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Utopia and Dystopia
Lecture Series ‘Provocations’ - GCOP200
Utopias are places that are usually illusionary, communities of perfect or near-perfect quality and members of the society are equal.
Dystopias are the opposite of such, meaning they focus on the destruction of society and a future in which there is a totalitarian regiment and a collective feeling of a post-apocalyptic world.
Utopias usually consist of images of 'heaven' and nature, the garden of eden, in Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' 1928, the beautiful women-laden garden is presented as a better world, and ideal world, but even then the main character is subjected to a feeling of being isolated and left behind by a woman from the 'other side', of which drags him into the dystopian settlement of the Metropolis. Within this film, the utopia is presented as being fun and playful, meanwhile the dystopia is hard-working and mindless.
Dystopias and Utopias have become a major topic and are used profusely within modern culture, games, films, writing and all art tend to skew the view of their created world in order to portray either a Utopian or Dystopian culture. Hideo Kojima's game 'Death Stranding' provides a brilliant view of a dystopia that also visually presents itself as utopian to some extent. Norman Reedus' character 'Sam' is profoundly against helping the heads of the UCA or the United Cities of America. However as he is bound by blood to serve this large company 'Bridges' he finds himself struggling to let go of the family members within that company that he left behind. Along the surreal elements of this game, Kojima presents a most amazing and visually stunning view of the world, the America he envisions of the future, where links and communications between one another become severed, and death leaves physical craters in the world.
Of course there are many more instances of Utopia and Dystopias being used in the making of certain texts and media. Seeing as it's something on many of the minds in our society, with current affairs diversifying people and their political stances, some quickly bring their opinions to an ultimatum, believing the world to either drop into dystopia or already be dystopian.
Technology a lot of the time is attributed to be an issue or a guideline for a dystopian future. Especially considering the older generations of this time and the fact they are not as exposed to the positives of technology, many feel that the anti-social nature of using phones and screens ruins physical encounters with the natural world. However its quite easy to see how the younger generation are more in touch with technology and are more understanding of how it aids general life. To many people technology represents a rise in knowledge, medicine, communication between people around the globe and safer work. Throughout human history, people are both afraid of change and yearning for it. This is something brought up a lot when it comes to politics.
Utopia and Dystopia in Games
DYSTOPIAN EXAMPLE: Metal Gear Solid
If WW2 never ended, how would have that changed technological advancements. Plus political themes, brutalist architecture to signify industrialism, arms race. War is bad, anti-fascist. More linear, you start being able to explore to some degree and then you are told what to do from that point on.
DYSTOPIAN EXAMPLE: Death Stranding
If the world was to suffer a ‘Death Stranding’ to the scale of a large mass extinction event, how would our society survive? How does the job of a ‘porter’ become the most important in this landscape. Also how death and the afterlife return to our realities in a world designed or expected to overcome death.
UTOPIAN EXAMPLE: Earthbound
Director of Earthbound presents the world of the game as a childhood world he yearns for. However at the end it becomes psychoanalytical and follows a view of if utopias are even worth working for or even relevant. Quite linear but gives into a very deep and echoing story line.
UTOPIAN EXAMPLE: Okami
A game literally about transforming the dead and dying world into a new and nature filled world, you play as the god of the sun / life, plays as if you are the artist of the sumie-like world, with open-world exploration and paintbrush.
UTOPIAN / DYSTOPIAN EXAMPLE: Mother 3
This game is part of the Earthbound series, it begins with a focus on the importance of family, familial bonds and are presented with a fun and loving neighbourhood that everyone resides in, as the game progresses you slowly watch the people of the villiage disappear and realise they are moving into the ‘big city’ where capitalism runs amok.
NEW GAME BASED ON EXAMPLES:
Group of childhood friends, travelling through a current time world war 2 zone, they trying to clean it up for the sake of a future, coming to the end of it they realise what's the point of cleaning a world war torn and never to be fixed. Kids are the only ones able to traverse these lands because there's a common law that the children cannot be killed, everyone else is free reign.
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Hauntology and Nostalgia
Lecture Series: Provocations - GCOP200
Hauntology is the concept that focuses on elements of the past and how they continue to exist in the present. Sometimes in the form of the ethereal and memory. Ghosts are the embodiement of hautology, something from the past iterating as something feasible and palpable in the present and future.
Hauntology can also be construed as 'pining for a future that never arrived' - Mark Fisher. Meaning the lost hope of a postmodern society that functions in a better manner than the current capitalist structure. Nostalgia and Hauntology both relate to art and adaptation in their own ways.
La La Land is the nostalgia for old musicals. The sentimental attatchment to that genre and the return to them.
Disney remakes are almost carbon copies, but the investment into these films is far too large for them to not use it. Each newer film had come up to around £1 billion gross earning.
The Monster Raving Loony Raving Party Manifestó (1997) - The Ministry of Nostalgia
Yearning for a life and remembering a time that did not exist, a time that we can only wish for, they view nostalgia as an unreal but beautiful space that is filled by our own notion of 'perfect'.
Modifying the image of the past. Doesn't come close to the truth.
The 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster, originally war propaganda, has now become the image of a bygone Britain. Only mass produced in 2008, perhaps due to the depression people found the poster to invoke what needed to be brought into the world. The stoicism of Britain.
Misremembering the history and past of Britain, common ideology of the masses.
Nostalgia is also quite universally used as a political tool, examples:
Brexit holds the belief that we are 'better alone'. As a people we’ve viewed ourselves as being independent, that what the Brexit vote thrived on.
Donald Trump, created a massive nostalgia over the term ‘Make America Great Again’ even though many failed to understand when and how exactly was America ‘Great’, some believe Trump’s understanding of ‘great’ is when slave labour was still a hit.
Svetlanya Boym - The Future of Nostalgia
Nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time.
Examples of hauntology in film:
A Ghost Story - 2016 - David Lowery
Watching the watcher, the womans husbands ghost waits for her. Abandons hollywood pacing. Deleuze Cinema 2.
Boards of Canada - future technical sounds now being used for a feeling of the past the nostalgia.
As I Was Moving Ahead - Jonas Mekas
Viewing almost 5 hours edited footage of old home movies alongside voiceover of Mekas, noting the beauty and nostalgia of the past, how to let it go and how to appreciate the real and present. The way its edited shows the chaotic and non-chronological way in which we remember memories.
Hauntology and Ontology - both studies of the gone and the being.
The 'ghost' is important in hauntology, the form of the past figuratively imparting itself in the future.
Buse and Scott - Ghosts Deconstruction Psychoanalysis
Jaques Derrida - Spectres of Marx - how the past informs the present. Non - origin, things exists without time, with live in an amorphous state of time and place.
Time is out of joint.
Other example of Hauntology and Nostaliga existing within film or other media:
‘Death Stranding’ 2019 - Hideo Kojima, a game based on the world having hideous connections with the dead, when they come into contact with you a massive explosion wipes out a mile radius. The dead are portrayed as ‘BT’s’ in this world, and show themselves as ghost-like figures attatched to the ground via umbilical cords, Kojima’s creative vision views the dead as something less honorable which is a major wind from the general assumption that the dead are dead within games. As the main character in the game ‘Sam Porter Bridges’ is also a sufferer of ‘DOOMS’ which isn't fully explained but so far the common understanding is that he can move between the world of the dead or the ‘Beach’ and the world of the living, as a consequence of this, he can revive himself from certain death.
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