If we have anything to show for past hundred years of world wars, space exploration, arms races, globalization and technological innovation, it's that humankind has never had better resources to identify the potential causes of its own downfall. As we become more aware of the problems we create for ourselves, fiction expressing our fears about those increasingly urgent issues has also become increasingly popular. Consider the glut of dystopian action movies that have overloaded theaters this summer, including Oblivion, After Earth, Pacific Rim and most recently, Elysium, the sophomore film from filmmaker and noted dystopian visionary Neil Blomkamp.
For fans of the subgenre, this proliferation is an awfully exciting thing at first glance, though it leaves us with some questions: When does such a glut constitute too much of a good--or in this case, bad--thing? Are sinister visions of the future less meaningful when there are so many of them, and when they fail to discuss the possible solutions--or, in Elysium's case, present inadequate ones? Do dystopian auteurs operating in this day and age have moral responsibilities when presenting their visions? What, if any, good does dystopian entertainment actually do?
"In some ways you might say that [utopia and dystopia] are older than science fiction itself," says UCLA English professor Ursula K. Heise, who studies utopian and dystopian literature--or as she calls it, "speculative fiction"--especially as it applies to environmental, digital, and global issues. She notes that while most science fiction only dates back a few hundred years, we can trace utopia as far back as Plato's vision of Atlantis.
"Thomas More's 1516 book Utopia envisions a perfect society not in the future, but right now, in some unknown part of the earth's geography," said Heise. "It was writing on the border of literature and political [discourse], identifying the perfect world in order to point out what was wrong with the world they already had."
The problem with utopia, however, is that it's often very boring; after all, once you achieve the ideal society, it's hard to imagine any substantive change that might upset the delicate balance of its perfection. What's more, says Heise, perfection is less useful because it's unrealistic. The ideal society was far easier to envision when we didn't know how many opinions there were to consider. Over time, "utopia has become more difficult to write and more implausible. In order for us to imagine an ideal society, we'd all have to agree on what that ideal society is. We've become a lot more conscious of the fact that across the globe, especially in regards to gender, race and religion, we don't share one ideal." That's part of why dystopian media has essentially won out over utopia during the last century: It's much more narratively interesting and effective--even in supposedly "perfect" societies like those in Aldous Huxley's *Brave New World *and Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale--to deal with problems by turning into massive allegories than doing away with them altogether.
So finally we come to the 2013 cinematic dystopia glut, where we saw Elysium take issues like immigration, access to healthcare, worker's rights, and socioeconomic stratification to their futuristic, yet logical extremes. Heise notes that those extremes -- the idea that the rich really could build a habitat on a space station, keeping out the poor by disenfranchising and murdering them -- aren't really supposed to be taken literally, as "apocalyptic writing is not supposed to be a forecast; it's the intensity of the apocalyptic view of the future that's the point: The darker it is, the more urgently the author calls you to reform."
Of course, actual reform is quite difficult to obtain; despite dystopia's popularity in modern fiction, Heise says its actual effect on society is less consequential, beyond a general understanding of contemporary fears.
"With narrative films, there are two things to consider: How does it change the public debate, in policy and government, and how does it change the average moviegoer's individual perspective? The general wisdom and empirical work on that says that [dystopian film] does raise awareness of issues, but only for a short time. Right after people have seen these movies, they're more willing to confront the problems shown in the movie, voting for politicians who promise to fight those issues, but ask them two or three months down the line, and the effect has usually worn off." (To put it in perspective, she cites *Avatar *as an example of a movie that resonated among human rights activists, environmentalists, and indigenous populations themselves -- but doesn't exactly drive climate change debate, or the election of Green Party candidates, in 2013.)
To make matters worse, Blomkamp's call for reform in Elysium involves an attempt to solve the complex problems he's forecasted in an extremely simplistic and nigh-magical way--a move that goes horribly awry and ultimately misdirects the viewer's attention *away *from the real issues at hand. Fiction and artistic license aside, Heise says in creating dystopias, the writer shoulders an implicit obligation to help people prevent the ills they perceive from worsening. In this case, that responsibility went into overdrive and combusted.
"[Elysium] sets up an interesting problem, but answers it with total clichés," Heise says. "You're pointing to a big structural, socioeconomic problem, and it's going to be solved by two white guys in cyborg armor beating each other up? You've gotta be kidding ... Healthcare [and immigration were] distractions, too: The idea is raised that once everyone is a citizen and ambulances go heal everybody, the problem is solved. The problem clearly wasn't that people were sick; healthcare's inaccessibility was a symptom of a radically inequitable economic system. These are treating the symptoms, not curing the disease."
In other words, while dystopian literature may not always change the world, it can have its uses. But the genre stops working altogether when its authors start trying to fix catastrophic, chillingly realistic problems with magical, utopian solutions. It's more likely to stick in moviegoers heads when they're left to debate the solutions on their own, as with the bleak cliffhanger ending of Blompkamp's previous film, District 9.
"Excluding disaster movies, there is an imperative in the dystopian genre, [an implied] call to action, to think about the problems before they become problems," she says. "[But] the problem with solving the problem [in the story] is that there will always be new problems coming out of your solutions," she says. "Elysium as a whole goes from complicated social, political and moral issues and simplifies them to black and white. I distress when movies and novels do this, because it's not as helpful as dystopias can be."
