Four texts: 1984, blade runner 2049, the minority report and The platform
Dystopian texts consist of an imaginary society in which there is normally distress or injustice and typically one that is totalitarian. Authority and control is all that people know and there is no way out of it so reading or watching these texts gives us the feeling of how trapped these people feel and how they are trapped in a place of which we wouldn’t think livable. The way these four texts are linked together is by having main ideas of control and how technology can be used for good and bad reasons.
The first two texts that connect are Nineteen eighty-four and The Minority report. 1984 has an overarching theme and idea of authority and control. The text is about a man named Winston living in a future world run by the state and no one has the freedom to think for themselves. A major symbol that is used in 1984 is eyes. These are shown in many ways throughout the text. “Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.” This quote is telling us that you have no privacy and everything you do and say is watched and listened to. The only place you have that isn’t being tracked is inside your own brain, you can’t even speak what you think there is no freedom of speech and you have to filter everything you say because one slip up and you could be vaporised. Another quote that gives the same message is “Big Brother is watching you.” This phrase is used a lot throughout the text, you are always being watched through anything that has a camera or a microphone even your own tv, which are called telescreens in 1984. You have a a group of people being run by the state doing everything they are told and they can’t do anything different otherwise they get vaporised, which is like being killed but instead you get wiped from the face of the earth. The state has complete control and with even the most simple technology such as microphones they have the information they need to be able to do anything they want, anyone they want to get rid of they can, and no one will ever be able to question it.
The Minority report links to 1984 in many different ways but mostly because they both focus a lot on authority and control. In the film The Minority Report you have a similar state except this time it is about saving people from murders by using the idea of being able to see into the future and the police and authorities getting there and stopping the murder from happening. To do this everyone’s privacy is taken away. If they can see when a well executed murder is going to take place then they can definitely can see a lot more than that. In 1984 you have the symbols of eyes and you have the same symbols in Minority report. Everything in the dystopian world of Minority Report you have things such as eye scanners when you walk into a shop and then this gives the information about what you like, to the shop and they can give you ads and items of clothing that you might want to buy, this in itself is an invasion of privacy. One major part of Minority report is the scenes when you have the authorities trying to find John in an apartment building. When they first arrive they scan the whole building for heat and find the amount of “bodys”. They view people as things that need to be kept under control not as actual human beings. All the camera angles that Steven Spielberg uses portrays the idea that the authorities are more powerful by only viewing them from a low angle and then when the camera is on the people in the apartments you have a birds eye view looking down on them taking away all their privacy and making them less than us, there is no escape you can’t run and you can’t hide. This is the same idea as 1984 being able to look down on people and see everything they do with their loss of privacy and them not being able to do anything about it. For the people that abide by the rules of the state it is a perfect world there is no crime because you commit any without being caught. Why should you complain about living in a world with no crime. Well for these reasons precisely; John is hiding in the apartment because he has just had his eyes removed and someone else’s put in to replace them so he can’t be scanned by the authorities. When the police come in the front door they make an announcement to the whole building through a sound system that is connected to every room which is an another breach of privacy. The police then release a whole lot of mechanical spiders to go off and scan peoples eyes and confirm their identity. The use of spiders and not just a little robot is because spiders have so many eyes and they can see everything that is going on, it is more of a metaphor for being able to see everything . The next big thing that takes away you privacy is that these spiders go into every room of the whole building and scan everyone’s eyes no matter what they are doing where it be making dinner, having sex or in the middle of big argument. These people have no control over it at all they just invade their home and take away their privacy. In 1984 they don’t invade your home they are already in it, listening through microphones and watching through hidden cameras. These dystopian films are just warnings of how a perfect world would need to be run but through the eyes of a someone who is suffering from the rules and not by the people running the state. John avoids being caught by taking off his eye patches so the spider can scan him and can confirm he is someone else but in doing this he risks going blind because he has to wait so long before he can remove them. But he has no choice he either gets caught for a murder he didn’t commit or risks going blind. I don’t think these are things you would need to be doing in a world where everything is perceived to be safe and crimes are unable to be committed. We are warned by these films and texts about how powerful this technology is and in the hands of the wrong people we may very well end up like old mate John.
