theonemacduff

Some people have posted to the effect that it's hard to follow the "plot" of the movie, but there is a novel you can read which closely resembles the movie. I'd guess in fact that Lucas either read the novel, or heard about it, because the plot of the movie, such as it is, closely resembles an anti-utopian novel from the 1920s, by the Russian writer, Eugene Zamyatin.

Called "We", the novel features an engineer who becomes a rebel against the oppressive state by falling in love. The state in the novel is pictured as a glass city, and it too tries to keep everyone locked up, conformist, and under constant surveillance. The ending of the novel is a downer, in that while the hero does briefly manage to get to the "outside", he is brought back and subject to an operation that removes his free will.

Aldous Huxley drew on the novel to some extent to write "Brave New World," and Orwell read both Huxley and Zamyatin in the period when he was drafting ideas for the novel that became "1984".

I'd actually like to find out what THX does once he's on the outside. The stunning final shot of the movie is ambiguous, in that he's free, yes, but the sun is going down. Symbolically, this might mean that he's free only to die as a free man.