The Capitalist and Cultural Work of Apocalypse and Dystopia Films

© CineAction 95: Global Nightmare: Horror and Apocalypse (January 2015) The Capitalist and Cultural Work of Apocalypse and Dystopia Films We are living in a dystopia. Our world is the capitalist aberration dystopia films depict. In his essay regarding the Canadian horror (and semi-dystopian) film The Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997), Angel Mateos-Aparicio reports that “French philosopher Jean Baudrillard … has argued that the ‘real’ world has become utopian and that fictional models provide an experience of what reality has actually turned into.” Angel Mateos-Aparicio, “The Symbolism of Synthetic Space in Cube (1997): Postmodern SF Film as Consensual Hallucination,” in BELLS: Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 17 (2008): 5. Mateos-Aparicio goes on to observe that Cube addresses “postmodern anxieties about the nature of contemporary social relations, the purpose of political structure, and the consequences of the predominance of capitalistic economy as the organizational principle of human relations.” Mateos-Aparicio, “The Symbolism of Synthetic Space in Cube (1997),” 2. Indeed, much post-modern cinematic narrative has been preoccupied with apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian fantasies that closely reflect aspects of our lived reality. These three categories are closely related in their ideological underpinnings. Certainly they share certain characteristics, not the least of which is a representation of the repressed anxiety regarding the potential fall of capitalist culture. All are concerned with horrific visions of a world in which patriarchal capitalism has been either annihilated or corrupted, and all three function as warnings or harbingers, cinematic realizations in the tradition of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, of what must be changed and what must be protected in order for patriarchal capitalism to survive. However, dystopia film does not inherently require there to be an apocalypse, and these films have a closer relationship with fantasies of utopia than do the other two categories. This paper seeks to distinguish the boundaries between films categorized as apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian and to examine some of the most iconic cinematic artifacts in each of the categories to differentiate their parameters and to explore in detail dystopian film through the prism of cultural theory, to better understand the cultural work that specifically dystopia cinema does. The last section elucidates the different cultural work effected by dystopia films that were produced before 9/11 and the more contemporary films In Time (2011) and The Purge (2013). Elizabeth Rosen succinctly describes the fundamental characteristic of dystopia narratives: utopia “comes at an unspeakable cost.” Elizabeth K. Rosen, Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 81. However, the fact that dystopia film presents an ersatz reality that is ostensibly worse than our own works to ideologically mask the fact that the horrific side-effects of capitalism in these otherwise utopian worlds ganged agley are representations of capitalist relations that already exist. Dystopia film is primarily concerned with the social conditions inherent to patriarchal capitalism in which the narratives simultaneously expose and reproduce social and economic contradictions in an ideological process of repressive tolerance. Dystopia cinema appears to criticize the damaging effects of self-indulgent capitalism while positing fantasies of class integration. These fantasies offer romantic justifications in which the altruistic tendencies of two characters resolve class contradictions in a narrative trajectory that ostensibly transcends capitalism and all of its evil, greedy commodification. Decade-post-9/11 dystopia films such as In Time (Andrew Nicoll, 2011) and The Purge (James DeMonaco, 2013) are significant contemporary examples due to the way in which they realize explicit capitalist axioms. In Time literalizes the capitalist axiom that time is money, while The Purge effectively dramatizes the commodification of violence in the convention of horror cinema. What these films have in common is the way they operate in a process of neo-Marxist repressive tolerance to criticize the aspects of capitalism that contradict romantic mythologies in an ideological effort to reconcile these contradictions with a valorizing fantasy of romance and revolution. Neo-Marxist cultural theory remains an effective framework in which to understand the cultural work accomplished by apocalyptic and dystopian narratives, especially in the context of widely distributed media commodities such as blockbuster cinema. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser suggests that ideology works to mask and displace any antagonistic forces that are a challenge to the current system. Storey, Cultural Theory, 6. Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance indicates that the forces of dominant ideology in a stratified capitalist culture tolerate a certain amount of critical dissent in order to create an illusion of agency and to contain and defuse resistance. In his 1965 essay, “Repressive Tolerance’” he states that “what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression … Thus, within a repressive society, even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the game.” Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance’” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, eds. R. P. Wolff, B. Moore Jr., H. Marcuse (New York: Beacon Press, 1965), 81-2. All of these ideological operations appear to be at work in dystopia films. Marcuse variously articulates the contradictory conceit of dystopian aesthetics. He explains that the true positive is the society of the future and therefore beyond definition and determination, while the existing positive is that which must be surmounted. But the experience and understanding of the existent society may well be capable of identifying what is not conducive to a free and rational society, what impedes and distorts the possibility of its creation. Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 3. He goes on to explain that The ideas of the available alternatives [to the social constructs in an ostensibly free capitalist society] evaporate into an utterly utopian dimension in which it is at home, for a free society is indeed unrealistically and undefinably different from the existing ones. Under these circumstances, whatever improvement may occur ‘in the normal course of events’ and without subversion is likely to be improvement in the direction determined by particular interests which control the whole. Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 5. Dystopia narratives appear to be highly critical of capitalist aberrations but only do so in the service of repressive tolerance. On the surface, the narrative, and even formal differences, between apocalypse, post-apocalypse, and dystopia cinema may appear obvious. However, some critics conflate the three genres as part of a postmodern interrogation of the tenability of narrative genre delineations. Maria Lisboa discusses utopia/dystopia narratives such as Nineteen Eighty-Four which she says all maintain the convention of a “post-cataclysm set-up involving an authoritarian despot or ruling power which officially saves humanity from itself through the exercise of a panoptical control that in effect in various ways dehumanizes it.” Maria Manuel Lisboa, The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2011), 101. Not only does Lisboa conflate post-apocalypse with dystopia in this description, her artefacts are predominantly literary. Many contemporary cinematic dystopia narratives are not post-apocalyptic, they are merely post-modern. “In his work on the apocalyptic motif in science fiction, David Ketterer defines any text as apocalyptic which is ‘concerned with presenting a radically different world or version of reality that exists in a credible relationship with the world or reality verified by empiricism and common experience.’” Rosen, Apocalyptic Transformation, 76. Ketterer’s focus on the general “apocalyptic motif” conflates apocalypse, post-apocalypse, and dystopian narratives in this broad definition, and includes virtually any cinematic science-fiction narrative ever constructed. Indeed, all three genres seem to share a postmodern nihilism regarding the dissolution of the particularly white male subject and the fall of capitalist mediated social regimes. Thus, the primary difference between apocalyptic and dystopian narratives is the fall of capitalist culture in apocalyptic narratives and its full realization in dystopian ones. Rather than annihilated, capitalism is over-present in dystopia narratives as a perversion of itself. Nevertheless, capitalist fantasies of aversion or reconstruction are very much at the heart of apocalyptic fantasies. Many American apocalypse movies are strange in that they do not depict an apocalypse at all. Films such as Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996), Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998), Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998), The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004), and 2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009) are concerned with fantasies of patriarchal heroism and technological might in an effort to effect impossible aversions of catastrophe. David Christopher, “Constructions of Non-Diegetic Hope in Last Night,” in CineAction, January 2013. Maria Manuel Lisboa observes this convention in her chapter entitled “And then There Was Nothing: Is the End Ever Really the End?”  “The broad spectrum of fiction and nonfiction on the subject of planetary destruction ultimately only rarely envisages total annihilation.” Lisboa, The End of the World, 53. She makes extensive reference to the cycle of renewal that is implied in the book of Revelation, in a world in which morality has been improved and restored.  Indeed, these American films seem to present a world in which a conservative Christian ideology pervades their resolution.  The hubris of science or human arrogance is checked by the near-apocalypse (even though it is frequently science that saves them), and the established social order can continue free of its contradictions with the new humbling moral knowledge.  Lisboa states that all scenarios of apocalypse are also morality tales that conclude with the medium-term effects of an opportune lesson well learned, and a new ethic of intended non-repetition in the future of past mistakes: moral recklessness, social dissipation, ungodliness and hubris of knowledge/power run-amok. Lisboa, The End of the World, 53. Such a narrative trajectory reproduces ideological myths of contradictory and stratified social relations rather than examining the more fundamental and compelling psychology that would accompany certain annihilation.  Many of the causes of apocalypse imagined in cinema leave room for narratives in which aversion and redemption can occur.  Lisboa points out that one of the conceits of apocalypse narratives, in which absolute annihilation rarely occurs, is that “All is as it should be, then, as long as something still is.” Lisboa, The End of the World, 73. In Jane Jacobs’ somewhat pessimistic Dark Age Ahead, she observes historical reality that is congruent with these apocalyptic fantasies of renewal and redemption. “Dark ages are horrible ordeals, ... But later on, life for survivors continues for the most part as before, after having been suspended by the emergency.” Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (Random House Digital, Inc., 2010), 7. Plague or pestilence narratives such as Twelve Monkeys, Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007) (re-coded as Christianity triumphing over science according to Žižek in his analysis of the evolution of such narrative iterations as the original text, The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, and the I Am Legend film), Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009), 28 Days Later (Peter Boyle, 2002), and Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011) are all ultimately narratives of redemption in which humanity not only survives, but brings the promise of renewed affluence with a rejuvenated moral code. Similarly, narratives that focus on zombies or vampires (again the iterations of I Am Legend, Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Zombieland, and Resident Evil); or on environmental collapse and the human responsibility for it, such as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Lord and Miller, 2009), The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 all