Directed by Mark RomanekWritten by Alex Garland, Kazuo Ishiguro (novel)
Why is it that we’re so engaged by dystopian fantasies? Why the fascination with a world that has headed off, or will head off, down a different and more problematic route to our own? After all, there unquestionably is a fascination there – going back through Blade Runner, Nineteen Eighty-Fout, Metropolis, to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and far more points in between than I’ll be going into here*. And if the surge in popularity of counterfactual novels (or alternative histories, or uchronia) is anything to go by, it’s an allure that’s growing.
But why? Perhaps it’s because we live in uncertain times, and on-screen bleakness and suffering holds up a mirror to threats in the world we live in, much as Hollywood’s golden age of horror in the 30s and 40s coincided with darkness beyond the cinema’s walls. Perhaps we’ve become used to a world so controlled and understood that any risk posed by events beyond our control seems exaggerated in its size and menace. Or perhaps we just like to be reminded of how much worse things could be, perhaps it offers a crumb of comfort in showing us that life isn’t all that bad after all.
Most dystopian and counterfactual stories deal with big, dramatic changes: the Nazis won the war, Napoleon conquered the world, robots became intelligent, society collapsed under a global nuclear conflict, Kennedy wasn’t killed, Franz Ferdinand wasn’t killed, Hitler was. However, in reality, it’s just as often small details and lifestyle changes that end up setting history on a different course entirely – changes that might not be noticed at the time, just as the passengers on a train don’t see the points being changed.
As I’m writing this, physicists at the CERN institute are announcing that they’re a significant step closer to proving the existence of the Higgs field, an invisible flood of energy spread throughout the universe, thought to be responsible for allowing atoms to have the mass they need to exist. It’s a big day for physics, with a number of others hopefully to come, and gives hope of the answers the project was looking to find. Yet CERN has had a dramatic and unexpected impact on all of our lives (definitely on your life, you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise): the software designed for sending data and theories and whatnot back and forth around the globe became the world wide web.
These changes, slow-burning, little-noticed-at-the-time but ultimately huge, frequently emerge from technological and scientific discoveries, slowly filtering out from the academic community until they leave no-one untouched. There are few if any counterfactual tales that ask ‘what if Jenner hadn’t discovered the smallpox vaccination?’ or ‘what if Lister hadn’t given the world antiseptic medicine?’, probably with very good reason from a literary point of view, but that doesn’t mean they transformed the world any less entirely.
The world-changing breakthrough in Never Let Me Go is a medical one too. But it’s also a discovery that's morally very questionable, one that saves countless lives while harming others. Most importantly, it’s one viewed solely from the point of view of those who are harmed by it, those whose lives are not transformed for the better but lessened and shortened by the change. This is where the dystopia exists – not for all those saved, happy and presumably either ignorant of the harm caused to others or choosing to look the other way, but for those who have to live a fractured shadow of a life.
All of which raises a difficult question – to what extent, if any, should we be allowed to cause suffering in order to save lives? Never Let Me Go, though raising the question poignantly and from the heart, does not seek to impose answers. What it does, and does with great panache and elegance, fragile and delicate, is to give a very human dimension to a deeply moral question. Not all dystopian tales must be universal; sometimes, a brighter future for the many ends up being built on the suffering of the few.
But why? Perhaps it’s because we live in uncertain times, and on-screen bleakness and suffering holds up a mirror to threats in the world we live in, much as Hollywood’s golden age of horror in the 30s and 40s coincided with darkness beyond the cinema’s walls. Perhaps we’ve become used to a world so controlled and understood that any risk posed by events beyond our control seems exaggerated in its size and menace. Or perhaps we just like to be reminded of how much worse things could be, perhaps it offers a crumb of comfort in showing us that life isn’t all that bad after all.
Most dystopian and counterfactual stories deal with big, dramatic changes: the Nazis won the war, Napoleon conquered the world, robots became intelligent, society collapsed under a global nuclear conflict, Kennedy wasn’t killed, Franz Ferdinand wasn’t killed, Hitler was. However, in reality, it’s just as often small details and lifestyle changes that end up setting history on a different course entirely – changes that might not be noticed at the time, just as the passengers on a train don’t see the points being changed.
As I’m writing this, physicists at the CERN institute are announcing that they’re a significant step closer to proving the existence of the Higgs field, an invisible flood of energy spread throughout the universe, thought to be responsible for allowing atoms to have the mass they need to exist. It’s a big day for physics, with a number of others hopefully to come, and gives hope of the answers the project was looking to find. Yet CERN has had a dramatic and unexpected impact on all of our lives (definitely on your life, you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise): the software designed for sending data and theories and whatnot back and forth around the globe became the world wide web.
These changes, slow-burning, little-noticed-at-the-time but ultimately huge, frequently emerge from technological and scientific discoveries, slowly filtering out from the academic community until they leave no-one untouched. There are few if any counterfactual tales that ask ‘what if Jenner hadn’t discovered the smallpox vaccination?’ or ‘what if Lister hadn’t given the world antiseptic medicine?’, probably with very good reason from a literary point of view, but that doesn’t mean they transformed the world any less entirely.
The world-changing breakthrough in Never Let Me Go is a medical one too. But it’s also a discovery that's morally very questionable, one that saves countless lives while harming others. Most importantly, it’s one viewed solely from the point of view of those who are harmed by it, those whose lives are not transformed for the better but lessened and shortened by the change. This is where the dystopia exists – not for all those saved, happy and presumably either ignorant of the harm caused to others or choosing to look the other way, but for those who have to live a fractured shadow of a life.
All of which raises a difficult question – to what extent, if any, should we be allowed to cause suffering in order to save lives? Never Let Me Go, though raising the question poignantly and from the heart, does not seek to impose answers. What it does, and does with great panache and elegance, fragile and delicate, is to give a very human dimension to a deeply moral question. Not all dystopian tales must be universal; sometimes, a brighter future for the many ends up being built on the suffering of the few.
*Not least because there's no shortage of such lists out there; dystopianfilms.com is as good a place to start as any.
No comments:
Post a Comment