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“The future is already here; it’s just not very evenly
distributed
William gibson
“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities
are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by
religious gro````````````ups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, what is real?
Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very
sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not
distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it
is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the
mind.
William Gibson is the doyen of modern dystopian fiction. His
first novel, Neuromancer (1980), widely regarded as the start of the
“cyberpunk” sub-genre, predicted the Internet and coined the term “cyberspace.”
Several of his stories have been turned into movies, including Johnny Mnemonic
and New Rose Hotel. Talking about his 2015 book The Peripheral, now a TV series
on Amazon Prime, he said that maybe we should stop thinking about the
apocalypse as a single event and consider it as multi-causal and perhaps taking
a prolonged period of about 40 or 50 years. The interest, he says, is in what
the rich and powerful are prepared to do to the rest of us to come out of it
intact.
This fits well with the idea of a long apocalypse, perhaps beginning with the 2007-8 crash and deepening the global crisis of the economy, states, the environment, all aspects of human life, including mass starvation and repeated pandemics, indeed all social relations—the Four Horsemen bundled together and lasting decades and cascading towards civilisational catastrophe.
The long period of Apocalypse capitalism might be dated from 9/11/2001, of course, and it is equally valid to see both the attack on New York and Washington and the world economic crisis as heralding the new age. What is not valid is to try to explain everything that’s happening solely with the political theories of the 1960s, let alone those of 1917.
The only thing mitigating an apocalyptic perspective is the
ability of the poor and oppressed, of the international workers’ movement, of
the environmental movement, and all those fighting for human rights and dignity
to impose our priorities against those of the billionaires. Olivier
Besancenot’s repeated presidential campaigns summed it up with a
brilliant slogan that should be revived: “our lives are worth more than their
profits.”
Gibson’s insights help explain the huge impact that science
fiction has within our culture and the primary place that dystopian sci-fi
holds. Sixty years of real-life human space exploration have ignited the
science fictional imagination, and computer graphics have enabled a much more
convincing portrayal. As we shall see, imaginary futures, or alternative
universes, can be used to say something about the present-day apocalypse—about
contemporary disaster capitalism. This talk led by
the late Mike Davis just before he died is a brilliant explanation of
“Apocalypse capitalism.” Davis is absolutely scathing about the “COP”
conferences and their ability to bring about any amelioration of climate
change.
First and foremost, a health warning. What is being said
here is not that most modern science fiction movies are ideologically
progressive across the board. On the other hand, some of the subgenres, like
“Superheros,” are almost by definition reactionary. Many sci-fi movies involve
huge dollops of sexism, and many of them have racist stereotypes, like most
contemporary Hollywood movies of any genre. I am arguing that many contemporary
movies reflect the world’s descent into Apocalypse capitalism, and the best of
them like Elysium, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Children of Men hold up a potential
future to critique aspects of the world we live in. Many have implicitly or
explicitly progressive things to say about the climate crisis and social decay.
There is a mixture of reactionary tropes and themes that are obviously
compatible with an anti-capitalist viewpoint. The balance between these things
exists even within franchises. So, for example, the second Avatar film,
“Avatar: The Way of Water,” revolves around the redemptive role of the nuclear
family in a way that the first Avatar movie does not.
Children of Men
Multiverse movies, in which people “travel” between here and
usually dystopian alternative universes (including later versions of this one),
have been popular among writers and producers because they allow them to
imagine anything; no one knows what really happens in alien civilisations, if
such things exist. Key texts in this genre include Inception, His
Dark Materials, The Man in the High Castle, Planet of the Apes, Donnie Darko,
the Philadelphia Experiment, and the recent “absurdist” movie Everything,
Everywhere, All the Time. In fact, this latter film is more than “absurdist,”
it is completely stupid. If this is what Chinese youth are watching, then the
future is less bright than I thought. In this category, the TV series Dark
Materials (iPlayer) and Man in
the High Castle (Prime) also stand out as dystopian triumphs.
Apocalypse capitalism is the latest stage of neoliberalism.
