when reality is more dystopian than fiction

what an overwrought title. i ought to change that.

what i’ve learned so far this year

I’ve learned that I really enjoy having a rowing machine at home. They were always fun for cardio at the gym, and rowing at home is even better because I can sing along with my playlist.

I’ve learned that I really enjoy wearing my wool blazers around the flat, as loungewear. I have a selection of vintage wool suit jackets, most stolen from my mother, and a few from cool girl clothes swaps. They were my winter coats when we lived in Spain. Now they’re my winter indoor loungewear in Berlin. They are warm, comfortable, and I look fantastically unhinged when I answer the door.

I’ve learned that I really enjoy when novels are set in a vague dystopia with a story focused on the humanity, or lack thereof, of a small cast of characters. Novels like Foe, by Iain Reid, and I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacquline Harpman. The latter is deserving of it’s own dedicated post, coming soon. The former is the subject of the next section of this post…

the book is always better than the movie?

Foe, the novel, was published in 2018 having already sold the film rights to an entertainment company, and the movie, produced by Amazon Prime, was released in 2023. There are only three characters in the story — a husband and wife, Junior and Hen, and an oddly menacing guy called Terrance. Junior and Hen live on a farm in climate ravaged near-future. Terrance shows up to inform Junior he’s been selected to travel to a space station, that he’ll be gone for several years, and that his corporation will provide Hen with a human-like copy of Junior as a companion in his absence.

The book is entirely from Junior’s perspective and begins when Terrance’s car headlights wake Junior from a post-dinner nap. Throughout the book Junior is concerned to the point of obsession with Hen, how she’s feeling and what she’s thinking about this major change in their lives. In the film we get much more alone time with Hen to answer those questions. Neither are concerned, at all, with the space station or the techno-biology behind Junior’s copy.

Ok, this is your official spoiler warning. After this little paragraph I will write, explicitly, about the surprise twist ending that is not really such a surprise or a twist. You’ve been warned.

In the novel my suspicions about Junior began almost immediately, but he didn’t feel menacing. He describes the past with a complete lack of specificity and he goes on and on about how happy he and Hen are on the farm. However, because the film is mostly from Hen’s point of view it’s almost a completely different story. Junior feels ambiguous at best and at times antagonistic. If a viewer hadn’t read the book they might have been surprised to learn that our Junior is actually the Junior copy.

While I enjoyed reading the book, it did seem to stagnate in the middle and I was left feeling it would have been more impactful as a long short story or as a short novella. And if it weren't for one tiny part of the film version — one I am sure was added by a deeply unintelligent studio exec right before release — this would have been my first experience of liking the movie more than the book.

The film opens with this prologue:

Later this century, fresh water and habitable land will be the most precious commodities.

Cities will be overpopulated, rural areas slowly abandoned, and new settlements planned for outer space.

Human Substitutes — AI with the capacity for consciousness — will begin to replace human labour in the most ravaged areas of earth.

First of all: that part about these substitutes replacing human labour literally never comes up in either the film that follows this prologue or the book.

Second of all: this prologue hates the film’s audience, because it doesn’t trust the viewer to pick up on the absolutely stunning visual cues that our couple lives in a dying land, surrounded by almost nothing but decay.

I took notes while watching the movie and I kept writing how much I loved the visual representation of this near-future dystopia. My favourite recurring shot is of the one single living tree amongst a scattering of tree skeletons in front of their house, only barely kept alive by Hen’s recycling of her shower water, carried out in buckets. So beautiful. Why, the fuck, ruin that with such a mealy-mouthed prologue.

Perhaps I should have just told you to spend a Saturday afternoon reading the novel — it’s short — and then to watch the movie from timestamp 1:11, keeping you in blissful ignorance of this offence to average movie-watcher intelligence.

in conclusion

I cannot believe there are still four more days in this month. I thought that January 2021 was bad. This is worse.

The only way I know how to cope is to celebrate my favourite thing about humanity: the fact that we tell each other stories, and the more modern fact of writing them down and sharing them across time and space.