The Rebirth of Utopia in 21st-Century Cinema

Figures

Figure 1. Moving on together: Post-apocalyptic inclusive imaginaries in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.

Figure 2. Little to look forward to: Rachael and Rick’s bleak horizons in Blade Runner.

Figure 3. Counter-programming the neoliberal co-optation of utopia: Awakening cosmopolitan networks in The Matrix.

Figure 4. Cosmopolitan cooperation as a way out of global apocalypse in Blindness.

Figure 5. Escape where? Acknowledging the need to confront the status quo in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Figure 6. Interstellar’s wasted crops: Ecocide demands ecofeminist perspectives.

Figure 7. The dystopian every day in Children of Men: Theo watches the news on Diego Ricardo’s death.

Figure 8. Long take dialogics: Holistic representations of social relations and shared spaces.

Figure 9. Lighting ties hope to the inclusion of the Other.

Figure 10. Star in American Honey: Overlooked and vulnerable, yet highly resistant and skilful.

Figure 11. The camera has their back: Endorsing protagonists’ aspirations in The Florida Project.

Figure 12. Blackening and queering utopian horizons at the end of Moonlight.

Figure 13. “It shouldn’t be so easy to sleep at night” – an appeal to ecological conscience.

Figure 14. An ontological renaissance: Jane’s eco-humanist conversion in The East.

Figure 15. Self-aware engagement: Committing to eco-social welfare.

Figure 16. Veronica’s crew in Widows: Rewriting gender and genre rules.

Figure 17. Billy and Clare in The Nightingale: Two histories of repression, one shared horizon ahead.

Figure 18. The ecocidal patriarchal establishment Katniss Everdeen aims at.

Figure 19. Back to “normal”: Remodelled gender aesthetics in the pastoral finale of The Hunger Games film series.

Figure 20. Greta Thunberg and Katniss Everdeen: The promising potential of ecofeminism.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who have supported me personally and academically during the years of learning that culminate in this book. First, I would like to express my gratitude to Peter Lang and the editorial board of the Ralahine Utopian Studies Series for selecting my work in the 2021 Young Scholars Competition and opening up a stimulating space for interdisciplinary utopian scholarship. I feel deeply honoured to contribute to a publishing project whose editors have illuminated my research from the start. Thanks are also due to my PhD supervisor at the University of Zaragoza, María del Mar Azcona, for her academic guidance during the writing process of my doctoral thesis. Celestino Deleyto, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Peter Evans, and Anne Gjelsvik deserve my sincere gratitude for providing insightful feedback on my research before and after the PhD viva. I also want to thank the members of the Department of English Studies at the University of Zaragoza, my research colleagues in the group Cinema, Culture, and Society, and my peer lecturers at the Faculty of Education.

Research towards this book has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPU 13/00057 fellowship) and the Ministry of Science and Innovation (project PID2021-123836NB-100). Also important were the scholarships provided by Santander Bank for the MA in Film Studies I completed at University College London, and the grants awarded by Royal Holloway, University of London, to carry out postgraduate research in the Department of Media Studies. All this would not have been possible if – in the pre-Brexit years – I had not had the chance to complete a BA in English Studies at the University of Roehampton, London, as an Erasmus student. This European education programme helped me mature as a future researcher but, most significantly, it allowed me to relish how much is to be gained by crossing borders – sociocultural, geographical, academic.

This book has greatly benefitted from what I have learned from my teachers in London and Zaragoza. Isabel Santaolalla deserves special ←xi | xii→mention for being the most welcoming Erasmus host at Roehampton and for tutoring my work as an ARGO intern at the Hispanic Research Centre. More than a decade later, her warm optimism, kind intelligence, and generosity continue to be tremendously inspiring. Mark Shiel’s MA seminars at King’s College were especially enlightening, as well as Jo Evans’s at UCL, and Barry Langford’s supervision at Royal Holloway. I would also like to express my sincere appreciation to Carmen Aznárez for her contagious enthusiasm as a lecturer of English in the School of Tourism at the University of Zaragoza. Going back to high-school days, I thank teacher Luis Montil for screening Stanley Kubrick’s films to discuss philosophical matters with 15-year-old students, which prompted my interest in cinema as a medium to reflect on social conventions and challenge ideological perspectives. I also extend my gratitude to my students in the Faculty of Education at the University of Zaragoza for letting me share with them – teachers-to-be – the joy learning brings about every day.

Above all else, I am deeply grateful to Raúl, Marcos, and Abril. Your unconditional love inspires me every day and gives me strength. The three of you make me feel fortunate to live in this world. Becoming a mother twice while working on a thesis has been a challenging enterprise. Even having a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf advocated for in 1929 (or, most commonly, a desk in a multi-purpose room in a very expensive tiny flat), we, working mothers, still struggle, one century later, to write, research, and create while upbringing – the huge amounts of time and effort that caring for little ones requires often silenced, unacknowledged, scarcely supported ←xii | xiii→by the state. Despite difficulties, I have been able to complete the PhD and raise our children, by your side, thanks to you, Raúl, and your caring trust in me. Resistant hope, mutual care, and stubborn work – and the many films we have watched side by side, which gave us precious access to worlds and people unknown – propelled us to believe we could make things happen together. And we did. You are the best family I could ever hope for, and my greatest wish is to stay with you and our children forever – exploring, learning, creating, sharing.

Martín, Mónica. 2022. “Awakening from Neoliberal Rationalities: The Ecological Conversion of Brit Marling’s Protagonist in The East”. Journal of Film and Video 74, no. 1: 19–27. Project MUSE <https://doi.org/10.5406/19346018.74.1.2.02>

Martín, Mónica. 2021. “Utopia as a Cosmopolitan Method in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men”. Utopian Studies 32, no. 1: 56–72. <https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.32.1.0056>

Martín, Mónica. 2021. “Time’s Up for a Change of Political Focus: Katniss Everdeen’s Ecofeminist Leadership in The Hunger Games Film Series”. Atlantis 43, no. 1: 89–109. <https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2021-43.1.06>

Martín, Mónica. 2020. “Ecocritical Archaeologies of Global Ecocide in Twenty-First-Century Post-apocalyptic Films”. In Avenging Nature: The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature. 179–194. London: Lexington Books.

Introduction: Tracing Hope in Cinema and Beyond

The PhD thesis that has become this book was completed in April 2020, during the long, exhausting weeks of home confinement imposed by the Spanish government to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Italy, Russia, France, India, United Kingdom, Argentina, Ruanda, and the United States had also told their citizens to shelter, and most other countries would do so shortly after. The quarantine of whole regions, the interruption of international air travel and the closing of schools, universities, stores, restaurants, libraries, museums, and cinemas, among many other “nonessential” services, brought daily life to a halt of undetermined duration. The worldwide outreach of the pandemic and its paralysing effects on the economy echoed the impact of world wars in history books. The ever-growing data of infected world citizens and casualties, mostly elderly, was desolating, while the prospect of collapsed health systems resulted terrifying. This unexpected global dystopian panorama seemed to be the plot of one of the films analysed in the upcoming chapters. Sadly, it was not. Yet, as sociologist Ruth Levitas argues (2013), it is in critical situations like this when utopia – conceived as a holistic sociological method to analyse our global social order and make ecological and inclusive proposals for its transformation – is most needed.