It presages a further collapse of the last remnants of the welfare state in
advanced countries and the total collapse of mid-20th century
developmentalism in the Global South.
Theoretically, Apocalypse capitalism is best explained in a
series of books by WI Robinson, including Global Police State, Global
Civil War and Can Global Capitalism Endure? Robinson has
taken Marxist political economy to a new stage, integrating “militarised
accumulation,” “digitalised capitalism” and the way that capitalism treats the
huge number of refugees and migrants as a “surplus population,” dehumanised beings
capable of being sucked into the workforce and then expelled again, according
to the whims of the transnational capitalist class and the diktats of the
market and increasingly brutalised state apparatuses.
Alfonso Cuarón’s movie Children
of Men, based on the book of the same name written by legendary crime
writer PD James, shows a world where no new children are being born. Britain is
one of the few countries with a government that still functions—albeit a brutal
fascist government—and there are many so-called “illegal” refugees who are
either imprisoned or executed if they are found. The story is set in 2027,
which leaves four more years to go. Despite the violence, to my mind, this is
one of the most potentially realistic dystopian Britains—if the progressive
forces lose all along the line.
Also set in a Britain under fascist dictatorship is James
McTaigue’s “V for Vendetta” (Nathalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, John
Hurt). Even if you haven’t seen the film, you will recognise the mask,
sometimes worn by hackers and anticapitalist demonstrators. The movie is based
on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. It really
belongs to the superhero genre, which will be discussed in Part 2 of this
article. Here we should note that although V fights against the dictatorship,
there are reactionary features to this character, and his methods of struggle,
like all superheroes, are literally fantastic.
A creepy fascist dictatorship is also on view in Fahrenheit 451 (1966, starring Julie Christie and
Cyril Cusak). The fire department’s role is to start fires, primarily of books
and the secret libraries they house. A key form of resistance is for people to
learn a book by rote and then join the resistance in the woods, so that even if
all copies are burned, the book persists. When Julie Christie joins the rebels,
each resistor is introduced by the book’s name. A particularly scruffy
individual says, “Hello, I’m The Prince by Machiavelli. As you can see, you can’t
tell a book by looking at its cover.”
Over the last decade, science fiction and reality have been
brought together in the notion of “singularity,” which in this usage[1] is
about how humans will merge with artificial intelligence. In Ray
Kurzweil’s use, “singularity” refers to the point where humans and
artificial intelligence effectively merge. We will be able to genetically
modify humans to integrate them with artificial intelligence and replace
defunct organs with implants. Humans Mark 2 will live longer lives and have
much greater problem-solving and memory capacities. That’s the Kurzweil theory,
at any rate.
Blade Runner 2049 and William Gibson’s novel Idoru
feature protagonists who become infatuated with characters who are in fact just
virtual people, with computer-generated holograms and engaging voices, linked
to massive computer data to replicate a female human.
The mother of all dystopian science fiction onscreen is
Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner (Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, Rutger
Haur, Harrison Ford). In addition to dealing with the issue of artificial
intelligence and androids, the movie foresaw a situation, already underway in
some parts of advanced hi-tech capitalism, of massively developed technology
alongside environmental catastrophe and infrastructure collapse.
In Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (Jodie
Foster, Matt Damon, 2013), ecological catastrophe and social breakdown have led
to the bourgeoisie extracting themselves from life on Earth and decamping to an
artificial moon called Elysium (the Greek and Roman name for “heaven”). This is
the ultimate gated community. From time to time, poor and desperate Earth
dwellers try to break into Elysium to access its health care and living
standards. Jodie Foster plays the defence minister who gives the order to shoot
down the illegal immigrant space ships. The obvious metaphors and similarities
between Elysium and real life show that the book is against capitalism. Which
Blomkamp openly espouses, and is also on display in his movie District 9.
The original Avatar (2009) includes a
polemic against the evil corporation and the American military that backs them
(clearly shown
in this video). Set in 2054, with the natural resources of the Earth
in crisis, the Resources Development Administration (RDA) mines the valuable
mineral called unobtanium on Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centauri star system.