leave space for the survival of patriarchy and capitalism. Nuclear annihilation movies such as Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) or its 1980s progeny such as the made-for-television The Day After (Nicholas Meyer, 1983) are uncharacteristically nihilistic but still inherently (and xenophobically) deal with the horrors of losing capitalist American culture as it exists. Even collisions of earth with heavenly bodies (Armageddon, Deep Impact) are subject to ludicrous narrative fantasies of aversion effected by patriarchal heroes with the reliable tools of industrial capitalist technology. Nevertheless, apocalypse narratives still inherently represent the terrifying possibility of absolute annihilation – a mass extinction of humanity in which neither life nor culture survives. The fear of death is amplified by the fact that there will be no continuity, no generation of children to carry on the patriarch’s name, mass annihilation and the loss of the capitalist way of life. In this regard, movies such as Take Shelter (2011), Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011), Last Night (Don McKellar, 1998), and even The Quiet Earth (1985) are pleasantly discomforting in their refusal to accept aversion, in their insistence on certain annihilation. Melancholia is highly progressive in its criticism of the capitalist-driven fantasies of the late 1990s. The main character, Justine, suffers from an inescapable depression - a side effect of capitalist culture – in a narrative that begins with a representation of inevitable annihilation. Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man as well as Marxist theories such as reification and commodity fetishism suggest that social relations mediated by commodities are inherently flawed. On CBC’s Empire of Illusion, “Writer Chris Hedges argues that North American culture is dying because it has become transfixed by illusions about literacy, love, wisdom, happiness and democracy. Jim Brown explores Hedges’ ideas about the mechanisms that keep us diverted from confronting the collapse around us” (http://castroller.com/podcasts/Ideas/2809799). This type of fantasy is congruent with an American viewing audience described by Timothy Morton as experiencing ideological denial. “It seems for many people it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Morton, The Ecological Thought, 101. According to Morton, then, even in a progressive fantasy of annihilation, the ideology of capitalism remains central to the narrative impetus. Post-apocalyptic films such as George A. Romero’s seemingly endless cycle of zombie films (particularly Dawn of the Dead [George A. Romero, 1978]), The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981), The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, 1999), and Aeon Flux (Karyn Kusama, 2005) offer similar fantasies of the way in which patriarchal capitalism might survive and re-assert itself in a world where the ‘utopian’ infrastructure of our present-day reality has been destroyed. The primary distinction between apocalypse narratives and post-apocalypse narratives is a temporal one. The former category frequently sets its narratives in the present and explores fantasies of aversion in the face of imminent apocalypse. The latter category explores the ways in which the remnants of patriarchal capitalism attempt to reassert themselves following some sort of global ecological annihilation (frequently nuclear). The eponymous Mad Max, for example, a patriarchal hero played by Mel Gibson in all three of the trilogy’s movies, fights to uphold a mythology of heroism, especially in Beyond Thunderdome. The world of Thunderdome is simply an aberrant extension of capitalism, as it was in The Road Warrior; both narratives revolve around the acceptable and the unacceptable regulation of the distribution of resources. In the unambiguously named Bartertown, Max is compelled into a gladiatorial battle with a warrior giant named Blaster. Max refuses to complete the execution of Blaster, however, upon discovering that he is developmentally disabled, although uniquely strong, and under the emotional control of an intellectual villain named Master, reproducing a social stigma based on his ostensible sympathetic heroism. Max’s patriarchal heroism distracts from the fact that the Thunderdome is a symbol of capitalist relations as they actually exist – a cut-throat competition for power and control of the most precious commodities. The narrative reconciles this contradiction with a fantasy of patriarchal heroism and sacrifice. Ultimately, Max saves a band of orphaned children from the clutches of Bartertown by destroying it with typical explosive spectacle. His destruction of Bartertown codes him as a hero of the children, a father figure under whom the lost children can thrive and survive to rebuild whatever civilization Max deems appropriate for them. Regardless of Max’s apparent humanitarianism, however, he is an unambiguously violent character, with a propensity to trade and gamble for his own needs – a selfish patriarchal capitalist for the ages. Perhaps the most saccharin example of post-apocalypse cinema is Disney’s Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). The narrative begins in a future earth ravaged by ecological disaster brought on by excessive production, consumption, and their inevitable side-effect, garbage. Coincidentally, Morton states that “What ecological art will certainly not be able to get away with for very much longer is happy-happy-joy-joy eco-sincerity. This mode will look less and less relevant, and less and less reverent, the further up to our necks we get in our own waste.” Morton, The Ecological Thought, 105. In Wall-E, humans have long since abandoned earth, and the planet (entirely depicted as New York) is solely inhabited by its only custodian, the lonely robot Wall-E (and, actually, his pet cockroach). The resolution of Wall-E includes the discovery of humans surviving in space, a romantic pair-bond for Wall-E, the vanquishing of the evil robots on a space ship, and a return to earth for humanity with a new sense of planetary stewardship under the guidance of Wall-E’s altruism. It is a touching tale in which the ecological annihilation of earth (at hand in our present reality) is mitigated, indeed subjugated, by a fantasy that states we will survive and overcome even a disaster requiring us to abandon the