Guest post: A pointed dystopia
Originally a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room.
I came across this review in Inverse magazine about a Netflix movie called Uglies. The focus of the review is how this is a 2014-style movie that came out ten years too late, for reasons I don’t understand. Apparently there was a YA (“young adult fiction”) dystopian craze ten years ago?
The movie features a dystopian society in which all citizens are required at 16 to undergo cosmetic surgery to become “Pretty”, after which they move to City, an idyllic community where nothing goes wrong and everyone is happy. The central teen character starts questioning the merits of being Pretty, and the motivations of Dr Cable, the person in charge of the project. She flees and joins a resistance group that has discovered the surgery is more than cosmetic: it affects the brain, making people more docile and less able to think for themselves.
The reviewer thinks the story line is ambiguous enough that people can make of it what they wish, but it screams “transgender ideology” to me. This is enhanced by the fact that Dr Cable is portrayed by Laverne Cox, a well-known trans-identified male actor. The review notes as much:
It’s a great villainous scheme within the story, but from the outside looking in, it’s hard for it not to feel icky: Laverne Cox, a trans woman, is playing the role of an evil mastermind brainwashing children into getting life-changing surgeries without them knowing the true side effects. It doesn’t take that much of a leap to turn this beautiful supervillain into a right-wing talking point.
Perhaps it could be a right-wing talking point, but surely it’s a point for anyone opposed to unnecessary cosmetic surgery done to meet societal demands rather than medical needs, and that’s not unique to one side of the political spectrum.
The YA dystopia “craze” was just studios’ attempt to cash in on the success of The Hunger Games.
In the book space, YA novels have always had a strong amount of dystopia, since the story structure works well as a metaphor for adolescence and change. I certainly read my fair share of novels involving coming-of-age surgeries, implantations, etc.
I suspect the author of the review thinks there was a YA dystopian craze ten years ago because she was in the target audience for YA fiction ten years ago. Now she’s a they and I don’t like that anymore, mom!
A bit of searching finds a dozen or two YA dystopian novels turned into films in the period around 2013-2018. I hadn’t noticed, but other people did and wrote articles about it. So the reviewer (who is, as noted a young woman who demands “they” pronouns) has a valid point. YA dystopian fiction has been around for a long time, and is still popular, but there was a boom time for movies.
Personally, I think there are a lot of good dystopian novels, some of which might be classed as YA, and some may work well as movies, regardless of what’s currently popular. How odd to dismiss what might be a good film made from a good novel simply because it’s not popular right now to make films from that kind of novel. It’s even sillier to say that a film should have been made in a time period when there was an overabundance of similar films.
Thanks for catching that the reviewer is a young woman “they”; it helps explain the concern about “right-wing talking points”.