Pandora is inhabited by the Na’vi, 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned humanoids who
live in total harmony with nature. When the Na’avi fight back and the RDA
attack spacecraft crash to the ground, they take on the role of 21st-century
indigenous rain forest defenders with Vietcong determination and mass support.
I saw Avatar in a cinema where some UK soldiers and their
families were in the audience. They walked out, shouting at the screen.
Postmodern critics might want to discuss the unsubtle and reductionist
metaphors here, but the US and UK militarists certainly get it and dislike it.
The evil corporation is at the heart of numerous dystopian
movies, for example the original 1978 Robocop, but also the first (and by far
the best) Alien film, in which the corporation attempts to bring some of the
most vicious aliens, the most perfect fighting machines, back to Earth, as well
as the Tyrell corporation in Blade Runner, the Soylent corporation processing
human flesh for food in Soylent Green, and numerous others. Soylent Green,
based on Harry Harrison’s novel “Make Roon! Make Room!” comes dangerously close
to predicting some of the main features of Apocalypse capitalism, including
global warming and water and food shortages. Like many writers, Harrison posed
the absolute number of humans as the problem, not what is being done to them by
global elites.
There is sometimes a nit-picking response to Hollywood
movies on the left. Hollywood films are big business and one of the cutting
edges of American “soft” ideological power, often based on the lives of the
rich or affluent middle classes and far removed from the lives of the majority
of the US population. But does that mean that these movies are automatically
disqualified from saying anything progressive? Obviously not. [1]
In The City and the City, a BBC series based on the novel by
China Miéville, and produced with his collaboration, the city—somewhere in the
Balkans—is divided into two, apparently on the basis of religion. But the two
parts of the city—Ul Qoma and Besel—overlap in the city centre and share some
streets and squares in the “hatched” area. Citizens must stay on their side of
the city—their side of the street or plaza—and this division is enforced by a
joint oversight committee called “Breach.” People are trained from an early age
not to see the other side of the street—called “unseeing.” Some reviewers have
questioned whether it is really possible to prevent people from seeing what is
directly in front of them. Of course it is—ask Antonio Gramsci or Karl Marx,
for that matter. It’s called ideology.
The division of the city is contested by small groups of
“unificationists,” who sometimes cross the border to hold joint anti-division
meetings. Miéville is a Marxist and former member of the SWP.
Peter Weir’s The Truman Show portrays
someone trapped in a TV soap opera, which he (Jim Carrie) imagines to be real
life. Millions watch his every move, and he gradually discovers what’s really
happening. The show’s director, Cristophe (Ed Harris), aided by Truman’s
“wife,” Meryl (Laura Linney), controls the whole setting. The island where
Truman lives is a real-life gated community called Seaside, Florida—a model
dystopia for the affluent senior citizens who can afford it. Its architecture
and lack of vibrancy (or young people) closely parallel Poundbury in Dorset, on an estate
owned by King Charles III. The Truman Show fits Guy Debord’s theory of the
Spectacle to a “t.”
In its sci-fi form, Seaside is watched by hundreds of TV
cameras. Truman has a final confrontation with Crisdophe, which centres on
choosing the dangers of real life against a comfortable but totally controlled
life. The corrupt drivel of “reality” shows is an obvious target for Weir’s
film, as is the way that surveillance is an inherent part of the spectacle
of digitalised capitalism.
Another BBC series, Noughts and Crosses, based on the novel
by Malorie Blackman, portrays a world in which Europe has been colonised by
Africans, who rule on behalf of the empire based in Nigeria. At upmarket
cocktail parties, most of the guests are black, and most of the waiters are
white. Rebellious white youth clash with the police, often white themselves,
but with senior officers who are black. The series, filmed in South Africa, is
slightly anachronistic because it shows direct colonialism and not contemporary
neocolonialism, but this is a minor point. Even for hardcore anti-racists, it
is still a culture shock to see black people controlling everything and lording
it over their white servants.
