The Future, Next to the Freeway
Next to a freeway entrance in the middle of suburbia there is a rainbow wall. The light shines through the metal, coloured in gradations of every colour. Behind and beneath the glimmering wall lies a futuristic development – a train station. Made entirely out of concrete, smooth, monolithic and minimalist, the station towers in all its glory below street level as though it were something out of the 1927 film, metropolis.
And yet, even closer to the shimmering wall is a strange man. A man with an elongated neck and a goofy smile, a smile that never seems to waver, a smile seemingly generated by the levers attached to his metallic base. His eyes glisten in their fiber glass blue, and his copper elements glint in the sun. Children play on his smooth, serpentine body and move his levers as though he too would move. But he instead stays, a construction just like the station, and the glimmering wall. He is an installation. Planted there in his grotesque happiness as though to scare the crows away and somehow implant his cheeriness into the drooping mouths of the weary travellers passing through. But, no matter how strange and obscene, he cannot move. He can only stand in petrified happiness as everyone else returns from the work day as drained metallic robots.
THE FILM
A satire of society and the current shape of the world through a vague homage of metropolis