Dystopia – Bitch Flicks

“She Called Them Anti-Seed”: How the Women of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Divorce Violence from Strength

In ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ the “strong female characters” are notable specifically for their aversion to violence. The film portrays its women as emotionally strong people who engage in violence only in self-defense, and only against the system that oppresses them.

Mad Max: Fury Road‘s Imperator Furiosa and the five wives look down upon the Citadel

This guest post by Cate Young appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

“Strong female character.”

It’s a phrase we hear over and over in pop culture, usually in reference to a female character in an action movie who has lots of guns. “Strong female characters” know how to fight, know how to use weapons and they best all the boys in confrontation. “Strong Female Characters” are effectively measured by their capacity for violence and their competence in the theatre of war.

But what does it mean when we equate strength with violence on a cultural level, and especially in relation to women’s place in society?

In Mad Max: Fury Road the “strong female characters” are notable specifically for their aversion to violence. The film portrays its women as emotionally strong people who engage in violence only in self-defense, and only against the system that oppresses them.

The film is set in a post-apocalyptic future desert wasteland where women have been reduced to various forms of slavery and their value is determined by what their bodies can produce. Whether it be breastmilk or babies, women’s position in this world is determined by their physical utility to the oppressive system they occupy. Furiosa is the notable exception, an Imperator who has presumably worked her way up the ranks of Immortan Joe’s highly patriarchal and hyper-masculine cultish new social order.

From the very beginning of the film we see how the women of this world conspicuously and determinedly avoid violence. We are introduced to the Five Wives initially through their absence; they have run away with Imperator Furiosa leaving behind a message for their captor Immortan Joe.

“Our Babies Will Not Be Warlords.” The Five Wives not only want to opt out of the violent system but also ensure that the system does not continue

These simple messages convey two main points: that the Wives are aware of their entitlement to freedom due to their inherent human dignity, and that they acknowledge that eliminating violence not only starts with them, but extends into preventing violence in the next generation. Their first act of resistance is a direct hit against the very violence that allows the oppressive system of this world to maintain itself; removing their future children from the violence of Immortan’s world.

“We Are Not Things.” Miss Giddy defends the Wives’ right to freedom

Later in the film, we see the Wives sidestep violence once again when the War Boy Nux attacks Furiosa as she is driving the War Rig. Furiosa initially wants to kill Nux, but the Wives tell her that there will be “no unnecessary killing” as Nux is brainwashed and “kamakrazee.” Essentially, the Wives know that even though Nux seeks to do them harm, he is simply a product of a violently oppressive system that positions violence as the way to salvation in Valhalla. He is a natural result of this system and a reflection of the fate they are trying to avoid for their own children, and they elect to toss him out of the Rig instead.

This conscious avoidance of violence is replicated in what I think is one of the most powerful scenes in the film: Splendid the Angharad, heavily pregnant with Immortan’s child, uses her body as a shield to protect Furiosa from Immortan’s bullets.

Splendid the Angharad as anti-patriarchal human shield

As I wrote in my initial review of the film:

She literally uses her body, the site of which has undoubtedly been home to rape and assault at the hands of Immortan Joe, (and now a constant reminder of such) as a weapon against him. She uses her increased patriarchal “value” against the very man who rules the patriarchal system of their world. To me, that was a powerful scene because it showed that even as her body had been used against her will to perpetuate a system that enslaved her, The Splendid Angharad did not view herself as property, but as an equal human being, capable of more than breeding warlords. Furiosa’s escape with the Wives was not so much a rescue as a partnership. She and the Wives worked together to achieve shared liberation in The Green Place.

The scene was a clever subversion of the hyper-violence of the film. Angharad’s body, a site of much violence, is used to prevent more of the same, as the other Wives cling to her to keep her safe. It shows that the Wives understand their relative position in this society, the role that ritual violence plays, and their ability to use it to their advantage.

Soon after this scene, Angharad dies, having fallen from the Rig. Furiosa and the Wives are devastated but know they must press-on. After Furiosa asks Toast The Knowing to the match their remaining bullets with their corresponding guns and she informs her that they have very little ammunition left, Dag and Cheedo note that Angharad used to call the bullets “anti-seed”:

“Plant one and watch something die.”

This relates thematically to the violence done upon the very earth on which they live by the men of the world. With reliance on guns and ammunition, the men have “killed the world” and now nothing grows. The state of the earth mirrors the violence that is done to the women and their bodies. It is fitting then that the women who are seeking salvation in “The Green Place” (that they later discover is barren) and are kept by Immortan as “breeders” due to the world’s low fertility would have very little “anti-seed” available to them.

The green place of Furiosa’s youth is now a barren swamp wasteland

When we are finally introduced to the Vuvalini, Furiosa’s previous clan of “Many Mothers” we discover that The Green Place has been decimated and that they are the last members of the clan to survive. These women however, many of them in their senior years are hardened to the world and perfectly acknowledge and understand that violence is sometimes necessary to achieve liberation.

The Vuvalini understand that violence is sometimes needed to achieve liberation

In confrontation with the War Boys and Immortan Joe during their journey back to the Citadel, the Vuvalini defend themselves and the Five Wives from attack on all fronts as the men descend upon them. While many of them fall, their bravery and willingness to sacrifice themselves in some ways mirrors the blind devotion that the War Boys show to Immortan Joe. The difference here is that they die in service to a liberatory ideal and not a cult of personality. The Vuvalini’s advanced age also serves to upturn our cultural notions of what strength entails. Even in the problematic context of strong women as violent, this rarely if ever includes the old. By being portrayed as capable and willing even in their age, the film redefines strength to encompass women who do not usually fall under this umbrella. Even better, it affords the Vuvalini, (including the Keeper of Seeds, and therefore life, strength, youth and vitality) the courtesy of demonstrating that their strength runs deeper than physical violence.

Finally, in the very last act of violence that we see a woman commit in the film, Furiosa confronts Immortan Joe and rips his breathing apparatus away, killing him and removing large chunks of his face. As one of the only acts of violence that can conceivably be perceived as revenge, Furiosa not only kills Immortan, but physically removes his face and thereby his identity, much in the same way that his violence against the Five Wives removed theirs.

Furiosa denies Immortan his identity through violence

It’s fitting that not only does Furiosa kill Immortan, but in light of the desolation of The Green Place she remembers from her youth, she takes up residence with the Wives in the Citadel at the end of the film. She essentially seeks to invert the history of the centre of this world’s violence by making it the centre of redemption instead. With access to clean water and greenery, she can reestablish the environmental richness of her youth, not just for her, but for all of the oppressed citizens of Immortan’s regime.

The Milking Mothers once again provide sustenance to the citizens of Immortan’s oppressive regime

In the end, these “strong female characters” are allowed to avoid violence as much as possible, engaging only as a last resort, and still emerge victorious.

They are allowed to divorce strength from the violence that we assume is inherent to that characteristic, and in the process highlight many of the problems with this larger cultural assumption.

Cate Young is a Trinidadian freelance writer and photographer, and author of BattyMamzelle, a feminist pop culture blog focused on film, television, music, and critical commentary on media representation. Cate has a BA in Photojournalism from Boston University and is currently pursuing her MA in Mass Communications so that she can more effectively examine the symbolic annihilation of women of colour in the media and deliver the critical feminist smack down. Follow her on twitter at @BattyMamzelle.

The Disappearance of Sexism and Racism in Dystopian Fiction

Certainly, teenagers strain against authority and exert their independence. This doesn’t mean they’re immune to other big issues that plague society – issues such as sexism and racism. If the novels being written for this demographic want to call themselves true dystopias based on a futuristic society in which our current way of living led to some global disaster, then the writers of the novels and the film adaptations shouldn’t shy away from some of the biggest issues in current politics and society.

This is a guest post by Maria Ramos.

If book sales and box office numbers are any indication, young adults love their dystopian fiction. So much so that the creative powers that be are intent on keeping the momentum going with more and more additions to this fairly recent genre phenomenon, for better or for worse. Unfortunately, the repetition breeds dilution of the initial idea of a dystopia as an opposite of a utopia, or perfect world.

The idea of dystopia takes into account basic and flawed human nature, hinging on the idea that power, political in this case, corrupts, leading to a small group of oppressors and a greater group of oppressed. YA dystopian fiction tends to present this oppression as a necessary sacrifice to save the rest of humanity after some global and apocalyptic disaster, often environmental in nature and with the clear message that we should take care of our environment now or suffer our own dystopia later.

The common element in a true dystopia is politics, but in these YA versions, the politics have become metaphors for the seemingly oppressive nature of adult and school rules under which teenagers often chafe. This conversion leaves the stories one-sided and shallow, expecting the reader to assume that, because this is a common problem within the young adult mindset, it is also the biggest problem facing young adults today. At best, such an assumption stems from laziness, and at worst, it’s insulting.

Take The Hunger Games, for example. Society is divided by geography and profession as each of the 12 districts supplies the capital city with a specific product or skill. The districts live in various extremes of poverty and deprivation. While some would argue that such suffering would bring out the best in some people, the situation is also ripe for the desperation that leads to an irrational fear of other, a prime motivator of racism. And yet, while the author created a diverse group of characters, including Katniss who was described as “olive-skinned,” the discrimination based on this diversity is simply missing.

The same could be said for The Maze Runner series (the first film is available on demand through Google Play and DirecTV), which provides representation of various races to include Asian and African American and yet never a hint of racial tensions either in the grove or once they’re out of it and into The Scorch Trials, the second installment of the book and movie trilogy. Possibly the worst offender of recent offerings, however, is the Divergent series, in which society is divided by faction only, with each faction based on a particular character trait. Not only is there no hint of racism anywhere in any of the three novels of this trilogy, but sexism is gone, too.

This latter is particularly hard to swallow given that the domestically abusive and oppressive male leader of one faction (while actively opposing the female leader of another) never once makes a disparaging reference to her being deficient because she’s a woman, even after his true character is brought to light and his crimes against his own family are revealed to all. There is one comment made by a male to the lead female Tris when Peter tells her she has nice legs for a “stiff,” but this is a reference to her previous faction only. No reference to her appearance as a female, only faction.

Overall, if writers and filmmakers wish to reach the widest possible audience, they’ll need to take a harder look at more than struggles with authority. By leaving out other important problems faced by today’s young people, they leave a glaring hole in the message.

