4 Past Movies That Nailed 2020 America

When Paul says that the character in his new non-Misery book swears a lot because, like him, they come from the slums, Annie immediately goes off about how SHE never swears, and so that must just not be a thing. Every creative decision that offends her palate is seen as a personal attack. Paul is barely human in her mind. He's more of a conduit through which God or the Universe bestows Annie with stuff she wants. It's a portrait of what happens when a person loves something so much that they start to hate it, because the real thing can never satisfy their hyper-specific tastes. The end result is, well ... what's a word for the extreme opposite of happiness?

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The conservative world is clean, healthy, and hasn't had any murders in decades. But the society also controls what citizens can eat, forbids them from swearing in their own homes, and has made physical sex all but obsolete. A lot of this comes from fears of their world turning out like the mole people's kingdom, where folks have all the individual freedoms they want -- they drink beer, fuck, and eat burgers -- but have to do it in a dirty, violent sewer. And the burgers are made of rat.

It portrays a world in which people's worldviews -- the fear of suffocating conformity versus the fear of chaos and violence -- are so irreconcilable that everyone creates separate, parallel societies. Today, as more liberal attitudes take hold among citizens, governments seem to get more conservative in response, as if any threat to cultural norms will bring everything crashing down.

It's essentially a giant game of chicken played against an imaginary opponent. And as the real world descends into chaos, a newspaper will blow across the shattered streets bearing the headline STALLONE TRIED TO WARN US.

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What sounds like a bunch of modern headlines stapled together is the plot of the Dan Aykroyd sci-fi comedy (and infamous flop) Coneheads. Based on a series of '80s-era Saturday Night Live sketches, the movie spoofs the experiences of immigrants in America, and in the process accidentally nailed many experiences modern immigrants have with ICE, which was formed about 10 years after the movie came out.

The Coneheads are hunted by INS (pre-ICE immigration) official Gorman, who doesn't care that the family has been living peacefully in America for years. In his mind, they moved here illegally, so he will use whatever means necessary to unmask them and kick them out. At one point he pretends to be a Jehovah's Witness to unlawfully enter their home. It may not be in the same league as ICE setting up fake universities to deport people, but it's the same fucking sport.

Also, just as in the real case of deportee Leticia Stegal, it doesn't matter that the undocumented immigrants have worked in the U.S., paid taxes, and have a child born on American soil. Immigration still has no qualms about bursting into their home in front of their children, which is another ICE staple.

In the end, it turns out that the Coneheads can't even go back. They became so assimilated that their own kind considers them traitors and wants to kill them. Maybe it's not the same as deporting a 40-year-old mentally ill diabetic who's lived most of his life in Detroit back to Iraq (he died there two months later), but the uniforms sure do seem to match.

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The villain is an orangutan named Dr. Zaius, who holds an impressive triple-title: member of the Ape National Assembly, Minister of Science, and Chief Defender of the Faith. He's therefore a politician, a scientist, and something of a pope. Zaius thus controls the flow of information on the ape planet, keeping stuff from the general population which he deems to be "dangerous" according to their Articles of Faith or Sacred Scrolls.

This includes scientific facts, like how flying machines are impossible. The chimps Zira and Cornelius are scientists, yet they don't question this propaganda until Heston shows them a paper airplane. They could have deduced the facts based on observable reality, but apes, like humans, don't work that way. They had been presented a worldview, and once it was accepted, facts were filtered according to whether or not they fit it. If your reply is, "That's right, the other side DOES do that! They're basically a cult," well, that's part of it. You spend all of your time dismissing other people's sacred truths, so you never scrutinize your own.

The techniques aren't new, of course. Whether the dogma is transmitted via scrolls or Facebook is irrelevant. Even worse, it turns out that without a modern equivalent of an all-powerful Dr. Zaius, we dutifully take on the task of programming each other via Minions memes. So if anything, Planet Of The Apes probably had too high an opinion of us.

Cezary is a freelance writer and editor. You should follow him on Twitter.

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