The second two texts that link together are The Platform and Blade Runner 2049. These two texts also relate to the same ideas as Minority report and 1984 in the ways that they are about control and people having no privacy. Separately they have a stronger connection with things such as hierarchy and capitalism. Blade Runner is about a police department rounding up old replicants because they are supposedly dangerous to society. This dystopian world is made up of a future version of earth where everything is abandoned and run down even though there is still people living in it. The main character Officer K played by Ryan Gosling finds out that he might be the possible child of two replicants, even though his job is killing off all these old replicants. In the end it turns out he isn’t, but the reasons for everything he does is because he is under the control of a superior person with with more power than even the authorities. These new replicants are not just property. They have private homes and can earn and spend money but they still are programed by the people in power of the state. The hierarchy of state runs in this order: Tyrell Corporation who are in charge of the police and authorities, then the police who are in charge of all the humans and new replicants and then at the very bottom you have old replicants which there are very few left of. So similar to 1984 you have a hierarchy where you are run by the state yet this is worse because you have a corporation running the state behind everyone’s backs. So it looks like the authorities are running it but in fact they are just being told what to do by someone else. A specific scene where this is shown is when someone who is employed by Tyrell walks into the office of the Chief of the LAPD and asks where officer K has gone and when the Chief doesn’t tell her where he is the Chief gets killed. All because she had been ordered by the owner of Tyrell to find out where Officer K was. You have no power if you aren’t at the top, no matter how high up in the police force you could still be killed and no one would be able to do anything. So imagine how bad it would be to be an old replicant at the bottom of the line you were being hunted and with the technology that the LAPD had you didn’t have anywhere to hide apart from in plain sight. Blade runner both links to 1984 and minority report in the ways that they are all run by a state, with everyone who isn’t at the top having no control. This text warns us just like 1984 and Minority report about how technology can be used in was of manipulating and controlling people. Which is scary because of how advanced our technology is these days and how easily it would be to end up in a similarly run state.
The Platform, a prison of somesorts. A lot of levels or floors you might say, the number being unknown to the prisoners. On the first day you get put on a level, say level 25. All you get is a bed a sink and a toilet it looks clean but only because there is nothing it to make it look dirty, there are two of you once you get your cellmate they stay with you no matter which level you end up on next. The only way you get food is when this magnetic “platform” comes through the big hole in the center of the room and you get 30 seconds to eat as much food as you want. You can’t save food and take it with you, if you do the room will either heat up or freeze down to temperatures you can’t survive. All these things are just ways of taking away your rights and privacy, you have someone you have never meet before and you can’t escape from. There is only as much food on the platform as is put on at the top so at level 25 you have already had 50 people have a go at the food. A scene that links very similarly to Blade Runner is when a new inmate wakes up in his bed with his cellmate and he won’t eat the food when it comes past because people have spat and thrown all their food scraps back on the platform. But when the food comes to his level his cellmate doesn’t the exact same he spits any bones or bits of food he won’t eat back on the table for the next people. It is a system of class and hierarchy and you make the most of being at the top. So when it comes to the end of the month and you get moved levels you have no idea where you might end up. At some point you take your turn trying to survive at the bottom. The people above you have no respect for you and you have no respect for the people below you. Even when your at the top you could be being nice to the people below you but you’re not because they weren’t the last time you were below them. If you took this into the perspective of our current world for any country that is in a dictatorship they are only in power until they aren’t but while they are they can do whatever they want. It’s a cycle and its all controlled by the people above the top floor making all this fancy food to feed the prisoners with. In this there is a connection between Blade Runners hierarchy with the corporation being in charge and in The Platform you have the people on level one being in charge of what the rest of the prisoners get to eat. Not that the prisoners have any choice in this because being in prison they have no rights, not even basic human rights to food. It is scarily similar to the ideas of prisons these days with having hierarchies but in a different form.
In the end it doesn’t really matter what people think about the texts they view it only matters if they do something about it. We have been warned and if everything ends up like one of these texts we can’t say we didn’t know it was coming. These four texts are telling us the same thing over and over again, by using ideas and symbols such as eyes shown in 1984 and minority report. The technology in these texts is not at all majorly different from what we currently have we are being watched and listened to through anything and everything and we don’t think about it as much as we should. The world isn’t perfect and we consider it a good place because it isn’t like any of these dystopias but its actually not far off from being a live dystopia and we are living in it.
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