Maria Ramos is a writer interested in comic books, cycling, and horror films. Her hobbies include cooking, doodling, and finding local shops around the city. She currently lives in Chicago with her two pet turtles, Franklin and Roy. You can follow her on Twitter @MariaRamos1889.

‘Equals’ Is an Interesting If Not Especially New Portrait of Mental Illness

Drake Doremus’ dystopian science fiction movie, ‘Equals,’ presents a pretty good metaphor for mental illness – just not a very challenging one.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Drake Doremus’ dystopian science fiction movie, Equals, presents a pretty good metaphor for mental illness – just not a very challenging one.

Equals, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this year before coming to TIFF, is set in a future society where people have been genetically engineered not to have emotions. It’s strongly implied that this is the basis for the false utopia the characters live in, where they all wear the same clothes, and live in modular apartments, solving puzzles in the evenings, like so many rational Vulcans. It’s an interesting idea – I, for one, would have liked to hear the characters explain what the purpose of human life was, and why they bothered showing up for jobs, if they didn’t feel any way about anything – but the movie isn’t interested in how this civilization works. Instead, it’s just set up as vaguely bad and communist, in a way that borrows from Nineteen Eighty-Four and other works that came before it, without exhibiting the same interest in social critique.

Instead, the focus of Equals is on personal, idiosyncratic experiences of not fitting in, or being labelled deviant, ill, and outcast because you don’t feel the right way.

The action kicks off when the main character, Silas (played by Nicholas Hoult), develops a rare condition known as SOS. His genetic programming fails and his emotions switch back on, leading him to have a panic attack in his apartment. Trusting the system, he turns himself over to the medical authorities and learns that the prognosis isn’t good. There is no cure for SOS and, while medication can slow the condition’s progression, sufferers eventually become so unstable that they have to be quarantined inside an ominous facility known as the DEN. Living conditions in the DEN are so deplorable that most patients kill themselves within days of arriving and, in fact, they’re encouraged to do so, because the horror of living with emotions is more terrible than death.

Silas, bummed out by this diagnosis but trying not to be, lest he get sent to the DEN, begins to suspect that one of his coworkers, Nia (Kristen Stewart, in one of her best performances yet) is also suffering from SOS, but trying to hide it. The two strike up a friendship that turns into a romance as they bask in the relief of having someone else to talk to about what they’re feeling.

Unfortunately, physical contact of any kind is strictly prohibited in this randomly (and somewhat senselessly) dystopian society – for reasons that, again, I would have been interested to hear about – and, as soon as their fingertips brush, Silas and Nia are on the path to being discovered, with predictably tragic results.

Equals has amazing sound design and a handful of beautiful shots, but it’s not winning any points for originality. The setting is sketched out in pretty vague terms, and the plot doesn’t offer many surprises. If you’re feeling churlish, you can spend all 101 minutes asking why questions that don’t have any answers. Equals isn’t really interested in its own setting except in so far as it establishes the concept “People living here are suspicious of feelings.” And the reason it wants to establish that concept is because the story is really a metaphor for mental illness, designed to tell us that we are too quick to medicate and suppress people whose feelings aren’t normal.

The story in Equals is structured to cover as many contemporary attitudes toward mental illness as possible, and to explore the way that different characters relate to SOS. Nia, distrustful of the system and scared of ending up in the DEN, never tells anyone what’s she’s experiencing and deals with it herself. It takes all her energy, every day, just to act normal; to not let anyone see that she’s different. On the other hand, Silas trust the system and ends up a with a medical record that follows him wherever he goes, counting down the time until he winds up in an institution. Arguably, things are easier for him because he can take medication to suppress his feelings, but he goes back and forth about whether it’s worth it to do that.

Part way through the movie, he joins a support group for other people who have SOS, where each person has a different opinion about how to see the condition and how to live with it. Over the course of the film he goes on a journey where he starts out waiting for a cure and later comes to believe that SOS is a natural part of who he is, and that the real problem is the way everyone else is reacting.

The questions that Silas struggles with are really important and really integral to the lives of people with long-term mental health conditions – especially ones that affect personality development and aren’t going to go away. Is this me or a disease? What does it mean that I’m different from everyone else – am I worse, am I better, am I equally good this way? If someone could cure me tomorrow, would I want to take the cure? Who would I be, if I did?

The metaphor works really, really well. What’s more disappointing is that the movie doesn’t seem to have an interesting perspective on the answers to those questions. Instead of challenging us, it takes the easy way out by setting up a situation where Silas and Nia are clearly correct in their beliefs while everyone else is just… well, crazy. It’s much more like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest than Benny & Joon – Doremus and scriptwriter Nathan Parker make it easy for us to sympathize with Silas and Nia to the point that a lot of the complexities are lost. Of course it’s better to live in a world where people feel something rather than nothing. Of course people should be able to talk about their feelings with each other. Of course it’s good to fall in love with someone. There are never any negative sides to SOS except that The Man is against you.

This Right Side, Wrong Side, Fight-The-Power-For-Your-Right-to-Be-In-Love stuff not only makes the story less challenging – it also makes it less interesting. The story never swerves away from predictable plot developments and, like a train conductor calling out the stops before you arrive, Equals mechanically foreshadows each and every one, suggests the most obvious possible outcome, and then delivers that outcome on schedule. I’d make a joke about Chekov’s cure for SOS and the convenient six-hour lag time before it goes active, but then I’d be telling you how the movie ends just as blatantly as the director does.

Look – there are things to like about Equals. Kristen Stewart’s good in it, the editing is very well thought-out and emotionally evocative, the sound is really good, and, hey – the metaphor is really good, too. But I wish that the metaphor were in service of a message I haven’t heard before.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

How the CW’s ‘The 100’ Is Getting Sex Positivity Right

In fact, it’s the aspect of love and intimacy, rather than lust and sexuality, which makes Clarke’s part in Finn’s demise so difficult–the show plays with the idea that human connection, whether it’s through friendship, family, alliance or romance, is painful because it matters, not because it is fundamentally wrong.

This guest post by Rowan Ellis appears as part of our theme week on Sex Positivity.

This article contains spoilers for the first two seasons of The 100 … be warned!

On the surface, it might seem like we live in a sex positive society already, I mean, I just wrote an article about Channing Tatum’s intimidatingly chilled torso for this very website. We hear things like “sex sells” all the time, meaning it’s clearly viewed as positive for our economy if nothing else. But the tiniest scratch below that oiled up muscly surface shows something more complex and gendered. Women’s sexualities and sex lives are viewed in turn as both precious fortresses and exploitable commodities, by a world which can’t quite make up its mind whether it wants to protect us or fuck us. But then men and boys are being taught not to respect either a “weak” woman who needs protecting, or a “slutty” woman who wants to be fucked. So it came as a ridiculously pleasant surprise to see the portrayal of sex and sexuality in the CW’s teen dystopian show The 100.

The 100 is one of those shows that snuck up on me; I watched the pilot when it first came out, and promptly dismissed it as an OK series that I might try again if I got bored and it ended up on Netflix. It’s the story of obligatory-CW-beautiful Clarke (Eliza Taylor) and 99 other teenage prisoners who lived on “The Ark,” a collection of space stations which houses all that is left of the human race, floating above the Earth. I say “lived,” past tense, because pretty much as soon as the show opens all 100 of them are blasted down onto the surface of our messed up planet to see if it’s survivable. One-hundred delinquent teenagers alone on a potentially deadly planet. What could go wrong? Honestly, I only gave the show a real chance after Tumblr excitedly informed me that the lead character wasn’t entirely straight, and it came under the radar as a show with increasingly great representation. So I gave it another chance, and by the time half a season had gone by, it was clear they were building a series that wasn’t afraid to give the middle finger to easy outs and happy endings. And yet, none of those difficult choices or moral and physical suffering were linked to the characters’ sex lives.

Although we like to talk about characters as if they were independent entities, it is the writers who choose character’s choices and the consequences of their actions; traditionally morality plays and novels had marriages to reward the good and death to reward the bad. Sometimes the only way to tell that an otherwise progressive woman was meant to be perceived as good was the fact she was allowed to marry at the end (Jane Eyre, anyone?). And so it is the consequences of sex on screen, not just the having of sex itself, which can truly show an audience how sex positive a show is. Meta-fictional films like Scream and Cabin in the Woods draw attention to this idea when they comment on the absurdity and sexism inherent in the horror trope “The Final Girl” and the importance placed on virginity, where “pure” women are allowed to survive, and having sex carries a death sentence on screen. Although in a show like The 100 the Venn diagram of “characters who have had sex” and “characters who suffer” has a lot of overlap, this is vitally not a causal relationship; the death of Finn and the horrific struggles that Clarke faces as a leader, are not because of their sexual relationship. In fact, it’s the aspect of love and intimacy, rather than lust and sexuality, which makes Clarke’s part in Finn’s demise so difficult–the show plays with the idea that human connection, whether it’s through friendship, family, alliance or romance, is painful because it matters, not because it is fundamentally wrong.

Teen shows have in the past been guilty of using sex to drive melodrama, or of using it only sparingly in “very special episodes” to give a warning. But The 100 uses its post-apocalyptic future setting to frame a version of the sexual worldview as a non-issue, suggesting that we as a collective species get the fuck over it when we have stuff to worry about like the end of the world. Is this realistic? Meh, who cares, I don’t watch sci-fi for realism, I apparently watch it for bisexual lead characters and complex moral decision-making with psychological consequences… but we’ll get on to that in a second. This lack of realism, I think, also extends into what makes the show an enjoyable watch for all its tragedy; there are some things that are safe, namely the sex. As a teenage girl being abandoned on an inhospitable planet with a number of teenage guys who all seem pretty invested in violence, gaining control, and hedonism, rape would be an immediate threat in my mind. Yet the CW set up of the show, and the storylines so far, seem to be completely removed from this fear, which gives me as a viewer a sense of security in a lot of ways. Similarly, the way the show pushes back against stereotypical or soap-like storylines, means as a viewer I am also not that concerned with the seeming lack of condoms or birth control going on, because I feel pretty secure that they won’t include “warning” storylines around safe sex with pregnancy and disease based on the tone of the show. At first, I was worried that the relative sexual freedom which the teenagers had found on the Earth’s surface would become a problem once the parents were reintroduced, with apologies and stern looks. But, again, they had more pressing matters to deal with.

