I was on Amazon.com, adding Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy to my "Save for Later" list because my copies are falling apart–I keep lending them out to friends–and among those little discussions at the bottoms of pages there I saw a thread titled something like, "Recommend any utopian movies?" Somebody was making an Amazon list of Utopian/Dystopian movies, and he couldn’t find any utopian ones.

I’ve had the same experience. I want to end my course in American Utopia next week with some clips from various utopian and dystopian movies, but while I can find plenty of the latter (I’m using Blade Runner), the former are rare as hen’s teeth. I’ve decided to use Zeitgeist: Addendum (the torrent download is free and legal, by the way), but it’s a documentary, not fiction (even if a lot of it is pretty unbelievable).

My theory is, utopia is a lot harder to pull off in movies than in some other media. Look at Star Trek: the Federation is a utopian society in many ways, but while this is brought up in the various TV series now and then (and probably in the books, though I haven’t read many Trek novels), the movies totally ignore those aspects of the setting. I think movies just don’t have time to deal with utopian aspects, which require a quieter (more boring) approach to portray them properly.

Because utopia is pretty boring. That’s kind of the point, really. Utopia is all about not living in interesting times.

What do you think?