"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.

Minority Report discussion

Minority Report is very obviously a science-fiction story, based in a near-future ultra-hi-tech Washington D.C., where "Pre-Cogs" literally can see the future; based on these visions, agents of the Department of Pre-Crime are able to intercept a murderer before they can follow through with their intentions. Whether the film depicts a dystopian scenario though is up for debate. Because of Pre-Crime and the 'talent' of the Pre-Cogs, i.e. scientifically engineered human beings, the murder rates fell to zero. There is truth in the argument that a character makes for Pre-Crime, that murder is the greatest affront on the "metaphysical fabric that binds us all." Pre-Crime would seem to be some kind of God-send if it was flawless, which it seems it is in the beginning of the film; but slowly it becomes known that the Pre-Cogs and Pre-Crime have serious flaws.

John Anderton, who whole-heartedly believed in Pre-Crime, is shocked and infuriated when he learns about the Minority Report; he comes to know he may have, from the very beginning of Pre-Crime, been wrongfully accusing innocent people of crimes they never had even committed yet. Not only that, but the accused aren't sent to a prison, which seems humane in the face of being jammed inside colossal preservation tubes, with no trial. In this way, in conjunction with the fact that this whole society has scanning apparatuses almost everywhere, so that "freedom" is virtually impossible except in some deeply mediated consumerist kind of way, may be why it qualifies as a dystopia.

The CGI in the film at times seemed surprisingly dated; I’d seen the film before and the CGI and effects in the film looked and felt extremely complex and advanced. Most of the time though the film maintains its cool and its quick pace seamlessly, utilizing shots from a multitude of perspectives and in many different ways. Though maybe from having seen it before, it started to feel as if the film was trying to draw the viewer along manipulatively quick and using a hectic amount of angle shots and fast-paced action to patch up its weaker spots. It’s easy to get caught up in the dazzling visuals, detailed set, and end up getting emotionally manipulated. The dialogue, like many of the other films, is almost all witticisms, quips, and suggestion. The story around John’s son, though, and Tom Cruise’s acting, often is very convincing and well done.

During the scene where John and the Pre-Cog have made it to the hotel and finally found the man who supposedly abducted and killed John’s son, the film took on an absurd tone when these holes in the screenplay started becoming too obvious; the Pre-Cog supposedly screams in terror on the bed on all fours, and John and the killer wrestle around. It was disappointing to start noticing these problems and the patchy narrative devices, because when I’d seen the film before it maintained it’s unique ambiance of a very high-quality sci-fi story. It’s interesting that many of the films so far have that element of quick-paced patchwork narration, attempts at dazzling visuals, and low characterization; and also the element of a disillusioned official of some kind having to come to terms with the deeper realities of the society around them, which they before did not see or understand. Overall, though, Spielberg's depiction of Minority Report remains an impressively detailed and interestingly worth-while film.

Soylent Green film/reading discussion

Soylent Green is a 1973 film remake of the 1966 dystopian novel Make Room!Make Room!, regarding overpopulation in specifically New York City. The film has a cheapo-1970s feel to it, and Charlton Heston’s acting is often unbearable, but the film does a decent job to convey concerns found in the novel. There are stairways in decrepit buildings coated with human beings with nowhere else to sleep, food riots after rationing shortages and the poor rioters are scooped up into the backs of dump-trucks, and one of the best scenes where Thorn (a name that doesn’t help the film’s general feeling of mild sleaze) manages to sneak into the Soylent Green factory itself and sees the truth behind the manufacture of Soylent Green: piles of white-covered corpses being liquidated into food-form. 

The scenario of the film and novel unfortunately does not seem very far-fetched: corporations, who by default or otherwise are in control of food production, decide upon, or are forced to take an extremely immoral decision due to extreme overpopulation, making food that is made of dead human beings to feed the “wretched refuse” that is the “teeming masses” of hopeless, living human beings. Would many people even want to know what it is that they are eating? Even people today, in times when, in the United States at least, there is an overabundance of food choices, often people want to remain ignorant of what it is they are eating. So its plausible to assume even if, and its left indeterminate at the end of the film if the public will ever know Soylent Green is made of dead bodies, people are starving and desperate, that they would choose to eat Soylent Green despite knowing what it is. The film makes a great effort to show the suffering and inhuman misery that the people of a hopelessly overpopulated New York City are going through. Which might not have been far from the real suffering of NYC during the time period the film was made. 

In each of the films and the novels that they are based on, and also the novel Feed discussed in the Fahrenheit 451 essay, a major theme or facet is a dominating power of corporations/governments, and their power of being able to maintain a total manipulation over unsuspecting people. This is the same too in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which is also discussed in the essay. Soylent Green does a good job of showing the differences between the realities of the rich and the poor; how in the posh apartment of the murdered elite William R. Simonson things can be found like soap, liquor, beef, and real vegetables, while out in the world these things are impossible to find and the great majority of people are even being fed dead human beings. 

