Dystopian settings make cool movie backdrops. The constant gloom and steamy, rain-slicked streets of Blade Runner. The poisoned atmosphere and battery babies of The Matrix. The armored monster trucks and endless deserts of Mad Max. The contrast of abundance and destitution between the capital and the districts in The Hunger Games. It’s easy to sit in our cinema seats with the lights turned off and cheer for our heroes when they finally WIN against a world made to tear them down. Deckard escapes Los Angeles with Rachel. Neo gains near invincibility inside his computer sim world. Max finds a way to live another day. Katniss rips the whole totalitarian regime to shreds in Panem.
Watching these movies and reading these stories is fun because we live in a relatively safe world where that could never really happen here. I was twelve years old when Blade Runner came out. Harrison Ford was recreating himself again, no longer just a space smuggler or an archeological adventurer, but now a replicant-killing bounty hunter. Everything around me as a kid was designed to keep me safe and protected. I wasn’t much older — just fifteen — when Mel Gibson fought his way out of the Thunderdome. I was married with children but still safely inside the economic expansion bubble of the late 90’s when Morphius unplugged Neo from his robot incubator. Those things could never really happen here, I thought after leaving the theater and driving back to the safety of our cozy, middle-income neighborhood, perhaps stopping to grab an ice cream or a burger on the way home.
What happens when the world you live in grows less cozy, less safe, and begins to take on the characteristics of those story worlds you just witnessed on the big screen or read in that book?
Classic dystopian novels like George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road thrilled me when I was younger. I can’t read them anymore. Not only does no one ever win in those novels, but the real world is growing increasingly similar to the world of those stories. There is no safe place to escape to now after reading them. Books are being banned and burned across the US. History is being re-written. We are told every day by our politicians not to believe the things we see happening with our own eyes. Like the father in McCarthy’s story, we have to constantly remind ourselves of the importance of compassion and humanity to avoid falling into a bottomless pit of hate, ignorance, and despair.
Orwell and Bradbury kicked off dystopian populism in the 40’s and 50’s, shortly after World War II and at the beginning of what would soon be the cultural and sexual revolutions of the 60’s and 70’s. The trend was re-ignited by Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth in the 2000’s. But there was a dramatic shift in the tone and plots of these later stories compared with their earlier progenitors. The narratives from Orwell and Bradbury focused on the struggle against cruel political and social systems that would ultimately break the characters. They were moral stories about fighting for what is right despite the long odds. They were cautionary tales to warn us against what could be if we’re not careful.
Apparently, we didn’t get the message. Something something … those who don’t learn from the past … something something.
Modern dystopian stories not only show us characters struggling against an unfair system, but they show us that unfair systems can be toppled, conquered, and destroyed. Coriolanus Snow (Hunger Games) and Jeanine Matthews (Divergent) can be killed. Trample on the rights of your people long enough, make them desperate enough, and no president or leader is safe from an army of pissed-off revolutionaries.
The dystopian stories of today give us something audiences didn’t have sixty years ago: HOPE. It’s the idea that we don’t have to just tolerate the injustices of a corrupt, amoral system designed to strip us of our rights and discourage us from thinking for ourselves. Just because the Party tells us, “Two plus two equals five,” doesn’t make it so, and we don’t have to accept it. There is power in standing together. There is power in fighting together. There is power in setting things right.
But these kinds of stories are also dangerous for these exact same reasons. It’s a strange conundrum in countries like the US, where the power of the government is granted by the will of the people, and yet the last thing any government wants is to cede any of its power back to the people. We’re already comparing the current US regime to Orwell’s Big Brother. And if we’re not careful, it won’t be long before the US Justice Department commissions the first branch of Firemen to search and destroy books that encourage disobedience and rebellion.
These new, more hopeful dystopian stories remind us that power can be given and taken away by either side at any time whenever the need and resolve is strong enough. The dystopian stories of the past worked because they made people realize what they could lose if they allowed it. Now that we’re actually allowing the loss to happen before our very eyes, these new hopeful dystopian stories make us realize we have the power to take things back again, but only if we’re willing to pay the price.
