Theme: Dystopias

The dystopia is a term created to mean the opposite of a utopia. The term utopia was coined after the novel Utopia (1516) by Thomas More in which he sought to imagine the best possible society. By contrast, the dystopia imagines the worst possible society.

The most famous utopias in literary fiction are the world of authoritarian control in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) where people are preselected from birth to fulfil roles in society.

Dystopia are almost always seen as authoritarian, as having security forces that stamp out any form of ideological dissent. A frequent plot in a dystopian film is of a world where lovers are struggling to escape to freedom from a world where their relationship is forbidden.

Many screen dystopias are modelled on real world models such as Nazi Germany from which they borrow images of charismatic leaders and armies of stormtroopers. Equally popular are dystopias where individuality is crushed or narcotised, or where the society is run by an Artificial Intelligence. A more recent development is the dystopia of constant digital surveillance.

A dystopia is a projection of its author/creator – a world where a feared aspect of present-day society is taken to nightmare extremes. The ideology can run all the way from Aldous Huxley’s distaste of the hedonistic society in Brave New World to Ray Bradbury’s fear of the loss of imagination and literacy in Fahrenheit 451 (1953), of the youth revolution in Logan’s Run (1976), of Political Correctness taking over in Demolition Man (1993) or of American democracy supplanted by socialism in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957). The original Star Trek (1966-9) is known for creating straw dystopian societies of the week for Captain Kirk to demolish.

The heyday of the screen dystopia was in the 1960s and 70s. By the 1980s, the dystopia had been supplanted by the Action Movie where the ideological nightmares of earlier works were replaced by generic authoritarian societies for the action hero, a man of hard-won individualism, to struggle against. Equally the rise of Cyberpunk and assorted dark futures have seen the ideological dystopia supplanted by a more ambiguous world that is extension of the present, although there still continue to be a number of examples of dystopian works.