THX 1138 vs 1984 (dystopias)

Remember in 1984 there really was no war. It was just a device they used to stir up patriotism for Big Brother.

Sounds like the US today to me.

It would be cool to live in the Blade runner world for a day or two. But then I'd get sick of the constant rain and asian people.

There is something sinister and unique about THX-1138 that is not in any other dystopias. All of them have a common tendency of an oppressive society with a totalitarian ruling class that wants to ban, censor, forbid or destroy a precious thing that we value today. Dystopias have been written about all manner of forbidden things, from common items like books or art to abstract concepts like freedom, love, or even emotions themselves.

But THX-1138 doesn't technically have that. No one is trying to ban anything. Sure, there are a lot of things people aren't permitted to do, but there is no class of elites enforcing these edicts.

In fact, as much as we can tell, THX-1138 does not have a ruling class at all. It seems to be a society stuck in a form of cruise control, with everyone doing only what's required of them and not really thinking outside their assigned role, and no one in charge to lead or take things in a different direction. With no leadership, the society is stuck in this state indefinitely.

How did it get this way? Allow me to speculate for a bit: It's obvious that in the not-too-distant future, something bad happened to surface living. Quite likely nuclear war. The survivors retreated to a massive underground complex and tried to rebuild their civilization there.

In the early going, they probably had a council of leaders to mandate certain standards to ensure survival and keep the fledgling colony from being snuffed out. Resources were scarce so their consumption was tightly controlled and regulated. Food, water and other essentials were rationed.

All non-essential things were too expensive and scarce to maintain so they fell out of favor; things like luxury, fashion, color, style, and flavor simply waned over the years until they were forgotten entirely. Only the bare minimum needed to survive was permitted. In time, people saw no point in clothes, hair, or even names. All of them were luxuries and the system couldn't justify the expense.

The system cannot afford anything extraneous or useless that might be a drain on society's limited resources, and this includes people. So there cannot be any pregnancies. All humans must serve a function, therefore they are grown for a purpose and are given a designation, and are terminated once they serve that purpose. Education was standardized, dissent and disorder repressed as they represent disharmony, which is expensive.

Civil unrest also needed to be taken care of. This was accomplished with the creation of impartial robot Police, and emphasized with mood-stabilizing drugs. The situation was so tenuous that even consumption standards were mandated just to ensure positive economic growth. Everything was regimented right down to employment, consumption, productivity.

Religion was kept as the last visage of social cohesion, unity and sense of purpose. But like everything else in this counterfeit society, it was simply a regimented waste of time. It's just a tape recording of a long-forgotten era.

The system they created was stable and fixed for the sake of efficiency and optimization. They had to forsake a lot of things to achieve it, but it was a necessary evil to ensure their survival, and they took comfort in the fact that it would not destroy humanity.

This probably went on for centuries. In time, society had reached an equilibrium, a utopia in function only. The leaders no longer needed to do anything so their function also atrophied until there was no one left in charge anymore, nor did there need to be.

And the system continued operating for hundreds of years, with each individual in it doing only what's required of them and never questioning the system itself. The system was self-sustaining so long as everyone kept doing their assigned role.

By the time the events in the movie roll around, it appears like the system has been running on autopilot for a very long time and there are a lot of indications that things are starting to break down. Robot police are malfunctioning, people are slacking at their jobs, drugs don't work as well, and several individuals are questioning why they even do anything. There are contingencies for these issues, of course, and the system tries as hard as it can to fix, destroy or marginalize the flaws inherent, but the flaws are accumulating and it appears like it cannot sustain things at the current rate.

And there is no one around who knows how to change course or suggest a new mode of living.

So unlike 1984, things are somewhat more tragic here as the people have been dependent on the system for so long that they don't know how to live outside of it. They aren't being oppressed by some diabolical ruling group, they are simply slaves to their own routine and can't conceive anything else.

THX-1138 represents the first human to ever voluntarily leave the system and reach the surface... quite possibly the first in hundreds of years. It's not likely that he will find anything up there -- a barren, irradiated wasteland. But that wasn't the point of the movie.