Are dystopian fictions cautionary tales or self-fulfilling prophecies?
The tagline of Alex Garland’s movie Civil War, produced by the American film and TV production company A24, is “All Empires Fall.” Set in a dystopian near future, where the United States has unraveled under a dictatorship and marauding militias inflict random acts of violence on citizens, the movie is presented—in Garland’s words—“as a sci-fi allegory for our currently polarized predicament.” According to the promotional blurb, it’s “an adrenaline-fueled thrill ride through a near-future fractured America balanced on the razor’s edge.”
Garland, who wrote the screenplay for the post-apocalyptic movie 28 Days Later and directed Ex Machina and Annihilation, has made his name as a purveyor of dystopian futures. Whether they deal with zombifying viruses, rogue technology, or extreme politics, his movies are extrapolations of a catastrophic present that is saturated with dread of even grimmer times ahead.
According to the writer and journalist Joe Queenan, writing in 2015, we’ve entered a “golden age of dystopian films.” After the upbeat 1990s, following the end of the Cold War, a far darker vision of the future took hold, explained in part by the bursting of the dot-com bubble, 9/11, George W. Bush’s identification of an “axis of evil,” and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Since then, migration, climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, and social media have all fed the insatiable fears of a twenty-first-century catastrophism.
Many recent dystopian films gain dramatic effect from drawing implicit analogies with contemporary events. In the case of Civil War, it’s a polarized politics, Trump’s autocratic leanings and his claims of a stolen election, the rise of the MAGA movement and the January 6 “insurrection,” as well as growing divisions between federal and state governments foregrounded by Covid and the migrant crisis—not to mention differences over issues from abortion to ESG and gun ownership. So much for “one nation under God, indivisible.” America in Civil War is a place of soured diversity. As a gun-toting militia asks disdainfully during his interrogation of a journalist: “What kind of American are you?”
The timing of the movie’s release was a PR masterstroke. Talk of civil war is pervasive in the US media with Americans across the political spectrum claiming that democracy is on the line. In the words of Barbara F. Walter, a professor of international affairs at the University of California, San Diego, and author of How Civil Wars Start and How To Stop Them, “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”
The philosopher and statesman Sir Thomas More, author of the 1516 philosophical treatise Utopia, never used the word “dystopian.” However, the ideal republic he imagined—More came up with the word “utopia”—was an attempt to overcome the social, religious, and political divides that had begun to tear Europe apart. His utopian society was conceived as a counterpoint and solution to real-world political turbulence and social breakdown. As Margaret Atwood once observed, “within every dystopia there’s a little utopia.” And conversely, within every utopia there’s more than a little dystopia.
Dystopia, Greek for “bad place,” was coined as an antonym of “utopia.” In an 1868 parliamentary speech on the Irish land question, the English philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill used the term “dys-topians.” For Mill, the dystopian was tethered to the utopian, since the one necessarily invoked the other. Put simply, the dream and the nightmare were inverted images of each other, and both drew their force from this oppositional relationship.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dystopian fiction took off, a rise closely linked to the development of the novel as a literary form that sought to make sense of the bewildering pace of technological, social, and political change. While this new industrial age was extolled by many, it was viewed by others with anxiety. Machines were destroying human autonomy; mega-cities, with their teeming masses, were becoming hearts of darkness. It was within this nexus of hope and fear that a modern dystopian imaginary was forged.
In 1920, when Yevgeny Zamyatin was writing his novel We, set in a twenty-sixth-century police state, the Red Army had seized power in Russia. Zamyatin, who had been a committed Bolshevik before the Revolution, viewed developments after 1917 with increasing alarm. His novel isn’t only a critique of contemporary politics, it’s also a reminder of how easily utopian dreams can be distorted and salvational creeds metastasize into death cults. Similarly, when George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in the 1940s, he did so as a condemnation of dangerous utopian confabulations epitomized by Stalin’s USSR, where the promotion of an ideal socialist society in state propaganda provided a screen for dictatorial power and the mass violence required to sustain it.
Dystopian fiction today is a different species, since it mimics rather than challenges the politics of the real-world. Instead of anticipating a future, it reaffirms a conflicted present. Because dystopia is already here, there is need to imagine another one.
This is why most recent dystopias exist in a twilight present; the future is so near that it merges with the now. As the writer William Gibson has noted, “What I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase ‘the 22nd century.’ Almost never. Compare this with the frequency with which the 21st century was evoked in popular culture during, say, the 1920s.”
Meanwhile, the doomsday scenarios evoked by scaremongering politicians on both sides of the political spectrum sound as if they’ve been cribbed from dystopian movie scripts. Even the advocates of progressive causes, such as climate change mitigation and social justice, now borrow from the dystopian playbook to push fear as an incentive for action. When dystopian fiction becomes indistinguishable from political discourse (and vice versa), both lose their transformative potential. Rather than serving as a cautionary tale and a call for action, this constricted dystopian imaginary reinforces political credos, becoming—as the futurist Monika Bielskyte has observed—a product roadmap and a self-fulfilling prophecy for the very calamities it warns of.
It also creates dangerous blind spots. A dystopia in which the West has no future, and the United States implodes, is a gift for Putin and Xi, who have been spinning yarns of this kind for years. Garland’s “All Empires Fall” tagline in Civil War suggests that America’s violent disintegration is the price the nation must pay for the hubris of its “imperial” escapades overseas. But it’s an adage with an uneven application, given Russia’s blatant empire-building in Ukraine and China’s territorial ambitions in East Asia.
Now, more than ever, we need to rediscover a dystopian imaginary that doesn’t just repackage our fears in the present. We need more utopias in our dystopias, otherwise, as Bielskyte suggests, “nightmares will be all we have to choose from soon enough.”