Utopia

 Amazon's Utopia has blood on its hands. Most people haven't seen this show.  But it has exerted, I think, a malign influence.  There is a limit to the popular entertainment industry's willful, cynical nihilism and its vicious paranoia -- I think Utopia establishes that limit.  For this reason, the 8 program show was not renewed, despite product design clearly anticipating an order for, at least, a second series  (The last of the eight episodes is overtly open-ended so that a second series could tie up loose plot-ends.  But the show's fans will wait in vain for this dispensation.).  And, it's on this basis, that each episode begins with a solemn disclaimer warning audiences that the series is a work of fiction and not to be taken as a comment on the present pandemic.  A week ago (I'm writing in August 2021), the screenwriter for the movie I am Legend had to make a public appearance to deny that a vaccine blamed for the creation of zombies in that film, now more than a decade old, was prescient as to our present dilemma -- "It. Is. A. Movie." the writer declared, "I made it up."  Apparently, not very many people have seen Utopia -- I can only imagine the mayhem that might have occurred had this Amazon-produced show been popular.  But, I think, that some of the toxins contained in the program have, in fact, leaked out into the general public. 

Utopia is a baroque, very well-made, and suspenseful horror film involving a small group of misfits battling a sinister pharmaceutical company run by a monstrous scientist named Christie (John Cusack who is spectacularly loathsome).  Christie's corporation purports to devise a vaccine for a deadly flu, a disease that kills children.  The vaccine, of course, is a Trojan Horse intended to have other malign effects on those who are injected with it.  And the deadly flu itself is a  product of Christie's company, an fantastically infectious disease agent spread through rabbits -- a traveling petting zoo is the vector of transmission.  (There's a misdirection at the show's outset -- Christie's company also produces simulated meat, a protein product grown in labs, that is initially thought to be the disease vector.)  The show's format is essentially an elaborate chase in which the misfits flee sinister infantile murderers unleashed upon them by Christie and his henchmen.  The program is ultra-violent with gruesome torture sequences about every couple episodes.  The misfits are led by terrorist named Jessica Hyde who is every bit as ruthless and vicious as the killers pursuing them.  Episodes are replete with amputations and eye-gouging.  One of the heroes is tortured by having salt, and, then, bleach poured into his eyes.  When he refuses to talk, the bad guys gouge out his eye with a spoon.  Not to be deterred, the guy spends the rest of the show with gory gauze stuffed in his empty eye-socket.  There's almost no sex.  This show wants you to get off on bloody murder, mass killings, and lovingly detailed imagery of feverish children dying from the flu.  The picture is shot in cable TV's most elaborate style -- sequences are bathed in saturated color and there are elaborately designed sets, startling off-center compositions, and excellent parallel editing, linking together the film's various disparate plot-lines.  Action scenes are competently choreographed and sequences culminate in spectacularly composed shots that summarize the action.  There's a great soundtrack blaring under all the cartoonish imagery.  The acting is febrile but effective.  The gory violence features a sweet-faced eight-year old girl who kills with impunity, another man-child murderer who sucks on an inhaler when he's slaughtering people (like Richard Widmark in the old noir Kiss of Death).  The show uses the Game of Thrones paradigm of establishing likeable and competent characters only to shock viewers by bloodily disposing of them without foreshadowing or, even, much in the way of narrative justification.  (Here a perky, optimistic blonde assists Jessica Hyde in gathering her group of terrorists; after proving to be particularly effective in resolving a dispute between the gang members, the guerilla, Jessica Hyde summarily executes her on the theory that there can be only one leader of the group -- and that person must be obeyed without question.)  The show likes to show murder victims lying on the floor in pools of gore with other characters blithely stepping around or over them.  John Cusack's creepy Christie seems to have an affinity for children -- he's always surrounded by them and each evening, at the family dinner, he seizes his kids' hands for a little secular prayer:  before eating everyone must explain "what (they) have done to justify their existence in this crowded world," a mantra that is repeated throughout the episodes and that becomes increasingly sinister as we see what Christie and his agents are really attempting to accomplish.  Utopia traffics in creating very strong, transient emotions in its viewers that are almost wholly disreputable -- a sequence will be set up to cause the viewer to passionately desire that some bad guy (or girl) be slaughtered in some particularly horrible way.  Often, this passion is indulged and character that we dislike suffers an awful fate.  But these passions -- for violent revenge, for gory retribution -- are purely transient, fleeting:  after a half-hour, you don't recall feeling anything except a sort of sour distaste at  your own complicity with the carnage on screen.  

