"Future almost Lost" essay discussion

The main argument of 'Future Almost Lost' is, finally, as the title says, that the future is not lost, but with a big footnote of 'yet'. A big part of the argument is that dystopian sci-fi films can provide maneuvering to the outside (the future is always 'outside' of Now) of present ideological dead-locks, opening up new possibilities for the societies they are supposed to reflect. In addition to this,  dystopian sci-fi, 'affective' audiovisuals, its argued, submerge the viewer more profoundly in the dystopian world than any underpinning thematic devices; which may be why so many dystopian films have a low degree of characterization, with characters that usually mostly talk in witticisms, while the surrounding environment is often very detailed and interesting. In connection to this, this audio-visual submersion can open up the 'body' to 'intensities' that have 'biopolitical' and ethical implications contained within themselves. Since dystopian are almost always located somewhere in the future, its argued that these openings of potential in the viewer offer ways out of the impasses of the present, to circumvent or prevent the dystopian future from happening. One aspect of this discussed in the final section relating to what aliens and the alien voice mean in film, i.e., by the generation of radically new or 'radically alternative' affects, dystopian sic-fi film, even if it is obscene and horrifying, opens the viewer up to new ways of feeling and seeing, or even opens the viewer up to be as a 'body without organs', displacing the viewer into a 'counter-hegemonic' space where there is potential to be 'born again into/through sensation'. 

"A World at Risk" essay discussion

In "A World At Risk: Unreliable Media and the Culture of Fear", Monica Martin argues that in this time of planetary crises of almost every kind, the mass media often function as distortion, pacification, and misinformation devices. She interweaves her arguments and presentation of information mainly around the two films Children of Men and V for Vendetta. But she also incorporates information to deepen her argument from texts like Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Contextualizing current political events within the dystopias and control societies of the films, she suggests these two films offer powerful and useful counter-narratives for our media-anchored, oppressive political atmosphere of total uncertainty. In the time we are living in, the "second modernity" & "world risk society", Martin argues for a wake-up call to the nature and workings of the media, and how they often support the dominant corporate political power elite while trying to appear to be presenting information neutrally. Like the landscape they generate a continuous fuzz in front of, the media themselves are a continuous war zone. 

'The Hunger Games'

Although my feeling about The Hunger Games was that it was mostly CGI crap, annoyingly obvious spectacle, teensploitation, and not worth watching, I don’t understand how or why it became such a popular thing. Is it a sign of how deeply entrenched so many teens/young adults are in a media-loop closed-circuit, that it can suck them in at any small amount of signifier or prompting from a film as  cheesy and reliant on sleight of hand as The Hunger Games? Or is it that a film like The Hunger Games, however superficially, touches on something on a deeper level for a lot of ‘young adults’? I don't know, but the film often had a feeling of subliminal invitation to consensual emotional delusion; identifying with Katniss is not because Jennifer Lawrence had convincing plastic surgery, or any of the scenes had any feeling of emotional authenticity, but because most of the tropes are familiar rehashings of things that have been seen and have been emotionally effective thousands and thousands of times before. Its terrifying that so many people are so completely bogged down in mediated mind-loops that any of it is taken seriously, or that parents allow their children’s consciousness to be crammed with the affective garbage that the film emanates from the screen. I would say a film like The Hunger Games (existential spiritual hunger, in the case of the audience?) only contributes to the real dystopian problems of the landscape we already occupy; ‘ideological inoculation’ and nothing else.

The Hunger Games depicts a North America after a continent-wide civil war. The dress of the characters in the district from which Katniss came have a Puritan, Protestant, pilgrim-like appearance; in some way an Old America trope, or even banking on a subconscious nostalgia for a more 'pure' America? The camera work is often deliberately shaky and chaotic, and often cross-cutting quickly across the crowd, Katniss, and other scenery. I understand the intention of this was to draw the viewer emotionally head-long into the hectic atmosphere around The Hunger Games, where the ‘tributes’ are like gladiators fighting to the death. Often though it seemed like the tricky, lightning-quick camera work was more trying to gloss over cracks in narrative flow or the production design,  not allowing or wanting the viewer to think or see too much. Too much neat but intentional attempts of connecting the dots for the audience, so as to make them 'like' the movie more; too much drawing-into emotional complicity in cheap (though probably huge budget) spectacle. Hollywood filmmakers don't get paid based on how well a movie prospectively will do, though I'm sure a lot of work went into pushing its success over the top, but on how high a film's budget is. Filmmaking almost seems  like legalized criminal behavior sometimes in its manipulations of entire populations. 

