Our theme for the month of March is “cities.”
The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. — Genesis 11:5-9, NRSV
I always wondered about and even sympathized with the terrifying confusion the citizens of Babel must have felt. Unity and the ease of monoculture sacrificed at the hands of idolatry for alienation and confusion. Even though the account is only an etiological myth, it tugs at the heart of a timeless anxiety: an inability to connect with our very own neighbors. Only rebellion against the Creator of the Universe could explain something so devastating as our forced disconnection. In this, the biblical account of the Tower of Babel is one of our oldest dystopias.
There’s something essentially antisocial about our great dystopian cities.
Timon of Athens, whose name gives origin to the word “timonistic” describing antisocial misanthropy, developed his cynical reputation during the Peloponnesian War—a time about as dystopian as it gets. I’m not sure to what extent Athens plays into Timon’s timonism, but, at the very least, it provides an opportunity for his deliberately antisocial behavior.
More explicitly, brutalist architecture (which I defended in this space a few years ago) is used as a symbol of authoritarianism and urban loneliness in all sorts of media. In both Wall-E and Ready Player One, humans have lost the ability to physically relate with one another through the technologization of daily life, especially represented through futuristic cities. Relationships have become, quite literally, artificial on the Axiom and in Columbus, Ohio.
Even in The Hunger Games’s The Capitol, a city filled to the brim with obnoxious and queer-coded people, the Capitol’s citizens appear disconnected from both reality and each other. In the first two films (I’m not sure about the books, sorry!), they are shown almost exclusively in large group shots where the masses have the potential to become an antisocial blob, not unlike a Sunday morning rock concert service at a non-denominational church. The main representation of the people of the Capitol comes through the live crowd at the TV show preceding the games—a spectacular showcase of the performativity of reality television, a format that denies authenticity and connection in favor of entertainment.
Dystopian cities and social disconnection are married in our cultural imagination. And anyone who’s ever lived in a major city for a significant period of time understands. Olivia Harre, based in Nashville, captures the feeling in her the post calvin blog this month:
I’ve lived in the same apartment for a little over three years, and I’ve only seen my next-door neighbor once.
I know she used to have a dog, but it seems mysteriously quiet over there now, and I worry it has passed away. I know she works from home some days but not all, and that she typically does her laundry around the same time as me. I know she listens to the same podcasts and artists that I do and calls her friends when she needs to vent and sometimes orders her groceries from Target. I know that she too spends most Friday nights vacuuming and watching Netflix. We’ve never met, but her presence next door helps me feel less alone.
It’s easier to feel alone in a lively city. And that’s precisely what fills them with dystopian potential.
Joshua Polanski (’20) is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, In Review Online, and Off Screen amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking and exhibition, slow and digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, and Middle Eastern film.
