For tens of millions the world over, the passing of Sean Connery is no small sorrow. The Scottish screen icon’s singular voice narrated three nerd generations, animating some of the most beloved cinematic documents of the past half century, garnering unparalleled affection and admiration. We all have our favorite Connery moment: for many, it was his purloining of the Red October as Marko Ramius; for others, his romancing of Audrey Hepburn as an aging Robin Hood; for still others, it might be his turn as John Mason, once of Alcatraz, in The Rock.
And for the seething masses, it’s the tweedy Professor Henry Jones, father of Indiana, or the supernaturally elegant superspy James Bond, both of whom we can safely consider immortal.
But not me. Nope! Not this boy. For me, the departed Connery’s finest moment arrived in 1974, in a breathtakingly bold and quirky little sci-fi adventure called Zardoz.
If you’ve never seen Zardoz, you’re part of an overwhelming majority; if you’ve never even heard of Zardoz, you’re in a greater majority still. The film barely made back its budget, which was paltry to begin with, and was no critic’s darling: Roger Ebert called it “a trip into a future that seems ruled by perpetually stoned set decorators”; his pal Gene Siskel (who gave it one star in four) wrote, "a message movie all right, and the message is that social commentary in the cinema is best restrained inside of a carefully-crafted story, not trumpeted with character labels, special effects, and a dose of despair that celebrates the director's humanity while chastising the profligacy of the audience." Pauline Kael bemoaned the script’s “unspeakable dialog” and called Connery “a man who agreed to do something before he grasped what it was.”
Yet for all this, Zardoz stands alongside The Omega Man, Logan’s Run, Silent Running and the Apes sequels as one of the shining gems of the pre-Star Wars sci-fi cinema of the Seventies. It was a bold era, when no less an artisan than Stanley Kubrick had made science fiction both cool and mind-blowing, and the imaginations of filmmakers were allowed to run wild and free, unconstrained by studio meddling or any real financial risk. Even today, those movies inspire a unique endearment, absent in the ham-fisted monster fests that preceded them and the digital orgies that followed, an endearment born of fresh takes on ancient notions, daring social explications, and shocking characters who shamelessly pandered to our most base and limbic reflexes. Zardoz proudly served up all three.
A bit of context here, for those unfamiliar: Zardoz was the brainchild of John Boorman, the British filmmaker who made Deliverance, cinema’s most disturbing buddy movie, the visually stunning Excalibur, and the British World War II gem Hope and Glory. After the landmark Deliverance, which earned 25 times its budget at the box office, Boorman had carte blanche – and decided to leverage his newfound cred to make The Lord of the Rings. Studio accountants were quick to quash that idea, but Boorman was nonetheless determined to do an elaborate fantasy – so he wrote one himself, then proceeded to produce and direct it.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
It’s the year 2293, and in an emphatic nod to H.G. Welles, humanity is divided into haves and have-nots – the Brutals, who populate a post-Apocalyptic wasteland, and the Eternals, who enjoy immortality in the posh Vortex. The Brutal population is controlled by Exterminators, precursors of the Sandmen of Logan’s Run, whose job it is to collect food from the poor sods and terrorize them with hand-me-down weapons provided by Zardoz, who gives them their marching orders. Zardoz, a disembodied bobblehead that floats around in cloudy skies issuing booming orders and ominous, cultish incantations, is really just a façade for the melodramatic and well-meaning Arthur Frayn, a brilliant everynerd whose real agenda surfaces later in the film.
Connery is Zed, an Exterminator who stows away inside Zardoz and enters the Vortex, there to discover the Immortals and their decadent, pointless paradise, where not much happens and nothing really matters (in a borrow from the Trek shelf, an AI named Tabernacle runs the place, and we know how well that always turns out). Discovered, Zed is at first considered a threat by the psychic Immortal Consuella (Charlotte Rampling), but May (Sara Kestelman) and Friend (John Alderton) have Zed spared and made a menial worker.
