A Slightly Better Future:
Visions of Utopia in A Boy and His Dog
Sitting under a lean-to constructed in the middle of the now ubiquitous
desert of mud, the boy Vic and his dog Blood argue about their future.
Blood wants Vic to finally believe in ``over the hill.'' Vic is
pessimistic. ``I know what you mean -- over the hill, where the
deer and the antelope play,'' he sneers, ``where it's warm and
clean and we can relax and have fun. And they grow food right out
of the ground! How do you like that pipe dream?'' This early scene
in the film A Boy and His Dog sets the tone for a movie that
will spend much of its time considering the notions of utopia and
dystopia. The terms themselves are never used, and the dialogue rarely
refers to such things, but the two themes are still ever present in
the themes, visual constructions, and sound design of the film. Times
have changed from our present day: nuclear war has ravaged the surface
of the Earth and left civilization buried under a lake of mud. The
human race has survived, but most of the people encountered in the
film are surface-world drifters, concerned only with needs of survival.
Also depicted is an underground and highly technological city, an
odd caricature of early twentieth-century American life. This retro
society is not treated kindly by the film, but when read in the context
of its time the alternating depictions of utopia and dystopia presented
in A Boy and His Dog are not an attack on the classic American
lifestyle so much as they are a warning to look forward instead of
attempting to recreate the past.The classic vision of utopia was the idea of a shining future where technology enabled the world to live in harmony and ease. The foundations of utopian thought began back with the Renaissance, as intellectual thinkers began to emerge outside of the church and started to look at a secular conception of the future. Where the church had guaranteed an afterlife, secular thought did not have this certainty. Instead the Renaissance thinkers turned to science and rationality to fashion a vision of a societal future (Bisk). Through technology, politics, and urban planning the utopia would be made into a place far better than the one in which they were now living. This is what Lyman Tower Sargent termed the ``eutopia'' or ``positive utopia'' -- ``a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived'' (qtd. in Moylan 74). Along with this definition comes the inverse notion of dystopia: a described society that the reader would view as significantly worse than the society in which he lived. These definitions provides a useful benchmark to consider when looking at different possibly utopian -- or dystopian -- visions in the film.
With Thomas More the notion of utopia really gained its foothold in popular thought. Several centuries of advancement in knowledge and understanding followed, with utopian writings waxing and waning in popularity. Finally modernism brought an even brighter vision of the future as technology's rapid advance made anything seem possible. The world had survived both of its great wars, and the engines of America's capitalist markets were once again booming. Author Tom Moylan, in his book Scraps of the Untainted Sky, writes that
Utopia rose, again, from the ashes of obscurity in the decades after World War II. Filled with hope after the defeat of fascism, aware of the weakening chains of imperialist power, yearning for better lives in the world of peace, and experienced in collective action, people around the globe began to give real shape to their collective dreams (67).These dreams were unable to be fulfilled by the traditional structures of the society, so once again the utopian imagination was there to act as sounding board and speculative testbed for the idealized narratives of a newly impassioned people.
The atomic age also brought a criticism of the classical view; as individuals lived through the increasing brinkmanship of the nuclear build-up they began to long for an idealized version of the past instead of the dark future they saw to be reality. America's celebration at the end of World War II was short-lived. The new atomic age that had ushered the end of the war quickly turned into a potential menace. Soviet and American build-up of nuclear arsenals led the populace to believe that the need for survivalism was soon to be inevitable. Technology, once heralded as the great promise of the future, was now the very thing leading society to the edge of destruction. This was the world in which Harlan Ellison wrote his short story ``A Boy and His Dog,'' published in the late 1960s. The film version stays true to Ellison's story, making it worthwhile to analyze the film in this historical context. The elements of the atomic age are easy to spot: the film opens with mushroom cloud footage that's universally familiar, the underground city is a large-scale actualization of the fallout shelter, and the surface-world chaos was the commonly assumed outcome of nuclear war.
