15 slides of research for my project on dystopia

1. Research
Catalogue
Dystopia

2. McTeigue, James, 2005. V for
Vendetta, Warner Bros
Set against the futuristic landscape of totalitarian Britain, V
For Vendetta tells the story of a mild-mannered young
woman named Evey who discovers a masked vigilante
known only as "V.“ She follows him as he brings down the
people who caused the atrocities which lead to Britain to
being in the state that it is in. The dystopian element is the
clear oppression of minorities and the totalitarianism of the
state. People in this society have no freedom and the
government is corrupt; taking out people who defy them
and neutralising minorities who appear to go against the
teachings of the Catholic Church.

3. Fukasaku, Kinji, 2000. Battle
Royale , AM Associates
In a dystopian society a random class of Japanese ninth-
grade students are randomly selected by a fascist
government lottery. They are kidnapped and forced onto an
isolated island, where they are equipped with food, water, a
map, and a random weapon. On the island, they have to
compete in a violent death-match game till only one victor
remains. The dystopian element of the film is clear due to
the fact the government are setting children on each other.
Children a supposed symbol of innocence and peace in an
attempt to control their people.

4. Kubrick, Stanley, 1971. A
Clockwork Orange, Warner Bros
Alex DeLarge, a violent juvenile delinquent in the near future, is
caught after a number of brutal rapes and murders. While
imprisoned, he submits to a controversial experiment to make
criminals sick at the mildest suggestion of violence or conflict.
Then Alex's victims want to welcome him back into society with
the same enthusiasm he has always exhibited when performing
his crimes. He then regains his freedom in the end.
The dystopian theme is explored through the willingness of the
state to remove free will from it’s subject in their hope to stop
violence and the happily violent acts seen committed throughout
by rebellious youths. The society lacks difference and
individuality while the government is corrupt and totalitarian.

5. Booker, M.Keith, 1994. The Dystopian Impulse
in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social
Criticism, London: Greenwood Press
While literary utopias depict an ideal society and reflect an
optimistic belief in the triumph of humanity and government,
dystopias present a society marked by suffering caused by human
and political evils. This book offers a detailed study of several
literary dystopias and analyses them as social criticism. The
volume begins with a discussion of utopias, dystopias, and social
criticism. By drawing upon the theories of Freud, Nietzsche, and
others, Booker sets a firm theoretical foundation for the literary
explorations that follow. The chapters that come next discuss
Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, and Orwell's 1984 as
social criticism of totalitarianism, Stalinism, the dangers of
capitalism, and fascism. Later chapters consider dystopias after
World War II, contemporary communist dystopias, and
postmodernist dystopias in the West.

6. White, John, 2008. Fifty Key British
Films, London: Routledge
A Clockwork Orange is one of the films mentioned in this book. The chapter
discusses how the film was removed from circulation in Britain due to the
increase in copycat crime soon after the film’s release. The film was only
removed from Britain due to the fact it seemed to ‘speak to the youth of Britain,’
which seemed to comment on the state of British society at the time. It describes
how Kubrick enjoyed using ‘supposedly low culture to underdress high culture,’
as the genre of the film is usually seen as quite low brow and ‘trashy’ by the
literary elite and is used to ‘dissect both British culture and the class-fixated
school of social realism,’. The book describes how the film challenges the
meaning of the word ‘civilized’, as Kubrick made a list of all things seen as
being ‘civilized’ in Britain such as Beethoven and associates them with erotic
fantasies of juveniles. Mainly the analysis describes the rebellion of youth as
Alex and his droogs willfully discard all aspirations of appealing to a certain
class or social group and create their own existence away from the powers of
the elite.

7. Fitzgerald, John, 2010,Studying British
Cinema: 1999-2009, London: Auteur
‘Dystopian Britiain’V for Vendetta
The piece describes how the novel was made originally as a protest to
Thatcher’s government and the heavy hand of the conservative
government. An example being Thatcher’s oppression of different
sexual orientation. The film aimed to be as close to the original story.
This book discusses how V has been interpreted as a terrorist rather than
a hero by some critics. This is especially due to the Islamic bombings
that happened around the time of the film. The actual film’s release was
meant to be on the 5’th November 2005 but had to be postponed due to
the London underground bombings. This added to the controversy as it
was explicitly related to the ending of the film.
To add to the difficulty of liking the protagonist, V, the book describes
how the audience also seemed to have trouble relating to a hero with no
facial expressions.

8. Meredith Borders, 2013. ‘Book vs. Film: A Clockwork
Orange’ Lit Reactor, Accessed at 17:34 on 7th December
2014: http://litreactor.com/columns/book-vs-film-a-
clockwork-orange
The article talks about how both the film and the book of A
Clockwork Orange were misinterpreted and taken as a
narrative that glorifies sex and violence. The director talks
about how he deliberately left in many of the violent scenes
to keep the shocking effect of the book.
The film left out the sort of ‘good’ ending where Alex
realises he’s not wanting to do horrible acts anymore but
instead chooses to settle down. Burgess reacted by saying
they should have left it in because he thought there should
have at least been a little moral progress, in the film there is
none.

