The Deep Politics of ‘Zardoz’ 

The following is an adapted excerpt from “Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today” by Anthony Galluzzo, published this month by Zer0 Books.

John Boorman’s 1974 film oddity “Zardoz” is now mostly remembered for star Sean Connery’s high-camp red-leather outfit and the eponymous flying stone head with which the movie opens. “The gun is good,” says the giant floating head. “The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of men…. But the gun shoots death and purifies the Earth of the filth of the Brutals. Go forth and kill. Zardoz has spoken.”

“Zardoz,” called “one of the wildest, most ambitious films of the 1970s,” was a commercial and critical disaster upon its release. While some have dismissed the film as a joke, the work has also seen its reputation grow over the decades, achieving something like cult status mostly due to the costuming (designed by Boorman and his then wife Christel Kruse Boorman) and its ornately psychedelic visual style. “Zardoz” has also seen an online revival in the form of memes mostly focused on Connery in his get-up or that giant stone head. Boorman himself considered the story important enough to put into “novel form”— after the film’s release and box office failure — in response to those “ghosts” that “pressed this strange vision of the future upon me,” as he writes in the preface to the novelization.

“Zardoz’s” baroque plot takes place in 2293 on an Earth devastated by nuclear war or ecological catastrophe or both. The Brutal human majority — mostly mutated due to radiation — are kept in check by the Exterminators, led by Zed (Connery). These Exterminators alternately kill and enslave the Brutals — forcing them to grow corn, for instance — at the behest of Zardoz, the flying stone head who dispenses weapons alongside imperatives to his Exterminator acolytes. Suspecting Zardoz is not all that he appears to be, Zed slips into the flying stone head hidden among the Exterminators’ regular agricultural tribute to discover that his god is in fact an airship piloted by an elaborately dressed human figure. (Boorman’s false sky god was inspired by William Blake’s depiction of Nebuchadnezzar and his poem “To Nobodaddy.”)  Zed shoots this figure, and the head goes down as a result, crash-landing in a lush, high-tech oasis known as the Vortex.

This event inaugurates Zed’s journey as he learns that the world — or the Outlands outside the Vortex — is run by the Eternals. This technologically advanced human elite, working in tandem with a supercomputer called the Tabernacle, possess seemingly godlike powers that include ersatz immortality as the Tabernacle repeatedly downloads each Eternal’s consciousness into new bodies grown from the genetic codes it stores and controls. The Eternals have for this reason dispensed with sexual intercourse, which they consider an unnecessary atavism, in line with Enlightenment-era perfectibilist William Godwin’s prediction that the triumph of reason would bring sexless immortality to humankind. The Eternals manage the Brutal majority by way of the stone head and their Exterminator devotees. The Exterminators therefore unwittingly enforce the Eternals’ murderous population and resource management imperatives against their fellow Brutals. We also learn that the Eternals once sought to leave the planet to join other Eternal space colonies. The Tabernacle developed the technology behind the Vortex’s phony sky gods for the purposes of interplanetary travel while maintaining the Brutal population as seed material for a space colonization project, until that project collapsed.

Zed brings discord to the Vortex, as informal leader Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) puts the “animalistic” Outlander on display for the ostensible purpose of scientific experiment. She scans Zed’s consciousness, for instance, forcing him to relive his past, as his mostly violent memories are projected onto a screen for an audience of Eternals: a clever variation on the flashback that implicitly identifies Zardoz’s largely Anglo-American audiences with the film’s Immortal overlords. Consuella “tests” Zed’s sexual function, which in turn discomfits and awakens the dormant sexual desires of her Eternal audience (and ultimately Consuella herself, at least by the film’s end). 

