Report: Three Dystopias |
Class: Mrs. Jackson, grade six |
by Sherley Morro |
|
The assignment was to summarize the three television show episodes we watched in class and also to analyze them.
All three shows are in black and white style and they all were about utopias or dystopias. They all have the same creepy start, with a deep voice telling us we are about to enter the twilight zone, and they all have the same man speaking to us at the start and the end of each episode.
Episode 1: “To Serve Man”
A guy on a spaceship smokes cigarettes. He tells us about an alien who come to Earth and made everything better. The aliens stop world hunger and they make everyone peaceful and they give us other secrets like nuclear energy. They leave a book called “To Serve Man.” But the guy telling us the story doesn’t trust them and eventually he figures out that the book is really a cookbook.
Analysis: It seems like the aliens bring utopia, not dystopia, with their gifts. But I noticed their way of stopping wars is to let every country build a force field around itself. But how is that going to stop a civil war like the one everyone says the president is trying to start? The aliens don’t solve racism, do they? They won’t stop factories from closing even after the president says he’s going to keep them open, will they? Will they stop cops from hassling my stepfather? I have to say, this episode isn’t about utopia or dystopia so much, is it?
Episode 2: “The Monsters Are Due on Maple St.”
In this episode, everything is normal in a neighborhood when something strange goes over their heads, like a meteor. They start asking each other what it was, and then they start feeling suspicious of their neighbors. One guy tries to talk sense to everyone and calm them down, but they don’t listen to him, especially when the lights flicker on and off. At the end, it turns out some guys in a spaceship have been making the lights act weird and they’re doing it to make people turn against each other. They say it works every time.
Analysis: This doesn’t look so bad to me. The families all have nice houses and the kids can afford ice cream without their parents saying they can’t afford “treats.” The kids are allowed to go around town without their parents watching them. None of the parents are morbidly obese and they all look like they’re not unemployed. The worst thing that happens to them is their lights start flashing. I think this one would be scarier if everyone’s iPhones and Androids stopped working—that would be dystopia!
Episode 3: “Time Enough at Last”
This episode is about Henry Bemus, a derpy guy with glasses who works in a bank and always reads books. Even his wife makes fun of him for reading so much. One day he’s reading in the bank’s vault when a big bomb goes off and destroys everything on the surface of the planet. He’s sad and he’s going to shoot himself when he finds a library and realizes that now he has time to read all the books in the world. But then he breaks his glasses and now he can’t read. Oops!
Analysis: Everyone says that it’s a mistake that Mr. Bemis is wearing his reading glasses all the time. Also, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that he would be the only survivor of the bomb (because other people might be in other bank vaults). But to me, those points aren’t as so important to me as the way that Henry Bemus’s life is dystopia when there are other people around and utopia when he’s alone with nothing but books. If dystopia is “hell made by the government,” then maybe Mr. Bemus would encourage North Korea to fire nukes at us!
In summary, this assignment definitely made me think. A lot. I know the television shows were all white people back then, but the next time I hear kids taking racist on the playground, I’m going to remember Maple Street. (And I’m definitely going to remember it the next time we have a blackout or if our water is ever contaminated again.) And whenever my stepdad complains he’s got a headache from his glasses but his insurance won’t pay for new ones with the right perscription, I’ll think of Henry Bemis. And when my mom and my aunt start saying again that there are no jobs around here since the factory moved to Mexico, I’m going to think about being eaten by aliens.
I think maybe people who talk about dystopia don’t count their blessings enough.