Jay Rohr
Released in 1975, Rollerball expressed a view of the future which critics found laughable. One reviewer wrote in The New Yorker it’s “as purblind as any film dealing in augury that I have ever seen.” Apparently, in 1975, a world dominated by corporations where the masses are too distracted to perceive their dystopian reality was incomprehensible. What an oddly innocent era that was.
The story centers on the titular game Rollerball. The then-future 2018 is an idyllic world. There’s no crime, poverty, war, or hunger; most of society’s ills are gone since the collective will of the people has been given over to faceless multinational corporations.
Playing Rollerball for the Energy company’s Houston team is the indominable Jonathan E. portrayed by James Caan (The Godfather). As the unquestioned champion of this extreme death sport, the athlete is asked to retire. The corporations don’t care for the way his success contradicts their message about the uselessness of individualism. After he refuses to submit, the rules are eroded until playing the game almost guarantees Jonathan’s demise. Nevertheless, he continues to play.
Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that, “Rollerball isn’t a satire. It’s not funny at all… it’s as if Mr. Jewison, and William Harrison, who wrote the screenplay, really believed that things like war, poverty and disease could be so easily wiped away and that something like Rollerball could be inflated into such an effective soporific.”
This sentiment seems consistent across negative reviews. That’s because such individuals didn’t see the forest for the trees. Rollerball wasn’t necessarily saying such things could be erased easily, but rather, exploring what humanity would willingly sacrifice to have them gone. Furthermore, the brutal bloody sport is easily a metaphor for any war or conflict serving as a distraction, especially given there’s no reason satire needs to be funny. It can be as grim as any senseless slaughter.
The film is an adaptation of the short story “Roller Ball Murder” by William Harrison. First published in the September 1973 issue of Esquire magazine, it caught the attention of Norman Jewison. By then, the acclaimed director had received Academy Award nominations for Best Director steering films like In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971). Already accustomed to making complex issues digestible for mainstream audiences, Jewison decided Rollerball would be his next picture.
Although numerous studios passed, the determined director bought the film rights himself, hired William Harrison to write the screenplay, and eventually landed a deal with United Artists. Since the short story didn’t layout a definitive explanation of the game — certain aspects of the prose are more poetic in their exploration of this reality as well as the violence and meaning of the death sport — Jewison took the reins. He and his staff combined aspects of roller derby, hockey, motocross, and judo into the specifics necessary for a finalized version. The result is a raucous brutal sport guaranteed to cause blood-soaked carnage.
It fit in with certain recurring themes during that era. Every decade seems to have its killer competitions such as Death Race 2000 (1975), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), The Running Man (1987), and The FP (2012). However, prominent 70s films abounded about dystopias disguised as utopia. These include Logan’s Run (1976), Z.P.G. (1972), Soylent Green (1973), and Zardoz (1974). Such movies usually involved some member of a society realizing all is not well, that the system they have participated in is not to the benefit of all.
In Rollerball, Jonathan E. is in a position of unique privilege. His success in the sport includes unimaginable wealth, freedom, and power. Interestingly, it’s the carrot and the stick corporations use to keep people like him in line. Everything Jonathan has earned can be instantly taken away. Even the love of his life, Ella, played by Maud Adams (The Man with the Golden Gun), is ordered to become an executive’s wife as a kind of punishment for the upstart athlete.
When a growing ennui saps Jonathan’s enjoyment of the game, he begins exploring life outside the arena. Using his privilege, he becomes aware various books are being rewritten by corporations to fulfill Orwellian designs to keep the masses in line. Worse, librarians in charge of the digitized archives storing all of humanity’s accomplishments have misplaced everything relating to the 13th century. In essence, erasing it from existence.
There’s a combination of casual disregard alongside a hideous manipulation of history that speaks volumes about the society seen in Rollerball. One might dare to call it prescient given our contemporary culture’s decline into a post-truth era that is indifferent to the veracity of facts. Moreover, it reflects notions put forth in philosopher Guy Debord’s “The Society of Spectacle”.
In that work, he wrote how spectacle can be used to convey to people what they should want and crave. Consumer society is not about living, rather having. Consider how, “In our real 21st century, the relationship between freedom, individualism, and capitalism has turned out to be incredibly complicated. Oppression is sold by glitzy superstar figureheads, while corporations earn good PR by fighting authoritarian laws, policing political leaders, and reining in renegade celebrities.”
Rollerball being a critique of consumerism illuminates how corporations have coopted the narrative of what makes a life worth living and rewards the adherents of their dystopian philosophy with money, sex, drugs, and privilege. All the while distracting the masses with the titular game. In many ways, it hauntingly reflects our social media obsessed society. Yet, as Debord put forth, détournement can be used to hijack spectacle and disrupt such messages.
Essentially, Jonathan E. is providing a service to his corporate overlords. He placates the public by playing Rollerball. His reward is a lavish lifestyle that can easily be taken away. However, his success risks disrupting the very message he’s meant to convey. He’s then left with the choice to retire or die in the game. All the while, there is this wonderful sense that these deeper issues are in no way a part of his thinking.