planet. The evil of capitalism that caused the problem, so explicitly signified in the opening scenes of the film, is mitigated and superseded by fantasies of resolved loneliness and human ingenuity. Ultimately, apocalypse and post-apocalypse narratives are highly ideologically similar in either their valorization of a patriarchal hero that can save capitalism, or their canonization of human tenacity. The post-apocalyptic film is little more than an ideological extension of the apocalypse film in which the primary distinction is the mechanistic movement of the apocalyptic event to a temporal position before, during, or after the narrative proper. If the unthinkable were to happen, these post-apocalyptic worlds become the cinematic arena in which the fantasy of rebuilding patriarchal capitalism can occur. Morton states that “It’s seductive to imagine that a force bigger than global capitalism will finally sweep it away. But what if this thought were coming to us from within capitalism itself? What if capitalism relied on fantasies of apocalypse in order to keep reproducing and reinventing itself?” Morton, The Ecological Thought, 125. With this aspect of capitalist repressive tolerance exposed in Morton’s rhetorical interrogation, the apocalypse and post-apocalypse film are suspect in their ideological agendas. The dystopia narrative steps in to continue the fantasy with a narrative that appears less romantically nihilistic and more explicitly critical. Dystopia films do not necessarily require the social worlds their directors imagine to follow an apocalypse. Dystopia film frequently effaces the apocalyptic event and instead predicates its vision of the future on intensified capitalism rather than annihilated. At the beginning of In Time, proletariat worker Will Salas highlights this aspect of dystopia. Regarding his aberrant social environment, he is dismissive. “I don’t have time to worry about how it happened. It is what it is.” Giuliana Bruno states that “The future does not realize an idealized, a sceptic technological order, but is seen simply as the development of the present state of the city and of the social order.” Giuliana Bruno, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and ‘Blade Runner’,” October 41 (1987): 61-74. In this regard, dystopia film is most distinct from apocalypse or post-apocalypse. Rather than a single catastrophic subtraction, through which patriarchal capitalism somehow survives, the evolution of capitalism itself is the subtraction which begins the process of a cultural dark age. Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, 9. Jacobs goes on to state that “the death or the stagnated moribundity of formerly unassailable and vigorous cultures is caused not by assault from outside but by assault from within, that is, by internal rot in the form of fatal cultural turnings, not recognized as wrong turnings while they occur or soon enough afterwards to be correctable.” Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, 14. Herein lies the fundamental distinction between apocalypse and dystopia. Both recognize the internal rot but apocalypse film denies and displaces it onto an external source, a capitalist defense mechanism to protect its status quo. In apocalypse films, an Other or external malevolent source is the cause of human demise. In the dystopia narrative capitalism doesn’t need to save itself from apocalypse, nor does it try to re-establish its patriarchal hegemony following one. It is a more direct criticism in that it suggests a trajectory for contemporary capitalism if its contradictions remain unchecked. Dystopia narratives are more introspective: “we” are our own worst enemy. However, its cultural work on behalf of capitalism is no less reproductive or romantic. A cursory glance reveals that the cultural work that dystopia films do is threefold. First, they expose contradictions of capitalist society which produces its own class-based inequalities. In Time for example is explicit in its depiction of a stratified class economy in which the working classes continually face near-fatal exploitation. Second, they produce a fantasy of escape from class inequality. Frequently it is a melodramatic heterosexual pair-bond that challenges the wealth and power of the dominant classes – little more than a fantasy of Marxist revolution. Third, within the progressive narrative framework of dystopia film lurks the ideological underpinnings that reproduce capitalist culture – a form of repressive tolerance. These films mask the fact that our present reality is already dystopian by representing what appears to be an even worse version of capitalist culture. Normally the process of suture experienced by a viewer is amplified by cinema’s photographic illusion of an indexical record of reality. This is one of the ways in which ideology, as it is described by Barthes, works to masquerade as a naturalized reality. With dystopia film the opposite is true; its representation of reality emphasizes a message that this only looks realistic, but in fact is not. These films seem to celebrate the extent to which they can make their false realities appear realistic. In the case of dystopia film, however, the artificial indexical reality is closer to actual reality than it is when such an index is working to mask capitalist ideology. The capitalist ideology with which dystopian film is preoccupied comes to light through the neo-psychoanalytical approaches of Robin Wood and Slavoj Žižek. In his essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” Robin Wood defines reactionary films as those which reproduce and valorize a conservative dominant ideology, and progressive films as those which challenge such ideology Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” 200. Dystopian fantasies appear progressive but are covertly reactionary. They tend to imply that the social contradictions they imagine are merely fantastical – that they do not exist today. However, in Slavoj Žižek’s A Plague of Fantasies, he states, the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy cannot be reduced to that of a fantasy scenario which obfuscates the true horror of a situation; the first, rather obvious thing to add is that the relationship of the fantasy and the horror of the Real it conceals is much more ambiguous than it may seem; fantasy conceals this horror, yet at the same time it creates what it purports to conceal, its ‘repressed’ point of reference. