Review of Z.P.G.

As a literal narrative, it would be pretty silly. You do not achieve ZPG with zero children. Instead, this movie is in the parable-like dystopian sub-genre of SF. In a crowded, polluted, urbanized, and globalized world, people--more particularly white people--are harangued by propaganda from the world government, backed up here by force, not to have babies. But, despite the techno-substitutes they are given, a metaphor of the prosperity, careers, consumer goods, entertainment, pets, etc., given to modern women, their natural desire to have babies still makes them unhappy, indeed psychotic. You know, SJWs who screech at transgressors. The hyper-artificial character of modern esp. urban life is represented by the fact the protagonists live in a museum. The audience is suprised to discover that what it thought was real life (within the movie) is actually an exhibit. Or is it? Reality blurs with the staged, a premonition of life abstracted through social media. The escape at the end indicates, as I took it, that the controllers were lying, there are other possibilities. (Or is it darker and hopeless? I am not sure.) At any rate, the unknown, unseen territory to which the protagonists flee represents the Natural World. This kind of dichotomy between the modern techno-bureaucratically managed, industrialized megalopolis and the Natural is the heritage, I suppose, of Brave New World. Back to the Land is not an actual political solution, but rather an image of what is suppressed in the modern psyche, a buried world the couple re-discover via their subterranean journey.