Rewatch/Rewind: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow
Or, how a bunch of nonsense about vague “predictions” terrified a generation
(Rewatch/Rewind is a feature in which I revisit a film that once made an impression on me, but I haven’t watched in at least a decade. Spoilers should be expected.)
You kids today, with your streaming services and your non-stop #content, you really don’t know how good you have it. Back when I was young, and television was believed to be the result of particles drawn from the air by the Devil himself, our choices in entertainment were rather more limited. Even with cable, for every Star Wars there was a Zorro, the Gay Blade, among other garbage that barely saw theatrical release before purchased by HBO in an “everything must go” sale. There were 24 hours of programming to be filled each day, and by god they were going to fill it with anything that was available.
Nevertheless, those of us who were less outdoors inclined just watched whatever was on, much like one ends up at a Denny’s because it’s one in the morning and nothing else is open. If I were to mention 1981’s The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, I’d expect people of a certain age (old) to react to it not with nostalgic warmth, but a nauseated grimace. One of cable’s most ubiquitous cheapies, it single-handedly triggered a million anxiety disorders in impressionable children who did not yet know that it was possible for something to be called a “documentary” and still be complete horseshit.
Directed by Robert Guenette and written by Guenette and Alan Hopgood, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow purported to tell the true story of French astrologer and physician Nostradamus, whose alleged psychic abilities allowed him to predict events thousands of years into the future. The predictions were written down in a collection of 942 quatrains, foretelling everything from the French Revolution to the Holocaust to Ted Kennedy’s election as President. “Ted Kennedy’s election as President?” you might ask. “But–” Don’t worry, we’ll get to that.
Despite the film’s limited budget, Orson Welles was its narrator/host, lending the whole thing much more gravitas than it deserves. I doubt I even knew who Orson Welles was at the time, other than the guy who did the Paul Masson “we will serve no wine before its time” commercials. Sitting in a study and occasionally spinning a globe for effect, Welles read the litany of bad news Nostradamus predicted in a grave tone, as if there was no doubt to its veracity. I had no reason to question him, and, indeed, would not know until far into adulthood that Welles didn’t believe a word of it. A job was a job, though (and by this point Welles needed whatever work he could get), and if that job required him to say with absolute certainty that Nostradamus foresaw the destruction of a city that would not be founded until years after he died, then so be it. Pass the Mrs. Pell’s fish sticks.
The Man Who Saw Tomorrow gets away with serving up massive truckloads of nonsense by carefully using the words “could” and “might,” correctly anticipating that gullible viewers (such as myself) would ignore them. In an effort to avoid religious persecution, Nostradamus wrote his quatrains1 in multiple languages, and even occasionally in the form of anagrams. Translated into English (and even assuming the translations are correct, which is arguable), they’re cryptic and elusive, relying on vague terms like “the new city” and “evil will fall on the great man.”
With a gullible mind and the slightest bit of tweaking, they could apply to virtually any major world event, even in the United States, even though the quatrains were written more than two hundred years before the American Revolution (which Nostradamus also supposedly predicted). It’s not unlike when a self-proclaimed “psychic” offers their assistance in a missing person case by claiming that the person will be found “near the water.” The vagueness of the statement (“near the water” could mean anything from dropped into the ocean to buried under a birdbath) makes it so there’s a better than 50% chance that the “prediction” is correct, and that’s more than enough for a lot of people.
Some other lucky guesses Nostradamus made included that in Europe a man “born of poor people” would rise to power after “seducing the great troop” with his powerful speeches, eventually leading them into war. Hmm…sounds almost like a certain World War II despot, nein? Sure, except that Hitler’s parents were middle class, and it’s probably safe to say that most people who are able to lead troops into battle are dynamic speakers. Supposedly this quatrain mentions the name “Hister,” which Welles repeats several times in awe, like he’s just been told the location of the Ark of the Covenant. Maybe, as far too many people still insist, it’s a misspelling of Hitler, even though it would be the only time in hundreds of quatrains that Nostradamus specifically refers to the subject of one by name. Or maybe it’s simply another name for the Danube River in Germany. Or, most likely of all, it’s a mistranslation, and doesn’t mean anything at all. But sure, maybe Nostradamus predicted the rise of Hitler, but somehow didn’t see that haircut and mustache.
I mentioned above that Nostradamus apparently predicted the Presidency of Ted Kennedy. Indeed, several quatrains are interpreted as referring to the Kennedy Family, even one that Welles suggests with a straight face is about the Chappaquiddick incident. Never mind about that, though, because Ted would bounce back from that tragedy and run for President in 1984, handily winning the elect–oh wait, I’ve just been informed that neither of those things happened. Well, nevertheless.
The real meat and potatoes of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow is in the final third of the movie, which discusses the premonitions that hadn’t come to pass yet (“yet” being 1981). Nostradamus only trafficked in worst-case scenarios, and rarely (if ever) predicted anything good for humanity, like a cure for cancer or an end to poverty. Indeed, after worldwide famine and natural disasters in the 80s, things would only get worse in the 90s with the rise of the Antichrist in the Middle East, ushering in World War III and the destruction of New York City by nuclear attack. Welles rattles off a veritable laundry list of horrors awaiting the world over grainy stock footage of missiles flying and world landmarks exploding, like the alien attack scene in Independence Day.
To say that this terrified nine-year-old me would be a grave understatement, especially considering that I lived less than 100 miles away from New York City. The Man Who Saw Tomorrow was released just as the second Cold War was, er, heating up, so the idea that nuclear war was imminent was more than plausible. It’s easy to see why even impressionable adults would be taken in by this malarkey, despite the fact that the interpretations of this particular quatrain merely assume that Nostradamus meant New York City, a city that did not exist yet in a country that barely had a name when he wrote it. It actually just says “the new city,” which legitimate experts interpreted as probably meaning Naples, which also as of this writing hasn’t been destroyed by an atomic blast. But, eh, details.
The long-reaching effect of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow could be felt in the days following the September 11th attack, back when email forwards were our number one source for misinformation. Surely this was the “new city” event Nostradamus predicted, even though (a) it was several years later, and (b) it did not, in fact, result in World War III. Osama bin Laden certainly fit Nostradamus’s description of the “king of terror” from the east who brought on nuclear apocalypse, but so did, at various times, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Ayatollah Khomeini, and whatever other brown men2 happened to be scaring us at the time.
If you think that time has lessened Nostradamus’s impact on American culture, I encourage you to Google “Did Nostradamus predict” and see what autopopulates. Well into the 21st century, his “you must answer my riddles three” blather is still used to give an air of dark mysticism to such events as the election of Donald Trump (because one of the quatrains mentions trumpets, you see), the war in Ukraine, and, of course, coronavirus. News outlets still report at the end of every year on what Nostradamus foresaw for the coming year. 2023 promises to be especially bleak, with great floods, mass starvation and yet another great war that will bring the entire world to the edge of destruction. These were essentially the same predictions he made for 2022, but come on, give a guy a break, after five hundred years it’s hard to come up with a new bit.
Well, some of them. Beyond The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, the Nostradamus saga is a study in misattribution, misinterpretation, and just flat-out making shit up. It’d be pretty entertaining if people to this day didn’t still take it seriously.
You’ll be utterly unsurprised to know that this included at some point Barack Obama.