We Got The Sci-Fi Dystopia

Without The Cyborg Killer Cops

While we may be able to trace the aesthetics of the dystopia back to the medieval hellscapes of Dante and Hieronymus Bosch, we know them now as science-fiction stories of a desperate future. The word itself brings to mind an embattled humanity on the brink of extinction, the day-to-day concerns of the characters therein reduced to mere survival. Dystopias are often considered imaginings of the future reflecting an anxiety about the present, and examining such films within the context of their original debuts certainly bears this out. However, the inception of the era of the science-fiction dystopia is long past, and from our vantage point in 2024 we can look back and take an assessment of their predictions, reconsidering them in light of what has come to pass, and the ways in which reality has proven much darker than even the most pessimistic dystopia.

                  For our purposes, we will consider a string of films following the original Blade Runner, which helped kick off a sort of golden age of futuristic sci-fi dystopias, closing with The Matrix. While many films like The Terminator, Cyborg, and Dark City were released to either commercial acclaim, started successful careers, or became influential cult classics, a few films from this era provide unique insight into the darkening of the American Dream, as it were. Robocop, Back to the Future 2, Demolition Man, both Blade Runners, and the original Judge Dredd film depicted bleak futures, with a set of causes and attempted solutions that bear significance to how things actually turned out, and the attempt to rekindle the genre with Blade Runner 2049 illustrates just how hard it is to make a believable dystopia in the 21^st century.

                  Robocop may be the most important film here, for it not only has themes contained within all the other movies, it also most starkly shows where dystopia’s got it wrong, and how ineffectual our real-life solutions - or lack thereof - truly are. In the film, crime has overtaken America, and even the world, and the police are engaged in a veritable war with drug dealers and petty street criminals. News reels in the film not only tell us how many police are killed every day (31 total by one gang alone), but world events reflecting a state of chaos, with South Africa (which, remember, was at the time of the films’ release engaged in a war with communists that was already almost 20 years old) threatening to employ nuclear weapons as a “last line of defense.”

                  The city of Detroit, where the film takes place, enlists OCP, a private corporation to assist the police with defense of the city, and they have two plans in mind. The first is the menacing “ED-209,” a robot with machine-guns on its arms that instantly malfunctions and kills an innocent employee. While the company is trying to get this plan back online, police officer Alex Murphy is killed in the line of duty because the beleaguered force is unable to provide him back-up in pursuit of the gang of drug dealers central to the film. This allows for the introduction of OCP’s second plan, championed by an ambitious executive, of cyborg cops with super-human strength and impeccable, pre-programmed training.

                  The conflict in the film arises with this up-jumped executive finds himself at odds with his superiors, who have nefarious plans, and turn out to be the employers of the gang of drug dealers. This conflict also demonstrates exactly where this film gets it wrong for the future of America, and why we can’t expect a cyborg killer cop to come save us. In the film, a private corporation, bent on profits from tax-payer money and control of city politics, fuels the crime by employing the drug-dealers and profits from it by offering a solution. But in reality, we know the real story is much different.

 Today narcotics plague our society, an epidemic that has reached two-Vietnams *per year* in overdose deaths, not to mention how many dead from drug-related crimes. Now the drugs are opioids, but when Robocop was released the crack wars were raging, and in fact that epidemic and the rampant crime it engendered provided fodder for most dystopian films of the era. However, the films’ depiction of an evil corporation fueling the drug epidemic and attendant crime wave gets it exactly wrong. In reality, we now know the CIA, the military, and other government entities were at the very least turning their backs on cocaine trafficking through Central America in the 80’s, and in the case of Bill Clinton, when he was the governor of Arkansas, actively allowing for the importation of drugs on clandestine air-shipments.

And now, with the opioid epidemic, we know it started with the FDA making way for the over or unnecessary prescription of oxycodone, which went on to inspire a feeding frenzy of other legal and enthusiastically advertised opioid products – culminating in a “fentanyl lollipop,” itself as if out of a bizarre science fiction movie. Unfortunately, once the government finally put a stop to most of these abuses – which took more than a decade – they had helped create a legion of addicts who instantly turned to the black market to buy heroin, which very quickly morphed into the now-raging fentanyl epidemic.

