Storytelling has always been used to instill values, teach lessons and influence the people of the world. While no one really knows when stories originated, but they were told verbally long before they were written. As society developed, stories could be used to guide children (and to an extent, adults) on how to behave. Hansel and Gretel, for example, is a lesson to not trust strangers and to listen to your parents. The witch is terrifying, clearly establishing that strangers are bad.
And if stories can be used as a medium to teach children a lesson, they can definitely be used to influence an adults way of thought.
And if they can be used to instill social values, they can also be used to instill political ones.
So much so that the CIA actually sent copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the 1950s (on balloons, which were then shot down by the airforce of those countries…) and the CIA then funded the production of Animal Farm in 1954.
And given that film is another medium used to tell stories, it makes sense that they can be used to deliver a message as well. Film is a visual medium, which allows it to reach the illiterate parts of the population, as well as the imagery used being capable of impacting the audience in ways that literature might not be able too – a single image can have as much impact as an entire narrative, and the image can be seen and processed within seconds, while a story will take at least a few minutes of reading.
One of the most obvious ways that film has been used to influence the general population is in propaganda films – which though people may think these only exist in totalitarian or corrupt countries, or during war time, they are also present in everyday politics, persuading people to vote for a particular party or to protest a particular movement etc…
And if governments can use film to persuade the population, it also makes sense that independent filmmakers can use film to persuade the population… and this births the genre of film that is called Dystopia.
Dystopia is a genre that embellishes a certain element of modern day life and takes it to an extreme, intending to instill fear over the thing and contend that it is bad… it could be political, or it could be something that is developing in science and has potential to be used in a malicious way.
Gattaca plays off gene therapy and the idea that a person’s genetics can be used to determine their entire lifestyle. And for the most part, the society works… unless you have crappy genes and are destined to be an underdog.
In a dystopia, the protagonist is usually one of the ones victimized by the government. This is so the audience connects with the underdog and agrees with the filmmakers intention – in Gattaca, being that the genetic control is bad and that it has gone too far.
They also usually follow what is happening in science and politics at the time the film is released – in 1997, when Gattaca was released, scientists connected behaviour in mice with their genetics, and people found that frightening, because they didn’t know what would result from that discovery…
By getting the audience to connect to a relateable character, and playing off of fears, dystopias are able to influence the audience about a particular element of society/science. Which gives them real power, because if a dystopia is successful enough with it’s message – and clear enough – it can play into the media’s fear mongering and can have a real influence over people and what they think, what they understand about a particular topic and how they would feel were it an issue they could vote on…
References
Dalrymple, W. Novel explosives of the Cold War, The Specter [online] https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/novel-explosives-of-the-cold-war/ Viewed 12-Sep-2019