Perhaps this is why Consuella wants to kill Zed immediately, setting her against May (Sarah Kestelman). May, supported by the majority, prefers that Zed live, at least temporarily, for the purpose of further study.  Zed is made to play servant to Friend (John Alderton) during this stay of execution. It is Friend who first exposes Zed to the rot at the heart of Eternal life — the ennui and imbecility that come from post-Singularity techno-immortalism — dramatically depicted in a growing subpopulation of Apathetics. Friend also introduces his Exterminator “slave” to the Renegades. The Renegades are Eternals who, in violating the Tabernacle-enforced Eternal consensus around norms of enlightened behavior and belief, are punished through expedited aging.  Which is one reason why these geriatric immortal renegades — like the Sybil of Cumae — want nothing so much as to die.

Friend himself is ultimately punished as a Renegade, after he vocally attacks the Vortex and its system, even as Zed learns that he was specifically engineered by a group of dissident Eternals to undo the Tabernacle and bring the gift of death to the Immortals, whose power and immortality stem from the immiseration of the Outlands. These dissident Eternals include Friend and Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy), the figure piloting the Zardoz head who Zed only apparently dispatches at the start of the film. Frayn, whose remit includes the management of the Outlands, designed the flying stone heads as a form of social control after the wizard-trickster in L. Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz”; hence Zard-oz. (In one significant flashback, we learn that it was Zed’s apparently accidental discovery of the children’s novel during a raid on a Brutal encampment that awakens his skepticism regarding the heads, all according to Frayn’s plan.)

Zed is a catalyst, designed by one segment of the Eternals intent on dissolving the Vortex. The final act of the film is consequently occupied by a civil war among the Eternals, as Consuella and her loyalists seek to capture and kill Zed and his new dissident Eternal allies, who include May, Friend, a reconstituted Frayn, and Avelow, the Eternal seeress who sees that the outsider will put an end to the Vortex. Even Consuella eventually embraces Zed’s mission. The Eternal matriarchs “impregnate” Zed with the collective knowledge of the Vortex, even as he literally impregnates them: “They would guide him and bathe him in their knowledge, so that their minds would mix through the touching of their skins. And as he mated so would they pass back to him their own seeds of information that would grow in him, as the life he transmitted would grow in them.”

In the film’s denouement, Zed destroys the techno-magical crystal that contains the Tabernacle’s intelligence and power — and with it the Eternals’ prosthetic superhumanity — in a hallucinatory shootout sequence that invokes the well-known hall-of-mirrors conclusion to Orson Welles’s “Lady From Shanghai” (1947), albeit in a characteristically surreal register. Up until this point, this master crystal functioned as server (and more) for the individual crystal transmitters that, as we see over the course of the film, telepathically bound the Eternals to each other by way of the Tabernacle, allowing them to “ascend” into various levels of collective consciousness in a hippie modernist adumbration of a still-nascent “world wide web.” Prior to this confrontation, Zed meets the senescent because Renegade human architect of the Tabernacle who regrets his project even as he attempts to explain his aim: to preserve civilization against planetary catastrophe like Noah or some Seventies retro-futurist version of our own Longtermist Elon Musks.

Boorman’s fable exemplifies that strand of early Seventies countercultural thinking that challenged the hypermodernist vision that drove both US capitalism and Soviet state socialism. This vision encompasses familiar elements of Western, and typically industrial capitalist, ideology. A non-exhaustive list of these elements would include: a belief in historical progress, defined in entirely Western and industrial terms and largely identified with scientific-technological development no matter the cost; a Promethean embrace of endless material growth and a corresponding refusal of biophysical limits and human self-limitation; a reified and hierarchical split between mind and body, human beings and a natural world reconceived as standing reserve or “ecosystem services” for human use and manipulation. While we should not deny the benefits of modernity, up to a point, we can now see the consequences of this ideology and the socioeconomic system it underwrites in the form of planetary ecological collapse. 

Laying aside the question of whether Boorman made a great, good, or bad film — “Zardoz” is all three at once — his phantasmagoria is the dream of a certain moment, lending cryptic, sublime, and ridiculous forms to certain fears and wishes circulating through the “advanced” capitalist world in a period of transition. Like his Soviet contemporaries Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov, who similarly contested the state socialist flavor of hypermodernism by way of science fiction and folklore, Boorman selectively draws on the legacies of artistic modernism and its techniques for his own ends. “Zardoz,” for example, is very much organized around the visual conceit of a crystal, since the Tabernacle is contained in a crystal. While the film’s comically iconic opening scenes, with stone head in Outlands, proceed through a series of wide-shot panoramic views redolent of landscape painting in a post-apocalyptic register, the film shifts into its characteristically crystalline mode once Zed breaches the Vortex.

