THX 1138 (1970)
THX 1138 poster artwork
Released: 1971
Production: LAWRENCE STURHAHN and FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA (executive producer)
for American Zoetrope
Direction: GEORGE LUCAS
Screenplay: GEORGE LUCAS and WALTER MURCH; based on a story by LUCAS
Cinematography: DAVE MEYERS and ALBERT KIHN
Editing: GEORGE LUCAS
Art Direction: MICHAEL HALLER
Animation: HAL BARWOOD
Sound Montage: WALTER MURCH
Title Design: HAL BARWOOD
Music: LALO SCHIFRIN
MPAA Rating: PG
Running Time: 95 minutes
Principal Characters:
ROBERT DUVALL.....THX 1138
DONALD PLEASENCE.....SEN 5241
MAGGIE McOMIE.....LUH 3417
DON PEDRO COLLEY.....SRT
IAN WOLFE.....PTO
ESSAY BY SCOTT BUKATMAN
Hopes were high the day that executive producer Francis Ford Coppola brought a rough
cut of his studio’s first release, George Lucas’ THX 1138, to the money
men at Warner Bros. Coppola was trying to develop a seven-picture deal with Warner
Bros.; his team of bright, young film-school graduates would create the features, and the
studio apparatus of Warner Bros. would finance and distribute them. Much was riding
then on the nearly completed project by the brightest of these up-and-coming filmmakers,
a science-fiction film by the (already) award-winning Lucas. In the film industry, the day
has become widely known as Black Thursday.
With the massive subsequent success of George Lucas, the man responsible for
American Graffiti (1973), as well as the stories for Raiders of the
Lost Ark (1981) and its sequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of
Doom (1984), and the creation of the Star Wars, it has been
nearly forgotten that his feature-film career was launched with the crucial commercial
failure of THX 1138. (The career of Francis Coppola, by contrast, has
been marked by almost constant setbacks and impasses.) With three quarters of a million
dollars of Warner Bros.’ money and the hopes of American Zoetrope, a budding new type
of film studio involved in Lucas’ science-fiction project, Lucas’ failure was particularly
crushing. The entire deal between Warner Bros. and Zoetrope, a deal which was to have
included projects such as The Conversation (1974) and
Apocalypse Now (1979), was unceremoniously canceled.
Although Warner Bros.’ response now seems remarkably shortsighted, it must be admitted
that THX 1138 does not suggest the commercial potential of a director
who was shortly to make some of the most successful films in history. It is a film which
often seems as bleak and as forbidding as the future it portrays. While one cannot fault the
work on a technical level, with its handsome production values, innovative visual
techniques, and stunningly constructed sound track, its liabilities as a work of mass
entertainment are evident.
As if to underscore the point, the film begins with a trailer for an upcoming Buck
Rogers serial, complete with rocket ships, ray guns, futuristic cities, and Buck
himself, described as an ordinary human being who is noteworthy for keeping his wits
about him. The bright optimism of the 1930’s version of life in the twenty-fifth century is
immediately undercut following the main titles. This 1971 vision of the future presents a
world of conformity and repressed individuality; workers function in a hivelike
underground city of blank whiteness and are kept heavily sedated, the better to perform
their repetitive and closely monitored functions.
The protagonist, THX 1138 (Robert Duvall), is troubled and confused. His job
performance is slipping as a result of his failing concentration, and he seeks solace in a
computerized confessional but receives only bland and preprogrammed responses.
Returning to his rooms, THX encounters his roommate LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie),
who has been replacing THX’s medication, thus preventing him from taking his dosage of
daily tranquilizers. As the effects of the sedatives abate, THX and LUH become
romantically and sexually involved, a highly illegal development.
SEN (Donald Pleasence), a conniving citizen of some minor influence, separates THX and
LUH by arranging for LUH’s work shift to be altered. Following the “destruction” of his
own roommate, he approaches THX with the suggestion that they share rooms; THX
refuses and anonymously reports SEN for misusing his authority. Because of the
discontinuance of his sedatives, however, THX is unable to perform his mechanistic job
functions, and his tension is soon noted by the supervisors. Arrested and prosecuted for
criminal drug evasion as well as for malicious sexual conduct, he is pronounced incurable
and is detained in a boundless white space.
