Week 5: Gattaca & The Truman Show

The Truman Show & Gattaca

The Truman Show has long been one of my favorite movies although I’ve never thought of it as a dystopian film. After finishing the readings, especially Dystopias and Histories the idea occurred to me that The Truman Show wasn’t just a weird funny movie but a serious commentary on bubble societies that seclude themselves away from the rest of the changes happening in the world under the idyllic thought that their view of how life should be lived is perfect and has no need for development.  Still, in our society, is the dream of a nuclear family seeming like a golden achievement.

As a child of divorce growing up with only one parent wasn’t something that was strange or seemed lacking in any way. In fact, most of my friends had divorced parents as well. I specifically remember being sent to a counselor in the 5th grade to get “help” with being able to cope without a father figure or rather with only a mother figure. To this day I still don't think that forcing a child, or anyone really, to see a single parent as a negative experience is right. Like with Truman his missing father figure is more of a driving force for him to achieve his dream (a trip to Fiji) than if he had continued to have the “perfect” family life. This ultimately results with Truman being able to break out of his physical and metaphorical bubble of living in the same town and experiencing the same things day in and day out.

The theme of perfect imperfection continues within the film Gattaca as well. Our world is made a beautiful place by people who strive to achieve dreams that to most seem unobtainable. 

In this story our main character, Vincent, yearns to be an astronaut and explore the galaxies. Right off the bat he is restricted from joining the space program, shunned for having imperfect DNA and is socially exorcized due to being a “de-gene-erate”. Seeing these barriers as penetrable, Vincent breaks legal and social law by impersonating another person with near perfect DNA.

The most impactful relationship in the story is between Vincent and Jeromne (whom Vincent impersonates). By the end both have achieved their dreams of being greater than themselves. Vincent, by finally being able to explore and pilot through space and Jeromne for being the greatest aid to Vincent to achieve the impossible. 

Dystopias and Histories

The reading concentrates on critical utopia and dystopias where a bubble society is caused by a deep reflection on past events to prevent future wrongdoings and missteps. 

Coercion and consent use a system of checks and balances to keep the bubble of control without causing mass pits of negativity causing riots. Dystopias keep themselves in a state of neutrality by using the state or the established government to keep the economy in a slow positive or neutral bubble thus keeping business owners happy due to a general positive income. At the same time the population has no rights or even any privacy due to the need of constant surveillance that the overpowering government must maintain to keep the haze of utopia to those trapped under dystopian control.

Week 4: Children of Men & Blade Runner

Week 4:

Children of Men & Blade Runner

The first time I saw Children of Men I was probably too much of a teenager to really understand how scary and realistic a world the film created. Children of Men definitely takes a page from Handmaid’s Tale with the whole no-one-can-have-babies thing. As far as I’m concerned this is not something that is a negative. Having the entire human race become barren is something that probably could happen since we use all kind of crazy chemicals every day without even realizing or, for the most part, caring. The most interesting part to me is how much the culture in Children of Men celebrates youth since 

Blade Runner is a whole different story. The human race seems to have continued to survive long enough for science to advance to the point where they can create any food or creature thus allowing anyone to enjoy culinary delicacies and giant naturally poisonous snakes that have been created to be harmless but outwardly identical to their original image. Of course the replicants of humans don't work out as well as animals, even though the human replicants have only so many years to live due to a fail safe in their data. This is where Harrison Ford is brought in to wrangle a group of replicants that escaped their colony on a developing planet and made it back to Earth in order to try and get a longer life span from their creator.

This kind of story is almost the same as any other robot with human emotions and feelings plot. Every time they’re interesting to me because it could go so many different ways. We could be destroyed and the robots could take the throne as the dominant being. The robots could just live on another planet and leave Earth. Or the robots or replicants could live peacefully amongst the human race instead of being enslaved. History has told us time and time again that enslaving anything or any one never ends well for the owner. I’d like to hope that the replicants eventually are seen as “people” and not just objects to do our bidding. That might be a bit too positive though.

Unmaking the Real? Critique and Utopia in Recent SF Films

Failure of the utopian movement starting in the 1960s to current times, seems to have pushed culture to be more focused on dystopian or darker futures rather than more pleasant outcomes of societies current actions. Commonly I miss being able to fully relate to an assigned text due to it referencing media that I am unfamiliar with, with this text I find it a much more enjoyable read since the references made are to pretty recent movies for the most part. This text definitely has me questioning why most Sci-Fi movies are more negatively angled. Is it because our society is actually concerned with our actions? Or is it merely a trend that will fade out over time?

