Dystopias

Dystopian parables like “The Walking Dead,” where zombies rule the earth, are an increasingly fashionable genre of entertainment, but the degree of apocalyptic pessimism is very different depending on the size of the screen.The dividing line between television and movies seems to be class conflict.Television shows posit a hideous future with a silver lining; survivors, good or bad, are more or less equals. Movies like “Divergent,” “Snowpiercer” and “Elysium” foresee societal divisions that last into Armageddon and beyond and that define a new, inevitably Orwellian world order that emerges from the ruins of civilization.

Movies project a morose, scary future where man is his own worst enemy, whereas television can’t entirely suppress a smile.There is something positive about the end of the world on shows like “The Walking Dead,” and “Z Nation” on Syfy and “The Last Ship,” on TNT. True, civilization as we know it is gone, but so is social stratification. Survivors don’t group into castes according to birth, race, income or religion. People of all kinds bond with whomever seems friendly, or at least unthreatening.

Dystopian movies based on young-adult novels understandably focus on the oppression of young adults, but in “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games,” a despotic elite divides the little people into cliques, only there is no prom in sight.Engels wrote about “contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes.” He meant in the movies. On TV, all men are equal and equally at peril in the apocalypse.