Dystopia: After the cliché

Dog Gone

Dystopia. The opposite of Utopia. Or a Utopia gone bad. An idea and vision of a perfect world getting lost when translated into concrete reality.
Former Stalinsist regimes and states were said to be solid examples. Totalitarian systems distorting social, political and economic ideals of Marxism and revolutionary Socialism to meet their own sadistic and power mongering ends.

That’s why George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four stood out to become and be celebrated as the 20th Century’s finest and most vivid portrayal of a Dystopian society.

Western Cold Warriors rejoiced when George Orwell, though himself a committed Socialist, delivered such a scathing attack at the Communist Soviet Union. Especially at a time when the Soviets were proudly flexing their system as being far more humane, people friendly and superior compared to capitalism-driven democracies.

Yes, and then some.

But Nineteen Eighty-Four with all its brilliant insights and imagery did, however, and turned the classic Stalinist example into a top-of-the-head Dystopian cliché. Even to the point of being emptied of its concrete elements and left as nothing but an all-too-simple example of a Dystopian reality.
Because at the dawn of the 1950s, as Western capitalist societies went full throttle into implementing capitalist ideas such as consumerism and corporate economics (all tightly weaved together with brand new ideals of “patriotism,” material well being, status and socio-political conformity), these societies (especially the US), also started suffering from a distinct form of mass paranoia.

Eventually, their governments and state institutions started using almost the same degree of intelligence-agency-related tactics and media oriented propaganda that was first attacked widely in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It wasn’t as concentrated and tyrannical as those being used in Communist regimes of the time, but they certainly were as meddlesome, arrogant and paranoid. The idea was to “protect freedom and democracy from sinister Communist infiltration.”

In other words, the ideal capitalist-democratic society too was turning into a dystopian nightmare. And what’s more, unlike the ones under the Soviet Bloc and China, the capitalist Dystopia was also riddled with daunting streaks of racism and quasi-religious interpretations of morality.



After the cliché


Even though famous German film director, Fritz Lang, was the first (back in the 1920s) to portray the Dystopian trends in a technologically advanced and consumerist capitalist society with his bleak silver screen classic Metropolis, it was left for the 1950’s Western Beat poets and writers to kick in the idea of looking at Dystopia beyond the Orwellian cliché.

But where Fritz Lang had openly alluded to a revolutionary Socialist uprising as a way to destroy the capitalist Dystopia in Metropolis, the Beats such as the vibrant Allen Ginsberg and the infamous William Burroughs took the more anarchistic, dadaist and existentialist route while defining (and defying) the new post-WW:II America.

Ginsberg’s Beat classic, Howel (1958), was a topsy-turvy, jumpy, funky and downright scary and enraged attack. Such an innovatively and spontaneously scribbled example of Situationist poetry also becoming a major commercial success was absolutely new. It had struck a chord. Not all was so well in the “free world,” after all.

From now on literary Dystopias wont ONLY be about Stalinist caricatures …


The Naked Lunch: William S. Burroughs (book: 1959); David Connenberg (film: 1991)

The last book ever to be banned in the United States, this Burroughs classic, written in the bizarre Dadaist “cutup method,” was deemed to be too “obscene” and subversive. An absurd semi-autobiography about Burroughs’ fetishes, addictions and rebellious lifestyle, it was accused of glorifying narcotic usage and sadistic sex! The truth was, it was just a frail, failing and hallucinating genius holding a cracking mirror at America’s post-war “straight society.” The freaky and sleazy “Interzone” his anti-hero escapes to (after accidentally shooting his beloved wife in the head!), is like the subconscious of a man disturbed by the images, values, hypocrisy and tyranny of the “straight society.”

Enigmatic Canadian director, David Connenberg, achieved the impossible by actually turning this once “unfilmable” book into an equally bizarre celluloid spectacle in 1991.


Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury (book: 1953); Farancois Truffaut (film: 1966)

Taking the cue from the infamous book burning ceremonies of Nazi Germany (perhaps the bleakest of living Dystopias ever?), veteran sci-fi writer, Ray Bradbury came steaming out with the haunting Fahrenheit 451 as his first full-length novel. Cleverly using the temperature required to burn paper as his title, he offered a shuddering image of a future society controlled by a police state of shadowy men, flame-throwing machines and state-run fire stations (which burn “dangerous books” rather than put out fires). Below them is a static society kept numb and busy with trivial game shows and soaps on large TV screens. Clearly, not only was Bradbury protesting and warning against the fast disappearing habit of reading, but he was also satirizing the initial rise of American consumerism and numb suburban conformity in post-War America.

