Rollerball (

1975

)

I never got really worked up over the way that Superman in Man of Steel (2013) indifferently levels half a city or the way that Wonder Woman raped a guy in Wonder Woman 84 (2020). Hell, I didn’t even mind the way Star War: The Last Jedi (2017) turned the galaxy’s most optimistic hero into a broken old man waiting sullenly for death. Don’t get me wrong, all these films are shit, but I had initially assumed, in my naiveté, that they were merely shit in a vacuum. I reasoned that these varied instances of bafflingly unheroic heroes were just the result of individual writers and artists who either didn’t know how to or didn’t want to write compelling heroic characters. Now, I’m not so sure.

Part of it is just how many examples there are of this phenomenon, either of heroes acting with surprising cruelty and indifference, nominal villains upholding unassailably heroic morals, or heroic figures from a bygone age torn down and dragged through the mud. It’s not especially hard to write heroic fiction, and even if you had no idea how to write one it’s easy enough to learn from the 2,400 years of templates to draw on. Even a city as devoid of talent as Los Angles is incapable of turning out a halfway decent heroic narrative. Just dust off those copies of A Hero with 1000 Faces and get to work!

Nor are these figures relegated to obscure artsy movies. No, they are cropping up regularly in the most mainstream of the mainstream. Indeed, the three examples I mentioned above all cost over $200,000,000 to make! Indeed, it’s often the reverse that’s true. If you want to see stories with heroic characters battling monstrous villains you need to look to the margins of cinema for films like Bone Tomahawk (2015).

The question remains though if it’s a deliberate decision by the big media empires, then what could they possibly hope to gain from it. Audiences like run-of-the-mill stories of heroes and villains and while none of the big-budget movies I mentioned above were unsuccessful, one would only imagine they would have been more profitable had they not gone out of their way to glorify immortality. Sure, some viewers were totally bereft of taste and considered Wonder Woman 84 (2020) a good film, but would they have liked it any less if the main character wasn’t portrayed as a rapist?

Then I watched Rollerball, a sci-fi movie from fifty years ago that presents a possible explanation for the strange turn in contemporary media. The film posits that heroes are potentially dangerous figures for authoritarian regimes, even when their heroism is as divorced from political reality as that of a great sportsman. Seeing an individual excel and triumph, rather than be slowly ground down by the world around them, might give the proles the most dangerous thing in the world: Hope.

Given this, it makes a degree of sense why the massive corporations of the contemporary world would insist on tearing down the icons of heroism. Even if the destruction of these heroes nets them a financial loss, it could still pay back dividends in other ways as the demoralized populace puts up less resistance as corporate/ political interests grab an ever-increasing share of power over people’s lives. It’s at this point where I start sounding like a conspiracy theorist, and while I’m far from convinced the theory does explain what before looked to be inexplicable. At the very least it’s an interesting argument. Still, that’s enough babbling about current affairs, let’s get back to the real point of this website: analyzing decades-old movies.

Although the world of Rollerball is lacking samurai swords and garish neon lighting, it is a cyberpunk dystopia all the same. The world has been dominated by a small cabal of powerful corporations that have proceeded to establish, in the words of Arthur Jensen “one holistic system of systems, one vast and immune, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars… One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”

It’s not all roses though, as it’s gradually hinted that the tyranny of an anonymous board of executives is at least as bad as that of medieval lords. If an executive likes the look of your wife's tits, there are no moral or legal means by which to stop him from simply abducting her and turning her into a concubine. Oh well, at least the corporate oligarchs of Rollerball can keep the population fed, clothed, and employed. That’s more than I can say for any tyrannical government (indeed most governments period) in human history.

Not that anyone can say that for sure in the world of Rollerball, as knowledge about history and even current events is so restricted that the average person has no understanding of the world or their place within it. Books are restricted items, which only the uppermost of the upper crust can access, and even the data they do have is so poorly stored that an entire century’s worth of learning can disappear thanks to what amounts to a clerical error. Average people have no idea about even the basic facts of the world around them, like how the corporations took over the world or even what the names of the men on the board of directors are. Hell, most people don’t even know what mega-corporation rules their local area.

