Society “gone wrong” somehow in the future, that’s what’s pictured in a “dystopia.” George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel, “1984,” written nearly 70 years ago, is presently in extraordinary demand with its harrowing vision of a technologically totalitarian state serving to caution us of what can easily come of current trends. The rich tradition of dystopian fiction has yielded an equally rich canon of dystopian dramas in the theatre and cinema, with a range
of source material from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 anti-fascist “It Can’t Happen Here” through Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 medically terrifying “Never Let Me Go.” Original dystopian films include a panoply of classics from the postapocalyptic “Mad Max” to the animated robotic future of Pixar’s “Wall-E.” Our dystopias mirror our present social anxieties by dramatizing their possible consequences, they underline the fatal flaws in our imagined utopias, and they have provided an extraordinary videography of compelling dramas. This course will screen ample material from that body of work and analyze its artistic and social significance.