Steampunk and the Next-Wave Revolution

Aleksandr Boguslavsky, director, Abigail

The walled city of Fensington has managed to protect itself against the pestilence racking the outside world, but at great cost: Inspectors demand constant random infection checks. Anyone showing signs of illness get bundled into dark sedans and whisked away. Young Abigail watched the Security Division abduct her scientist father, calling him infected. Now a young adult, Abigail feels the first stirrings of infection inside herself.

Steampunk, as a genre, is frequently antimodernist, highlighting a premature collision between technological modernity and traditional culture. I sometimes pooh-pooh American steampunk, which often reeks of naïve pastoralism. But this Russian confection has a different ethos. Coming from a nation whose administration has been accused of assassinating dissidents, this movie’s antiauthoritarian heart feels brave, and openly tries to kick the Putin Administration in the balls.

One chance encounter shows Abigail that the Inspectors’ reach isn’t as universal as she’d thought. The state’s power, she discovers, depends on citizens’ compliance. The centralized state rewards conformity and mediocrity. Citizens willing to obey get rewarded with stable, undistinguished, middle-class jobs. But Abby is dissatisfied going along to get along; she demands to know where the Security Division took her father.

In some ways, this movie demands comparison to the original Star Wars. Abigail, blessed with the first glimmerings of supernatural power, seeks guidance, and discovers an underground resistance to the empire’s well-paid fatalism. Even the corps of masked Inspectors attack and die with the persistence of Imperial Stormtroopers. The visual design also recalls Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley, with its flamboyant spellcasters and carnival swamis.

Like those franchises, director Aleksandr Boguslavsky uses atmospherics, turning the physical space into a character. Boguslavsky turns the narrow, medieval streets of St. Petersburg, Russia, and Tallinn, Estonia, into spaces packed with terror and wonder. Fensington’s draconian mayor has greywashed the city, but the magical underground has built their own community, brightly lit, lush in color, and brimming with life. Now they have to defend it.

Unlike Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter, though, Abigail doesn’t find a resistance prepared to uphold brave humanistic values or support the transcendent. Fensington’s magical underground has become paranoid and insular, and fallen under command of Bale, a sultry-eyed, Robert Pattinson-like demagogue. Bale is charismatic and intense, but also fixed and dogmatic. Before long, Abigail realizes the resistance is as authoritarian as the government it resists.

Abigail (Tinatin Dalakishvili) makes her stand against the evil Inspectors, in Abigail

This movie’s CGI grandeur and retrofuturistic design help expound a very real conundrum in which many youth find themselves today. Abigail wants to recapture the sunlit optimism she experienced with her father, a world of nature and allegory and possibility. But she finds herself caught between two conflicting powers which have more in common than either acknowledges. Both will force her to forego her dreams, or else get her killed.

On one level, this story is very Russian. Historically, Russia and its CIS satellites have found themselves torn between conflicting absolute theories: tsarism versus Bolshevism, mafia capitalists versus secret police. In choosing between official or illicit authoritarianism, Russians have, for over a century, been forced to choose which denial of human individuality they prefer. Never free, they’re only allowed to choose which boots they have on their necks.

Yet this experience is, I suggest, not specific to Russia. As conventional religions, economies, and governments have proven themselves inadequate in recent years, the alternatives which arise to replace them have served to concentrate power, not spread it. The re-emergence of small-f fascism in multiple nations reflects the ways “free” citizens have to select which illiberal, antidemocratic force they prefer ruling their lives.

Abigail prefers another path. Guided by her absent father and his clockwork talismans, she proposes that salvation lies outside Fensington’s walls. She offers to show Fensington’s magical underground a truth hitherto unimagined: wide, sweeping vistas under blue skies. The symbolism isn’t subtle. But she can’t escape the city’s habituated limits alone; she needs other wizards’ solidarity. She needs them to step out in faith.

The fact that Boguslavsky made this movie in English bespeaks his global ambitions. (His mostly Russian and CIS actors have their lines dubbed by American voices.) Fighting battles like we’ve always fought them, Boguslavsky says, ties us to outcomes we’ve already seen. We need new approaches, and equally importantly, we need new leaders, untethered to their own glory. We have to step outside our own walls.

Boguslavsky’s grown-up fairy tale has the potential to inspire future generations to change. It also challenges us to accept the uncertainty and wonder that come with taking back our own destiny.