Ignorance is only one tool that the corporations use to keep the population in line, the other weapon is demoralization, and the chief means of achieving this is the titular sport of Rollerball. The game consists of two teams of men mounted on roller-skates and motorcycles having an especially violent roller derby match while they try to dunk a heavy metal ball into the opposing team’s goal. Rules are sporadically enforced, and the nature of the game means that serious injuries and even deaths are far from uncommon. The game is designed to be as brutal and fickle as possible, subconsciously proving to viewers across the world the pointlessness of individual effort and personal heroics.

That’s the idea anyway but as it turns out one man, Jonathan E. of Houston has beaten the odds and become an icon. He’s the greatest Rollerballer who ever played, but what do you do with a legend in a sport that’s designed to crush everyone who plays it? Well, at first Jonathan’s corporate handler, Mr. Bartholomew, simply tells the star that he’s going to retire. At first, Jonathan is amenable, he’s had an excellent career after all, and his work as a Rollerballer is enough to keep him living in luxury for the rest of his days; but even so, it seems odd to him. He’s never heard of another Rollerballer being forced into retirement and he can’t figure out why he’s the exception. He’s still in his prime, and probably has another decade of Rollerballing left in him. Moreover, whenever he tries to find out why the corporation is so determined that he retire he runs up against a stonewall of silent resistance.

Jonathan has his own reasons for distrusting and loathing the executives too. His wife, who he still loves dearly as evidenced by the fact he’s still pining over their home movies, was taken prima nocta style by a nameless executive. Sure, it wasn’t Mr. Bartholomew who took her, but it hardly endears anyone to your organization when your colleagues go around raping (in the Roman sense of the word) people’s wives.

So, Jonathan bucks the trend and refuses to retire, so in response Bartholomew and the other executives decide that it’s time they resort to cruder methods to break the Rollerball star once and for all. They announce a rule change for Houston’s upcoming game with Tokyo: No penalties will be called for physical contact and only limited substitutions will be allowed. Add to this the fact that the Tokyo team is justly famed for their hand-to-hand prowess means that the match will be less of a traditional rollerball game and more of a brawl on roller-skates.

When Jonathan not only survives this ordeal but clinches a win for Houston in the process the executives pull put all the stops. The next game will be against New York, and will have no penalties, no substations, and no time limits! So, the game will continue until one team is totally demolished. Naturally, Jonathan E isn’t going to be stopped by a little thing like that, and so he’s left skating alone in the stadium past the bodies and carnage of the horrific match. The crowd cheering his name and swelling in excitement until they are a veritable mob, while Mr. Bartholomew flees the stadium in terror at what might very well be the start of a populist revolt.

In order to succeed, a film like Rollerball has to work on two levels, it has to be a compelling sci-fi dystopia that gives the audiences a harrowing glimpse at a possible future while at the same time being a thrilling sports movie. Boy does it ever succeed in the latter category. The rules of Rollerball are made clear to the viewer from the very beginning, and the action is always clearly shot and displayed so the viewer is never once confused about what is going on or why it is happening. The action is never strictly by the books, as players will try to cheat whenever they think officials aren’t looking, even deliberately taking penalties if they think the trade-off is worth it. When the rules are changed halfway through the movie we’re given ample warning about when it will happen and what that change will entail. It also helps that Rollerball as a sport is pretty damn spectacular. It’s less baseball and more gladiatorial combat, so there’s hardly a dull moment.

As a dystopia, Rollerball does a bit too much telling us that things are bad without showing. Part of the issue is that in-between Rollerball games the action mostly takes place in one lavish home or another. One wonders why the corporate regime of Rollerball is going to so much trouble to suppress information of history; they have created the most lavish standard of living in human history. Sure, the people of the world are spiritually much poorer (as evidenced by the ubiquitous drug abuse), but it’s unclear whether this is a universal issue or if these are just some depressed individuals. I would like to get more glimpses at the wider world al la Robot Jox (1989) to really see how much daily life is different from our time.