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 7. In this regard, dystopia film is just as reactionary as apocalypse and post-apocalypse film. In fact, apocalypse film is ideologically more honest. It explicitly valorizes capitalist mythology whereas dystopia appears to be critical of it. In that context, the cultural work to reproduce capitalist mythologies is all the more covert in dystopia film. Films such as A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson, 1976), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), The Running Man (Paul Michael Glaser, 1987), A Handmaid’s Tale (Volker Schlöndorff, 1990), Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997), I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004), The Island (Michael Bay, 2005), In Time (2011), The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012), and The Purge (2013) are direct in their criticism of the social contradictions inherent to capitalism. These worlds, often in the near future (to the release dates of the films), are not necessarily separated from contemporary reality by a fantastical apocalypse. Certain social and economic institutions of capitalism have merely evolved into what the films depict as unethical extremes. For example, Bruno observes that such an iconic dystopia as that depicted in Blade Runner “does not take place in a spaceship or space station, but in a city, Los Angeles, in the year 2019, a step away from the development of contemporary society.” Bruno, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and ‘Blade Runner’. In a discussion of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), Rosen reports that the ostensibly utopian “New Jerusalem is only this same world, free of the terrorist threat, a goal toward which the bureaucracy continues assiduously to work.” Rosen, Apocalyptic Transformation, 81. Cinematic dystopia narratives are only apocalyptic in that they depict a society in which ‘utopian’ capitalism has been annihilated by either social or technological aberration. “In each case the disaster not only unleashes violence and autocracy in a variety of forms but it also reveals that such tendencies were always already there.” Lisboa, The End of the World, 94. These aberrations, at least in their nascent forms, are already present in the ‘utopian’ capitalist reality in which these films are produced. Taking into account a feminist perspective on dystopian narratives that imitate contradictions in contemporary society, Maria Lisboa summarizes Margaret Atwood’s novel A Handmaid’s Tale (1985) (made into a film in 1990). The main character, Offred, has become the fertile concubine, described as a form of chattel (a commodity), to a military overlord in a dystopian future where infertility runs rampant. In the pre-dystopian world of the late twentieth century, “despite holding a university degree, Offred was a low-ranking white collar worker, whose colleagues, all women working under a male boss, generally lacked full material autonomy. In the Handmaid’s account, therefore, women remain the property of men in both societies.” Lisboa, The End of the World, 90-1. This narrative example betrays typical dystopian artefacts in two ways; it follows an apocalyptic war, and its society has little that might be considered utopian to any but the most privileged patriarchal few. However, even A Handmaid’s Tale maintains the conventional preoccupation of dystopian narrative with the further perversion of a capitalist contradiction that already exists. Cinematic dystopia narratives are often concerned with the horrific way in which technology might be misused. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, for example, human commodification has been taken to an extreme. Proletariat workers are mass produced from a single human egg in a scientific rather than social framework. “The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. 1932 (London: Vintage, 1998), 23. Social stability in this environment of organized exploitation is maintained through a process of ideological indoctrination, “hypnopaedia,” (Huxley, Brave New World, 42) – highly reminiscent of Althusser’s critique of the educational system as the dominant institution in the maintenance and reproduction of capitalist ideology in (what he refers to as “the socio-technical division of labour.”) Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” marxists.org, 21, 5. Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997) explicitly represents the perfection of class discrimination based on the dystopian chestnut of genetic modification. The Running Man (Paul Michael Glaser, 1987) represents the misuse of media technology and the exploitation of the proletariat. All suggest the technological advancements the narratives imagine are not unethical except when misused. Dystopia film explicitly criticizes capitalism in a process of repressive tolerance through which the contradictions of capitalism are reconciled by fantasies of romance and revolution. In “Spectacular Recuperation: Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy,” Brian Michael Goss observes that “romantic love on screen clearly has ideological effects; these are often reactionary, as Miller (1990) has observed in the context of 1980s U.S. films.” Brian Michael Goss, “Spectacular Recuperation: Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 24, no. 2 (2000): 156-176. Goss goes on to explain that “Arthur Penn’s groundbreaking Bonnie and Clyde (1967) can be construed as an antecedent on this score.” Goss, “Spectacular Recuperation,” 170. The mythology of romantic revolutionaries established in the trope of Bonnie and Clyde remains a narrative escape in which dystopia narratives are able to reconcile the contradictions they highlight back into the ideology of the dominant order – in this case a reactionary mythology of romance. Goss points to Ryan and Kellner’s Camera politica (1988) and Robin Wood’s Arthur Penn (1970) for further argument regarding the reactionary nature of romantic love on screen. One of the most iconic and critically revered examples of dystopia narrative that demonstrates this function is Blade Runner. Blade Runner takes capitalist human commoditization of proletariat labour to an aberrant extreme. Artificial humans called replicants have been created to perform all of the menial and dangerous labour associated with