Notes from the Dystopia

Reviewing dystopian science fiction in the age of President Trump

[notesfromthedystopia-blog]

Week 11: The New Barbarians (1983)

“It would be wonderful, a dream would be that no country would have nukes, but if countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack.”

– President Trump

Part of his Bronx Warriors Trilogy, director Enzo G. Castellari (1990: The Bronx Warriors and Escape from the Bronx) brings back George Eastman (1990: The Bronx Warriors), Giancarlo Prete (Escape from the Bronx), and Fred “Hammer” Williamson (1990: The Bronx Warriors) in The New BarbariansI, a movie that has nothing to do with the Bronx. Credit where it’s due, Fred Williamson looks great, but not as great as Anna Kanakis, because, well done, costume designer Mario Giorsi: what you lack in post-nuclear holocaust realism chic, you make up for in OMFG!

The New Barbarians opens with a nuclear strike melting a city, forwarding in time to a barren landscape strewn with corpses in sexy, boob-windowed hazmat suits and the text “2019 A.D. The nuclear holocaust is over.” A small band of survivors is just trying to make their way through this crazy, mixed-up world, rationing what little food they have and continuously trying to signal anyone left alive before the antagonist Templars show up, pew-pewing their hopes against the rocks. Riding what-sounds-like-electric,-but-exhausts-like-gas future dune buggies, the Templars somehow are able to wear pristine white uniforms with see-through chest plates and perfectly coiffed hair in the apocalypse, like a Broadway musical version of the bad guys in The Road Warrior. Loner Scorpion (Prete) shares an uneasy past with the Templars which comes to a head when he intervenes in their abduction of Alma (Kanakis). After a colorful sex scene and some inter-Templar noncompliance, Alma and Scorpion find a caravan of faithful survivors who believe in a thing called “God.” Alma opts to stay in the hopes of building a society and Scorpion opts to leave, because he’s a loner, Alma, a rebel. When he learns the Templars have discovered the God caravan, loner Scorpion teams up with fellow loner Nadir (Williamson) and a murderously scrappy boy genius to take down the Templars once and for all.

The dystopia of The New Barbarians is set in 2019, nine years after a nuclear holocaust, so thanks, Obama. The landscape is a deserted wasteland mostly devoid of food and hope (mostly). The immaculate, dune-buggied Templars are a nihilist man cult lead by One (Eastman) whose driving motivation is to purge all life whenever they encounter it, as a form of vengeance against the world leaders who initiated the nuclear war, a roving riot perpetuating a violent series of psychotically sarcastic “Is this what you want?!”s screamed to the long dead. There are no women among the Templars, because there is no need to continue the race. New members of the Templars are initiated from a ritual spectacle of public rape conducted by One, facilitated by Shadow, One’s number two. MGTOWing, it’s a prison culture without walls and one wheels.

All thinking about Trump and nuclear apocalypse needs to be within the context that he doesn’t understand the severity of nuclear weaponry. Sympathetically recognizing that President Trump can’t read, it’s still no excuse in an America where everyone has seen The Terminator (1984). As originally reported by Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s The Morning Joe:

"Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can't we use them."

President Trump neither understands the don’t-play-chicken lessons of the Cold War, nor the enormous disaster that nuclear weapons pose to life and the environment for, in the case of Uranium-235, the kind that was in the bomb dropped over Hiroshima onto civilian targets on August 6, 1945, a half-life of 700 million years. Nuclear capability has gotten only more devastating since World War II, as Chernobyl released 200 times more radiation than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, combined. To that end, Chernobyl won’t be safe for human habitation for at least another 20,000 years. A lasting impact of nuclear exposure, of course, is cancer, as the risk of cancer doubles when the exposure to radiation doubles, and the risk of leukemia quadruples when the exposure to radiation doubles. One result of the U.S.’s test and use of nuclear weapons is a cancer pandemic in its own citizens.

President Trump intends to increase the budget for nuclear weapons by more than $1 billion in 2018. It is two and a half minutes to midnight on the Doomsday Clock.