Even though the film was intending to depict the decadence and pomposity of the Capitol, it only seemed like for all the effort it must have taken to do this, that the film itself came across as decadent and pompous: not a critique of wealth and power, but an expository for it. Nothing formed into a coherent or interesting vision. Nothing really is left to chance; the ending is right there from the beginning, just some thrilling visuals, action scenes, and emotional filler have to be plopped around inside the middle. PlaySkool dystopian collusion for already-ADDisordered young adults immersed in an already-dead U.S.A. culture that is as decadent and anti-reality as the moneyed power of The Hunger Games. How many experts were brought in to help the filmmakers achieve their aim of total-impact on the young adult market? The film stinks like a high school popularity contest, but they succeeded in their marketing strategies, sticking in a teenybopper dystopia to help control the fears of an emotionally disturbed young. 

The Road film discussion

The Road was a devastating dystopian film, but almost in the opposite way than the other dystopias in the other films so far; 1984 had a similar filthiness and bleakness to it, but in Tom Hillcoat's film, there is no government breathing down anyone's neck; no technological manipulations or oversight of any kind. There's a total absence of government or order at all; the terror of living in this dystopia is that or surviving moment to moment, never knowing what will happen, where not one thing is certain. We are put right away into the aftermath of some planetary catastrophe, the nature of which is never made explicit. The landscape is barren; cities and residential areas are in the same state of burnt-out devastation. The dominant colors during entire film are murky greys and blacks. As with other effectively convincing dystopias, this depiction of the future is frightening because is contains real potentials for what the future could look like. There is overwhelming evidence that there is a planetary ecological meltdown already happening; a sequence of events like the simultaneous outbreak of global war at the same time as ecological meltdown could bring human beings back into a situation of pre-Stone Age (post-Anthropocene) conditions, not far different from those shown in The Road. As in Soylent Green, if it comes to it and there are no other options, its likely human beings would end up resorting to eating other human beings instead of starving; even the kind of horrifyingly cruel cannibalism that the movie depicts. 

Cinematically, the film utilizes a great amount of different shots to create a feeling of convincing realism and effective narrative flow: using panning deep-focus long shots to capture the dreary devastated landscape. Also at times, connecting the film to it's beginning, the film uses flashbacks to tell how the boy and the man lost their mother and wife. I would say the film is far superior to a film like Children of Men, even though Children of Men has highly stylized, technologized cinematography or even an extremely detailed production design. The reason might be that Children of Men is too stylized, too postmodern in the way it depicts its dystopia. The Road gets into the ugly,  filthy, dehumanized, desperate reality of dystopia in a better way, showing the utter vulnerability and mortality of a man and his son under the most dire existential conditions. It's like in The Road, humanity is back in completely pre-civilized times; the soundtrack of the film often adds to this horror of total vulnerability; through the mourning, melancholy of the music there are often echoes of noise like faint animal calls coming through the wilderness. The man and the boy aren't given names, which adds to the depersonalized animalism of their situation; "In these times there is no room for luxury", the old man says. The desperation is at such a pitch that suicide potentially could have been the end of the characters at many different points. A terrifying implication of the film is the extremes human beings can be pushed to if the circumstances are dire enough; there are enough examples through history and daily life. We should hope society and the social contract never break down to the extreme showed in The Road.