the corporate colonization of space. These androids are a cinematic realization of Marx’s concept of grundisse – the replacement of living labour with ‘dead’ technology. Ironically, only when masquerading as a ‘moral abuses’ agent for the American Association of Variety Artists does the blade runner Deckard articulate the proletariat plight clearly. Regarding her employment as an exotic dancer, he interrogates Zhora with such questions as “Have you felt yourself to be exploited in any way?” While her employer treats her as human, albeit an exploited one, Deckard’s task is to destroy her because she is not. However, in Blade Runner, the boundaries between the living and the grundisse are blurred. The replicants seem very much alive and endowed with all of the hopes and emotions of a living human. When Deckard inquires after how Rachael can be unaware that she is a replicant, corporation CEO Tyrell responds that “Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto.” Yet the replicants are fully expendable. They explicitly represent the subjugation and exploitation of proletariat labour at the hands of excessive corporate power. When they rise up against what Althusser refers to as the repressive state apparatuses (RSA’s) of the corporation and the police, symbolized by the blade runner, a capitalist mercenary in their service, the replicants are rewarded with annihilation with one exception; the narrative ends with a fantasy that reconciles the obedient replicant, Rachael, with an agent of the repressive state apparatuses, Deckard, in a conservative heterosexual pair-bond which normalizes a fantasy of upward mobility. According to Althusser, RSA’s participate in reproducing economic social relations beneficial to the dominant classes. Althusser, marxists.org, 11-12, 14. One ending depicts the two driving into an idyllic natural landscape. The proletariat replicant escapes into a romantic pastoral of nature with the disenfranchised RSA agent. All is well. As Morton points out, “The profundity of Blade Runner, and of Frankenstein, isn’t to point out that artificial life and intelligence are possible but that human life already is this artificial intelligence.” Morton, The Ecological Thought, 111-2. Blade Runner tells us that we are the exploited labour the film depicts, but that we have a place within the system that allows for survival and romance. The conflict that drives these narratives is premised upon the unstable social foundation of their dystopian societies. In that sense, the narratives are themselves already contradictory. As the societies suffer their inevitable destabilization within the diegetic time of the plot, one wonders how these societies could have been standing at the beginning of their narratives – they are always crisis medias res. Both In Time and The Purge resolve this contradiction by foregrounding youth in the new dystopian societies; these narratives appear to be peopled by the youth of our own immediate future. The societal instability has only just begun. The effect will be the immediate dating of the narratives, a small concern for Hollywood productions based on quick return profits, but avoids the social instability contradiction which cannot be explained in such narratives as Logan’s Run, in which Logan is apparently the first radical in generations of his dystopian world. These recent dystopian films are different from pre-9/11 dystopia in that they resolve their narratives by suggesting that the utopian aspects of the social realities they represent, the inevitable promises of the trajectory of our current capitalist reality, can be realized without their dystopian side effects through the ongoing efforts of heroic bourgeois individuals to mitigate their contradictions. Before 9/11, dystopian narratives encouraged a revolution against the social contradictions they exposed, and concluded with protagonists either escaping or destroying the dystopian society. As early as 1976, Michael York as Logan was escaping his futuristic underground utopia to earth’s surface in Logan’s Run during what looks like the technological collapse of the underground city. In Blade Runner, Deckard and Rachael flee their abysmal urban setting to a sunlit highway in mountains of green. And as late as 1998, Jim Carrey as Truman in The Truman Show flees his dystopian media prison to what must have been the demise of the long-running reality show, and the obsolescence of his artificial domed world. Gattaca is a strange aberration in this regard. The hero Vincent/Jerome played by Ethan Hawke remains an entrenched part of his dystopian culture, but escapes into space for a period of time following which the viewer is lead to believe his ruse will be discovered. He intimates that he has no intention of returning. Following 9/11 the ideological work of dystopia film to both criticize and reproduce the social relations necessary to support capitalism intensified. Both In Time and The Purge feature narrative apertures in which there is every indication that the protagonists will remain resident within their respective narrative societies, now freed from its dystopian effects having reconciled the narrative conflict. These films resolve their narratives by suggesting that the utopian aspects of the social realities they represent, the inevitable promises of the trajectory of our current capitalist reality, can be realized without their dystopian side-effects through the ongoing efforts of heroic bourgeois individuals to mitigate their contradictions. A decade after 9/11 the process of intensification matured into a thematic distillation of explicit symbols. In Time, for example, is a 2011 film that depicts a world characterized by two popular dystopian conventions; genetic modification has provided for a world in which physical aging ceases at the temporal age of twenty-five, and the exchange economy formerly mediated by money has been replaced with the negotiation of life-spans to accommodate the contradiction of an ever-increasing population in which everyone is otherwise immortal. The film literalizes the capitalist axiom that ‘time is money’ as a metaphor for the way that human capital is valued based on its temporal labour input. In Time appears highly progressive in the way it exposes a capitalist system of class stratification in which the proletariat face the serious exigencies of poverty-induced violence and potentially fatal