James Caan does a marvelous job of portraying a simple fellow who only wants to play Rollerball. He’s caught up in matters a little outside his intellect, though he does show clear signs of being aware that something is wrong. He may not have the vocabulary necessary to illustrate the point, but his gut is screaming that something is amiss.
Director Jewison accents this by showing the character’s declining delight. For instance, the first match audiences witness is a thrilling chaotic mess. Jonathan’s team comes out on top, and we see him shouting with joy. By the end of the film, the game is nothing except a grim slog. All the fun is gone — even the things we love to do can lose their luster.
What’s additionally interesting is the portrayal of Mr. Bartholomew by John Houseman (The Paper Chase). He is the Energy company executive who tries to encourage Jonathan to retire. Rollerball, thanks to Houseman’s performance, gives the impression of a friend honestly encouraging someone he cares about to choose life. It makes things strangely less malevolent than other depictions might have chosen.
The ruling corporations are willing to give Jonathan everything he could ever want, but all he wants is to play the game. Part of his single-mindedness stems from a burgeoning realization there’s a soulless quality to this dystopian reality. Consider a moment in the movie where drunken aristocrats rush out of a party to a pristine green field.
There they use a sci-fi pistol to obliterate trees for their amusement. Horrific implications simmer throughout the scene. For one thing, the weapon is essentially a handgun implying the hideous potential of war. If it can annihilate a tree in one shot, imagine what it might do to a person. Meanwhile, this casual waste of nature mingles with a desperate desire for stimulation only violence can satisfy. It says something about a society numbed by atrocity as spectacle; what people are willing to accept as normal, especially when dead inside.
The world of Rollerball presented by Norman Jewison is thrilling when the sport is on screen. The director captures the kinetic essence of the game, while rarely flinching from the blood splatter. Nowadays, it might seem tame, but at the time, the feature earned an R-rating for violence among other things.
This bothered Jewison who said, “I would ask how you make a statement about violence without showing any violence.”
Even more upsetting to the director was when certain promoters approached him. After Rollerball raked in $30 million dollars at the box office, some folks wanted to make the killer competition a real sport. Disgusted by the prospect, Jewison, who owned all the rights to the game, refused. In many ways, that indicates the dark side of capturing an image of society that is too accurate. It may become a self-fulfilling prophecy as it attracts attention.
Rollerball “prompts us to consider the implications of surrendering our autonomy for the convenience of entertainment, raising unsettling questions about the nature of free will in an increasingly corporatized world.” As such, it can serve as a quasi-roadmap for those without scruples, especially when the world changes. Consider what Antonio Gramsci wrote in The Prison Notebooks about when “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”
Prescient as Rollerball may have been, it intrigues me that it remained rabidly individualist. Jonathan E. may be M.V.P., but he’s supported by several other players. Granted, they’re content in the role as distracting spectacles. Yet, neither the film nor the short story ever seems to consider the group could collectively disrupt this corporate dystopia.
Hollywood has a long history of embracing rugged individualism. It’s a central component of the Western genre, the closest exception being The Magnificent Seven (1960) or Silverado (1985). Movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1958/1978/2007) may have interpretations specific to their eras — McCarthyism in 1958, then ex-hippies succumbing to the cultural hegemony they once resisted in ’78 — but Western cinema always portrays collectivism as something potentially monstrous.
This could be partly due to a dogmatic inclination towards the modes of storytelling set down by the likes of Joseph Campbell and Vladamir Propp. That isn’t to say their formulas are worthlessly wrong, simply that they need not be the only way of telling tales. Protagonists typically are the individuals who make events happen, and they often do so by going into the forbidden zone, defying the ruler, curing a curse, etc., but they need not be singular.
Ada Palmer and Jo Walton really dissect this dilemma in The Protagonist Problem pointing out how, “believing that real life has protagonists, but that you yourself are not one, leads to impostor syndrome, feelings of powerlessness, inaction, cynicism, and despair. It leads to the belief that if you personally don’t resemble a protagonist (if you falter, have undramatic setbacks, mundane problems, job hunts, laundry, rent) then you can’t be one of the special few whose actions matter.”
Collective action is rarely seen in motion pictures. Even in the Hunger Games franchise Katniss leads a rebellion, it isn’t the rebellion that defeats her dystopia. And it seems a similarly lost opportunity in Rollerball given the team aspect already built into the sport. Perhaps a remake could explore that route, though the disastrous box office bomb attempted in 2002 almost precludes zero possibility of such a project.
Visions of tomorrow are rarely meant to walk the world backward. They serve as inspiration or warning of what could and perhaps may come. In many ways, the 1975 Rollerball was too prescient to be appreciated at the time. Meanwhile, it missed an opportunity to say something different about protagonists, how they don’t always have to walk alone. Rollerball was a warning too ahead of its time to be seen clearly, yet too dogmatically told to see its own narrative potential.
The actress in the screen capture from Tubi is Pamela Hensley, who played “Mackie”. Maud Adams played Ella.