"The futurological congress" : the novel and the film

Streszcz. ang.

Stanisław Lem’s Futurological Congress is one of his best stories. In this brilliant parody of all futurological projections he creates a vision of the future in which a dystopian apocalypse of universal misery is ‘covered up’ by a utopian image of Earthly Paradise imposed on the gullible humanity through mass consumption of hallucinogens. Ari Folman’s Congress, a film inspired by Lem’s story, puts the blame for the Big Lie on the corporate media and mass entertainment giants. They are responsible for stripping people of their identity, tearing up traditional family ties, and imprisoning the atomized individuals in unreal fantasy worlds. Folman’s pessimism goes further than Lem’s, the more so that his heroine, actress-turned-avatar Robin Wright, does become a victim and cannot run away from her suffering, while Lem’s main character, space explorer Ijon Tichy, is only a visitor in a world invented by the writer.