A negativity around women and sex is not just doled out from those in positions of power, the “I’m not like other girls” phenomenon between female peers is rooted in ideas around sexual promiscuity and femininity being lesser. This negativity towards sex is a tool used to pit women, and girls, against each other, rather than being a tool for raising up fellow men or boys because of their perceived sexual prowess. The double standard is hardly new and can be seen in real life as well as being played out on screen in films like Gone Girl, where Flynn criticises the idea of the “cool girl” aesthetic as creating a personality and way or acting based on your desirability to men. This is why it was so refreshing to see the treatment of Clarke and Raven’s relationship, as two women who were interested in the same guy, be secondary to their other connections. There is no passive aggressive MeanGirl-esque in fighting fraught with jealousy; Clarke can’t turn off her feelings for Finn, but immediately understands she can’t be with him, and gets on with what needs to be done. This decision is completely in line with her nature as someone who sees things as they are as far as she can, who is practically minded, who corrects Finn even as he is trying to be romantic when seeing that Raven falling to Earth isn’t a shooting star at all. Clarke is the first person to see Raven on Earth and witnesses her essential rebirth on the planet, they share an interesting relationship in their different ties to Abby, Clarke’s mother, and their friendship is of vital importance based on their respect for each other. The show ultimately rejects the jealous ex paradigm which it seemed to be setting up, and identifies itself as unexpectedly progressive in its portrayal of female friendship.

The portrayal of bisexual women in society at large, is one of “greedy” girls showing off for the attention of men. They are often viewed as more likely to be unfaithful or “slutty,” and both the straight majority and gay community seem to be wracked with worry that their bisexual partners are secretly monosexual. The portrayal of Clarke (the clear lead of the show) being attracted to and forming relationships with, both men and women, plays away from these shallow stereotypes, while not denying her an active sex life. The tragedy in the storylines with both her partners is not caused by her sexuality, although her very real feelings for them heighten the pain for both her and us as an audience. Killing Finn and having to watch as Lexa betrayed their political alliance, took a huge psychological toll on the teen, but ultimately her hardest decision- to kill the population of Mount Weather- was connected to familial and friendship based bonds that created the community of the 100. However, historically the b-word has been conspicuously missing from the screen, even in forcefully progressive shows like Orange is the New Black, and so it is too for The 100. This can be explained away with the idea that the future is as liberated about sexual orientation as it is about sex, and that labels are no longer used or required. But that reduces the real need for bisexual viewers right now to have representation on screen and arguably contributes to the bi-erasure which it could so easily be combatting.

Ultimately, this is a show that features some really beautiful humans having sex, and in that way it isn’t unusual. What The 100 is getting right is creating a narrative where the usual toxic cliches are subverted, and the characters are all the better for it, rather than ignoring sex and praising characters for that instead. There are of course ways to improve: I hope that next season we have Clarke voice her sexuality specifically, because that explicit labeling would be a pioneering act in representation. I would also like to see more diversity, particularly in body type, having an active sex life on the show, which is often missing or played for lazy and crude laughs on screen more widely. How likely is that to happen? My experience with shows in the past tells me, not very. But at the start of The 100 I’d never have guessed they would make any characters queer, and look what they did with their lead. So, if you’re reading this writers of The 100, I’d really love for you to prove me wrong again.

Rowan Ellis is a British geek using her YouTube videos to critique films, TV, and books from a queer and feminist lens.

Empowerment in the Imaginary Spaces of Zach Snyder’s ‘Sucker Punch’

By creating her own worlds where she is a force to be reckoned with, Babydoll reclaims that very thing that was taken away from her by her stepfather and the hospital: her humanity.

The women of Sucker Punch — The women of *Sucker Punch*

This guest post by Toni McIntyre appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

At first glimpse, I’ll admit that Sucker Punch looks like little more than Zach Snyder’s latent schoolgirl fantasies brought to life. That Emily Browning, who plays main character Babydoll, has: A) that patronizing name and B) the dewy wide eyes of an anime heroine don’t exactly help. That said I’ve never been one to dismiss a film on wardrobe choices alone, even if they do cater a whole buffet’s worth to the male gaze. Snyder himself has even hinted that the aesthetics of Sucker Punch were chosen deliberately to mock geek culture’s sexualized fantasy version of women. Whether he was successful in that endeavor or not is fodder for another essay. The point is that as waifish as Babydoll appears, and however we may be tempted to dismiss Sucker Punch as just another male fantasy, a close look at the dystopian spaces within the film and how Babydoll exists in those spaces reveals a more woman-friendly, if bittersweet, reading.

The tragedy that starts the movie in earnest takes place in a very tight space. Babydoll attempts to shoot her abusive stepfather as he breaks down the door to a closet where Babydoll’s sister is hiding. The shot misses its intended target, ricochets in a way only bullets in movies can, and fatally wounds Babydoll’s sister inside the closet. Taking immediate advantage of the situation to unburden himself of his remaining stepdaughter, Babydoll’s stepfather carts her off to a mental hospital. Babydoll trades one menacing patriarchal force for another as crooked orderlies loom menacingly over Babydoll and the other broken but beautiful patients.

Rocket, Sweet Pea, and Blondie in the bordello world of Babydoll’s creation

Unable to cope with the reality of being in the hospital, Babydoll escapes inward and creates the first of two imagined worlds in her own mind. The first space is a richly adorned bordello and exists as the real world askew. The women from the hospital are still trapped, to a degree, in the bordello, but they have noticeably more power in how they present themselves to each other and to their male customers than they do in the hospital. It’s enough for Babydoll to become much more vocal once she’s imagined to be in the bordello—she becomes a plotting, rallying force for the other women.

It’s Babydoll’s second imagined world, one she accesses while she dances and enters a trance-like fugue state within the bordello, that Babydoll acts out her readiness to fight. While in the bordello everything is secrets and plans, in this second world, it’s all action. This second space is where things expand, where we get wide shots of extravagant landscapes—feudal Japan, a dragon’s den, a maze of soldier’s trenches. This second world is the tiny space of the closet where Babydoll fought her first battle, and where she lost in every sense of the word, blown wide open, given the space Babydoll needs in order to imagine battles she can fight and win.

Babydoll in her second world, armed and ready

Famed author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was observing a patient who experienced “transports” similar to Babydoll’s. Sacks pitied his patient and described the man’s imagined worlds as a “deceiving surface of illusion” that lacked anything deep or true. I’m not going to say Oliver Sacks is wrong in his observation, but I think it’s a simple way of looking at mental worlds or spaces—as untrue. I don’t think we’re meant to view any of the worlds Babydoll creates as false. And to quote another very wise and bearded man, Albus Dumbledore, even if something is happening only in your head, “Why on earth should that mean it’s not real?”

Babydoll had to travel within herself to worlds she created and could control, in order to discover a truth. We get a glimpse of what that truth is in a bit of dialogue delivered by the older matriarch figure the bordello:

“You see, your fight for survival starts right now. You don’t want to be judged? You won’t be. You don’t think you’re strong enough? You are. You’re afraid. Don’t be. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight.”

By creating her own worlds where she is a force to be reckoned with, Babydoll reclaims that very thing that was taken away from her by her stepfather and the hospital: her humanity.

Sucker Punch strives for optimism. The film wants to tell us that we have all the power within ourselves to rally against an unjust system. For a film bleeding special effects, it hits a real gut-punch worthy note of reality when we watch Babydoll fight—and fail. Again. The patriarchal forces at the hospital resurface and Babydoll sacrifices herself to ensure the escape of one of her fellow patients. Babydoll is lobotomized, her physical being trapped in the hospital, her mind free to sink down within the worlds she made for herself. Sucker Punch wants to tell us we have all the power we need to fight a unjust system, but, also, that that system sometimes still wins. It’s honest and brutal. Babydoll is made a prisoner twice over, and it’s a cold comfort that at least the second time, the decision to become locked in her own mind is hers. Sucker Punch is a story of finding your strength. It’s about looking in when those in control take away your ability to look out. It’s about making your own space when the space they give you is too small and too controlled for you to actually be. It’s equal parts a suggestion and a warning of what happens when you travel far enough into your own subconscious to really know yourself and all you’re capable of when the world outside may still beat you down. When I think about Babydoll, locked in her own mind, I think about when Gatson Bachelard warned that “he who buries a treasure, buries himself with it.”

Toni McIntyre is a native of Philadelphia but a Pittsburgh hockey fan. She once wrote a paper in grad school on Inception and couldn’t sleep for a week. She’s very often, too often, on Twitter.

‘The Hunger Games’: Proving Dystopia Is the Best Young Adult Genre

Dystopia, in its futuristic escapism and its contemporary relevance, is an ideal genre for the young adult demographic. By pushing the boundaries of disturbing content and reflecting on youthful idealism, dystopian narratives trust the YA consumer to be both literary in their consumption of the book or film, but also socially and morally insightful in their view of the imagined world they hold.

This guest post by Rowan Ellis appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Dystopian narratives can generally be described as “An imaginary place where people lead dehumanised and often fearful lives,” which is accurate, but does not fully express key characteristics of the genre.^[1] The Hunger Games, for example, is temporally situated in a future version of America, and this relationship between time periods affects the causes of the dystopian societies and the extent to which our own world is responsible for their making. In this way, and especially looking at The Hunger Games as a Young Adult series, we can examine how dystopian landscapes are an overwhelmingly apt vehicle for social awareness in the younger generation by interacting with their world and self-identity.

The Young Adult label is a recent one, with a distinctive lack of research on the genre; even its definition is contentious as a mixture of both a self-styled labelling by authors themselves, and a marketing tool for publishing companies. Intended readership is perhaps the most useful way of understanding the Young Adult literature, with the genre then defined as those books, films, or TV written and produced specifically for young adults.

