Demolition Man- Utopian, Dystopian, or other?

[FaxModem1]

Yup.

So, Friendly becomes President, has no idea how to govern, and the whole system collapses?

Maybe Otto the toadie will keep him from burning San Angeles down through sheer incompetence?

[The Romulan Republic]

Maybe.

You know, all this makes me want to write a post-movie fanfic to better flesh out the setting and explore its politics. But I don't know if I'm the right person to do it. I'm not much of a comedic writer, and Demolition Man is ultimately somewhat satirical and light-hearted. I'd probably play it way too seriously, and too straight.

[Batman]

Depends on what your priorities are. Yes, the audience (and for a visual medium, shoudln't that be vidience?) are going to be rather dissapointed, but I bet the inhabitants of San Angeles would be a lot happier with your approach.

[FaxModem1]

No one in San Angeles reads, remember?

[edaw1982]

Aspiring utopia, borderline dystopia. It seemed rather controlling in many ways, and the heavy reliance/obsession with the one leader guy was a problem. But overall, yes, it was pretty 'soft'. It's not a place I'd have WANTED to live necessarily... but if the alternative was worse? It's not the worst place to be if one is reasonably law-abiding by nature.

Did they ever mention what the OTHER countries in the world were like?

I wonder...

Maybe they're all different shades of dystopia. You have peaceful sterilized conformity utopia (like straw man United Federation of Planets) in California, maybe Mad Max-verse in Australia, 1984 over in England, etc.

^

That's a good point

[Ender]

The reverse, in fact. All are different shades of utopia.

To paraphrase Hitchcock, stories are life with the boring parts removed. Which, in telling stories of utopias and dystopias, erases much of what makes life hellish for most folks in deference of the necessities of narrative. You know how Bruce Sterling said "the future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed"? That's basically how you write either a utopia or dystopia. Your typical utopian story is the luxury available to the hyper rich brought to the WEIRD middle class. Your dystopia, the daily lives of the white first world poor brought to the WEIRD middle class. The routine experiences today of nonwhite western poor, much less the poor in less developed countries, that never quite filters into the consciousness of these stories. 1984 didn't have millions infected with guinea worm like was the case in the real 1984. Robocop suggested a corporate hell in having workers pay a few hundred bucks for full heart replacement on their lunchbreak so they could be back on the job (else be fired)- compare that with real medical access for people of color in America today. Starship troopers didn't have mass famines caused by climate change and financial speculation. The Sheep Look Up ignores the redlining and pollution targeting that real life does to communities of color (and has people resisting it at the end, contrast that with the response to Flint). In V for Vendetta, Father Lilliman is an anomaly, where we now know from Jimmy Savile and Jeffery Epstein such actions are far more frequent and tolerated among the rich. Never the levels of starvation, the frequency of genocide, the low quality of water, the epidemic rate, and in particular, Never is the rate of rape and sexual assault portrayed anywhere near the frequency it occurs in real life. They are always shocking, held out as the decisive event to how the regime is horrible, whereas in truth they are common place and under reported.

The fact is that while they may be discomforting for your usual white college educated suburban middle class family, for most of the world, if they were transported into a given fictional dystopia, it would be a massive improvement

[FaxModem1]

I think your glance is skewed. Sure, Oceania doesn't seem to have a guinea worm infestation. But they clearly have starvation, thought police, lack of resources, and their children are either sending them in for not being loyal to the state or dying in pointless wars against their neighbors. Winston Smith describes childhood memories of taking food from his mother and younger sibling because he was so hungry and didn't want to share. They die due to this. Does guinea worm outweigh starvation in your eyes? But hey, at least they don't have parasites in their bodies(that we know of).

[Simon_Jester]

Interesting point, Ender. Though... if I might micro-analyze...

1984 didn't have millions infected with guinea worm like was the case in the real 1984.

In fairness, it probably did, it's just that they mostly don't live in Britain Airstrip One. There's not much evidence of the parts of the world squabbled over by the three warring superpowers being anything other than hellish.

