The Horror of a Dystopian Society Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

The Horror of a Dystopian Society - Essay Example The category of dystopian films is closely related to that of post-apocalyptic film and dystopian societies often arise in the awake of natural or manmade disasters that have led to the destruction of the societies that came before them. However, dystopian societies can also arise as a natural consequence of the direct historical extension of certain flaws in the current-day society with no intervening catastrophe. Recent films with dystopia inclinations include Gattaca (1997), 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Equilibrium (2002), Minority Report (2002), Banlieue 13(District 13, 2004), Casshern (2004), V for Vendetta (2005), and Children of Men (2006). These more recent dystopian movies have become particularly clear in the way their dystopian features are not predictions so much as satirical commentaries on the present world of consumer capitalism. This paper examines the genre of dystopia with a view to understanding its common traits, ideological valences and historical specificity. Although the term dystopia predated 1900, dystopia became recognized as a literature genre during the twentieth century and has not lost its hold on the society’s imagination, as evidenced by recent films such as The Island, V for Vendetta and Children of Men. Introduction A utopia is an imaginary society that dreams of a world in which the social, political and economic problems of the real present have been solved or at least in which effective mechanisms for the solutions to these problems are in place. A dystopia on the other hand, is an imagined world in which the dream has become a nightmare. It is also known as anti-utopias. Dystopias are often designed to critique the potential negative implications of certain forms of utopian thought. However, dystopia films have a strong satirical dimension that is designed to warn against the possible consequences of certain tendencies in the real world of the present (Thomas and Booker, 2009, pg. 65). After a flurry of utopian fictions at the end of the nineteenth century, dystopian fiction became particularly prominent in the twentieth century, when suspicions of utopian solutions to political and social problems became increasingly strong as those problems grew more and more complicated and as events such as the rise of fascism in Europe seemed to cast doubt on the whole Western enlightenment. While utopian societies are designed to enable the maximum fulfilment of individual human potential, dystopian societies impose oppressive conditions that interfere with that fulfilment. These oppressive conditions are usually extensions or exaggerations of conditions that already exist in the real world, allowing the dystopian film to critique real world situations by placing them within the DE familiarization context of an extreme fictional society. In a dystopian society, the citizenry are forced to think alike, either by the use of drugs, by force or even if necessary mind control. It is synonymous with oppression, corrup tion and limited human rights Dystopian fiction films tend to focus on certain key motifs and ideas that in one way or another involve an opposition between social control and individual desire. In the dystopian society or state, however, social control generally has the upper hand.