Truman Show discussion

"You never had a camera in my head": 

The Truman Show

It's coincidental that both the Truman Show and Gattaca both use 1950's U.S.A. tropes. In both of the films, the dystopia could be said to be a personal dystopia for the main characters, but maybe not for everyone else. Jim Carrey plays a grotesque caricature of the overly, almost psychotically friendly role of an ultra-sterilized 1950/1960's Main Street, U.S.A., industrally-produced compulsory-positivity conformist. The film does a good job recreating a creepily fake, bright-white and pastel, flannel shirt and overcoat, vaccinated white-bread world. But being the focus of an entire TV show, inside of a gigantic metal bubble stage set, Truman never had the chance to understand what was really going on, and starts to question the whole thing after a few accidents. As the artiste director of the Truman Show says, "We believe the world we are presented with". Although I think the film ultimately seems to function in much the same way the Truman Show does, as emotional manipulation, affective and social control, and spectacle, it provides an interesting scenario in terms of dystopia. Like the director says to Truman's failed lover and liberator, "The world out there, the world you live in, is the sick world"; he believed he created a perfect world for Truman, protecting him from the chaos of the outside world. Truman was the unfortunate guinea pig unknowingly living inside a completely artificial society.  His friend tells an 'interviewer' that "nothing you see is fake, merely controlled" about the Truman Show. Strangely enough this might be the underlying truth about 21st Century U.S.A., too.  

Truman’s father ‘drowns’ right in front of him (all televised), disappearing forever from his sight until he reappears on the set 20 years later. His reappearance intensifies the series of accidents that lead to Truman totally disbelieving in the world he could only take more or less for granted up until that day. His father, though, just becomes integrated again into the spectacle that is driving Truman crazy, and which he is running from, and tells Truman nothing useful. Truman becomes determined to find the truth that first left a permanent impression in his mind, which was given to him by the woman he really loved. He can’t cross the bridges that lead off of the island because of his father’s faked death, though. The film does a good job showing how casually creepy and cruel the director is: even Truman's fears are based on an artificial incident. But it seemed to confirm the feeling that the film finally does not add up to much, when Jim Carrey at the end repeats his “And in case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night”, in what seemed to bring full-circle the fact that the Truman Show was 'only' entertainment, intending somehow to leave the audience reassured that heroes will always triumph, no matter what. The deeper ideological problem suggested here being, "You don't really have to do anything; the spectacle will take care of it for you". Which leaves the Truman Show out of the realm of a 'critical dystopia'. 

The film often uses the surveillance camera perspective to show how Truman is being unknowingly watched. The film does a good job to create a disconcerting effect of exposing the manipulative under-layer of Truman's 'reality', by sometimes zooming into a product, interspersing the artificial layer of advertising right in front of Truman's eyes. I think these things are good metaphors for the kind of dystopian world that exists now. "Something happens and it can drive you crazy ... not even worth thinking about". The distractive-brainwashing strategies used by Truman's 'best friend' seem like the ideologic imploring of consumer capitalism speaking for itself: ignore contradictions, gloss over ugly points, relax and enjoy; tomorrow will be another day. Truman rebels against all this in his kind of counter-narrative, escaping his own personal dystopia,  and enters into the real world through the exit door. In terms of a consumer-capitalist dystopian landscape, the Truman show offers many good instances of evincing the conditions of entrapment and control that forces of Power seek to instantiate through daily life, which people are often unable to see clearly or explicate; therefore, "Something happens and it can drive you crazy ... not even worth thinking about". But, I think the Truman Show fails in this (if it even is really attempting to address any of these problems), and steps only inside of the realm of entertainment, and does not seek or hope to criticize; in this way, it is uncritical, and I believe functions as just another object of 'ideological inoculation' which keeps citizens in places of passive consumerist habits. Like the final scene where the security guards don't really care about anything: "What else is on?"

Gattaca film discussion

Gattaca often reminded me of the feel and quality of mid-90's movies that I used to watch as a kid. It has a slickness and a sentimentality to it that movies from that time had; I don't know if they do anymore. I don't mean it in a nostalgic way; there's too many reasons to be critical of the ideology of films. Like: why does the future the film is supposed to be showing look and feel like wealthy 1950's post-war U.S.A.? It's sci-fi but I'm not sure it's dystopian. The relegation of Ethan Hawke's character Vincent to a life that is relatively pre-determined because of his genetic 'inferiority' is more like a variation on themes that are a constant in the world, e.g. the unfairness of privilege.