Like many films of the day, A Boy and His Dog examines a post-apocalyptic world. The opening shots of atomic blasts, added for the film's re-release, situate the tale in a very distinct time frame that's anchored not by the year -- 2024 -- but by its relation to this world-changing event. The bombs have gone off; the world as it was has been destroyed. Ever the tutor, Blood tells Vic that World War IV ``lasted five days, just long enough for the final missiles to leave their silos on both sides.'' The devastation is thorough; modern civilization is buried beneath a deep layer of mud. Technology has seemingly been destroyed as well, those on the surface travel by foot or on vehicles propelled by human power. This absolute desolation is a common theme of the atomic age. In A Boy and His Dog, as in several other apocalyptic films, the human race is not wiped out. The final seconds of the film Panic in Year Zero! show survivers passing signage declaring ``There Must Be No End, Only a New Beginning'' (qtd. in Newman 153). The now empty deserts hold the promise of a new start. The wistfully considered ``Over the Hill'' is said to have farming and peace. The same future may someday be possible for the desolate land that once was Arizona. Gregory Waller writes in an article for Cinema Journal that the film ``celebrates the survival of humankind.'' It ``hold[s] out the millennial promise of a new beginning, even though the Earth has been reduced to a vast desert'' (15). It is on this fresh canvas that Ellison and director L.Q. Jones paint two diverging pictures of utopia. The surface world is a chaotic place, ruled by no higher power aside from the rag-tag gangs that prowled about in search of canned food and women. The overwhelming visual image presented on the surface is that of vast space. The desert stretches far into the horizon before rising into hills and mountains. This truly is a desolate situation, and it's a wonder any humans have been able to survive in this type of an environment.
Yet technology and civilization have not been completely destroyed. Hidden deep underground is the city of Topeka, an exaggerated caricature of early 20th century American life housed in an self-contained underground facility. The shelter, either built for government use or for the use of individual families, was a familiar Atomic Age sight. Kim Newman says that the ``shelter became an American institution'' (66). Vic descends into this world through a heavy-duty surface entrance -- the only structure seen on the surface in the entire film, clearly built after the destruction had occurred and the dust had settled. The portal juts out of an empty desert, its metallic mass imposing in the emptiness of its surroundings. Unlike the surface world, this underground society has clearly retained pre-war technology. Vic uses a keycard to unlock the portal door, which then opens for his automatically. Between the portal and society are a maze of hallways with cable conduits snaking overhead. Everything looks freshly painted. Tanks and pipes reveal the machinery that powers this independent world. The scene Vic encounters just after entering the structure make even more interesting the lack of visible technology in the society it contains. Having had the technology to build the shelter before the war, its inhabitants -- perhaps more correctly the founding fathers of the city -- made a very conscious choice to create a neo-luddite society. Their world contains a robotic enforcer that's capable of understanding human speech and a machine designed to stimulate its male occupant and harvest his semen, but in other respects it's a world that's free of many innovations of the twentieth century. The dress, the architecture, the themes -- all are taken straight from a time which surely none of the inhabitants, and few if any of the founders, could possibly have lived.
This society is very postmodern in its conception. It uses technology to recreate the past, and puts a lot of work into it. The early 1900's, the age to which this underground time has been rewound, saw a middle-America free from the modernism that led to the demise of the civilized world. Modernism and its exaltation of science and knowledge brought about rapid advances in technology. This technology backfired, though, when it came to the creation of the atomic bomb. The town of Topeka can be viewed as a backlash against modernism, a controlled world whose leaders are determined to not let history repeat itself. Technology, the cause of this ruin, is viewed as both the enemy and something which must be harnessed in order to survive and rule. Eric Rabkin, writing in the 1980's but expressing a sentiment acknowledged well before that, notes that ``the obvious problems of our world are consequences, at least in part, of science, and everyone now knows this; the solutions, if any there will be, will use science, and increasingly people know this too'' (qtd. in Stone 68). Those in charge of governing Topeka keep technology to their own use, intent on protecting their people from it while still requiring it to live. The small town America sense of order and civility is maintained through an iron rule of force. Emotionless death sentences are handed out to those who deviate and attempt to do something considered new and unacceptable to the ``Committee,'' those who run society. The pronouncement is the same for all: ``Lack of respect, wrong attitude, failure to obey authority, what say thee committee? Farm, immediately.'' Yet another example of masked reality, this expression is nothing more than a euphemism for the dissident's true fate: death. Michael, the friendly looking robot cop disguised in farmer's clothing, is the one who performs the ugly deed. The technology and the means of control are hidden behind a surface-level scene of order and small-town American pride. A parade winds along a green lawn, young school girls are shown giggling and playful, and yet the first thing Vic sees when he enters this society is a vast cemetery stretched across a rolling hill in front of him. Though the film does not give the underground city an age1, the number of graves is inordinate for a young city. The obvious suggestion is that the level of discontent in Topeka is much higher than the surface calm would lead one to believe.
