Utopia and Dystopia in the Age of Trump: Images from Literature and Visual Arts
2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/utopianstudies.32.3.0707
ISSN2154-9648
Autores ResumoReviewing this collection nearly a year after the deposition of Donald Trump by Joe Biden, one is prompted to delve through memories of a presidency so flagrantly outrageous that it is hard to comprehend that some of the events that took place under it were real. By the final months of Trump’s tenure, the coronavirus had brought the United States to its knees, with a death rate then unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Meanwhile, the wave of Black Lives Matter protests, sparked by the brutal killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police, were met with violent military force. The US Army was deployed in cities seen as protest hotbeds, such as Portland, Oregon, and teargas was used to dispel peaceful protesters outside the White House in June. This was to clear the way for the president to make a fascistic televised speech about “law and order” in front of St John’s Episcopal Church, while flaunting a Bible. All the while, Trump continued to show an absurd disregard for the most basic tenets of factuality and truth in his public pronouncements, from an apparent endorsement of the medicinal qualities of household bleach in May, to his completely unfounded claims in August about the enormous ammonium nitrate explosion in Beirut being the result of “a bomb of some kind.”1Although the prospect of another four years of Trumpism has since been averted, Brodman and Doan’s collection, published in 2019, should count as a warning about the dangers still to come: the so-called alt-right remains an active force, and one struggles to shake the feeling that Biden’s victory was less a ringing endorsement of the Democrats’ centrist agenda than it was a desperate repudiation of Trump’s utter ineptitude in the face of COVID-19. In light of the events of Trump’s final year in power, many of the volume’s diagnoses of America’s recent dystopian malaise have, if anything, actually come to feel overly cautious. The essays in the book are for the most part engagingly written and interesting, and cover a wide range of texts from literary and popular visual culture. As the editors mention in their introduction, there is a clear connecting thread running through all of the chapters: the notion that “one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia” (6) crops up time and again throughout the book, with contributors repeatedly showing that a kind of utopianism is at play in the Trumpian promise to “Make America Great Again”: a utopianism that has, of course, catalyzed the intensification of a dystopia in the eyes of the president’s leftist and liberal critics, as well as in much of the rest of the world.The most fascinating chapters tend to be those that place the Trump era in historical context, often by reassessing nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts in the light of Trump’s ascendency. Daniel M. R. Abitz does precisely this through an illuminating reconsideration of Henry James’s short story, “The Great Good Place,” which compares and contrasts the “Great” in James’s title with the “Great” in Trump’s aforementioned election slogan. Similarly, Ryan Farrar’s reassessment of Katherine Burdekin’s 1937 novel Swastika Night compares Trumpist rhetoric to the misogyny underlying Nazism and concludes that “Burdekin’s novel underlines how a collective culture organized under a tapered sense of supremacy threatens to sprout like an unweeded garden, dispersing its rotten seeds across all corners” (208).Most notable of these chapters that reassess texts from the past, however, is Daniel Adleman’s “The Medium Is the Massacre,” which identifies a shockingly prescient premonition of post-2016 America in Bret Easton Ellis’s 1989 novel American Psycho. Adleman notes that Trump, who is the psychotic Bateman’s aspirational role model, is “directly and indirectly referenced more than thirty times throughout the story,” and that the novel anticipates the future direction of then-nascent neoliberalism because it “hyperbolizes the era’s paroxysms of ostentatious consumption and status fixation, [that] there is no life outside of the Market” (73). In addition, the novel “eerily anticipates the present-day xenophobic project to build a prophylactic wall around Fortress America to keep ‘the beggars’ out” (73). Ultimately, the text harbors what we might call modest thanotapian potentials about our present circumstances. That is to say that the novel serves as the locus of a particular narrative event, a thanatotic break in the discourse network that potentially jolts the reader out of their complacency and complicity with efficiencies and pleasures of neoliberalism’s psychotic, rudderless model of “the good life.” (82) This introduction of the notion of neoliberal thanatopianism as a way of making sense of American’s present predicament is one of the book’s most interesting takes on the “utopia/dystopia” binary that is returned to throughout, offering a potential way out of this sometimes-circular theoretical double-bind.The book’s