Investigating dystopia to mark Glasgow Film Festival's new strand

Things have got so bad that there’s talk of cancelling a couple of rugby matches and possibly even this summer’s Olympic Games in Japan. The Melrose Sevens may yet be next. Meanwhile, parts of the planet are ablaze or blighted by drought or, in the case of Venice, soon to disappear under an all-engulfing tide. The Middle East is the usual basket case, India is on the brink of civil war and Putin is throwing anyone who dares make a joke about him into the Volga.

Adding to these woes are myriad irritations, from the perniciousness of social media to the Tourette-like tweets of the US president. In order to survive, we are told we must stop driving, flying and cruising, eschew meat and dairy products and embrace Gregg’s vegan sausage rolls, and give up log and coal burning stoves. Apparently we have 10 or 20 or 50 years to shrink our carbon footprint. If we don’t, then what? We’ll melt or freeze. Or be deprived of oxygen. Unsurprisingly, depression is rampant and suicide as common as the cold.

There are few reasons to be cheerful. Glancing round my book shelves my eye alights on Gore Vidal’s collection of essays, Armageddon?, published in 1987. Would that the supreme provocateur were alive at this frenzied hour. In the eponymous essay Vidal cites two books – Prophecy and Politics, Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War by Grace Halsell (“a speechwriter for the dread Lyndon Johnson”) and The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, a must read in the 1970s for Christian fundamentalists – which warned that our lease on the earth is near as dammit up. It’s all there in Bible, apparently.

Vidal was, of course, properly dismissive of such doom-laden fruitcakes. But even he had to concede that we human beings have it well within ourselves to self-destruct. The future he foresaw was one in which there was a war between the Christ and anti-Christ: “A war, to be specific, between the United States and Russia, to take place in Israel.” To back up his theory, Vidal quoted James Watt, not the inventor of the light bulb but Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior, who in 1981 told Congress: “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”

No-one was a better reader of runes than Vidal. He took a bleak view of humankind and, at this juncture, it would be perverse to disagree with him. If we can find a way to mess things up we surely will. This is a definition of dystopia, an imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as it can possibly be. For writers and filmmakers of a less-than-sunny bent it is, ironically, an increasingly attractive setting their stories, never more so than today. According to the New Yorker magazine we are living in “a golden age for dystopian fiction”. Among the novels mentioned are, inevitably, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Michael Tolkin’s NK3 (located in the aftermath of a North Korean chemical attack [where] people lose their memories and ability to reason) and Underground Airlines by Ben H Winters (in which slavery persists and is made even more cruel by slave-owning corporations).

IN dystopia – one of the main themes of this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, which is showing both classics of the genre and new releases – things can only get worse. Allan Hunter, the GFF’s co-director, reckons that directors and producers and audiences are drawn to such apocalyptic scenarios because of the artistic licence they offer.

“There is a chance to let your imagination run riot visually, creatively, but knowing that it is attached to really thought-provoking material about life on Earth.

‘‘One of the interesting things about some of the films from the 1960s and 1970s is that they seem to say more about their own era than they do about the future. Planet of the Apes seems to speak directly of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and films like Soylent Green or Logan’s Run have sexist and misogynistic elements in a way that survivors of that era will all do well to recall.

‘‘So, it is a chance to make films that operate on many different levels – entertain, excite and deal with some very fundamental questions about human existence, artificial intelligence and the shape of things to come.”

In utopia, dystopia’s antonym, things can only get better. Literary historians trace the origins of the word, if not the concept, to the second decade of the 16th century and Thomas More’s book Utopia. It was a place where all is well and everything is going swimmingly, like Brexit under Boris.

More’s imaginary state was a communist nirvana. There was no private property, free universal education, six hours’ manual work a day, cheap if not chic clothes, free medical treatment, and meals – accompanied by reading and music – in civic restaurants. All religions were to be tolerated, but the penal code, especially in sexual matters, was brutal; adulterers were enslaved; repeated offenders killed. Alas, More’s paradise remained unrealised, not least by himself. Like many people in his era he fell out with Henry VIII who had him executed.

