We’re All Living ‘Simon’: These Dystopian Movies Keep Coming True

Michael Cieply
·4 min read

I wish all these unhinged movies would quit coming true. Escape From New York. Escape From L.A. Being There. I Am Legend. You name it. Somebody shoots a whacko/dystopian/dysfunctional fantasy. Eventually, we all end up living it.

At the moment, I’m living Brazil—bureaucratic dysfunction. My wife and I bought out a lease car. The leasing company sent documents: It says so right there on the envelope, which you could see on Thursday’s download from Informed Delivery. That’s a digital platform on which the Postal Service provides an image of the day’s mail. Very handy. Or it would be if they actually delivered the mail, which, when it’s really important, they often don’t.

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Of 12 pieces due on Thursday and Friday, only the one marked “IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS VEHICLE RELATED MATERIALS ENCLOSED” didn’t arrive. Instead, I got a lot of junk mail, plus an important document plainly addressed to someone else. That one contains a warning that, absent a system update, said person’s automobile wifi apparatus won’t work next month, thanks to an unsolicited network upgrade.

I didn’t open the envelope. But I know what’s inside, because my car is the same make, facing the same impending doom. But I can’t worry about that, because I’m too busy fretting over how to navigate the Department of Motor Vehicles—more Brazil— and pay a hefty, soon-to-be-overdue, transfer tax without the IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS that were photographed and noted online (at least, the envelope was) before being consigned to a dusty cubby, or the bottom of a mail bag or some neighbor who has no more use for my car title than I have for his or her or their software collapse advisory.

Or maybe the papers will show up. You never know. On Jan. 21, I got two bills that had been AWOL since New Year’s Eve.

(UPDATE: The docs showed up late Saturday. Crisis averted.)

Granted, I’m cranky from sweeping up what’s left of a smashed car window—that’s the Escape From L.A. part. Nothing stolen, just smashed. It’s the price you pay for parking around here—Seth Rogen said so on Twitter a couple of months back. Time to take a breath. Walk to the beach.

Down in Santa Monica Canyon, someone emptied the shelves in the little free library. All the books are in a great, big, dirty pile. Keep going. By the bus stop, some fancy plants are uprooted, tossed around. Not exactly Road Warrior stuff. Walk on.

The pedestrian tunnel is graffitied again, but at least there’s no one vomiting or screaming threats. The last batch of graffiti was painted over four days ago. It’s the same tagger this time. And he, she or they left a cinematic reference: “Have you seen the movie Equaliberiem?”

I take this to mean Equilibrium, the dystopian film in which Christian Bale goes off his emotion-suppressing meds and joins the artistic underground. Or something.

Anyway, somebody down here has been living it, while the rest of us have been muddling through a real-life version of Simon. Remember that one, Marshall Brickman’s authoritarian slapstick, from 1980? Mad scientists pawned off Alan Arkin as a bumble-brained dictator from outer space. “He loves you. Do what he says,” read the poster. It sounds like a vaccine ad.

But back to Simon. Arkin started making rules. He outlawed Hawaiian music on elevators. He put term limits on condiments. He regulated facial hair and air blowers in restrooms. It was kind of like California, where we’ve banned gas-powered weed-whackers, a broken sprinkler can get you fined the price of dinner and drinks at Citrin, and raw garbage goes straight to the green can—not the black or the blue—so it can (in the Santa Monica version) be turned into biofuel for internal combustion engines we’re supposed to be swapping for electric motors fed by a grid that can’t handle the load it’s already got. (Make a note; our rotating outage group is N001.)

You can pick a store shelf clean in San Francisco or Los Angeles without being detained. Our governor just said he’s sorry for saying something pejorative about gangs, while tidying up their mess on the train tracks. In Washington, meanwhile, someone is starting to sound a bit like Chauncey Gardiner; so the Administration is borrowing credibility from Tom Hanks. But that already happened in The Simpsons Movie.

And here in Santa Monica, with the missing mail and broken auto glass, we pay an annual fee for a city-run false alarm reduction program, the function of which is to charge you a fee if your system reports a false alarm. You pay to get billed to pay some more. Even Simon never thought of that. We’re living Idiocracy.

Maybe they should do a sequel. But I guess it would be a documentary.

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