Robocop suggested a corporate hell in having workers pay a few hundred bucks for full heart replacement on their lunchbreak so they could be back on the job (else be fired)- compare that with real medical access for people of color in America today.

Robocop probably wouldn't be a dystopia at all if not for the blatant corruption and the fact that it posits something along the lines of "what if the accelerating crime wave of the 1970s and '80s had never stopped?" Honestly, Roe v. Wade and the abolition of leaded gasoline probably had a lot to do with why that isn't exactly what happened, and an '80s moviemaker couldn't have been expected to foresee that.

Starship troopers didn't have mass famines caused by climate change and financial speculation.

Well, they had World War III- but it was a backstory event well in the past.

Plus, Starship Troopers isn't really a dystopian or utopian novel. Heinlein doesn't really try very hard to make his hypothetical Terran Federation seem like a much nicer and better place to be than, say, early 1960s America. Conversely, it's not a lot worse in qualitative terms. Not if you don't mind the fact that you have to have a term of service in the armed forces of certain civil agencies in order to get the vote.

The fact is that while they may be discomforting for your usual white college educated suburban middle class family, for most of the world, if they were transported into a given fictional dystopia, it would be a massive improvement

To be fair, I think you're comparing the circumstances of the worst-off citizens of our society with the average citizen of the dystopia. I'm not sure that's a good comparison; you could equally well compare today's urban poor in our society to the people who, in a dystopia, are worst of.

Like, say, Brave New World's Epsilon-caste workers, who are deliberately damaged in vitro by fetal alcohol syndrome to the point where they are stunted and illiterate. Not just some of them, but that entire category of workers. I mean sure, they have enough drugs and porn to keep them happy, but you'd have to be pretty damn low on the totem pole even by the standards of the American underclass to envy them.

[Q99]

Which is part of where San Angeles holds up fairly well. SA is not only a much nicer place to live to many lower-class environments, but it compares favorable to plenty of middle class lifestyles as well, in many respects at least.

[FaxModem1]

Which is part of where San Angeles holds up fairly well. SA is not only a much nicer place to live to many lower-class environments, but it compares favorable to plenty of middle class lifestyles as well, in many respects at least.

Unless you have a lower standard of living than the sewers, while scavenging and stealing to survive, it does not have a favorable quality of life to most places today. And I'll freely acknowledge that for a lot of people, that is the case. But the simple act of consensual touching of someone else(even in the privacy of your own home) is illegal.

But, this is rather akin to saying that Panem from the Hunger Games is Utopian, because people in the Capitol have it so nice, while utterly disregarding the quality of life for those in the Districts.

Sure, life is nice, as long as you don't read, don't swear, don't touch others, don't eat meat, don't drink alcohol, don't have sex, don't listen to non-jingle art or music. Otherwise, it's stealing what you can to not starve, or hoping you have enough to trade for what vermin a few people cook to sell.

Maybe a life without human touch, thought, or real options until death in exchange for a place to live and food to eat is a fair bargain for you, or for most people in your mind, but I don't think it is.

[Q99]

Unless you have a lower standard of living than the sewers, while scavenging and stealing to survive, it does not have a favorable quality of life to most places today. And I'll freely acknowledge that for a lot of people, that is the case.

The normal people are the available standard of living. The Scrapes are an opt-out movement there by choice, so when judging the standard of living, one must really consider the 'opt out' part, no-one has to do that, they chose to do that over annoying restrictions.

Food, entertainment, freedom of movement and work, general good health, etc. is the norm, at the cost of a bunch of annoying, but not fundamental, restrictions.

Putting in a good number of annoying restrictions doesn't change that it has a heck of a lot going for it, and even violating those restrictions often results in merely annoying penalties.

A high standard of living that plenty of people may legitimately not want doesn't make it worse than a sewer for most people.

[Simon_Jester]

The thing to look for when distinguishing a dystopia from a future that is merely suboptimal is to ask yourself the question:

"Could people who aren't somehow forced to be happy plausibly be happy here, in the broad sense that includes self-actualization?"

