Dystopian Fiction – Bitch Flicks

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.

Dysphoria Dystopias in ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Glen or Glenda’

However, comparing Wood’s deeply personal product with the Wachowskis’ deeply polished one, ‘Glen or Glenda’s explicit gender dysphoria with ‘The Matrix’s allegorical dysphoria reveals parallels that illuminate both films.

“You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You felt it your entire life.” – Morpheus, The Matrix

Though Lana Wachowski’s coming out should not be an excuse to limit interpretation of the Wachowski siblings’ most iconic film, The Matrix, to a closeted discussion of gender dysphoria, yet it is a film that is profoundly concerned with psychic dysphoria as sci-fi dystopia: with jarring disconnects between perceived reality and actuality, embodied in a heroic struggle for the reimagination of the self against escalating systems of social control. Ed Wood Jr.’s cult 1953 B-movie, Glen or Glenda, explicitly harnesses classic science fiction to dramatize the psychology of gender dysphoria. As was fictionalized in Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood, Wood was a self-accepting crossdresser who approached the topic of gender dysphoria with an empathy almost unique for his era, clumsily advancing enlightened opinions that would later become orthodoxy. There may be deceptive cunning underneath Wood’s film’s rough surface. Assigned to create a cheap, B-movie freak-show exploitation of the notoriety of Christine Jorgensen’s sex change, Wood delivers a freak-show of random mad scientists, mischievously accuses the cismale audience of suffering from pattern baldness due to their failure to wear women’s hats, creates a surreal nightmare of social conditioning, and then allows his transgender subjects to be islands of humanity within this freakish world. He effectively delivers a transgender freakshow in which the transgender are never freaks. On the surface, Wood’s film and the Wachowskis’ could not be more different: one is the cheap and amateurish product of a man popularized by the Golden Turkey Awards as “the worst director of all time,” while the other is a slick blockbuster considered a milestone in special effects, that has spawned serious, academic debate over its philosophical meanings. However, comparing Wood’s deeply personal product with the Wachowskis’ deeply polished one, Glen or Glenda‘s explicit gender dysphoria with The Matrix‘s allegorical dysphoria reveals parallels that illuminate both films.

Dystopia, Now: Contemporary Reality As Sci-Fi Nightmare

“It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth” – Morpheus, The Matrix

The most fundamental parallel between The Matrix and Glen or Glenda is their shared concept of present reality as a creation of sci-fi dystopia. In Glen or Glenda, Boris Karloff’s mad scientist is positioned as a creator-figure, who performs sex change transformations with a wave of his hand, while omnisciently supervising all life. Though Karloff’s never-really-specified relationship to the film’s realist narrative, complete with weirdly hovering intrusions over the action, are celebrated ironically as symptoms of Wood’s incompetence and oddness, yet Karloff’s role in Glen or Glenda mirrors that of the machines in The Matrix: he enables a dual discourse of irresistible predestination and faulty creation. Karloff’s “pulling of the string” drives surges of wildebeest like irresistible animal impulses, which place Wood’s hero as a puppet who must “dance to that which one is created for” while recognizing that “nature makes mistakes, it’s proven every day”, just as Neo struggles to accept that he is not in control of his own life through the guidance of his re-creator Morpheus.

Using a nightmare sequence of mobbing crowds and mocking variants of the schoolyard chant “slugs and snails and puppy dog’s tails, that’s what little boys are made of, sugar and spice and all things nice, that’s what little girls are made of,” Wood dramatizes the sinister power of social conditioning in a way that would be considered Lynchian surrealism, if he wasn’t dismissed as the worst director of all time. Where Wood uses a nightmarish dream sequence, the Wachowskis use body horror, in the violation of flesh-penetrating bugs and the imposed silence of a mouth literally sealed shut, to expressively dramatize the sinister power of their Agent “gatekeepers” over the hero’s most intimate body and self. Wood’s visual vocabulary for expressing the internal experience of gender dysphoria is drawn from James Whale’s Frankenstein, a queer lexicon of absent nurture and flawed divinity. The Wachowskis’ visual vocabulary in The Matrix is drawn from Ghost In The Shell, a cyberpunk anime that explores gender identity through a dystopia where characters can explore their identity by “plugging themselves in” to superpowered new bodies (or “shells”) of any gender. The effect of both texts, however, is to code lived reality as a profoundly unnatural and imposed nightmare that is essentially dystopian and demands the psyche’s resistance, symbolized for the Wachowskis by re-Creator Morpheus’ red pill.

