Zardoz

We must pay a visit to a 1974 movie called Zardoz. It's a sci-fi peek into a speculative future of immortal telepaths in a utopian bubble surrounded by a wasteland. Zardoz is a fake stonehead god. The wasteland is populated by illiterate wretches descended from survivors of a civilization-ending catastrophe of some unspecified kind.  The great masses of them, who are no more than lambs for the slaughter, are called "brutals."

The exterminators appointed by Zardoz to kill the brutals see themselves as "Chosen Ones." Sean Cannery is Zed, an exterminator. All he knows of the world is what booms from the mouth of the stone head. He believes that he and his friends are one with their stone-head god. On the job, they wear big, scary masks with the face of Zardoz pointing front and rear.

Zed is a happy hunter.

All seems right with the world until Zed sees a face in the window of a library. He breaks down the door with his foot (Mark Fuhrman called that kind of entry "a size-twelve warrant"). He can't see the man's face  at first because he, too, is wearing a mask.

The man hooks Zed's curiosity with books that teach him to read. He learns easily and eventually reads a book that show him the simple Zardoz word game and the parallel of the mask. He sees how everyone has been tricked into believing something that wasn't true – something he lived by, died by and killed by. He called it, "A fairy story about an old man who frightened people with a loud voice and a big mask."

It is probably no accident that the first item we see in the book that begins to teach Zed the magic of the written word begins with a bottle labeled "INK" and a picture of a running ink spot. When you see the masterful Denslow ink renderings in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, its hard not to give as much credit to the artist for the book's success as the author.

The Wizard of Oz is so firmly rooted in the collective North American mind as an American fairytale that Arthur Frayn's British accent is the first thing that throws you. None of the characters in Zardoz speak the way they do in The Wizard of Oz. No tree, animal, scarecrow or hollow metal man speaks at all. The Zardoz characters dress differently. Nobody in Zardoz is nice or cute or funny. But when you boil down the basics of each story you see how little it takes (a hunt / a revolver / a "witch eliminator" spray can) to turn a Dorothy into a Zed. You see what you expect to see and hear what you expect to hear when everything seems normal. Normal, that is, for fantasy, science fiction or drama "based on a true story" like this one.

Zardoz, the movie, provides all the heavy-handed clues you need to learn what Zed learned in the library long before you get to that scene. There is, nevertheless, a good chance that you won't see it coming. You'd think that anyone who read the book or saw the movie would have to be a dunce not too see the Wizard of Oz architecture of Zed's existence outside of the utopian zone called a "vortex."

After all, how far removed from the title "Wizard of Oz" is the name "Zardoz"? How far removed from the cyclone that took Dorothy Gale over the rainbow is the is the vortex inside a transparent protective barrier that reaches to the clouds? And what kind of name is "vortex" for a placid community inside of a standard, sci-fi movie force field? Surely the man at the very beginning of the movie who says, "I am Arthur Frayn... and I am Zardoz," and calls himself "a fake god by occupation and a magician by inclination" – surely, that character is a dead giveaway...Right?

Not necessarily.