Looking into a mirror.

dystopia |disˈtōpēə|nounan imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. The opposite of Utopia .
Generally speaking, I like dystopias.
Not that I'd want to live in one, mind you. But when I think about some of the most thought-provoking, gripping movies I've seen or books I've read, accounts of dystopia are a common theme. It's the science fiction nerd in me rearing his ugly, bespectacled head. To give you some examples, here are some of my favorite dystopian stories:

The Giver: The world of this book is one without risk, without unpredictability or color. It's not that things are necessarily bad here - everyone is provided for, and things are peaceful - but everything is under strict control; free will is essentially nonexistent. Love is nothing more than a concept. Memories of a time before this condition ("Sameness") are all held by one person, known as The Giver. The story centers around an 11-year-old boy named Jonas, chosen to be the new Receiver of these memories.
My seventh-grade reading class went through the book on audiocassette. Being the over-achieving speed reader that I am, I always brought the book home and read ahead. It holds the illustrious title of First Book That Majorly Creeped Me Out. Last semester, I took a Children's Literature class and we read The Giver again. I appreciated the book in a different way this time around, but still creeped out in parts.
V for Vendetta: I love Natalie Portman. Enough said?Okay, there's more to the film than that. Much like The Giver, the government in this story is a totalitarian one - that is, there's no limit to the control they exact over citizens' lives. Enter V, an anarchist determined to overthrow the government. It's a great story, and visually well done.











Children of Men: Like it says on the poster, the world has essentially fallen apart as people are struggling to deal with the fact that humans can no longer reproduce - nothing like knowing that the future is irrelevant to make people go crazy and have a total societal breakdown.
This 2006 film cemented in my mind the fact that director Alfonso Cuaron is a genius (he also was behind my favorite of the Harry Potter movies thus far, The Prisoner of Azkaban). There's an incredibly involved scene in a car that is one.continuous.shot. The first time I saw it, I was like "Wait.. no way! The camera's still rolling! STILL!" There's enough stuff going on that you hope they only had to shoot it once, because resetting would take forEVER. Trust me, you'll know when you see it.


Nineteen Eighty-Four: This book is in many ways the classic example of a dystopia. I just started reading it today. Late to the party again. The cultural influences left by this novel are far and wide, including this famous Apple commercial directed by Ridley Scott:


You get the idea. The masses are more or less enslaved, with every single aspect of their lives being policed and controlled, even their thoughts. Massive posters up everywhere with the phrase "Big Brother is Watching You" serve as a warning to all. The slogans of the Party: "WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."
In the book, George Orwell imagines what England would look like three decades in the future, were Socialism to have caught on. In some ways, I think every other one of the above works owes quite a debt to this novel; the way government is portrayed in each is largely derived from Orwell's ideas.
Bringing us back to the beginning: I enjoy works such as these. Not only are they really good at drawing you into the story, they offer an interesting critique of our own societies. Could a scenario such as one of these really happen? Anything is possible; you know what they say about power corrupting, and all that. But politics isn't really my game. The thing that I really enjoy about stories like these is that dystopia offers the greatest potential for hope.
A scene from Children of Men floors me every single time I see it. Clive Owen's character is helping get a mother and her baby - the only one in the world - out of the country to a research lab, to safety. On the way, they're caught in this hotel in the middle of a firefight. People are dying left and right, and the place is literally being reduced to rubble while they're hiding out. Suddenly, the baby begins to wail. All fighting stops. The mother and child make their way out of the building, and there's a moment of extreme tenderness as soldiers on both sides let them pass; all hope for humanity's future is walking past them at that very second. Absolutely beautiful.
The point is this: when you are in such a messed up world, hope is in stark relief to all the darkness around you. When one has the sense that things are fairly Okay, one can be lulled into a life of quiet desperation and complacency. But when things are truly bad, hope and love carry a much deeper meaning, because they are all we have. Sometimes, there's nothing to do but believe that there may be a light, a chance that we may yet be saved. We connect with stories like this because in some ways, they are part of our story.
"In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." John 1:4-5