Amazon’s new show Utopia tells the story of a plot to depopulate the earth with a pandemic. It’s just the latest paranoid drama to offer perverse comfort, writes David Jesudason.
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Scientists are ignored. Schoolchildren fall ill. Vaccinations offer hope. Utopia is a new TV series so prescient that it feels like the timing of its release could itself have been part of a conspiracy theory. Released today, the Amazon Prime drama focuses on the threat of a global flu pandemic. A graphic novel manuscript foretells its events – it depicts a scientist who created a flu-like disease designed to thin out an overpopulated Earth. This comic book is obtained by a gang of geeks who have to go on the run to escape numerous murderous enemies, intent on stopping anyone seeing the book’s revelations. After spending their lives wanting to decode the graphic novel’s contents, they now have the truth in their hands, even if it could lead to their deaths.
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While the edit of Utopia was only finished in April, right at the height of the coronavirus outbreak in the US and Europe, the show has been long in the works — it is, in fact, a much-delayed remake of the 2013 cult UK drama of the same name. But its mood of paranoia could not be more topical at a time when people regularly take to the streets to decry shadowy forces controlling and manipulating our world. Whether the issue is Covid-19, climate change or US politics, it seems like we have never lived in an age more filled with conspiracy theories, where these narratives have become a way to explain the biggest problems our planet faces.
The US remake of cult UK series Utopia centres on nefarious goings-on involving John Cusack’s Dr Kevin Christie, a charismatic biotech CEO (Credit: Amazon)
The rise of social media is undoubtedly the key to this era of dark speculation, as people can ever-more easily spread and amplify their suspicions. Indeed, in August, the US president himself endorsed the support of him by prominent conspiracy theorists: followers of the movement QAnon, who allege that Satan-worshiping paedophiles have infiltrated the world’s most powerful positions, and that President Trump is on a mission to root them out.
A history of paranoia
Or perhaps we have always been just as quick to lean on far-fetched narratives to explain tragedy. From the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case of the 1930s, through to the assassination of JFK and the 9/11 bombings, history shows us that when there’s a moment of societal tension, there’s then a slew of conspiracy theories that seek to blame underground organisations, a global elite or certain religious groups. And where conspiracy theories have sprung up, cinema and TV have always been quick to follow.
Often the early period of the Cold War – a time of worldwide paranoia about seemingly pending nuclear annihilation – is cited as the golden age of conspiracy theorising, having given rise as it did to a whole range of suspicions about the ‘other’, from concerns that communists had infiltrated the Western establishment to the theory that the US government were covering up the existence of alien life. Such stories in turn spawned a series of TV and films from The Twilight Zone (1959-64) to The Manchurian Candidate (1962).
Then, in the 1970s, the fallout from the Watergate scandal (which ironically centred on a president, Richard Nixon, who himself fuelled a distrust of elites) caught the public imagination and led to a whole new wave of conspiracy thrillers about nefarious goings-on in the corridors of US government: The Parallax View (1974), The Conversation (1974) Three Days of the Condor (1975) and of course, the great film about Watergate itself, All the President’s Men (1976).
In the 1990s and early Noughties, conspiracy theories were at the foundation of the drama in mainstream shows like The X Files or Lost, but they notably avoided very real and present dangers or atrocities still in the public memory, like 9/11. However in recent years we’re seeing more and more prestige TV dramas, from Mr Robot to Black Mirror to Homecoming, whose plots use conspiracy theories to address very tangible and ever-present societal dangers, such as the role tech, government surveillance and Big Pharma have in our lives. In 2020, though, of course, none of these shows feels quite as easy to get swept up in as Utopia. Watching the show’s lead gang deduce the very manmade genesis of a world-imperilling virus, some viewers may find their imagination getting the better of them – particularly given the continuing spread of unevidenced theories that coronavirus originated in a lab.
1962’s The Manchurian Candidate reflected the Cold War paranoia of the age (Credit: Alamy)
Dr Michael Butter, professor of American literary and cultural history at Germany’s University of Tubingen, claims one of the reasons conspiracy dramas are now so popular is that modern, expansive TV series suit complex conspiracy theories as, rather than having to whiz through plot, they offer audiences the scope to feel like they’re discovering the drip-drip of information alongside the show’s protagonists. “[Long series] really go together well with the logic of conspiracy theory,” he says. “Where everything is connected, where you always find another clue and make another connection. And this makes conspiracies so wonderful for show runners, because they can always add something. You can also turn around the plot after two or three seasons, [where] suddenly you’re learning that everything that you thought was true was not really true, and you move in a vastly different direction.”
A playful take on the genre
The US remake of Utopia, written by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, changes elements of its British predecessor to make the series more relevant for a global audience – as, for example, the original used a conspiracy theory to explain the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) outbreak that occurred in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s and led to 4.4m cattle being slaughtered and around 178 deaths.