It must have been an exciting event when the brilliant French director, Farancois Truffaut, decided to turn this insightful Dystopian vision into a film back in the late ‘60s, but surprisingly, (and uncharacteristically), he decided to play it straight, failing to bring out the book’s upfront satirical content.


A Clockwork Orange: Anthony Burgess (book: 1962); Stanley Kubrick (film:1971):

The late Stanley Kubrick had that rare knack of turning great books into greater movies! His finest (and most controversial) in this respect remains to be his stunning film version of Anthony Burgess’ 1962 shocker, A Clockwork Orange.

While bringing to life Burgess’ violent, near-future British Dystopia, Kubrick liberally uses vintage ‘70s pop excesses, celebrated kitsch and avant-garde gaudyism, paralleling it with loud blasts of Beethoven and Wagner, and scenes of violence that though highly stylized, look as real as real can be!

It’s about a Britain in the clutches of amoral politicians trying to climb the political ladder by offering brand new ways to keep the populace voting for them. The whole thing takes place within a system that seems to be a futuristic version of the old Labor Party’s Keynesian centralism and ‘70s notions of ultra-liberalism. Violent, working-class youth gangs who have found “constitutional” ways to get around the liberal, pro-rights system, throng streets and “Milk Bars,” committing violent crimes (usually against apathetical elders who feel left out in this youth oriented brave new world).

It all comes across as a whiplash warning against the pitfalls of interventionist liberalism. This becomes apparent as we see one of the gang members (the mercurial Malcolm McDonald), jailed for murdering a middle-aged woman and then being selected to undergo a new “scientific technique” to cure him of his violent and criminal urges. However, the new technique is a horrific parody of overindulgent scientific ambitions, “curing” our protagonist to the point of him actually vomiting every time he is faced with even a mild episode of violence (and sex!). The sitting government parades him as a breakthrough result of its ingenious new way to (scientifically) rid the society of violent youth without the use of the conventional jail system. However, he is soon facing violence from revengeful cops and even aging aristocratic intellectuals. He is unable to respond or protect himself, because every time he does so, he falls sick and collapses. His condition leads him to a state where he attempts suicide and thus becomes a major embarrassment for the government.

The bottom line of this violent, vicious and dark satire of western liberalism is that society is like an organism. It is violent as a whole. And not exactly because of a few violent individuals. True?


THX: 135: George Lucus (film:1971)

Director George Lucus’ first full-length feature was a far cry from his feel good space operas (Star Wars films). In fact it was also perhaps the first attempt to film a modernized version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. A commercial dud on its initial release, THX: 35 has steadily risen over the years as a solid cult classic. Though made on a shoestring budget, it does have its unique sci-fi moments as it tracks a strange society (inexplicably) living underground and controlled by faceless, robotic policemen and a “confession machine” (the Big Brother). It’s definitely communistic, perhaps Lucus’ idea of a Stalinist state in some distant future. But it’s just that and nothing else and eventually starts to suffer when Lucus starts to heavily build in American concepts of individualism and freedom into the mix. But an entertaining watch nonetheless, and not overbearing.


Tarkus: Emerson, Lake & Palmer (aka ELP) (album: 1973)

Perhaps the most comprehensive album dealing with pet ‘70s progressive-rock subject: How revolutions only manage to replace one set of dictatorships with another.

In classic prog-rock style of the period, ELP twists and turns across a symbolic sci-fi/ “mystical” tale involving strange looking, tank-like creatures getting into battles of will, morals and good old physical combat. Enjoyable Dystopian hippie fiction propagating social and mental evolution over violent revolution.