As sure as night follows day, More’s Utopia was followed by different versions of dystopia, it being much easier to imagine a world – and a race – going to the dogs than one in which everything is hunky dory.

Long before the coming of the cinema dystopian novels were a thriving genre. Every generation, it seems, looked into the future and saw something that reduced them to terror. Man’s inhumanity to man was often the inspiration for dystopians. In the last decades of the 19th century, and even into the first decade of the 20th, it was possible for writers such as HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw to view with optimism what might broadly be called progress.

Likewise, in the 1960s, when flower power briefly bloomed, there was a sense that after centuries of war and destruction human beings might find a way to live together without slaughtering one another.

Such examples, however, are rare. More common are the instances when, after a short period of peace, we decide it’s time to hurl missiles at our neighbours. This was fertile terrain for science fiction writers such as Philip K Dick, who sent people into outer space in the hope of discovering a planet in which our better selves might prevail. It was no surprise to learn than they did not.

In the last century, two cataclysmic world wars gave writers and filmmakers the opportunity to envision what lay in wait for us if we did not get our act together. Such novels as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1948 were obviously born of the era in which they were conceived. Both are novels largely of ideas; characters are conspicuous by their lack of “character”. They are also symptomatic of the times in which they were written.

WHAT is remarkable, though, is the targets at which they take aim. Among Huxley’s betes noire, for example, are picture palace talkies, gutter journalism and jazz. He was also scunnered by the carmaker Henry Ford and his fellow novelist DH Lawrence.

Nor was he enamoured of what he saw as the new multinational industrialism. This forecast a world without nationality, which seemed to be the hard sell of the Ford publicity machine which showed the great man visiting model schools, revolutionising education and, by implication, eradicating crime and poverty. In short, as the literary scholar John Sutherland has said, it was “utopia at last”, which moved Huxley to offer his alternative.

How well such books and the films they inspired have worn is debatable. One of the key problems associated with art that is dependent on foretelling the future is that it can be judged on its accuracy. If, say, you insisted that the world is going to end in 2000 and it doesn’t you are likely to be left with egg on your face.

This, says Allan Hunter, was in part behind his festival’s purpose. “The idea of the retrospective was in some way a reaction to the feeling that the world was in a pretty dispiriting state and many of the post-war certainties are crumbling away. So, we thought it would be interesting to look at how cinema had offered dystopian visions of the future and take a look at how science fiction was matching up to science fact.

“Re-watching some of the titles you are struck by how prescient some of them are about climate change, overpopulation, scarce resources and many of the issues that we are facing now. The Day the Earth Caught Fire from 1961 has really stood the test of time and what seemed fanciful then – impending disaster, Britain sweltering in record temperatures close to a 100 degrees – seems all too real now.

“I also think Soylent Green is underrated. Its sense of crowded cities, scarce resources and how you solve the problem of feeding an ever-increasing population is really striking.

“Then, of course, Planet of the Apes is a classic, questioning why humankind should believe it will always remain the dominant species on earth.”

What Hunter has also noticed is the trend is towards even gloomier scenarios and that in modern films the events forecast as being in the future mirror closely what’s happening today. One such, he says, is Alfonso Cuaron’s adaptation of PD James’s novel Children of Men. “It changes little details from the book but already seems to have predicted the world we currently live in; civil unrest, state oppression, pockets of resistance, fears about the end of life on earth as we know it, etcetera. They also tend to have bigger budgets and darker visions of where we might be heading.”

The latest bulletins suggest that filmmakers have their work cut out if they are to gazump the horrors currently facing us. Why we need to terrorise ourselves further when reality is so grim is a moot point. It’s as if we want to test our resolve, to see how far we are prepared to go before we truly appreciate the grimness of our situation.

I am a fine one to talk. Waiting by my bedside is Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road in which, promises the blurb: “A father and his young son walk alone through burned America.” They are heading for the coast but must first defend themselves against lawless bands. They have the clothes they are wearing, scavenged food and a gun. No hope remains. The pair have only each other’s love to sustain them.

“Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.” Such is our definition of fun.

Glasgow Film Festival runs from now until March 8. For programme details and listings: glasgowfilm.org/festival