Utopia anniversary symposium
- Utopia anniversary symposium
This year marks the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia. Beyond its own significance, it gave a name to various traditions of speculation that preceded it and to a range of subsequent social and cultural practices, from experimental communities and political discourses to works of the imagination across all media. It has also given rise to a plethora of associated concepts and critical categories, including anti-utopia, eutopia, dystopia, cacotopia, ambiguous utopia, ambiguous heterotopia, critical utopia, critical dystopia and afrotopia. To celebrate this anniversary and the generative power of More’s work, we invited a number of scholars and writers to contribute short pieces on utopianism and related ideas in contemporary sf, film and/or television.
– The editors
- Utopia in dystopia:Cloud Atlas
Sf movies, together with war and horror films, are interesting indicators of what culturally and politically goes on in a society. The 9/11 attacks of 2001 striking New York and Washington have generated a great number of cultural responses from Hollywood. While realist movies initially replicated the event without offering an analysis of it, such as United 93 (Greengrass US/UK/France 2006) and World Trade Center (Stone US 2006), and later focused on the psychological consequences of the event, as in Reign Over Me (Binder US 2007) or Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Daldry US 2011), sf films in particular dealt with the attack obliquely, turning – more often than not – to post-apocalyptic scenarios and atmospheres, as in War of the Worlds (Spielberg US 2005) and Cloverfield (Reeves US 2008). Among sf films, Cloud Atlas (Wachowski siblings and Tykwer Germany/US/HK/Singapore 2012), adapted from David Mitchell’s novel of the same title, stands out as a significant visionary tour-de-force.
In his extended study of Hollywood’s response to 9/11, Tom Pollard also notices that very few films deal with the events of 11 September directly. He writes that today, in both realist and sf films, Islamic terrorism is translated or transformed into many shapes, from greedy corporate executives, ruthless killers and brutal intelligence agents to climatic apocalypse, aliens, zombies, mutants and vampires – all variously attacking ‘symbols of Western businesses [End Page 73] and governments’ (12). According to Pollard, post-9/11 sf ‘expresses fear, anxiety, panic, and outright paranoia about humanity’s fate in a violent, chaotic universe’, and apocalypse is the form this ‘paranoia assumes in the genre’ (131). If Cloud Atlas is one such film, its use of the apocalyptic trope suggests not so much a fear of terrorism, but a critique of political, economic and social greed against all living forms on the planet. At the same time, however, the film maintains a utopian horizon, much in the tradition of the critical dystopia.
Mitchell’s complex novel tells six interconnected but separate stories in a variety of genres (diary, epistolary, thriller, farce, and dystopian and post-apocalyptic sf) that span nearly 500 years, from 1850 to 2300. The film establishes at the outset the six settings, and then brilliantly interweaves the stories through recurring themes, images, objects, phrases and music. The stories’ interconnectedness is also maintained through the same actors playing multiple roles throughout the film, switching gender, age and race from tale to tale. Also binding all segments together is that in each, the protagonists must struggle against individual and collective forms of greed, corruption and injustice.
The story of Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), which takes place in a post-apocalyptic Korea in 2144 and is narrated as an interview recorded by a regime Archivist (James D’Arcy) before Sonmi-451 is executed, provides the most interesting example of individual and collective utopian struggle. At the centre of the film about this dystopian, hyper-consumerist ‘corpocracy’, called Nea So Copros, is a radical critique of capitalism. The extrapolated future is a violent, exploitative, hierarchical society where ‘purebloods’ (consumers) are encouraged to consume under constant surveillance, and ‘fabricants’ (genetically modified clones) are modern slaves. In Nea So Copros, individual and collective agency is denied and its inhabitants strictly adhere to a series of laws, such as consuming as much as possible, and a series of commandments called...