living standards. It is more reactionary, however, in the way it contrasts a fantasy dystopia against the viewer’s reality that suggests such a reality is already utopian. Furthermore, it depicts a faux utopia still fundamentally predicated on a capitalist economic organization, and in which its own contradictions can be resolved through the revolutionary actions of a heterosexual pair-bond in the romantic order of Bonny and Clyde. In Time represents class stratification through an urban metaphor of isolated districts separated by military-industrial toll booths. The amount of time/money/life required to traverse each boundary becomes increasingly expensive, a system designed to preclude the upward migration of proletariat populations. The poor are kept safely distanced from the rich and populations (in a world of potential immortality) are controlled via increasing costs (measured in hours of life) in the proletariat sectors. Proletariat worker, Will Salas, played by Justin Timberlake, incidentally inherits over a hundred years from a disillusioned member of the bourgeoisie seeking to meet his death in impoverished Dayton. Unfortunately, Will’s un-aged mother dies at the hands of unexpected rising costs just moments before he can share his new fortune with her. Now on a vendetta, Will uses his newfound wealth to traverse the tolls and travel to affluent New Greenwich. While there, he demonstrates a fearless recklessness in his spending of time that is alien to the ambient populace. His behaviour catches the attention of police authorities and enamors him of a young bourgeois beauty named Sylvia played by Amanda Seyfried. Together, they play out a combination of the ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ conventions and incite a revolution in which the poor steal time and the banks are emptied. This resolution sounds unexpectedly socialist. Susan Sontag offers an argument that codes the levelling of life spans as post-modern rather than socialist. Sontag observes that the post-modern subject lives in “an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” Sontag, Against Interpretation: and Other Essays., 224. Dialogue in the film makes clear that not even the proletariat wish to change their economic social stations. At the outset, Will claims, “I just want more time on my hands than there are hours in the day.” The proletariat classes merely want life security and an escape from the daily terror of imminent death. Likewise, wealthy debutante Sylvia, is so bored with the banality of ageless freedom that she claims that she feels just as psychologically compromised as Will. She adopts an attitude that life without the fear of death is not worth living. Sontag, Against Interpretation: and Other Essays, 225. She goes on to claim that sometimes she envies people from the ghetto. “The ‘clock’ is good for no-one. The poor die, and the rich don’t live. We can all live forever as long as we don’t do anything foolish.” The leveling of life spans in the narrative is not a socialist revolution but rather a social one. Proletariat and Bourgeois protagonists Will and Sylvia are united in a romantic pair-bond that levels and forgives all class exploitation, especially after the humiliation of Sylvia’s father, a greedy New Greenwich patriarch, brings a cathartic fantasy of justice to the narrative. It seems that the established economy will survive the narrative closure, and the utopian effects of immortality, brought on by the capitalist advent of scientific genetic advancement, can now be enjoyed by all without any dystopian side effects. Moreover, the racial and gender dynamics are anything but progressive in In Time. Beyond the dystopian side-effects of youthful immortality in which “many must die so that few can be immortal,” envisioned as economic class stratification, the otherwise utopian society is almost exclusively Caucasian. Ideologically, the film suggests that a utopian future will be free of racial integration and blindingly white. Lisboa observes “ethnic uniformity” as a defining feature of many utopian visions. Lisboa, The End of the World, 135. However, her observation does not completely describe the utopian vision. While other visions of utopia may be the ethnic uniformity of a specific class (Lisboa lists none specifically), In Time is uniformly white in its representations of proletariat and bourgeois heroes alike. The only character of an identifiable ethnic origin other than white with a speaking part is Borel’s wife. Borel is Will’s best friend and a proletariat alcoholic with an infant child. His wife has less than five lines of dialogue and is dropped from the narrative long before its resolution. Similarly, the narrative reduces all romantic integration to three couples, all heterosexual. In the pair-bond between Borel and his African-ethnic wife, he is an absent alcoholic and she is attached to their infant child. It is clear that Sylvia’s father is a political patriarch. His wife is irrelevant. In the pair-bond between Sylvia and Will, he is the aggressor, the hero, the leader. She is merely a bourgeois symbol and an extension of his narrative. The Purge reconciles the capitalist contradictions it highlights with even more conservative strategies of containment. The Purge imagines America very much as it is today, except that it is experiencing all-time lows of violent crime and unemployment. This statistical utopia has emerged out of a cathartic social practice in which the contradictions of excessive population growth and social repression are resolved through an annual ritual in which “all crime, including murder,” is permitted for a twelve-hour period. It is the year 2022. Under “the new founding fathers” the diegetic media describes America as “a nation reborn.” An opening montage of urban violence is highly critical of American culture as it exists now. Violence, a side-effect of capitalist class stratification, has been channelled and contained to a single annual event called “the Purge.” Not only is this event used as a controlled cultural catharsis, it has the benefit of unburdening the capitalist economy of socialist considerations by eradicating undesirable populations and demographics. Financial affluence is the measure by which people are deemed expendable or not. Government employees higher than an ambiguous “ranking ten” are exempt from the Purge. Lead protagonist James Sandin, played by Ethan