[notesfromthedystopia-blog]

Week 10: Escape from the Bronx (1983)

“I love eminent domain.”

– President Trump

Trash returns in the sequel to 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Escape from the Bronx, this time intent on saving what remains of the Bronx from ruthless Manhattan land developers, The General Construction Corporation, set to take over the no man’s land and build condos on top of its ruins, leafletting the broken tenements with posters and flyers that read “LEAVE THE BRONX. SIGN UP FOR A NEW HOUSE IN ENCHANTING NEW MEXICO” and “GET OUT OF THE BRONX. WE GOT SOLAR HOUSES IN ENCHANTING NEW MEXICO WAITING FOR YOU”, but, instead, Bronx residents are set alight by the flamethrower-wielding astronauts of the Disinfestation Squad. Trash, a high-value target of the Disinfestation Squad, presumably because of his history of dragging police officers to death and his pistol’s helicopter-exploding bullets, is part of a rag-tag, rebel army of surviving Bronx gangs who shall not quietly into the New Mexican night and survive under the surface of the borough. When Trash ‘n’ pals decide to kidnap the president of the General Construction Corporation to stop their bloody eviction, the full might of the Disinfestation Squad is brought down upon Bronx, slaughtering most of the remaining gang members, before Trash blows up the leader of the Disinfestation Squad inside his armored van with a single, magic bullet.

The dystopia of Escape from the Bronx continues that of The Bronx Warriors: extreme economic disparity between rich and poor. Escape from the Bronx includes new details of the powerful Manhattanites manipulating the media as they induce a Bronx genocide (the lone investigative reporter is murdered and her photographer is also flamethrowered to death). The forced march to New Mexico is a ruse meant to deceive the poor into complacency, which falls to the wayside of violent gentrification.

Citizen Trump has a history of fighting to take private property from the unwilling, and President Trump agrees with him, stating “You need eminent domain. And eminent domain is a good thing, not a bad thing.” Embracing eminent domain, private property can be transferred from one unwilling private party to another predatory private party, with the government acting as the middle man, as Citizen Trump tried to orchestrate in 1994 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which would have seen the property of five businesses handed to Trump, had not the deal fallen through. Unsurprisingly, the arguments Trump makes about seizing private land for the public good, like building roads, hospitals, and schools, are never what his eminent domain efforts are for, which include wanting to (but failing to) seize a private home from a septuagenarian widow to demolish it and pave a limousine parking lot in its stead. In speeches, he talks about giving power to the people, but his actions are about seizing property from the people or, to quote Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, he “built a lot of his business on the backs of the little guy.” Of course, despite Trump boasting “no one is more conservative than me,” government seizure of private property isn’t a small government or conservative belief, as those snowflakes at The New Republic point out.

Trump proposes “tax holidays for inner-city investment, and new tax incentives to get foreign companies to relocate in blighted American neighborhoods”, demands “law and order”, and is a friend to urban developers. In other words, based on his history of betraying the poor and the working class and building his empire on their losses, “This could be called a gentrification policy.”

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Week 9: 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982)

The crackdown on illegal criminals is merely the keeping of my campaign promise. Gang members, drug dealers & others are being removed!

– President Trump

In the optimistic spirit of “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” 1990: The Bronx Warriors flatters the originators of the post-apocalyptic genre, as an Italian rip-off of The Warriors (1979), The Road Warrior (1981), and Escape from New York (1981). Seventeen-year-old Ann flees from the onset of her guilty responsibilities as the heiress to the arms manufacturing giant, The Manhattan Corporation, into the lawless Bronx and the strong arms of urban barbarian Trash, leader of the Riders, one of several colorful Bronx gangs, each controlling their own turf in their own motif: The Tigers, an elegant pimps gang; the Zombies, a roller-hockey gang; the Iron Men, a Chorus Line gang; the Scavengers, a Tusken Raiders gang; and The Riders, a plastic-skulled motorcycle gang. To retrieve Ann, The Manhattan Corporation hires a mercenary cop named Hammer (not played by Fred “Hammer” Williamson), who pits the gangs against one another, and Trash must escort Ann across dangerous rival gang territory to the Tigers to explain to their leader, Ogre (played by Fred “Hammer” Williamson), that they’re all being played for fools. Or, mathematically,

