Michael Koerbel, “In Captivity” (2011)
Superficially in the style of a “Truman Show” situation comedy, this short film is an amusing riff on what a future dystopian hell might be for humans. In the future, humans have become an endangered species and Jim (Josh Beren) has been brought up in captivity by cyborgs. He is the star attraction in a museum that teaches young cyborgs what life was like for humans just before the global catastrophe that killed off billions of their species and left a few stragglers behind. Jim spends his days as a couch potato obsessed with television soap operas and collecting toys from cereal boxes. One day the cyborgs release a new human, Caz (Keri Safran), into Jim’s cage (which has been made up to look like the interior of a 1950s-era suburban house, Hollywood sitcom style). Caz is unhappy about having been captured and having to live in cramped quarters with Jim, and for a couple of days the two fight and bicker. After Caz creates a diorama using Jim’s toys, Jim realises she is serious about escaping their cage and helps her to leave the museum secretly. Now Jim discovers true loneliness for the first time and he starts to contemplate the possibility of also leaving …
While the entire premise is sketchy and unrealistic – cyborgs holding humans in captivity would most likely give them enough space for a community to develop, and keep the humans preoccupied with hunting, farming or other activities so that the humans are happy with their lot and never entertain the notion of becoming independent – on one level, it does perhaps force us to question whether we would prefer giving up material comfort and security, and the security of the familiar, to pursue freedom and independence and to achieve any dreams and goals we may have. The film is not long enough for its two main characters to develop into beings we would care about. The cyborgs appear to be little more than unthinking machines that can be easily duped. On another level, we are urged to think about how animals living in a zoo and on continuous display experience living in an artificial world where they never have to hunt or move to find food, and how they might appear to their fellow beings living normally.
The film also cleverly inverts the notion of slavery from a stereotype usually associated with never-ending labour and lack of creature comforts to a stereotype of living in comfort and never having to work – at the cost of surrendering our independence and freedom of choice to slave-masters, no matter how indulgent they may be.