Here’s a short 10-minute film by Floris Kaayk called ‘Origin of Creatures.’ As a connoisseur of all things dystopian (and utopian), I found the premise pretty irresistible: Humans have devolved into single-limbed or organed variants of their former selves, evidently in the wake of some massive disaster (climate change? nuclear war? etc). Now they must cooperate to survive, pooling their single-organed resources to rebuild society.Here’s Short of the Week the describes the macabre creation:The Origin of Creatures is based on one of the most well-known tales about collaboration, the Tower of Babel. This tale is transformed and twisted and is set in an imaginary future, after the world is hit by a catastrophe. Among the remains of a devastated city lives that what is left of humanity. Human bodies are divided into separated parts of the body and are fused to special beings. Together, these creatures form a colony, they can only survive when collaborating. In the rubble of destroyed buildings they are trying to build a nest as large and as high as possible, so that the colony’s queen gets enough sunlight to reproduce, but due to miscommunication this mission is doomed to fail.Heavy-handed allegories abound! But let’s go deeper than that, just for kicks; maybe it’s a dark comment on how super-specialized work has devolved us into single-minded and single-purpose functionaries in modern society. We have only a skill or two to contribute each, and some of those (bloggers?) may not even matter in the time of true crisis. Who needs the ear, here, anyways? There seem to be no predators in the dystopian limb-world future.Also, the message is grim, not hopeful; disaster will leave us Sisyphean limbo. We will never amount to more than the sum of our struggling parts, but tomorrow is another day.
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