V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta bore many similarities to Nineteen Eighty-Four, more than most of the other films we’ve seen. It makes sense, since putting an end to fascism was seemed to be the overarching theme of the movie, and a fear of fascism was one of the things that spurred George Orwell to write the original Nineteen Eighty-Four novel.

For the most part, V for Vendetta seemed like Nineteen Eighty-Four except it takes place in 2020 instead of 1984 and is also way more action-packed (which, again, makes sense given its heritage.) One similarity that Monica Martin brings up in her article, ‘A World at Risk’, is that of the giant screen of Adam Sutler staring down at what are essentially his government goons, and comparing it to a poster depicting Big Brother with the words “Big Brother is watching you” printed at the bottom. That line, or some variation of it, is probably one of the most quoted from the novel and film.

The idea of constant surveillance, intrusive or not, seems to be one of the cornerstone themes of dystopian science fiction. And like the Ingsoc party of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Norsefire Party is always watching and they use it to their advantage. The Norsefire Party “fabricates news according to its needs” and “[uses] terrorism as a label to apply to all its political opponents.” All they have to do is to know who to put in their crosshairs, and then they’re free to simply pull the trigger. Sound familiar?

And maybe it’s not just the idea of surveillance, but rather screens themselves, that are the constant in dystopian fiction. Oftentimes, it’s the people that are depicted as watching the screens, rather than the people being watched by the screens. Another comparison that Martin makes is between Children of Men and V for Vendetta, where characters are glued to a television screens of government broadcasts. We rely so much on visual media as a means of communication and for obtaining information that this comparison actually hits fairly close to home for us, which is very appropriate for dystopian fiction.

In fact, there’s a recent television series that tackles the idea that screens might be too large a part of our lives today. The series is called Black Mirror (the “black mirror” being the screens of our televisions, computers, smart phones, etc.) and it’s like Twilight Zone set in the modern-day where instead of science fiction being the perpetrator of events, it’s technology. Screens are so commonplace today, and so seemingly innocuous in our lives that we hardly ever give them much thought, but the show (or the first episode, at least, since that’s all I’ve watched thus far) does a fantastic job at making you think about how powerful, and potentially dangerous, a screen can be. I don’t necessarily know if Black Mirror qualifies as dystopian fiction (I feel the message is more “don’t underestimate the bounds of technology”, but I guess the Terminator films are dystopic in their own way), but the first episode of the series is definitely worth a watch if you’re interested in seeing a television screen doing all sorts of harm. The first season of the series is on Netflix.

Children of Men

Children of Men is arguably the darkest of the films we’ve watched thus far. While there are certainly dystopian themes present in the film, with a police-state London herding refugees into concentration camps, I think it can be argued that the film is more about an apocalypse than it is a about a dystopia.

Children of Men is set in 2027, where every person on Earth is infertile, incapable of producing children. Because of this global infertility, humanity faces extinction. London, which is where the film begins, is depicted as being one of “stable” cities (if not the only one) on Earth where things are relatively peaceful. The rest of the world, however, has fallen into complete disarray. Though much of it is left to the imagination, one can only assume that the rest of the world went all Mad Max, with people looting and killing because there is no longer a society to stop them.

Then, we have refugees flocking to London hoping for some form of asylum. However, they are denied entry and turned away by London’s military-police. In fact, many of the refugees are detained in concentration camps for reasons not unlike Hitler’s for imprisoning the Jews in concentration camps. In both cases, the victims were detained in order to satisfy and placate the rest of the population.

From the outset, I think it’s obvious that London in Children of Men is a dystopia set in an apocalyptic world. With human society on the decline, London has militarized itself in order to provide its citizens with some semblance of order and peace for humanity’s last few years on Earth. As far as dystopias go, Children of Men’s London has it all: a militarized police, concentration camps, control of the media (one example Monica Martin provides is the opening scene, with the people staring at a screen), and even its own resistance groups.

But despite taking place in a dystopia as well-developed as Children of Men’s London, I feel that the dystopian elements only served as a vehicle for the rest of the film. The story isn’t about overthrowing or subverting the London government, it’s about Kee being pregnant and getting her to Human Project to help further their research into curing the global infertility so they can save the human race.

Had the government gotten their hands on Kee, it’s likely that they would’ve wound up exactly like the government in The Handmaid’s Tale, where they’re the ones with all the power because they’re the only ones who could continue the human race. But that’s not what happens. Ultimately, the London government is as powerless as the rest of the people, unlike the government in The Handmaid’s Tale, where they have a way to produce children. Of course, that’s not to say they aren’t relevant to the plot. In fact, they have a huge impact on the way things turn out. Were it not for the government, there would be no resistance movement. And were it not for the resistance movement, Theo would have never met Kee.