From that point onward, the mise-en-scène is accordingly kaleidoscopic rather than sequential. Instead of quick cuts and sudden juxtapositions, we get frames within frames within frames, as Boorman collapses what could be a montage sequence of cut-image-cut into baroque and disorienting wide shots, such as the scene in which Zed is examined by his new Eternal overlords after his first jarring appearance among them. We can see different figures — from Zed on the table to Eternals Consuella and May, who appear free floating even as they are supposedly examining their captive, to the regenerated bodies of the Eternals suspended, as if flying, in a synthetic amniotic fluid behind glass — engaged in different actions at different scales. It isn’t just this surfeit of images that distinguishes the film, as certain critics suggested at the time, but the way Boorman renders sequential action as fractured simultaneity. The linear movement of progressive time, including the dialectical linearity of montage, has been flattened into a confused and blinking virtual world that suggests nothing so much as the cyberspace that was yet to come in 1974. It is as if Boorman acknowledges the irony of using film — a mechanically reproducible form of visual media that defines the modern period — to interrogate techno-modernism through an implosive visual language that cannibalizes much of film history. The only point when we see sequential time dramatized, in a deliberately overblown stop-motion montage, is during the film’s coda. And there are no more arresting images in Boorman’s film than these final ones.

In a film that consistently refuses montage until this penultimate point — after Zed and Consuella flee into the wreckage of the Zardoz head, after the collapse of the Vortex, refashioned as cave — Boorman presents his viewers with a time lapse montage of this reconstituted family’s life cycle. From the couple, Zed and Consuella, to a slightly older couple that includes a pregnant Consuella, to that same couple with a new child to an older child and finally an adult who significantly leaves, the sequence concludes with the same couple reduced to their skeletal remains, hand bones forever clenched together.  

Perhaps in implicit rebuke to the grand visions of historical progress that animated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — when Progress and its utilitarian calculus were used by various regimes across the political spectrum to justify mass death in the present for the secular immortality to come — the film dramatizes the one unavoidably linear trajectory and its telos in what was once hailed as the most revolutionary-progressive film forms: montage.

This scene also presents the viewer with a reductio ad absurdum of the nuclear family as an insular dead end, especially when we consider that May, upon the dissolution of the Tabernacle and the Vortex, led a band of those now-mortal Eternals who opted to live their finite lives, rather than die, into the Outlands with the express purpose of building a new society alongside the Brutals. While this new dispensation remains offscreen, like some negative invocation of utopian possibility, in the film, Boorman (and Stair) provide more detail in their novelization, beginning with the end of the Vortex:

This artificial Paradise, inset in the real world, making its surroundings the poorer because of its presence, had been swamped, flooded back into the Outlands. Now all the goodness that had been artfully stored here would be redistributed back into the places from which it had been stolen. May and her women would set out.

Implicit in this extended novelistic account of the artificial paradise’s “goodness” redistributed back into the “places from which” it was “stolen” is that broad anti-colonial sentiment that pervades the narrative, which Boorman here more explicitly links to ecological concerns — specifically the theory of uneven ecological exchange according to which high technology and the entire “imperial mode of living” is predicated on the exploitation and expropriation of the Outlands by a neocolonial core. May and her band are giving back what they stole while aiming to live as equals with the Brutals within the limits figured by the mortality they embrace in embracing the end of the Tabernacle and Vortex.