Hawke, reminds his children of “all the good the Purge does,” especially in the context of the financial rewards he has enjoyed selling security systems specifically designed to protect the wealthy from vigilantes on the night of the Purge. He informs his children of the privileged status their family enjoys with a horrifically bourgeois blind eye. “Bad things do happen tonight but we can afford protection so we will be alright.” Only the homeless and the poor, hardly represented in the film, are the victims of the cathartic violence the Purge encourages. Things begin to go wrong for the Sandin’s only once an African-American “stranger” enters the narrative and they are besieged by racist and classist bigots bent on murdering him. The Purge appears highly progressive in the way it exposes the way in which capitalist class stratification might produce social violence and repression. Part of the way The Purge achieves its apparent criticism is through the borrowing of conventions from the horror film genre. Horrifically masked vigilantes with an irrational dedication to their evil designs assault the suburban harmony of a bourgeois family in a bleak environment of darkness and relentless suspense. The villains who place the Sandin’s under siege articulate an elitist perspective as their leader encourages the Sandin’s to release the African-American fugitive in their care to them for execution. “You’re good folks just like us, one of the haves. We’re all fine, young, educated guys and gals. [He’s] nothing but a dirty, homeless pig.” However, their victims are a strangely conflated mix of an impoverished racial minority and the white bourgeois protagonists. The Purge is a horrific vision in which this social and political stratification is coded as terror and the frightening aspects of this dystopian capitalism appear vilified. The movie is more reactionary in the way it reproduces certain racial social politics and suggests that the contradictions it explores can be resolved with the perseverance of a strong, successful patriarchal family leader, very much a convention of the conservative American apocalypse film. The dystopian aspects of the America of The Purge are mitigated by the romantic notion of a sacrificial father. In his efforts to protect his family from the Purge vigilantes that have infiltrated his home, Sandin is eventually killed. The violence that any member of the bourgeois might experience during the Purge can be overcome with the romantic efforts of a self-sacrificial father to protect them. The narrative concludes with a fantasy of integration of a different kind. Whereas in Blade Runner and In Time symbolic members of the proletariat are romantically integrated with members of the RSA or the bourgeoisie respectively, The Purge concludes with the integration of a deeply impoverished racial minority taking up authority as the head of a bourgeois family. Following the death of James, the African-American stranger steps in to save the family from the ravages of their neighbours, jealous of the profit the family generated from local security sales. One neighbour unambiguously explains this motivation for her vengeful malevolence. “You made so much money off of us and then just stuck it in our faces.” The American dream of upward mobility is at odds with the sentiments of the evil bourgeoisie in the film, except, of course, for the bourgeois protagonists. The stranger’s heroism plays out as an ambiguously sexually-charged alliance between the now widowed family mother and their new saviour. True to the conventions of the horror genre from which the film borrows, the narrative concludes in aperture. The dystopian world of the Purge remains intact and rife for endless iterations of sequels of the annual Purge. Also true to the horror film genre, the movie works as a purge for the viewer on an ideological level. They can experience the cathartic fantasy of having criticized bourgeois affluence and capitalist corruption, and having survived the horrific night the narrative depicts, to emerge from the theatre renewed in their contradictory capitalist social existence. The film is not subtle in this regard. In an ambiguously cynical montage of diegetic radio broadcasts, the last dialogue of the film heard by the audience highlights the success of the purge in terms of heightened population reduction and economic advantages, especially in the gun and security industries. Due to the Purge, both of these industries apparently saw “profits in both quarters.” The viewer can depart the diegetic world of the narrative reassured that such violence at least serves the economic purposes of capitalism. Both films appear to criticize their capitalist origins but work ideologically to suggest that the America they imagine is not the America of today. These films work as fantasies of displacement which valorizes the capitalist dystopia in which we live, just as rife with corruption and inequality as many if these filmic fantasies. The simultaneous criticism and reproduction (of the social conditions inherent to capitalism) in dystopia cinema result in a thematic parallax. The films are both reactionary and progressive and therefore either depending on your critical perspective. Blade Runner literalizes this parallax. Deckard uses utopian technology to extract an impossible parallax from a two-dimensional photograph. He uses it to locate and execute Zhora. However, the parallax occurs in the narrative at what might be the beginning of his shift towards sympathy for the replicants. The social function of each narrative depends on the viewer’s already present ideological propensities. However, the criticism is explicit and the ideology is covert and romantic. Ultimately, the reproductive function of dystopia cinema supersedes the critical on an ideological level and Hollywood continues to generate profit from the production of dystopian fantasies that feed and satisfy a populace indoctrinated on capitalist paranoia, especially following 9/11. As global capitalism expands, it remains to be seen if international film industries will adopt Hollywood dystopia narrative conventions, and whether such ventures will prove more or less effective in their critical function; whether there is international hope to escape the capitalist loop of ideology and repressive tolerance, or whether the dystopia in which we already live will become a global phenomenon. 24