Why is dystopian media becoming too realistic?
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Dystopian media encourages a desire for change by delving into the uncanny.
Regardless of your political affiliation or optimistic outlook on life’s daily happenings, things have felt off lately. When I say off, I do not mean irregular or, in a metaphysical sense, out of alignment. I mean, there is this uncanny aspect of the monotony of everyday life— one that you can’t find the source of but feels familiar, almost known. Maybe life has felt like the prelude to a dystopian novella or a ticking bomb, counting down on an unknown, unseeable timer. Regardless of the circumstance, life often feels like it is counting down to an inevitable dramatic crescendo, just like in your favorite dystopian media piece. But what if I told you that this feeling is by design?
This is not to say that writers like Cormac McCarthy, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, or Margaret Atwood have secret “insider” knowledge that no one else is privy to, but that those who create media in this category do so to visualize their outlook on the world and its potential future(s) in a digestible, yet exaggerated, manner.
Yes, exaggerating real-world societal structures and events to their hyperbolic extremes is nothing new. This is a practice done as the backbone of any piece within the dystopian genre— most genre’s really. Ruminating on and cautioning against the realistic extremes an object or body will go to given circumstances is something natural to this genre of prose. Likewise, dystopian media speaks to the human condition and, even in hyperbolic circumstances, how it adapts to such change.
In 2023, Craig Mazin— an award-winning director, writer, and actor —talked about his recent adaptation, The Last of Us (2023- ), with the online news blog AwardsWatch. During this interview, when asked about the degradation of world societies, Mazin stated: “Well, history certainly seems to indicate that [contemporary society is crumbling]. It’s hard for us to tell because we see time in these very slow stretches of tiny amounts. So we live our lives over the course of, if we’re lucky, 80 or 90 years…[which] is not a relevant amount of time in the span of history. It’s irrelevant…So yeah, it seems to me that nature is entirely about life and death, that cycle…[For me] it’s [about] facing our own mortality. And it’s interesting that it’s fungus that is there waiting when things start to fall apart. Fungi break it down and return it back to its basic elements so that it can be used to rebuild again as life, as structures, as things.”
For Craig, fungi is a means of both destruction and creation, but for you, it can be an entirely different means— which is okay! What dystopian media has been telling us and trying to get the larger populace to understand is that this is by design. You feel like an Orwellian nightmare is brewing within the world or like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is hanging over you because you recognize the warning signs— the cyclical beats that create these occurrences— but do not know what to do with such knowledge.
To revel in dystopian media is to indulge in the uncanny, which resembles the known but ultimately foreign, to create discomfort in audiences. Like the uncanny, dystopian media intends to arouse this discomfort within all readers and use these feelings to power conversation— dialogue(s) —about remedies. To pass dystopian media off as simply “apocalyptic life” is to cast aside the reason this genre exists, ignorantly, and the potential its forewarning can have on not just a person but an entire society.