MR 054: The Natural History of Fear

This is the voice of Light City. Welcome to your new work day. Today is high productivity day. Loyalty and productivity will be rewarded with extra license broadcast hours. Your state loves you. Happiness through acceptance. Productivity through happiness.

Welcome citizen to your life in Light City! Refer to the approved mandatory infotainment broadcast for information on our glorious society. You will have no fear of the censor if you follow the approved rules, ask no questions, and report to your Conscience any deviant behavior. Remember: Questions lead to answers. Answers lead to knowledge. Knowledge leads to freedom. Freedom leads to dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction leads to unhappiness. Your state wants you to be happy.

Alright, that's enough of that. We're gonna actually talk about the story now. This story is incredibly clever in so many ways. It's a story about a dystopia where the people are kept in strict line by a state, controlled by people who keep themselves in strict line. There are two classes of people. A prole, a worker, who is nothing. They don't even have names. They are just referred to by their job: the cook. The maid. The engineer. The fire chief. The nurse.

Then there are the upper class, but even they don't have names. Just their roles. The Editor. The Board. The DJ. The Conscience. The Censor. Their names are very Orwellian in nature, obscuring the true purpose of their jobs. They are afforded a certain amount of more privliges than the lower class. After all, someone must remember. How will we know what is forbidden if we don't have someone to remember it? How will we know that questions are bad if we don't even know what a question is?

That's a question. Questions are forbidden. It's a reductio ad absurdum of dystopian fiction. Questions just in general are illegal. But it cuts to the heart of the matter. Power is maintained through discipline and order. A monopoly on violence. Questioning that violence is what leads to power being toppled, eventually. So you can't let the questions start in the first place. Those that question get revised, their entire personality rewritten into a new person. Perhaps seen as kinder than simply killing them.

Indeed, ideas must be carefully and meticulously controlled. We have state approved broadcasts, infotainments, that are required viewing for all proles. These are created by the DJ for mass consumption and show the values that we must all follow to serve our state.

It's a well ordered system. A state that maintains itself on its threat of violence against everyone. Yet there is no benefit here. Nobody benefits from this. There is no wealthy upper class to benefit from the subjugation of the proles. Even those who have power are subject to the threat of violence, regularly being revised and replaced. The ideology exists to propagate itself for no reason. The story uses the analogy of a spinning top. It goes round and round and round. Never changing. Everything in its place. A well ordered, quiet machine. But one little push... and the whole thing falls apart.

The story itself is less important to the ideas being presented. We see Charley being revised multiple times. First she is a Prole whose husband asks a question. She calls the Conscience to arrest him and she ends up getting revised as well. Just being in the vicinity of someone asking a question means you are infecting. Ideas are infections. Just by exposing someone to them you are spreading them even if you don't believe them. So anyone exposed must be revised so they don't remember. Curing the infectious disease as it were.

Charley gets revised several more times during the course of the story. She is a Nurse. She is a Conscience. She is the ultimate Censor, each time growing in power. While C'rizz starts out as a Conscience and then becomes the new Editor when the Doctor as the Editor falls from grace.

The Conscience is the police and a therapist all rolled into one. They are very powerful. They exist to stamp out dangerous thoughts before they become widespread. The Editor exists as the ultimate Conscience, the judge, who deals with these ideas on a higher level. He believes there is a conspiracy to revolution brewing in this city and he intends to find it. Revolution is hiding in the shadows. A boogey man, waiting to strike.

The Conscience (C'Rizz) confronts the Nurse (Charley). He has a plan to spread revolution by giving her the Doctor's memories. But she believes it is a test. Later the Editor confronts the Nurse and tries to do the same thing, saying he is on the side of the revolution, but this is actually a test. You can't trust anyone. You don't know if they really are who they say they are or if they are testing you.

The Conscience really did have a plan to incite revolution and the Editor revises him. He's after the Nurse now, he believes the Nurse is the key. He visits the DJ for clues as to whether the Nurse really does have the Doctor's memories, but the DJ exhibits a surprisingly large amount of freedom, and the Editor wants to arrest him. But the DJ kills himself or the Editor killed him, it's not clear. Either way, the Editor is accused of his murder as his perception of events start to deviate from the Board's perception of events. He runs away, searching for the Nurse, trying to kill the revolution that he knows exists.

He lives off rats, trying to find her. He does, in a cave outside the city and she shows him things outside the city: things that his brain has no way of perceiving. This was an interesting idea. You have no way of understanding what you're seeing, no perception of it because you've been inside this city for so long, that you seen nothing. But the Nurse helps him to see what the State hides from them.