The contemporary relevance of YA protagonists ensure that the exploration of self-identity for characters within these films is inevitably reflected back onto the YA audience, helping to shape their own views of themselves and the world around them. By exclusively using protagonists who are young adults themselves, films like The Hunger Games are able to emphasise the need for social change, and the possibility of it, by giving power to its viewers; as the protagonists create a better world, so too can the audience. At a talk at Cadogan Hall, John Green asked for questions from the audience of young readers. On receiving insightful and pertinent questions, and reading aloud one on the pain of writing about unfulfilled lives, and another comparing the use of water in his book to that of James Joyce in Ulysses, he remarked “I wish all the journalists who tell me my books are too complex for teenagers could hear this.” Dystopia, in its futuristic escapism and its contemporary relevance, is an ideal genre for the young adult demographic. By pushing the boundaries of disturbing content and reflecting on youthful idealism, dystopian narratives trust the YA consumer to be both literary in their consumption of the book or film, but also socially and morally insightful in their view of the imagined world they hold. By extrapolating a possible future from wider themes of importance in the contemporary age, the need to change current society is heightened.

Literary critic Robyn McCallum prefaces her work on adolescent identity by proposing the relative truism that “concepts of personal identity and selfhood are formed in dialogue with society, with language and with other people.”^{^[2]} The implication of this for The Hunger Games, however, is far more significant, as the reaction to and rebellion against Panem shapes not only the self-identity of the characters, but also the audience’s attitudes toward them. Dystopian worlds are often a product of mankind’s inability to learn from history, and The Hunger Games utilises this by mirroring its world building with Ancient and contemporary civilisations while creating the new history of Panem. Penelope Lively’s argument that “to have a sense of history is, above all, to have a sense of one’s own humanity” ties Katniss’ identity to distant history, as much as to her father’s death in the recent past.^{^[3]} The use of the name Panem for the dystopian world Collins creates, gives a multi-layered sense of antiquity and contemporary history. The Latin translation of Panem as “bread” is most notably tied to the quintessential Roman phrase “Bread and Circuses,” directly paralleling the Games and historical Gladiatorial contests, with the pre-Games feast even mirroring the cena libera in Roman culture. However, there is also a similarity with the famous Pam Am airline, evoking the past glamour of American globalisation, ironically contrasted with the static divisive state of the future America. Similarly the Capitol ties together ancient Rome and modern Washington with the utopian setting of the high society in Collins’ novel. The film’s costumes and design has a similar relationship with history; District 12 has a distinctive feel of dustbowl America, as if stepping out of the Depression-era photograph of an impoverished farming community.

Although set in our future, Katniss’ outfit undeniably echoes the past.

McCallum argues that “to displace a character out of his/her familiar surroundings can destablise his/her sense of identity,” yet Katniss does her growing within the hostile and unfamiliar landscape of the Arena, as she refuses to mirror the career tributes bloodthirsty methods, even though we as an audience know she is already skilled in hunting and killing.^{^[4]} The Arena is a form of anti-society, as The Games encourage a distrust of society via a distrust of individuals and alliances on which communities are based. By placing Katniss in such a space, it ensures a shaping of her social identity as a victor, but also her internal one, as her compassion is not completely destroyed by the mistrust and cunning she demonstrates in order to survive.

For a dystopian society to flourish there needs to be, as a characteristic of its ruling elite, the ability to block out natural empathy, or to remove the lower citizens from full human status deserving of empathy, in order for these hardships to be justified.^{^[5]} For the Games in The Hunger Games to achieve their purpose, they have to be watched both in horror by the Districts, and with delight and wonder by the Capitol. The Hunger Games uses the Games as an extreme image of where desensitising an audience potentially extrapolates to. The most immediate reflection of empathy within The Hunger Games is the relationship between Katniss, Rue, and Prim, as Katniss finds herself unable to detach her feelings for her sister with those for her fellow Tribute. This creates a sense of her as an unexpected maternal figure, sensing a gap between the younger girls as small children, and herself as an adult with responsibilities to them. Haymitch, as a representation of the experienced, and therefore jaded, adult character, is able to comprehend consequences of Katniss’ actions, whereas she reflects the stereotypical teenage attitude of living in the present, allowing her to focus on empathy over practicality and preserving her as a moral character as she teams up with the defenceless Rue.

The Other is a vital component of social (rather than ecological) dystopian fiction, as the propensity of the ruling elite to create such a nightmarish reality often relies on the subjugation of those who are deemed different. Going through the physical gendering process of puberty emphasises gender divides for YA characters and viewers. Gender in Panem is never raised as an Othering principle, indeed both male and female tributes are treated with the same objectification and callousness, and both genders display compassion and ruthlessness equally. However, the problems of patriarchy are so present in our own society that we project these values onto the characters. The Atlantic magazine, for example, described Katniss as “the most important female character in recent pop culture history” and the success of the film franchise has bolstered support of an increase in films with female protagonists as both morally and financially justified.^{^[6]} In The Hunger Games, Katniss’ unbridled contempt for her Mother’s mental state, shapes her into becoming a traditional father figure, assuming the patriarchal rather than matriarchal role in the house. Similarly, although ostensibly the tribute Johanna Mason subverts the traditional gender stereotypes when fakes a meek sensibility in her own Games before revealing her bloodthirsty nature in order to win, there is a sense within the books that the same ploy would have worked had Joanna been Joseph.

Those of a high social rank in the Capitol become characterised by an extreme aestheticism, mirroring the turn of the Century upper-class preoccupation with art and beauty explored by Oscar Wilde and other Decadent artists. Cinna’s team work relentlessly on Katniss, as the ideals of beauty are vital to gaining support in the Capitol; looks help you win. In Finnick’s storyline, this preoccupation is given an added sinister twist, as he confesses Snow allowed Capitol citizen’s to rape him, inviting a comparison with the sexual exploitation of both men and women from the working-class backgrounds in Panem, with the sex industry in our own world.

Having Katniss act as the face of a building revolution, young adult viewers can see reflected in the films images of fictional young adults with the ability to change the world. They use a combination of fear and hope to allow young adult viewers to feel empowered, both in their internal self-identity and their engagement with the contemporary issues reflected in the films. Hope is traditionally the driving force in children’s fiction–to prevent despair from becoming the ultimate end of the experience, thereby preventing the impetus for creating a better alternative, and the same can be seen in Young Adult fiction. The actor Donald Sutherland, who portrays President Snow in the film adaptations of The Hunger Games has noticed the story’s “potential to catalyse, motivate, mobilise a generation of young people who were, in my opinion, by and large dormant in the political process,” through this combination of alarm and optimism.

Dystopian films relate the horror of the fictional worlds to the future of their own; in The Hunger Games the starvation in the Districts is a clear reflection of the poverty and famine experienced world-wide, even within contemporary America, where 57 percent of American children live in a home which is designated “poor” or “low income” and 20 percent live in poverty. Moreover, the extravagance of the Capitol’s food and clothes holds a mirror to the wasteful culture in the Western World, where up to half of all food produced is never eaten. Furthermore, the life or death conditions for children chosen as Tributes can be associated with the problems surrounding the use of child soldiers in countries such as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The empathetic fear of young adults towards these issues was illustrated clearly in the viral awareness campaign “Kony 2012,” where the plight of child soldiers captured the attention of hundreds of thousands of young people world-wide. Although critic Downey wrote in 2005 that “one of the great difficulties in teaching about horrific periods of history […] is addressing how to help students comprehend the incomprehensible,” she simplifies the abilities of young people by supposing that what is viewed as “incomprehensible” is relegated to the past, and that as adults, teachers are able to better understand these events.^{^[7]}

Hardships endured can both build and destroy characters, and although destruction can be viewed as a more realistic reaction to living in a dystopian society, forming positive identities around interacting with a society and set of values one finds unfair or lacking is a YA viewer’s reality. As the brilliant YA author Patrick Ness puts it, “Teenagers don’t see dystopias as dystopias; they see them as barely fictional representations of their day-to-day lives,” through their own powerlessness and fear. A fear which is inevitable in our world, and a reality to YA viewers–Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, famously composed its terrifying society from real cultures and historic movements. Dystopian narratives gives a YA audience a way of processing this reality at a distance, while potentially using it for personal inspiration, to foster an empathy which allows them to create their own morality separate from and informed by imperfect societies.

^{^[1]} Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature (Springfield, MA: Merriam Webster Inc, 1995)

^{^[2]} Robyn McCallum, Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity (New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 1999) p.3

^{^[3]} Penelope Lively, “Child and Memory,” Horn Book, 49/4, (1973), p.400

^{^[4]} Robyn McCallum, Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity (New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 1999) p.190

^{^[7]} Downey, A.L., “The Transformative Power of Drama: Bringing Literature and Social Justice to Life” English Journal, 95/1, (2005) p.33

Rowan Ellis is a British geek using her YouTube videos to critique films, TV, and books from a queer and feminist lens.

Hell Is a Future We Make for Ourselves: The Many Dystopias of ‘The 100’

As she has an older brother, her birth was unauthorized and when she was discovered she was sent directly to the SkyBox. And so on. While some of the crimes are legitimate, many are the result of children growing up in a totalitarian state. So clearly it’s going to be better here on the ground, right?

Ha!

Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) and Anya (Dichen Lachman) in one of The 100’s many dystopias — Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) and Anya (Dichen Lachman) in one of *The 100’*s many dystopias

This guest post by Deborah Pless appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

The first scene of The 100 makes it pretty freaking clear that this is a show about dystopia. We are introduced to a pretty blonde girl drawing a landscape scene using only the dirt and grime of her prison cell. The voiceover narration informs us that this picture, and all of the other pictures that ornament her solitary confinement, is drawn from imagination. She has never set foot on Earth, and she will almost certainly die in space like all the rest of her people.

Cheerful stuff, huh?

The girl, Clarke Griffin (played by Eliza Taylor), is our main character and the voice of reason in The 100, a CW show that came on as a midseason replacement last year to middling reviews, but has continued to improve and now, after the completion of its second season, officially qualifies as a “cult hit.” Based on the novel series of the same name by Kass Morgan, you would be forgiven for assuming this is just another Hunger Games ripoff. It isn’t.

The 100 is a show ostensibly about teenagers falling in love and making poor choices against the backdrop of an ever-changing dystopian landscape, but in reality the show is far less concerned with emotions than with social commentary. The dramas and frivolities of the first few episodes fade away as the show goes on, being replaced instead by a compelling and gripping drama about political power, the ethics of war, medical experimentation, torture, the values of indigenous cultures, imperialism, and, occasionally, hope for the future.