Topeka's order is a product not just of the rules in place, but also of an active and constant attempt to brainwash its residents. From the moment Vic enters the underground society the viewer is subjected to a constant indoctrination from loudspeakers placed throughout Topeka. The speakers offer advice on how to live life, always looking to conform the people of Topeka into an identical populace full of people who act correctly and properly at all times. Each message proclaims itself ``another helpful hint for living from the Committee's almanac.'' The city's ``Original Elders' Proclamation'' also speaks to a desire for homogeneity. It tasks the city with the leadership role in helping ``to remake this sinful world in God's own image.'' For the elders and the current members of the Committee, that image is one in which no difference of opinion or action can be tolerated. Neither, in fact, can be any difference in appearance. All residents of Topeka wear a heavy coat of makeup on their faces. Their white skin -- there is no diversity shown in this underground world -- is made even more pale by a caked layer of white. Their cheeks are painted a rosy pink. The uniformity is part of the Committee's instilled order. Mick Broderick, in an essay titled ``Surviving Armageddon,'' writes that Topeka's whiteface makeup ``represents the perpetuation of Middle American praxis as a (continuing) means of social control, permeating with its invisible ideology successive generations who are sutured into unconscious compliance.'' Vic, coming into this world as an outsider, finds it all strange and upsetting. He wants to get out, to get back up to the surface world where he can ``get in good straight-forward fight with some son-of-a-bitch over a can of beans.'' While those who have been raised and indoctrinated in the underground society may not see the structures it has raised, Vic has butted up against them instantly.
With the parameters of this underground society thus established, it is time to look back at Sargent's eutopian definition for analysis. The question is this: would a reader in the late 1960's see this depiction of Topeka as considerably better, or considerably worse, than the condition in which he currently lived? While the residents of Topeka live safe from outside attack, the 1960's fear of nuclear destruction is traded for a fear of punishment from within. Whereas citizens of the 1960's were out in public exercising their rights to protest, such actions in Topeka would result in a quick trip to ``the farm.'' Thus it seems that a reasonable person of the time would view the strict underground society as a step in the wrong direction, a dystopian vision of the world.
Though the authoritarian society depicted in Topeka is a fetishized early 1900's middle America, the film's negative portrayal of Topeka should not be viewed as an attack on American life. Topeka models its aesthetics after an earlier time in American history and taps into some of its moralism as well, but the underlying philosophies are very different. Perhaps most importantly, Topeka is centered on looking back, while the American dream is that of the future. The ``utopian'' world of Topeka is quite literally constructed. The space in which it exists was hollowed out from the ground and inside was built a world that very much wanted to be perfect. It is in this intentionality that the utopia of Topeka fails and falls into dystopia. Janet Staiger, in an essay titled ``Future Noir,'' writes that ``dystopias seem to be fabricated as corrupted versions of some utopian (or euchronian) scheme rather than initiated outright'' (101). This notion of fabrication is important. The founders of Topeka have created an image of their idealized time, but in reaching backward to construct this image they've succeeded in leaving out the very forward-looking nature that made America what it was. While their intention was to permanently ground Topekan society in a perpetually unchanging time, the real time itself never shared their idealization. A motionless time has no goals and no strivings; while the activities seen as exciting in the early twentieth century are faithfully imported to Topeka, the sense of purpose that had carried American life was not. While they had set out with grand intentions, their vision had indeed turned corrupt. During the DVD commentary on an underground scene which features a Topeka marching band, film critic Charles Chaplin proclaims that the scene is ``an American as borscht'' (a beet soup from the Ukraine). Many aspects of Topekan society indeed reveal traces of socialism. The Committee is in full control of the systems of production -- it decides who works, and when, and whose picture adorns the cans of jarred fruits. Though the culture's aesthetics are American, the underlying spirit and nature is not, and the result is that the carefully constructed world falls well into the category of dystopia.