THX is briefly reunited with LUH; they make love, and she informs him that she is
pregnant. The two are forcibly separated, and in scenes that combine humor and horror,
THX is subjected to medical examination, exploration, and manipulation (the sequence is
reminiscent of another release of the same year, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork
Orange). Finally joining other prisoners in the white void, THX impassively
listens as the men argue about the nature of their prison. SEN appears among the
detainees and attempts to organize the group with himself serving as their leader. THX
rises, indicating that he is leaving, and SEN, in an attempt to impress the rest, announces
that he and THX will journey to the Barrier which imprisons them and back again. When
the pair have moved beyond the sight of the others, however, SEN desires to quit,
following THX only with great reluctance.
The two are joined by another, a man who, it develops, is only a hologram---an
electronically generated reality. Professing a desire to be part of the real world, the
hologram points the others toward the exit, which turns out to be an unlocked, unguarded
door. Beyond the doorway is the press of the crowded, deafening city, and THX and the
hologram are separated from SEN. The escape of the two prisoners is noted by the
authorities, and a budget is allocated toward their capture.
THX attempts to locate LUH through the computerized information system, only to learn
that she has been destroyed and recycled into existence as a new fetus. SEN, sitting quietly
among the children of the city, is recaptured without resistance, unable to function outside
the parameters of the system that had previously defined the entirety of his existence. THX
and the hologram, still evading the police, steal cars, but the hologram, unable to operate
successfully his vehicle, crashes into a pillar and is destroyed. Following a high-speed
chase through the tunnels of the city, THX arrives at its outer perimeter. The robotic
police pursuers, still trailing THX, are recalled as the budget for the pursuit is exceeded.
They make a final attempt to convince THX to return with them, noting that the surface of
the planet is uninhabitable. THX, in defiance, continues his climb toward the top of an
endless shaft, and the film concludes as he emerges into the light of a dramatic sunset. He
stands, upright and victorious, in the open air of his new world.
As Dale Pollock, in his biography of Lucas, has noted, the theme of escape dominates the
filmmaker’s work. THX 1138 sketches a future society in which the
citizens have been reduced to passivity; what enables THX to escape is neither his
ingenuity nor his strength but simply his determination to do so. The exit from the white
void is unguarded, yet no other prisoners make any effort to find it. Like Buck Rogers,
THX is an ordinary man who keeps his wits intact.
The passivity of the populace is engendered through the nearly constant surveillance of the
population---a conception of social control which echoes the analysis of the prison system
by Michael Foucault. THX is first seen in a video image transmitted from within his
medicine cabinet as a computerized voice cheerily inquires into the nature of the problem.
His job performance is seen to be monitored by numerous supervisors and from a variety
of angles. The careful and constant dispensing of tranquilizers insures the complicity of the
citizens in their own imprisonment.
The basic conception of the film was present in the original form of the work, a
fifteen-minute short film produced while Lucas was teaching film at the University of
Southern California. Lucas’ short student films had already attracted the attention of his
peers and teachers, but it was THX 1138:4EB, a film produced with his
class of navy students in 1967, which gained for him wider notice. The film won first prize
at the third National Film Festival (Lucas had entered films in three categories, but the
judges decided against awarding the young filmmaker a virtual clean sweep), and at least
some critics and production executives became aware of the film and of its promising
creator. While the film was not noteworthy dramatically, the innovative visuals and
general freshness of the work consistently impressed.
The basic idea for the short film arose in collaboration with fellow students Matthew
Robbins and Walter Murch, the latter of whom would ultimately serve as coscripter on the
feature-film version. From the skeletal notes of an individual’s escape to freedom from a
futuristic, subterranean civilization, Lucas added a battery of special effects: overlaying
video and film images; running continuing computer graphics along the bottom of the
screen; and distorting a sound track of audio broadcasts.
A scholarship brought Lucas into the industry, where he served an apprenticeship to
Coppola. The two developed a close relationship, and when Coppola set about
establishing his own studio, an alternative to the high-budget commercialism of the majors,
the abilities and projects of his protege were certainly a consideration. Of the seven
proposals Coppola made to Warner Bros., an expanded version of THX
1138:4EB was the one he pushed. Claiming that the project, still in a rough-draft
stage, was ready to move into production, Coppola managed to acquire $3.5 million to
develop more scripts and $750,000 to produce THX 1138.