It is also unquestionably a show about dystopia. Though evident in the first scene, it wasn’t until well into the second season that I realized that the show wasn’t just an exploration of one particular dystopian future, however, but instead an exploration of all of them. Really. All of them. Every organized culture or civilization that our heroes encounter in the course of the series is a different exploration of dystopia. And while this can make the show rather bleak and hard to watch, it’s fascinating.

The basic premise of the show is inherently dystopian. Our heroes all live on the “Ark,” a cobbled together mush of space stations in orbit over the Earth. They’ve lived there for 97 years, since a nuclear war wiped out all life on Earth. The people of the Ark know that they are just a waiting generation who will live and die on the Ark with the understanding that in another hundred years their descendants will be able to go down and live on the planet once the radiation levels have decreased.

Because they have limited supplies, the Ark is run as a totalitarian dystopia. There is never enough food, water, air, or medicine. All food is rationed, all parents may have only one child, and medicine is reserved only for cases when the alternative is death. Even their shoes and underwear are handed down from one generation to the next. Break a law on the Ark – and there are many – and you die. No trial, no reprieve, just a sad farewell to your loved ones, the removal of all shoes and useful clothing, and then a swift death being shot out the airlock.

If a minor commits a crime, then they are sent to the “SkyBox,” a holding detention center where they await turning 18. Once 18, they face a panel, and that panel will decide if they should be “floated” or returned to the Ark’s main population.

Our story starts when Clarke and her fellow inmates in the SkyBox are hustled out of their cells and onto a dropship. Confused and terrified about what is happening, the teenagers (and children) soon realize that they are going down to Earth. Why? Well, as they and we learn, because the Ark can no longer support life and they must find out if the Earth has healed enough to sustain them. In other words, Clarke and all of her friends, 100 of the most vulnerable members of this society, are used as canaries in a coal mine.

The Ark kids reach the ground. — The Ark kids reach the ground

So obviously the Ark is a dystopian place. As the show goes on – obviously the kids survive their trip to the Earth’s surface – it become increasingly clear that the governmental situation on the Ark is hellish at best. One child was incarcerated for hitting the guards who held her back as her parents were executed. Another character, Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos), committed no crime but being born. As she has an older brother, her birth was unauthorized and when she was discovered she was sent directly to the SkyBox. And so on. While some of the crimes are legitimate, many are the result of children growing up in a totalitarian state. So clearly it’s going to be better here on the ground, right?

Ha!

As the kids quickly learn, the ground is no more hospitable than the Ark was. While there is no totalitarian rule, their society quickly devolves in a Lord of the Flies situation. A hundred teenagers and children who have been locked up in prison and forced to live in a police state their whole lives suddenly have complete freedom? Yeah, it goes pretty Lord of the Flies. Then, just when they’re starting to get their act together, it becomes clear that the Ark children are not the only ones alive on the ground. There are others.

That brings us to the Grounders, as the people of the Ark come to know them. The Grounders represent another form of dystopia, this one more similar to Mad Max. The Grounders are the humans who developed an immunity to the radiation poisoning the Earth and so rebuilt society.

Grounder leader Indra (Adina Porter) and her warriors

They hunt with bows and arrows and spears, wear an amalgamation of clothes they found and animal leathers, paint their faces to look scarier, and even speak a completely different language. Heck, they even have a village called “ton DC” built in the bombed out ruins of Washington DC. In other words, they appear at first to the Ark kids as “savages,” a dystopian view of who they could become if they lose all of their “civilization.”

Fortunately, the truth turns out to be much more complicated than that. While the Grounders are genuinely savage, they also have an artistic and healing tradition that is complex and beautiful, as well as a culture that is distinct and clearly quite functional. Though tribal and very divided by factions, the Grounders quickly become the least dystopian society on the show, and the Ark kids even cease their war and try to make a truce.

Unfortunately for our heroes, though, the Grounders are the least of their problems. As the story progresses, the kids run into another dystopian hellscape, this one called “Mount Weather.” Mount Weather is a bunker, or system of bunkers, hidden inside a mountain and home to a large population of seemingly nice, decent people. They’ve lived inside the mountain, sheltered by its radiation shields, for the past hundred years. They have abundant food, shelter and safety, and even flourishing art and culture. It’s the first place the kids go that is, well, beautiful.

But that beauty covers over the horrible truth that Mount Weather is just another dystopia. This time it’s a medical one, where the people of Mount Weather are basically vampires, kidnapping Grounders and draining them of their blood in the hopes of building up a radiation immunity. When the scientists at the mountain discover that the Ark kids have an even better immunity, they decide to harvest the kids’ bone marrow, whether they consent or not.

Inside Mount Weather’s medical research facility

Not to be outdone, by this time the bulk of the Ark’s population has reached the ground and formed a camp called “Camp Jaha,” which operates under the same dystopian rule as the Ark did. And across the mountains we discover a desert wasteland of outcasts and landmines and pilgrims searching for the “City of Light.” That City of Light? Turns out to be just another terrifying technological dystopia.

What’s the point of all of this? Well, aside from the writers of The 100 clearly enjoying the bleakness of their world, these competing dystopian futures actually manage to form a cohesive picture not of dystopia but of how we ought to respond to it.

Like I said above, our main character for the show is Clarke. Clarke is smart, caring, incredibly pragmatic and kind of scary. She quickly becomes the leader of the kids she came down with, but goes on to become the leader of all of the people of the Ark, a symbol of resistance for Mount Weather, and more. While there are other characters whose lives we follow, the story revolves around Clarke, particularly around how Clarke reacts to dystopian societies. Namely, how she never reacts well.

On the Ark, Clarke was locked up in solitary confinement for the crime of treason. She and her father discovered that the life support of the station was failing and tried to warn everyone. He was executed; she was locked up. At the dropship, when the kids go all Lord of the Flies, Clarke is the voice of reason, foraging for food and medicine while the others let the world burn.

Clarke and her mother, Abby (Paige Turco)

When captured by the Grounders, she resorts to diplomacy. When captured by Mount Weather, she speaks out against their propaganda and escapes, taking a former enemy with her. She quickly establishes herself as the real power of Camp Jaha and, with the help of her friends, brokers a deal with the Grounders to go to war against Mount Weather. Not bad for a 17-year-old girl. Not bad for anyone.

Clarke clearly believes in the values of a good society, but what makes her a fantastic character is how strongly she believes in speaking out against a bad one. She has no qualms about speaking truth to power. And she will not abide a dystopia. By showing Clarke butting heads with so many different kinds of failed societies, we’re given a look at what it means to stand up for our own rights and the rights of others in any situation. I’m not saying that the show is perfect or completely unproblematic, but I do think that it has something very interesting to say when it comes to how we ought to react to dystopian landscapes.

It says that we should react with understanding. We should figure out what’s wrong, what about the society is making it so unbearable, and then seek to fix that. Clarke doesn’t believe necessarily in blowing up bad societies, though she does sometimes do that. Literally. It’s more that her arc is about seeking the good and using these visions of failed places to figure out what will work and what should be.

This is especially meaningful considering that Clarke is, well, a teenage girl. She’s the demographic of our society that we pay the least attention to and give the least credence. And yet the whole show is centered around proving how much value Clarke and the other kids that society originally deemed expendable actually have.

Maya (Eve Harlow), Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos), and Monty (Christopher Larkin) fight together in Mount Weather

It’s not just Clarke, either. The show centers on the kids the Ark sent down, the ones society had abandoned, as they explore different kinds of dystopias. They’re a pretty diverse bunch and their reactions to these different situations give us a wealth of commentary on those dystopias.

So while Clarke’s not perfect and neither is the show, they’re clearly trying. Clarke sometimes falls into white savior behavior, and the show occasionally tries to force storylines that feel disingenuous and frankly kind of weird. But whatever. I don’t need a perfect show or a perfect heroine. I’d rather have this, a meta-commentary on the different types of futures we envision for ourselves as a species. Even better, it’s a meta-commentary where each future is torn down and reassembled by the children who will actually inherit it.

As The 100 shows us, the point of dystopia isn’t to look at the future and weep. The point of dystopian landscapes is to give us a vision of what our future could be and then to explore how to make sure it never is.

Deborah Pless runs Kiss My Wonder Woman and works as a freelance writer and editor when she’s not busy camping out at the movies or watching too much TV. You can follow her on Twitter and Tumblr just as long as you like feminist rants, an obsession with superheroes, and the search for gluten-free baked goods.

Manic Pixie Revolutionary Awakenings

Maria essentially makes Freder the chosen one—she inspires him to go underground and gives him his purpose when he awakens to the dystopian system in which he lives. Without her, the story does not proceed and the system continues unopposed.

This guest post by Julia Patt appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Contemporary audiences best know Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for its unlikely restoration after museum workers discovered several missing scenes from the film in Brazil in 2008, 80 years after the film’s 1927 release. An archetypal depiction of the class struggle, Metropolis continues to influence dystopian landscapes, from George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead to The Hunger Games.

In the opening scenes of the film, we learn that the Metropolis is in fact two cities: the wealthy city above and the workers’ city below. Our protagonist is Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), son of the Metropolis’ Master, Joh. Freder differs little from the other men of his class—indulging in meaningless contests in the city’s stadiums, enjoying the comfort of elaborately dressed and painted women in the Eternal Gardens, and completely oblivious to the trials of the working class. It’s only when Freder encounters Maria (Brigitte Helm) that he deviates from the course set for him.

In this first scene, Maria brings a large group of children up to the Eternal Gardens so that they may see the people who live there. “These are your brothers,” she says again and again, perhaps addressing both groups. While the other visitors seem alarmed by the newcomers and move away, Freder stands transfixed, watching Maria.

He then learns of the deplorable conditions in the city, but only because he follows Maria underground. There he sees terrible accidents, men lagging with fatigue at their posts—all the horrors of the industrial world with its vast inequalities. Afterward, he tries to explain the conditions to his father, who is unconcerned, so much so that he casually dismisses one of his own employees to go join the ranks at the machines.