9. ‘katalinawatt’, 2010. ‘Studies in Dystopia: Battle
Royale’ on I’ve seen the Future. Accessed at 12:09 on
9th December 2014:
http://seenthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/studie
s-in-dystopia-battle-royale.html
The article mentions how the film adaptation of the book is
full of the same shocking gore seen throughout the novel.
The adaptation keeps that gore in to convey the shocking
environment that these children are thrust into by their
government. The film is compared to the recent film The
Hunger Games (2012, Gary Ross) and described as a more
‘amped-up version.

10. Dan Jolin, 2013. ‘V for Vendetta’ on Empire,
Accessed at 12:14 on 9th December 2014:
http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/rev
iewcomplete.asp?DVDID=117300
The review of V for Vendetta mentions how the film was marketed so
that many people thought it would be a teen action thriller, when in fact
it turned out to be a deliberate political thriller with less than five
minutes of action scenes in the film’s entirety. The article mentions how
many would have been offended by the bombs traveling in the tube but
won’t or shouldn’t be due to the nature of the totalitarian government. A
post-apocalyptic presentation of Thatcher’s Britain.
The film is described as ‘proudly post-911’ in the sense that after that
there was a lot of fear of different religious minorities circulating
through the media creating a frenzy and the film demonstrates the fear
in a deliberately over compensatory way.

11. Quentez D. Hodge, 2013. ‘V For Vendetta: The
Unraveling of a New Beginning’ Quentez D. Hodge,
Accessed at 11:30 on 8th December 2014
:http://quentezhodge.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/
v-for-vendetta-final.pdf
The essay talks about how people today, although they
don’t agree with all the government say, we have learned to
deal with it because we think there is no other way. It
mentions how V and Guy Fawkes both represent people
who have tried to change that view. Hence the Guy Fawkes
masks that V wears and encourages others to wear. The
essay explains how many of the acts in the play such as the
torture of Evey and the child being shot for wearing the
mask were added to convey to the public the extent the
government were willing to go to keep their people under
strict jurisdiction.

12. Michael Clement, ‘Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange’
Visual Memory, Accessed at 17:50 on 7th December
2014: http://www.visual-
memory.co.uk/amk/doc/interview.aco.html
In the interview they discuss how the protagonist have
reacted to the society in the way that a dystopia is in a way
their utopia. At the end of the narrative the corrupt
government come together with the violent youths in the
form of them (Alex’s old droogs) becoming police men.

13. Jonah Weiland, 2006. ‘V FOR VENDETTA: Talking With
Director James McTiegue’ Comic Book Resources,
Accessed at 16:40 on 7th December 2014:
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=articl
e&old=1&id=6685
The interview mentioned how they were able to film the
entire scene in front of the actual houses of parliament due
to the fact it’s public building. In that sense the filming
itself was a protest to the Government. They also say how it
was difficult to film some of the concentration camp scenes
due to the historical connotations, it made the process more
real as it’s actually seeing things have happened that people
universally view as atrocities.

14. Steve Erickson, 2012. ‘How 'Battle Royale' Became a Cult Hit and
Capitalized on 'The Hunger Games‘’ The Atlantic, Accessed at
13:32 on 6th Jan 2015.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/h
ow-battle-royale-became-a-cult-hit-and-capitalized-on-the-
hunger-games/254184/
Battle Royal is discussed in this article relating to it’s
affects on countries due to the content. It mentions how in
Japan it has been banned for people under the age of 15 and
mentions how the film appears to have been deliberately
‘badly’ marketed in America although also mentions how
these are merely rumours. This said the potential political
influence of the film remains clear. The article also
mentions how the director’s own experience fighting in
WWII was an inspiration for some of the scenes.

15. Jasper Sharp and Tom Mes, 2001. ‘Kinji Fukasaku’
Midnight Eye, Accessed at 20:04 on 7th January 2015.
http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/kinji-
fukasaku/
This interview with Kinji Fukasaku talks in detail about
age in the film. It talks about how the children are treated
awfully due to what is basically adults losing faith in
themselves due to the state of society.
It mentions also about how modern children are thrust
into a war like situation which caused the Japanese
government to this the film was unsuitable for children to
see.
The overall message from Fukasaku was that all of his
films are questions relating to the political state of Japan
at the time, asking ‘will this be the direction we go?’

16. Strick and Houston, 1972. ‘Interview with Stanley Kubrick
regarding A Clockwork Orange’ Sight & Sound, London: BFI
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0070.html
This interview about A Clockwork Orange with Kubrick
talks about what he has added and left out of the film. He
mentions how although Alex appears more pleasant in the
film during the prison section of the story than in the novel
but this is used to emphasise how happy and accepting he is
of his actions and therefore his truly evil nature.
The torture of Alex was made more extreme because they
needed people to be equally horrified by the actions of the
Government and seriously consider the moral decisions
behind it and put across the message that it is more evil to
take away man’s choice of being good than for a man to be
evil.