That the Vortex is breathtakingly sterile, the pinnacle of human inconsequentiality, becomes apparent to Zed, whose mind serves up puzzles for Consuella and May as they probe it and whose genes serve up still more surprises when analyzed: Zed is actually Arthur Frayn’s idea of a kwisatz haderach, a genetic superman Frayn long planned to send into the Vortex to relieve the inhabitants of their eternal curse – boredom, to be dispelled by means of death. This Zed serves up, having a showdown with the AI and then rallying his fellow Exterminators to the cause, and carnage ensues. Zed knocks up May and a few of her besties, and the film signs off with Zed and Consuella shacking up and having a baby, there to live long and decompose.
Impossibly ambitious and pretentious
The story is a delicious stew of familiar sci-fi themes, conventions, and tropes, spiced heavily with shockingly over-the-line sex and violence and more than a little sociopathic kink. Most critics thumbed down, but more than a few found much to love: the Chicago Reader declared it "John Boorman's most underrated film – an impossibly ambitious and pretentious but also highly inventive, provocative, and visually striking SF adventure with metaphysical trimmings," while Variety delivered the verdict, "direction, good; script, a brilliant premise which unfortunately washes out in climactic sound and fury; and production, outstanding, particularly special visual effects which are among the best in recent years and belie the film's modest cost." Charles Champlin called the film “a tribute to creative ingenuity and personal dedication. It is a film which buffs and would-be filmmakers are likely to be examining with interest for years to come." In this, he was spot-on.
Indeed, Zardoz was, for its time, exemplary filmcraft, marshalling not only its creator’s considerable powers but those of the venerable Geoffrey Unsworth (2001, Superman) behind the camera. Beethoven’s 7th is sprinkled liberally throughout the proceedings, and David Munroe’s original score eschews cliché by including an array of old-world instruments. Add to this special effects that were, for their time, arresting, and Zardoz sums up as a compelling piece of work, one that Champlin called “a technically ingenious and provocative manifestation of cinematic language.”
Stunting the growth of adolescent minds
If there’s one aspect of Zardoz that causes it to stand apart from its early-Seventies siblings, it’s its broad range of themes. This wasn’t particularly common back then; most of these movies had a single moving part and worked well for it. Silent Running was the fragility of life; Soylent Green was overpopulation. The Andromeda Strain was humanity’s helplessness before the dangers of the void. WestWorld is the modern Frankenstein. Only A Clockwork Orange stands out as multi-themed, riding disturbing social satire through a moral landscape that challenges free will, validates vengeance and authenticates psychology as a weapon of the state.
Zardoz reaches further still, and manages to go as too-far as Kubrick. Zed, firmly positioned as the story’s good guy and hero, pretty much pillages and rapes his way through both landscapes – and this is something we had never seen before. It’s unsettling enough to watch Sean Connery parading in a bright red oversized thong, sporting chest hair and a ‘stache worthy of Harry Reems, killing and fucking everything that moves; what’s really tough is realizing, then accepting, that the man who brought 007 to life never rises above the level of a prop in service of this pastiche of dark motifs and theses. Granted, Bond himself was the quintessence of moral ambiguity, and racked up considerable body counts himself; but no Bond movie ever stared us down with an actual moral dilemma, let alone existential puzzles, and Bond’s copious matings were mercifully consensual. Zardoz hijacked the brain, mindswarming its ideas like murder hornets, and rendered its star a misplaced narrative minion in order to achieve it.
Which brings me to my point (and I do have one) - the effects of all this intellectual legerdemain on the minds of the tens of thousands of 14-year-old boys who formed the core congregation for this entire genre (of whom I was, of course, one of the most faithful). True, I was a bit older than that when I first caught the movie on late-night television, but was I, were any of us, possessed of enough knowledge, experience, and literary acumen to fully process any of these themes, let alone all of them? Really?
It’s one thing to be presented with Sara Kestelman’s quite noteworthy breasts without a smidgen of warning and find ourselves saying, Jenny who? It’s another to see Darby O’Gill putting babies into women tangled in fishing nets without their permission and understand that, in context, he’s actually doing them a favor. The adolescent male brain takes in the sight of naked women sealed in baggies and can’t leap to the required understanding of the exigencies of class struggle taken to alarming extremes with quite the nimble dexterity Boorman seems to assume.