Fahrenheit 451 film/reading discussion

Fahrenheit 451 as a film was a painfully bad attempt to recreate Bay Bradbury's famous dystopian novel; a very corny 1960s-style take that does no justice to the book itself. The stiffness of the shots themselves often appear to be trying too hard to seem flashy or adept, e.g. as the firemen toss the bag of books from the balcony and it falls in slow motion as if to suggest “Oh no, they’ve thrown them from the balcony, how ruthless!”. Then the bag explodes when it hits the ground and they have to re-collect all the books again to put onto the firepit, which doesn’t make sense at all and adds to the unintentional comical aspect of the film. The comedic interpretations of the firemen's costumes, and the very flat, robot-like acting, made the film almost not worth watching, along the lines of worst kinds of cheapo sci-fi.

Maybe the film has just not aged well, being made in 1966, but THX-1138 was made only 5 years later, and still texturally, visually, and sonically held up very well for over more than 40 years. So as an adaptation of a very famous dystopian novel, however contestable the novel’s premises about the importance of books being the basis for a dystopian world are, the film does not do justice at all to Bradbury’s vision and ideas. The film betrays a total lack of authentic imagination that a film like THX-1138 has, and only has very cartoonish, caricatured ideas about what the future will look like, which makes the film almost depressing, but also making it clear why there was so much to rebel against in the 60's, too. The film doesn't transcend the conformity of the 60's, which is what the book is almost ultimately supposed to be about: what it means to be an individual. 

In the essay ‘Compare/Contrast: Media Culture, Conformism, and Commodification in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and M.T. Anderson’s Feed’, a very interesting point is made in relation to “the power of the culture industry to mold the tastes of it’s audiences”, so it creates almost a world complete unto itself, like a closed circuit, but is taken for granted as Reality. But if television could provide “the same infinite detail” and aesthetic depth as literature, maybe the majority of people could experience directly what was only previously written about. Bradbury suggests the great majority of people never experience what is contained in literature because they never read or are able to read the great works, and because of their lack of mental development, they are easily controlled, molded only into “ideal consumers” that are conditioned to respond any kind of corporate prompts through technological media.

'Children of Men' film discussion

 

Children of Men is set in a Britain of the near future, in the midst of global warfare and strife, and also years after a crisis of infertility among women; no babies have been born for over a decade and a half. The action is almost literally centered around the main character Theo, as nearly the entirety of the film is shot from a hand-held, shaky, voyeuristic perspective, and we view the surrounding action based on what is happening around Theo. The film itself feels very much like a videogame vignette. The vivid, sharp visuals; the mechanical, fast-paced, superficial dialogues; the camera suddenly and voyeuristically tilting this way or that to expose another action-scene taking place from another angle; all contribute to the sense the film texturally is not very different from a videogame vignette. 

Throughout the film, elements of a Big Brother, 1984-style techno-authoritarianism are interspersed: in the midst of total decay, chaos and poverty are clean, hi-tech screens advertising or spreading anti-immigrant propaganda. The anti-immigrant, or illegal immigrant, policy is so heavy handed in the film that immigrants from every corner of the planet are kept in cages and transported to prisoner camps. As always, the wealthy in the film are living in extreme luxury, though popping pills, and the poor suffering the full effects of the global meltdown: a trope found in nearly every dystopian film and essay so far.

Often the camera spins around in an ‘eyeline match’ shot, following the direction of Theo’s gaze, suggesting total immersion in the action of the film. In this way the film almost seems to be unconsciously mimicking videogames. Emotional or human depth of any kind isn’t there, or is only hinted at; though that is a common facet of dystopian fictions. Instead the film focuses on short, choppy conversation, and in detailing the environment and action within the mutilated environment. Again, there is the suggestion of respite from the horror and chaos of the dystopian society to be found in nature, or symbolized at least by nature; in this instance, at the hidden home in the forest of the old science-wizard hippie. Many times the film hints at, that in the midst of global meltdown, invoking old traditional spirituality, in almost a New-Age kind of way: for example, Hindu language and ‘OMMM…’ after Julia had been killed and laid out in the forest.