Although he prevents the man’s suicide and saves another from exhaustion, Freder can find no overarching solution or purpose apart from pursuing Maria and at several moments bids these other characters to wait for him. He’ll find answers, he seems sure, when he finds the woman who has so shaken him. He’s not wrong, either. When he later finds Maria—more than 30 minutes after her first appearance—she is delivering a modified sermon about the Tower of Babel, ending with the maxim: the mediator between the head and the hands is the heart.

Joh, Freder’s father, immediately recognizes the danger she presents and turns to the inventor, Rotwang, to help him discredit her. They decide to give Rotwang’s greatest creation, the Machine-Man, Maria’s face. It’s worth noting, however, that the Machine-Man had a female form well before this plan—Rotwang created it to replace the woman he loved. Joh and Rotwang are naturally delighted with the Machine-Man version of Maria, calling it the most perfect and obedient tool. Each believes that the Machine answers only to him, although it is ultimately unclear whether the Machine has motivations of its own. (“Let’s watch the city go to the devil!” it exclaims toward the film’s conclusion with noticeable glee.)

It does, however, fulfill its joint purpose, which is to bring chaos to both the city above and the city below. In the Metropolis’ nightclubs, the Machine dances, driving the upper-class men to violence and delirium. Below, it incites the workers to revolution and encourages them to destroy the machines that keep both cities alive and functioning.

Thanks to the Machine’s efforts, the Metropolis comes close to complete destruction, with the workers’ children trapped in a flooding city below and the wealthy stalled by massive power outages above. Rioting breaks out as the two classes encounter each other on the surface. However, Maria saves the workers’ children—with Freder’s assistance—and later, the mob unwittingly destroys the Machine-Man. After seeing his son nearly die, Joh has a somewhat convenient change of heart and, with Freder’s help, joins hands with the worker’s foreman.

All this comes at the hands of one woman and her doppelganger—equal forces for peace and chaos. But Maria isn’t a character with much agency or screen time. Freder’s pursuit of her dominates our attention throughout the film. And ultimately she is not the mediator, rather only the inspiration for him, the original Trinity to Neo’s Chosen One in The Matrix.

Maria is an unusual character in other respects. It’s unclear what her position or profession is, although it seems likely she might be a teacher or a minder for the children, and she doesn’t quite seem to belong to the working class. Neither does she seem to spend time with other women. Only men come to the meetings she calls; in fact, we see no women workers at all until the film’s final act.

There seems to be a suggestion, then, that only men can overthrow the oppressive society—we see three men clasp hands at the end of the film to show that peace is possible. Aside from the women in the mob of workers, women in Metropolis remain isolated, surrounded by crowds of men. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no moment of: “These are your sisters.” However, without Maria, revolution seems unlikely. She threatens the status quo by calling her meetings; she inspires Freder to leave the city above and witness the city below. Her image—properly manipulated—is enough to create division within both societies, but she also contributes to the unity.

The Machine-Man, of course, has even less control over its destiny. Its appearance is stolen, an appropriation of Maria’s body for the benefit of the patriarchal upper class. If it loves chaos and seems devious, we should remember that it was designed to behave as it does. It is an ideal tool because it appeals as women as meant to appeal without any desires or notions of its own. But it’s worth noting that the other women of the upper city are also tools of the patriarchy, used for a particular end other than their own determination, however willing their participation in the system might appear.

Ultimately, Metropolis gives us two images of how women function in repressive societies—as revolutionary visionaries and unholy temptresses. However, it falls short on both sides: they can neither overcome nor create the dystopian world as they choose.

We find a similar duality of character in François Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. The film deals similarly with a male hero of the dominant society awakening to the realities of the world around him: Guy Montag (Oscar Werner). Montag belongs to the enforcement class—he burn books—and lives a comfortable if unhappy life with his wife, Linda (Julie Christie).

Linda is the picture of complacence. She consumes the media her society dictates, wants what her culture tells her to want, and questions little.

We wouldn’t know anything of her unhappiness, save for the fact that in her second appearance in the film, she has apparently overdosed on pills. It’s never settled satisfactorily whether she did this intentionally or by accident. The emergency crew treats it as a routine occurrence, so it seems likely that Linda represents the typical woman of her station—lonely, uneducated, and lacking control over her life in any meaningful way.

Montag is visibly shaken by the episode, but only to a point—he is in the midst of a transformation inspired by Clarisse, a woman he meets on the train. In a deft move by Truffaut, Christie also plays Clarisse, distinguished from Linda only by her short hair.

Although he is not as immediately taken with her as Freder is with Maria in Metropolis, Montag clearly finds himself drawn to Clarisse. (She is often regarded as one of the original manic pixie dream girls.)

He seems happy to see her again and goes so far as to visit the school where she works with her after she’s fired. He particularly seems moved by her emotional response when the children don’t remember her—she cries the tears Linda can’t.

But most importantly, Clarisse puts Montag on the path to his awakening by asking him, “do you ever read any of the books before you burn them?”

Don’t mind me…just here to inspire you to a revolution.

Clarisse, like Maria, is an active participant in a movement to change the way her society works. She warns a man at the beginning of the film that the firefighters are on the way to his house. She doesn’t teach the way she is directed to and she challenges all of Montag’s preconceptions about the world in which he lives. However, as with Metropolis and Maria, Fahrenheit 451 is not Clarisse’s story. And strikingly, the dual casting of her and Linda suggests that the two play complementary roles in Montag’s life. One represents the inadequate if safe life he’s lead and the other the intellectual freedom and curiosity he learns to want. But under slightly different circumstances, Clarisse might have been Linda or vice versa. Their individual desires, while relevant, do not drive the narrative the way Guy’s do. Rather, like Maria and the Machine-Man, they represent the two possibilities in particular dystopian systems—their roles largely determined by the needs of men in those societies, be they revolutionary or otherwise.

Ultimately, what are we to make of these manic pixie dream girls with their unusual ideas? Is there a moment when they might do more than inspire others and take real revolutionary action on their own? And is it possible to tell the story of a woman coming to the same realizations that Freder and Guy do?

Or, does it all come back to the creation of the Machine-Man—the ultimate symbol of society’s desires with no identity of its own?

Recommended Reading: “Reproducing the Class and Gender Divide: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis”

Julia Patt is a writer from Maryland. She also edits 7×20, a journal of twitter literature, and is a regular contributor to VProud.tv and tatestreet.org. Follow her on twitter: https://twitter.com/chidorme

Dystopia Within ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’

What helps ‘Evangelion’ continue to grow its popularity is not the focus on religious or sci-fi elements, but its commitment to showcasing the fragility of humanity through its flawed and destructive characters tasked with saving the world and themselves. And how does the franchise show this? By literally placing the future of what’s left of the world in the hand of dysfunctional and emotionally fragile children.

This guest post by CG appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Dystopian landscapes have begun to grow in popularity with audiences, particularly in film and literature. Franchises like The Hunger Games and The Walking Dead have given audiences this love affair with settings that include abandoned cities, constant threats of death, and the occasional love triangle in an attempt at normalcy. But what these popularized franchises have done is cloud our definition of what dystopian media can do. In fact, there has been dystopian media done before that called for us to embrace and examine how humanity is represented in these otherwise bleak landscapes.

With this, I call to you the brilliance of the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, Neon Genesis Evangelion refers to a franchise created by Hideaki Anno and Gainax Studios, going on to include a 25-episode anime, six films (including three reboots), and a 13-volume manga series. The franchise itself is incredibly popular, launching back in the 1990s and maintaining a steady fanbase ever since. What helps Evangelion continue to grow its popularity is not the focus on religious or sci-fi elements, but its commitment to showcasing the fragility of humanity through its flawed and destructive characters tasked with saving the world and themselves. And how does the franchise show this? By literally placing the future of what’s left of the world in the hand of dysfunctional and emotionally fragile children.

The story of Evangelion focuses on three 14-year-old pilots that control giant robots called Evangelion Units, as they battle monsters called Angels that threaten to destroy (what’s left of) the world. These Angels have already destroyed half of the world – the oceans have turned red, half of the world’s population has been killed. Some of the characters live with the consequences of the Second Impact – one character, Misato Katsuragi, tries to live with her guilt of directly surviving the Second Impact while her father does not.

The pilots of the Eva Units serve as the main characters of the franchise, and remain the gatekeepers to the internal conflict of the internal conflict of the franchise. The main character is Shinji Ikari – abandoned by his father who later asks him to pilot one of the Eva Units, Shinji revels in the feelings of guilt and unraveling that comes with feeling horribly inadequate to everyone around him. One of the episodes of the original anime is called “Hedgehog’s Dilemma,” focusing on a psychological condition that makes for Shinji’s insecurity to hinder him from getting close to others, for fear of further rejection. For Shinji, he reclaims some of that validation in the form of piloting the Eva. Like the other pilots, the Eva Units give him identity beyond his own limitations. Although, as we soon learn, it is not enough to allow them to completely escape.

The second pilot is Asuka Langley-Sohryu, a hotheaded and brash girl who clings to her title as an Eva pilot as a badge of honor. To Asuka, she revels in being needed and having purpose. But her overconfidence shadows a deeper hurt of fierce inadequacy. When her title as an Eva pilot is no longer enough to shield her from facing her fear of being useless, it quickly manifests into putting Asuka in further danger. In this unforgiving future, where the survival of humanity rests on the sounders of three teenagers, Asuka’s mental unraveling to be more dangerous that we would expect.

The final pilot is Rei Ayanami, a girl who is seen as emotionless and stoic. She follows orders without thought or individuality, and she has a strange connection to the Eva Units themselves, as well as to Shinji’s deceased mother, Yui. Rei is interesting in that she must learn to reclaim her individuality and importance as a person. She struggles to find meaning with being expendable.

The psychological stability of the pilots, as well as the adults that are supposed to be directing and guiding them, become paramount to the development and plot of Evangelion. It’s not simply the bleak landscape that draws out the despair in the characters; it is the drive of destruction that lingers on the tongue of everyone around. Shinji, Asuka, and Rei are left to salvage humanity out of the hopelessness that surrounds them.. and it makes for oddly addicting media.

Though the franchise explores other themes of faith, relationships, and tragedy – at its core, Neon Genesis Evangelion gives us a tale of searching for meaning and embracing the strength of flawed humanity, even when the situation is bleak.

CG is a writer, blogger, and fangirl from New Jersey. Most of her online writing can be found on her site (blackgirlinmedia.com).

