In his LA Review of Books essay, "The Economics of Mad Max and Star Trek", Tom Streithorst identifies the two distinct types of future that cinema regularly presents to us. On one end of the spectrum, there’s Star Trek’s gleaming utopia of plenty, a nirvana liberated by technological innovation and an increasing removal of limitations; on the other, Mad Max’s savage, desperate dystopia, scarred by ecological disaster and perpetual conflict. Both are a result of mankind’s collective masochism.
Though both films are popular examples of science fiction as popcorn entertainment, the opposing futures of Star Trek and Mad Max are pitched not as mere fantasy, but as reality yet to come – and therein lies the value. Films that propose a certain kind of future for humanity are often making a conscious effort to challenge the viewer’s sense of the modern world, and to encourage the audience to consider the possible future effects of what’s happening right now.
Glorious utopian visions like Star Trek’s, though, all too often fail to address contemporary issues. Such optimism tends to ignore problems by implying the future is rosy regardless of our actions today. The flipside of that coin – the dystopia – encourages a different kind of thinking altogether. Where the utopian film reassures us that everything will be alright, the dystopian movie contends that it might not be. Its function is twofold: first, dystopian cinema expresses the filmmaker’s fear and dissatisfaction with the modern world; second, it attempts to transfer that concern to the audience in the hope it will start a dialogue.
It’s difficult to measure the impact of dystopian fiction on film. We know 1983’s speculative nuclear holocaust drama The Day After so depressed Ronald Reagan that it convinced him to rethink his ideas on nuclear proliferation. After watching the film, Reagan wrote in his diary of his determination “to see there is never a nuclear war”. Four years later, Reagan would, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, sign a US-Soviet treaty that abolished all mid-range nuclear missiles in the USA and USSR.
Such concrete examples of dystopian cinema having a direct meaningful influence, however, are rare. The best dystopian films instead tend to contribute to ongoing discussions or create indelible images of our fears of tomorrow. Though it’s unlikely Pope Francis watched George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road before writing his pro-environment encyclical in June, Miller’s film has nonetheless done its bit to keep the vital conversation about our ecology active.
In Fury Road, what’s left of the human race continues to wage war and wring the Earth dry of fossil fuels, even though the planet is already a desert as a consequence of man’s actions (and simultaneous inaction). Miller appears to have noted the lax attitude of certain nations to global warming as well as the nuclear threat, showing the nasty conclusion this could take us to in 50 years. The film may be an outrageous bit of fun, but its subtext couldn’t be more serious: we either divest and disarm, or lose the world to more chaos, more hardship, more despair.
Fury Road’s dustbowl apocalypse is not unique in showing an embattled, dehydrated future Earth. Other recent examples are David Michod’s The Rover, Jake Paltrow’s Young Ones and Gabe Ibanez’s Automata. All three, like Mad Max: Fury Road, are set in a tumultuous near-future wracked by ecological and societal decline. But Fury Road differs from those films in one crucial way: it reached the masses.
That is in large part because it was designed to attract viewers. The Rover, Young Ones and Automata were all marketed based on their strikingly bleak visions; this would have been off-putting to many. Mad Max, however, was promoted as a carnival of precision-realised mechanical chaos, an action extravaganza fit for the mainstream, not the art house. A significant proportion of movie-goers enjoy cinema for its escapist pleasures, not its ability to remind them what’s wrong with the world. So was it deceitful of writer-director George Miller to also design the latest Mad Max movie as a socio-politically and environmentally-conscious parable?
The film’s surprisingly challenging nature prompted outrage in some quarters. Upon watching it, audiences discovered Fury Road’s star wasn’t Tom Hardy’s titular Max, here reduced to a grumbling prop, but Charlize Theron’s feminist warrior Furiosa, and a harem of rebel-women refusing to be mere “things” to a hyper-masculine post-apocalyptic society. Some so-called "men’s rights activists" were vocally distressed, claiming they’d been duped into watching something that addressed the issue of gender inequality, when all they wanted was familiar male-led action.
But this is the way that the great dystopian movies have always done it: sneak the message in through the back door. Like Ridley Scott’s seminal dystopian sci-fi Blade Runner or Terry Gilliam’s Orwellian black comedy Brazil, Fury Road’s damaged world is the backdrop, not the whole movie. The film is both a spectacular and terrible vision, one that entertains as it provokes.
Fury Road covers some of the most pressing issues of today – it also carries pointed messages about the widening class divide, institutional corruption, and religion as a means of control – as dystopian cinema has throughout cinema history. It’s a type of cinema that reacts in step with the times, and projects its outrage via more palatable allegory. In the 1960s, there was Alphaville and Fahrenheit 451, concerned about despotism and censorship; in the 1970s, Soylent Green and Silent Running, anxious about overpopulation and food shortages; in the 1980s, RoboCop and The Running Man, bemoaning resurgent right-wing politics and the rise of trash culture.
You can see concerns about overpopulation in recent dystopian classics Minority Report and Children of Men, about ecological meltdown in The Road and Snowpiercer, about artificial intelligence in Ex Machina and genetic modification in the two Planet of the Apes prequels. Even in JJ Abrams’s “rebooted” Star Trek movies, elements of dystopia have begun to spill into the utopia. Abrams’s Star Trek Into Darkness presents a world – a universe, even – still open to threats from within, from terrorists seeking to dismantle a perfect civilisation.
Though dystopian cinema could ultimately be considered more "responsible" than utopian cinema in that it aims to challenge rather than encourage complacency, it is still prone to carelessness. Another recent dystopian film, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, is for much of its running time one of the responsible ones. As a crew of astronauts and scientists leave a failing Earth behind in search of other habitable planets, Interstellar is about the dangers of over-farming, about mankind’s failure to understand that the Earth has only finite resources.
It’s a timely picture, especially considering scientists have just declared that the Earth is on the verge of a "sixth mass extinction" (man-made). Interstellar’s conclusion is troublingly cheerful, though: when an advanced, spacetime-manipulating future race comes to the rescue at the eleventh hour, humanity is saved. A sideswiping twist, to be sure, but one based in impossible pseudo-science, offering hope that’s totally out of our reach. It suggests our survival as a species is inevitable, if only we sit back and wait for something other than ourselves to save us.
Unlike Interstellar, Mad Max: Fury Road offers no false hope; indeed, it offers no hope at all. There is no solution offered for the reversal of irreversible climate change, and nor should there be. Miller’s film is a more "responsible" one than Nolan’s, in that it presents a dystopian future without suggesting there’s an easy way of returning to a state of harmony. Dystopian film has always been at its most powerful when shaking us out of our apathy with a heavy dose of dread; when forcing us to see the world with new eyes, or convincing us to fear what might be coming. It’s a wicked little subgenre, but a necessary one all the same.