<The Warriors +  <Escape from New York = The Bronx Warriors

When Hammer fails to stop Trash from making peace with the Tigers, he and his police force implement Operation Burnt Earth, massacring the Tigers and Ann in a hail of gunfire, flame, and sadistically maniacal laughter, presumably inspiring the 1985 MOVE bombing. However, like a true urban cowboy of the apocalyptic wasteland, Trash harpoons Hammer and ties him to his plastic-skull adorned motorcycle, dragging him past the sunset through the faux Bronx.

After an impressively artful opening credits scene, The Bronx Warriors lays the context: “In the year 1990 the Bronx is officially declared No Man’s Land. The authorities give up all attempts to restore law and order. From then on the area is ruled by the Riders.” The dystopia of The Bronx Warriors is one of extreme economic disparity, with the wealthy sheltered in civilized Manhattan and the impoverished abandoned in the lawlessness of the Bronx. Manhattan retains all the conveniences of modernity, while the Bronx is a bombed out brick ruin (without a gasoline shortage). The law works for the rich to tyrannize the poor.

Campaign-era Trump declared himself “the law and order candidate,” capitalizing upon fear of the increasing voice of the other as proof of lawlessness, despite statistical data that shows crime rates steadily declining under President Obama, but this rhetoric and obstinance in the face of facts isn’t new. In 1989, as an angry reaction to the brutal Central Park jogger case, Citizen Trump took out a full-page ad in all four New York newspapers headlining “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”, poisoning an already volatile environment which soon saw five minority youth incarcerated for six to thirteen years in prison based on confessions that were beaten out of them. Despite Trump’s belief that torture “absolutely” works, in 2002, these convictions were vacated when the original serial rapist who committed the crimes came forward. Maddeningly, it should come as no surprise that Trump has never apologized, backpedaled, or rethought the case, despite proof of innocence. In Trumpworld, it’s a worse crime for his ego to admit a wrong than for poor men to spend over a decade in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. His pride is more valuable than their lives.

Trump campaigned on the disparity of rich and poor and the fear of the elimination of the American working class. Candidate Trump had successfully championed himself as an advocate for the working class and the small businessman, despite his history as a (presumably) billionaire businessman who refuses to pay the working class and small businessmen who have done work for him, increasing his (presumably) billions. For a man who all-caps Tweets “JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!”, one wonders if those will be paid jobs, jobs, jobs or unintentionally free labor from people who can’t afford lawyers, unintentionally free labor from people who can’t afford lawyers, unintentionally free labor from people who can’t afford lawyers. It is mind-blowing to see a man with a history of not paying working class people to tell working class people I’m going to get you jobs and for those working class people to believe him and vote for him. It’s voting with a self-deceptive dissonance of that may have happened to some other poor schlub, but it won’t happen to this poor schlub. It’s the same self-deceptive dissonance that will keep people from admitting they were wrong for their vote in the first place: because they’ve learned from Trump that pride is more valuable than recognizing suffering, even if that suffering is your own.

[notesfromthedystopia-blog]

Week 8: Alphaville (1965)

I noticed Chuck Schumer yesterday with fake tears. I'm going to ask him who is his acting coach, because I know him very well.

