Like most other dystopian movies, ROLLERBALL examines the relationship between the individual and the state. But while movies like 1984 correctly conclude that the ordinary citizen will inevitably be the loser in this contest, ROLLERBALL instead pits the extraordinary man against society.
Jonathan (“god-given”) E (Energy?) may on the surface be just another gladiator. He is, however, no mere self-serving Spartacus.
When the rules of the game are changed, as they frequently are by the games organizers, he asks why, and not only that. He realizes that it works both ways.
You can’t bomb women and children. There are no rules.
You can’t kill a policeman. There are no rules.
Jonathan E plays a violent game. He is a violent man.
ROLLERBALL insures that this violence works inside the system, but violence is always ultimately liberating. Jonathan E may be only a sports hero, but he’s still a hero in the Greek sense of the word, a demigod.
When those in power give praise to democracy, they are not talking about social justice. Their sole purpose is to make the rabble mistrust the extraordinary man, to envy and hate him, because such men are never satisfied to merely fend for themselves, they are invariably saviours and liberators, intermediaries between Man and his gods.
This might have been a mere postulate, if it hadn’t been for the uncannily precise prediction of a society forty years after its release. In the movie, all written sources – the basis of any civilization – have been transcribed and fed into a central computer aptly named Zero (the Internet) to be methodically erased.
Without books, the population can be herded like swine to the trough. After all, you can always buy a child off with a new toy.
Still, in what is seen by their masters as mere CIRCENSES, all the dangers to society that human nature represents are merely dormant (which is, of course, why we watch these movies). What ROLLERBALL is saying, could not be said in any other way.
And even if it could, it wouldn’t have meant anything without the catharsis of that final icon of a divinized Jonathan E, fresh from the slaughter, with Bach’s toccata and fugue on the soundtrack. It’s where we separate the quick from the dead.
HORROR AND SCIENCE FICTION IN THE CINEMA BEFORE 1980