1984 is terrible for basically everyone. No one is happy, the entire point of the society is to crush everyone and make them a miserable cog in a terrible, pointless, destructive machine. The purpose of power is power, no one's interests are served. Except perhaps for a few utter sadists whose job is to make everyone else suffer, it's uniformly horrible. A dystopia.

In Brave New World everyone is 'happy' in the sense of being drugged into this weird state of universal party, but basically everyone is only satisfied with the way things are because of blatant mind control and conditioning. Just about everyone is 'forced' to smile, as it were. Ambition and hopes and dreams and love are largely washed out by this constant tide of hedonism. It's not the same kind of horrible, but it's a place where none of us really belong or could enjoy ourselves, except by doping out on the readily available drugs and casual sex and giving up everything else we aspire to.

But it sounds like a lot of people from our society COULD be happy in San Angeles. They might not like everything about it, but it offers a lot of opportunities to be happy. The big thing I don't like is the reading and writing. What's up with that again? I don't think I ever saw the movie, actually...

[Q99]

Good phrasing of the criteria, Simon.

Reading doesn't seem correct, they had text based screens all over, including in the museum. Huxley had books in her apartment. The old guy Spartan knew described Phoenix as 'the evils we only read about,' to the younger cops. This seems like a literate society to me, and it's definitely an educated one.

I think someone's just misremembering there, I can't find anything on reading and writing mentioned in the script. Like, violent reading material would be very hard to find to be sure, but not so much that people can't get a hold of it if they really try like Huxley did, and I bet the best-sellers-list is full of fictional novels of people productively working together to accomplish stuff, do-it-yourself guides on how to be more productive, happy, perform a variety of skills, etc., because I can't think of anything that indicates non-violent material would be an issue.

I'd bet they've got a fantasy book that's basically just the life of a Hobbit in the Shire where no dark lords show up.

[TheFeniX]

As I think I've said before: While violent fiction might be regulated, there's a museum stocked to high Hell with all the REAL world examples of how people have been murdering each other. And.... if you think about it, that's pretty weird. Houston has multiple military museums, but I can't think of one where you can walk in and see shittons of civilian firearms and excerpts from the 80s-90s crime waves. They have a whole "armory" and "Hall of Violence" section. They seem fully willing to remind people how bad things were and they really were that bad.

But it sounds like a lot of people from our society COULD be happy in San Angeles. They might not like everything about it, but it offers a lot of opportunities to be happy. The big thing I don't like is the reading and writing. What's up with that again? I don't think I ever saw the movie, actually...

The current group of people in SA seem more than happy and though it's hard to say how much is "brainwashing," if it IS brainwashing, then it's incredibly weak. Like I've put forth before: I think people were so done with the violence and death in the 90s, they socially engineered themselves with Cocteau as the hired contractor.

And seriously, I highly recommend you watching Demolition Man. It still holds up incredibly well. Like how GalaxyQuest lampooned the Sci-Fi genre (mostly Star Trek, obviously) but still made for a great Sci-Fi romp? That's Demolition Man, but for Action Movies.

[Ender]

Interesting point, Ender. Though... if I might micro-analyze...

I'll offer the caveat that I was making a banal observation about the genres tropes and narrative rather than going through the details of all dystopias. It's like pointing out that the difference between a romcom and psychological thriller horror movies is framing and that the obsessive male in the romcom looks like Ryan Reynolds, but the behaviors themselves are basically the same. A statement that is true, but not particularly insightful.

Plus, Starship Troopers isn't really a dystopian or utopian novel. Heinlein doesn't really try very hard to make his hypothetical Terran Federation seem like a much nicer and better place to be than, say, early 1960s America. Conversely, it's not a lot worse in qualitative terms. Not if you don't mind the fact that you have to have a term of service in the armed forces of certain civil agencies in order to get the vote.

Ever read The Iron Dream? Does a good deconstruction of the standard milSF book and highlights that it is in fact bad. While I acknowledge that Heinlein is pitching hyper libertarianism with a smiley face rather than fascism, the difference between the two is one for polisci nerds; life would suck under both.

To be fair, I think you're comparing the circumstances of the worst-off citizens of our society with the average citizen of the dystopia. I'm not sure that's a good comparison; you could equally well compare today's urban poor in our society to the people who, in a dystopia, are worst of.