The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich 2004) pictures
a sudden environmental collapse as the Arctic ice cap melts suddenly, causing a
tsunami that hits the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Twenty years ago,
many reviewers thought this was unrealistic and underestimated how the
environment could suddenly go into total collapse. But as we go past numerous
environmental tipping points that are making huge areas of the Earth’s surface
uninhabitable and as glaciers worldwide melt at a rapid pace, this no longer
seems so unrealistic.
The basic plot of The Day After has been reproduced
endlessly in downmarket fillers, part of the huge amount of film product needed
to sustain the ever-multiplying platforms—Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV, Disney,
etc. The core of the Day After plot is that a dystopian event occurs, families
flee for safety, families are separated, but they are reunited after much
struggle, and the family triumphs. See the Greenland
trailer to get a glimpse of this. The family as a redoubt against the
ills of the world is everywhere now and challenging the individualistic hedonism of
the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Films that are a slight variant of this are I am
Legend and Finch, in which the protagonists wake up after apocalyptic
events (a solar flare and a pandemic, respectively) to find themselves
apparently the sole survivors. Both enjoy the company of man’s best friend, but
Finch also has the company of a ridiculous robot, just what you need to stock
your online movie platform (in this case, Apple TV).
Don’t Look Up, in which a huge asteroid is set to destroy
the Earth, is a metaphor for climate change denial and attacks capitalist
politicians and the media by ridiculing scientists and environmental activism.
Different views that demonstrate the range of left-wing responses can be seen
in the reviews by Ian Parker, on this site, and Ezra Brain, a theatre worker in New York. On the central
idea in Brain’s piece—being “against subtlety”—I go with it 100%. You don’t
have to make a movie version of Stalinist “socialist realism” to get across a
blunt anti-capitalist message. Brain references the didactic work of Berthold
Brecht, for example, Mother
Courage, to illustrate how a creative work can have a wider significance
enabled by unsubtle metaphors.
Brecht’s The
Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, written in the 1930s, features the rise of a
Chicago mobster and charts how he bullies his way to becoming the top gangster
in the city. The most obvious reference to the present was Al Capone, but the
deeper reference was Hitler’s rise to power. Another very unsubtle metaphor!
“What happens when we all die because something smashes into
the earth?” films are at their most sophisticated in Lars van Trier’s 2012 film
Melancholia (Kirstyen Dunce, Charlotte Rampling, Kiefer Sutherland). Here,
dystopia is about mental anguish of the type that every terminal patient
eventually goes through. As far as we know, nobody engages in looting or
rioting as the end of the world approaches.
Many authors have argued that the first real science fiction
story was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The technology it correctly
predicted was electricity, although we have since discovered that the
application of large amounts of electricity to the human body can have negative
consequences. This posed the question, “What makes us human?” What is the core
of “humanness”? The monster is rejected because of the way he looks, but he is
articulate and teaches himself to read. Is he human?
Films and TV based on the issue of artificial intelligence
and humanness include Ex Machina, Humans, the Terminator franchise, I, Robot, the
Matrix, and many others.
An original take on this theme is the 2002 film Solaris.
As his space vehicle orbits the eponymous planet, crew member George Clooney
meets his former—and dead—wife, Natascha McElhone, on the station. She has been
summoned from his mind by the planet itself. She doesn’t know who she is or who
she is supposed to be. Is this real or just a figment of his imagination? And
if it is the latter, does it matter if he falls in love with her again? Or is
that just refusing to face up to the fact that nearly all love ends, one way or
another, in grief? The story is based on a novel by pre-war Polish author Stanislaw
Lem.
