Dystopian Themes that Emerge in British Cinema

Dystopia is a sub-genre that is central to British literary history. It pairs itself with the British cynicism and creates a richly bleak outlook on the future world that British cinema has identified and created some of its most influential films from. It is an unspoken subtext that Britain’s have this pre-existing psychology, but as literary forms have evolved over the hundreds of years of creating dystopian fiction, the mode of cinema has allowed the sub-genre to explore views of the future very self-consciously, staying culturally relevant in one hand whilst also referencing the literary founders of dystopia in Britain, as many of their core concepts remain true to this day.

“Dystopian narrative is largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century. A hundred years of exploitation, repression, state violence, war, genocide, disease, famine, ecocide, depression, debt, and the steady depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life” (Moylan, 2000, 11).

The examples in this essay evaluate dystopian themes at three vastly different points in the timeline of British dystopia and how they have evolved. Firstly, Orwell’s totalitarian ‘1984’ (1984), recreated by Radford, although I will treat the film as a post-war perspective on the future as Orwell intended; Kubrick’s cold war comic, ‘Dr Strangelove: Or how I learned to stop worrying and Love the Bomb’ (1964); and Boyle’s ‘28 Days Later’ (2002) as a contemporary comparison.

‘1984’ quickly establishes the power divide in the film between those working for the Party of INGSOC (translated as English Socialism) and those who are true members of the Party during the act of the Two Minutes Hate. Radford focuses on the emotional anguish in the faces of the crowd but does not allow them to break the fourth wall – this is role is reserved for the face of Big Brother. He creates the hierarchy in the space with the powerful gaze, followed by the party leaders and then the workers, like Winston and Julia. Radford also uses this image in a way that Briton’s have identified with propaganda in the past, using the same sepia tint, facial structure and eye contact as the infamous ‘Your Country Needs YOU’ poster, to create the same sense of anxiety in the audience as there is in the characters. ‘Big Brother is watching you’ is the most fundamental concept in the text and relies on technology advancing and being harnessed to control the social masses. Individuals lose their privacy to ensure they are following the ideology of the party. This persistency ensures they do not physically violate policy, but also influences them psychologically. It is a technological panopticon which Foucault argues creates social paranoia and increases compliance as a result. (Foucault, 1977). With this social paranoia, INGSOC can prevent thought crime and create a society where the mind is in the party, not in the people. In ‘1984’ free thought is classed as Berry’s interpretation of Global Thinking. She argues that “Global thinking can only do to the globe what a space satellite does to it: reduce it, make a bauble out of it.” She explains how the only true global thinkers have led multinational corporations and “done so by means of simplification too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought.” (Neuman, 1991, 346/347) Orwell see’s the party of INGSOC as global thinkers enforcing their ideology, and through their manipulation, they constrain thought to the point that any form of free, let alone global thought, is classed as a crime.

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Psychological control was their true desire and the entire life the individuals lived was to ensure this control: fabrication of history, manipulation of language, castration in the Anti-Sex League and more. Orwell took the view on life post-war and analysed how it could develop over time. Following the war and his time at the Ministry of Information, he saw a lack of trust between those in power and those in the position of consumption. He became highly aware of how the public were being manipulated so easily through the use of basic propaganda, therefore with the advancements in technology and media output, a totalitarian society seemed only inevitable to form. For a dystopia to exist, it must have a utopian opposite. For every inhalation, there is an exhalation and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every ounce of hatred the people have for Big Brother and their oppressive society, INCSOC falls more in love with the power they have of their subjects psychology. The more the people finally surrender to loving Big Brother, the more empowered the party feels. Maus argues that ‘critics have often succumbed to the temptation of the overwhelmingly binary ‘us vs them’ reasoning that defined the conflict” (Wheeler, 2005, 3). Although simple and binary, it must be at the core to divide the two opposing views, otherwise there could be no opposition.

In ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’, the Cold war acts as the dividing factor with America and Russia being the binary opposites. However, it is not as simple in terms of conflict as ‘1984’ due to the nature of the threat in the narrative. “The signs are that by the mid-1960s, despite (or perhaps because of) the Cuban missile crisis, many people were learning to live with the threat of nuclear annihilation” (Shaw, 2001, 140). Although Russia and America have opposing views, Kubrick does not allow the just this opposition to be the threat. The Mutually Assured Destruction scheme is a mutual threat – appropriately abbreviated to MAD. Public discourse during this era sub-textualized the bomb and as a result it gained an allegorized status which Kubrick magnified to influential people having sexual desires regarding the power and possibilities of the bomb. Although American-born, Kubrick approaches the absurdity of cold war with a fundamentally British comedic approach. His characterization is central to the comedy but also to the dystopia. General Jack Ripper personifies America’s military machismo gone wrong but is also a clear homage to a famous section of British history. Kubrick ironically portrays Ripper, a person capable of executing the world’s most powerful military strategy, Plan R, are also worried that the fluoridation of their water is a “Commie” scheme that has resulted in his “loss of essence”. The sexually charged, macho nature continues with ‘General Turgidson’ who is introduced prior a sexual encounter with his secretary. Turgidson remains turgid and carries that energy into the War Room and excitedly suggests to “launch an all-out and coordinated attack” on Russia and America would “stand a damn good chance catching ‘em with their pants down.” The supposed voice of reason is President Merkin Muffley. As the name suggests, his role is to ‘cover-up’ the mistakes of his subordinates, doing so in a comedically delicate and domestic way with Russian President, Dmitri. Finally, we have Dr Strangelove. He satirises the world’s perception on American stupidity as a Nazi Scientist leading the nuclear plan of America, wearing nothing but a glove and a pair of semi-tinted spectacles to conceal his identity. As argued with “1984”, the man-made apocalypse is dystopian for the rest of the world is his utopia: “a ratio of ten females to each” with the women being selected on “cross-section of necessary skills” in underground in mine sites—an idea so exciting that the Dr cannot resist but heil the sky at his sexual excitement where his castrated body expresses itself. His excitement continues to grow until the sensation becomes so great, he regains the ability to stand in a climax where life on earth as we know it is destroyed to the sound track of Vera Lynn. Kubrick hyperbolizes the sensations the status of the bomb through Dr Strangelove’s sequence in the ending of the film. The bomb did as much to create the mainstream culture of the Cold War as it did to create the counterculture. As this was all behind closed doors, the public could only speculate whether life was in the hands of the machismo-driven and clinically insane. Kubrick is criticising the discourse that glamorised the bomb through his ironic portrayal of how humankind could have been destroyed.

Danny Boyle’s ‘28 Days later’ stays true to convention by choosing a dystopian theme relevant to the present audience. Released during the scares of the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001, Virus-culture was highly prevalent. As a result, identification with the crisis, when used in conjunction with the iconic city of London, is dramatically increased. Boyle uses the dystopian convention of binary conflict between the infected and the humans, but also uses sub-conflicts that play more of an important role in the narrative message than the infected story-line. Being the most contemporary example, it is also the most reflexive on the genre of dystopia. The salvation of the soldier’s turns out to be of equal danger to the protagonists. “I promised them women” Major West explains. As the rape culture is established, Jim naturally goes against his plan and chaos ensues. During this moment, conflict is at its furthest with the infected and it its greatest with the soldiers in the closed environment. The boundaries between safety and danger are at its most blurred, Jim is pistol-whipped and falls unconscious. Trust between all parties is broken and they point their guns at each other in an Animal Farm-like manner “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” (Orwell, 1989, 118). Boyle is conscious of this and is challenging the perception Maus stated previously with simple binary opposition. He layers secondary conflict within the main narrative to highlight that the loudest and most pronounced threat is not always the most dangerous. Kubrick also creates this within ‘Dr Strangelove’ as the primary threat is the bomb, but the true danger is the people in charge. Sat at the round table in the war room, with the likes of Turgidson and Ripper in orchestrating military procedure, Dmitri with his doomsday machine and a sex-fuelled Nazi Scientist leading the nuclear plan, Kubrick is suggesting that we should not worry about the bomb because of its threat to life, but worry about those in charge of the weaponry who are using it to stoke the fires of their ego’s.

British dystopia in cinema remains largely the same as the Orwellian texts that bought it into the mainstream. “British cinema would be defined in terms of already established discourses of Britishness, by turning in on itself, on its own history and cultural formation” (Higson, 1989, 42). The same is happening to the sub-genre of dystopia: the binary opposition is still the core, but it is cultural themes that influence the dystopia that change. It will continue to evolve is tandem with popular culture but seems it will keep a firm handle of the successful foundations that the British writers establishes many years ago.