– President Trump 

Arriving from the Outlands in his Ford Galaxie, wearing his trenchcoat and fedora and armed with his M1911A1 Colt Commander semi-automatic pistol, the reserved secret agent 003 Lemmy Caution enters Alphaville to document the city with his Instamatic camera; find missing agent Henri Dickson; capture or kill the creator of Alphaville, Professor von Braun; and destroy Alphaville and its dictatorial, sentient computer, Alpha 60. Upon arrival at his hotel, under cover of being a photojournalist, Caution is the attempted victim of both, separately, seduction and assassination, which he halts with jolts of contemptuous fury, before tossing both seductress and assassin out of the room. Falling for either admits its own vulnerability, and real men are not vulnerable. Caution does go for a programmer, second class, rather than a seductress, third class, because third-class whores are beneath Lemmy Caution (assumedly, that notion of classist shame was brought with Caution from the Outlands, as shame is too illogical to oppress upon sex workers). In Alphaville, passion is shunned while the passions are rendered commerce. The guarded, intellectual masculinity of the French New Wave (men who aren’t happy, so much as negotiating content without the feminized weakness of abandon) is outlawed in Alphaville, replaced with cold logic and calculated order, because it’s better to be snide than emotionless; better to be warmed by anger than cold; better to feel contempt than nothing at all. Lemmy Caution does not undermine the technocracy of Alphaville with joy, but, rather, with cynicism. He doesn’t want to bring peace; he wants to bring the freedom of nihilism. In his joyless victory, the leathern Caution rides off into the horizon with the beautiful Natacha von Braun (played by Anna Karina) by his side, as he instructs her not to look back and as she tells him she loves him. It is a love that defies both justification and their 23-year age gap. (Assumedly, their age distance is more traversable than his emotional distance.)

The dystopia of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution is a technocratic dictatorship where human concepts of free will, poetry, and emotions are outlawed. Aberrant citizens who behave illogically with uncontrolled displays of unrepentant love or grief are condemned to public execution through a process of men in suits machine-gunning them into swimming pools of women stabbing them for the spectacle of compliant onlookers applauding the efficiency of the state. When Alpha 60 is destroyed, the citizens of Alphaville slide down a vertigo K-hole of emotions, rendering them them unable to stand erect under the influence of feeling, drowning in entropy confusion.

This is the deviant ninth of 15 Lemmy Caution movies, with Eddie Constantine playing the character in all but the very first. For a film about the calculating suppression of emotions, this portrayal of Lemmy Caution is a terse departure from his previous depictions as an imbibing, fun-loving, wry-smiling womanizer to one as cold and hostile whose most frequent display of emotion is abrupt anger and careless violence, the acceptable masculine emotions. Previous incarnations show him as cynical with a drink in hand; Alphaville shows him as world-weary and without patience. Ironically, this seems to have broken the character, effectively ruining Eddie Constantine’s twelve-year run as Lemmy Caution, only for the actor to return to it fifteen years later with a series of post-modern satires, concluding with 1991′s Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, again directed by Godard, the director who first severed Constantine’s emotional relationship with the character in Alphaville.

There’s an argument to be made that President Trump was voted in because people wanted to cast a big fuck you to the snowflakes, and that’s the undercurrent of the political discourse: empathy is weakness, divergence makes you a cuck, and reservation makes you a beta in Alphaville. There’s a devaluation of compassion in favor of celebrity malice owning a questioner like some bitch. During his campaign, Candidate Trump mocked the physical stature of Senator Marco Rubio, imitated another man’s disability to the cheers of sycophants, and approvingly reTweeted the notion that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s historic humiliation by husband’s infidelity was proof of her unworthiness. It was a campaign that had no fucks to give and people couldn’t get enough. There was no bar low enough (case in point: here’s a video with a Trump supporter making a “grab ‘em by the pussy” joke in front of his own daughter). And the campaign won. It wasn’t a landslide, despite the lies, but it won. People said yes to Trump and said fuck you to giving a fuck.

As Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University Paul Bloom recently hypothesized, “The Trump vote was an eff you to the sort of people who read The New Yorker and live in places like Cambridge and New Haven.” As neoconservative political commentator David Frum recently said, “There are millions of people in America who say You know what? I am just delighted to see Donald Trump be rude to the snobs. I don’t care what he’s going to do to me. It’ll be worth it.” Finally, and most crystalline, as Esquire writer Jack Holmes recently wrote, “There is perhaps no better gauge of the moral decay of this nation than this apparently widespread notion that having compassion for other human beings is a form of weakness.” 

[notesfromthedystopia-blog]

Week 7: La Jetée (2016)

Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would. In a heartbeat. I would approve more than that. It works....And if it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.