He brings her back and she gets revised. She is now the new Conscience and arrests the former Editor, now brought low. He still thinks he can stop the revolution, but now it is his turn. He knows the Conscience used to be the Nurse and he thinks the Doctor's memories are buried there. So he lures her out, does the same thing she did to him. Expose her to the outside world. The sound a spinning top seems to coerce the memories of Charley out of her and she reveals that the Doctor's memories are inside that spinning top. The Editor smashes it, convinced he's killed the revolution and now convinced he's the Doctor. He desperately wants to be revised. He calls it his reward for working so hard for the state. He doesn't want to remember being the Doctor. Yet the new Editor thinks he's part of the revolution, convinced of it in fact, and wants him to confess.

We get the Doctor's memories of when they arrived in Light City. The Doctor, C'Rizz and Charley arrived here and thought it was beautiful. They arrived right at the start of the Jubilee. The Jubilee is the quarterly festival in which all crime is legal, kind of like the Purge. The Proles are allowed to think whatever they want, say whatever they want, ask as many questions as they like. So when they encounter people asking questions non-stop, the Doctor thinks it is some sort of greeting. They end up getting seperated and lost in the chaos. Thousands of people will die in this Jubilee and so the Doctor agrees to give them his memories (and Charley's and C'Rizz's memories) in exchange for finding them and keeping them safe. Their memories will be used in the production of infotainment, carefully edited to project the values and messages of Light City to the proles.

The Jubilee serves an interesting purpose as well. It is a way for the upper classes to see what needs to be edited and revised in the infotainment, what ideas need to be purged. While it seems like freedom, it is still a vital method of control.

Ultimately, The Editor is brought before the Censor (Charley). The Censor remembers everything that has been forgotten. The Censor explains that society is like a child. It must be strictly controlled. But it will grow up into an adult and find its own way. Perhaps this society has only existed for a short time, strictly controlling its children until a revolution inevitably topples it. The Censor says there have been revolutions in the past and there will be in the future. They are necessary for advancement. Now it is perhaps time for the Editor's revolution. It is time to topple this society and begin anew.

The Censor reveals the ultimate twist here. The Doctor, C'Rizz and Charley all have four limbs. Two arms, two legs. Yet the people in this story have eight. The Doctor lives for thousands of years, his friends live for decades. Yet a thousand of these people's generations wouldn't fit into one of the Doctor's years. The Doctor, C'Rizz and Charley are long gone. They left immediately after giving away their memories. These are just people using these memories, believing they are these people, to incite revolution.

This is a fantastic story. Well written and well crafted. It is absolutely about a survelliance state and every single scene takes place on a screen. Someone is watching everything going on. Indeed, this framing device is used several times. The Editor watching the Proles. The Prole watching herself. It can easily be confusing: twisting and turning with its plot, but that is very much on purpose. The characters constantly change, revised over and over. The society is a jumble of people who don't even know who they are anymore. That's the point. They have no identity, but they do know that they love the state and venerate the regime.

It's a state that maintains itself largely on the people in it. It depends on the Proles reporting others and themselves if they question or think the wrong thing. And they are happy to do so. Several times we see people call the Conscience on themselves or others. The state REQUIRES participation to maintain its monopoly on violence.

The acting is fantastic here as well. Paul McGann is absolutely brilliant as the Censor. He dives headfirst into this roll, every bit the strong actor we know. He's at once sympathetic and sinister, spiriling out of control until he's begging for revision. India Fisher does a phenomenal job playing several different revised versions of herself. The Prole and the Nurse, fearful of the people above her, happy to maintain the status quo. The Conscience and the Censor, part of the maintenance of the power of the state, confident in her abilities. This is an odd one for Conrad Westmaas because we don't really know anything about C'rizz at all apart from that he's a Monk. It's only his second story and yet we're doing something so experimental as this. This is the kind of thing that you'd want to do when you already know the characters particularly well, like with the Doctor and Charley. We hardly know C'rizz. Still, he plays the part very well, playing the Conscience who tries to incite revolution and the Editor trying to draw out the old Editor's plans.

I don't usually talk about it either, but I have to compliment the sound design and music as well. The editing is superb. You can hear the camera backing up and revealing that someone is watching a scene on a screen. The theme itself fades into a screen as if it too is being watched. There is a theme made specifically for this story that fits, dark and oppressive and moody.

This is a phenomenal production from start to finish. I remember adoring this story when I first heard it and I haven't changed my mind on that. It is very experimental and it probably isn't for everybody, but it's an experiment that works wonders.