A “hopeful future.” How delightfully mythical that sounds in the face of the world’s many tragedies over the last thousand years — a sparkly daydream within a singular moment, gone as quickly as it arrived.
Sure, that sounds pretty bleak. But it’s not as if this realistic cynicism is without warrant. Once upon a time, Hollywood was capable of producing hopeful, positive, and generally upbeat entertainment.
Of course, the protagonist faced many struggles, but there was always an underlying sense that everything would turn out just fine in the end.
It’s not difficult to understand the elemental sense of doom and cessation that pervades most of our entertainment nowadays. People crave it; the more angry they are, the more they’ll demand doom and gloom, with blood galore.
A brief snippet of history (roughly a thousand years or so) tells a tale of cyclical redundancy — the madness of crowds demanding their due. However, history is also a revelation, a reminder that it need not always be this way.
Modern Entertainment Is Dour and Bleak
“Man, an object of reverence in the eyes of men, is now slaughtered for jest and sport…and it is a satisfying spectacle to see a man made a corpse.”
-Seneca
Seneca was a stoic philosopher who lived between 4 BC and AD 65. One of the most frequent themes throughout all of his writings was violence and torture. Seneca believed people were wasteful of their lives, and the violence they embraced was a part of that waste.
Of course, no one is literally dying onscreen these days unless Alec Baldwin is hanging around somewhere on set. Still, there is a clear and ongoing focus on society’s ultimate destitution.
How often are futuristic, dramatic contrivances not dystopian these days? Everything is bleak, washed out, and peopled with ambivalent and often violent characters.
Silo, for instance, is a popular show on Apple TV+, and its story revolves around hundreds of human beings, the last on earth apparently, condensed into underground silos, eeking out a living under the oppressive hands of unseen forces.
The surface is a bleak and tortured landscape, inhospitable to every living thing. Similar levels of futuristic human despair, oppression, violence, and forlornness percolate within the plotlines of popular television series.
The Handmaid’s Tale, The Last of Us, Severance, Fallout, Snowpiercer, Squid Game, Sweet Tooth, Westworld, The Stand, and See are just a handful. In ancient Greece and Rome, it was the Etruscans and Gladiators. Bear-baiting and jousting dominated the Middle Ages through the Renaissance.
Cockfighting, urban football, and dogfighting held their own during the Industrial Revolution, but now movies and TV shows dominate as cheap, accessible forms of entertainment.
Whether it is a mix of adrenaline and cathartics, a sense of benign masochism, or a more malevolent sadism, people always seem to love a violent, regressive display of human depravity. Dystopia sells. Misery sells. Thus, it will always remain a marketable product.
Fortunately, It’s Not Always This Way
“Where there is no hope in the future, there is no power in the present.”
-John C. Maxwell
The hopeful future of the stubborn optimist is not a figment of everyone’s imagination. After all, Rome fell under the weight of its own rot and discombobulation. Duels were banned. Dogfighting and cockfighting were illegal.
The thing is, there are a variety of shows out there that reflect the more positive aspects of the human condition, such as Ted Lasso, Modern Family, Derry Girls, and Friends. That’s not to say that the characters within are inherently without flaws.
The progression from flawed to enlightened is the joyful aspect that attracts so many viewers. This focuses more on the future of humanity and how it is often depicted in fictional works, notably on the big and small screens.
Some futuristic series come close. The Expanse has its share of violence and terror, but it’s also set in a time when humanity lives among the stars. For All Mankind presents an optimistic future as well, eschewing the dead, atrophied existence of our future generations.
The problem is that they are far outnumbered. Even clean, slick science fiction such as Foundation and the soon-to-be-released Dune: Prophecy is rife with tyranny, subterfuge, backstabbing, and the neverending human desire to dominate.
Considering the overwhelming divisions in modern society, there is little reason for everyday people to embrace an optimistic, hopeful future.
Some of us experience a brutal, stressful day at work, face animosity within the family, and then turn on the TV to be deluged with hateful rhetoric from politicians and their followers. That’s not even counting the sludge and filthy depredations on social media.
Joyful escapism has given way to consistent renderings of bleak futures rife with enduring hostilities.
Entertainment Should Embrace a Hopeful Future
Playing connect-the-dot with dystopian futures and our everyday lives is not a complicated exercise. Jenji Kohan, screenwriter and producer on Orange is the New Black, recently addressed a crowd in Berlin, Germany.
“We’re being fed this diet of dystopia and then [over time] we remember this idea we’ve been given that the future is a dumpster fire, and then we manifest it”
-Jenji Kohan
She’s certainly on the right track. However, the question is this: Do we create the future based on today’s entertainment, or does today’s entertainment simply reflect a future we incline toward?
It’s a question with no easy answer. No one knows the future, no matter what the lines on the palms of your hands look like. History is nothing if not cyclical, and opening a history book that covers more than a hundred years of events is revelatory in that regard.
But just because history is cyclical doesn’t mean the curve forms itself in a vacuum. It could be that the simplest catalyst that leads to a better tomorrow is a change within the entertainment industry.
No, this isn’t about writing, producing, and filming the modern-day version of the society in Demolition Man. As Jenji Kohan was so keen to point out, even in a more hopeful future, humans will still have their problems.
An entertaining, attractive narrative arc is just as doable in a more upbeat, hopeful future as it is in a dystopian one.
In a way, shows covering the future of humanity are sources of inspiration and imaginative stimuli. Unfortunately, the current preference in Hollywood is a dystopian projection of the future.
Character depth, an intriguing mystery, a phenomenal narrative arc, a deep and resounding plot, and fantastic dialogue are more than enough to drive optimistic future fiction.
As current events stand, there’s a high degree of probability that people are more than ready for a dose of optimism and a hopeful future.
Maybe it’s time for TV to deliver the brighter content that viewers seem to be craving.
