Episode 133: Silent Running 1972 & 1985

Silent Running is an interesting film. To me, it loses some potency by trying to chase too many plots in the same movie. Is it about environmentalism and conservation? Is it about isolation and dependence on robots to deal with ennui and loneliness? Somehow it tries to do too much. BUT: each theme is even more relevant now than in 1972.

Then, in 1985, the band Mike + the Mechanics records the song "Silent Running," which was loosely based on the '72 film. 🌠The More You Know lol.

⚠️ Spoilers ahead.

Links:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14222351

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Forge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i17mgRK3GX8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running_(On_Dangerous_Ground)

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses the 1972 sci-fi film Silent Running and its relevance today. The film, directed by Douglas Trumbull, follows Freeman Lowell's mission to preserve Earth's last forests in space. Lowell rebels when ordered to destroy the greenhouse, leading to a shift in the film's themes from environmental preservation to isolation and robot companionship. Causey critiques the film's plot shifts and its portrayal of corporate greed and environmental destruction. She also connects the film to contemporary issues like deforestation and the impact of convenience culture. Additionally, she ties the 1985 song "Silent Running on Dangerous Ground" by Mike and the Mechanics to the film, highlighting its political undertones.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Silent Running, sci-fi film, environmental destruction, ecological stewardship, Douglas Trumbull, dystopian future, geodesic domes, Freeman Lowell, corporate greed, isolation, robot companionship, technological convenience, nuclear power, space exploration, Mike and the Mechanics.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about the 1972 sci-fi film *Silent Running* as well as the 1985 song that was inspired by it. Naturally, there will be spoilers. In order for me to discuss the film, I have to do so in its entirety, as well as talking about the themes and why I think it's still relevant all these years later. So, if you have not seen it, this is your fair warning that spoilers abound in this episode. As of this recording, I was not able to find the film anywhere for free on streaming, I rented it from YouTube. I was able to cash in some credit card rewards points, so I didn't actually pay anything to do it. But if you have to pay 399 to a streaming service, is it worth it? It really depends on whether or not you enjoy sci-fi as a genre, if you don't, then it might not be the best $4 you've ever spent, and the movie is far from perfect. Is it terrible? No, it's not terrible. Is it the greatest film I've ever seen? Also, no. It's kind of in the middle, and I think for me, one of the reasons why I didn't like it as much as I thought that I might was because it drifts off. It starts with one premise, and you really get bought in, but then it drifts off into something else. But the reason why I wanted to talk about it on the air is because both of the notions-the one that it starts out with, and then the one that it ends up with-are relevant today, almost alarmingly so. Spoilers are here. If you're fine with that, continue on. If not, bookmark this episode, download it, come back to it later. If you're still with me, let's choose our frosty beverage of choice, saddle up, and take this ride.