Minority Report

I was in middle school when I learned what the term "dystopia" meant. It was described by the teacher as being a utopia (a word my classmates and I did know). It didn't really make sense to me, but she went on to explain that it's impossible for a utopia to exist, and all attempts to make one would result in a dystopia. I kind of understood at the time, but at the same time I didn't, and up until watching Minority Report, I still didn’t. Theoretically, given enough time and effort, it should be possible, right?

In Minority Report, there’s a police force called “precrime” who have access to a precognitive trio that can see into the future. The precrime unit uses the information they can obtain from the precognitive visions and try to arrest people before they commit the crimes they see that they’re going to commit. Supposedly, the precrime unit has brought down crime to 0% in their area of operations (by stopping it all before it happens), which sounds like a pretty great sell for basically anyone that’s not a diehard criminal. Who doesn’t want to live in a world where people don’t commit crimes?

There are, of course, numerous flaws with this system (many of which are brought up throughout the course of the film), but even assuming that the precrime system is 100% accurate, without flaw, and that everyone knows it, the precrime system is basically all that Nineteen-Eighty Four’s Thought Police could ever hope for and more. It’d be an absolute cinch for them to catch thought criminals because they’d literally be able to see their thoughts. Granted, the precrime system can only detect criminal thoughts, but that’s still a breach of privacy. The idea that you can be arrested for thinking the wrong thing is an incredibly controversial one even today, so one can pretty easily imagine what would happen if precrime ever became a thing in our world.

In the world of Minority Report, we’ve got a system so efficient at stopping crime that crime no longer happens. That sounds like a step towards a utopia if I’ve ever heard of one. Yet, it comes with a few strings attached. While I’m certain that are people who’d be okay with Minority Report being a reality, there will be those opposed to it. In this way, I can see how a utopia might become a dystopia.

Still, I’m not totally convinced that a utopia cannot exist, let alone the fact that all utopias are doomed to fail, that they all must become dystopias.  I think it’d be possible for there to be a place where everyone just gets along, and no crime happens because there’s no reason for there to be any. I don't necessarily think that a utopia should be what a society strives, or that it'd be a practical goal, but I do think that one could exist.

Fight Club

Fight Club was very interesting for me to watch because I’d watched it long ago and I’d never once considered it to be a work of dystopian fiction. It’s not necessarily that I was against the idea, but the thought had just never crossed my mind. I still wasn’t sure I was going to be watching the right film when I popped the disk into the DVD player, but having finally watched it again, I totally understood why it was included on the syllabus.

I’m pretty sure that all the works of fiction set in dystopias that I’ve read, watched, or played were all works of science fiction (or speculative fiction, if you want to go there). So to me, dystopian fiction has also always been science fiction. You have stuff like cyberpunk, a science fiction genre that’s literally always set in a dystopia where advanced technology exists, but it’s only available to the wealthy. Bladerunner is probably the most prominent example of cyberpunk in film. Or you have most of the other films we’ve watched so far, where it’s the near-future, but some aspect of our lives or society has changed for the worse. It’s always speculative, though: “This is what will happen if governments are given too much power,” or, “This is what will happen if corporations are given too much power,” or, “This is what will happen if babies can’t be born anymore,” or, “This is what will happen if we legalize euthanasia.” (As in the case of the film, GATTACA.)

Fight Club posits that we are living in a dystopia today. Some of the examples of dystopias I gave above were settings where the government or corporations were given too much power. Fight Club isn’t worried that the government or corporations will become too powerful like Nineteen Eighty-Four or Bladerunner are, it’s worried (“worried”) that they already have too much power, with anti-consumerism in particular being set up as the “antagonist” of the film.

At the very beginning the narrator, who refers to himself as “Jack”, tells us how he’s overly-attached to his furniture; a pretty clear message about our over-reliance on corporate products. Tyler Durden then tells Jack to ditch it all, to sever his attachment to the furniture; a rejection of our corporate overlords.

And then comes the Fight Club. It seems innocuous enough at first, just a bunch of like-minded people getting together to vent some steam. But as the movie progresses, the Fight Club grows into something bigger (read: it becomes a full-fledged resistance movement). Fight Clubs start to spring up all over the states (resistance cells), Jack and Tyler literally begin to train an army, and then we have Project Mayhem. An actual plan to bring down the corporate system, the oppressor.