Animals: Pink Floyd (album: 1977)

Pink Floyd were once the late ‘60s leading spaced-out psychedelic act, who till their 1971 album, Meddle, were usually about great “acid trips” and dizzy hippie escapades. However, when the 1973 oil crisis hit western economies and the Vietnam War came home, all the feel good euphoria of the post-war years came crashing down. But as the first of the “neoliberals” (today’s “neocons”), started to attack the whole Keynesian and “New Deal” economics of the welfare state as the real culprits of the crisis, (and thus setting the scene for the West’s shift to the right in the coming years), Floyd, first with 1973’s brilliant, Dark Side Of The Moon and then, more aggressively, with 1977’s Animals, balked hard and loud at the shifting paradigms of the capitalist system. The reason behind Animals relentless anger and sarcasm was also the exploding, anarchic late-‘70s Punk Movement (led by the likes of The Sex Pistols and The Clash), and the way it was was heaping scorn at the leaders of the ‘60s “Woodstock Generation” for selling out to capitalism and numb bourgeoisie apathy.

Floyd responded with one of its most out-of-character and scathing albums to date. Lead wordsmith, Roger Waters, took the whole concept of Orwell’s anti-Stalinism Animal Farm and placed it at the heart of the western capitalist system. The Floyd were one of the first to do so directly.

Waters raved and ranted through the hypocrisies of the modern western capitalist system, its economics, its ideals, its values and morals, like a knife, using irony, sarcasm and giving guitarist Dave Gilmore all the space he needed to break out with some of most scorching leads this side of rock. And yet, quite unlike Punk’s similar chants and concerns, Animals remained intact as an intellectual query. Consciously intelligent, thoughtful and highly poetic. In fact Animals actually helped Floyd to be the only high flying progressive-rock act of the period to survive the nihilistic Punk onslaught and also manage to prosper when the ‘80s finally eschewed the post-war left and set the world on a path towards the cowboy politics and neoliberal economics of the “New Right” (ala Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, “Globalization,” “neocons” et al.).


Blade Runner: Ridley Scott (film: 1982)

Based on the brilliant short-story Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (written by leading sci-fi storyteller, Philip K. Dick), Ridley Scott delivered his most powerful punch, making Blade Runner one the most appreciated sci-fi films this side of Kubrick’s 2001. Philip K. Dick was obsessed with themes of whole societies run by large corporations, ruling the roost over bleak, technologically fixated Dystopias, and Scott gives accurate imagery and landscape to such a nightmare.

In fact the world shown in the shape of the American city the movie is set in is now quite like any modern large urban jungle teeming with mammoth, neon advertising billboards and smug, ubiquitous technological gimmickry, all juxtaposed with corrosive filth, pollution, congestion and poverty.

The year is 2017 and large corporations operating inside massive pyramid-like metallic skyscrapers towering into dusty, dark and smoggy skies, dish out human like androids to work as cheap labor/slaves on harsh Martian landscape for mining purposes. But as the corporations keep advancing their technologies (for quicker profits), and start churning upgraded versions, some androids actually start developing a consciousness; a feeling they do not quite understand but are ready to defend through murder.

The corporations weary of the rebel androids hire Blade Runners (cops trained to track down such “malfunctioning” androids), and the jaded Decker (played by Harrison Ford) is one of them.

The whole idea leads to the that sickening feeling of alienation and emptiness felt in fast advancing capitalist urban centers, the sort of emotions that are usually suppressed (for survival’s sake), but which end up damaging the very soul and psyche of modern man. However, Blade Runner shows how when mechanical things like androids start feeling the same awkward emotions, they do not suppress them (they are too innocent to do so), and (thus) are hunted down and eliminated for they become a threat to the pragmatic and stone-faced corporate order. How can they let machines to start behaving like humans in a world where even the humans are not allowed to remain human?


1984: Michael Radford(film: 1984)

This was the Orwellian classic’s first big-screen appearance, aptly released in 1984. But where it was thought that the director might have liked to weave in a bit of contemporary notions and angles on his late 20th century look at Orwell’s early post-War attack on Stalinism, he played it straight. And it’s not a bad job as such, even though Reagan’s America and Thatcher’s Britain at the time were seeming more Stalinist in essence than Brezhneve’s Russia or Deng’s China! John Hurt, Richard Burton and Eurythmatics’ eerie score are its greatest redeeming factors.


