I’ve enjoyed dystopia for several years. While I’m no expert, I am amused when people call any book or movie with a dark premise or setting ‘dystopia.’ I probably sound like the woman in the Blues Brothers: “We have both kinds of music here: Country AND Western.” But there are definite distinctions between dystopia and post-apocalyptic literature. Dystopia explores man’s attempts to create the ideal world but fail miserably, often due to the avarice or power hunger of whoever finds themselves in charge. One aspect of the true dystopic book is what I call the compromise. Whether they intend to or not, authors of true dystopia create such a controlling environment, such an onerous mind space, that people are forced to violate their own deepest values in a pragmatic attempt to survive.
Brave New World tells the story of Bernard Marx who criticizes his society as horrific and distasteful. While visiting a “Savage Reservation” on vacation, he meets two non-natives there, a European woman who had been abandoned there by her tour group and her son. Marx brings them back with him and then enjoys the fame and glamour of being their rescuer and sponsor. In Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag compromises his good guy status when he escapes the authorities by allowing an innocent man to be cornered and executed in his place.
The most horrific example is in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Winston Smith and Julia, his supposed love, are arrested. In one of the most disturbing and memorable scenes in literature, his interrogators approach Smith to close a metal cage with a hungry rat inside around his head. The torture is bad enough, but then Smith screams, “Do it to her!” This is all before Julia is revealed as an agent of the Thought Police.
I was reading the Gospel of John this morning and realized that Imperial Rome was amazingly dystopian. With the Emperor cult, words and expressions were as deadly as outright acts of sedition. Pilate was frightened of Jesus’ answers. It might seem outrageous to suggest, but he may have been closer to becoming a disciple than Governor Felix ever was. But Pilate was caught between Rome and the Jews. In order to keep his position, he had to speak the right words, do the right things, thread the needle between warring factions. In doing so, he turned the King over to be crucified, in spite of his wife’s warning and his own better judgment.
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