Week 3: The Handmaid's Tale & Fight Club

This week really focussed on the difference or possible similarities between a utopia and a dystopia. Taking a sideways approach to these words definitely helps process each film we watch. This week was especially interesting due to the combination of films. Handmaid’s Tale clearly from a woman’s POV as Fight Club is of a man’s, which causes an interesting shift when watching the films one after another. 

Handmaid’s Tale hit home a bit more than Fight Club although I’ve seen Fight Club ten or plus times. This is possibly because I was watching it for the first time and also because I am a woman. About 1/4th of the way through the film a reporter calls fertile women “our most precious resource” as if being fertile makes you property of the government. For the wealthy population the position of Handmaid is a necessity and part of a utopia in their war stricken country to keep the population from becoming only the old. For everyone else it is a forced servitude in a dystopian war ravaged country to a strange couple to then be raped and impregnated to bear their child.

Fight Club is not like Handmaid’s Tale in the sense that it isn’t an account of a current dystopia it is rather the beginning of a transformation of a dystopia to a utopia (at least for some). The narrator as he will always be called, due to the impersonal lack of a name, finds himself stuck in a bland world full of mundane tasks and subconsciously decides to change everything. By the end a massive data bank full of million’s debt records is blown up as the narrator and Marla watch as a budding new couple in a new world.

Whether it’s the creation of new life in a world thats crumbling to pieces or the lighting of a fuse that would change the world both films are about escaping from a dull broken day to day life and being able to become an individual.

Week 1: Farenheight 451 and Soylent Green

Films

Both of the films for this week I have both heard about in discussions where the participants are really trying to show how understanding and worldly they are. That being said I, myself, have never seen either film up until this week. After watching both of them I have got to say I now understand why these films are brought up in debates and conversation.

Many times science fiction seems to very closely show us what types of issues humanity is going to face in the future. Things like global warming, overpopulation, corruption, and many more are common especially in dystopian themed films. Unfortunately these are all problems the world is facing now although on a much less exaggerated scale. I’d like to hope that the good in the world is keeping any one of these issues from spiraling out of control.

In Soylent Green we are taken through a situation in which a detective, played by the great Charlton Heston, is brought in to find out what exactly happened to Soylent Corporation’s lawyer, later known as a board of director’s member, William R. Simonson. During the investigation of the lawyer’s body and estate the detective comes to the conclusion that the lawyer did not indeed commit suicide but was instead murdered.

This is where Corruption really rears it’s ugly head for our characters. Due to the world being in the over populated and completely polluted state the detective takes it’s upon himself to use the wealthy lawyer’s amenities to properly shower and eat real food. Even though we are shown Detective Thorn stealing from a dead man we don't necessarily feel bad for him due to the extreme circumstance that the society is in. Like in many dystopian stories the main character will commit an act of law breaking or the breaking of a societal rule, both of which the detective committed by stealing food and then showering at the deceased man’s apartment. This is to show the audience that even the so-called “good guy” is forced to do evil due to how bad of shape the world is in. 

We see this type of “good evil” in Farenheight 451 as well when Montag is forced to kill his superior and subdue another firefighter in order for him to escape their interrogation and his own possible murder. Although we know that both of these created worlds are evil Montag’s world seems much closer to how our own current society acts. We are already walking around with the real world version of “Seashell Radio”s via bluetooth. Most of the younger generation is also so absorbed with “documenting” their lives through pictures and 140 character summations that they cannot see the beauty of nature or spend an hour without some type of media consumption.

To me at least, Farenheight 451 was a far more terrifying and realistic social outcome. I constantly hear the youngest generation talk about how reading is boring, slow, and takes too much time. Yet you never hear anyone have the same complaint about reality television or just television in general. Especially with smart phones having the full ability to stream video, or even audio content alone, to the audience member there’s no time or place that we are restricted from having access to theses amenities and our US society even deems cellular service a kind of right that should be added amongst the 10 commandments.

Reading

The reading for this week was a great place to start to really get my brain into a space to critically analyze dystopian arts. The film mentioned at the very beginning of the article, Never Let Me Go, is made from one of my favorite books and the film itself is a movie I choose to re-watch every couple years. Using Never Let Me Go as a platform since I know it well I was able to connect with and understand Booker’s thought process on identifying dystopian art and how to analyze it. I definitely agree with his definition of dystopian in that it must include an oppressed society that one is then able to comment on thus crating the story and lesson the audience would learn from the work.