Dyyyystopia
Piece in today's Guardian G2 section on the sudden swathe of dystopian movies: why is the future on film always so grim?
I think it makes some good points: As Imran Siddiquee pointed out last year in the Atlantic, it is a world where white people are the ones doing most of the suffering. It is a world where white people get to masquerade as oppressed minorities.
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Often, the dystopian vision of the future is a cyberpunk wild west with robots and spaceships instead of prairie schooners and stagecoaches. In this sense, the films are futuristic versions of cowboy movies, which depicted a world where law and order had vanished and ornery varmints and back-shooting dry-gulchers mercilessly dispatched honest sodbusters and prim schoolmarms to Boot Hill and everybody was waiting for the murderous Apaches or the bloodthirsty Comanches to show up and stake all the men out in the hot sun and let the fire ants get to them.
Though I tend to dissent from the conclusion to that last paragraph 'It was no fun whatsoever', because, as I have argued heretofore apropos of the post-apocalyptic narrative, some people like these precisely because 'there ain't no law West of Pecos/outside the dystopian panopticon' and they find that, at least in imagination, attractive. (I may also have commented on the gendering of this, no, really, don't mock.)
I think it's also that the dystopia narrative tends to position our Heroes as the Sympathetic Rebels, who are breaking the law and commiting acts that under other circumstances would count as serious criminality, in order to Overthow A Brutal (or Deviously Opiuming The People) Tyranny. They are not either The Man, nor are they the miserable or stoned sheep who sit down under his iron heel.
I also wish to know in how many of these movies the Big Bad (or at least their henchpersons) is played by a British thesp, on the grounds that there is an ur-motif in US movies and whether the rebellion is supposed to be taking place in classical antiquity or the far-distant future, The Man is really George III (though, do admit, if not actually saner, mad in less relatively benign ways: they would be chopping down or burning up the trees in Windsor Great Park rather than shaking hands with them) and we are talking War of Independence as the model for just revolution. Or possibly the only one there has ever been... This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2246775.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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