Types of Dystopos: Pangaea

Panem in The Hunger Games; Eurasia in 1984; the Magisterium of The Golden Compass

Tectonic theory posits that the earth is actually a series of plates floating on molten metal. The continents used to be smashed together in a giant supercontinent that geologists call “Pangaea.” It suggests a simpler world, where you could walk from one side of the extant world to the other; it’s a world that’s almost impossible to imagine as contiguous with our own, Brazil and Nigeria next door neighbors, Russia and Alaska and Canada all one big hunting ground.

In dystopian fiction, a similar move happens: in 1984, we have neither Great Britain nor Russia nor China but Oceania and Eurasia and Eastasia. In The Hunger Games, we have Panem (a word that is probably originally a play on “panem et circenses,” the Latin for “bread and circuses”, but also nicely captures the idea of a pan-encompassing nation-state).

Goodwhere, Badwhere, Nowhere, Thiswhere

Dystopian novels are hot right now: my dad has been reading them like crazy—the Uglies series, the Hunger Games series (check out my review of The Hunger Games series: 1, 2, and 3), the novel Matched, and more and more. I liked them before they were cool—right?—I remember being in high school, senior year, reading 1984 and Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 and the rest.  Now we've seen an explosion of dystopian fiction.

The easiest answer for this sudden trend in popularity is this: most teenagers and young adults like them, and now that YA literature is hot, dystopian novels are hot, too. I can imagine why I as a young adult, just learning the shadier undersides of everything from economics to politics to religion to authority in general, would enjoy reading books where the entire world is slightly askew: to wit, it was the way I saw the world I was living in already anyway.

Devil's Party or Not

My friends and I get in fights about Milton occasionally. (/nerdalert) There are basically two readings of Milton. William Blake felt that Milton was “of the devil’s party without knowing it” — that in writing Paradise Lost, Milton lost control of one unruly character named Satan. Stanley Fish instead argues that Milton was fully in control of his work and that the seductiveness of Satan is part of the story’s message.


It's really a question of how much power do you attribute to an author and how much to the reader. When I argue with my Milton fan-friends, I find myself pulling away from attributing too much genius even to a genius like Milton; when I argue with my science-oriented friends, I find myself pushing them to think that "yes maybe Moby Dick is a symbol for something other than a whale." Everyone falls somewhere along the spectrum, and everyone falls somewhere different depending on how much they like -- or understand -- the work and the author in question.

Lad Theory

Last Saturday, I was drawn into a random conversation with strangers at a friend's birthday party. I listened to a guy, mid-thirties, make generalizations about sex and love and make indirect asides about his ex-fiancee and his friends -- and then I piped up, "Oh, isn't this just ladder theory or Harry Met Sally stuff?" It didn't phase him -- he just said no, it was his own theory, and a good one, about how men can't be friends with women whom they're attracted to.



Like your eighteen-year-old cousin who makes up "quotes" that are actually misremembered lines from old Modest Mouse tunes, I find a certain type of guy tends to regurgitate the Ladder Theory, whether they've read it or heard it recycled in fraternity discussions or actually tapped into that original vein of nice-guy-resentment from which the theory springs. Guys are simple! they'll have sex with anyone. Girls are impossible! they have two ladders: guys they'll sleep with and guys they won't. The theory recycles familiar tropes like the "friend zone" and the "nice guy" -- though here they're given ever-affectionate terms like "abyss" and "intellectual whore."

The Uninvited Other Identity We Sensed at the Fight Club

Sara and I went to see Shutter Island last Friday -- mostly because it was the film showing at the St. Louis Moolah Theatre (and who can pass up an opportunity to sit in leather couches in an old Masonic lodge, watching movies on a giant screen?), but partly because it was a thriller and partly because it's a Scorsese film and partly because of Leonardo DiCaprio. It's about two US federal marshals who come to investigate the disappearance of an escaped woman from a island-locked mental institution for the criminally insane.

And so the film begins rather provocatively: two men who barely know each other, visiting a very scary place on a very solitary island in what appears to be a thickening storm, trying to get information from increasingly recalcitrant and resistant hospital leaders and guards, mixed with unnecessary flashbacks to WW2 and their death camps which are meant to resonate with the possibly evil machinations of a hospital for the insane in the 1950s. So far so good, yes?


So does the film move in the direction of a horror film, where the lights go out, the storm sets in, and all the evil criminals run loose, doing unforeseen violence? or does the film move in the direction of a political thriller -- i.e. the push for further information slowly reveals deeper and darker levels of conspiracy and manipulation? or does the film become a psychological thriller, where the hero's psychological pressures begin to bleed into the dilemmas of the villains, unsettling reality as we know it?

Anatomy of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

So Sara and I went to see (500) Days of Summer last Thursday. This was not technically her desire, because she could see that it was a wet, sappy, soppy, sorry hipster mess just from the soundtrack of its trailer. It was my desire, because I read how it subverted some cliches of the romantic comedy -- and because I secretly love romantic comedies, as long as they weren't so predictable.

Days of Summer (apparently you can remove the 500 without damaging the title) recycles the classic notion of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a cliche whose recent history I'd like to trace here. It all begins with that beautiful wish-fulfillment fantasy of guy-meets-girl, guy-is-brooding, girl-teaches-guy-how-not-to-brood, a fixer-upper relationship, thanks, you can drive him off the lot now. It works because the guy is vulnerable and scared of rejection and smart and deep and hard-working but has trouble with the opposite sex and hey guys that's just like me! And so we sit down in the theatre and we empathize -- and then the guy gets the girl finally, or the girl dies and the guy becomes a doctor or an architect and then visits her grave. (either way, you win?)