So where is the evil corporation pushing all this? While Perdue pharma has justifiably been demonized for their role, they are hardly an OCP equivalent, paying drug dealers to take out their enemies and push drugs to create a problem only they have the solution for. As always, the real problems are institutional and go much deeper, but the true story is such that privatization or evil corporations can’t shoulder even half the blame. What about greedy and credulous doctors prescribing all these pills? Furthermore, in the case of actual heavily armed, cop-killing drug cartels selling these drugs, they aren’t in bed with any private corporations, but in bed with the government and police of Mexico itself.

Our answer to these problems, sadly, does not come in the form of bullet-proof police officers with automatic pistols, but rather increasing anarcho-tyranny. Ancho-tyranny is the idea that the government allows rampant crime to intimidate normal people, taxpayers, and voters, into a paralysis of fear, threatened or actual injury or death, and legal trouble, as a way to stymie political opposition. And this has borne out in explicit detail with the BLM-fueled “defund the police” movement after George Floyd died and riots broke out across the country. So not only are we not getting privately made killer drones and cyborgs to clean up our streets, we’re not even getting an embattled police force attempting to hold things together like we got in Robocop.

Judge Dredd was clearly modeled on Robocop and shares many similarities, in fact it’s something of a cyberpunk pastiche of Robocop, Blade Runner, and even Star Wars. While its quite a lot of fun and visually compelling, it’s certainly the least creative and least well-written of the films considered here. It’s worth discussing, however, for the way it contrasts with Robocop on one important detail, which lends further insight into the way we’re using these films to understand our current plight.

These films depict a law-bringer using violence to instill order in a chaotic world, which is of course a theme dropped straight from the western genre into a futuristic setting, but each film deals with the origins of the law-giver differently. While in Robocop, he is a technologically enhanced cyborg created and funded by a private corporation, Judge Dredd is a genetically enhanced super-soldier created by a panel of “Judges.”  In this futuristic world, “Judges” are police officer, judge, jury, and executioner, all in one. In other words, the excessive bureaucracy of the state, which can slow down the delivery of justice or, as we’ve seen in the case of anarcho-tyranny, completely subvert it, the Judges bring swift justice at the scene of the crime.  

These judge are what’s left of the state, and they represent a distillation of the criminal justice system, the eradication of all the unnecessary middle-men in the prevention of crime. Of course, in order to get to this state of affairs, the world had to undergo over a century of crises and be reduced to teeming masses crammed into a few mega-cities, surrounded by a barren wasteland. Which, incidentally, is exactly the setting of Blade Runner. Dredd, along with sporting a dour visage and half-helm with opaque visor, carries an automatic machine-gun pistol, also like Robocop. An unrelated detail worth mentioning is a speederbike chase and some windswept orange-tinged desert scenes, replete with silhouetted men in billowing robes using digital binocular/scanners, all straight out of Star Wars. Again, this film is mostly just for fun, based on a comic, with the feel of a comic, but the backstory lends us insight into reality in much the same way as the other films.

For us, in the real world, the bureaucracy has only grown exponentially, and our police are held back, penalized for using force on violent ex-felons, and in some cases having their resources reallocated. We no longer have to imagine the crime-ridden world in which the people in these films live, like the viewers did at the time of their release, we only need to watch the news every day, or old footage of the BLM riots of 2020, or Ferguson 2014, etc etc. But what we absolutely cannot imagine is a towering, by-the-book super cop with carte-blanche permission to execute criminals on the spot, despite how much we might wish for it.

Back to the Future 2 does not have an avenging cop, but it does contain one similar detail to Robocop in particular that is worth mentioning. Perhaps of all these films, Back to the Future 2 comes the closet to prophecy. We’ve already seen that Robocop gets the locus of crime and disorder wrong, blaming money and power-hungry corporate executives on a problem fueled by the very state actively working against its solution. But in Back to the Future 2, it’s not a corporation or a powerful board of executives ready to ok some greedy, quite literally murderous scheme, but rather one man, one tycoon, one Casino-magnate, explicitly modeled on Donald Trump.