Wood’s decision to open his film with a trans* woman’s suicide, narrated through her suicide note of repeated arrests for cross-dressing–“let my body rest in death, forever, in the things I cannot wear in life”–underlines the seriousness of the psychological crisis of gender dysphoria. Wood’s dramatization also recognizes the individual nature of each trans* experience, from the “transvestite,” who was conditioned by the environment of early youth to value femininity over masculinity and yearn to express his feminine side, to the “pseudo-hermaphrodite” Anne, who seems to correspond to a trans woman in her description as “a woman within… indeed meant to be a woman.” Anne challenges gender stereotypes by excelling as an army officer, before choosing a sex change operation. The “removal of the man and the formation of the woman” is represented onscreen by Bela Lugosi’s scientist blessing the new incarnation in a pseudo-religious ceremony.

The Holy Trinity: Variations And Incarnations

“You’ve been living two lives. In one life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson… the other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias “Neo”… One of these lives has a future and one of them does not.” – Agent Smith, The Matrix

When Keanu Reeves’ hero, hacker Thomas Anderson, is introduced, he has constructed an imaginary identity and vicarious second life as “Neo” that is confined within the cyber-realm. The basic plot of the first film is Anderson’s gradual embrace and embodiment of “Neo” as his true identity, while realizing his imposed identity of Thomas Anderson as a fictional construct. It is Hugo Weaving’s sinister Agent Smith of the social-conditioning “matrix” who continually imposes the (explicitly masculine) identity of “Mr. Anderson” onto Neo. It is when Neo finally resists and asserts “my name is Neo!” that he frees himself from the inevitability of his defeat. It is Neo’s allies who affirm his true identity, with Trinity’s iron belief in his potential self, embodied as a kiss, acting as the catalyst for his final awakening into unbounded liberation. Many commentators have pointed out that Neo can be read as a Christ allegory. Fewer have highlighted that Trinity’s name evokes the Holy Trinity’s conception of a single being’s incarnation into multiple forms. If Morpheus functions as a Creator/Father mentor to Neo’s Christ-figure, Trinity must represent his Holy Spirit. Her kiss is therefore not only Mary Magdalene’s handmaiden witnessing Christ’s resurrection, but the descent of the dove/spirit as agent of his baptism and awakening to mission.

The film’s iconic uniform of black leather, slicked back hair and shades visually codes Carrie-Anne Moss as a female variant of Keanu Reeves’ hero, reimagining the patriarchal Holy Trinity of the Christian religion as a transracial, transsexual one (the theme of transracial incarnation would later play a controversially race-bending role in the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas). While the dizzying complexity of the Matrix sequels are beyond the scope of my study, it should be noted that they center on Neo’s battle through ever complicating systems of social control and predestination to avoid the compelled sacrifice of Trinity. A traditional feminist reading would bemoan that Trinity serves as yet another apparently Strong Woman reduced to damsel-in-distress. However, reading Trinity as Neo’s liberated alter-ego enables an interpretation that is more coherent and thematically rich. Trinity is introduced before Neo – demonstrating her super-strength and desirable mastery over laws of nature, she is his ultimate goal throughout the films.

Glen Or Glenda describes the relationship of “Glen” and “Glenda” as “not half man, half woman, but nevertheless man and woman in the same body,” evokes the idea of multiple incarnation of a unified being. A kind of trinity is established between Glen, Glenda and the supervising creator Karloff, similar to that between Morpheus, Trinity and Neo.

The Blue Pill: The Lure Of The Cure

“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.” – Morpheus, The Matrix

In The Matrix, the “blue pill” represents returning to the “prison for your mind” that is coercive social conditioning. The character of Cypher represents the lure of the cure, in rejecting the “desert of the real” with its lack of comforts, its isolation and its persecution by patrolling machines, in order to resume a pre-programmed, conforming life where he forgets his past and betrays the team because “ignorance is bliss.”

Neo is dissuaded from his own instincts for comforting conformity by Trinity, the empowered alter-ego who gives him strength to resist his moments of doubt with her own certainty: “You know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you wanna be.” In Glen or Glenda, Barbara becomes the strengthening image, with her willingness to accept and love Glen, even if he never abandons women’s clothing, being the catalyst for his mental freedom. While insisting that a sex change is a happy ending for Anne, Glen’s happy ending becomes his reabsorption into a standard male role by finding his cravings for loving femininity fully answered by Barbara. This ending satisfies the mainstream audience’s urge to “cure” Glen, but only if they can grant the trans* audience’s demand that Glenda be accepted as she is, as a part of Glen, as a crucial precondition of the cure.

Gender policing limits the opportunities for full self-realization of all people, though their realized selves might take many forms across a wide spectrum of gender identity. In Lugosi’s words, “one is wrong because he does right. One is right because he does wrong.” Paradoxically, the mainstream audience are the obstacle to their own liberation, because of their mental indoctrination into an ideology of gender policing. As The Matrix‘s Morpheus puts it, they are “the very minds of the people we are trying to save, but until we do these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy.” Or as Glen or Glenda has it: “You Are Society – JUDGE YE NOT.” In the struggle to envision a world without rules or controls, without borders or boundaries, the self-actualization of all people is implied. As long as their matrix of policing thoughts and ingrained prejudices exists, the human race will never be free. What an everyday nightmare.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vUoSPJm5w0″]

Brigit McCone covets the Bride of Frankenstein hairdo, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and hanging out with her friends.