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So when you simply Google search this film, the little blurb that pops up about it reads: After the end of all botanical life on Earth, ecologist Freeman Lowell maintains a greenhouse on a space station in order to preserve various plants for future generations. Assisted by three robots and a small human crew, Lull rebels when he is ordered to destroy the greenhouse in favor of carrying cargo. A decision that puts him at odds with everyone but his mechanical companions. Lul and his robots are forced to do anything necessary to keep their invaluable greenery alive. This film also marks the directorial debut of Douglas Trumbull, that name might be familiar to you because not only was he a film director, but he was also a famous visual effects supervisor, and some of his effects were used in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I've profiled on the podcast before. If you missed that episode, I'll drop a link to it in the write-up for this one. Please do check it out. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek, Blade Runner, which I will absolutely at some point talk about Blade Runner as well as do androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick absolutely had some magnificent sci-fi dystopian sci-fi novels that we should talk about. The Tree of Life, and he directed Silent Running and Brainstorm. Brainstorm BT Dubs is going to come up in an episode before the month is out because I will be talking about how I have gone down the Natalie Wood rabbit hole, and Brainstorm was the film that Natalie Wood was working on with Christopher Walken when the incident happened on the yacht and she passed away. So essentially, the plot of Silent Running is this: at some point in the future, you know, like we we get into dystopian sci-fi, and that's very often how it is. At some point in the future, it's kind of like fairy tales. Once upon a time, so we go, we get transported to some magical time in the past. We may not necessarily know when, but just once upon a time. And sci-fi, especially dystopian sci-fi tends to take us to at some point in the future, at some point in the future, and we're never really told why. That was something that kind of bugged me, and I was hoping to see like, okay, is this based on a novel? Maybe some of the unanswered questions that I have about this film are answered in a book, but. That's not the case here. The screenplay was written by Derek Washburn, Michael Chimino, and Stephen Botchko, which you may recognize Stephen Botchko's name because he was a famous television writer. There was a novel, but it was a novelization of the film that came out after the movie. So this is just based on a screenplay and not on a novel, which was kind of disappointing to me because I was like, I want to know what the differences were between the novel and what actually got put out in this film. Because Hollywood is notorious for changing things and not always for the better, but in the future we don't know why. Precisely, was there some kind of nuclear conflagration or what happened? But all forests on the Earth have become extinct. We're kind of told that there was some sort of environmental exploitation or some kind of disaster, some kind of cataclysm, but we don't really know what that was. As many specimens as could be gathered have been put in these geodesic domes so that they can have like a biodome in space, a greenhouse that's protected in a dome, as part of a closed ecological system that's on a cargo spaceship, and so there are these these spaceships, American Airlines space freighters that are outside the orbit of Saturn in outer space. Freeman Lowell is an ecologist, and he's played by Bruce Stern. And there's only four crewmen, including him, on this particular spaceship, and so he's like the botanist, the gardener, the ecologist, and the ship that he's on is called the Valley Forge. Valley Forge, of course, is a little wink to American history because Valley Forge was the place from 1777 to 1778 where George Washington's Continental Army camped out, and he really had to take this ragtag group of militias and turn them into a fighting force to win American independence.

So we see that Lowell really takes care of the plants. He has like a little group of rabbits, you know, some little fuzzy animals and things, and you can tell that his job is deeply meaningful to him. And he's imagining that at some point they will get out of outer space, they'll go back to Earth, and then with the plants and animals that he has carefully kept in these geodesic domes, he'll be able to reforest the planet. And he spends a lot of his time by himself in the domes, taking care of the crops and taking care of the animals. And you can tell that he's just like totally in his element. And so we're we're thinking at first, you know, this is going to be an environmental movie. This is really about deforestation and the way that companies and governments are bulldozing natural resources because they are. That's not like that's changed over the past 50 some odd years. That's still happening, and so that's that was the movie that I was bought in to watch, and that's where I thought it was going. So the crew of each ship that's out there in this orbit of Saturn, they get orders to jettison and then destroy the domes, like blow up these forests, all the plant and animal life that has been so carefully preserved, painstakingly preserved, and then bring the freighters back to commercial service. And there's not even really ever a reason given for why that would need to happen. So four out of the six domes are destroyed by nuclear power, Lowell is like to hell with this, and so he stages a rebellion and decides that he will save the plants and animals that are on his ship, and he murders one of his crewmates who arrives to put the nuclear explosives in the dome. Now, in the process of having the fight and then the murder of this crewmate, Lowell's leg is injured, but he jettisons and triggers the destruction of the other remaining dome. So he winds up actually himself nuking one of the domes that he should have been protecting simply because the other two crewmen were inside it, so it's sort of like I'm willing to destroy these plants and animals that are in this dome and only have one left, because it means that much to get rid of these crewmen that I think are going to to blow up the dome anyway. I mean, I guess we could say it was a necessary sacrifice given the parameters of the movie, but wow, I was like, okay, you know, I'm getting a bit lost at this point because you know I'd gotten bought in that this guy is a botanist, he's an ecologist, he really cares about what he's doing here, but then he blows everything up except for this one dome, and he starts killing people. Like we're we're getting a little wide of the. Here for me, okay. But then the plot starts to shift again. So he gets the three service robots, and they do look very much like you know 1970s robot ideas. A little bit almost like the Jetsons. You know, like in the in the future we will have robots that look like weird boxes that are very clunky. But he stages a fake explosion as a ruse, and the Valley Forge goes speeding towards Saturn. And the idea is that he's going to hijack the ship, and then he will have the last forest dome to take care of. He reprograms the drones to perform surgery on the leg, and then he decides that they are going to try to navigate with this spaceship, the rings of Saturn. The ship, of course, gets into turbulence and rough passage. One of the robot drones is lost. I mean, I was about to say it dies, but it's lost. But the ship and the remaining dome survive somewhat unscathed to the other side of Saturn's rings. So Lowell decides to name the robots that survive. So it was kind of like he had this idea that these three robots would be called Huey, Dewey, and Louie, as a you know like an homage to the Disney characters, the little ducklings. So it's like Louis was the drone that yeeted out into space and died, or doesn't work anymore.

