SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
I think no matter who you are, where you are, or even when you are, you can look around and feel like things are a little dystopian. And yet, over the years, we have often coped with that dread by making movies of even worse dystopias, whether it is "Clockwork Orange" in the 1970s...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A CLOCKWORK ORANGE")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) It was the next day, brothers. And I had truly done my best, morning and afternoon, to play it their way.
DETROW: ..."Escape From New York" in the 1980s...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) In the name of the workers and all the oppressed of this imperialist country...
DETROW: ...Or "Hunger Games" in the 21st century.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE HUNGER GAMES")
ELIZABETH BANKS: (As Effie Trinket) Happy Hunger Games. And may the odds be ever in your favor.
DETROW: Movies are always providing visions of humanity as its own worst enemy and often channeling and expounding on the top anxieties of the current moment. And despite all that anxiety, we seem to love to see these movies. And why is that? In our latest movie chat, we are going to try to answer that question with two of ALL THINGS CONSIDERED's biggest film fans, Marc Rivers and Mallory Yu. Thanks for being here.
MALLORY YU, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
MARC RIVERS, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: Let's just start with that question - why, when things already feel dystopian, do we feel like we should use our free time, our escapist time to dive even deeper in dystopias?
RIVERS: I mean, we're just sick people, Scott. I mean, I...
YU: We just like to feel bad.
RIVERS: Yeah. I mean, I remember when a bunch of us were watching, you know, "Contagion" when the COVID shutdowns were happening.
YU: Yes.
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: And, like, there's - we're kind of attracted to what kind of scares us, you know, like, in the same way that we're attracted to horror movies, and dystopias are kind of horror stories of the future, you know? And I think beyond that, they're interesting what-ifs, you know? Like "Children Of Men" - what if we were in a future where we couldn't have babies anymore? What if we're in a world where for 24 hours crime was legal, like in "The Purge" movies?
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE PURGE")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Police, fire and emergency medical services will be unavailable until tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. when the purge concludes. Blessed be our new founding fathers and America, a nation reborn.
RIVERS: If we think about, as audience members - how bad can things get? - I think artists kind of take it as an implicit challenge. Like, I'll show you.
DETROW: So, I mean, that leads to the next point. Like, what would you say makes a great dystopia movie? Are there any constant threads we can pull, Mallory?
YU: I think that the best ones mirror current society's flaws and make us think about those systems that lead to those flaws. They take sort of things or aspects of society that we might criticize and take them to their logical or illogical conclusions.
DETROW: What's a good recent example?
YU: I think for me, a good example is "Mickey 17."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MICKEY 17")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) On Earth, nothing was working out, and I wanted to get the hell out of there.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) You're applying to be an expendable?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #6: (As character) You read through the paperwork?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Yeah.
(As character) I should have read through it.
DETROW: And this is a recent movie about basically multiple clones, isn't it (ph)? OK.
YU: Exactly. And Mickey is down and out. He has no prospects, and he decides to sign himself up as an expendable, doing sort of the worst jobs of humanity and dying over and over and over as a result. And one of the jobs that he is hired to do is, you know, basically human experimentation. And he goes through these horrific scientific experiments, and that is something that we already do in society and have done.
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: His - I think that movie - like, a lot of dystopian films are about kind of who and who isn't expendable in our society, who is actually valued and how we distribute that value across, right? And I think we should also kind of make a distinction between dystopias and maybe post-apocalyptic thrillers. I think it might be a distinction without a difference, but I feel like...
DETROW: How would you divide those two?
RIVERS: When I think about post-apocalyptic films, I think it's all about kind of survival.
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: And dystopian dramas are more about kind of how we choose to live in a way.
DETROW: OK.
RIVERS: You survive a plague. You survive a - like, you know, a zombie apocalypse. But something like "Mickey 17" is about kind of who's on top, who's on the bottom.
DETROW: Right. This is a society. The structures are in place. It hasn't just collapsed. That's just how it's set up.
YU: Yeah, there are systems in place.
RIVERS: There's a - there are systems and policies in place that dictate how people live in dystopian films.
DETROW: Like, let's take - "Minority Report" is one example.
RIVERS: Definitely.
