Is the dystopic vision of the film ‘Rollerball’ fast becoming reality? Matthew Jordan, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Penn State, lays out his concerns…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the films of Norman Jewison<\/a>, who died on Jan. 22, 2024, had a unifying theme, it was how his characters searched for meaning and questioned the rules of their worlds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No matter the genre of the scores of films he directed<\/a> \u2013 from \u201cIn the Heat of the Night\u201d to \u201cFiddler on the Roof\u201d \u2013 his characters grew by confronting their own biases and preconceptions, even if it meant sacrificing things they once held dear. And as a media scholar<\/a>, I see the Canadian director\u2019s 1975 film \u201cRollerball<\/a>\u201d as one of his most underrated works. In it, the film\u2019s hero, Jonathan E., is a star athlete who\u2019s willing to risk his own life to avoid being a pawn for his corporate overlords.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Set in a dystopian 2018, the film helps make sense of today\u2019s political and cultural struggles, which are taking places as corporations and the wealthy consolidate their control over the information systems, newspapers and media outlets that once served democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In \u201cRollerball,\u201d Jewison depicts a future in which corporate feudalism has replaced democratic nations, with entire sectors of the economy consolidated under single corporations. Instead of citizens governing themselves, subjects live in cities ruled by corporations that demand unwavering fealty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The corporations provide for their vassals, giving them material comforts and entertainment, which work to assuage resentments fueled by rigid social inequality. Jewison\u2019s glassy-eyed characters pop pleasure pills like Tic Tacs to zone out and dream of being executives making decisions, even as they can\u2019t even approach that sort of agency, power and control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The oligopoly asks only that no one interfere with corporate imperatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unable to find meaning as individuals, people instead seek it out in media spectacles like Rollerball, a kind of motorcycle roller derby meets football meets basketball.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each major city has a Rollerball team that helps residents channel their aggression and cultivate a sense of belonging. Jonathan E., played by James Caan<\/a>, competes for Houston, a city owned by the Energy Corporation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rollerball serves an enormous social purpose, because it acts as a form of entertainment while also reinforcing the idea that corporate society, as one executive says, \u201cis an inevitability.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though it allows for rare individuals to rise out of poverty to fame when chosen by the corporation, all of them are eventually sacrificed to the brutality of the game or to shifting corporate priorities. The audience learns that corporations make all decisions and that strength is power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Bartholomew, the head of the Energy Corporation, \u201cthe game is designed to break men,\u201d revealing people to be as disposable and fungible as pistons or rods in a machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jonathan E. is the one player who can\u2019t be broken; he starts to resent the executives telling him what to do, and he wants to know how corporate decisions are made. Who decided to take his wife from him one day and reassign her to serve as the wife of an executive in Rome? Why can\u2019t he choose the path his life will take?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The owners eventually decide that Jonathan E. is getting bigger than the game, and that his popularity as a player is a threat to their control. They want him gone and order him to retire<\/a>. When Jonathan refuses, the executives change the rules of the game so he\u2019ll be killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\nComfort in exchange for subservience<\/h3>\n\n\n\n