– President Trump

La Jetée is Sam Brooks’ 2016 high school student film reimagining of Terry Matalas’ (Star Trek: Enterprise) and Travis Fickett’s (Nikita) 2015 12 Monkeys SyFy television show update on Terry Gilliam’s brilliant Twelve Monkeys 1995 update on Chris Marker’s 1962 time-travel experimental love note La Jetée. Jacob Baldy’s The Man arrives in 2098 from dystopian 2101 where he meets and loves Jenna Sholefield’s The Woman to be allowed to move forward to the future beyond 2101; which was inspired by Aaron Stanford’s James Cole who arrives in 2015 from dystopian 2043 and coerces Amanda Schull’s Dr. Cassandra Railly to help stop a virus outbreak from erupting in 2017 started by the Army of the 12 Monkeys, ostensibly lead by Emily Hampshire’s Jennifer Goines; which was inspired by Bruce Willis’ James Cole who arrives in 1995 from dystopian 2035 and coerces Madeline Stowe’s Dr. Kathryn Railly to help stop a virus outbreak from erupting in 1996 started by the Army of the 12 Monkeys, ostensibly lead by Brad Pitt’s Jeffrey Goines, which was inspired by Davos Hanich’s The Man who arrives in ~1960 from dystopian ~1987 where he meets and loves Hélène Chatelain’s The Woman to learn how to move forward to the future beyond ~1987.* Time travel is tricky.

As in the 1962 original, The Man is a prisoner (or slave) tortured with disease and electricity by his dystopian government (The Victors) to send him back to the past of 2098 from the present of 2101, ravaged by war. While in his past of 2098, The Man is visited by Others from his future who promise to cure him of his government disease and bring him to a utopian future, if he’s able to bring The Woman with him, she being of some vital, but undisclosed importance. Unable to coerce The Woman to risk her safe present for the dangers of an unknowable future, The Man’s mission fails and he is returned to the clutches of the torturous government of 2101.

Despite the unconstitutionality of torture being in conflict with the 8th Amendment, despite waterboarding being against the law, and despite waterboarding being deemed ineffective, President Trump has wants to reinstate its use, because he “feels” it works. It’s worth noting that President Trump, despite nobody being “bigger or better at the military than” Trump (says Trump), despite his years at a private military school, and despite his health being “astonishingly excellent,” President Trump avoided military service in Vietnam, due to bad feet. Assumedly, President Trump has also never been waterboarded.

Also related to the exploitation of prisoners, stock prices for private prisons have increased under President Trump, as the law-and-order president has vowed to arrest more people, leading to mass incarceration and holding them in private prisons, which, compared to federal prisons, lag in rehabilitative services, like educational programs and job training. Of course they do, because rehabilitated prisoners are the worst thing that could happen to private prisons: private prisons profit when people commit crimes and when criminals reoffend.

*Fun Fact!: La Jetée (2016) has nothing at all do with 12 Monkeys (2015) or Twelve Monkeys (1995), aside from their shared homage to La Jetée (1962), so there was a sacrifice of truth for symmetry.

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Week 6: 12 Monkeys (Season Two) (2016)

Is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter than your wife?

– President Trump

Introduced in 12 Monkeys (Season One), the mission of the Daughters, a post-apocalyptic female warrior cult following both aged & youthful (in that order) and brilliant & insane (simultaneously) Jennifer Goines, is revealed in Season Two. With all the time shenanigans and alternate pathways opening up, the Daughters are tasked with safeguarding the driving motivation to live in physicist Dr. Katarina Jones’ life: her own daughter, absconded from death, Hannah.