The show's organizing narrative device pushes Utopia into malice.  The program begins at a ComicCon, that is, a fan convention where kids gather to rave about their favorite comic books and comic book characters, participants colorfully dressed for cos-play.  As it happens, there is a very popular comic book called Dystopia -- the comic book features a young girl named Jessica Hyde who is raised in some kind of commune called "Home".  She is held hostage by an evil character called Mr. Rabbit (a giant malignant-looking rabbit somewhat like the monster in Donny Darko).  Jessica Hyde is hostage to Mr. Rabbit's evil schemes which are implemented by Jessica's father, a microbe hunter who has been press-ganged into creating deadly viruses for bio-warfare.  Jessica's father rebels against Mr. Rabbit triggering a violent chase depicted in the comic book that, of course, parallels the chase occurring in film's narrative -- Christie (who turns out to be Mr. Rabbit) and his minions pursuing Jessica Hyde and her ragtag group of guerrillas.  (The show is very similar in format, pacing, and design to The Boys, a show featuring an equally monstrous corporation that uses caped super-heroes to assault its nemesis, also a rag-tag group of misfits.)  In the comic book that structures the show's plot, Christie's corporation has unleashed a flu virus created in gain-of-function studies involving tropical bats.  This flu gets out of the laboratory and starts killing children.  Jessica Hyde, the comic book character, has to fight both the minions of Mr. Rabbit and the flu to save the world.  This is where Utopia becomes problematic -- the program shows a supposedly fictional work that comes true; that is, the comic book's story about a deadly flu virus engineered by evil scientists in order to foist an even more malicious flu vaccine on the world is revealed to be the model for what is happening in the reality posited by the series.  Of course, the parallels with the Covid situation and its vaccine are startling, eerie, even, uncanny.  (The show, produced and written by the woman Gillian Flynn, is based on a British TV series that was produced around 2013 to 2015 -- it seems that Utopia in Flynn's version for Amazon was made in 2018 and released in 2019.  Therefore, resemblances to present-day events are, as the disclaimer advises, purely coincidental -- but, of course, the premise of the show was derived from the toxicology involving SARS and Zika (with hints of Ebola), that is, earlier quasi-epidemics that never quite penetrated to the UK and USA.)  What makes the show so insidious is that it posits that a work of popular entertainment, a comic book, can afford a model for havoc  in the real world.  If this is true, then, how can we not interpret the TV show, Utopia, as providing the template for the Covid-19 pandemic that now threatens the very audience for which the Cable show was mad?.  Things imagined by writers come true in reality.  Does this mean that the writer actually knows something through his or her sinister connections that is unknown to the rest of us.

Mr. Rabbit's vaccine doesn't really treat the bat flu -- in fact, the bat flu has also been manufactured to provide a vehicle for the government to mandate vaccines.  (In Utopia, unlike our current dilemma, the public clamors for the vaccine and, indeed, pressures the FDA to approve the remedy before it is properly vetted.  Of course, in our parallel reality, half the public refuses to take the vaccine, arguing that the medicine was created with unseemly haste and is not properly approved -- in fact, the FDA's inexplicable refusal to approve the vaccine except under emergency authorization suggests that the agency is, itself, unsure about what effects the vaccine will have -- at least, this is what I have heard people aruge.  And this has proven to be a disincentive for people to get injected who are suspicious of the vaccine.)  The evil corporation led by Christie (Mr. Rabbit), in fact, has concealed in the vaccine a mechanism to sterilize those who are vaccinated -- this is Christie's misguided attempt to save the world  from the horrible effects of overpopulation.  I think this plot element has escaped from Utopia and is now infecting people, even those who haven't seen the show -- popular entertainment, as we know, has its viral aspects.  In the last few months, I've heard a number of people say that they refuse the vaccine because it will adversely effect their fertility.  Here fiction imitates reality and seems somehow prophetic -- and this fiction seems to be confused for the truth, infecting people with yet another reason to refuse the vaccine.