“There Is No Sanctuary”

The article explores Michael Anderson’s slick sf thriller Logan’s Run as an imaginative thought experiment playing out the debate on the 1970s “energy crisis.” Released in the anxious year of the United States’ bicentennial, the film depicts both the computerized utopia of the 1970s’ “technologists” and “neo-Malthusian” fears of nuclear war, pollution, and overpopulation. What the two sides have in common is the central problem to so much of the energy humanities: an inability to understand the foundational importance of energy to any society, which the field has theorized as an “energy unconscious.” Logan’s Run examines that unconscious, which takes the form of the population in the film’s domed city living in a literal bubble of ignorance about the basic facts of their own lives. When main characters Logan and Jessica escape that spectacular city through the “backstage” of the tidal mechanisms by which the city is supposedly powered, they discover how such an intentionally ignorant population might be easily manipulated by greater forces content with keeping them unconscious, through open “conspiracies” that the city’s inhabitants prefer not to see.