However we want to say it, drone number one is Dewey, and then drone number two is Huey. Okay, so that's perfectly not confusing, right? So Lul, Huey, and Dewey go out into deep space to maintain the forest. Lul reprograms Huey and Dewey to plant trees and to amuse him, to play poker with him, and keep him company. And he has them bury the crewmate that he died inside the biodome. It's kind of like we may as well just bury his remains in here and let him turn into worm food, just like he would do if we were in nature, not some kind of controlled dome. And Lowell starts to talk to them like they're friends, or maybe even like they're his kids, Huey gets damaged because Lowell is trying to amuse himself. So we start to get into these themes of ennui, boredom, isolation, loneliness. Where does the mind go when you no longer have that interface between you and others? Compare and contrast interaction with other people, what happens? So there are these buggies that the crewman had been using to drive back and forth around the spaceships on, and he's just using it like it's a go kart. So Lowell, in the process of using this buggy like it's a go kart, he runs into Huey and damages him, and Dewey is sentimental, I mean, like as much as a robot can be, I guess, and refuses to leave Huey's side during the repairs. So Lul has run into this is complicated. Lol has run into Huey over the course of using the buggy like it's a go kart, and then Dewey hangs out with Huey while Lul is trying to repair him, and it's this kind of like, oh look, do these robots have sentience? Kind of moment, right? We're not supposed to say that. You're not supposed to say the word sentience. You're supposed to say something like singularity, because somehow that sounds less threatening, I guess. But time goes by, and Lowell discovers that the biodome is dying, and he's trying to figure out what he can do. Like, what what could I do to keep these plants and animals from dying off on me? Like, I've made all of these sacrifices to keep this one biodome, but he can't figure out what's wrong. I mean, we we sort of know, like with common sense, that if you put a bio dome like that too far away from the sun and it's not getting enough light, obviously the plants are going to die off. It's kind of like duh. So another space freighter called the Berkshire is waiting to see if the Valley Forge has survived its trip around Saturn, and it reestablishes contact. But the thing of it is, Lowell knows that it's going to be discovered that he's gone ape shit out in space. He's killed crew members. He's blown up biodomes. He's he's really you know to put it bluntly, he's fucked some shit up, and he knows that he's going to get caught. And he's thinking about jail time and prosecution and all the things that are going to happen to him. And finally, he has this eureka moment where he realizes, like, oh shit! I got the biodeome too far away from the sun, and the lack of light has cramped and restricted the growth of the plants. So he tries to install lamps, like grow. To correct the situation, and he's trying to save the forest before the Berkshire arrives because he's like they'll probably just blow up this dome. The plants are on their last leg anyway. I'm going to be discovered as a murderer. Like there's no way that this ends well for me. So Lowell manages to yeet the bio dome to safety and get it away from the main spaceship, he then lets off a nuclear charge and destroys the Valley Forge, and of course Huey, the damaged robot, and he himself also get hurt in the process. So our final scene is the green for the the the the greenhouse forest, the the geodesic dome with the grow lights in it, just drifting out into space. But Dewey, the robot, has stayed behind.