I've always heard a dystopia as being synonymous with a utopia, because one man's utopia is another man's dystopia or something like that. It kind of makes sense, but at the same time, it also always sounded a little bit like nonsense. Minority Report, for me, was the first work of fiction that really sold me on this idea. And having just watched that film, I also saw it here at the reveal that Jack and Tyler were one and the same, and it's the one thing that really got me on board with the whole "Fight Club is dystopian fiction" thing.

The Handmaid's Tale

This film actually really reminded me of Children of Men, which had a very similar plot. In Children of Men, society has fallen into disarray when it's discovered that people (or I suppose just women, really) can no longer give birth. At their core, I think that’s the biggest difference: in Children of Men, the birth rate is a flat zero, whereas in The Handmaid’s Tale, about 1% of females are still fertile. It’s only a minor disparity, but it makes a world of difference.

In Children of Men, no babies are being born. The opening scene has us and the main character watching a news broadcast where the breaking news is that the youngest person in the world (which would make him/her the last baby ever born) has just passed away. The people watching the newscast are absolutely devastated. While the world of Children of Men isn’t in complete chaos, it’s made clear that any semblance of order is just a product of indifference, delusion, or both. With humanity on the brink of extinction, there are riots, wars (over god knows what), resistance movements (resisting god knows what), and concentration camps (because of all the refugees from the wars). There are, of course, those who still cling to hope, like Human Project, a group that’s trying to cure the worldwide infertility.

On the other hand, we have The Handmaid’s Tale, where a number of women, albeit a small number, are still fertile. These women are inducted into the Handmaids, which basically seems like a cult where they’re “worshipped”, and it’s what this particular dystopian society seems to be structured around, as opposed to the chaos in Children of Men. It makes sense, seeing as the Handmaids are technically the only people who can stop humanity from being extinct. Like Children of Men, The Handmaid’s Tale is about hope and the continued existence of mankind, but their settings are very different.

The part that I don’t really get is why they’re treated so awfully, given their practically divine status in society. In The Handmaid’s Tale, hope isn’t really the issue so much as oppression is, and I think it’s where the film kind of fails. One of the New York Times book reviewers characterized the novel as “’very readable’ but criticized the ‘thin credibility of the parable’”, and that essentially sums up my feelings about the film. I enjoyed it as much as I did Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I liked quite a bit, but I really felt that The Handmaid’s Tale’s presentation was off. A setting where only 1% of the population is fertile sounds really interesting, but it was pushed aside by a pretty standard story about how the government and too much power should never be together.

Soylent Green

Soylent Green is another example of how film can use the spectacle of science fiction to create a convincingly real, yet futuristic, setting. The execution fell short of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it still worked for me. The biggest problem for me was how disjointed the city felt; in some scenes, the streets are packed with people or cars, while in others, the streets are completely devoid of people and basically anything else, really. There's no clutter, no trash (at least, not as much trash as there should have been given the state of the city), and the city is dead silent at night.

Still, Soylent Green did a good job at depicting a convincing future despite there being no advanced or futuristic technology. And that's the part that's so interesting to me. When people think of science fiction, they think about the future and the strange technology it might hold for us. Think hovercars, lasers, and holographic projection. How neat would it be if your bathroom mirror had a direct stream to the weather channel? Soylent Green's world has none of that stuff. In fact, a lot of the technology in Soylent Green looks ancient and outdated by our modern standards (having to use an exercise bike to generate electricity, for example), and though that may simply be because the film itself is old, I think there's more to it than that.

Soylent Green isn't shiny and it isn't technologically advanced. The luxuries afforded to the wealthy are exactly the same as what we had decades ago: hot running water, air conditioning, fresh-cut meat, etc. Their cars are the same as ours. Their buildings look more or less like ours. But what the setting does have that we don't is a decaying New York City. For us, it's unprecedented. New York City has simply never been in such a sorry state as it is in Soylent Green (this is just conjecture, but I imagine that it wasn't even as bad during the Great Depression, though Soylent Green has the benefit of being pure fiction).

When you see the city, you can only think, "Wow, New York City doesn't look like that, and it never has," so the only other possibility is that it's New York City in the future, and that's not something a novel could do in as few seconds as it takes Soylent Green to do.