As former CIA agent Amaryllis Fox says of terrorists: “Everybody believes they’re the good guy.” In the dystopia of 12 Monkeys, the antagonist Army of the 12 Monkeys, organized by Olivia, pushes for the apocalypse as a means to create a utopia without death (from their perspective, they are the protagonists in their own story). To do this, in 2043, the Army of the 12 Monkeys sends field agent Messengers throughout time to kill Primaries, humans who serve as a lifeline for time. Primaries, like Jennifer Goines and Lillian (played by Madeleine Stowe, as a tip of the hat to the original Twelve Monkeys [1995]), have a hyper-awareness of time streams and their fragility, which give Primaries a genius schizophrenia of history, the future, and the precarious logic between the two. The ova of the first Messenger, Mantis, is used to create Olivia. Olivia is the daughter of Mantis, and Olivia watches over the birth of Mantis, her mother, in 2015. The Army of the 12 Monkeys, which includes Mantis’s mother Olivia, refer to Mantis as “Mother.” (Similarly, the Daughters all refer to Jennifer Goines as “Mother.”) Time travel is tricky.

Portrayed as fighters & protectors, scientists & catalysts, mothers & daughters, the diverse role of women in 12 Monkeys cannot be downplayed. Women sacrifice themselves to both drive the dystopia and delay its inevitability. While the cause-and-effect nature of procreation is necessary, complicated, and fascinating in a show about time travel, there are no throwaway depictions of sexually objectified women.

As this is Women’s History Month, and as President Trump says that women should be treated “like shit”, 12 Monkeys’ characterization of women as having their own agency, choices, conflict, growth, and dedication is noteworthy. Applying lessons from 12 Monkeys, it’s fair to say President Trump’s incestuously bangable daughter, Ivanka, also believes she’s the protagonist in her own story, rather than a woman complicit in the dangerous, yet unwarrantedly confident fumblings of an enabled manchild.

Fun Fact!: Both Daughter and Daughters are two very excellent, very dissimilar bands whom the SyFy network have not properly taken advantage of for soundtrack purposes.

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Week 5: 12 Monkeys (Season One) (2015)

I think Snowden is a terrible threat, I think he’s a terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country — you know what we used to do to traitors, right?

– President Trump

The 12 Monkeys SyFy television show is Terry Matalas’ (Star Trek: Enterprise) and Travis Fickett’s (Nikita) 2015 update on Terry Gilliam’s brilliant 1995 update on Chris Marker’s 1962 time-travel experimental love note La Jetée. Aaron Stanford’s James Cole arrives in 2015 from dystopian 2043 and coerces Amanda Schull’s Dr. Cassandra Railly to help stop a virus outbreak from erupting in 2017 started by the Army of the 12 Monkeys, ostensibly lead by Emily Hampshire’s Jennifer Goines; which was inspired by Bruce Willis’ James Cole who arrives in 1995 from dystopian 2035 and coerces Madeline Stowe’s Dr. Kathryn Railly to help stop a virus outbreak from erupting in 1996 started by the Army of the 12 Monkeys, ostensibly lead by Brad Pitt’s Jeffrey Goines; which was inspired by Davos Hanich’s The Man who arrives in ~1960 from dystopian ~1987 where he meets and loves Hélène Chatelain’s The Woman to learn how to move forward to the future beyond ~1987. Time travel is tricky.

In 2043, the few survivors of the 2017 virus outbreak form bands of scavengers looking to loot, murder, and occasionally invade a quasi-government facility. Post-Katrina teaches this to be true. While James Cole initially starts as a voluntold prisoner, he soon becomes a full-fledged believer in the mission of time redemption. Aaron Stanford’s James Cole has more success at altering the future than Bruce Willis’ James Cole, so either his team of scientists are better at this or the story allows for more time paradoxes than the source material.

While President Trump has offered to ally himself with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange if they their secrets favor him, 12 Monkeys (Season One) treats whistleblowers in the way President Trump prefers: through murder. Season One sees the CEO of a biotech company murder a scientist who intends to speak to the press and the U.S. government orchestrate the poorly thought-out overkill of an terroristic Edward Snowden.  

12 Monkeys also features Amanda Schull, a genetically gifted cross between Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts, as Dr. Cassandra Railly, whom, like Madeline Stowe’s Dr. Kathryn Railly, is introduced as she’s concluding a speech about the likelihood of a virus pandemic and then she’s abducted by a man who knows that likelihood to be true. And her name is Cassandra.

Fun Fact!: So far, including Cherry 2000, this is the second 2017 dystopia, excluding our current one.

