Film reviewers often reach for a clutch of well-thumbed words and phrases to convey a sense of time and place quickly. This is not a criticism. These reviewers are rarely given sufficient space to explore often complicated themes of several films at a time.
A familiar locution, understood by all readers, allows them to cut to the action, as it were. “Dystopian nightmare” is one of them and when I see this deployed by my favourite reviewers my interest is piqued.
To my mind, the dystopian nightmare by which all others must be measured is Escape From New York. This 1981 John Carpenter masterpiece works on several levels. It’s often described as “cult”, another idiom that tells you there will be no rocky but ultimately pleasing romance in the middle of it. Instead, there is an edgy undercurrent that induces emotional disorientation in the watcher. It can’t be long now until we get zombie love stories (love bites obligatory) and zombies saving the president by eating all the kidnappers on Air Force One.
Escape From New York is the dystopian’s dystopia. With Frank Doubleday’s first vulpine cackle as the malevolent clown/gangster, Romero, you begin to feel gloriously uneasy. And it gave us Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken, the finest antihero (and antihero’s name) of them all. But it works, like all good dystopian nightmare movies, because it suggests that the bleak future scenario it depicts is not beyond the realms of distinct possibility, in this case, a walled and decaying New York city being turned into the national penitentiary for America’s most violent criminals.
These types of film also spark the imaginations of both left and right. Left-leaning punters see in them the inevitable consequences of rampant and authoritarian capitalism, while rightwingers nod approvingly and ask why we can’t introduce such a system now.
Yet I fear for the future of dystopian apocalypse films. When we currently have the leader of the world’s most powerful country routinely targeting ethnic communities and preaching hatred of minorities every time he opens his mouth, the dystopian nightmare is close at hand. And when the newly elected leader of Brazil, the biggest country in South America, openly discusses ethnic genocide you know that dystopia has been turned up to apocalypse. Although, admittedly, nothing will beat wee Romero blasting away at Donald Pleasance as the US president in his underpants holding a briefcase with the nuclear codes.
In Scotland last week, a dystopian nightmare was painted by the Herald under the headline “Blackouts, deaths and civil unrest: warning over our rush to go green”. This was a report quoting the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland (IESIS) warning of “deaths, severe societal and industrial disruption, civil disturbance and loss of production”.
According to IESIS, society has become imperilled by an over-reliance on uncertain green energy that has left some holes in the electricity system. When you add to this the expected dire consequences of Brexit, you could be forgiven for scanning the horizon for signs of the four horsemen and yon pale rider chappie and not the Clint Eastwood one either. I immediately thought of the film franchise The Purge, in which citizens are given a full day each year to come and go as they please without any legal redress. In this way, the authorities sought to address a recent uncontrollable rise in violent crime.
As films depicting dystopian nightmares go, The Purge wasn’t bad but suffered from a huge plot hole. If you knew in advance when the day of chaos would be, you’d simply arrange not to be around for a couple of days and take a wee break in the Highlands, although you might risk being picked up on a lonely road by a comely alien looking like Scarlett Johansson who injects you with dope juice before you live your life out as a cow on a farm. And what’s the point of a dystopian apocalypse if you don’t get the chance to overthrow big capital and kill the bill?
In Scotland, at least, according to our top engineers and our most authoritative newspaper, we need to be looking at the price of an underground bunker or at least seek out the wellies and cagoules for a couple of nights up Glencoe. Scotland’s own version of The Purge could be about to happen any day and night now. Nor do I think this would necessarily be a bad thing.
Many of our people have been living in dystopia since the day they were born. To them, society was founded on anarchic principles, but with a twist: only the richest and most influential people in society get to operate above the rule of law. The norm for them is to avoid paying taxes and use their vast wealth to change or delay legislation and bring an entire country to the brink of financial ruin in the knowledge that they will never be prosecuted. In turn, they allow the world’s most powerful criminals to use their biggest city as a laundry for dirty money.
If the lights were to go out and we were to have an extended period of civil unrest, it might be an opportunity for those on the receiving end of UK society’s unequal equation to even up the game. It could be like a 24-hour version of the conveyor belt on Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game... on acid, with everything up for grabs.
• Kevin McKenna is an Observer columnist
