by Laurie Penny
This film makes plain what other dystopias have already hinted at: the nightmare of environmental collapse is a double nightmare. The real horror is not the drought and the howling desert and the lack of Wi-Fi and sunscreen. The real horror is other human beings. The question is not how we’re going to survive the droughts, the floods, the dimming of the lights across the world. The question is: how will we survive each other?
The answer is that we will survive together. The threat of environmental and social collapse is no longer the stuff of science fiction. In any future dystopia, women and minorities will be more vulnerable than ever, and that is precisely why their liberation will be more vital than ever. Take Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series. In a drought-stricken California, Butler’s young heroine Lauren Olamina leads a community of survivors who manage to thrive because they have a code of tolerance and mutual aid as well as a stash of guns.
In Fury Road, the answer is the same. Furiosa’s initial plan is to take the Wives to ‘The Green Place’, where women live in safety and harmony. But when they get there, it’s a toxic swamp, peopled by a handful of badass biker grannies (presumably the last survivors of the Feminist Twitter Wars). There is no utopia here. It turns out that there is no ‘Green Place’, no safe space for Furiosa and her charges to retreat to, no magic world without men. Max and Furiosa triumph not by escaping, but by returning to the Citadel, where they will survive together or not at all.
Unlike in so many feminist dystopias – from The Handmaid’s Tale to Suzette Haden Elgin’s neglected Native Tongue series to the genre-busting comic Bitch Planet – not every man in this film is an unredeemable bellend. In Fury Road, the men can be redeemed too. By the end, Max has realised that his best chance for survival is to fight with Furiosa and her gang – not for them, but alongside them.
And then there’s Nux. Nux is a speedballing, feral war boy who starts the film hunting Furiosa and her gang and ends up throwing in his lot with the women, giving all he has to keep their truck moving. It’s a gorgeous, scenery-chewing performance by Nicholas Hoult, who gives us the tanked-up henchman as a lost, ignorant child trying to find meaning in violent masculinity. In the first hour, he gets thrown out of a moving truck as the women scream their mantra, ‘Who killed the world?’ It obviously wasn’t them. But it wasn’t Nux, either.
Nux is as much a victim of Joe’s death cult as any woman. He is terminally ill, painfully ignorant of the world, and spends most of the film getting punched in the face by someone or other. He has the capacity for sacrifice and even sweetness, although this is not a world where romantic love can survive for long. Most of the characters in Fury Road have clear precedents in science fiction and fantasy. Nux is something rare: the redeemable feminist ally as hero.
This, in Furiosa’s words, is a film about redemption. Not for everyone. The snarling, lurching patriarchs of this film probably need to die in flames, and Immortan Joe is the 1 per cent in club makeup. In the end, we believe that the war boys, too, will be freed from slavery. Perhaps the real reason that this film has upset the neo-misogynists so very much is not just that it throws their Return of Kings fantasy into vivid, horrible relief, but that it offers the possibility of redemption for all of us.
Fury Road tells a simple, vital story, and it tells it in dazzling colour with buckets of blood and bristling war trucks. The story is this: the liberation of women is the liberation of everyone, and there’s only one way to stay alive when the world burns. We must learn to survive each other, because we can’t survive without each other.
DYSTOPIA NOW
The generation reaching adulthood in the latter part of this decade has not yet been named. The reason for this may well be superstition. First, we had Generation X, the anhedonic children of the 1980s and 1990s; then there was Generation Y, the anxious, driven millennials who grew up just in time to inherit the financial crisis. What can today’s teenagers call themselves that doesn’t sound apocalyptic? Where else is there for them to go but the end of the alphabet? It’s a little too prophetic for comfort, because if ever there was a cohort born to save the world or die trying, it’s these kids. No wonder they all love The Hunger Games.
Most teenagers I know spend a frightening amount of time reading dystopian fiction, when they are not half killing themselves trying to get into universities that they know are no longer a guarantee of employment. Suzanne Collins’s dark trilogy, which tells the story of a teenage girl forced by a decadent, repressive state into a televised fight to the death with other working-class young people, has sold more than 65 million copies worldwide. It has become the Defining mythos for this generation in the way that the Harry Potter books were for millennials. In a recent study, the economist Noreena Hertz suggested naming the young people born after 1995 ‘Generation K’, after the traumatised, tough-as-nails protagonist of The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen. The logic is sound. The teenagers whom Hertz interviewed were beset by anxieties, distrusted authority and anticipated lives of struggle in a dangerous, uncertain world.
Every exciting, well-told adventure tale is a comfort to lonely children but some stories are much more than that. When I was at school, Harry Potter and his friends were more important than the Greek pantheon. Harry, Ron and Hermione spoke to the values of my millennial cohort, who grew up convinced that if we were talented and worked hard, we would go to the equivalent of wizard school and lead magical lives in which good would ultimately prevail.