[notesfromthedystopia-blog]

Week 4: Twelve Monkeys (1995)

I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way. Believe me.

– President Trump

Twelve Monkeys is Terry Gilliam’s brilliant 1995 update on Chris Marker’s 1962 time-travel experimental love note La Jetée. James Cole (Bruce Willis) travels from the future of 2035 to the present of 1990 to stop a bioterrorist from germinating the apocalypse, which actually occurs in 1996 (time travel is tricky). Along the way, there are missteps in World War I and pit stops in an insane asylum, where he meets Jeffrey Goines (an astonishingly good, Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe Award-winning, and Best Supporting Actor Academy Award-nominated Brad Pitt, more reminiscent of the Brad Pitt from Kalifornia [1993], True Romance [1993], and Fight Club [1999] than the Brad Pit from A River Runs Through It [1992], Interview with a Vampire [1994], and Legends of the Fall [1994]), who leads the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, the assumed instigators of the viral, genocidal outbreak, but [SPOILER ALERT!!!] is more prankster Animal Liberation Front than doom-forcing virologists.

Terry Gilliam takes La Jetée’s dystopian landscape and, like everything else he envisions, notches it up to his dark, genius surreality (à la, Time Bandits [1981], Brazil [1985], and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen [1988]). The visuals, camerawork, and mechanics are frighteningly unsettling: all wet, noise, steam, rust, and disembodied authoritarianism. There are Orwellian alternative facts of this dystopia, where prisoners are forced to volunteer and lies are spoken loudly as truth. While it retains La Jetée’s prisoner exploitation, it swaps nuclear armageddon with viral apocalypse. The surface of 2035 is uninhabitable by humans while animals run amuck: as cold as it is free.

The germ nature of Twelve Monkeys is wry-smile-inducing, in light of President Trump’s self-effacing dismissal of his alleged Russian sex tourism. Also, the United States of America Germaphobe-in-Chief has stated that handshaking is “barbaric”, which is curious, given how enthusiastically bad he is at shaking hands. In the world of Twelve Monkeys, President Trump’s germaphobia proves well-founded. So, he should probably cool it with the foreign prostitutes (“ALLEGEDLY!”) and tiny-sized hand-dominance.

Madeleine Stowe plays virologist Dr. Kathryn Railly, sucked into the lunacy-as-dystopian foreshadowing of Cole. In 1996, months before the outbreak, Railly gives a lecture on the Cassandra complex to a group of scientists, after which she meets Dr. Peters, [SPOILER ALERT!!!] a true believer in an impending environmental destruction, whom Railly ironically dismisses and whom then proceeds to drive the apocalypse while working as a scientist for the corporation Goines’ father owns (for a time-travel film, there’s an interesting play in cause and effect here). In Trump’s post-truth America, the Cassandra complex is a worthless non-exchange of anti-Trumpian “I told you so!”s meeting pro-Trumpian lack of giving a shit.

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Week 3: La Jetée (1962)

France on edge again.

– President Trump

After World War III, Parisians flee the irradiated post-nuclear wasteland streets to live underground, where tunnel rulers perform maddening time-travel experiments on prisoners to somehow find a cure for the present in the future, by way of the past. Time travel is tricky. 

Chris Marker’s experimental short film is a love story that presents clear warnings against nuclear war and World War III, both of which percolate in the current American political landscape as President Trump argues that America needs to expand its nuclear capabilities and China fears war is now a “practical reality”. The nuclear war of La Jetée is unexplained, so, while it could be Muslims, it’s probably Trump. 

Actually, it’s probably neither. Though it’s never stated outright, assumedly La Jetée’s point-of-Armageddon “past” is 1962 and La Jetée’s “present” is probably 1987, judging by the age of the main character, which puts “The Man’s” initial stop in the “near past” at approximately 1960. So, it’s probably Reagan.*

La Jetée also brings to mind the American prison-industrial complex, which churns citizens into a private, or for-profit, prison machine, and, therefore, has no incentive to decrease crime or rehabilitate criminals. Under a deregulatory presidency friendly toward big business and fond of “law and order”, despite the Constitution, the threat of citizens losing their rights and dignity so that private businesses can see increased profits looms heavy. For example, “Massachusetts sheriff offers prison inmates to build Trump's wall”, or, you know, slaves.