Also, another side note: the reveal at the end of the film, "Soylent green is people!" really caught me off-guard. Ignoring the fact that the build-up to the reveal was fantastic, and I really enjoyed it, there's actually a product called Soylent that's being made today. It's a drink that supposedly contains all the nutrients you need in a meal and is being marketed that way. So, going into the film, I kind of assumed that Soylent was, well, good. Now, I'm wondering who in their right minds would name their own food product after something that's made from people.

THX 1138

George Lucas's THX 1138 was a pretty confusing film to me. Maybe it's because it was so similar to Ninenteen Eighty-Four and Soylent Green in tone and setting, and because I thought THX 1138 was inferior to both, but it just felt like nothing really interesting happened in the film. Or maybe it's because I simply misinterpreted the film, which is the more probable reason. Here's what I have:

The giant picture of Jesus Christ was a fairly obvious allusion to religion, and it got me immediately thinking about God. Now, I know basically nothing about religion, and my knowledge of Christian parables runs about as deep as Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark. The story of Adam and Eve seemed like the obvious fit when LUH switches THX's medications, allowing him to experience love for the first time ever (read: she seduced him). And later on SEN (read: SIN, the snake in the tree) tries to convince THX to be his roommate, which would result in THX kind of breaking the law because it would mean not reporting SEN for committing a crime. But then THX shoots down both SEN's offer and my theory about this being an Adam and Eve story.

From this point on, I have basically no idea what's happening in this film. THX gets arrested and is sent to some weird prison where he reunites with LUH and finds out that she's pregnant with their child (not sure about the significance of this beyond the obvious symbolism associated with childbearing and childbirth).

And then they get separated again, and THX winds up with SEN and a bunch of other prisoners. Then THX and SEN try to escape, but not before joining up with one of the hologram people who tells them that he wants to be a real person (again, I'm not really sure what the significance of this character is). Then, SEN gets separated shortly after escaping the prison, and THX and the hologram person find that LUH's organs have been harvested for some reason (I couldn't figure out why), and then THX escapes to the surface of the world, alone, and he sees the setting sun.

All the while this is happening, SEN has some sort of cathartic episode, where he's all zen-like and serene while talking to a bunch of children, and I don't know why this happened. Then he gets arrested.

On a side note, this film had a few bits (mostly the sound design and the androids) that reminded me of Star Wars. It makes sense, since both THX 1138 and the Star Wars films were directed by George Lucas, but as a whole, they were completely different experiences. It was interesting to see George Lucas tackle the more philosophical side of science fiction, but I'm afraid that I don't think he did so particularly well here. While I think there's something to be said for slow-paced and thoughtful films, like Stanley Kubrick's 2001, this film was just slow and not really all that thoughtful.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Science fiction started as a literary genre, going at least as far back as Marry Shelley's Frankenstein, written in 1818. However, it's a genre that film adopted pretty much as soon as it was invented, when George Méliès directed the film A Trip to the Moon (or perhaps even earlier). There are some things that each medium can do that the other cannot. I don't think one is better at science fiction than the other, but one thing in particular that film is able to really capitalize on is the spectacle of science fiction. It doesn't necessarily have to be lasers and spaceships and aliens, although that's often the case, but just being able to see and hear the setting as if you were there provides a very different perspective for the viewer.

I'd read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was in high school, and again during my sophomore year in UB. It's a fascinating political/science-fiction novel, and its arguably still relevant today, despite having been written over half a century ago. Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in the contemporary future where a government, the Party, is given absolute power over peoples' lives. The Party abuses its power in just about every way imaginable, and it maintains its power through control of the people, and by effect, control of history. The film begins with a quote that accurately describes the Party and its goals: "He who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past."

The novel serves largely as a warning against giving the government too much power, for fear of allowing it to become a totalitarian state, and I feel the film did a good job as an adaption of the novel.

Watching the film, the one thing that struck me the most was what you could hear. Particularly, how often you'd be able to hear Big Brother's or the Party's voice over an intercom. I'm sure it's described in the book as being incessant, or at the very least, it's repeated often throughout the novel. But in the film, it quickly became almost a natural part of the background noise for me, which really sold me on the insidiousness of the Party. Rather than being told or imagining how Big Brother can get into your head, you can hear it for yourself in the film. Even as you watch the film, Big Brother's doctrine is drilled into your own head as if you yourself were one of his subjects.

Additionally, its sparing use of a nondiegetic soundtrack (if it did at all, I don't quite recall) helped establish the absolute barrenness of the setting. The periods of silence contrast starkly with scenes where there's a lot of people and motion, and it shows just how little the people of Oceania really have when you see Winston sitting alone in absolute silence in either his room or his prison cell.