We were wrong. Today’s young people have no such faith in the system. Not everyone gets a happy ending in The Hunger Games. There is even a theme park planned, which seems rather redundant, as young people looking for the full Hunger Games experience – fighting to survive by stepping on the backs of other young people in an opulent, degenerate megacity – might as well try to get a graduate job in London.
Generational politics can obscure as much as they reveal. All of us, however, are marked by the collective political and cultural realities of the time when we grew up. The generation born after the mid-1990s is about to reach adulthood in a dark and threatening world, a world of surveillance and police repression, of financial uncertainty and environmental crisis, of exploitation at work and abuse on the Internet. It will have to navigate this bleak future without the soothing coverlet of late-capitalist naivety that carried millennials through school and university until it was cruelly snatched away by the financial crisis in 2008. That was the year The Hunger Games was first published. Sometimes, the right story arrives at the right time.
The ‘young adult’ section of every bookshop is now flooded with dystopian titles, from Veronica Roth’s Divergent series to Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours, which envisions a future in which women are trained from birth to be perfect wives and handmaidens, rather like a horror-movie remix of Teen Vogue. The publishing industry prefers to follow trends rather than set them but the inexhaustible hunger of Generation K for dystopian stories is partly a search for answers to questions that aren’t being addressed at home or at school, such as: ‘How will I survive when the world I know collapses?’ and ‘How will I protect my family?’
Perhaps the biggest difference between the Potter universe and today’s dystopian stories lies in how the young protagonists relate to authority. Harry Potter and his friends are surrounded by sympathetic grown-ups, some of them wise, some of them kindly and some of them able to transform into furry animals. Sometimes authority goes wrong – such as when the hateful Dolores Umbridge takes over Hogwarts – but the problem is never with the system.
In The Hunger Games, the few adults who can be trusted have a tendency to be murdered by the state. Katniss cannot rely on any grown-up for help: not her drunken, shambolic mentor, not her traumatised mother and certainly not the agents of the Capitol, who are out to exploit her for their own ends. That mistrust tallies with the attitudes of today’s teenage readers, according to Hertz. They do not trust authority or institutions, and why should they? Adults have made an Orwellian nightmare of ha
lf of the world and set fire to the rest. They might mean well but ultimately they do not have your best interests at heart, so it is up to you and your friends to keep fighting. This isn’t Hogwarts. You’ve got responsibilities and you’ll have to grow up fast.
If the moral of Harry Potter is that good will ultimately triumph, the message of The Hunger Games is that we are all doomed, adults can’t be trusted and all you can do is screw up your courage, gather your weapons and fight to survive, even if ‘the odds are never in our favour’. Today’s teenagers are braver, better connected and less naive than any generation in living memory and it is up to the rest of us to stand behind them. Spoiler alert: there could yet be a happy ending, as long as adults remember, like Katniss, that the young are ‘more than just a piece in their Games’.
UTOPIA SOMEDAY
There are many cruel and routine lies we tell to children but perhaps the most indicative is this: if you tell anyone your wish, it won’t come true. Whether it’s your birthday or you’ve just seen a shooting star, you’re not supposed to articulate your desires, because if you do, they’ll blow out like candles on a cake. This parable was probably invented by parents trying to avoid the trauma of not being able to give their children what they want but we carry it with us to adulthood, when it is repeated to us by our leaders. Don’t tell anyone the sort of world you would like to see – at best you’ll be disappointed and at worst you’ll be arrested.
‘We want more.’ One day not long ago, exhausted by the news, I dragged myself out of the house to a book fair, where I came across a new collection of utopian fiction by radical women. That was the first line and it stopped my breath in my throat. When basic survival seems like a stretch goal, caught as we are between the rich and the rising seas, hope feels like an unaffordable luxury. I believe the precise words I used to the bookseller were: ‘Shut up and take my money.’
There has never been a more urgent time for utopian ideas, precisely because the concept of a better world has never felt further away. World leaders met to decide how many cities are going to sink before something is done to reduce carbon emissions. They met in Paris, which had recently seen the opening scene of a new act in everyone’s least favourite dramatic franchise, ‘War in the Middle East’. The world may well be heading into yet another economic crisis; robots are apparently poised to automate away the few jobs that aren’t under water. We seem to be living in a dystopian trilogy scripted by a sadistic young adult author and I very much hope that our plucky young heroes show up to save the day soon, even if there’s a clunky love triangle involved.
Right now dystopian fiction is everywhere, and for good reason. Dystopias are easy to relate to, and easy to construct: to paraphrase the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, you might as well pick five news headlines at random, make a collage, and there’s your plot. Utopias are harder. Utopias require that we do the difficult, necessary work of envisioning a better world. This is why imagination is the first, best weapon of radicals and progressives.
Utopian stories existed long before the word was coined by Thomas More in the sixteenth century to mean an ideal society, or ‘no-place’. Plato’s Republic has some claim to being the first but there are as many utopias as there have been communities that dreamed of a better life. It is no accident that the early twenty-first century is a great age of dystopian fiction. The ideology of late-capitalist patriarchy has become so all-encompassing that it no longer looks like ideology. Fredric Jameson observed, ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ – and the reason for that is not that capitalism is the inevitable destiny of humankind but that we have spent our lives being told that even thinking about any other future makes us ridiculous.