Fun Fact #1!: La Jetée is the inspiration for both Twelve Monkeys and Isis’s Celestial and SGNL>05 albums.

*Fun Fact #2!: It’s probably not Reagan! While Reagan was the American President in the 1987, the apocalypse of La Jetée would have occurred in ~1962, which would have placed it with President Kennedy’s 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, but Reagan was funnier, because monkeys.

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Week 2: Cherry 2000 (1987)

You know, it doesn't really matter what [they] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass.

– President Trump

In the far-flung dystopia of 2017, men can find love and romance in sex androids who will have dinner waiting for you when you get home, so you don’t “go through the roof.” If you want the hassle of dealing with a real human woman, well, they have clubs where such things can be negotiated for short-term services. 

When Sam Treadwell’s young and beautiful piece of roboass has a meltdown, he hires fiery human redheaded tracker E. Johnson at the Glory Hole to enter the desolate badlands of Zone 7 to find a duplicate replacement Cherry 2000. Played by Melanie Griffith, E. Johnson is a proto manic pixie dream girl who takes the boring executive Sam Treadwell on an adventure full of toaster oven stashes reminiscent of Smash TV victory and lunatic Hawaiian-shirted marauders. Inexplicably, E. Johnson falls for Sam, whose most dominant trait is his enduring love and devotion for his ex-robogirlfriend, which is never a good foundation for a new relationship.

Cherry 2000′s pocket-civilization of America features an unemployment rate of 40% and an economy that runs on recycling and scavenging, presumably because we’ve tariffed other nations’ goods and restructured trade agreements so much that other nations’ don’t want to deal with us, but without adequately educating a workforce, we can’t manufacture new products. (The cause of the economic collapse was not explicitly stated, so there’s some speculation going on here.)

On its outskirts is Zone 7, an inhospitable desert wasteland which could not have possibly been caused by global warming, which is totally not a thing. Instead, it could have been caused by the nondescript “Border Wars”, though Zone 7 turns out to be Las Vegas, so America didn’t fare too well in the Border Wars. With that implication, this was clearly an America that didn’t have a wall.

[notesfromthedystopia-blog]

Week 1: Soylent Green (1973)

Obama's talking about all of this with the global warming and … a lot of it's a hoax. It's a hoax. I mean, it's a money-making industry, okay? It's a hoax, a lot of it.

– President Trump

Alongside cinematic luminaries Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten, Brock Peters, Paula Kelly, and Dick Van Patten, Charlton Heston stars as New York City Police Department detective Frank Thorn in Soylent Green, an environmental catastrophic and thorough dystopian future 2022 suffering overpopulation, overcrowding, draught, food riots, and extreme class disparity. Assumedly, the overpopulation is due to President Trump’s defunding of Planned Parenthood. 

The film centers around Detective Thorn’s case of a murder of a wealthy CEO with a conscious, so, like Edward Snowden, but if Edward Snowden were a wealthy CEO, though Edward Snowden has not yet been assassinated. Through the modern lens of citizen journalist documentation vigilantism, Detective Thorn is the working class fascist Black Lives Matter foreshadows: he breaks into your apartment without a warrant, steals all your food, beats you and your girlfriend up, and fucks your furniture. Thorn has at least four human shields in this film.

The environment of Soylent Green, while not necessarily irradiated, is desolate, infertile, heat-waved, and dust-bowly. This is the result of the inequation of science < commerce, because, after all, climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese.

A conceptual detail is that beautiful women can have a temporary, precarious career as owned objects, “furniture” acquired with apartments whom serve as domestic sex slaves expected to merely dutifully cook, clean, make nice, and fuck. To list the comparisons that President Trump owns a game show where the prettiest girl wins and has bragged about grabbing beautiful women by the pussy because he just can’t help himself (though he’s fully entitled to it) would be degradingly obvious.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

...

It’s people.