Like, say, Brave New World's Epsilon-caste workers, who are deliberately damaged in vitro by fetal alcohol syndrome to the point where they are stunted and illiterate. Not just some of them, but that entire category of workers. I mean sure, they have enough drugs and porn to keep them happy, but you'd have to be pretty damn low on the totem pole even by the standards of the American underclass to envy them.

I didn't compare the worst off in our society though, I noted that dystopias highlight the daily lives of the white first world poor as brought to the WEIRD middle class and that routine experiences today of nonwhite western poor are worse than what we see.

I mean to the counter example of your intentional poisoning of the Epsilons, look at the horrific numbers out of Flint, or the poison levels for communities of color and developmental impacts from that. TODAY numbers came out about birth rates and fetal death in Flint due to the lead contamination that are horrifying.

Like Fax mentions 1984 having starvations and saying that's worse than parasites. Except the real world has both and at a far larger scale than pop up in fiction.

Narrative and parsimony mean the boring background of life gets cut, and that by necessity means most of the nightmares of reality have been edited out of dystopian fiction.

[Simon_Jester]

I'll offer the caveat that I was making a banal observation about the genres tropes and narrative rather than going through the details of all dystopias. It's like pointing out that the difference between a romcom and psychological thriller horror movies is framing and that the obsessive male in the romcom looks like Ryan Reynolds, but the behaviors themselves are basically the same. A statement that is true, but not particularly insightful.

My counter is that while you're pointing in the general direction of the truth, you're taking it too far by trying to say "all fictional dystopias are just less-bad, watered down versions of reality, the real dystopia is downtown Detroit!"

Plus, Starship Troopers isn't really a dystopian or utopian novel. Heinlein doesn't really try very hard to make his hypothetical Terran Federation seem like a much nicer and better place to be than, say, early 1960s America. Conversely, it's not a lot worse in qualitative terms. Not if you don't mind the fact that you have to have a term of service in the armed forces of certain civil agencies in order to get the vote.

Ever read The Iron Dream? Does a good deconstruction of the standard milSF book and highlights that it is in fact bad. While I acknowledge that Heinlein is pitching hyper libertarianism with a smiley face rather than fascism, the difference between the two is one for polisci nerds; life would suck under both.

The Iron Dream resides somewhere between deconstruction and parody, in that it was explicitly crafted to be as crypto-fascist as possible. As such, it does not prove anything "in fact" about the genre it parodies, any more than the Three Stooges prove that all groups of three people are "in fact stupid." It DOES highlight certain trends in fiction that people should be aware of and disturbed by, but you're doing absolutely nothing to connect Starship Troopers to those trends except to name a parody novel and say "and the existence of this parody novel proves that all military SF is bad and Nazi-ish."

Have some damn standards!

If you're going to analyze Starship Troopers, then DO that. Make your claims, prove them or drop them on their own merits.

To be fair, I think you're comparing the circumstances of the worst-off citizens of our society with the average citizen of the dystopia. I'm not sure that's a good comparison; you could equally well compare today's urban poor in our society to the people who, in a dystopia, are worst of.

Like, say, Brave New World's Epsilon-caste workers, who are deliberately damaged in vitro by fetal alcohol syndrome to the point where they are stunted and illiterate. Not just some of them, but that entire category of workers. I mean sure, they have enough drugs and porn to keep them happy, but you'd have to be pretty damn low on the totem pole even by the standards of the American underclass to envy them.

I didn't compare the worst off in our society though, I noted that dystopias highlight the daily lives of the white first world poor as brought to the WEIRD middle class and that routine experiences today of nonwhite western poor are worse than what we see.

I mean to the counter example of your intentional poisoning of the Epsilons, look at the horrific numbers out of Flint, or the poison levels for communities of color and developmental impacts from that. TODAY numbers came out about birth rates and fetal death in Flint due to the lead contamination that are horrifying.