So it's like Huey and Lul are hurt and presumably killed, but Dewey, the last remaining robot, is like very gently caring for the garden that's been yeeted out into deep space, and he's holding an old watering can that Lowell used to use. So we're kind of left with this conflicting yet somehow tender image of a little robot going around trying to take care of these plants. The the last forest, presumably the last forest anywhere, and this robot is trying to keep it alive through some pretty bizarre and difficult circumstances. So for me, I I really didn't like feeling that I had a bait and switch because I was signed up to watch an ecological sci-fi movie, you know about the the forests have been slashed or nuked. There's not plant life like there should be on the planet. The planet may not even really be habitable anymore. And here's the last ditch effort to try to reforest the earth, and now that's being deemed not important, not commercially viable anymore. So fuck it. That's that's an amazing message. You know, I was I was ready. I I had my popcorn and I was ready to watch that film, and then it just like takes a hard right into isolation and robot companions, which I will talk about that theme. Don't get me wrong, but it's like wait a minute. Well, what happened to the first premise? Like we're living in an age where they're planning to reboot Three Mile Island next year. Did you know that? I hadn't heard a damn thing about it until just recently because I went down the rabbit hole. Next week I will be talking about Three Mile Island and the China Syndrome and the I mean, textbook fucking textbook example of predictive programming that we have with that film. The film comes out, and not even two weeks later, there's the disaster at Three Mile Island. But see, now we're told don't don't say that it wasn't a disaster. That's just a bunch of hippie bullshit. You're supposed to support nuclear energy. You shouldn't be a NIMBY person that doesn't want a nuclear power plant in your backyard. And it's like, well, forget that. I don't. And these goddamn data centers that are popping up everywhere too. And a smelter plant. We're being told that all of this stuff is so important for national security. And it reminds me a lot of the Cold War brinkmanship, you know, the U.S. doing something, the Soviets doing something, the Soviets doing something, the U.S. doing something, and the rest of the world kind of being held hostage by choose this day who you will serve, decide which side you're on, east or west. You have to pick a side, and then the Non-Aligned Movement saying we really don't want to fucking do that. We just want to live our lives and stay the fuck out of this, but that's how it's being presented, and it scares me because you have entire generations of people now that they have no memory of the Cold War. It's just an abstract concept to them. I I don't even know if they study it in history class. I would really have no idea what what some of these kids are being told in in a regular run of the mill public school now I would have no idea what they're being told or what they're studying or how idiotic it probably is how dumbed down and bizarre that it probably is but they have no memory of that tit for tat and brinkmanship, and it it scares me to think about this idea of we have to do this. We're going to be arm twisted into this because if we don't come like let AI go crazy, then somebody else will do that. If we don't have this smelter plant, if we don't have this nuclear plant, if we don't have this, if we don't have that, then somebody else will do it, and they could be the bad guys. And I'm looking around, going, "Well, who the fuck are the good guys at this point? Like, it kind of feels like we've gone way, way off the rails. And for me, you know, I I really have picked up certain DAG habits. One of which is hiking, and another one is photography. It wasn't that I didn't like going outside.

I've been involved in agriculture for a long time now. I had definitely would get outside, but in terms of like having a coordinated hike and like taking a camera and saying I really want to just enjoy nature, I don't want to leave anything but footprints, and I don't want to take anything but a photograph. You know, and being able to capture these moments, like there was, for example, I think I've told the story before. You know, a prairie rose that I saw, and it was there one week and gone the next. But that photograph exists. That that rose was real, and I captured a photograph of it, or a bird in a particular place, or a deer in a particular place. Like life goes on, but for that moment in time, I was able to capture that natural interaction, and that means something to me. When you get out in the forest, it's just like, oh God, everything else melts away, and you can hear yourself think, and you can also get away from intrusive thoughts if that's what you want too. If you've been ruminating about something, well, where's the money going to come from? I don't know why she thinks that. I don't know why he believes that way. I don't know why my boss acts like this. And you can get away from a lot of those thoughts and just like absorb yourself. It's a bit like going into a whole nother world. You just hear birds and the breeze through the trees. You know, it's just so calming and wonderful to get out there like that, and to and to climb and to mess around and to do things that maybe you didn't think your body could do. I enjoy that tremendously, and it's upsetting to me how much land is just being developed for nothing, farmland, forests, etc. Why? So that developers can continue to shit out suburbanite tract housing, and the excuse is well. There's a lot of people that that don't have affordable housing. So are you saying that people shouldn't have affordable housing? No. Did you hear me say that? No. That's not what I'm saying at all. They're not pooping out affordable housing, you guys. Wake up! They're shitting out crap like the same old suburbanite tract houses for way the hell too much. You get a starter home that's like 1,200 square feet, and somebody puts a half million dollar price tag on it, and it's like, on what planet is that sustainable? You butchered up some old man's farmland that's probably been in his family for the past 150 years, so you could shit out some unaffordable, unattractive suburbanite housing. Good for you. I hope it was worth it. So I'm really I was like okay I'm bought in Lowell let's like I want to see your geodesic dome I'm ready for this and then and then it goes way way way off the rails and I'm like oh okay well Lowell becomes a murderer and I definitely don't advocate that and then he starts blowing up his own dome so that there's only one left I definitely don't advocate that. It takes a weird, weird turn, almost like the, like like a little bit like The Shining, you know, because that is one of the themes of The Shining is that Jack is crazy and he he goes to the hotel with Wendy and Danny, and you know it's going to end poorly. That's that's a big difference between the novel and the film. Like you know, that it's going to end poorly, and there's all of this isolation. What do you do when it's you trapped with your family and there's no escape? You know, yes, you can go to opposite ends of the hotel, but you can't ever really completely be by yourself. Oh, and then by the way, there's ghosts everywhere, so we we start to get into isolation and robots as your as your friends, and I'm like, well, shit, you know, those those themes are certainly relevant. It's just not exactly what I thought I was signing up to watch when I picked Silent Running. So there certainly is a theme of environmental destruction and ecological stewardship, and there is, yeah, I'm thinking 1972. Okay, sort of an early cinematic warning, at least about human neglect of the planet.

