Logan's Run Presages the Rise of the Modern-Day Biomedical Security State

There are lots of movies I watched as a boy that I thought were really cool which, upon reflection turn out not to have much to them.

Logan’s Run is the opposite. I watched this movie when I was fifteen years old and I don’t recall it made much of an impression on me. But I just re-viewed it and I have to say it was stunning.

The movie is set in the Twenty-Third Century. Some unspecified ecological disaster has wiped out most of humanity. The remainder have retreated to a domed fifteen-minute city where they have dwelled for so long they have all but forgotten the outside world exists. There they devote their lives to the pursuit of sensual pleasure, but there’s one catch: life must come to an end on one’s thirtieth birthday.

Each citizen has embedded in the palm of his or her right hand a crystal flower – a sort of biometric ID which also serves as a life clock. When the flower beings blinking, you have entered Lastday – the last twenty-four hours of life. When it turns black, your time is up.

Actually, the citizens are offered a way to extend life beyond that, in the fiery ritual of the “carousel.” “Be strong,” a disembodied computer-generated voice assures them, “And you will be renewed.” But in fact, no one has ever been “renewed.”

Not everyone has bought into this. Some citizens take matters into their own hands (or “do their own research,” as we might say today) and attempt to flee when their time is up. Logan 5, the title character played by Michael York, is a Sandman, a member of the elite police force charged with hunting down and summarily executing “runners.”

As the film opens, Logan is called away from the carousel ritual to track down and kill a runner. He clearly enjoys the slaughter, and he clearly is good at what he does.

Afterwards we see him relaxing in his bachelor pad, using a futuristic combination teleporter/tinder app to dial a date. Jessica 6, played by Jenny Agutter, appears. She seems distraught and confused and mentions she was a friend of the man Logan had executed earlier. Logan, who clearly has one thing on his mind, grows impatient with her ramblings. Then Logan’s friend and fellow Sandman Francis 7 enters, along with two chippies who clearly are more in the mood than Jessica is for the sort of fun and frolic Logan is hoping for. Disgusted, Jessica makes her exit.

Later Logan gets called in for his new assignment. A computer-generated voice informs him he has been assigned to go undercover as a runner and find “Sanctuary,” the mythical location where, it is believed, the runners go to live out their lives. To facilitate his deep cover, the voice tells him, his Life Clock will be sped up by four years. Logan looks and finds the crystal flower in his palm has begun blinking.

“Do I get my four years back?” he quavers. There is no answer.

Logan finds Jessica and asks her to take him to Sanctuary. After initially refusing, claiming she knows nothing about it, she agrees to help him. A series of adventures ensue and finally the two manage to break out of the city and begin wandering in the wilderness. Their trek takes them through a cemetery (a place whose function is a total unknown to them) and finally to the Old Man (played by Peter Ustinov), a solitary hermit living in the ruins of what was once the United States Capitol Building.

Accompanied by the Old Man, Logan and Jessica return to the city to spread the good news: you don’t have to die on your thirtieth birthday, and there is a whole world out there to be inhabited. This is followed by the ridiculous shoot-em-up finale which is the standard for this sort of thing, and they all live happily ever after. But no matter. This still is an incredible film.

The carousel scene, which comes almost at the very beginning of the movie, is beyond disturbing: the submissive obedience of the citizens on their Lastday, their faces concealed by the gruesome death masks they are made to wear, the naïve enthusiasm of the spectators, and their willful blindness to what is going on literally right before their eyes as the unfortunates on their Lastday begin floating up in the air toward some sort of mysterious spinning orb and one by one are blasted to smithereens.

Just as breathtaking, but in a different kind of way, is the scene in which Jessica and Logan ask the Old Man about the meaning of some inscriptions they saw on the cemetery headstones. The Old Man explains to them the concepts of “beloved husband” and “beloved wife,” and, for the first time in their lives, Logan and Jessica begin to dream of the possibility of staying together, raising children together, and growing old together.

This is one of those rare works of art which becomes not less but more relevant with the passing of years.

Watch the carousel scene. What does this remind you of?

Your thoughts?