When Skies Fall, Bodies Fail: Gender and Performativity on a Dystopian Earth

In rejecting Lexi, Anne perpetuates the false solidarity and universal acceptance Butler points out in the above passage. Anne sees Lexi as failing to perform the necessary gender of her body. Lexi is the very symbol of a failed body, the failed universal woman Anne has expected of her daughter.

This guest post by Sean Weaver appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

I’ve often stood under the night sky, barefoot in the dew-soaked grass, contemplating the vast expanse of the universe, the sky. The stars, like little blips of life, unfold and become more prominent the further away from the cityscapes that fill suburban horizons. I’ve felt the uncanny feeling that exists when contemplating that space. I’ve also felt the familiar feeling, knowing that I am not the first to experience such phenomena. Like countless others before, I’ve stared at that unknown, that unreachable space, in which only a few have ever touched. On the other hand, I’ve experienced the gravity that tethers all objects and bodies to the ground. The weight of the sky, pressing feet firmly to the ground, reminds me of the forces that define my life and the gravity we hold so much faith in. What were to happen if we suddenly lost that faith, the sky falling, crashing down, with the full weight of gravity behind it? What if the gravity holding your body in stasis failed?

Many science fiction narratives seek to answer this question, to go beyond the familiar into the uncanny where every aspect of our existence is called into question, especially when alien beings have come to colonize the Earth and its inhabitants. It’s a dystopian narrative told over and over. Aliens discover a valuable resource on Earth. Aliens pillage and destroy. Humans sometimes prevail. Given the Earth’s colonial history, we can understand the fascination behind such narratives. Enter Falling Skies. Falling Skies takes place after Earth is imperialized by alien overlords called the Esphendi. The show focuses on a group of Americans, led by Tom Mason (Noah Wyle), his family, and Captain Weaver (Will Patton), who have pulled together to fight the alien hostiles, even naming their ragtag group of misfits the 2^nd Mass. This is, more or less, all anyone needs to know in terms of narrative/summary; to go into further detail would give away to many spoilers.

While many critics and viewers have pointed out the flaws in Steven Spielberg and Robert Rodat’s Falling Skies—such as its romanticism of white European settler propaganda and disregard for indigenous tactics of colonial resistance, to its blatant portrayal of male dominance /heteronormativity, and its American patriotic ethnocentrism—the show has drastically changed since its first airing in 2011. Although I agree with what many have said of the show, even having my own love/hate relationship with it, the show evolves in season four, and that’s where I’d like to focus in this critique.

The show shifts gears, moving away from the male dominant narratives, to finally developing its female protagonists, and in doing so reveals the gravity gender and performativity have over certain bodies, and its certain tendency to perpetuate the oppression of said bodies. Judith Butler writes, in her book of critical feminist/queer essays Bodies That Matter, on the discursive limits of sex, the body, and performativity, stating:

Hence, the reading of “performativity” as willful and arbitrary choice misses the point that the historicity of discourse and, in particular the historicity of norms (the “chains” of reiteration invoked and dissimulated in the imperative utterance) constitute the power of discourse to enact what it names. To think of “sex” as an imperative in this way means that a subject is addressed and produced by such a norm, and that this norm—and the regulatory power of which it is a token—materializes bodies as an effect of that injunction. And, yet, this “materialization,” while far from artificial, is not fully stable…And further, this imperative, this injunction, requires and institutes a “constitutive outside”—the unspeakable, the unviable, the nonnarrativizable that secures and, hence fails to secure the very borders of materiality. The normative force of performativity—its power to establish what qualifies as “being”—works not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as well. And in the case of bodies those exclusions haunt signification as it abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the nonnarrativizable, the traumatic…To the extent that we understand identity-claims as rallying points for political mobilization, they appear to hold out the promise of unity, solidarity, universality.

In this passage, Butler reveals that it is not enough to read bodies and performativity as necessary, or forced. This type of reading reproduces hegemonic norms, and regulates power structures that oppress bodies, specifically the bodies of women. Furthermore, Butler reveals that this type of treatment of bodies and performativity creates a “constitutive outside,” which leads to false promises of unity and solidarity.

It is this “constitutive outside” that I would like to explore in regard to season four of Falling Skies, and how the main female protagonist Anne Mason (Moon Bloodgood) reproduces the artificial illusion of unity and solidarity while forcing her hybrid daughter into the traumatic space this outside represents. Throughout the show, Anne has pushed the boundaries of gender and tradition in her survival in the dystopian landscape created by the arrival of the Esphendi overlords. She is at the head of her field, a field dominated by men, and as a doctor she is the best there is—even developing a technique to remove the harnesses that change the children into the Skitter slaves that do the work of their alien oppressors. In this sense, Anne pushes past the restraints of performativity that men would expect of her.

However, in the beginning of season four, Anne has stepped out of her role as the healer. She is no longer the doctor who has kept the bodies of her people stitched together. After experiencing a traumatic capture at the hands of the Esphendi, resulting in Anne giving birth to a hybrid daughter, Alexi (Scarlett Byrne), Anne begins to lose control. For the Esphendi are master colonizers, and realize that to control the men they must first control the women. This experience changes Anne, and she no longer takes up the role of doctor. Instead, she steps into the role of leader and a warrior woman out for revenge. But she no longer pushes past performativity; instead, she lets performativity control her. She forgoes all feelings, and in doing so reveals the true nature of dominance over other bodies. Anne becomes so raveled up in performing the role of warrior, that she begins to instill fear in others in regards to the nature and being of her daughter Lexi.

Lexi is a hybrid in every sense of the word; she is both human and Esphendi. Due to her hybridity, Lexi can control the matter and elements of the Earth. She also has the ability to mature quickly. However, as a hybrid Lexi is rejected by the people of the 2nd Mass, including her own mother. In fact, at one point Anne exclaims that the Esphendi had killed her daughter, leaving Lexi perplexed at the idea of family. She even questions her mother stating, “But, I am your daughter; we are family. Why am I different simply because I am Esphendi and human?” Eventually, through Anne’s rejection, Lexi sacrifices herself in a mission to the moon to destroy the power source of the Esphendi Empire because she realizes that her existence is artificial, insubstantial. She finds herself in the space of the “constitutive outside.” Unknowingly, Anne perpetuates the fear of otherness. She doesn’t recognize her daughter as a woman, because she is foreign, alien, hybrid. In rejecting Lexi, Anne perpetuates the false solidarity and universal acceptance Butler points out in the above passage. Anne sees Lexi as failing to perform the necessary gender of her body. Lexi is the very symbol of a failed body, the failed universal woman Anne has expected of her daughter.

This is only the second evolution of Anne’s character arc. But, it reveals the nature of performativity and how it may be experienced in a dystopian world. Falling Skies is finally beginning to evolve and question the very ideology that seems to define our existence. I wonder, however, what more will be revealed when it comes to the nature of bodies. While season five is the final season, I wonder how Anne will handle the conflicts to come. What will become the outcome when Anne and her family begin to rebuild the world once the Esphendi have been defeated, if they are defeated? Will they repeat the past? Will Anne push pass the performativity that has come to control her actions and beliefs or will she succumb to the gravitational pull that forces certain bodies to fail when skies come falling down?

Sean Weaver has a MA in English/Literature from Kutztown University. He is currently News Editor at Vada, an online magazine from the UK with a new queer perspective. When he isn’t reading or writing, he is hard at work looking for new ways to understand what it means to be queer.

Twitter: @levirush8

Blog: http://post-colonial-scholar.blogspot.com

The Burden of Carrying On: The Currency of Women in Dystopian Films

I can’t keep count of the number of times the fact that women menstruate has been used as a reason to render us incapable of doing something. However, the fact women can have children (while cis-men cannot) is arguably our greatest power in a time of crisis.

This guest post by BJ Colangelo appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

When I was 8 years old, I was given written permission from my parents to watch Titanic on VHS at my friend’s 10th birthday party. Loaded up on birthday cake, potato chips, and as much cherry Coke as I could stomach, I sat in awe as I watched the seemingly unsinkable ship crack in half and kill approximately 1,500 people. As the string quartet played their final notes, the main antagonist of the film (Billy Zane’s Cal Hockley) grabbed a stray child claiming her to be his daughter in order to secure himself a space on a lifeboat reserved for women and children. My friend’s mother was a feminist, liberal arts school college professor and upon watching this scene uttered:

“Leave it to a man to manipulate the only system put in place where a woman’s life is actually given any sort of value.”

Every day, women are made to feel worthless. Whether it’s the media bombarding us with contradictory ideas on how to be, or the fact politicians still think our rights need to be settled by a vote, women are still struggling for equal treatment in just about every aspect of existence. During the March 10 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly hosted Marc Rudov, author of Under the Clitoral Hood: How to Crank Her Engine Without Cash, Booze, or Jumper Cables, to discuss “What is the downside of having a woman become the president of the United States?” Rudov’s initial response to the question was, “You mean besides the PMS and the mood swings, right?” I can’t keep count of the number of times the fact that women menstruate has been used as a reason to render us incapable of doing something. However, the fact women can have children (while cis-men cannot) is arguably our greatest power in a time of crisis.

As seen in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later… Christopher Eccelston plays the leader of what appears to be the last of surviving civilians in Britain after the epidemic of the Rage Virus. Eccelston’s Major Henry West is a military man through and through, as are the overwhelming majority of the men surviving at his outpost. Major West sent out a radio broadcast searching for survivors to join him and his men, but once characters Hannah, Selena, and Jim arrive at the sanctuary, the true motivations for the radio broadcast become horrifyingly clear:

“Eight days ago, I found Jones with his gun in his mouth. He said he was going to kill himself because there was no future. What could I say to him? We fight off the infected or we wait until they starve to death… and then what? What do nine men do except wait to die themselves? I moved us from the blockade, and I set the radio broadcasting, and I promised them women. Because women mean a future.”

While Major West’s speech (and the events that shortly follow) opens up an entirely new can of worms regarding the sexual politics of the apocalypse, it’s still a reminder that women are arguably the most important symbols of hope in dystopian landscapes.

