"Defying Gravity" With Public Transit
One of our car culture's most powerful forces of acculturation is film & television. I'm not referring simply to car advertising, but rather to the glamorizing of the automobile in films. From Sean Connery's Aston Martin in Goldfinger to Steve McQueen's flying Ford Mustang in Bullit to the various incarnations of the Batmobile, cars have long been as important -- if not more so -- than the characters who drive them. Through filmic depictions of the car, we are encouraged to fantasize -- and more importantly -- to aspire.
Such fantasizing has been particularly true of science fiction TV and films, in which viewers have been treated to both the fanciful (the flying Spinner in Blade Runner), and the dystopic (the turbo-charged, jerry-rigged world of Mad Max). Regardless of whether or not the future depicted is a desirable one, the one thing we have been able to count on is that we will still be driving -- and that those cars will be real cool.
Which is why the new ABC television series Defying Gravity is so refreshing. Set in the year 2052, the show deals with a multi-year mission through the solar system, and -- in flashbacks set 5 years prior to launch -- the training the crew went through.
And in this future, there is nary a car to be seen.
Unlike the recent series Battlestar Galactica -- in which almost every action of the characters reflected the intensely-detailed political and religious structures of Colonial and Cylon society -- Defying Gravity has been slow to reveal much about life in the mid-21st Century. The characters' cell phones are certainly thin. And abortion is illegal. But life looks much the same as it does now.
This recognizability was a deliberate decision on the part of the show's creative team. According to series director David Straiton,
"Fifty years from now, it's not The Jetsons. There will be inventions that we can't even think of yet, but I think life will look pretty much the same. So that's really the approach, that life isn't all that further advanced except for maybe a few gadgets along the way."
The one element of that future that Straiton was convinced about, however, was public transit. The series is filmed in Vancouver, so the SkyTrain was an immediate inspiration:
"I rode my bike home the other day underneath the SkyTrain and I thought, this is the future...Vancouver embraces a lot of ideas that the world should become. [It has] a really strong public transit infrastructure...the SkyTrain and bike paths. A lot of people live in high-density housing, where they're building up instead of building out, and smaller apartments. That's the future."
This car-less future is subtle: nobody talks about the absence of cars, they simply accept that they have to take public transit everywhere. As a result, the characters are regularly seen conversing on buses and trains, and key moments of their relationships occur "in transit" as it were. In one emotionally powerful sequence, Zoe Barnes (Laura Harris) collapses at the bus stop as a result of taking an abortificant, and Maddox Donner (Ron Livingston), who was waiting with her, is able to save her.
This casual use of public transit in a popular television series is notable for another reason: the show's sexiness. The crew is as busy dealing with their frustrated sexual desires as they are with the hazards of space, and so the divorce of beautiful people from any depiction of cars is commendable.
But not unique or unprecedented. Most notably, none of the various incarnations of Star Trek have ever featured a car, although a helmetless Chris Pine did drive a motorcycle in the recent blockbuster film, and, in a flashback, an 'antique' corvette.
However, Star Trek has largely posited a far future, one in which life on Earth is radically different, even utopian.
Defying Gravity, by contrast, offers a future anyone under 50 may live to see. That this future offers both the wonders of interplanetary travel and ubiquitous -- and sexy -- public transit makes it a show with considerable potential to contribute to our acculturation for a low-carbon future.
By Michael Dudley
Such fantasizing has been particularly true of science fiction TV and films, in which viewers have been treated to both the fanciful (the flying Spinner in Blade Runner), and the dystopic (the turbo-charged, jerry-rigged world of Mad Max). Regardless of whether or not the future depicted is a desirable one, the one thing we have been able to count on is that we will still be driving -- and that those cars will be real cool.
Which is why the new ABC television series Defying Gravity is so refreshing. Set in the year 2052, the show deals with a multi-year mission through the solar system, and -- in flashbacks set 5 years prior to launch -- the training the crew went through.
And in this future, there is nary a car to be seen.
Unlike the recent series Battlestar Galactica -- in which almost every action of the characters reflected the intensely-detailed political and religious structures of Colonial and Cylon society -- Defying Gravity has been slow to reveal much about life in the mid-21st Century. The characters' cell phones are certainly thin. And abortion is illegal. But life looks much the same as it does now.
This recognizability was a deliberate decision on the part of the show's creative team. According to series director David Straiton,
"Fifty years from now, it's not The Jetsons. There will be inventions that we can't even think of yet, but I think life will look pretty much the same. So that's really the approach, that life isn't all that further advanced except for maybe a few gadgets along the way."
The one element of that future that Straiton was convinced about, however, was public transit. The series is filmed in Vancouver, so the SkyTrain was an immediate inspiration:
"I rode my bike home the other day underneath the SkyTrain and I thought, this is the future...Vancouver embraces a lot of ideas that the world should become. [It has] a really strong public transit infrastructure...the SkyTrain and bike paths. A lot of people live in high-density housing, where they're building up instead of building out, and smaller apartments. That's the future."
This car-less future is subtle: nobody talks about the absence of cars, they simply accept that they have to take public transit everywhere. As a result, the characters are regularly seen conversing on buses and trains, and key moments of their relationships occur "in transit" as it were. In one emotionally powerful sequence, Zoe Barnes (Laura Harris) collapses at the bus stop as a result of taking an abortificant, and Maddox Donner (Ron Livingston), who was waiting with her, is able to save her.
This casual use of public transit in a popular television series is notable for another reason: the show's sexiness. The crew is as busy dealing with their frustrated sexual desires as they are with the hazards of space, and so the divorce of beautiful people from any depiction of cars is commendable.
But not unique or unprecedented. Most notably, none of the various incarnations of Star Trek have ever featured a car, although a helmetless Chris Pine did drive a motorcycle in the recent blockbuster film, and, in a flashback, an 'antique' corvette.
However, Star Trek has largely posited a far future, one in which life on Earth is radically different, even utopian.
Defying Gravity, by contrast, offers a future anyone under 50 may live to see. That this future offers both the wonders of interplanetary travel and ubiquitous -- and sexy -- public transit makes it a show with considerable potential to contribute to our acculturation for a low-carbon future.
By Michael Dudley
posted by The Centre for Sustainable Transportation at
8:57 PM
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