Creators of dystopian sci-fi are as shocked by the events of 2020 as you are
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
"V for Vendetta" director James McTeigue said the decision to pick 2020 as the year in which his film was set was a coincidence.
Neither he nor the screenwriters — Lana and Lilly Wachowski, who adapted the original 1982 comic book series by Alan Moore and David Lloyd about a masked revolutionary (Hugo Weaving) and his protege (Natalie Portman) pitted against an authoritarian regime ruling Britain — could have predicted that so many parallels from the near-future-set allegory would arrive this soon.
"When we set the film, we were just abstracting it into the future," said McTeigue, whose film is getting a timely rerelease in theaters Friday.
"Look at the Wikipedia entry for 'V for Vendetta' and it reads, 'The world is in turmoil and warfare, the United States fractures as a result of a prolonged second civil war and a pandemic of the St. Mary's Virus is ravaging Europe,'" McTeigue said. "That's the synopsis written 15 years ago or whenever."
"Is it good fortune [in timing] or something that happens every once in a while in history?" asked the Australian filmmaker. "I don't know."
Either way, the real-life developments of 2020 are proving uncomfortably familiar to many creators of dystopian science fiction.
The genre has been a popular form of catharsis for audiences slogging through their present existences since before H.G. Wells tinkered with "The Time Machine" at the end of the 19th century. Written 35 years before its title, George Orwell's "1984" posited a totalitarian world full of mass surveillance that already bore a resemblance to Stalinist Russia of his era.
In recent decades, movies have also plumbed our fears of a future in which humanity has been devastated by overpopulation ("Soylent Green" in 1973), societal collapse ("Mad Max" in 1980), technology run amok ("The Terminator" in 1984 and "The Matrix" in 1999) and a turn to authoritarianism ("Blade Runner" in 1982 and "The Hunger Games" in 2012).
For the most part, though, those cinematic visions of a post-apocalyptic future have been more about popcorn than the kernels of truth. And in the pages of books like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (2006) and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985), the dark visions laid out for the future seemed years away at worst.
Then the calendar turned to 2020.
"A lot of societal norms have stopped," McTeigue said. "A lot of what we expected of government has completely changed. The paradigm has been completely been turned on its head."
The global Covid-19 pandemic, the likes of which hasn't been seen since the 1918 flu pandemic, blanketed the planet and has killed more than 230,0000 people in the United States alone.
Wildfires unprecedented in scope and damage scorched Australia and the West Coast of the United States — a coming attraction to a bleak future marked by climate change.
Democratic norms are teetering across the globe, as exemplified by the Trump administration's continued disregard for the checks and balances that have been the bedrock of the American political system.
Protesters of racial injustice have taken to the streets across the U.S. and elsewhere, often coming into conflict with police and government troops.
And heading into Tuesday's U.S. presidential election, there's an overwhelming fear in the zeitgeist that it's only going to get worse.
"To me, if 2020 were a movie, you just wouldn't believe it," said Scott Westerfeld, author of the young adult dystopian franchise "Uglies," which is currently being adapted into a film for Netflix. "Because it doesn't just seem to be one apocalypse: It's not just the pandemic, it's also government dysfunction and it's murder hornets. I spent the early part of the year in Australia, where there were incredible fires."
"It seems like we have a lot of things piling up on each other in a way that wouldn't really be believable in a serious apocalypse movie or fiction," Westerfeld said.
Back in 1976, writer John Wagner co-created the comic book character of Judge Dredd with editor Pat Mills with a goal to entertain, not envision. Climate change, a deadly pandemic, the fall of democracy and automation taking away jobs from humans were all baked into the story, but largely as a backdrop for the titular hero's violent adventures.
What Wagner and Mills dreamed up for the British magazine, "2000 A.D." — adventures set in a future in which the irradiated landscape is pockmarked by giant crime-ridden cities policed by officers who serve as judges, juries and executioners — would grow popular enough on both sides of the pond to lead to two film adaptions, including a 1995 Sylvester Stallone vehicle.
