Dystopias: Real Ones vs. the Movies

Source: Dystopias: Real Ones vs. the Movies, Stewart Hicks, 14:42, uploaded 2024-03-07, Watch Later position 976.

Stewart Hicks opens with a walk to the beach that gradually turns into a lesson in urban control. A multi-lane highway interrupts the route, a damp tunnel carries the pedestrian underneath it, and the beach is closed without a reason that can be seen. There is no public toilet, and when the walker tries to use a tree, police officers arrive on bicycles. A camera on a nearby pole has been watching the scene. Each part of the journey looks like an ordinary inconvenience until the pieces form an environment that limits movement, denies basic needs, and observes the person who moves through it.

The city as a controlled stage

Hicks defines a utopia as a perfect, harmonious place that offers equality and freedom from war, poverty, and injustice. He connects the word to the Greek ou-topos, “no place”, which makes the ideal fictional from the start. A dystopia reverses that condition through misery and ubiquitous control. Neither term describes a place that exists in a pure form, so Hicks treats them as positions on a continuum that can be used to read real surroundings.

He uses The Truman Show to make the relation clear. Sea Haven appears as an ideal town from Truman Burbank’s point of view. It gives him pleasant houses, an easy routine, friendly neighbours, and constant sunshine. The town’s other residents and its unseen producers understand it as a stage built to contain him. Its design works because Truman cannot see the devices that monitor and direct his life.

Every city controls some people more than others. The people for whom a city has been designed may experience its restrictions as convenience, safety, or beauty. Someone outside that intended role may meet the same design as an obstacle. Hicks therefore asks which parts of an environment support ordinary life and which parts quietly remove a person’s ability to choose. He develops the test with Dr. Dan Bashara, who helps him describe six signs of dystopian design.

Movement and choice

The first question asks whether the journey home offers more than two modes of transport. Several ways to travel create room for improvisation. A broken train can leave a person with a car, a bicycle, or a walk, whilst a compact city can make those alternatives practical. Hicks links this capacity to freedom because a person can alter a plan when conditions change.

He turns to Dark City, where a small city has no known exit and its residents have forgotten that fact. At midnight, alien rulers put everyone to sleep, move them around, and give them new identities so that they can run further experiments. The fantasy of falling asleep at the start of a journey and waking at the destination becomes frightening when the journey disappears along with consciousness. The film makes the loss of choice into a loss of self.

A city can also make movement difficult through long, chaotic, draining routes. Hicks treats that as a sign that efficiency or surveillance has taken priority over personal contentment. The number of transport options does not settle the question by itself. Their usefulness depends on whether they let people change course when life interrupts the plan.

Contact with other life

The second question asks whether a person encounters other people, animals, or plants and can interact with them pleasantly. Hicks describes this contact as one reason people come to cities. Living things give a person evidence that the world extends beyond the built environment and beyond the individual self.

The contrast appears in Metropolis. The wealthy residents live above ground beside a pleasure garden, whilst the workers live below in a world of concrete and machines. The underground city removes the forms of life that make a place feel shared. Community, animals, and plants then become signs of an environment that allows coexistence and pleasure. Their absence can show that the city has been arranged around a hierarchy that gives some people access to life while others maintain the system below them.

Access to the visible city

The third question asks what a person sees when looking up. How much of that view contains space that is physically and functionally accessible, and how much contains clear sky? A view can suggest openness whilst the ground remains closed to the person who is looking.

Hicks uses Chicago’s lakefront as the local example. A person can see the lake and still struggle to reach it because a freeway or private condominiums block the route. The city has made the destination visible while withholding access. Public space therefore depends on paths, entrances, and permission as much as on what appears in a photograph.

Elysium gives the same arrangement a science-fiction form. The Earth has been damaged, and the wealthy escape to a floating space-station paradise. The poor remain on the ruined planet below. Hicks treats the elevated refuge as a recurring image in apocalyptic fiction, where survival takes place above the damaged ground. A penthouse or high balcony can give a person a view over the whole terrain and the power to plan from that height. The people below inherit a city they can see without being able to use it.

Environmental danger

The fourth question asks which parts of a walk could kill a person: air, water, other people, machines, buildings, animals, food, infrastructure, noise, or temperature. The list makes danger part of the ordinary environment rather than a single dramatic event.

Hicks uses Soylent Green as the clearest example. Technology and pollution have damaged the world, leaving people dependent on a processed food called Soylent Green. The film’s late revelation is that the food consists of dead people. Its dystopia joins environmental collapse to a system that turns human bodies into a resource, then hides that process from the people who depend on it.

The test concerns more than whether a city contains hazards. It asks which hazards the environment makes ordinary, who bears them, and whether the system gives residents enough knowledge or power to avoid them.

Goods, services, and bureaucratic identity

The fifth question asks what happens when a person needs a public or commercial service. Does the process move through a confusing chain of anonymous encounters, or does it address the need with speed and clarity? Hicks jokes that a utopian film about bureaucracy would be unbearably dull, then treats the difference as a measure of how a city regards a person’s time and dignity.

Brazil supplies the dystopian case. The protagonist goes to the Ministry of Information to escape a bureaucratic problem. When he gives his name, the staff tell him to go upstairs. He asks whether they want to see his identification and points out that he could be anyone. They answer that he could not be anyone. The scene turns bureaucracy into a system that decides a person’s identity before the person can explain himself. Its cruelty comes from the loss of possible action as much as from the delay.

Efficient service can support autonomy when the process stays clear and accountable. A sequence of anonymous procedures can make control feel like administration, especially when a resident has no way to challenge the category assigned to them.

Surveillance and the inner self

The sixth question asks how many hours of the day a person’s location, actions, conversations, or thoughts are recorded. The extent and type of surveillance reveal the relation between trust and power in a city. Transparent monitoring with clear limits can coexist with privacy. Pervasive monitoring gives an authority the ability to treat personal freedom as a problem of order.

Science-fiction dystopias often make the inner self the final territory of surveillance. Minority Report moves beyond the question of where a person is and asks whether a system can watch what the person is thinking. The possibility is frightening because it removes the private space in which a person can form an intention before acting on it. A camera on a pole is easy to overlook. A system that claims access to the unseen parts of a person leaves nowhere outside its account.

The catch inside the ideal

Hicks returns to the warning that people in power can turn a pleasant feature into a device of control. A city can offer sunshine, order, efficient movement, and attractive public space while assigning each person a narrow role within the arrangement. The Truman Show expresses the problem in its final exchange: Truman’s apparent freedom exists inside a world that has been built to keep him there.

The six questions give a way to examine that tension at street level. Their answers depend on who lives in the city and whose needs its design serves. A place can feel utopian to the person who receives access, comfort, and protection, whilst the same structures can make another person’s movement, privacy, or dignity harder to sustain.

Limits

This note follows Hicks’s English captions, the supplied description, and the interview’s examples. The description provides no chapters, bibliography, linked research, or named studies beyond Dr. Dan Bashara’s contribution. The interpretations of The Truman Show, Dark City, Metropolis, Elysium, Soylent Green, Brazil, and Minority Report therefore remain part of the video’s argument rather than independently checked film or urban-history claims.

The six questions form a useful set of prompts for looking at a city. They do not measure whether a place is utopian or dystopian, and they cannot by themselves establish who designed a restriction or why it exists. Hicks presents them as a way to notice the relation between built form, autonomy, and power before deciding what a particular feature means.