Could dystopias get any worse?
State censorship and government oppression are terrifying and have no place in a democratic society. These are practices that belong in books and films as a cautionary tale.
Here are movies and series depicting life under an authoritarian regime, one that stifles individual freedom and practices state censorship. I can’t stress this enough; this is unrelated to any real-life events or news stories that might have come up lately. No relation at all.
The Wave (YouTube)
This film shocked me when I saw it in 2008, and it is still unnervingly relevant. The Wave is based on a real-life classroom experiment from the 1960s, when a teacher tried to show students how fascism can rise again.
Rainer launches a project to demonstrate the appeal of autocracy. He starts small with uniforms, slogans and a salute mimicking a wave. While Rainer wanted to show how quickly people lose their individuality, the experiment rapidly gets out of control. The students fall in line faster than anyone expects, and by the end of the week the classroom has become a movement called The Wave, complete with symbols and a willingness to target outsiders.
The Man in the High Castle (Prime Video)
All World War II aficionados eventually come to ask the same question: what if the Nazis won? In 1962, sci-fi author Philip K Dick asked that question when he wrote The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history where the Allies lost World War II. The United States, following a nuclear bomb dropped on Washington and the Japanese launching a full-scale invasion of the West Coast, is carved up. The Nazis control the East, the Japanese Empire the West, and in between lies a thin neutral zone that is basically the Wild West with more fascism and fewer saloons.
During the occupation, we meet characters striving to make it through everyday life. Many of them are inspired by a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, banned in the Reich because it proposes the unthinkable: an alternate reality where the Nazis lost. The author of that blasphemous publication? A man cryptically known as ‘the Man in the High Castle’.
The genius of the show is not just the big “what if” premise. It is the everyday details. The American flags with swastikas, the propaganda broadcasts, the sense of dread when ordinary citizens realise that collaboration is the only way to survive.
The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
“Women don’t need feminism” is a cry often repeated, especially in the, well let’s just call them “you-should-know-your-place” circles. Author Margaret Atwood respectfully disagrees and paints a future where women are one step removed from being property. Once more, we are in alternate history America where fertility rates have plummeted due to war and environmental factors. A theocratic state where women are brutally subjugated and fertile women are assigned as property to powerful men.
The imagery became instantly iconic. Red robes, white bonnets, faces bowed in obedience. You know. Fiction. No way this would happen in real life, right? Atwood said that she invented nothing and that every atrocity in the book and series has a precedent.
June is arrested in her attempt to flee to Canada with her husband and daughter but is captured and assigned as a Handmaid to Commander Fred Waterford. As her new master and everyone around her try to erase her personality, June clings to her individual self and refuses to give in.
Children of Men (YouTube)
Extinction through infertility is not an uncommon theme in dystopian sci-fi. Children of Men, released in 2006, imagines a world where humanity has become infertile. No children have been born for nearly two decades. Civilisation has collapsed and Britain has turned into a fortress state. Refugees are hunted down, people are corralled into cages, and propaganda screams from every wall. Fiction, of course.
Clive Owen plays Theo, a former activist turned jaded bureaucrat after the death of his son. One day Theo stumbles into the one miracle left on earth. A young woman who is pregnant. Protecting her becomes the central mission and Theo decides to risk everything to get her to a scientific group in the Azores focusing on curing human infertility.
Chernobyl (HBO Max)
Not all authoritarian nightmares are fiction. HBO’s Chernobyl dramatised the Soviet Union’s handling of the 1986 nuclear disaster, and it was more chilling than any sci-fi thriller. The show depicts how a system built on secrecy and fear of political repercussions can turn an accident into a catastrophe.
It tells the story of how corrupt, incompetent government officials mishandled the meltdown as well as the trial that followed.