We can even say, with the assurance of hindsight, that were the movie not such a relentless action feast and visual smorgasbord, that core congregant with his acne and his social ineptitude and his tenuous grasp of situational ethics might actually absorb some of the true substance of the tale, and wind up... well, a little scarred.
Some of that substance is benign enough, to be sure; the overarching theme of Humankind’s Connection to Nature, lifted with all its glorious nuance from Deliverance, does the mind of the young teenage boy no harm; the less subtle theme, Penis Bad! (also lifted, with far less nuance, from Deliverance), is another matter entirely. This from a movie underscoring somewhat forcefully the brutal truth that whatever else sex is, it’s mostly about making babies. Thank you, John; that’s definitely where young minds want to go.
Less benign is the no-less-immediate theme of Humankind’s Connection to the Machine, again a Trek nod that also extends to much of the sci-fi of the day - the Computer That Runs the World. No kid grows up in the early Seventies without knowing this one backwards and forwards, but never before (nor even with the Skynet and the Matrix and the Alien Mother yet to come) had we seen an AI as morally twisted as this one, implementing make-work laws and attaching the horrific penalties of aging and death on transgressors, just to give itself something to do? What was I supposed to do with that? This is narcissism on a gargantuan scale, portending not just the perils of power in the wrong hands, but a chillingly inhuman snapshot of cruelty’s rock bottom, served up for youngsters who have yet to grapple with the reality and lessons of the Holocaust. Again, John – thanks for that!
But the big theme is, of course, Immortality – again, a familiar path offered up with a fresh layer of gravel. We’d picked up on the unfortunate truth that immortality consists largely of boredom from many sources, from TV to Heinlein to comic books; but where those sources had all tended to emphasize that the solution is to give life new meaning, Zardoz did a 180 – the problem admits of no solution, and the obvious answer is not to enhance life, but to end it. This horrific conclusion kicked off our existential dread years ahead of schedule, undermining our inevitable future quests for meaning with the back-of-the-mind shadow that whispers, It’s all ultimately pointless... Grazie, John Boorman. We could have waited a whole 'nother six years for Nietzsche to tell us that.
Off to see a wizard
Yet for all this quibble, Zardoz does serve up a bit of wonder that is tailor-made for that young teen in the crowd – the revelation, embedded in Zed’s memories, of the books Arthur Frayn provided that equipped him for his eventual mission. And the Wizard of Oz in particular, from which Frayn took his god moniker, and from which he lifted the entire Man Behind the Curtain concept that allowed him to orchestrate the end of the Vortex, with Connery’s Zed as his testosterone-ridden Dorothy.
There’s some honest-to-goodness magic in that, and the wide-eyed, pimply-faced teen is primed for it. It’s a deployment of that truly special analogia that lives within us from our earliest childhood readings, the ensorceling connections that books and stories and fairy tales serve up to equip us for the buffeting winds and rolling thunder of maturity. That Arthur Frayn nurtures his murderous creation with such readings, building his entire humanity-saving scheme around this profound and very relatable attribute, is the stuff of true prestidigitation - and it’s in the mind of the star-gazing, future-glimpsing nerd boy that it most readily thrives. I should know!
Decades exist between my most recent reading of Zardoz and the one before, though it sits on my DVD shelf with all the other Seventies popcorn. I find my perception of it has morphed greatly in that interregnum; I wouldn’t have written what’s above in my 20s. But while my perception has shifted, my enjoyment of the film has not. I think it’s goofy, glorious, chilling, provocative, and overcooked. Just horrible. And just marvelous. And that’s what I think every single time I see it.
One final thought escapes me. With its AI-as-ruler and floating-head-as-deity and rulings on the nature of life and deep emphasis on the importance of baby-making, it now seems to me a terribly humanist film, for all its violence and deprecation: it’s saying to me, pretty clearly and loudly, that We Are God. And, as such, we have certain responsibilities – making babies, of course, but also preserving meaning in our existence, and making that existence about something more than the elitist voyeurism that keeps the Immortals from drifting away altogether. Something more than this thing we do in our own Vortex, the one we carry in our pockets and keep open in our web browsers. Well, that’s a message I can get behind. Yes. We Are God. And as such, we’re about preserving all those things that give us meaning.
Or is God in show business, too?
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