many chapters on pop culture are also often insightful. Texts covered include the Judge Dredd and X-Men comics (by 2000 AD and Marvel, respectively), Denis Villeneuve’s recent Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049 (2017), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), the Margaret Atwood–inspired Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–), and Charlie Brooker’s hit Channel 4/Netflix production Black Mirror (2011–). What is particularly intriguing is that even these chapters tend to engage in a process of reassessment. For instance, as with Adleman’s chapter on American Psycho, the chapters on comics reread major storylines in their respective series through the lens of Trump’s presidency. Tom Shapira’s chapter, “Through the Eyes of the Wardens,” reassesses the focus in Judge Dredd on a hypermobilization of “security” in the advancement of authoritarianism, while Elisabetta Di Minico’s “The X-Men Saga and Dystopian ‘Otherness’” asks what that series’ much-celebrated exploration of othering in late twentieth-century American society (racial, religious, and sexual) can tell us about the roots of the unabashed white, cis-male supremacism that Trump encourages in his supporters. Similarly to these chapters on comics, Sue Matheson’s essay on Blade Runner 2049 offers a careful and insightful reading of that film as itself a reassessment of the now well-established genre of cyberpunk (Matheson calls it “tech noir”) in light of recent events. Meanwhile, like Villeneuve’s film, Mad Max and The Handmaid’s Tale, both astutely analyzed by Kate Waites, offer reimaginings of influential 1980s dystopian texts.Even Matthew Paproth’s chapter on Black Mirror, a text much less rooted in the past than many of the others analyzed in the collection, places at its heart a consideration of the way that the program’s writers were prompted to reassess their approach to the series after Trump was elected in 2016. The election was one of many moments over the past decade, Paproth reminds us, in which the real world was seen to be “growing ever closer to the type of dystopian visions that [the series] had prophesied” (167). In the show’s third season, the first to air after Trump’s election, episodes begin making repeated reference “to characters and technologies from its first two seasons” in a newfound drive toward “hyperdiegetic” world-building. This moves the show away from its earlier bleak nihilism, Paproth argues, toward “a path forward for viewers frustrated with the many ways in which the real world is beginning to resemble the dystopian visions presented in their black mirrors” (175). As with the book’s other chapters on major pop cultural texts, through this analysis of Black Mirror’s newfound self-referentiality comes a necessary prompt to reflect on the American media culture that created the conditions for Trump’s rise.At times the book does veer into the sorts of traps that have commonly snared Trump’s liberal critics. These include an occasional propensity to monsterize Trump, viewing him as exceptional or an aberration from the norm in a way that arguably glosses over the hyper-mediatized, hyper-consumerist groundwork that has been laid for him in American media, political, and corporate culture in recent decades (he was the star of a hugely popular reality television show for eleven years, after all). Occasionally, too, the comparisons between events or characters in the texts under analysis and those in America since 2016 can feel a little forced or superficial. Cartoonishly authoritarian figures like “Bad” Bob Booth in Judge Dredd (“a violent lunatic who cheated his way into the presidency” [177]), or Senator Robert Kelly and Reverend William Stryker from X-Men (both violently antimutant, “human supremacist” public figures [152]), are cast as eerie premonitions of Trump. This is of course true to some degree, but not to the extent that we should forget that these characters were created in response to their own, highly specific 1980s context. The deeply discriminatory Reagan administration itself actively rolled back progress on civil rights by giving credence to the concept of antiwhite “reverse discrimination,” while also pioneering the now all-too-familiar slogan, “Let’s Make America Great Again.”2 As the book elsewhere makes clear, Trump’s presidency represents an acceleration of, rather than a break from, the past four decades of American neoliberalism.It is perplexing, then, that the collection ends on a chapter such as David L. McNaron’s “Diverse New World,” which turns its gaze away from those who have held power in America over recent decades, and instead suggests that the “plague” that has given rise to Trumpism is “borne on the wings of the Left” (223). In light of the coronavirus crisis, McNaron’s focus on plague, with reference to Camus’s The Plague (1947) and Jean Raspail’s controversial anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints (1973), might initially seem prescient. However, turning its back on the reflexive reassessment of norms at play in the book’s other chapters, this deeply defensive essay proceeds to actively reassert the kind of “anything goes” free speech