Brazil: Terry Gilliam (film: 1985)

This should stand out to be the sharpest and most far-sighted look at the “Globalized” world we live in today. But this was made way back in 1985 and that’s why one can now clearly observe and fully appreciate its daunting prophetic qualities. Directed by the quirky, Gilliam, (former Monty Python man), Brazil is a loud, eccentric and vicious satire of some future world stuck between tech-smart capitalism/consumerism and old-school bureaucracy. Just like Floyd’s Animals, Gilliam takes another anti-Stalin Orwellian scenario, (Nineteen-Eighty-Four), and puts it smack dab at the core of a capitalist society. The results are eerily recognizable: Bright, buzzing shopping malls packed with mindless consumers, humungous advertising billboards put up to hide the decaying economic and environmental imbalances of the system, a middle-class kept numb and dumb with various feel-good TV shows, and a snooty, decadent upper-class involved in equal parts in frivolous social pursuits and place intrigues involving giant corporations and the politics of bureaucracy. The working class is kept in check in cheap, shaky apartments and in areas way behind the malls and advertising hoardings and with the help of a fascistic police force. More scarily (since this film sometimes seems a bit too prophetic), is the presence of freewheeling crusaders reflecting underclass frustrations by bombing malls and posh restaurants. However, the film is quick to suggest that these bombings are staged by the government itself (to keep the populace in fear of “terrorists wanting to see the death of prosperity!”).


Brazil is pitch black comedy, studded with vicious British humor and a liking for absurdity, and on its way to intensely mocking matters like consumerism, capitalism and the bureaucracy, it even ends up mocking Orwell as well! And why not, because today the Big Brother is not the all encompassing Stalinist state, but “the market.”


The Running Man: Paul Michael Glacer (film:1987)

Based on a racy short-story by the prolific Stephen King, this Arnold Schwarzenegger thriller is a jumpy and upfront satire poking fun at America’s obsessive TV game show culture. Set in a future society run by giant corporations which use violent, long-winding reality TV shows to keep the populace distracted from their dictatorial designs, The Running Man is quite in the league of corporate Dystopias first explored by the likes of the great Philip K. Dick. Though not as dark and existentialist.


Operation Mindcrime: Queensrych (album: 1989)

An interesting example of a progressive-metal band going the distant in constructing a conceptual album about an Orwellian Dystopia in a capitalist setting. Though not quite Floyd, a bold attempt, nonetheless.


Starship Troopers: Paul Verhoeven (film: 1994); Robert A. Heinlein (book: 1959)

Now this is an intriguing case. Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 book was seen as a way by the author to express his violent xenophobic and fascist feelings towards communists, liberals and blacks, as he wrote with great relish about a future America under an aggressively militarist and fascist regime at war with giant, ugly bugs which live on another planet and are always threatening the glory of the American society. Even though Heinlein himself remained vague and enigmatic about his motives, but not so the colorful and exciting Dutch director, Paul Verhoeven, when he decided to turn this bizarre tale into a big-budgeted Hollywood thriller. Verhoeven directly and with equal enthusiasm treated the whole theme and plot as a frantic way to satirize and parody the whole idea of right-wing disciplinarianism and the glory and fondness some folks attach to military life, war, patriotism and the authoritarian state. Verhoeven came from way left to a plot that supposedly came from the far right. The film is quite a spectacle, really.


Kandahar: Mohsen Makhmalbaf (film: 2003)

Surprisingly, this film is the only attempt so far by a director (or writer), to use a fascistic Islamist state as a setting for a Dystopian tale. Islamists crave and pray (also pray!), for reestablishing the “glory of Islam” (witnessed during the rule of the religion’s first five kalifs fourteen hundred years ago). They want to do so through Islamic Revolutions and imposing the rule of Sharia. In the modern world only post-Shah Iran is a related example, but ironically, Islamic Republics like Pakistan and Sudan and (especially) the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia should be able to supply some excellent ideas and insights to anyone wanting to write a fictional account of an Islamist Dystopia.
However, talented Iranian filmmaker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, aptly takes perhaps the darkest and most violent of the living Islamist Dystopias, (the former Taleban-ruled Afghanistan), to construct a horrifying and disturbing (and yet touching), celluloid tale of the horrors of a land reigned by a group of fanatics claiming to represent “true Islam.”

There are still many Muslims who mourn the loss of the Taleban. However, once you witness (more than just watch), Kandahar, you would at least feel that they should get their heads examined (if not chopped!).

But in relating the horrors of such a society, and all of its violent contradictions, fanaticism and savagery, Makhmalbaf keeps a stable, subtle pace, almost treating the film like an open, objective docudrama about repressed, war torn and crippled people waiting for chartered UN planes to parachute their monthly cargo of artificial limbs.

Kandahar is a heartbreaking film. It’s just too real. And too close to home.