Yes, they're horrifying to us. By Brave New World standards those rates are pocket change, and the world government is doing it to a large percentage of their population, forever, all the time, when they don't have to, because it's easier to control mentally disabled but heavily conditioned laborers than to automate or to cope with larger numbers of functional adults.

It's the terrible experiences of lead poisoning and fetal alcohol syndrome, squared, and multiplied by a government that does it on purpose very explicitly and holds it to be a positive good that this be done to a significant fraction of all children.

Just because real things are fucking appalling, doesn't mean that they are automatically worse than fake things.

In a typical dystopia, the outcomes for the people who in our society would be well off are on par with what we would consider "terrible" in our society. The outcomes for the people who in our society are doing poorly are as bad or worse in the dystopia

Like Fax mentions 1984 having starvations and saying that's worse than parasites. Except the real world has both and at a far larger scale than pop up in fiction.

Narrative and parsimony mean the boring background of life gets cut, and that by necessity means most of the nightmares of reality have been edited out of dystopian fiction.

That criticism is true for literally all stories, because there is no way for any story to contain 100% of what the world contains. If any story that fails to do so is somehow whitewashing the evils of our real world by failing to portray the Real Evil of the Week, then by definition there is no such thing as a story that is worse than real life.

In which case your criticism makes no sense; it's as if you decided to criticize a person by saying "wow, what an oxygen-breather" or "you're such a biped!" A trait that all possible works of fiction possess (not being as all-inclusive as real life, and therefore by definition leaving out something about real life that sucks) cannot be used to criticize any single work of fiction.

There's no way to counter that 'criticism.' Except by explicitly saying in the text "yeah, our world is like yours except XYZ," and at this point I feel like you'd just ignore that if you saw it in a book.

...

On another note, think about the setting of Orwell's 1984. It consists, essentially, of three dystopian superpowers that consist approximately of "The Anglosphere plus South America," "Sino-Japan-Central-Asia," and "pan-Europe plus Asiatic Russia." They fight over northern Africa, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia.

Technology is poured entirely into warfare and tightening control of the population. The leadership is basically indifferent to human suffering, everywhere, all the time. They actively encourage it. They don't give a crap about improving the welfare or productivity of their societies, and indeed would rather actively suppress and impoverish such development as long as it helps them stay in charge.

Do you honestly think that the plight of the worst-off people in their society is any less bad, in any possible way, than that of people in real life? The miserable populations in undeveloped Third World countries would still be just as miserable if not more so.

[Q99]

And seriously, I highly recommend you watching Demolition Man. It still holds up incredibly well. Like how GalaxyQuest lampooned the Sci-Fi genre (mostly Star Trek, obviously) but still made for a great Sci-Fi romp? That's Demolition Man, but for Action Movies.

Yea, *whereever* you fall on the dystopian argument here, it's a great movie well worth watching.

[jamesraykenney]

Mildly dystopian. Infinitely better than places like 1984, the Mad Max universe or Mega-City One, but still dystopian. You can't swear without being fined, there's no actual sex in sex, there's no fun food. 'That's not even within hailing distance of a utopia.

Truue, but the sex bit isn't disallowed, just not really part of their culture (*probably* due to matters like the AIDS crisis, which was coming into the news and huge when the movie hit), and the food thing... ok, they need more variety but food wars, whatcha gonna do? Basically, aside from the swearing those are non-enforced cultural issues rather than actual can't-do things. And the swearing fines are minor enough that Spartan had no apparent real consequences for going for the record, a cop's paycheck seems like it handled it. Is it really dystopian to be a society with minor bad-sides most of which are non-enforced cultural ones? I kinda feel like that's too soft a take for the word, even a mild one.

I mean, like... I'm pretty sure Spartan liked it better than the modern day in the end, it just needed some tweeks and the removal of the boss who'd push more controls as long as he could.

Where is everybody getting the no variety in food thing... They said that all restaurants were Taco Bell, not that they all served the same food...
It is like A&W and KFC... they are owned by the same company, but they do not serve the same food(except for the combo stores).
If they bought out all the other stores, that does not mean that they would stop having different menus at different locations, just that they all would have the same name(in real life, even that is not always true).