DETROW: There is this police unit that is making arrests based on crimes that have not happened yet, and you see how the whole world is structured around that idea that everyone seems to have accepted in it.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MINORITY REPORT")
TOM CRUISE: (As Chief John Anderton) Mr. Marks (ph), by mandate of the District of Columbia PreCrime Division, I'm placing you under arrest for the future murder of Sarah Marks (ph) and Donald Dubinos (ph) - take place today April 22, at 0800 hours and 4 minutes.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #7: (As character) No.
RIVERS: And they live in this wild surveillance state where just there are eyes constantly watching. Even the ads - they're talking to you. They're addressing you directly in "Minority Report."
DETROW: Which is one of those movies that the proportion to which I think about the movie on a regular basis going through life in 2025 is, like, out of whack to other movies in a way that I think, like, is a sign of a successful, really well done dystopian movie. Let's get into something that I mentioned at the top of this conversation, and we've been hitting on a little bit here and there. It's that you can see a dystopian movie from a certain era, and it can pinpoint the top anxiety of that era.
RIVERS: I think one thing that's cool about these - those dystopian films that you mentioned is they're visions of the future and they're also time capsules.
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: So we can look back at something like "Escape From New York," which posits, you know, what if crime is so out of control in Manhattan - what if we just turn Manhattan into a giant prison? - you know, which is just absurd enough to make for a good movie but also taps into real-world paranoias and fears around that time. You know, there's all this white flight where white people were leaving the cities into the suburbs and crime was an issue. And think about movies from the '90s, like, "The Matrix" or "The Truman Show" or these movies that were about the kind of tensions between virtual and real reality and also about this kind of ineffable feeling that even though things are supposed to be right, they feel wrong.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE MATRIX")
LAURENCE FISHBURNE: (As Morpheus) What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life - that there's something wrong with the world.
YU: Spielberg's "A.I." is one that I have been thinking about recently.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A.I.")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #8: (As character) Robots, who were never hungry and who did not consume resources beyond those of their first manufacture, were so essential an economic link in the chainmail of society.
YU: Like, when you consider a world in which capitalism is selling these robots programmed to love you like a child, like, that's really dark.
DETROW: And we are so many steps closer to it...
YU: Yes.
DETROW: ...Than when that movie came out.
RIVERS: We're accelerating to "A.I." It's like - like, that...
YU: Closer than ever.
RIVERS: Some of us looked at "A.I." as a warning, others looked at it as a challenge.
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: Like, let's get there. Let's (laughter)...
DETROW: I want to ask both of you - to wind this down - is there a dystopia that hits especially hard to you or that you find yourself going back to time and time again? Mallory?
YU: One that I keep coming back to just because it's a banger of a movie is "Battle Royale" from 2000.
RIVERS: Ooh.
YU: There is constant hysteria over teenage disenfranchisement and juvenile delinquency in big cities nowadays, and it's kind of like, well, why don't we ever think about why that is? You know, what are the sort of factors that lead to juvenile delinquency? Versus let's criminalize these kids and shunt them away from society. And, you know, "Battle Royale" kind of forces you to think about - what are we doing to our children when we try to make examples of them? - but in, you know, a really extreme, very beautiful, gory way.
RIVERS: I wouldn't last one day in that future. I think my pick - it's a little more cuddly than Mallory's.
YU: (Laughter).
RIVERS: But honestly, we are just living the world of "WALL-E" right now, I mean...
DETROW: Oh, my God.
YU: Oh, my God.
RIVERS: ...Like, minus living on a spaceship, if we think about, you know, in this world where people are pacified...
DETROW: Mass consumption.
RIVERS: ...By technology, living in front of our screens and, you know, letting Earth go to waste and these mega conglomerates, you know, kind of controlling our lives.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WALL-E")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #9: (As character) Buy N Large - everything you need to be happy. Your day is very important to us.
DETROW: When Amazon - when Blue Origin started to be a thing, and I was like, oh, no, the company that sends us boxes of everything is also building spaceships, I was very unnerved (laughter).
RIVERS: Oh, yeah. We're, like - it's like they're using "WALL-E" as, like, a blueprint (laughter), I feel like. So I feel like that movie, we are right there. And this idea that we're kind of becoming more infantile dependent on technology is...
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: ...I think, very prescient.
DETROW: That is NPR's Marc Rivers and Mallory Yu. Thanks to both of you.
YU: Thank you.
RIVERS: Thanks, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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