Playing with Fire: “Compulsory Heterosexuality” in ‘The Hunger Games’

While my conversations with my friends’ 12-year-old daughters about the trilogy always began with “Team Peeta!” or “Team Gale!” our conversations in the classroom focused on the scholarship of female collectives and violent resistance; we didn’t need Gale and Peeta as fodder for conversation. But on the last day of class, I introduced Adrienne Rich’s idea of compulsory heterosexuality to complicate the larger conversation in which readers—and viewers—find themselves forced to choose a camp, just as Katniss is forced to do.

This guest post by Colleen Clemens appears as part of our theme week on Reality TV.

I taught Suzanne Collins’s novel The Hunger Games as the culminating text for my Women and Violence in Literature course this semester. Almost all of us had read the book already, but to look at Katniss through the lens of the female protagonists that had come before her in the semester—The Bride, Firdaus, Aileen Wuornos, Legs, Lisbeth Salander, Malli, Phoolan, Sihem—meant we could consider the work Katniss is doing in popular culture. So while we had read the book before, we hadn’t read it the way that we read it together.

Much conversation focused on subverting gender norms, yet we talked little about the focus of the love interests until our final discussion. While my conversations with my friends’ 12-year-old daughters about the trilogy always began with “Team Peeta!” or “Team Gale!” our conversations in the classroom focused on the scholarship of female collectives and violent resistance; we didn’t need Gale and Peeta as fodder for conversation. But on the last day of class, I introduced Adrienne Rich’s idea of compulsory heterosexuality to complicate the larger conversation in which readers—and viewers—find themselves forced to choose a camp, just as Katniss is forced to do.

Of course, the filmic versions of the novels rely on the love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale as a way to include the most viewers, including the 16 or so people who saw the films without having read the trilogy. In a perhaps unintended meta-moment, Caeser smiles to the adoring crowd and calls a surviving Peeta and Katniss “the star-crossed lovers from District 12” from a set that looks uncannily like one from American Idol or The Voice.

Within the context of the Hunger Games and the arena, The Capitol, just like Hollywood, gives the audience what it wants: a forced—or let’s borrow Rich’s term “compulsory”—heterosexual relationship that Katniss barely tolerates in the novels. However, Katniss co-opts the Capitol’s compulsion, her only opportunity to ensure the survival of both herself and Peeta, and uses it to resist the Capitol and disrupt their narrative of what the Hunger Games should accomplish—passivity—and instead incites the fire of revolution.

After Katniss becomes District 12’s first volunteer in an attempt to spare her sister Prim, whose odds were clearly not in her favor, the former is whisked to the Capitol where she must become what the audience wants: the picture of femininity as a clean, waxed, young lady, a female object that must win the affection of the wealthy sponsors who hold her life in their hands. In the clinical setting of the Remake Center, her team—after a required second round of cleaning–transforms her body from that of a ragged, hard coal-mining daughter to that of a smooth, soft Capitol woman where femininity means manipulation of one’s body, often to the point of disfigurement (as happens to Tigris in Mockingjay). Haymitch reminds Katniss that she needs to be “nicer” to win the attention of the viewers.

Once the tributes are in the arena—the Capitol’s entrancement with the Hunger Games relying on bloodlust, the Districts’ on fear—Katniss and Peeta separate. After many, many deaths of children in a PG-13 film, the Gamemaker announces a change of rule after his menacing conversation with President Snow: two winners can emerge from the same District. As Gale watches the Games, his jealous sidelong glance casting toward the television, the rest of the Capitol can now root for love in the reality death match.

The Capitol viewers—and the Hollywood viewers—are then treated to the scene they have been waiting for. All of us feel relieved there is a chance for the heterosexual love to live; the edict seems to good to be true! We get the love scene that confirms their relationship, and Katniss’s performance makes it easy for all of us to forget that this relationship is forced, that Katniss and Peeta have both come to realize that their best chance of surviving is by feigning heterosexual desire. They press together in the cave. Haymitch sends medicine with a note reminding Katniss what she must do: “You call that a kiss?”

In talking about Kathleen Barry’s work, Rich reminds readers in her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” that “[t]he ideology of heterosexual romance, beamed at her from childhood out of fairy tales, television, films, advertising, popular songs, wedding pageantry, is a tool ready to the procurer’s hand and one which he does not hesitate to use.” The viewer requires a fairy tale—Katniss and Peeta’s lives depend on this fairy tale. In an infection-induced fog, Peeta dreamily recounts watching Katniss go home, “Every day. Every day.” We are led to believe she has been the object of his love without her awareness. We can hear the viewers in the Capitol swooning—and lining up to help. And we see Gale leering at the screen as his love goes to another man.