The finished film is a triumph of technique over script content, as Lucas’ image and sound
tracks endow the depicted society with a complexity that the screenplay could scarcely
have conveyed. As in Star Wars (1977), the spectator is plunged into a
future that can be understood only gradually, and never completely, yet if the effect in the
later film is to produce exhilaration and breathless pacing, in the earlier work the effect is
one of alienation and paranoia. The film is dense with film and video images, medical
readouts, computer graphics, numerical counters, and holographic overlays. The brilliant
sound montages by Walter Murch---who would later aid the Coppola productions of
The Conversation and Apocalypse Now---combine
human voices with garbled rerecordings, computer voices, robot voices, and inventive
appropriations of additional sounds (in the climatic chase, for example, the sound track
cuts between the jetlike sound of THX’s car and the cool electronic hiss of the police
motorcycles). The total effect is that of a complex, multilayered, fragmented civilization,
and so the sense of dehumanization is continually enhanced.
The critical reception of the film was not uniformly negative. While many lambasted the
film’s sterility, others were impressed by the debut work of an interesting new director.
The film sold out both of its screenings at the Cannes Film Festival and attracted
admiration in Europe. Both The New York Times and
Time magazine found much to admire in the film, yet noted a lack of
narrative originality and inconsistencies in the film’s tone, which shifted from satire to
seriousness without warning. Paul Zimmerman of Newsweek, however,
saw the film’s future as an effective extrapolation of present trends and stated,
prophetically, that George Lucas is a child of our age, fascinated by the beauty of
technology, and aware of its dehumanizing potential. With American
Graffiti and Star Wars, it would soon become apparent that
Lucas was indeed a gifted product of his times.
THX 1138 is often damned for deriving so much from the worlds built by
George Orwell in 1984 and from Aldous Huxley in Brave New
World. While this is clearly the case, the film abounds in small ideas of its own
which evoke more recent and more subtle authors of science fiction. The medicine cabinet
that asks the citizens their problems, the computerized chapel service, and the calming and
sensitive robot police officers in particular recall the science fiction of Philip K. Dick,
whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) would be
filmed as Blade Runner (1982). Dick’s work is filled with such humanized
products, which often---as is true in THX 1138 as well---implore the
citizens to consume more, to remain calm, and to “tune out.”
Lucas’ subsequent work remains squarely in the arena of entertainment, and he has not
directed another unsuccessful film (although More American Graffiti,
1979, on which he served as executive producer, failed at the box office). At first glance,
the serious “message picture” of THX 1138 would seem to have little to
do with the work Lucas would ultimately produce. Yet when one recognizes Lucas’ major
attributes as a filmmaker, his first feature is easily assimilated into his oeuvre. George
Lucas, more than any other commercial filmmaker, is a collagist of contemporary culture,
and THX 1138 is his most overly collagist work. The densely structured
image track, which combines different media and computerized graphic displays; the
equally complex sound track, with its cacophony of the sounds of a technologically
advanced culture; the liberal borrowings from both classic and modern science-fiction
sources---all of these elements combine to create a film that is essentially a thickly textured
collage of cultural artifacts. American Graffiti, with its dependence on the
songs and sounds of the early 1960’s, as well as through its interweaving of four narrative
lines, continues the trend, while Star Wars, with its incorporation of
myriad science-fiction sources and Hollywood adventure films, is a veritable encyclopedia
of popular culture. Star Wars also features a textured sound track which
combines extensive scoring with an array of alien and robot sound effects.
The theme of the individual’s escape from a confining reality links THX
1138 to the other work of George Lucas, then, but it is in its construction of a
culture through the incorporation of a multitude of source materials that the film truly
finds a niche in Lucas’ canon. Only in tone does this first feature differ from its successors,
and it remains a provocative and largely successful premier work by a major filmmaker.
From MAGILL'S SURVEY OF THE CINEMA ANNUAL 1985.
Essay © 1985 SALEM PRESS. All Rights Reserved.
Poster artwork © 1970 WARNER BROTHERS / AMERICAN ZOETROPE. All Rights Reserved.
Title and logo designed by Karen Rappaport
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