It’s no surprise that the religious answer to “what makes us
human” is our soul, the ghost in the machine, of which the all-too-destructible
human body is merely the earthly appearance. However, any materialist’s
understanding of humanity is that it is matter that has evolved to the point of
self-consciousness. In principle, if it were possible to replicate such
complexity, there is no reason that the “replicants” thus created could not be
self-conscious and thus properly autonomous, with their own emotions. Even if
we find out that only organic matter can reach the level of complexity needed
for self-aware intelligence, there is no reason that organic matter couldn’t be
made in a lab, even to the point where it becomes self-aware. Already
researchers have created artificial human cells which have
shown the capacity to link up in Petri dishes and learn
Among the many movies and TV shows based on the accession to
humanness of robots is I, Robot (Alex
Proyas, 2004). Robots are divided into “good” and “bad” according to the
instructions their makers have built in. In a key scene, the good robot named
“Sony” is accused of having murdered his maker, Dr. Alfred Lanning. Sony
insists that he could not have murdered Lanning “because I loved him.” When
Detective Spooner (Will Smith) says that robots don’t have emotions, Sony bangs
the table so hard that he dents it. Spooner replies, “That one’s called
anger”—recognising de facto that some robots indeed have emotions (it turns out
that Sony is a higher specification than run-of-the-mill NS5 robots that can be
made evil).
One group of cyborgs that definitely have emotions are the
Nexus-6 replicants in Blade Runner. Limited to a four-year life span, they come
to Earth to get an extension. When this proves impossible, they run riot. The
“prediction” made by Blade Runner, a 1982 movie set in 2020 and only partially
fulfilled, was the combination of a highly complex and advanced scientific and
production apparatus and a morbidly collapsing civil society, in which it rains
all the time. Never mind the details; Blade Runner’s prediction of social,
economic, and ecological collapse is coming true.
The interaction between science fiction and science fact is
self-evident. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the dystopia was often nuclear
war or its aftermath. In 1964, two movies based on books with a near
identical plot were released: Fail Safe, starring Henry Fonda, and the grimly
hilarious Dr. Strangelove, produced by Stanley Kubrick and starring Peter
Sellars in multiple roles.
The BBC produced Peter Watkins’ The War Game in
1966, a pseudo-documentary about the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Britain
that showed horrific scenes of mass death and destruction and the role of the
armed police in shooting irradiated casualties and the imposition of martial
law, commanded from the Regional Seats of Government that had been secretly
constructed underground. The film, however, was deemed too dangerous to
broadcast and was finally shown at the National Film Theatre in 1996, 30 years
after being produced.
Authoritarian dystopias come in different flavours.
Orwell’s 1984 is the hard version, with all-pervasive
surveillance and state brutality, but Huxley’s Brave
New World is the soft version, where the masses are kept in
order with endless supplies of a tranquilliser called Soma. State agents roam
the streets looking for depressed people who can be given the drug.
In the 1975 version of Rollerball, the
apocalypse—long-forgotten wars and social collapse—has given rise to a world in
which US cities are controlled by “executives” of the big monopolies. So
Houston is the energy city, Chicago is the food city, and so on. A combination
of material plenty and brutal sports, endlessly relayed on multivision, keeps
the masses in check. What they lack is freedom. This version of the film, the
one with the politics intact, unlike its ridiculous 2022 remake, was made at
the end of the great post-war boom, when a lot of Marxist thought focused on
alienation rather than class exploitation and imperialism as the critical
problem facing the oppressed.
When the Energy City Chief Executive Mr Bartholomew (John
Houseman) tells Houston’s star Rollerball player Jonathan E (James
Caan) that he should retire, Jonathan smells a rat. Bartholomew
is blunt with him: “Rollerball is a stupid game,” he tells him, “in which no
one is supposed to be endlessly successful.” “The only thing we ask,” he says,
“all we have ever asked is that people not interfere with executive decisions.”
Like the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia and Eastern Europe, anything that is
the product of immense personal effort outside the system is regarded with
suspicion. All attempts to bring down Jonathan fail, and the power of
individual brilliance and individualism as a doctrine is preserved.
One of the most watched sci-fi televisions series have ben
those based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The
Handmaid’s Tale (Channel 4). This, of course, contains overt metaphors
about the war on women, particularly the war on reproductive rights in the
United States. Many people, including me, found going beyond Series 1
difficult, as the sequels contain mounting crescendos of barbarities against
women. But there is no question that the Margaret Atwood novel and TV series
have played an enormously progressive role in engaging millions of viewers and
listeners with a stridently feminist story. Since the TV series started in 2017,
3.5 million copies of the book have been sold.