But what does ecosocial restitution look like in this case and on a devastated Earth? An Earth whose devastation stems in part from the Eternals’ technosphere — gated communities behind invisible shields, organized under the auspices of A.I. governance, genetically engineered Immortals with replaceable bodies, a human zoo managed for maximum extraction beyond the walls, policed by an anti-gravity “god” ship. And lest we forget, this technology is first developed to flee the earth: “another dead end.” In an uncanny echo of present-day “Longtermists,” it was to secure the long-term survival of human civilization — at least for a certain sort of human being — against immediate and long term existential threats that the Immortalist order was established.

So, which of these technologies and techniques can May and her women repurpose in a sustainable and egalitarian way in the Outlands? Aside from the Eternals’ ersatz immortality, ended by Zed, what technologies must they dismantle? And keeping the biophysical limits of a damaged planet in mind, what kinds of new collective self-limitation, and collective abundance, will characterize this new arrangement, as May and her band embrace birth, alongside death, in struggling to birth another society? 

These questions are even more pertinent now amidst general biospheric collapse, when the ruling classes of the global north and their court ideologues, across the ideological spectrum, fantasize about decoupling from a natural world that always seems also to include vast swathes of wretched humanity, and fleeing to the stars. Here is that decidedly nostalgic futurism that dominates so much of what passes for political analysis, often left-inflected but effectively indistinguishable from libertarian and alt-right Singularitarianism or Longtermism. Under labels such as “left accelerationism” and “fully automated luxury communism,” we can detect an ironically backward-looking desire for those high-modernist “lost futures” of the twentieth century, to invoke cultural critic Mark Fisher, that supposedly offer us the lineaments of a better world. 

While we do not want to junk the modern world or its infrastructures in their entirety, what do we salvage and how might we reconfigure various traditions and modes of being together in a way that allows for human and non-human flourishing on a finite planet? What does a degrowth socialism absent of austerity of the Malthusian sort look like? 

Imagine a socio-technical order that mixed small towns or cities, built on the model of the medieval European commune or the Iroquois village, integrated into their bioregions, surrounded by belts of farmland, organized along the agro-ecological lines that blend traditional and contemporary modes of farming. Imagine that farmland surrounded by wilderness, which could include pasturage and pastoralism alongside a constellation of more-than- human lifeworlds. Imagine a decentralized renewable power grid and a centralized system of computers — perhaps, if energetically viable — subject to collective human imperatives and used solely in the service of eco-human ends coordinating the action of these various communes, when such coordination is necessary, after the elimination of personal digital devices and algorithmic post-political management. Imagine a mixture of animal power for transportation and agriculture, alongside bicycles and even high- speed trains — when necessary — dirigibles floating against a clearer sky, after exhaust and artificial lighting, after the petro-automobile complex, after advertising, after exchange-value and its cancerous forms of development.

“But why?” ask our dogmatic hypermodernists. “To draw any line or to set any limit is arbitrary: If clean water or antibiotics, why not cryogenics or human-machine fusion of the Tabernacle sort?”

Putting aside the many ways that today’s self-anointed elites use these ideological fantasies to mystify the workings of our catabolic capitalist order, this specious reasoning forecloses exactly those acts of judgment that define human reason: drawing lines and setting limits. These would-be human supremacists would instead cede our precious autonomy to “autonomous technology” and an inhuman idea of material development as an end in itself. One criterion for such judgments, outlined by Illich and others, is a technological order that serves genuinely human ends. We could further expand this aim to encompass creaturely and broadly ecological aims so that human ends never again compromise non-human lifeworlds, as we have done during the era of industrial capitalism.

Such a mix of “high” and “low” technology — a term I use capaciously to include narrowly technical structures and institutional arrangements — similarly shocks our hypermodernist ideologues, for partly aesthetic reasons, still looking forward to the uniform space-age technosphere envisioned in Kubrick’s 2001.

The point is a human-scale and Earth-appropriate technics. Such a vision also offends modernist political ideologies in its mixture of centralization and decentralization, for example, and its implicit insistence on another ethos. Because such a project will require new norms and forms of life alongside transformed material structures, as the Critical Aquarians understood over fifty years ago.