We're looking at this future where the flora has gone extinct, and temperatures have been artificially standardized. So the only quote-unquote natural, and we're using that term super loosely here, natural ecosystems are inside the geodesic domes, and we see a conflict really between Freeman Lowell's reverence for nature, and then also humanity's detachment from the Earth's original biosphere, and this is highlighted in the film so very well. I mean, to me, the film gets some bonus points just for this one scene alone. So the guys are sitting around playing cards, and Lowell is is kind of moralizing a little bit to them about the environment and ecology and why the plants and animals are so important. And one of the guys turns to him and smarts off, and says, "If it was really that important, somebody would have done something about it before now. If it really mattered, people would act like it mattered. And I was sitting there with my little bowl of popcorn, like, "Yes, sir, that's it. That is it, okay. So let's go back to the people need a flavor of housing. Yeah, they do. That doesn't mean you need to deforest the planet and rip up Granddad's farmland to do it. Because when you look at these suburbanite tract houses, it's not like some developer is saying, "I want to be beneficent and do something for my fellow man, so I'm gonna bring a return to like 2018 or 2019 pricing. If this house, the going rate for it would have been $135,000 pre-pandemic. That's what I'm gonna price it at. That they're not fucking doing that. They're they're putting these $400, $500,000 price tags on tiny houses, and acting like there we did you a favor. It's like how how is this helping anybody? And my argument is it's not. And so what that guy says when he smarts off, oh my God, it's so true. If it really mattered to people, I will at some point, do my episode. I keep threatening to do this, and I haven't decided yet if I'm going to put it in the members-only area at Conserracy Theories way after dark, or if I'm going to talk about it on kind of a broadly publicly available episode. I just don't know yet because I don't know how raw I want to get. Sometimes it's better to kind of put things behind a paywall to keep the wrong ears from hearing what you have to say, but people, yeah, I really, I really have to stop and think about how I want to say this. We we have people that they just want the sound bites, you know. Been talking in the members only area about the disappearance of local media and how it's being done on purpose. It's not happening like you're not being isolated from the local newspaper and local news media and reporters who know the community and who are trusted in the community. That is not happening on accident. It's being done on purpose to keep us more siloed, to keep us more tribalistic, and to keep us frankly in the dark, to make it more difficult, you have this percentage of people now that consume their news through TikTok, fucking TikTok, okay. And gone are the days where my grandpa would sit in his favorite recliner and read the newspaper from cover to cover, and that's what he did. That was the ritual, man. My grandma would make a fantastic dinner. She was a great cook, which she learned from the best because my great grandmother, her mother, was amazing, absolutely amazing cook. So she'd make this wonderful dinner, and then he'd sit down in the chair and read the paper. And then at 10:30, when Mash came on, everything else stopped. He was going to watch Mash before he went to bed because he was a Korean War veteran. We're way off from that, you know. Like the attention span is so much shorter, and people are like, I just, I just want to get my news from TikTok. Just tell me what I'm supposed to think. Just brainwash me in like little easy installments. And I just, I'm really disgusted by that. I'm really disgusted by it because it's like, you know, you're contributing to your own destruction, right?