The film itself was much more slow paced than most of the other films we have watched so far; much more conversational and quiet. Sometimes it did feel overly sentimental, like in the beginning family scenes; and the score often seemed over the top; in that part at least. Which made it seem almost like Elizabethan sci-fi. Hawke often narrates the film in voice-over. There were some good lines in parts of the film, like "genetic identity becomes a valuable commodity", and "you can go anywhere with this guy's double-helix under your arm". In a way, it seems that in Gattaca genetics takes the place of money or privilege. The In-Valids are subject to scorn and abuse from the genetically superior; the police officer had to bear what was being yelled at him by Jerome in his wheelchair, just because Jerome had the power to say whatever he wanted with impunity. Like other, or all, dystopian or sci-fi films, privilege and power were a dominant theme in Gattaca.

In the essay "Dystopia and Histories", the authors "identify a deeper and more totalizing agenda in the dystopian form insofar as the text is built around the construction of a narrative of the hegemonic order and a counter-narrative of resistance". Gattaca does do this, though is it really dystopian, I don't know. Wikipedia calls the film "biopunk", which may be more accurate that dystopian. Many people will never reach the top echelons of society because of their genetic makeup, but the great majority of people never do in this world too; so the film doesn't really veer in the dystopian direction that much, in ways that THX-1138 or 1984 do. Gattaca does have that mixture that’s a kind of 'critical utopia', where apparently, at least for a small minority, genetic engineering has reached the point where a person can grow to be some kind of Ubermensch. But the film while showing the unfairness of this ‘hegemonic order’ is a ‘counter-narrative of resistance’, in how Vincent overcomes this apparently non-circumventable system based on genetic predisposition, and finally achieves his dream.

There were parts of the film that did have poignancy. In how people like the doctor and Irene conspire to help Vincent fulfill his dream, that seemed to say people often are very good even in the face of hegemonic systems of oppression or exclusion, and find ways to circumvent unjust policies or world-views. Irene could have hated Vincent for impersonating someone he wasn't, or could have had some autonomous response of disgust that she had made love to a person who is, as an In-Valid, somehow less fully human than her. The doctor could have turned Vincent in at the last moment, or even anytime; but he had known all along somehow that Vincent wasn’t Jerome, but apparently admired Vincent for doing what he was doing because he had hopes for his own son. And I guess in these ways the film shows that even in degrading systems that can corrupt or unjustifiably oppress people, there’s an urge for solidarity and kindness.

John Hickman essay discussion

 

In John Hickman's essay the "Rise and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Drug Dystopia", Hickman explores themes and information based around seven dystopian-fiction novels that center around a drug that has one kind of effect or another. Only one of the novels, John Brunner's "The Stone that Never Came Down", is based on a drug that has a positive or liberating effect. The remaining six novels use drugs in their fiction as an enslaving or destructive power, that pacify or destroy the populations or individuals that use them. Hickman's main argument, or inquiry, is: why does the important subgenre of the drug-dystopia contain so few explorations of this theme? It's not as if the pharmaceutical industry has backed off or become less of a major force, as Hickman discusses. He concludes that "The best explanation is that neither writers nor their readers now perceive drugs as sufficiently intriguing or sufficiently technologically threatening as material for gripping drama", but that "Ordinary drugs in the form of chemical compounds are now so prosaic" and "Drugs of all sorts are already so commonplace that many would find improbable a threat of increased levels of medication to induce mass conformity or political demobilization". While it may not make for great drama (which might be part of the problem, if entertainment is a kind of drug), it seems that Hickman might have missed an important point. The normalization of all kinds of drugs might play a big role in glossing over serious social problems, and drugs might go a long way in helping individuals function in a dys-functional society. What if all the anti-depressants, anti-anxiety pills, and sleep aids disappeared? There is probably lots of room for exploring that scenario, where, if these now commonplace drugs were removed, the more banal and normalized horrors or dysphoric pressures of everyday life might be able to become more visible. As Hickman hints at, we might already occupy a dystopic landscape where drugs play a dominant role, if only if that role is in aiding bewildered individuals in coping with the tremendous stress and contradictions of life today.