It is one of the most anticipated releases of 2024. fallout, adaptation of the video game saga, will arrive on Prime Video on April 12. Taking place on an Earth devastated by a nuclear catastrophe, this anticipation fiction envisages a near future transformed into a nightmare. In the jargon, the exercise takes the sweet name of dystopia, a genre which has invaded the small screen in recent years. Let’s quote Black Mirror, released in December 2011, which imagined the possible abuses of the use of new technologies. Or the totalitarian universe of The Handmaid’s Tale, in which fertile women are exploited by a childless elite. Not forgetting the recent post-apocalyptic (and pandemic) narrative The Last of Usone of the great successes of 2023 (second best launch of the decade on HBO).
A sign of our good mental health
Covid-19, war in the Middle East and at the gates of Europe, climate crisis… In an anxiety-provoking international context, how can we explain this fascination? First, out of interest in these subjects. “The series fans I interviewed are worried about today’s world, but they see these series as aids to thinking, analyzes Marine Malet, doctor in information and communication sciences, researcher at the University of Bergen, at the origin of a thesis on the subject. For some, it is almost a civic gesture, a way of raising awareness and documenting the themes covered. And then, there is a cathartic function in watching them.”
But this craze is also directly linked to the current period. Dystopian production has undergone changes throughout history, explains Aurélie Huz, lecturer in French literature at Paris-Nanterre University, specialist in science fiction and media cultures: “In literature, we see that the genre grew in power at the same time as concern around the arrival of new political ideologies, capitalism and socialism, in the first half of the 20th century. In the 1960s, it flourished when we began to become aware of the consequences of industrialization on the environment or the population.” Looking at the great successes of recent years, our anxieties would therefore focus on the excesses of digital technologies, the climate crisis or even transhumanism.
Rest assured, however: disenchanted, the viewer of 2024 nevertheless enjoys good mental health. “If the main function of dystopia is to warn, this gesture of anticipation is itself a bearer of hope: that of warning in order to avoid, collectively, the occurrence of imagined situations,” explains Marine Malet. So everything is not dark in dystopian series, which above all remain a pleasure to watch. “Viewing them has nothing to do with reading an IPCC report, Aurélie Huz reassures us. Fiction allows this detour towards themes that we do not like to see in reality. We approach them because the we know that we are in the imagination. And we must not forget that what makes a story is difficulty and confrontation. There are also narrative imperatives.” Certain series, such as post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, broadcast in France at the end of 2022, are even tinged with optimism. In this fiction, where a deadly flu has decimated the population, the survivors will try to rebuild a world, while trying to keep the best of the old. Utopian, you say?
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