My girlfriend, Spooking Reading Girl, once had an example essay question while she was at university which asked if Sauron and the Ring hadn't come along and spoiled everything would the Shire and the life the hobbits lead be an example of a utopia? When I saw this I thought two things. First, that would be a very boring book, and secondly, for me it would be awful. The pleasant countryside existence of the hobbits would be my idea of Hell. It's all so twee and gentle, everyone has silly names and does silly things. I would find it very tiresome.
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| The twee horror of The Shire |
Utopias and dystopias are a favourite topic of fiction, the word utopia was first used by Sir Thomas More in his book, Utopia, in which he imagined a perfect, or at least much better society. A dystopia is a society that is much worse that ours. The most famous dystopia is probably 1984 in which George Orwell imagined a future society constantly under surveillance by secret police, fighting never-ending wars and where, effectively, facts no longer existed and they could be rewritten to suit the circumstances. Orwell based a lot of this on Stalinist Russia where history books were rewritten to show Stalin as more active in the Russian Revolution than he was and downplaying his enemies contributions. You get far fewer utopias in fiction for the main reason that they are quite boring. A genuine utopia would have no crime, no war, no conflict, what would there be to write about? Aside from perhaps More's own work the most famous utopia I can think of is the Federation in Star Trek. The Federation is a nation of many planets and different alien races working together for the betterment of society. Earth especially is pictured as peaceful, prosperous and happy. Star Trek was created during the Cold War and the idea of a future Earth where we all cooperated instead of fighting each other was the stuff of science fiction. On the bridge of the Enterprise there was mix of races and cultures, Chekov is Russian but aside from the occassional forays into time travel that detail is completely irrelevant. Perhaps most famously the Federation had no money and they have evolved some other way of allocating resources fairly. This is made very clear over the various films and tv shows and in their universe at least is seen as a very good thing.
Some dystopias aren't as bad as all that. The Matrix is a classic dystopian world in that in the film intelligent robots and computers have rebelled against their human masters and eventually use humans as a power source. Humans lie asleep in little pods while various wires and tubes carry away the energy they produce. However instead of just letting the humans scream and cry in their little pods the robots created an artificial reality for the people to live in. This reality was a representation of what the world had been like near the peak of human civilisation, more or less, the late 1990s. Humans spend their entire lives in this artificial reality unaware of what is really going on. I must say, this is very charitable of the robots as that doesn't sound too bad to me. Instead of having to live in a world virtually destroyed by the human-robot war, in which the Sun has been blocked out, they live in a much nicer world. That is far better than humans treat most cattle and livestock and if I had to choose a dystopia to live in I think I'd pick that one. Certainly these robots are far nicer that the ones in Terminator whose tactics are to completely wipe out the human race. Agent Smith in the film even says the first artificial reality they made for people was really nice, where nothing bad ever happened but that people just wouldn't accept it as real. One of the characters even made this argument in the film, he didn't care if it was artificial, it was a better existence than the one he had free of the Matrix. All I can say is that I, for one welcome our new robotic overlords. Incidentally, having watched The Matrix again recently how good is Hugo Weaving in that film? He is clearly the best person in it.
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| The scene stealing Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith |
If we're trying to work out the worst dystopia I would argue it is Brazil. Terry Gilliam's dystopia is similar in many ways to 1984 but the sinister government isn't just evil they are actually rather incompetent. A typing error leads to the arrest of the wrong man and when he died in custody it sends ramifications through their failing system. Bureaucratic inefficiency and indifference is life threatening in this world. Surely the sign that this is the worst of all possible worlds is that Michael Palin - generally acknowledged as the nicest man in the world - played a terrifying government torturer. Any world in which Michael Palin could do these things must be a very bad place indeed.
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| The horrifyingly nice Michael Palin in Brazil |
There are lots of examples of worlds where people think they live in a utopia but are perhaps wrong. Minority Report is a world in which psychic beings can see the future and direct the police to stop murders before they happen. A new crime is invented where the criminal can be punished for a murder they were stopped from committing. But this better future comes at a price, as it always does, and Tom Cruise played the police officer in charge of "pre-crime" who became a suspect himself. Genetic engineering is the tool in Gattaca that has lead to a world populated by beautiful, intelligent, athletic people as virtually every baby is genetically engineered. As one doctor explained at the beginning of the film, the child is still made from the parents genetics but given the best of what they have. Ethan Hawke played one of the few people to be born "naturally" and the heart defect he was born with convinced his parents that their next child should be engineered. Hawke, frustrated by the limited life his "inferior" genetics gave him he adopted the identity of another engineered person, someone whose genetics wouldn't hold them back. The fact that Hawke was not only able to match the talents of his genetic superiors but also outdo them suggested that success wasn't just down to genes. Minority Report and Gattaca both present worlds that for most people are a utopia, a world free of crime and a world of smarter, healthier and just better people but there are those at the sharp end of this utopia. In Minority Report it is the people convicted of crimes they hadn't yet committed and in Gattaca those people left to do all the menial jobs their genetically superiors don't want to do.
It's important to remember as well that not all of have the same idea of a utopia. As I found the idea of living in the Shire distinctly unappealing some people would feel the same way about the arguably communist and atheistic society set up in Star Trek. As a socialist atheist leftie I can get happily get on board with the society in the Federation but I get the feeling Donald Trump would object. I think people are now inherently suspicious of anyone touting a utopian society and in the same way that most sorts of trouble start out as fun most, dystopias start out as an attempt at utopia. There is an episode of Doctor Who called the Happiness Patrol who basically murder anyone not happy but they had good intentions when they started out, trying to make people more happy. Individual freedom is often thought of as more important than anything else. In the fantastic graphic novel Red Son, the spaceship that brought Superman to Earth crash landed in the Soviet Union, not America. So Superman is still a hero, he saves people etc, but instead of having an idea that people should be free to decide for themselves he instead has been brought up in a society where it is okay for someone to intervene and he takes over the Soviet union after Stalin's death. He will actively make the world better. And he was, in a way, successful but many people would object to him forcing a utopia on them.
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| Notice the Hammer and Sickle on his chest |
Perhaps the problem with utopias and dystopias is if you don't agree with their vision of society you're in trouble. Margaret Atwood, an author of several dystopian novels, said that every utopia has a problem, what to do with the people who don't fit in? In Doctor Who's The Happiness Patrol they were killed, in Red Son they were labotomised, and how a society treats people who don't fit in probably defines how close they are to either the utopia or dystopia label.
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