But is this really a dystopian conception, or is it actually anti-utopian instead? In order for it to be so, there must be a belief in the concept of utopia. One could argue that the negative view given to the city of Topeka is an attempt by Ellison and Jones to show that utopia is not possible. Instead, though, it is more interesting to examine conceptions of utopia elsewhere in the film. In fact, the two scenes that do show a vision of utopia have nothing to do with the underground world of Topeka. The first such scene, coming only fifteen minutes into the film, shows Vic and Blood after stealing food from a marauding gang. In the dusk of an orange setting sun the two lie on their backs, contented and full. Vic has stuck his rifle butt into the a mound between them and it stands like a flagpole while the two let down their guard and relax. Vic and Blood daydream aloud about what they'd like to do next, but they're in no hurry to do anything at all. The elements found in the very last scene of the film are quite the same. The two have just had their fill to eat, and they're walking off in the breaking light of a new day. The future is bright; they're headed for over the hill. They're joking, both are in good spirits and good condition. The common element in both scenes is that their basic needs are fulfilled: they have food and companionship. Despite the basic theme of the movie being Vic's search to find a female, the scenes where he is most content are two that find him alone with the dog who serves as his father figure and mentor. Only when these basic needs are fulfilled are the two able to think to the future.
Here too one must apply Sargent's test: are these small snapshots of life ones that would be considered a step in the right direction? The nuclear threat is gone; the nations have exhausted their arsenals and blown themselves out of existence in the process. Already pieces of civilization are starting to regroup. Blood talks of over the hill, where farming is the key to their renewal, but signs of progress appear in the desert as well. The movie theater, meager though it and its fare may be, is a critical step in the right direction. The operator has set up cans of food as a valid currency, and he provides the movie to his audience in exchange for cans they've gathered. This interdependence characterizes civilization and is tenuous without it. Vic and Blood has exhibited mastery of their environment and have their basic needs met. While surely not a traditional conception, an argument could be made that this semi-primal lifestyle is a small step forward from the constant wariness of the atomic age. If nothing else a person in this post-apocalyptic desert would know that the world would not be destroyed; society had already done its worst, and those remaining had indeed survived. From there the future could only get brighter. This, far moreso than underground Topeka, embodies the American ideal. Here again lies the opportunity for a society to rise up making something out of what has been reduced to nothing.
In the current age science fiction has been appointed the bearer of the utopian conception. Largely, current utopian views tend to skew toward the conception of the dystopia; the vision of a perfect world does not seem to hold much water in modern times. People today have a difficult time accepting as realistic the idea that a society could exist without its share of the problems that plague the world seen around them. And indeed the film A Boy and His Dog is largely dystopic. Nuclear war does occur. Society is destroyed. An attempt to recreate small-town America ends up as a caricature of the USA crossed with the USSR. And yet the tale ends positively; the two main characters survive and even end up in better shape than they were in at the beginning of the film. A Boy and His Dog does not deconstruct the ideals of the American dream, it instead promotes them in its survivalism and its willingness to engage whatever the future might throw into its path. The lesson of the film is simple: you can't recreate the past. So don't try. Instead, set out to find that mythical place over the hill.
- 1
- A later Ellison story says that World War IV broke out on July 4, 1995.