The 2011 thriller Contagion may be the movie of the moment due to the coronavirus, but the film takes place in the present. Dabblers in futurism have infrequently chosen pandemics as a dystopian theme, typically looking instead to technology as the thing that could destroy life as we know it. Terry Gilliam’s 1995 Twelve Monkeys was a rare exception. In the film, just 1% of the Earth’s population remains in 2035 after a lethal virus wipes out five billion people, forcing the survivors to live underground.
Need it be said, science fiction has served as the primary launching pad of twisted tomorrows over the past century and a half. Mad scientists, master races, mutation, barbarism, and disembodied heads are just a few scenarios of future-gone-bad. The granddaddy of dystopia, however, has been the creation of machines more intelligent or powerful than ourselves, reflecting our real-life fear of technology run amok. Not surprisingly, then, the robot or automatic man has been a ubiquitous figure in the dystopian futures, both appealing to our quest for perfection and acknowledging the threat that we may lose the essence of what makes us human.
H.G. Wells’s stories served as the bridge between the romantic sensibilities of Victorian futurism and the colder, crueler versions forged in the Machine Age. Wells’s most significant contribution to the field was the realization that the tools of Man had changed but Man had not, posing major trouble ahead in his future as new, much more lethal tools were discovered. With the social consequences of technological change now part of the conversation, dystopian themes entered the discourse of futurism, with science not only our best ally of tomorrow but also our worst enemy, i.e., the ways and means of mass destruction.
Through the first half of the 20th century, the loss of individuality due to rampant mechanization and conformist mass society frequently served as cause for alarm for the future. Fritz Lang’s 1926 masterpiece film Metropolis (which was inspired by an actual trip to New York) featured a dystopian city of the future in which citizens were dominated and enslaved by machines. Real life events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s only served to fuel fears of a universal State akin to Aldous Huxley’s disturbing and prescient 1932 Brave New World. Likewise, in his 1933 The Shape of Things to Come, Wells located utopia a couple of generations away after the fall of capitalism, a world in which things would get a lot better only after they got a lot worse.
The palpable anxieties of the postwar years were reflected in dystopian visions of the future. Definitely making some postwar Americans edgy about future technologies was George Orwell’s 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four; his dystopian vision of a totalitarian world state was a warning about unchecked nationalism (and repressed sexuality). Echoing Huxley’s own concerns that humanity might be heading to places it should not go in a brave new world, Nineteen Eighty-Four tempered the otherwise firm faith in science and technology during the postwar years. In particular, rather than a miraculous device of entertainment or education, Orwell’s two-way television of the future meant that Big Brother was watching and listening, something considered very much within the realm of future possibilities in the wild west days of the medium.
Also making some mid-20th century folks nervous were future scenarios for the always controversial robot. Early forms of industrial robots were already eliminating some manual, repetitive jobs, triggering fears of rampant unemployment as they further developed. “If we are not to be displaced by robots we must establish social control over them,” Edmund C. Berkeley, a “thinking machine” expert and designer, argued in 1950, suggesting perhaps the creation of a Robot Machine Commission whose oversight function would be analogous to that of the Atomic Energy Commission.
As America’s postwar triumph faded, so did much of its faith in a future defined by unlimited progress, a leisure-based society, and urban utopias. In its place, a new future emerged in the late 1960s that reflected the social, economic, and political turmoil of the times. Alvin Toffler’s 1970 Future Shock became a poster child of this era’s dominant narrative of tomorrow, as concerns about the economy, the environment, energy, and the Vietnam War became dark clouds on the horizon of our collective tomorrow. For the first time in American history, it became apparent that the future might not be as good a time as the present—a sharp break in the previously ever-progressing idea of tomorrow. Dystopian voices in the crowd were nothing new, but now with an unpopular, perhaps unwinnable war, major racial unrest, and the power to do serious damage to the planet any number of ways, the American future was an increasingly perilous place.
As well, much like how Reverend Thomas Mathus in the 18th century predicted that too many people would one day be roaming the planet, dystopian narratives of the latter 20th century argued that the world was becoming dangerously overpopulated. Despite the increasing popularity of the birth control pill in the West, fears of there being too little food to support billions more people was a big chunk of future shock, along with the prospect of our being packed in like sardines.
