early and far too late.
Cities move in, take root and expand, whole neighborhoods throwing themselves
together in convulsions of glass and steel.” The image of the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz appears, therefore, not
too distant.
the Emerald City, the Wizard of Oz