Like you're by by allowing everybody else to do your thinking for you, you're not ultimately doing yourself any favor, because you cannot count on the people doing your thinking for you to be magnanimous and generous and caring and loving because it probably won't be, which leads me to another theme: corporate apathy and commercialization. You know, so we've had the the crewman that smarts off to lull about well, if people really cared, something would have been done about it. Yeah, absolutely, that's right. And there's corporate apathy and governmental apathy about that too. So the cargo ships that have the last forests, the last ones that you're ever going to see ever, the the very last of their kind, belong to a commercial entity. And then when the company the company determines that the domes are no longer cost effective, it's just it's not really the the best thing for our bottom line, it orders them to be jettisoned and detonated, so that the freighters can go back to standard commercial service. Doesn't that seem like the realest thing that would happen in that situation? Like we have the last forests, like the last bunny rabbits and birds and owls known unto man-they're never coming back again. But fuck it, we can make more money if we put these back in commercial service. You'll never convince me that that wouldn't happen, and it shows how corporate greed and short-term financial priorities can compromise the things that are. Really irreplaceable things that people are not gonna miss until they're gone. Sometimes I see those videos that pop up on social media where it'll be like, "Here's what something was like in the 80s, or "Here's what something was like in the '90s, and it definitely I'm at the age you know where it triggers that nostalgia because it's like that world is gone and it's never coming back, and I am so glad, so glad, that I grew up in the era before constant cell phone surveillance, before AI, before social media. My God, am I glad! You know, we got to run around and do all kinds of things, and sometimes your parents knew what you were up to, and sometimes they didn't know, and sometimes that was for the better. And I'm just I'm so I'm so glad I'm so glad that I got to have that experience. But you know that time is gone and it's not coming back. It's irreplaceable, and so it is with all of this land. There's only so much land on the planet. It is a finite resource, and once you take that land and develop it. If you decide to undevelop it at some point and try to let it go back to nature, that takes some time. It takes some real management, some real effort. But that crewman is right. If it really mattered to people, it wouldn't be this way. Something would have been done about it a long time ago. Now we also get into isolation, guilt, the psychological breakdown. So after Lul goes off the the rocker, after he loses the plot a bit, and he murders his crewmates to prevent the destruction of the domes. Which look in the context of the story, if those are the last forests that are ever going to be in existence anywhere, I understand his fervor. I just don't endorse what he did. He's left alone. Then it's him and the robots. So he has this physical and psychological solitude, but but it goes beyond solitude. It goes beyond this is peaceful. I can hear myself think, and it's just me, you know. And it starts to go into loneliness. He has this journey into deep space, so he's going further and further into the abyss, and he has this really heavy psychological toll of those emotions like isolation, guilt, obsession, and we start to see him unravel. We have anthropomorphism and companionship with technology. Oh, and isn't this a big one now? You can talk about something that feels incredibly prescient for a 1972 movie. He has this profound loneliness, and so Lowell takes the three reprogrammable service drones and names them Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and gets them to play tasks or gets them to do things, to perform tasks like playing poker.