fundamentalism that Trump and the alt-right have time and again turned to their advantage. More, it echoes Reagan’s conceptualization of “reverse discrimination” in its critique of what many conservatives and liberals alike today view as the hypersensitive leftist cancel culture that they perceive to be on the rise in public life. Describing a parody of twentieth-century leftist moral orthodoxy in Raspail’s novel, McNaron writes: “the minute someone questions ‘diversity’ these defenders of the faith label them ‘racists and fascists’ and thereby prevent discussion and stifle dissent. Does this sound familiar?” (215). Meanwhile, a few sentences later, he adds: the farther in time we move from slavery, segregation, and colonialism, the more virulent the charges of “racism.” One wonders why so many people would wish to move to such wicked, racist countries. When no evidence exists, racism takes invisible forms: “institutional racism” and “white privilege.” The secular religion of egalitarianism allows no other explanation for nonwhites’ failures. (216) As if unsatisfied with the startlingly offensive claim that institutional racism is a concoction of white advocates of “secular egalitarianism” (“the sophists and priests of the Left” [217]), rather than the core premise of most Black-led American movements of the past fifty years, the chapter goes on to quote favorably and repeatedly from British anti-immigration advocate and neoconservative Douglas Murray, whose book The Strange Death of Europe makes the case that a heightened sensitivity over language surrounding Islam lies at the heart of the Western world’s contemporary ills. Drawing on Murray, McNaron argues that “Westerners face a demographic plague that is reducing them to minorities in countries their ancestors founded and built” (221): a sentence that would not look out of place in a far-right manifesto. The term “Westerners,” here, apparently precludes the possibility that the category can include people of color; meanwhile, how the editors allowed McNaron’s uncritical usage of a phrase like “demographic plague” into an otherwise serious book is disconcerting.It is likewise disturbing to see more overtly racialized claims such as the following finding their way into a contemporary academic publication: “Raspail opposes the destruction of the white world. Love of one’s own does not entail hatred of others” (223); and a sentence later, critiquing the recent voting patterns of American liberals: “Most liberals drew no distinction between racial self-interest and racism: wishing to limit immigration to protect the integrity of one’s own group was for them racist” (223–24). Like his point about “demographic plague,” above, McNaron’s vague claim about a “white world” apparently under threat from “destruction” directly channels the so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theory currently espoused by anti-immigration figures in Europe (such as Renaud Camus and Éric Zemmour, themselves both influenced by Raspail) and popularized by the alt-right in online chatrooms like 4Chan. The theory expresses a fear that white people in multicultural Western nations are mere decades away from becoming ethnic minorities, via a gradual shift in population numbers.3 Meanwhile, it is a fallacy to suggest that in the United States, with its not-so-distant history of slavery and segregation, and where white people continue to be the largest demographic group, hold the biggest distribution of wealth, and wield the most political power, white “self-interest” is anything other than the very definition of racism.McNaron concludes his piece with the classical liberal truism that “when someone presents an argument, … it is incumbent on [others] to show why the argument is incorrect” (224), but in doing so he places the prerogative for disproving bigoted views on the very people who are most hurt by them. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, it should go without saying that it is wrong to expect anyone to need to “debate” their very right to exist as an equal with others in the world. This denial of racism by ostensible liberals in universities, politics, and the media is surely a dystopian reality in need of more urgent address than any “new regime” (220) of people simply calling racism out. At one point, McNaron goes as far as to appropriate the terminology of transgender activism to claim that “we should refer to others as they self-identify instead of, for example, branding them ‘white supremacists’” [224]. This is gaslighting, and his analysis of Raspail’s novel only serves to show for how long the deeply solipsistic perception that white people are “constantly telling” (217) people of color about racism (rather than vice versa) has held sway in certain circles of the American and European intelligentsia. It is a shame that Brodman and Doan have decided to include this piece at all, let alone to end the volume on it (presumably as a kind of provocation), as it undermines the carefully self-reflective work done by other essays in the collection to understand the complex roles played by utopia and dystopia in the rise of a still-dangerous American far right.
Referência(s)