Zed gets it and gets that he has no place in this new world:

If they were not all wiped out, they would have a hard winter to survive alone; a brief time before the birth of their children; then greater risk as they would be doubly vulnerable. But some would not bear children, and they all had had two hundred years of study and exercise to prepare them for this time… Zed envied them. They would be the first to land from this ship. The first explorers to set foot on a new Earth.

Inverting the pop-modernist cliché of space exploration as final frontier and upending the male-dominated project of an outer-space exit from what some call, in a terminological fit of hubris, our “Anthropocene” Earth, we are instead presented with a band of women looking to rediscover and repair their old home. Marsha Kinder read in Boorman’s depiction of the Vortex, seemingly dominated by women leaders such as May and Consuella, a misogyny that undercut the critique of technological utopias, as she notes:

When Friend releases the monster within him and rebels against the utopia, he shouts: “The Vortex is an obscenity, I hate all women”. Suddenly we realize that the Vortex is an image associated with female sexuality and that the women seem to be in control.

But while Friend’s rebellion ends in his begging Zed for immediate death, May and her cohort of women opt for a new, albeit finite, life, founding an alternative community that retains the matriarchal structure of the Vortex while jettisoning the rest. After fulfilling his role as sperm donor, Zed notably has no role or place in this new community, which suggests nothing so much as the eco-feminist visions of theorists such as Maria Mies and Carolyn Merchant or novelists like Ursula Le Guin.

Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” — a short story published in October 1973 — is a relevant Critical Aquarian intertext insofar as Le Guin rejects programmatic utopianism while maintaining a commitment to radical social transformation. The story’s narrator describes a seeming utopia called Omelas in a self-reflexive way only to reveal that the Omelans’ universal felicity depends on the perpetual degradation of a child kept in a grimy basement out of view, but not out of mind. Most Omelans visit this generic scapegoat of a child, sitting in its own excrement; they rationalize this suffering as the cost of the happiness, freedom, equality, and abundance they all enjoy as Omelans (all save one).

Le Guin reveals the sacrificial impetus behind a utilitarian logic that ostensibly seeks to maximize the good of the majority — usually defined as the maximization of pleasure for the maximum number of people—even if that requires the institutionalized, if unseen, brutalization of a minority (of one in this case) as a means to an end; this scenario also mirrors the anti-colonial parable inscribed in the relationship between the Vortex and the Outlands. Le Guin’s parable offers a rejoinder to what she calls the Euclidean or programmatic utopias that define the Western tradition from Plato through Thomas More to orthodox Marxism.

Like the imperfect and ambiguous utopia imagined on the planet Annares in Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed”, her science fiction novel of the same year, and insofar as she depicts a substantively utopian impulse — directed against static utopias organized according to scientific principles rather than necessarily imperfect political struggles — it is found in the few Omelans who walk away from their “artificial paradise,” or as Le Guin herself later articulated her position:

Utopia has been Euclidean, it has been European, and it has been masculine. I am trying to suggest, in an evasive, distrustful, untrustworthy fashion, and as obscurely as I can, that our final loss of faith in that radiant sandcastle may enable our eyes to adjust to a dimmer light and in it perceive another kind of utopia. As this utopia would not be euclidean, European, or masculinist, my terms and images in speaking of it must be tentative and seem peculiar. Victor Turner’s antitheses of structure and communitas are useful to my attempt to think about it: structure in society, in his terms, is cognitive, communitas existential; structure provides a model, communitas a potential; structure classifies, communitas reclassifies; structure is expressed in legal and political institutions, communitas in art and religion.

I would also add, reading Le Guin’s essay against her earlier story, that “communitas” is primarily the collective human process or action of rupture, creation, and the perpetual work of perennially imperfect recreation and maintenance that follows. Rather than in Omelas or some already existing place outside the city limits, Le Guin locates “utopia” in the ones who walk away or, more precisely, in their walking away — in their rejection of the Omelan status quo, in their exit, and finally, in their implied urge to build a new lifeworld, like May’s new community in the Outlands.

