Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

'What does a scanner see?' Techno-fascination and unreliability in the mind-game film.

Abstract: In popular cinema, paranoia and conspiracy plots often go hand in hand with questions of technological innovation. For example, A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, US 2006) combines issues such as audiovisual surveillance, conspiracy, and manipulation without disambiguating between paranoid delusion and conventional causality. By foregrounding the possibility of all audiovisual media to colour our perceptions, the film emphasises its own functioning as a mediated and synthetic presentation of a story. Moreover, its mode of presentation mimics the themes of delusion, conspiracy, blurred boundaries, and unfixed identities, drawing the spectator fully into its state of confusion. Films such as A Scanner Darkly signal a current shift in narrative cinema, and prompt a kind of spectator-engagement much in line with posthumanist views on subjectivity. Rather than pertaining to traditional notions of illusionism and suspension of disbelief, these "mind-game films" (Thomas Elsaesser) employ unreliability and spectacle for the creation of unstable and synthetic storyworlds. While firmly embedded in the institution of narrative fiction cinema, A Scanner Darkly presents novel and significant modes of signification and agency (even if limited or dystopian), both for those "trapped" within its filmic story and for the spectators on its other end.

Conclusion: The One where They’ll Still Be There for You—Reflections on Friends’ Place in Television Culture for Its 25th Anniversary

Abstract: This chapter begins to offer the authors’ final reflections on Friends and its place in present and future television culture by attending to an intertextual reference to the series within a television show that in many ways could not be more different from it, namely The Handmaid’s Tale. The contrast between the multi-camera sitcom and the dystopian thriller allows the authors to conclude their considerations of Friends’ strategy of intimacy and to think through the ways in which the programme complicates notions of the ‘then and now’ and discourses of continuation and transformation. Informed by interviews with co-creator Marta Kauffman, executive producer Kevin S. Bright and director James Burrows, the authors sum up the key contribution the book seeks to make to television scholarship and finish by reflecting on Friends’ 25th anniversary in September 2019.

Immortality and Immunity in Margaret Atwood’s Futuristic Dystopias

Abstract: Jean-Luc Nancy calls our attention to the need to “look squarely at our gaping lack. .. to confront ourselves: first, with utter awareness; then, in such a way as to really scrutinise ourselves” ( “Confronted Community” 25). Margaret Atwood’s futuristic dystopias The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009) offer a unique ground to pursue this scrutiny. They portray both the human compulsion to erase finitude and the obsession for immunity, while critically exposing the way in which human communities are constructed. Hence, they deploy deconstructions not only of various genres, such as dystopia and castaway survivor narra- tives (Bouson, “Game Over” 141), but also of the notion of the organic or operative community, as defined by Nancy in The Inoperative Community.