"It was just a story, a bleak dystopian future colored, I suppose, by our own politics and the increasing dominance of the right wing, but we never thought that deeply about it at the start, or ever really expected the future it portrayed to happen," Wagner said by email. "I mean, people had more sense, hadn't they?"
American actor Sylvester Stallone stars as the titular law enforcement officer in the dystopian sci-fi film 'Judge Dredd', 1995.Richard Blanshard / Getty Images file
Wagner said he's been particularly taken aback by the degradation of democratic norms, or "a strange idiocy," as he calls it, in countries like Britain and the United States.
"Dredd was a creation of his time — it's just that his time never seems to have ended," Wagner said. "The world just keeps getting crazier."
Westerfeld set his "Uglies" books, the first of which was published in 2005, in a future where teenagers are considered "ugly" until they receive government-mandated plastic surgery to be turned into socially acceptable "pretties."
The saga presages the obsession present-day teens have with social media and selfies, but the backdrop of scarcity and fossil fuel depletion that he created has proven to be even more unsettling.
"Part of the 'Uglies' aesthetic is the assumption that 'Rusty' civilization (as our current society is dubbed in the books) didn't have forever to go, it wasn't something that was sustainable," the author explained. "The way that we use fossil fuels and the way we use every other resource available to us doesn't seem a sustainable path. And on top of that, we don't seem capable of changing our path to something that is sustainable."
"It always seemed to me that this civilization was one that was not going to ease into some other form gracefully," Westerfeld said.
Among the books that Claire Curtis, a professor of political science at the College of Charleston who specializes in dystopia, considers most prescient of this period-preapocalypse nonfiction are the Octavia Butler novels "Parable of the Sower" (1993) and "Parable of the Talents" (1998).
"A lot of people have talked about those books because in 'Parable of the Talents,' Butler has a right- wing presidential candidate whose slogan is, 'Make America great again,'" Curtis said. "Even though it was published in the 1990s, there's a clear sense of worry about climate change and a sort of societal breakdown, this notion that the United States is no longer the country that we think of it as being."
If there's a silver lining on the mushroom cloud, however, it's that the main draw of dystopian drama has always been the undercurrent of hope. As dark as the visions of autocratic futures are in films like "Blade Runner" and "The Hunger Games," respectively based on novels by Philip K. Dick and Suzanne Collins, there's always a Harrison Ford or Jennifer Lawrence around to fight the power.
Jennifer Lawrence in "The Hunger Games."Lionsgate
"What [these stories] are channeling is sort of two interrelated things," Curtis said. "There's a piece where we imagine ourselves in that possible future that causes us to feel fear, to feel dread."
"But, I think there's also a hope piece, too. This idea that, 'OK, so in the future things might be radically worse and I'm fearful right now that we're going in this direction, but I also see that in the future people are working against this radically worse possibility,'" Curtis said. "And maybe that gives me a sense that now I, too, can work to keep that future from happening."
Case in point, women have been dressing up in costumes straight out of the "The Handmaid's Tale," made popular recently through the television adaptation on Hulu, to protest the conservative encroachment on women's rights.
How Margaret Atwood's 'Handmaid' costume became a political protest symbol
As McTeigue noted, the Guy Fawkes mask in "V for Vendetta" also became a symbol of defiance at Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, during the Arab Spring protests and for the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement.
McTeigue, though, cautioned not to put too much emphasis on the prescience of "V for Vendetta." Moore and Lloyd had produced their original graphic novel as a rebuke to Thatcherite Britain; the Wachowskis and McTeigue filmed their version with the Bush administration in mind.
"Stories like 'V' and the political climate we find ourselves at the moment are cyclical," the filmmaker said.
"You always get these anomalies that pop up in our system. For whatever reason as human beings we embrace them — and then our better angels usually find a way to quell them," McTeigue said. "But we're definitely going through a period like that now."
Tags
Who is online
417 visitors
It's amazing. Mr McTeigue and the others are a bit slow on the uptake.
