Dystopia Speech

Imagine your hell. What would it look like? Who belongs there? Fictional...or real? Is it anything like our modern world or is it a fear beyond your wildest imagination? At the heart of every dystopia is essentially, the exploration of human nature and the expression of the fears that drive our societies. There are three main fears which are involved with dystopia. They are; political dispute and rebellion, the stifling of freedom to express individuality and the loss of human connectedness, which is central to our need for social interaction and validation. In order to address these fears, dystopian texts examine contemporary issues and hyperbolise them; consequently identifying the possible flaws that underlie the societies we construct and shedding insight into our response to their deconstruction.

Two such examples of dystopia are the novel, 1984 by George Orwell, and Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E. These two texts, while individually examining rather different social issues both involve the three central elements that define dystopia, the repression of individuality, the elimination of human connectedness and the prevalence of political dissent.
On board the Axiom in the 2008 film Wall-E, we discover the sequence of events that led to the evacuation of the planet Earth. In the past, one large megacorporation has gained control of all business and government on the planet. The human population is so distracted by consumerism that they never notice that they have been stripped of all their freedoms and are now dominated by the BnL megacorporation. The axiom cannot be questioned or challenged; the passengers therefore never question their lives or their existence. Under this repression the corporations rule by force, imposing severe punishments on anyone that defies their power. The difference here though is that the people are so engaged in mundane pleasures that they are unaware that they are being dominated and manipulated by an all-powerful corporate Police