Word: dystopia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...once changes very much and too little. For instance, in McGoohan's show--a Cold War story of totalitarianism--giving the Villagers numbers made chilling sense as a dehumanizing, de-individualizing device (and 40 years ago, played a tad more original). But for The Prisoner's new dystopia, which seeks to control minds more than imprison bodies, it doesn't quite fit. One would think the Village's happy-faced thought control would try to create the illusion of individuality--as with the mind-wiped servants in Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, who are given names and false identities...
Borges, in that haunting short story “The Library of Babel,” imagined the universal library as a dystopia, where “the shelves register every possible combination of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols,” where the availability of all possible books means the reliability of none, and where the librarians spend their days searching vainly for a master catalog which must, by logic, exist somewhere amid the annals of nonsense. I fear for the opposite: a world where finding the proper book is all too easy and simple...
...worst is on display. In her new book of essays, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy (which for some reason has its title and subtitle reversed in the U.S.), the country isn't merely sundered into the worlds of the rich and the poor. It is a lawless dystopia, plagued by rapacity and violence: "In eastern India, bauxite and iron-ore mining is destroying whole ecosystems, turning fertile land into desert," she writes in the introduction. And in an essay, about the 2002 anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat: "Women were stripped, gang-raped; parents were bludgeoned to death...
...this for New York in the mid-'70s: from its desperate blight emerged some pretty sharp movies. Back then, children, Hollywood was actually interested in reflecting contemporary society, and this poster child for urban dystopia provided the perfect setting. A raft of films - Serpico, Death Wish, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver - navigated that stinky Styx with the expertise of a champion white-water rafter. A lesser but still pertinent entry was The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which starred Robert Shaw as the criminal mastermind and Walter Matthau as the transit detective trying to talk...
With the exception of Johnson's remarkable run, the few successful 100-day sprints have been a triumph of vision over substance. Roosevelt, Reagan and Obama changed the national mood more than anything else - and moods can change back quickly, especially in our overripe, overwired cable-news dystopia. As impressive a start as Obama has had, these 100 days could come to seem an overambitious and naive presage of disaster if the President's financial policies are inadequate to meet the crisis; his budget proposals are gutted by Congress; and his attempts to leave Iraq, fight in Afghanistan and negotiate...