The Trouble with the ‘It’s Not Real Fascism’ Argument
Minimizing the threat of Trumpism ignores the lessons of Trump’s disastrous rise, and belittles the hard on-the-ground work going into Trump’s potential defeat
by Laura K. Field, The Bulwark
In recent weeks, the president of the United States has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power , has repeatedly claimed that the election outcome will be illegitimate because of massive voter fraud, and has encouraged his supporters to “ go into the polls and watch very carefully .” By a wide margin, most voters expect there will be intimidation at the polls —and indeed, it is already happening .
A US flag hangs behind US President Donald Trump as he speaks during a "Great American Comeback" rally at Bemidji Regional Airport in Bemidji, Minnesota, on September 18, 2020.
Brendan Smialowski / AFP) via Getty Images
Over the course of the last four years, after all, our institutions have been under a daily stress test, and they have not all held strong. The attorney general has repeatedly undermined the integrity of the Department of Justice. Congressional subpoenas have gone ignored. Whether or not Trump wins re-election, the country will be reckoning with the fallout from Trumpism for years to come.
Yet some writers insist in arguing that there is no cause for real alarm. From Ross Douthat in the New York Times , to the Atlantic’s Shadi Hamid , to Walter Shapiro writing for the New Republic , the message is pretty simple. Tut-tut, there-there, trust us: Trump is too incompetent to overturn the election or put democracy in peril , the institutions have held up, and much of the hysteria of recent years has been overblown. If the president had really wanted to, he could have used the pandemic to seize power . “There will be,” Douthat writes, “no Trump coup.”
This is a soothing message for an exhausted national psyche, and I certainly hope that they are right about what’s in store for us in the days ahead. But their confident insistence that the worst has passed suggests that even these very thoughtful people have failed to internalize the dangers inherent to Trumpism. It also amounts to an implicit denial of the work that has gone into attempting to defeat Trump.
T he debate about a potential Trump coup maps loosely onto another public conversation of the Trump era: the question of how to classify Trump and his administration. Judging by their actions and their aspirations, do these people count as authoritarians, wannabe tyrants, fascists, quasi-fascists, proto-fascists, or what ? Here—as with discussions surrounding racism—a lot depends on how we understand the terms at hand, but the basic question is the same: How dangerous is Trump to American democracy? You can read all about it in nuanced pieces by scholars like Samuel Moyn and Sarah Churchwell in the New York Review of Books .
Douthat has consistently challenged the idea that Trump poses an existential threat to American liberal democracy. As he put it in his recent no-coup column , “Our weak, ranting, infected-by-Covid chief executive is not plotting a coup, because a term like ‘plotting’ implies capabilities that he conspicuously lacks.” Douthat has been making some version of this argument since at least December 2015, when he wrote a column entitled “ Is Donald Trump a Fascist? ” and made a plausible case for “no.” The problem is that circumstances have dramatically changed since then, and Douthat’s basic position has not.
In the 2015 piece, Douthat argued that Trump should not be deemed a fascist, for three reasons. First off, Trump just wasn’t very serious:
Second, Douthat argued, Trump was too unhinged to appeal to the GOP: “It’s still quite likely that the Republican Party is inoculated against him. ” (Douthat cites conservative religious commitments and libertarianism as bulwarks against Trump.) Finally, a national freakout over “Trump-the-fascist” would, Douthat argued, be a distraction from the root causes of widespread civic disaffection.
I bring up this old column not to dunk on Douthat, who is very thoughtful, but because it is important to keep in mind just how astonishing the events of the last four years have been. Almost all the things that Douthat mused in 2015 would be tell-tale signs of fascism have come to be. Trump has rallied a movement of far-right intellectuals . He has mobilized paramilitary forces to take to the streets . And, of course, Trump did win the primary. I don’t blame Douthat for not anticipating the speed and depth of the GOP’s submission. But submit they did. And today, the GOP is a hollow cult of personality beholden to Trump. The party literally has no other platform .
All of this was and should remain alarming regardless of the election outcome. Indeed, my greatest worry is that the message of Douthat and the other quietists prefigures a post-election denialism on the part of conservatives that will paper over not only the worst threats posed by Trump (which Douthat can articulate ), but also the serious problems that Trumpism conceals.