Here is an example of natality — the human capacity for rupture and new beginnings, a collective non-biological elaboration of the birthing process that nonetheless bridges both halves of the centaur — most fully theorized by Hannah Arendt. While death forms the natural and existential horizon for all human beings, it is in the fact of our birth — which Heidegger or some of his followers negatively characterized as thrownness—that Arendt locates a distinctively human capacity for new beginnings.

Arendt synthesizes natural and social determinations in her account of an underdetermined human condition, as opposed to a fixed human nature. We are conditioned, on the most fundamental level, by the facts of birth and death and a survival imperative rooted in our corporeality and the historically specific biosphere through which we evolved and of which we are a part. These conditions connect us to the earth and all other forms of terrestrial creaturely life. But, after our centaur condition, we also build a world distinct from, yet dependent on, Earth that similarly shapes us as we shape it: “In addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-making conditions, which their human origin and their variability notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things.”

With this model of natality in mind, let’s note how Zed’s gift of death also includes the gift of birth — and all the gifts of embodied finitude — although Zed is pictured as mostly useless in this instance, standing to the side in a posture of mute, impotent encouragement as his companion pushes through the pain. Consuella’s pregnancy and delivery are, on the other hand, the precondition for her unnamed son and this unnamed son’s departure — in implicit rebuke to Zed and any aspiration to patrilineal or dynastic continuity — perhaps for May’s new world. And that new world, organized along non-normative if not explicitly matriarchal lines, begins with the multiple pregnancies of her almost entirely female band. Against contemporaneous futurist feminist Shulamith Firestone, and her present-day epigones, the “solution” to patriarchy is not the automation of the birth process but the transformation of eco-social relations such that birth (and death) are not horrible things to be denied, abolished, or transcended.

This sequence precedes and initiates the final montage sequence — both set to the rhythmic, simultaneously stirring and dirge-like Allegretto movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony that binds them together — and its two endpoints. Musical passages from the Seventh Symphony recur throughout the film, alongside alternating snatches of incidental and synthesizer music, arranged by early music pioneer David Munrow. Boorman strives to create a visual analog for an extended piece of music, using recurrent leitmotifs and variations to mark thematic continuities. This approach reaches a condensed apotheosis in the final few minutes of the film: the ostensibly linear progression that constitutes the film’s finale is, on closer examination, a contrapuntal play of motifs.

One such motif reaches its endpoint in the death and disintegration of Zed and Consuella, foregrounding finitude and its acceptance as the existential horizon of creaturely being, particularly on the individual level. But the other endpoint — the growth and departure of the child turned adult, perhaps for May’s utopia limited — is a necessary complement to that finitude, which expands and negates — expands because it negates — the narrowly biological fact of birth: “The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born.”

We are born, live, and die in time, as both products and makers of our times. We persist beyond the span of an individual life in the form of our collective arrangements and traditions. The “birth of new men and the new beginning” ensures both the continuity of those traditions and the possibility of ruptures or revolutions. And traditions long dead, even the traditions of the vanquished, can be resurrected or recreated by new people in their own time, according to their own needs. Perhaps this is the meaning of the final image in John Boorman’s hieroglyphic spectacle: a rusty, cobwebbed six-shooter, apparently Zed’s, hangs suspended in front of a cave wall stained with handprints. While the absurdly antiquated gun — an emblem of the ways high technological development intersects with war-making — suggests, in a hopeful way, a future in which systematic extermination is a relic, the handprints evoke the prehistoric cave painting at Lascaux. Does Boorman here imply that the events of the film, ostensibly set in the far future world of 2293, occur in some prehistoric past? Even as the film clearly builds on the disastrous twentieth century and its late-stage dystopian fears, here is a final imagistic rebuke to dominant ideas of linear, teleological, and homogeneous linear time or Progress. More than cyclical time or the Nietzschean “eternal recurrence of the same,” the handprints attest to human finitude, continuity, and the possibility of recreation across qualitatively different times and temporalities. It is both the limit conditions of our time-bound human, or creaturely, condition and the sheer contingency of history, human and natural, that allows for new beginnings, even among the ruins.