Just because dystopia is easy doesn’t mean it’s useless. There is value in pointing out oppression. A great way of shutting down dissent is to insist that it’s not enough to be against things without also deciding what it is that you are for. From the anti-war movement to Occupy Wall Street to the reimagined Corbynite Labour party, everyone on the left is used to hearing this – that we cannot point out what’s wrong with politics without instantly suggesting an alternative. This is nonsensical. If you were being beaten up by a gang of armed thugs, you would be within your rights to demand that they stop doing so without listing alternative places they might land their blows; ‘not in my face’ is enough. It is difficult to think clearly about a better world when you’re trying to protect your soft parts from heavy boots. Difficult, however, is not the same as impossible.
Most leftists do have an idea of the sort of world they would prefer to see. Many of us have several. It’s just very hard to get us to talk about it, for the simple, human reason that we’re worried we’ll be laughed at. The standard response to anyone who suggests that perhaps we might like to live in a society where half the world’s wealth isn’t controlled by less than a hundred people is ridicule – even though the only truly ridiculous idea is that the current economic system is sustainable.
We don’t say what we want for the same reason that we were told as children not to tell anyone else what we wished for – because it’ll be awkward and painful if we don’t get it. Because when a dark future seems all but inevitable, hoping for better seems like setting yourself up to get hurt.
But the nature of utopia – the very meaning of the word – is that it is ‘no-place’. The journey is more important than the destination, but without a destination in mind there is no journey.
When I think about utopia, I think about my grandmother. My mother’s mother left school at thirteen, lived through the Maltese blockade and was obliged by religion and circumstance to marry young, suffocate all her dreams of education and adventure and spend her life taking care of a husband and six kids. Half a century later, I can choose when and whether to have children. I can choose to live independently from men. I regularly travel alone and there are no legal restrictions on getting any job I’m suited for.
The kind of independence many women my age can enjoy would have been almost unimaginable half a century ago – but somebody did imagine it, and that is why we got here. A great many somebodies, over centuries of struggle and technological advancement, asked how the world could be different for women and set about making it happen.
Exactly a century ago, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland envisioned a society of women in which production was communal, motherhood was valued, relationships were equal and rape and violence were unknown.
Reading Herland today, it is striking that for every proposition that came true – women are now allowed to divorce their husbands and participate fully in political life – there are two more that seem as far-fetched now as they did in 1915. Motherhood is still not valued as work. Women are still expected to organise our lives around the threat of sexual violence. But all that can change as long as we continue to ask for more.
Anyone who doesn’t believe that a better world is possible if we dare to dream it should take a look at the recent history of women’s liberation. The way I see it, I owe the women who came before me not just to live as freely as possible, not just to demand that women of all classes and backgrounds are able to access the freedoms I enjoy, but to demand even more.
For as long as I have been a feminist, I have been asked – usually by grumbling men – when, exactly, we will be satisfied; when women and girls will decide we have enough. The answer is contained in the question, because the instant that we do decide that we are satisfied, that there can never be a better world than this, is the instant that the future shuts down and change becomes impossible.
Utopia is the search for utopia. It is the no-place by whose light you plot a course through a harsh and unnavigable present. By the time you reach the horizon, it is no longer the horizon but that doesn’t mean you stop going forwards.
Right now, the future seems dark and frightening and it is precisely now that we must continue to imagine other worlds and then plot ways to get there. In the midst o
f multiple global crises, the only truly ridiculous proposition is that things are going to stay exactly the same.
Human societies are going to change beyond recognition, and from the conference table to the streets, our best shot at surviving that change starts when we have the courage to make impossible demands – to face down ridicule and say: ‘We want more.’
FEAR OF A FEMINIST FUTURE
To imagine the future is a political practice, which means that it’s both strangely awful and awfully strange. In 1990, a team of scientists and researchers was given the task of mapping far-future scenarios for the disposal of nuclear waste. Their dilemma: how to design a warning system to make sure humans in twenty centuries’ time don’t dig in the wrong place and kill the world. As part of the report, a group of academics – all men – came up with a set of ‘generic scenarios’ for how these future humans might live. Their most terrifying scenario? ‘A feminist world’.
According to this bizarre piece of nuclear science fan-fiction, in the ‘feminist world’ reached in the year 2091:
Women dominated in society, numerically through the choice of having girl babies and socially. Extreme feminist values and perspectives also dominated. Twentieth-century science was discredited as misguided male aggressive epistemological arrogance. The Feminist Alternative Potash Corporation began mining in the WIPP site. Although the miners saw the markers, they dismissed the warnings as another example of inferior, inadequate, and muddled masculine thinking.
It goes on to describe how ‘extreme feminists’ reject the entire concept of knowledge as ‘masculine’, and instead ‘put values and practices of attention to the feelings and emotions of particular individuals’, dooming the world in the process.