You know things that they were never really quote unquote meant to do, like be his friends and play poker with him and assist with his medical care. And so there is a human need for empathy, for connection, and even for me as an introvert, I hate to use the word socializing, but I will. It's not about being sociable. It's about having the opportunity to socialize when and where it's wanted, and then how people in that kind of isolation will project personality and emotion onto machines. Like if there's no human society around, or the human society that's back on Earth has failed me, and I'm now yielding myself towards Saturn. I guess Huey, Dewey, and Louie the Roblox are my only choices. It also, I think, sheds at least something of a light shines something of a light on extremism in environmentalism, because Lowell is not just a straightforward hero or a straightforward villain. You know he has a good goal. He wants to preserve the lat the last of it, man. The last of natural life. This this is it. The last chance express. That's a noble goal, but then he gets into murder, betrayal, deception, destroying the forest. Like, in order to trap the two crewmen that are going to blow up the forest anyway, I guess I better blow them up. And it's like, okay, now wait a minute. So there is a sort of questioning, at least, of are these kinds of acts justified? I'm using justified in massive air quotes here. Are they justified if you're trying to protect something that is irreplaceable, something that society is sort of shit on, but is going to be important? I don't condone the violence that happens in the film. To be clear, I just I'm on the air, and this is a public episode. I have to say that super clearly. I don't condone it, and I think that it makes people who are actually working towards conservation look kooky and fruity, and and that shouldn't be happening. Last but not least, there's a theme of the blindness of technological convenience. This is another big one. Whitney Webb has talked a lot about how in the Western world we value convenience, and we will go just sort of like the the rats following the Pied Piper of Hamlin. We'll go along with anybody so long as we get to keep our convenience. Lowell's crewmates represent the general public of the era, people who are happy with synthetic stuff. There's the scene also in the movie right before they kind of get into their tiff about well if it was really important, because Lul is talking about real food: apples, bananas, oranges, carrots, potatoes, things that come from the earth, and they're eating these soylent green like space cake type things, and they're like, "This is fine. We're fine with it. We don't have any problem with sitting here drinking soda pops or drinking beer and eating soylent green. What the fuck? We don't care. And and so you have like this juxtaposition of Lowell, who's like, "Look at the stuff that's real. Look at the stuff that's natural. And then you have the the crewmen who really represent the general public, saying we like synthetic food, we like fast food, we like plastic fake manufactured environments. Isn't that a big one? Because everything on social media is fake, fakey fake, fake, fake. Whether you're talking about literal AI deep fakes or you're talking about curated moments, somebody can have a picture or a portrait. It can be a picture of them with their spouse or their bestie or whomever. And I'm not saying the picture isn't real. They may very well have held the cell phone out and taken a selfie and captured that moment, but it's a moment. You know where I look at nature photography and say, wow! I'm really glad that I captured that squirrel perched on that log because who knows that squirrel may not even be alive anymore. I'm glad that I caught a picture of that prairie rose before it was disappeared, and I don't know did some other creature eat it? Did it die? What happened to it? These moments are curated moments for social media.

What you didn't see is the girl and her bestie that got into a cat fight five minutes later, or the couple that says date night with this cutie that files for divorce a week later. That's the stuff that you don't see. But people like the synthetic food, the manufactured plastic environment, and the mechanized comfort. So they look at Lowell's passion for ecology, for the real plants, for the soil, and they go-that's antiquated and weird-and that shows, I think, how consumer convenience can dull humanity's appreciation for an organic life. People say they want this and this and that, but then they don't. Certainly, something I've encountered in agriculture numerous times. You have people who assume that farming is going to be like the living embodiment of a Norman Rockwell painting, and it's like, oh, contraire! It's absolutely not. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and you're going to have all kinds of problems that you never expected. The day will come where I retire from agriculture, not because I don't enjoy keeping animals or taking care of the land, but just because it wears on you, mentally, physically, and financially. And when I start to get to a point physically where I'm like, I don't know that I can reliably do this anymore. I don't know that my body is in a place where, when it's 100 degrees with a heat index of 115, or when it's Arctic chill, you know, and there's a minus 15 wind chill, and it feels like your nose is going to freeze off. I don't know that I want to be out here doing this stuff anymore, and I don't know if it's healthy for me to be out in extreme conditions anymore. I want to be able to pack it up and say, okay, I did it. I raised my animals. I'm a member of the livestock conservancy, and it's like I've raised my heritage breeds. I've I have have been part of the work that helped these breeds that were on the brink come back and still be here. I've done it. I've done the work. I've left the land better than I found it, and now it's time for me to roll up the sidewalk and move to a different pursuit. I'll be able to retire from it with a sense of pride. But it's not for everybody, you know. And people start imagining, oh, I'm going to wake up in the morning and the hens are always going to have fresh eggs for me, and and everything's going to be perfect, and it's going to be like some trad wife influencer that I follow on Instagram. And it's like, ma'am, it's not going to be like that at all. Whatever it is that you've seen on fucking Instagram, take that and throw it out the window because it won't be that way at all. I can tell you, I'm a veteran. I've been doing this a while. I'm a master cattleman and a certified master grazer. I can tell you, whatever illusions you have, break them before you do this. Go and volunteer. Spend some time on a farm. Get dirty. Get sweaty. Get nasty. And really think about whether or not it's something that you want to do. I don't want to dissuade anybody from doing it if it's what they really want. But man, you better feel just almost called by God Almighty to do it if you're going to do it. So convenience, you know, being in a climate-controlled environment, having every. At your fingertips, it's going to be much more appealing to people. When Lowell is like, "What about real food? What about plants? What about nature? They're like, "Fuck that. I would say it's not only the response of the 1970s public; it's even more so today the response of the public. Because back then, you still had people doing a lot of outdoor activities. They didn't have social media and computers and everything at their fingertips. Now somebody can sit inside the house and watch streaming and play on their devices and talk to AI and just never leave. That's crazy. When we think about just that change that's happened within a lifetime, it's crazy.