We often think of dystopian films set in fantastical and futuristic worlds after some post-apocalyptic cause. What we see in It Follows is the wastelands of Detroit and the aftermath of economic devastation. It’s this backdrop set in a contemporary setting that blurs our vision of the forest for the trees. The value of women in this dystopian world is quantified by the supernatural curse that starts to follow these characters. This outside force makes it so that a sexual encounter is needed in order to survive. It’s blatantly said through the film that it’s easy for Jay (Maika Monroe) to pass it on, “because she’s a girl.” She even has two suitors fight over the opportunity to take on this curse, allowing her to be in the power position to have a choice in which suitor essentially lives or dies. It’s from the male perspective that women are seen as currency, as something holding the most value, and they will do anything to obtain them.

Mad Max: Fury Road enforces this practice through the lens of women fully aware of their value. The plot of the film is centrally focused on gender politics, but it never once feels heavy handed. Surprisingly, the escaped “wives” in the center are also never sexualized, even from their former captor. The girls do discuss the villain Immortan Joe having a “favorite,” but the women are fully aware of their value. Amidst gunfire, these women use themselves as shields, understanding the War Boys’ fear of harming them. However, this fear isn’t rooted in a sexual desire, but in the desire to survive. Sexuality isn’t used as a weapon, but the women use themselves as a weapon to address the fact they are in control of any hope for the future. Immortan Joe’s desire to save the women comes not from a loss of beautiful sex slaves, but from a loss of the possibility of continuing his familial line. Men cannot continue on their own without women, and the world of Fury Road knows it. In this universe, we must work together to make a future.

The unfortunate reality of the value of women in dystopian societies is that the relegation of women as currency brings out the absolute worst in humanity. They say that money is the root of all evil, and if women are now being valued as a currency, the evil is bound to leak through. In 28 Days Later… the soldiers are willing to rape the first women they see, and in It Follows, a man has chloroform at his disposal, presumably for use in case Jay were to have denied him sex. While there is power in women gaining the ultimate value in dystopian landscapes, there is also a great risk that comes along to being reverted to nothing more than currency.

BJ Colangelo is the woman behind the keyboard for Day of the Woman: A blog for the feminine side of fear and a contributing writer for Icons of Fright. She’s been published in books, magazines, numerous online publications, all while frantically applying for day jobs. She’s a recovering former child beauty queen and a die-hard horror fanatic. You can follow her on Twitter at @BJColangelo.

The Margins of Dystopia: Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Noah’

It certainly isn’t a feminist world she lives in, but she does her level best to undermine her husband in an enclosed space. As Noah himself veers away from his family tradition of life-supporting environmental husbandry, Naameh continues to practice what he (used to) preach, preserving her daughter-in-law, the animals, and the land once they find it again.

This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

I’ve written before about a Darren Aronofsky film that I liked tremendously, Black Swan. I was a fan of The Wrestler and The Fountain. So when news of the director’s intent to tackle a Biblical epic in Noah was revealed, my reaction was a cautious excitement, but also: “Huh?” After seeing it, the “Huh?” response is pretty much still there.

But I was fascinated by Noah as a representation of dystopia, and, by its conclusion, of a supposed utopia. Its thinly veiled save-the-earth message seemed to simultaneously re-tell the Bible story with a new twist, and reinterpret it for non-believers (see also the “updated” environmental message of Scott Derrickson’s 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still). It was rather a strange experience, however, that for much of the film I had no idea what was going to happen next. That is not how I expected to experience a semi-familiar Bible story I heard many times as a child. These “inaccuracies” comprised the bulk of the negative reviews of the film, like this one from The Guardian.

It was easier then, perhaps, to see its story as a cautionary tale about our own time and place, removed from specifically Christian ideologies (except maybe for the Rock-Biter-esque Nephilim). So while it was clear enough how the film addressed environmental issues such as sustainable growing practices and the exploitation of natural resources, what did it say about other resources, like people? Human capital? Gender roles? Well, these topics were also disintegrating in the dystopic mess.

How dystopian is Noah’s opening act? Well, after a brief VFX sequence summarizing Creation, we fast-forward right to the murder of Noah’s dad at the hands of a young Tubal-Cain (sorry, spoilers…also something I didn’t expect to say in an essay about a Biblical story). Quite frankly, after sitting through the two hour and 20-minute movie, the plot points of the Bible story and the film have blurred a bit. What viewers know for sure is that Adam and Eve have been dispelled from the Garden, murder is a thing (thanks to Cain), and there are two factions of humans. One is the followers of Tubal-Cain, Biblical forger of bronze and iron, who are aggressively industrial, environmentally exploitative, and eat meat (sometimes human, sometimes CGI, pre-flood fantasy animals). Their existence is shown to be difficult, dirty, warrior-like, and (of course) patriarchal. It is only by accident, for instance, that a raiding party of these denizens leaves young Ila (Emma Watson) alive, and their violence has left her barren, though Noah’s wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) is able to save her life. This interaction, specifically, highlights differences between the two groups: essentially, one carries death, the other life.

The tribe of Noah are the descendants of Seth (brother of Cain and Abel, for those following along in the Genesis story), who possess a particular set of skills when it comes to the Earth. Members of their line appear to be caretakers of the land and perhaps the first environmentalists. They’re also vegetarians, in case you were wondering. Their existence is also seen to be difficult, and yet because of their family dynamic, close relationships, and respect for all living things, viewers understand that their ethos is preferable. Their costumes are softer, natural fabrics rather than metal armor and leather; they have names and distinct personalities as opposed to a mob-like, metalwork-blackened horde. The film goes a pretty long way to ingratiate these characters to us, most likely because later Noah himself will come close to tearing them all apart. But throughout most of the film, we see two clearly demarcated factions with clearly defined ideological beliefs in direct opposition to each other. Pretty divisive, and therefore pretty dystopian.

Of course we know that the story goes further than just setting up a conflict on the human scale. Noah’s main internal conflict lies in his troubling dreams and visions. His confusion creates tension not only within Noah’s own mind, but also within his family, as he tries to discern what exactly the Creator wants him to do, and to what end. Much of this conflict has to do with reproduction. Throughout the film, he successfully alienates almost everyone dear to him when he comes to believe that the Creator is so distressed with the human state of affairs that He wishes humanity to completely die out. He refuses his sons’ wives, and threatens to kill his grandchildren. His narrative becomes one of punishment for the variety of ills humankind has visited upon the Creator’s Earth, of which he comes to see himself and his family as equally guilty members in spite of their life-focused ethos.

Charting Noah’s emphasis on life and reproduction may illuminate the film’s dystopian arc. Early in the film, Noah experiences a vision of seeing a flower sprout spontaneously from a drop of water. Disturbed by this vision and his frequent dreams of a destructive flood, he seeks out his grandfather, Methuselah (incredibly, Anthony Hopkins). Methuselah gives Noah a seed, which, when planted, sprouts an entire forest full of trees from which to build the ark. While this seed is certainly a sign of life, and gives life to all of this lush CG greenery, it is a resource grown to be exploited in a way not unlike Tubal-cain’s mining operation. Is this permissible because it’s in the service of the Creator?

While the ark-building is happening, Noah’s children are growing up. Including Ila, who has become an adopted daughter, beloved of Noah’s eldest son, Shem. Because she is barren as a result of her childhood encounter with those violent raiders, Noah goes looking for wives for his two younger sons (after all, they have to repopulate the Earth after the flood). But when he arrives at a neighboring encampment, he sees chaos, violence, fire, and animals being ripped apart for food. It isn’t pretty, and we can understand why this vision seems to support Noah’s new interpretation of the Creator’s plan: his family’s purpose is only to save innocent animals, and when that task is done, humans will die off as the last of his family perishes. It is Naameh who cannot reconcile this plan, and she visits Methuselah to ask him to intercede. Here, we have the restrictions of a patriarchal society functioning within the life-driven Noah clan, where the potential for the continuation of the human race seems to rest not with the women who might bear the children, but with the aging male progenitor: his word may sway Noah and save humanity.

Meanwhile, Noah’s son Ham refuses to abide by his father’s wishes (rejection of the patriarchy) and goes to find his own wife. When he’s captured and imprisoned by Tubal-Cain’s league, he meets Na’al, a female captive. As the flood rains begin, the two escape, and Ham leads Na’al toward the ark to save her. But Noah has waded into the forest to find Ham, and as they run from the Cainian hordes, Na’al’s foot is caught in an animal trap and Noah forces Ham to leave her behind (re-establishment of the patriarchal law). They barely make it to the ark in time to be saved from numerous crazy CG geysers contributing to the rain and rising floodwaters.

And, in a surreal but somehow predictable turn of events, Ila encounters Methuselah in the forest and he magically cures her infertility. With his supernatural blessing, she seeks out Shem and they have a passionate moment in the forest just before boarding the ark. We can see where this is going—Ila will become pregnant and bear Noah’s grandchildren—but it’s significant that her ability to reproduce is granted her by the patriarch of Noah’s family.

All the while, Naameh maintains her role as an herbalist and a midwife and maybe the first organic farmer. Though she’s continually shot down, she does consistently object to Noah’s rule; I can’t quite reconcile this review’s characterization of her as a “drip.” And because representation matters, it’s worth noting that I think Connelly is channeling Linda Hamilton’s arms in Terminator 2 even as she participates in traditionally feminine activities like midwifing and healing. It certainly isn’t a feminist world she lives in, but she does her level best to undermine her husband in an enclosed space. As Noah himself veers away from his family tradition of life-supporting environmental husbandry, Naameh continues to practice what he (used to) preach, preserving her daughter-in-law, the animals, and the land once they find it again.

The end of the film predictably sews things back up between Naameh and Noah, especially after he is moved to mercifully spare his twin granddaughters’ lives after feeling only “love” when about to kill them. The patriarchy is duly restored. Yet there are cracks. In an epic case of middle-child syndrome, Ham quells his rebellious attitude but strikes out on his own just as the rainbow covenant moment glows through the denoument. Additionally, I couldn’t help but notice that there STILL isn’t a wife for Japheth, the youngest son. And who’s going to marry/mate with Ila’s daughters? In its final adherence to the Biblical source, Aronofsky’s film leaves some troubling questions even as its narrative may—through its departures from that source— subvert ancient patriarchal structures that are still part of the female dystopia.

Rebecca L. Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodramas, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.