Dystopias

Live every day as if you’ve come back in time from a dystopian future to try and prevent everything from breaking. 

— Charlie Jane Anders

Have you ever asked yourself how you would do in a zombie apocalypse? Well, I have, and I already know the first thing I would do: die. You see, any story that takes place in a horrible futuristic world make me want to curl up in my bed and never come out! They make us picture realities where our worst nightmares could come true at any given moment. That is how dystopias work. Writers put their finger on one part of society that could go wrong and exploit that fear. Dystopias have a way of hooking the audience and leave everybody wondering; Can our world really get that bad? Should we actually listen to the warnings these stories give us?

Take Book of Eli for example. The movie is based in America, 30 years after a nuclear apocalypse, and portrays Eli, a man on a mission, carrying a book. When he gets to a desert town, its ruler, who has been looking for that book, tries to take possession of it. The whole movie, we are left wondering why that book is so important. When we discover that it is the Bible, we get a clearer idea about a message of the movie. In a reality where knowledge is power, people kill each other for a book who could bring hope to the survivors. Faith is timeless and transcends all barriers. We can imagine that Carnegie, the bad guy, wants the book to gain power by acting as a prophet or even a God to the people that remain hence why he is taking such desperate measures. In a way, the movie is a warning about both the dangers of having bad people in power and the obvious threat of a nuclear war. That is my opinion as an atheist, but there is also another point of view. Christians have argued that the plot of the movie is all about the power of God and how faith can save you. They support that idea by mentioning how God savedEli from most of the bullets and saved him from his fatalinjury. I guess you can choose whatever perspective you want that will help you sleep at night.

“People had more than they needed. We had no idea what was precious and what wasn’t. We threw away things people kill each other for now.”

Eli, Book of Eli

That line from the movie rounds up the material aspect of a dystopia. It is when you’re left with nothing that you realize that some things are luxuries. In Book of Eli, wet wipes and shampoo are extremely scarce and people will hurt others to get them. Eli is a very wise man and as someone who was present in the old world, he can attest to what was lost, both physical objects and values like humanity. 

The loss of humanity is a common theme in dystopias. It is often the reason why the worlds in which they take place stay the way they are. When all you have known in your life is survival, you don’t look for other ways of living. Just look at our elders. Most of them have no idea how to make a google search on their phones, but they don’t really care because they weren’t raised with that technology. A more drastic example is the Korowai tribe in New Guinea. They are cannibals. Real life CANNIBALS. The point is, they don’t know better. They were raised to kill the sorcerers. They believe that if people die unexpectedly, it is the work of a sorcerer and they must be killed and eaten to avenge the dead. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the man and the boy run into cannibals while on their journey. They stumble into a room of naked people destined to die as food. Although the boy always wants to help, the duo had to think of their own safety first. That is where the conflict of humanity versus survival comes in. In most dystopias, the main characters are faced with a choice. The boy has chosen to be good and keep humanity alive (or at least what he knows about it). The man, on the other hand, has only one mission: protect his son. You can see his struggle as they meet other survivors. If they do the man wrong, he puts his human values aside and deals with the situation. He remembers the other world and still has faith in God. The boy also seems to know about religion and he always mentions carrying the fire. In Book of Eli, Eli carries the Bible in search for people in need of faith. It is a recurring theme in both cases.

“You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”

The man, The Road

This might seem like a simple sentence, but it is much more than that. Not knowing how the world ended in The Road only makes me imagine the worst. That statement is saying that the man can only focus on the bad things that he wants to forget instead of the good like the memories of his wife before she killed herself. He forgets his humanity sometimes instead of embracing it.

The biggest warning that I find in dystopias is the loss of humanity. It’s when we turn on our people that everything goes downhill. Just look at every war ever. We need hope for better days, a time when help comes before you ask for it and politics aren’t to blame for the world’s biggest problems. That’s why dystopias are so captivating to us, we can see what could happen without really living it. But really, how far are we from getting there? One red button on a crazy president’s desk could take us there in the time it took for you to read all of this. Boom.

To read more on The Road: http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy-review

This article speaks another truth about The Road. It supports my idea that material objects are not appreciated enough today and that in the book, we can see how the son was raised differently than how he would have been in today’s society. He mentions the time when the man finds a Coke and the boy asks him what it is. It’s a perfect example of how materialistic we are. Every kid in the G20 knows what a Coke is, but he did not. It helps to show how much different their reality is and provides quotes to prove it.

To read more on Book of Eli: https://literaryanalysis.net/2010/02/06/movie-review-the-book-of-eli/

This movie review on Book of Eli serves a perspective of a Christian which, as an atheist, I could not provide. The writer seems to have respect for the way Eli protects the Bible and acts (except for the violence) upon it. It is really interesting to discover that they used Christian imagery that you can only notice if you have studied their symbolic texts. The article is very biased, but as long as you can acknowledge that, it is a good point of view that should be considered. Religion is a recurring themes in dystopias and therefore, needs to be explored in analysis.