Now I want to shift gears for a second, and talk about a song that was very popular when I was a kid back in the '80s, "Silent Running on Dangerous Ground, a song by Mike and the Mechanics. The '80s was a great time, man, for music. I still love my '80s music. It is it's go-to music for me. I love yacht rock too from the '70s and '80s. We had some good spin-offs. We had some good solo careers. Sting broke from the police. I love the police's music, but Sting broke from the police. Steve Perry put out a solo album separate from Journey, and you had people that would go on these kind of side missions. We saw that with Duran Duran. There was Arcadia, and then there was also the Power Station, and that kind of happened with Mike and the mechanics. So Mike Rutherford, kind of his little side project when Genesis was on hiatus was to do Mike and the Mechanics, and it had a really cool lineup of people. Rutherford himself obviously was in the band doing guitar and some of the backing vocals. Paul Carrick did lead vocals, and Paul Carrick had been in some really cool bands: Ace, Roxy, Squeeze, Adrian. Lee was on the keyboards and Peter Van Hook was on drums, and I'm remembering this song, and I remember the video too from when I was a kid, and it's it's a weird song and it's a weird video because it's basically like, you know, people that have been oppressed or taken over by some kind of tyrannical government, and they're trying to get away from it. And it's like, this seems like an odd, especially looking back on it as an adult. It's like this seems like an odd concept for a hit video and a hit record back in the '80s. Funny enough, the song was banned by the BBC during the Gulf War, because it talks about topics like war, nationalism, jingoism-really, I would say-and religion, and then there's also a direct reference to boomsticks because there's a lyric in the song. There's a boomstick and ammunition just inside the doorway. So I guess the Beeb thought it was a little too hot for TV. An interesting thing that ties all of this together, surprisingly to me, is that Mike Rutherford gave an interview back in the 80s about the song, and he said that he named the song after the film *Silent Running* because he remembered the movie and he was thinking about outer space and how the song itself, like if you listen to the music, it kind of does have like a weird, like outer outer space kind of vibe to it, which I honestly hadn't thought about it before. I had not connected the dots until I heard about this interview, and I was like, oh, okay, wait a minute. It's it's odd too how the creative mind works, where you can be watching something like Silent Running the movie, and then make this oddly political song more than a decade later. So the video is its own little weird miniature sci-fi movie, and it features clips from a movie called Choke Canyon, which is interesting because it was actually inspired by Silent Running. So maybe it was a copyright thing. I don't know why Silent Running doesn't show up in the video for Silent Running, but anyway, Mike Rutherford, in an interview back in the 80s, said that the song is quote about a guy who's traveled light years away out in space somewhere, and he's ahead in time. Therefore, he knows what's going to happen to his wife and kids back home on Earth, and he's trying to get the message to them to say what's going to happen, the kind of anarchy, the kind of breakdown of society, to tell them to be prepared. And Rutherford said that he named the song after the film "Silent Running, because I remembered that film so well, and our song had a spacey feel to it. If you're a fellow Gen Xer like me, you most certainly remember both the song and the video. So, is Silent Running 1972 worth your time? Again, I say it really depends on what your tolerance level is for the sci-fi genre.

If you're a big sci-fi fan and you will watch almost anything in that category, definitely worth three or $4 for you to rent it. If you're not a big sci-fi fan, and then on top of that, you really want the movie to pick one coherent theme and stick with it, Silent Running 1972 might not be the best choice for you. Nevertheless, it is interesting that here we are, all these years later, and. Same themes that were being talked about in that film are relevant today. Stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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