A new era of dystopian futurism began with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The 1968 film was a lightning rod for the growing ambivalence towards technology and a clear sign that our blanket faith and trust in the machine was over, should there be any doubt. Films of this era located in the future also gave viewers the palpable feeling that tomorrow was now entirely up for grabs, recast as a Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest. From the soft-core porn universe of 40,000 A.D. in Barbarella (1968) to the predator-filled Mad Max and Alien in 1979, the cinematic future was one in which the id ruled. These movies were essentially over-the-top reflections of the nation’s pre-AIDS sexual climate and high crime rate. Soylent Green (1973), Rollerball (1975), Logan’s Run (1976), and Silent Running (1977) vented (or perhaps intensified) our fears of nuclear apocalypse, rampant pollution, and the population explosion, establishing dystopia as its own creative genre.
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Is Viewing Water Outdoors More Restorative Than Green Spaces? Fears of an impending dystopia or even apocalypse continued to course through the zeitgeist of the 1980s. In real life, New Agers and Christian fundamentalists each prophesied in Messianic terms while survivalists in the nation’s backwaters prepared for the end of days. Was it then any surprise that pop culture offered scary views of what might be in store? Movies like Road Warrior, Brazil, Blade Runner, and Escape from New York depicted an Orwellian, post-apocalyptic future, and uncertainty about tomorrow could be seen even in usually happy-go-lucky advertising. Apple’s incredible “Big Brother” commercial of 1984 suggested that Orwell may prove to be right after all, despite the introduction of the liberating Macintosh computer.
The spread of AIDS through the 1980s made many think that a plague reminiscent of the Dark Ages might be upon us, raising our collective paranoia considerably. Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense initiative and the development of space stations only confirmed that we better have a back-up plan if a Russian rogue state let loose one of the thousands of unaccounted for Cold War-era atomic bombs. And if that wasn’t enough, concerns about global warming or the “greenhouse effect” was picking up steam as new evidence supported the theory that the planet was gradually heating up, probably because of our burning of fossil fuels.
The future, and the present for that matter, was irrevocably altered in the mid-nineties, when it became clear that the internet was going to be a major force in our lives. Technology had always been at the forefront of futurism but the digitalization of society was, it seemed, swamping almost everything else in its path at a startling speed. Through the dot-com bubble, its bursting, and the mainstreaming of the internet, many visions of tomorrow shifted from the real world to a virtual one; these visions were often a complex mashup of utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares. More than ever, perhaps, there was a “catch” to the future, the idea that there were ghosts in our growing number of machines a reoccurring theme in our prophecies and predictions. With the lines between man and machine and what is real and not real getting increasingly fuzzy, our faith in and fears about the future continued to accelerate, with the stakes of tomorrow never higher.
Waking up safe and sound in 2000 did little to ease our millennial jitters, cinematically speaking. No cute aliens could be found in the near future world of Spielberg’s 2001 Artificial Intelligence: AI in which melted polar ice caps have sunk all coastal cities. In this dystopian fairy tale, realistic robots serve people but things go awry when one of them expresses human feelings for his mother, a reworking of Pinocchio as Huxley might have imagined it. There’s no crime in Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report, based on a Philip K. Dick story, but only because genetically altered humans (“pre-cogs”) are able to predict them before they happen.
Rather than plague, interplanetary warfare with bugs, genetics gone bad, or ecological disaster, it was a particularly nasty computer virus that ruins the futuristic day in the 2003 Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. "Can the outdated-as-a-Betamax VCR Terminator destroy the much more advanced Terminatrix T-X sent back from 2032?" we wonder, making us ask ourselves serious questions about where technology might lead us a few decades out. I, Robot of the following year, based on an Isaac Asimov story, was another cautionary tale of technology run amok; the threat of robots taking over the world in 2035 a familiar sci-fi device had new resonance as “smart” robots came into actual being.
Movies of the early 21st century set in the future were equally dark. Great Britain is a fascist state in the 2005 V for Vendetta, based on the graphic novel of the same name; the only individual to stand up to the oppressive government is considered a terrorist. The UK or what’s left of it fares little better in the 2006 Children of Men, with humankind in 2027 on the brink of extinction due to the infertility of women. Chaos, violence, and anarchy reign in this nightmare of a movie, the only voice of reason an aging hippie living in the woods. Over the past decade, virtual reality has emerged as a haven from real-world dystopia. In Ready Player One (2018) set in 2045, for example, people choose virtual realities as an attractive alternative to an environmentally challenged Earth, a future to which we’re getting dangerously close.