Dystopia Dyspepsia

Honey Bee - Grinderman (mp3)

I saw Blade Runner in the theater in 1982. I was 10 years old. I thought it would be some futuristic Raiders of the Lost Ark or some revisioning of Star Wars, because I was just a kid, and I understandably equated Harrison Ford with those two movie franchises.

This memory came to me because I took my two daughters to see Tron: Legacy during the holidays. The movie was difficult for me to follow -- because, well, the plot kinda sucked -- so I knew the girls were lost during most of it. Their looks of stern concentration as they tried to comprehend it reminded me of the replicants and the scene on the roof where Rutger Hauer’s character is slowly dying in the rain. The difference between the two moments is that Blade Runner got better as I got older. Tron: Legacy will continue to suck with each passing year. In that sense, I have done my dear children wrong.

The other thing that reminded me of Blade Runner was a “debate” on the NYTimes web site about the current state of young adult fiction, or YA for lingophiles. Called The Dark Side of Young Adult Fiction, the debate is about what to think of the increasingly dark, violent and “dystopian” movement in the genre.

Anyone my age who read comics in their younger days knows that dystopian and dark visions are nothing new. They weren’t even new in the ‘80s when Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns completely nuked the Archie universe of sugary gum drops with superheroes who raped and murdered and TV reporters who smiled while reading about unspeakably horrific world events.

Worse still, some 25 years after Blade Runner and The Dark Knight Returns, one would have to admit that too much of their futuristic vision is far too close to our current reality.

I spent my break quickly devouring a popular YA novel on my Christmas present, a gorgeous and cheap Kindle. The Hunger Games is certainly dark and dystopian. A more believable and better-written and Americanized version of the Japanese cult novel Battle Royale. Both are about teens chosen to duel to the death for the entertainment of a captive and somnambulently passive citizenry, and both owe origins to a history of gladiators and The Running Man by Stephen King nee Richard Bachman.

The Hunger Games is extremely popular amongst our middle school-aged boys. While I have an admitted weakness for YA fiction, this book seemed particularly well-written and danced the line between violent enough and not too violent, and it never felt particularly exploitative or bandwagon-happy the way many of the vampire genres do.

So the questions worth asking about this “trend” of violent dystopian YA novels, which is hardly a new trend, are as follows:

• Are these books merely another form of vampire novels, pure science fiction meant to entertain and bemuse?
• Are they that “dystopian,” or are these novels trying to prepare our younger generations for possible realities our parents and culture refuse to acknowledge?
• Does reading about young protagonists struggling to survive and fighting to the death for food or shelter help keep stresses about stupid bubble tests in perspective for its readers?

If indeed there’s nothing new under the sun, then these apocalyptic visions downgrading The Road into something more palatable for young teen brains are also finding slightly new ways to tell tales as old as ink and parchment. And just as A Clockwork Orange did almost half a century ago, these tales must feed some part of us that needs a warning, a fright, a shock to our malaised system.

God bless you, Nostradamus, original dyspeptic dystopian visionary. Your spirit lives on!