                  In the film, Marty and Doc travel to the future and Marty realizes that he can use a sports almanac to bet on all the games from the past and win. Biff, the antagonist from the films, catches on to his idea and steals the book, and the Dolorean, for himself. He travels back in time and gives the book to his younger self, who then uses it to bet on every game and become the richest man in the world. In the present (the 1980’s), Biff is a gaudy casino magnate who uses his money to influence American politics and become de facto ruler of America. As a greedy megalomaniac, he uses his money and influence to enrich himself while the country descends into a post-apocalyptic wasteland rife with abandoned buildings, garbage blown streets, and roving bands of automatic-wielding criminals terrorizing normal citizens. And the writer of the film subsequently confirmed that the character of Biff was in fact based on Donald Trump.

            

      Well, Donald Trump went on to become the actual President of the United States, 26 years after the film was released. And we didn’t get the dystopia depicted in the film! We have it now, as the title of this piece suggests, but that wasn’t until Trump lost the presidency (or had it stolen). Coincidentally – or not so coincidentally- the very conditions of anarcho-tyranny and Sci-fi dystopias erupted during election year of 2020. But while Trump was the President, things were good, at least relative to where they went and had been previously.

       None of the problems we have been discussing here can be laid at Trumps feet; the opioid crisis, the 2008 crash that rocked our economy, the influx of illegals and ex-felons fueling crime, the roving mobs burning and looting, cartel corruption and drug production…all of this began on someone else’s watch, before or after his presidency. Again, even the barren empty streets of Covid and the rampant BLM rioting, while technically during his tenure, cannot be blamed on him. The riots in particular were openly endorsed and excused by his political opponents.

      So while the conditions of the sci-fi dystopia of the 80s may look accurate, the causes are way off. None of this – or very little – can be blamed on rapacious tycoons or greedy, calloused businessmen. And even when they do play a role, like with Pfizer and Oxycodone, it’s done hand in glove with the full institutional support of both the government and the entire medical industry – not one evil or unscrupulous man. In the case of Donald Trump’s presidency, we can even argue that perhaps this greedy businessman is actually a better leader than career politicans.

        Although Biff was constructed on Trump, the super rich tycoon is a type, and we have other examples of their rule. Michael Bloomberg, for example, was a billionaire banker, and New York City flourished while he was mayor. Crime plummeted and new construction exploded. The city became a world destination for young people and business investors, and among many other signs of prosperity, by the end of his tenure Brooklyn was overrun by families pushing baby carriages in places that were, 20 years earlier, crime ridden slums.

     In the films, the blame is laid on greedy private interests for ignoring crime and allowing squalor to spread, but one of the main complaints of the left against Trump and Bloomberg was that they were *too hard* on crime. This flies in the face of not only the films we’ve already discussed, but also the Blade Runner films, in which one rich man takes over not just the US but the entire world.

       Blade Runner is famous for its depiction of teeming masses of prostitutes, vagrants, and criminals swarming underneath massive skyscraper-sized digital advertisements for pharmaceuticals and electronics. The world is run, in the first by Tyrell, and the second by Wallace, by two unimaginably rich and powerful magnates who produce replicants, cyborgs meant to for hard labor on off-world colonies. The films depict the replicants striving for independence, in the first murdering Tyrell because he can’t give them life, and in the second, plotting a revolution for their own freedom. But these replicants represent the very underclasses tha rose up, threw off the yoke of their oppressors, and gained freedom in places like Haiti, South Africa, and to an extent even in the US. But this “freedom” is itself what has resulted in the dystopia like conditions in those places, perpetrating the violence, larceny, and instability on the normal people just trying to live their day to day lives.

                  It is for this reason that I would argue it isn’t even possible to depict a dystopia anymore, at least not along these traditional lines as seen here. By the time Blade Runner 2049 came out, we have already seen that the wealthy tycoon, once in power, did not in fact create these squalid conditions and instability for the normal person, and that the normal person doesn’t react the way they did in the other films. Voters, democrats and the left in particular, weren’t begging for Robocop to come save them, they lobbied and voted and even marched, protested, and rioted, for the criminals to have more freedom, and for the political and legal strength of those who would impose order to be curtailed and rescinded. A dystopia today, as evidenced by Blade Runner 2049, isn’t even believable anymore.