This feigned relationship is in fact their only option for survival, one that they will play up later in this film as they dress like Prince Charming and Cinderella…

and (spoiler alert) in Catching Fire with their acceptance of the sad fact that the Capitol’s desire for their heterosexual relationship to carry on means that they must marry in order to survive…

and (super spoiler alert) by Katniss’s resignation in the epilogue of Mockingjay in which she succumbs to Peeta’s desire to have children with him.

In the final scene of the Games, Katniss is mocked by another girl for trying to save her “lover boy.” We see the Capitol watching the love story. The command center grows quiet while the men and a few women controlling the couple’s environment watch during a rare moment of stillness; even they are captivated by the story they have created. Katniss and Peeta are the finale. The audience must know: Will their (heterosexual) love survive?

Panem holds its breath. The desire for compulsory heterosexuality is the pair’s shield—though it puts them at risk, it is the only way for the two of them to survive. They are in a bind of expectations others put on them in order to endure in this system of oppression called Panem and its games. And instead of choosing herself–“We both go down and you win”—she sends Cato to the dogs, saving her life and Peeta’s (and in a moment of gender essentialism, fires a mercy shot to spare Cato an even more horrible death).

They hug. Everyone relaxes. A crescendo of anxiety is released for a moment when we think they will both live: Heterosexual normativity can persist.

And then the previous provision is revoked. Peeta and Katniss stand at the cornucopia, the ultimate symbol of hearth and home reflecting the audience’s desires for heterosexual normativity, and recognize that their attempt at playing into the Capitol’s desires for a heterosexual relationship to flourish even in the face of terrible odds did not work. One of them must kill the other.

Katniss takes control of the situation. We see the districts watch them hold the poisoned berries to each other. The thought of losing both lovers becomes unbearable, and the games are called to an end. They are the “winners,” a moniker few of the surviving tributes accept. Katniss and Peeta hug again.

Rich argues that “[h]eterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women, yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.” The Capitol has done just this: imposed the narrative of heterosexuality onto the lovers, and then used it to attempt to kill them. However, when Katniss takes the Capitol’s desire and pushes it to its limit—to the star crossed lover, the Romeo and Juliet, the Pyramus and Thisbe, the dangerous hyper-heterosexual narrative of “if my partner is dead, I can no longer bear to live” story—and thereby breaks the games. By encouraging co-suicide, she makes the story so much more than the viewers can bear (whilst they have no problem bearing the awfulness of watching children die) that she takes the Capitol’s desire and exploits it to save their own lives—though it relegates her to a life of living a lie to maintain the ruse that saves her life.

In their final interview, the fairy tale couple, “the star crossed lovers from District 12,” sits onstage as the audience swoons. Caesar feeds them the story they are to parrot: “You were so in love with this boy that the thought of not being with him was unthinkable.”

Katniss plays into the audience’s desire, though we know she is not in love with Peeta: “I felt like the happiest person in the the world. I couldn’t imagine life without him.”

And finally, “We saved each other.” The audience practically faints with joy.

But forcing herself into the ruse of heterosexuality puts her at more risk, not less. Katniss is trapped: she cannot “win.” Playing into the deception draws the attention of the Capitol’s leaders, while not playing into the narrative means she may have been dead in the arena.

The last shot of the film focuses on Snow watching the “lovers” hold hands overhead. Menacing music plays as he walks off. The image of their heterosexual coupling is not enough for him. Katniss will be at risk for the rest of the trilogy because of her subversion. Rich ends her essay with a call to the reader to consider the damage that occurs to women within the framework of compulsory heterosexuality:

“Within the institution exist, of course, qualitative differences of experience; but the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality, and in the absence of choice, women will remain dependent upon the chance or luck of particular relationships and will have no collective power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives. As we address the institution itself, moreover, we begin to perceive a history of female resistance which has never fully understood itself because it has been so fragmented, miscalled, erased. It will require a courageous grasp of the politics and economics, as well as the cultural propaganda, of heterosexuality to carry us beyond individual cases or diversified group situations into the complex kind of overview needed to undo the power men everywhere wield over women, power which has become a model for every other form of exploitation and illegitimate control.”

Katniss spends the rest of the trilogy grappling with the material consequences of her decision to co-opt heterosexuality to save her life in the arena. Her experience echoes in Rich’s words: “absence of choice,” “cultural propaganda,” “the power men everywhere wield over women.” Catching Fire and Mockingjay find their roots in her struggle to come to terms with her need to feign a heterosexual relationship with Peeta. We will have to wait to see how the filmmakers decide to construct the rest of their “love story.” Because Katniss and Peeta never really have a choice.

Colleen Lutz Clemens is assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.