“Corporate society takes care of everything. And all it asks of anyone, all it’s ever asked of anyone ever, is not to interfere with management decisions.”
Norman Jewison’s 1975 film Rollerball depicts a sport played in an undated future; a hybrid of speed skating, speedway and the NHL. Teams score points by slotting a metal ball into a goal whilst circling an arena. Fatalities are common, and players exude a gladiatorial prowess. This technocratic ultra-violence has all the unhinged barbarism of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and the Mad Max franchise.
Their bloodsport is the bread and circuses of a global civilization that knows no nationality, that has eschewed all forms of “tribal wars”. The “national wars” and the “corporation wars” are referred to as bygone memories. Humanity is largely pacified and commodified, and all global control is at the behest of a handful of conglomerates. At each game of Rollerball the teams no longer stand for a national, state or team song, they stand for the “corporate hymn”.
Jonathan E (played by James Caan) is a veteran of Rollerball and the captain of the Houston team. With the respect and admiration of his colleagues and fans, he commands a strong following. But when Bartholomew, CEO of the Energy Corporation tries to coerce him towards an early retirement, Johnathan feels there is something not right. He is being offered a slick retirement package, and a life of material fulfilment and luxury awaits once he hangs up his boots.
He lives in a corporate regime of Machiavellian control and compliance which doesn’t have any external appearances of totalitarianism; it is more a cross between Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Jacque Ellul’s The Technological Society. To retire from Rollerball would mean further incorporation into a managerial regime where all organic sense of adventure seems to have been lost. Not only has it ceased to be organic, but the vigour and empathy of human relationships have disintegrated into sterile transactions.
Johnathan E remembers that his wife left him for a wealthy CEO, and his very questioning of this rocks the boat. The fact that he can easily get another woman who act as surrogate wives on “assignment” is meant to placate this. But it also affirms that he is in search of meaning, something which has been rendered obsolete in this pacified future. This begins an odyssey of searching and questioning.
Any critical questions or objections shown by Johnathan E about retirement are met with condescending dismissal, with the constant need to respect “executive decisions” being stressed, with the reasons for retirement not being made exactly clear to him, or what the consequences for him will be if he continues to play. Whilst this will certainly decrease the risk of being brutally injured or killed in a game of Rollerball, it would appear that the bread and circuses spectacle is the only source of honour for him.
In an early part of the film, Johnathan E visits a library in search of books about the corporations and world history, only to be told that all books have been digitized and tailored for the corporations’ own ends, stored at protected locations. At a party celebrating a broadcast of his career exploits, mindless carousing, designer drug use and a sterile form of degenerate hedonism are abundant.
A bored Executive bourgeoise aim explosives at trees with their futuristic pistols, setting them on fire out of a lustful boredom. Still eager to know why he is been coerced into retirement, Jonathan is told by his friend, coach and original mentor Cletus who is now an executive in the Energy Corporation that the corporation’s Executive Committee is afraid of him.
Though this still baffles Jonathan, he is still keen to know more, and despite the pressure of hectoring veiled as “advice”, he vows to continue playing. Though he does not yet fully perceive why he is a threat to the system, his handlers certainly know that he is, as his persona, traits and deeds stand out glaringly amongst the crowd. The system and CEO’s like Bartholomew do not want his reputation to exceed theirs for fear of a decentralizing force that would shudder their regime of control and efficiency.
It is when Houston play their semi-final against Tokyo that the rules are changed to increase the pressure on Johnathan, even to kill him, by having no penalties and limiting substitutions. After several players are killed and Johnathan’s best friend Moonpie is left practically braindead, Houston defeat Tokyo and are to face New York in a world championship final. The executive class change the rules yet again, eliminating all substitutions, and having no time limit. This fixing of the rules is a clear ploy to kill Jonathan, whose longevity, vigour and character threaten the bread and circuses routine.
In a final search for information, Jonathan visits Geneva to access the world’s main supercomputer, in which all of the world’s knowledge, now monopolized and conditioned by corporate interests is stored. The librarian jokingly and cynically mentions that the computer, named “Zero” has somehow “lost” the entire 13th Century. Any efforts to yield knowledge of how corporate decisions are made yield nothing but talk which is akin to nonsensical PR friendly nomenclature.
Prior to Houston’s final against New York, Jonathan’s former wife Ella who “assigned” herself to a wealthier and more powerful fat cat visits him one final time as a last ditch effort to convince him to retire on the grounds that the game will be a literal death match. Realizing the corporate executives have sent her to him and are continuously trying to gaslight him by playing on one of the few things he even cherished, he deletes a long treasured video of the two, and decides that he will play in the final.
The final game is a bloody ordeal, in which Jonathan is left the last man standing. He refuses to kill his final opponent and with a bitter reluctance amidst Bartholomew’s gaze from the grandstand, scores the only winning goal in the game. This leads us to an ambiguous ending to the film where Jonathan repeatedly circles the stadium and the audience chants his name.
We cannot necessarily read whether this is mere enthusiasm for the sport or whether this will lead to a riot that transgresses beyond the bread and circuses. Bartholomew leaves the arena anticipating the chanting may lead to rioting. Jonathan E has defied and not died. Whether this will result in slave revolt a la Spartacus or a massacre like the one Justinian arranged at the Nika Riots against the Byzantine mob is unknown, and the viewer is left guessing.
Some might interpret Johnathan E’s role in Rollerball as being an affirmation of individualism in a world of totalitarian conformism. Whilst a traditional sense of individuality and uniqueness is dead and buried, the world of Rollerball can still be called individualist in the modern sense everybody appears free to consume and indulge as they please so long as they do not create a problem for the technocracy. It is a world where the liberty of individual and enterprise is permitted to an absolute rule provided no other narrative should question it.
Corporate hegemony has such a stranglehold on this soma-addled pleasure dystopia, that the protagonist yearns for a living, breathing authenticity that has ceased to exist. In a world where nations, ethnic identities and families have become obsolete, and decadence has become the norm, his strife is comparable to that of Roy Batty in Blade Runner or Zed in Zardoz. All three characters are far more masculine than their elite handlers, are on a quest to fathom the powers that control them, and ultimately challenge and threaten that order.
Unlike Batty and Zed, he does not slay the hated oligarch, and we could also cynically assume that the crowd that roars his name do not desire dissent, just more escapism and entertainment from the non-transcendent, unheroic way of living that epitomizes Nietzsche’s definition of the “last man”. But we can also see in Jonathan E a man who to paraphrase Heidegger, is willing to challenge the fate to which he appears doomed, however futile his efforts may be.
Far from being the greatest film of all time, Rollerball is still an entertaining, engaging, downbeat and prescient look into a world in which Marinetti’s preoccupation with speed and acceleration have been perverted into a spectacle to placate the blood frenzy of global hordes of depth-grovellers whose only other purpose in life is to be passive products of consumption.
Excuse The Blood 