                  One last film worth considering is Demolition Man, another Stallone film, that got a lot more correct than these others. In fact, in a way, the film doesn’t even depict a “dystopia,” per se. The film beings in 1996, which was the future for a film released in 1993, with a great shot of the famous Hollywood sign in LA on fire. A huge swath of downtown LA is quite literally off limits to the authorities, controlled by Simon Phoenix, played by Wesley Snipes, in one of his best roles. Phoenix and John Spartan, an LA cop played by Stallone, are involved in a massive explosion that kills over 30 hostages, and both are frozen in a cryo-chamber for release in the distant future. Once they are thawed, they emerge into a clean, safe, glimmering San Angeles, a megalopolis of combined LA, San Diego, and Santa Barbara.

                  The plot and sub-plots, while interesting, are not relevant to this discussion, but what is relevant are the conditions under which the people of this future live, here 2032. There is no crime, no disease, not even any swearing. San Angeles is a high-trust society, in which peace is not enforced by a draconian police for, but rather crime simply isn’t considered by the indoctrinated and complacent – but seemingly happy – citizenry. Once Phoenix is released onto the streets, however, the people and the authorities are in no way equipped to deal with his flagrant disregard for the law. He’s exceedingly aggressive and commits wanton violence against the police, who quite literally don’t know how to deal with him, for they have to consult a computer, which recites for them the protocols for dealing with a criminal. But nowhere in the program or in the police training is there any instructions for dealing with a citizen who won’t comply.

                  The imagery here is quite comical, when considered in light of the above realities of modern day, real life crime. A black criminal is surrounded by police, who give him orders that he flagrantly ignores, proceeding to attack them and damage and steal property. While its played humorously, it inadvertently provides commentary on the very liberals who want to hamstring police intervention and empower criminals. Often enough when we see these scenarios play out on police or bystander footage, the criminal ends up being killed or restrained, but when that happens, especially in the cases of George Floyd and Ferguson Missouri, the public reacts not by thanking the police for enforcing order and removing a threat, but by rampant rioting, destruction, and even death. So we could argue that what we see in the film is a portrayal of what the activists really want!

                  There is much more to say about Demolition Man, like the eradication of physical sex because of the still-fresh AIDS epidemic, in which absurd measures were taken to demonize heterosexual sex over a disease spread by unprotected homosexual relations. This echoes poignantly with the Covid epidemic, which not only involved some of the same authorities (Fauci), but went much further in perpetrating actual lock-down measures and other stifling rules on both business and human inter-relations. So while in the other films discussed, the conditions of dystopia never played out in real life or, when they did, for entirely different reasons with entirely different responses, in Demolition Man, we see a future depicted in which the liberal position on crime and order are put into practice. While we do see a seeming utopia for a while, criminals are given de facto freedom to run rampant over it and take full advantage of the naïve trust the liberals, or indoctrinated herd, foolishly come to expect.

                  How would one depict a fictional dystopia today? It’s hard to imagine. It has been argued that a dystopia is a manifestation of anxiety over the future born from the conditions of the present, and it’s easy to see, when considered in context of their release, what these conditions were at the time: the crack epidemic, globalization, privatization, and the AIDS epidemic. Well, all of those things have since had decades to play out, and we’ve seen where they’ve led: rampant crime, insecurity, unemployment, and urban blight. We got the sci fi dystopia. But the reaction from the political classes and the voters, at least on one side, has not at all been what the films predicted. Rather than clamoring for order, they spent their energy and resources on stymying anyone and anything that would curtail the disasters. So now, perhaps it’s not simply the reality of our conditions that render a dystopia impossible, but also the lack of anxiety for the future. It a resignation over the conditions of the present, at best, and a demand to make things worse, which can only mean that our leaders and some of our people *want* these things.

                  Perhaps the job of science fiction for the future is to try and answer why that might be.