The Road (John Hillcoat 2009) is set in a world where
the Global North is covered in ash, which has killed most organic life, and in
which refugees from the north try to make it to the tropics. We were told
nothing about the causes of this catastrophe, which could be a nuclear winter
caused by war or a Chernobyl-like nuclear accident, or it could just be an
environmental collapse.
There are dozens of such apocalyptic movies, many of them
completely derivative and run-of-the-mill. Take the 2007 movie Flood (starring
Tom Courteney, Robert Carlisle, and Jess Sarah Gils), whose producers have paid
out for a strong cast but underinvested in believable special effects. A
massive wall of water overcomes the Thames Barrier, and central London is
flooded. That is very likely—the Thames Barrier will not prevent flooding in
central London if global warming causes catastrophic sea-level rise. Then
again, pandemic movies like Contagion, Outbreak, and 12 Monkeys actually
underestimated the threat of pandemics to human civilisation, as demonstrated
by the COVID crisis, a crisis that is far from over.
The movie Noah, in whose lifetime the original climate
change threats to jumar civilisation occurred, has a quality worthy of its
subject: dreadful. The only intriguing aspect of the Ark story is whether it
was based on a recollection of a cataclysmic event at the dawn of human
civilization, such as the massive flooding event that created the Mediterranean
Sea, which was caused by rapid rising sea levels.
Then the ‘60s dystopia was often nuclear-war, or its
aftermath. Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 Clockwork Orange, based on a
reactionary novel by Andrew Burgess, envisages a brutal and heartless Britain
where Russian slang has invaded the language, probably a result of a war or at
least growing Russian Communist domination of the West. The movie brings
together many of the tropes of contemporary petit bourgeois paranoia – fear of
the Reds, hostility towards the young (mixed with jealousy), contempt towards
‘pop’ culture etc.
The big breakthrough for science fiction came in the 1960s
and early 1970s. Until then, science fiction was definitely a thing but very
much a minority pursuit. Penguin Books, which dominated paperbacks then, had
its own sci-fi section with brilliantly coloured covers. Western paperbacks and
movies were on the way down and eventually almost completely replaced with
science fiction, although this genre seems to be making a comeback—sometimes in
the form of science fiction Westerns (the Westworld series and Out of Range).
This later series revolves around the appearance of a large and apparently
infinitely deep hole (probably 40 feet across) in a far-flung part of a huge
ranch. We discover that people who fall down this hole reappear at different
times in the near past or the near future. As far as we know, only two people
have ever discovered this hole, and people who reappear at different times
somehow avoid meeting their contemporary selves. And it appears that this
programme will not be extended beyond one series, so we are left in the dark
about what is going on or what this programme is all about.
It might be argued that I have cherry-picked dystopian
movies to highlight those with potentially progressive content. It is true that
a lot of them don’t have anything progressive about them but are a farrago of
reactionary drivel. Take The Boys. Racism, sexism, and
hypermasculinity are all present, along with massive violence. This kind of
thing will be discussed in Part 2 of this article.
Part 2 – Capitalist Superheros, the
Wild Hunt, and Humans Murdering Aliens, coming soon.
Further reading
[1] Take
Alfonso Cuarso’s movie, Roma.
It's one of the first "art house" movies made by Netflix, which had
only a very minimal release in cinemas in order to qualify for awards, which it
duly got. Was Roma’s production a capitalist enterprise? Obviously. Was it
socially progressive in its basic message? 100%.
What about Peter Weir’s 1981 film, Gallipoli? Same answer.
The evil state or corporation ruining lives for profit is a recurrent theme of
science fiction - evoking an implicit anti-capitalist message. What about The
Queen’s Gambit (Anya Taylor-Joy), one of Netflix’s most successful projects,
which features a woman chess champion who fights her 1950s repressive family
and her brutal boarding school to achieve her ambitions and then refuses
attempts by President Richard Nixon to use her as a piece of cold-war
propaganda against the Soviet Union. Is this meant to be a literal account of a
little-known campaigner, or is it the elaboration of an alternative past? Its
left-leaning political message is clear.
Source: AntiCapitalist Resistance
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