It is fair to warn, as Douthat and Moyn both have, that loaded language and alarmism can lead to serial distraction and evasion of real problems. But minimizing the threat can create confusion, too. Walter Shapiro writes that “if the polls hold up on election night, Democrats can say with confidence and joy, ‘Our long national nightmare is over.’” This strikes me as awfully blithe. Is everything troubling that brought us Trump—and everything troubling that flowed from Trump—simply going to disappear if Biden wins? Will QAnon just fade away? Douthat concludes his recent column with a classic both-sides warning about dangers coming from the illiberal left (“a zealous progressive vanguard and a monopoly in the commanding heights of culture”), and concludes that for liberals not to “seed another backlash” they will need “both vision and restraint.” It strikes me as odd when conservatives speak like this given that Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee, but setting that aside: How is legislative restraint on the part of Biden Democrats going to do anything to heal the country’s deep discontent? Won’t anyone be expected to deal with the country’s actual woes?
M inimizations of the threat posed by Trumpism, and exaggerations of the leftist threat, also discount all the hard work and solidarity that have gone into fighting Trump. The idea that Trump is not a fascist (or is too incompetent to become one) implies a counterfactual world in which he did not come up against serious pushback from regular Americans across the political spectrum, time and time again. Trump’s failures—and, again, his defeat is not yet accomplished—have not simply been a matter of splendid-incompetence-meets-sound-institutions. They have also been a result of unprecedented mass activism on the part of ordinary liberals and progressives, as well as independents and Never Trump conservatives. From the women’s marches to ACA phone-banking to outrage over the child separation policy, Trump’s worst excesses have often been kept in check by the country’s citizens—often in the face of institutional failures, and certainly with very little help from the spineless GOP.
But still these writers cannot resist poking a bit of fun at the left’s excesses. Douthat writes dismissively in his recent column of how “many liberals have spent the last four years persuading themselves that their position might soon be as beleaguered as the opposition under Putin, or German liberals late in Weimar.” Walter Shapiro speaks of Democrats’ “dystopianism” and their “phantasmagoria of fears.” And Shadi Hamid quips about the entire “grift of books” that “told Americans to prepare for incoming dictatorship and permitted rich suburbanites to fantasize being French resistance fighters in World War II without any of the danger.” It’s easy enough to get caught up in this kind of mockery. But reading up on fascism and autocracy while engaging in political activism isn’t as silly as these writers make it sound. Such comments strike me as especially out-of-tune in light of how much activism since 2016 has been powered by American women .
Douthat is right when he says that reality is about to intrude on us. Soon we will have a better sense of what is in store for our democracy. But regardless of the election outcome, Trump is a symptom of much deeper civic ills—problems that aren’t about to just disappear, and that could be the precursor to something worse. As Jonathan Chait writes in his response to Douthat, Trump may be more feckless than autocratic, but he has the full support of a major party. No one should be sweeping all that under the “it wasn’t real fascism” rug.
Furthermore, the fact that millions of Americans have fought this administration is a valuable sign of civic strength, and it should be recognized as such. If Trump is defeated in November it will be thanks in no small part to progressives who were willing to compromise, to “liberal hysteria,” to Black Lives Matter organizers, and to the so-called Resistance. The people involved in those efforts deserve gratitude and respect, not dismissive call-outs and belittling Tweets.
Reality is about to intrude, it’s true, but political realities don’t just happen on their own. They are the products of action and inaction, of choice and ineptitude, of chance and of vigilance and of freedom. If the Trump era has meant anything, it’s that nothing in politics should be taken for granted anytime soon.
Pretty sure that RAH (Robert Anson Heinlein) would be pissed off at Trump.
He never cared for tinhorn dictators or fools.
Dunno... He was pretty quick with militia-ish "libertarianism".
Believe seven impossible things before breakfast and you will never be surprised.
That surprises me...
I don't think there is a question of if there will be a dystopia in the United States, it's more a question of when.
I agree. We'll either get a patriarchal plutocracy or we'll have to learn Mandarin.