sheldrake

clara_swift, I have done the homework you asked for.

Ha ha, now you have to read it.



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The Changing Nature of Change: Modern Dystopias from Lang to Busted

"Well, I've been to the year 3000, Not much had changed but they lived underwater" ("Year 3000", Busted, 2003).

Not much had changed but they lived underwater.

What are we to make of this seemingly paradoxical claim from Busted's classic 2003 opus? Is it yet another example of the ever-deteriorating standards of literacy in Western culture? Or is it possible that we can hear in this apparently throwaway lyric an echo of a disaffected generation; a generation betrayed by history, by authority, by technology, by the very idols set up for it to worship? And how can we hope to reconcile this echo, this sonic vision if you will, with the classic utopia/dystopia dichotomy, a paradigm that has been our mistress, master and whipping boy ever since More published his seminal work? Do we, in fact, need now to create a new future? A new future for an imagined future generation living in an imagined future unimaginable by us (the 'us', the never more generic 'we', of the 21st Century) from this, our lonely position of life lived on the precipice of the many imagined futures of earlier generations?

Or not?

I would like to begin, if I may, by discussing Fritz Lang's early influential masterpiece, Metropolis, 1927. Much, indeed, has already been written about this work, but perhaps it may be argued that most critical analysis misses a vital point -- the beating heart, the lifeblood, if you will -- that lies at the centre of Lang's vision. This point being:

'Why is Metropolis so quiet?'

It is after all, a city, an urban centre. Surely this city of 'Metropolis' (whether the Metropolis of the workers' underground caverns, or the above-ground, daylit Metropolis that is the pleasure garden of the upper classes) would be teeming with all the clamour and riotousness and essential glorious noise of concentrated humanity? But, no. The city is as silent as the grave. Its residents, be they lower or upper, rich or poor, are forced to communicate visually, in written messages (a precursor, perhaps, of the age of the text-message, and Internet Chat). But let us return again to the lyric with which I began this essay:

"Well, I've been to the year 3000, Not much had changed but they lived underwater"

They lived (note use of past tense here - are the authors suggesting that notions of time, of 'before' and 'after', of 'past', 'present' and 'future', are redundant in this post-postmodern, post feminist, post-past-post-future-post-everything present?) underwater. When we are underwater, sound is muted, distorted, transformed. Could it be that, far from the lightweight, throwaway snippet of muzak, the strip of wallpaper ripped from the background of youthful 21st Century lives that it appears to be, Year 3000 is a heartfelt cry, a plea, a whale-song booming low and plaintive across the wide oceans of modern existence? Where, they ask, is the future you (by which they (the generic 'they' of 'them') mean the generic 'you' of 'us') promised us in your wild imaginings? Where is our neat, easily navigated, 20th Century science-fictional black/white, good/bad, rich/poor divide? Where, in short, is our sexually alluring lady robot?

Where indeed? Once again, Busted have their finger on the pulse of the fly in the ointment of our own modern dystopia:

"I fight my way to front of class, to get the best view of her ass / I drop a pencil on the floor, she bends down and shows me more." ('What I go to School For', Busted, 2002)

Here, Busted are clearly pointing to a parallel between the carefully ordered world of Lang's underclass, and the rigid, dictatorial, essentially safe structure of the contemporary education system. But it is, ultimately, a false sense of security. One day, the structure will collapse, the machine will topple, and the workers/students will be 'set free' to deal with the chaos of adult life as best they can. Sexuality (the spectre of Lang's mechanical goddess/whore) is both empowerment and trap in this process. Here, Busted reference the ongoing Maria/false Maria duality, in their invocation of What I go to School For's 'Miss Mackenzie', as can be deduced from this text taken from their official website:

The boys are naturally reticent about naming their own individual Miss Mackenzies - they insist she's an amalgam of every single, female teacher ever encountered... ('The Band', busted.com, 2002).

Where is she indeed, this elusive 'Miss Mackenzie'? Is she alive and well in the hearts and abdomens of the young male population? Or is she an anachronism, a useless faded ghost, blowing in the wind of change?

Perhaps we should seek the answer to this question in the sweaty, beer-stained nightclubs, the smoke-emburdened public houses, the dayglo, acid-tinged, vomit-encrusted Saturday morning cartoon marathons of the fractured, disillusioned, ultimately tragic phenomenon that is Modern Youth. Perhaps we may find it in the syncopated gyrations of their popular dance groups, the steady beat of their drug-induced techno rhythms, the carefully plucked eyebrows and relentless, desperate gurning of their plastic idols?

Or perhaps it lies further back, in the original Utopia of that foreshadowing of the modern day guru, Thomas More. On the face of it this seems unlikely, as More (that early precursor of the celebrity television talk-show host) is so undeniably old and dead. As Jason Hans Klein explains in his essay, An Island of Socialism in Sixteenth Century Europe; Socialism in the Utopia of Sir Thomas More:

More is like his Utopians, simply contemplating what would be nice, a daydream maybe. [...] More's Utopia anticipates the characteristics of a modern classless society, though not proposing any means by which to obtain this blissful paradise.

In other words, More is, ultimately, quite rubbish.

To conclude then, Year 3000 must surely be seen as not merely worthless detritus, as junk, as a screwed-up wrapper from a Big Happy Mac Fast Forward Whopper Meal, but as a message from a new underclass, a class made up of our young, our children, our 'fair, apple-cheeked youth'. These, then, are the offspring of 'Metropolis', of 'Bladerunner', of 'Cheggers Plays Pop'. And this, therefore, is a message not merely from the heart of our society, but from our very own 'imagined future'.

I could scarcely do better than to end this essay with Eric Alan Hatch's words on Lang's film in The Baltimore City Paper:

...if [it] has a simple political message, it's that things get worse before they get better--and that things don't get better by themselves. (Hatch in The Baltimore City Paper, 2003.)

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I can't believe I actually spent valuable time doing that.