Recently, I saw The Long Walk, One Battle After Another, Bugonia and The Running Man, all within a month or so of another. All four films could, I think, be considered dystopias, and each is saying something different - and something interesting - about public concerns and public psychology in 21st-century America. Dystopia is hardly novel - Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, considered the first dystopia film, is nearing its 100th anniversary. Yet, the genre feels ever-present, and ever more relatable, applicable, and nonfictional. Why has the genre enjoyed such continued success, despite cinema’s general decline? Why do we couch ourselves in projections of how much worse the future could be? And why does it feel ever-more real?
I wanted to begin by exploring, briefly, on the plots of the films and their dystopian elements:
The Long Walk, an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novel, follows 50 boys competing on a televised contest of wills, where they must walk without stopping or falling below a certain speed, else face execution, enforced by the patriarchal Major. Set in an alternate, post-civil war America ruled by an authoritarian regime, the contest is used to inspire national productivity; a spectacle of patriotism and brutality which those in command believe will take America back to the Good Old Days of Manliness and Strength and Never Ever Crying Ever. The film interrogates these ideas of manliness, strength, authoritarian control, and escaping the regime. A stereotypical dystopia.
One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s most fantastical work, is anything but stereotypical. Following a group of libertarian revolutionaries, PTA’s blockbuster - inspired by the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland - adopts a political machine-gun for a narrative tool, aiming and firing at every group and party you can think of. The dystopia here is subtler, and is concerned not with the typical manifestations of apocalyptic authoritarianism; surveillance and poverty. Instead, the film explores a rampant sexuality - let’s fuck while the bomb goes off - and the consequent perversion, gender injustice, and aggressive masculinity. PTA’s dystopia feels attuned to our times, our social worries, and the observed effects of the misinterpretation of sexual liberty.
The Running Man wasn’t a very good movie. Another Stephen King adaptation, the film follows a father of a sickly infant, unable to make money and so resorting to competing on high-stakes game shows to earn enough ‘New Dollars’ (branded with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face) to pay for healthcare. The show he settles on involves evading law enforcement and the public for 30 days, to win one billion of these New Dollars. If you fail, you die. Despite the uninspiring acting, the bland script, and the almost satirical lack of on-screen chemistry, the dystopia in the film is no less present - and no less relevant - than in those above. This film deals in the classic dystopian motifs of surveillance and poverty, but nods also to these ideas of corruption (especially in media), powerful conglomerates, AI - modern manifestations of Orwellian fears.
Finally, Bugonia. Though I have written already about Lanthimos’ latest effort, I haven’t considered the ways in which we might treat this film as a dystopia. The film follows a conspiracy theorist, bent on proving that the unattainable CEO of his Amazon-esque company is actually an Outer Space Alien. The film seems to deal with dystopia solely in the modern sense; treating these topics of conspiracy theory, social isolation, wealth distribution, and other unconventional modes of dystopia. It doesn’t touch the typical ideas; surveillance and poverty and authoritarianism, not really. It’s a 4-chan inspired, reddit-based dystopia, apt for our times.
These films, varied as they are, suggest that dystopia has shifted from a genre of warning to one of reflection. The apocalypse is no longer on the horizon — it’s ambient, infrastructural, and televised. We no longer imagine Big Brother watching us; we livestream ourselves to him. Dystopia today isn’t about the future’s collapse, but about the inertia of the present — the sense that nothing truly changes, except for the worse - the death of progress. To understand why the genre endures, we must look at what it reflects: a public psychology shaped by exhaustion and the spectacle of decline.
Traditional dystopias dealt in these ideas of state control, surveillance, and scarcity, because these reflected most accurately the public fears of the time - growing videographer capabilities came out in surveillance fears, growing wealth polarity came out in scarcity fears, changing and ever-growing governmental powers came out in fears of state control. Dystopia served as a moral rehearsal and a simulation of despair; a sandbox to ‘play out’ our worst choices and our most heinous actions, and to observe the collapse - or the success - of the resultant society.
Contemporary forms of dystopia do much the same kind of cultural catharsis, but their focuses have shifted. Now, we fear the social internet, ousted in our dystopia fantasies of media addiction. Our fear of the capitalistic framework begets the dystopian landscapes of hyper-capitalism and financial autocracy. Our changing social operations manifest in dystopian images of alienation and social polarisation.
We can view dystopia as a mirror of the modern spectacle; both The Long Walk and The Running Man show us how suffering can become a spectacle - using dystopia as entertainment, within the world of the story, demonstrates how a society of the future could thrive and feed off suffering. Sadistic and fantastical as this may seem, some critics suggest that we’re playing a similar game in our everyday lives; Debord’s Society of the Spectacle claims that our present society is over-interested in the ‘spectacle’ of living, of marketing and selling ourselves for social credit and recognition.
We might also see the modern dystopian shift as moving from an external to and internal focus; One Battle After Another and Bugonia treat dystopia not as an authoritarian externality, but as a symptom of our waning control over our bodies, our desires, and our digital lives. A nod to Foucault’s biopolitics, the films demonstrate how our modern situation forces us to cede power over our very own faculties and thoughts, and the adverse effects this has on our internal lives and our external connections.
So why do audiences seek dystopia? I don’t think that it’s all cultural catharsis and perverse schadenfreude; the function of dystopia has changed definitively in recent times. Dystopia used to be a ‘hope through despair’, an imagination of the worst allowing us to steer in direction of the better. In modern times, however, dystopia functions not as a warning but as a bleak realism. A catastrophic imagining not of the ways we could go, but the places we are. Not as a warning to heed of what we could do to ourselves, but a tour of how we will be if we continue down this path. It’s no longer a warning, too late for that. It’s a looking-glass, a mirror image extended a few years into the future. But increasingly, terrifyingly so, it’s less and less fictional.
People have always felt this way. Orwell’s society considered 1984 to be bleakly realistic, chronicling fears of communist brutalism and surveillance. Sylvia Plath’s 30s short story America! America! projects similar disillusionment with the great American Dream, the sense that human life has been subsumed into systems of control disguised as freedom. The difference is, the manifestations of those dystopias, the literal practicalities, always felt like the works of science fiction. Never have the pictures felt so possible, seemed so unavoidable.