What’s more, while the UK version, penned by playwright Dennis Kelly, depicted an idiosyncratically broken Britain of decaying tower blocks, greasy spoon cafes and bland motorway service stations, the remake inhabits a more familiar glossy US milieu of comic cons and tech firms led by charismatic CEOs, like John Cusack’s Dr Kevin Christie, a Mark Zuckerberg-style leader who has brought a new meat substitute to the global market. It’s a stylish and slick update that riffs on the original’s offbeat colour palette which featured, for example, an England with continually blue skies (a result of post-production colourisation) but fails to successfully recreate its subtle characterisation (Adeel Akhtar’s Wilson Wilson was one of UK TV’s most memorable, non-stereotypical Asians) due to a larger cast.
Their shared stylised ultra-violence, including a horrific eye-gouging torture scene aside, what both versions do well is capture a kaleidoscope of conspiracy theory belief among their main characters with Wilson Wilson, now played by Desmin Borges, being the most militant believer compared to everyman sceptic and fellow comic book nerd, Ian, who is at the opposite end of the scale. This range of beliefs enables Utopia to appeal to everyone from ardent conspiracy theory lovers to conspiracy theory cynics alike.
“Utopia has the trope of people playfully engaging with conspiracy and conspiracy theory,” says Butter, pointing to the way in which the genesis of its main conspiracy theory in a comic book offers a meta-wink at how popular culture both fuels and hinders conspiracy theorists. “It [reflects] this idea that conspiracy theories are still popular and attractive, and at the same time they’re stigmatised… as something for entertainment, for board games, for comic books or whatever.”
The Parallax View (1974), with Warren Beatty, was one of a series of conspiracy thrillers to be made in the wake of the Watergate scandal (Credit: Alamy)
The steady stream of conspiracy-based entertainment that has appeared recently (including documentaries such as Netflix’s A Perfect Crime, about the 1991 assassination of German politician Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, which is also released today) might also owe a lot to the fact that we live in a world so keen on conspiracy narratives – such that they have even been popularised and endorsed by the most powerful man in the world. Although Trump is not the first US president to be intrigued by conspiracy theories, he is perhaps unparalleled in using them so overtly for political ends, Butter argues, such as the Obama ‘birther’ conspiracy theory that is now being echoed in his amplification of a similar theory about Kamala Harris. This might even explain why he himself is now at the centre of one.
“Trump is really, really good at playing conspiracy theories,” Butter says. “He uses them as a safety net for himself. He is very good at not really being pinned down to them. He is always introducing them saying, ‘I hear a lot’, ‘people tell me all the time’, ‘a lot of people are saying that’. This makes sure that conspiracy theories are constantly reported, are constantly in the public sphere and this in turn [may fuel] cultural representations.”
The lure of the conspiracy
“Populism has a way of really simplifying the world,” he adds, “and simplifying social conflict and then providing very simple answers that usually don’t work. And we know from a lot of studies that there is a lot of overlap between people who are drawn to populist politicians and movements with people who believe in conspiracy theories.” It’s an irony that where conspiracy theories once took aim at society’s most powerful institutions, they are now being harnessed by the powerful, as a way to engage with disillusioned voters, who may have felt previously ignored by mainstream politics.
John Grohol, psychologist and founder of the Psych Central website, sees conspiracy theories as a way that some can make sense of major events without challenging their worldview. “I believe that not only do they give a little bit of order, they try and make sense of something that doesn’t seem to make any sense,” he says. “So, for instance, it doesn’t seem to make any sense that terrorists would fly airplanes into very tall buildings. Before 9/11 happened, that just never occurred. And so for people to wrap their heads around that kind of event, conspiracy theories arose to help make sense of that tragedy.
“Researchers have found that people who are more fearful and anxious have lower perceived feelings of control over situations,” he adds. “So people with those kinds of traits tend to believe in conspiracies more.”
Amazon series Homecoming, whose recent second season starred Janelle Monae, is part of a new wave of conspiracy-based TV dramas (Credit: Alamy)
In fiction, equally, conspiracy theory dramas exploit events and issues that we fear the most – and so it was that climate change, population control and unregulated science were at the top of the news agenda when Kelly first conceived Utopia. Now, with Extinction Rebellion protesting daily and causing headlines, some might say it is a fitting moment for Utopia’s take on climate change radicalism, which sees dogmatic ideology cause human suffering.
Others might argue that Utopia exemplifies the problem with conspiracy theory dramas: that they can promote the kind of unfounded crankdom that says, for example, that climate change activists are the real problem not climate change itself, even when it is the latter in reality that is devastating the planet and causing widespread deaths. But most viewers can watch Utopia without suddenly believing its outlandish plots and doing this might even be part of its allure.
“Shows like Utopia appeal to people who watch them ironically,” Butter says. “And I don’t think that this tells [those types of viewers] anything about how the world really works. And of course they also appeal to people who still believe that conspiracies exist all the time and that they might actually be on to something.”
Whatever the audience response to Utopia, its producers must be hoping its on-the-nose subject matter proves a potent draw in 2020. For some, it might be a bit too close to home: but for others, its far-fetched pandemic conspiracies might just provide some perverse comfort, given how our real-life pandemic still awaits so much explanation.
Utopia is available now on Amazon Prime
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