The Strange Saga of FM-2030: A Futurist Genius Who Had Himself Frozen in Glass
In the mid-1970s, the philosopher and former Olympic wrestler Fereidoun M. Esfandiary changed his name to FM-2030—combining the year he would turn 100 years old with an abbreviation which variously meant Future Man, Future Marvel, or Future Modular, and also happened to be his initials. To FM-2030, conventional names symbolized weighty cultural baggage. He believed markers like “ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, religion” would become irrelevant in the near future, when technological progress allowed humans to become synthetic “post-biological organisms” who lived forever. As proof of concept, FM-2030 had himself cryogenically frozen in amorphous ice at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in 2000, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Of his future revival, he told The Palm Beach Post: “I’ll be so glad that I’m back.”
A decade out from the year when he claimed “everyone will have an excellent chance to live forever,” FM-2030 has not yet been revived. But his story has come back in the form of an odd independent movie called 2030: The Film. The feature was directed by and stars a British corporate filmmaker named Johnny Boston, who met the transhumanist as a child and later became his friend. With the help of his marketing film crew and FM-2030’s longtime friend, Flora Schnall, Boston sets out to chronicle the reanimation process of the futurist’s frozen corpse. The movie is framed as non-fiction—and was submitted to four film festivals as a documentary—but what emerges is a confused hybrid of real subjects speaking evidently scripted dialogue, “secretly” recorded interviews that either flouted recording consent laws or were conducted with actors, and events that, technically speaking, never happened (the lab in the film successful revives a cryogenically frozen pig). “I don’t love to mention it,” Boston said, “but yes, we did script it.”
At its best, the movie’s flexible relationship with fact could force the viewer to loosen their idea of what’s possible—the effect FM-2030 hoped his theories might have on the public. But if that was Boston’s intent, it gets lost in its execution and his frequent digressions on himself. After a brief voiceover of an archival FM-2030 speech, the movie spends the bulk of its first act introducing not FM-2030, but Boston and his artistic dissatisfaction with corporate work. A full chronological biography of FM-2030 never comes, replaced by a bizarre subplot in which Boston casts himself as a pathological liar who earnestly believes in cryogenics. Over the course of the film, Boston uncovers an apparent, but little explained conspiracy at the cryonics lab, and then abruptly alienates Schnall, leaves his wife, misses his kid’s ballet recital, accuses one of the scientists of having a workplace affair, and briefly plots an escape to Israel (?) after discovering the lab has been spying on him, only to never mention it again. The end of the film I won’t spoil, but let’s just say, things come alive.
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