The film is very successful in creating a devastated landscape, where people from all over the world are being hunted down, imprisoned, or killed by black-outfitted military personnel. Is it a coincidence that the final skirmish scene, the Uprising, happens right after or during an Islamic protest march (which much like the rest of the actions in the film has no background context, but comes out of nowhere, going to nowhere)? It seems that a dystopian film like Children of Men, with its title apparently suggesting some kind of profundity, might end up serving as a kind of dystopian ‘realism’ of some kind, and which may ‘ideologically inoculate’ its audience of probably younger viewers (videogame players) in many ways that end up ‘enclosing them within the very social realities they disparagingly oppose’(Naturalism and Dystopia). This may be the case if only in utilizing the videogame format visually and texturally and ideologically in a way that seems to leave people feeling comfortable or ‘enclosed’; this is also shown in the kind of soppy sentimental witty-banter the characters often display. So its not quite clear at what level, if any, Children of Men functions in a didactic, cautionary, or contributive way.

Essay analysis: "Where the prospective horizon is omitted"

The argument of the essay "Where the Prospective Horizon is Omitted" seems to be in part, as the title suggests, that dystopias are 'bad places' of little to no hope, no possibility of improvement, and no "prospective horizon' is seen or felt past which exists a life that is different and better. Wegner wants to argue that these dystopian facets, with their basis often in reality and real problems, should not be 'naturalized' or taken for granted, because, as the opening epigraph says, the Real is "an unfinished world", and 'the only realism' is 'an enormous future'. Wegner wants to argue for hope and imagining a better future even in the face of dystopian scenarios, which, due to political circumstances or otherwise, might omit 'the prospective horizon'. For example in Fight Club, where schizophrenic split and attempted suicide are outcomes of desperation against a life dominated by 'Post-Fordist' corporate namelessness and 'the global neo-liberal onslaught', and were the only or best perceived options to oppose a hated life. Wegner wants to argue that the possibility of radical insight or transformation and new political collectivities are always 'tendential and latent', and dystopian fictions should not ostensibly convey a 'naturalism' without critique, because without being a critical dystopia, what may appear to be a challenge to or exposing of harsh existing realities can have the effect of 'ideologically inoculating' an audience into reproducing 'the very social realities [a dystopian fiction] disparagingly opposes'. Therefore, a dystopian account or fiction without an impulse toward any 'utopian present future' is potentially conservative and can end up serving the kinds of political or other forces which it previously had the impulse to oppose. Therefore, the argument seems to be that dystopian scenarios should never be taken for granted as a kind of 'realism', or appear to convey a 'naturalism', because the window toward 'the prospective horizon' and positive transformation, no matter how dire the circumstances political or otherwise might appear, should never be closed.

The Handmaid's Tale film/essay discussion

Cinematically, The Handmaid’s Tale for me was very unsuccessful. The film itself feels much more and too obviously trying to illustrate ideas and falls flat in attempting to create a believable dystopian world; THX-1138, 1984, and Fight Club all succeeded in doing this very well. Even though both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale were made in roughly the same era, 1984 doesn’t have any sense of being an “80’s” or cheesy 90’s film, whereas The Handmaid’s Tale unfortunately carried for me a sense of redundant drabness all the way through, which took away from any of the ideas or significance it tried to portray, e.g. extrapolating on the possibilities of domination by ultra-ring-wing evangelical Christian fundamentalism, women being more or less sex slaves, etc. The film was obviously very detailed and tried to re-create scenarios from within the novel, but never crosses the line into a convincing or interesting depiction of this scenario. It often feels too obvious what is happening is being staged, whereas in the films mentioned above this sense was not there, at least for me.

In the essay “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Critical Reception”, there is an interesting point about “the novel’s deeper interest in the process of narrative itself, a process repeatedly fascinating to Offred”. Since her husband was killed right in front of her, and she was taken away from her child who was left on a cold mountain, then sent into a life of virtual sex slavery, constant vigilance, and dehumanization, Offred probably did have the need to tell herself stories in an attempt to stay sane, though apparently she knew they were only fictions she created herself. This theoretical depth is absent in the film.

It is interesting to think of the film as an extrapolation of the potential of Christian fundamentalists taking control of the United States, where there is no sex except for procreation, where conformity and mind control are enforced through creepy Puritan entreaty to emotion rather than intelligence, e.g. as in the scene where the handmaid’s surround and kill a man who was a political rebel and not a rapist, then the girl walks calmly away saying “have a good day”, with blood on her face. It’s a good example of a kind of dystopia where intelligence has been subverted to the point where medieval ritual with wild appeals to emotion is reinstated, combined hideously with a sleek modern technological environment. Atwood, in a similar way to Fight Club, might have touched and extrapolated on potentials already present that could lead to American fascism, which might be why as stated in the essay that The Handmaid’s Tale “deserves an honored space on the small shelf of cautionary tales that have entered modern folklore”, and account for its popularity.

The film might not have been as well done as the others, and the score too falls flat with none of the emotional depth or suggestiveness of 1984, especially considering Offred’s predicament of totally losing her life and her previous identity, but the ideas are still useful in thinking about where the present could go with the current dominance of ultra-right-wing puritan Christian fundamentalism in U.S. politics today.