Death Race 2014

Smell the fresh pretzel bread. Watch the many, many rings of the circus.

“Near Calvin College an imprudent coed found herself too far from cover when the Racer suddenly came streaking down the campus. Frantically she sprinted for safety, but she didn’t have a chance with a driver like Willie behind the wheel. The razor-sharp horn on the right fender sliced through her spine so cleanly that the jar wasn’t even felt inside the car.

“Leaving town the Racer was in luck again. An elderly woman had left the sanctuary of her stone-walled garden to rescue a straying cat. She was so easy to hit that Willie felt a little cheated…”

“…And for some reason he kept remembering the belatedly pleading look in the old woman’s eyes as he struck her. Funny that should stay with him…”

— The Racer (1956) by Ib Melchior

This short story, the inspiration for the 1975 Roger Corman film Death Race 2000, is one of those science fiction works that posits that the bored, amoral dwellers in the future will enjoy murder as a spectator sport. Like Rollerball, or The Tenth Victim, or Hunger Games.

Far-fetched, you say?

Let’s face it. In 1954, William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies shocked the reading public with its story of schoolboys devolving into murderous savages. Now, I suspect it would bore us. Not a high enough body count.

Combine the 21st century American factors of the ubiquitous cult of guns — now used to slaughter children daily in an epidemic to which Americans remain resolutely indifferent — and “reality” TV shows in which callousness and treachery are encouraged and richly rewarded.

Tell me what that equation adds up to.

Steadily worsening economic and environmental conditions make disaster commonplace, and numb the capacity for empathy. Assassins and prostitutes abound as popular culture role models. A man who stalks and guns down an unarmed teenage boy is not only acquitted, he is cheered. The United States blows wedding parties to bloody bits with flying robot bombs.

Look down that road as we race along. Can you see the finish line yet?