Utopia and Dystopia: the Shift Tells All

“Perfection itself is imperfection.” [1] A perfect world or a utopia can be created, but it cannot be sustained or controlled. A utopia is an imagined fairy tale place with everything someone can desire. A perfect place with everything to its ‘perfection’, with the right amount of fear and fun, which is hard to create, sustain, or control. Perfection is what makes a utopia, since there never can be perfection utopias cannot be prolonged or precise. Everyone has their own utopias as well as an idea of what they would want, and what they would do, but just one utopia is impossible to have. This is depicted in film and literature. For example; William Golding’s novel and novel based film ‘Lord of the Flies’, films; ‘V for Vendetta’ by The Wachowski Brothers, ‘Gattaca’ by Andrew Niccol and ‘1984’ by George Orwell. These are some films and novels that portray why a Utopia cannot be created, sustained or even controlled, dystopia to utopia or utopia to dystopia. “Our life dreams the Utopia. Our Death achieves the ideal.” [2] This quote is displayed in the novel and film ‘Lord of the Flies’, as Piggy tried to keep his and Ralph’s utopia alive but lost his life during the attempt. Ralph and Piggy’s struggle to construct their Utopia that held a lot of value for most of the kids at first, the inception of the utopia was by Ralph who was elected the ‘chief’. Quickly from one utopia, there was another. After seeing Ralph’s utopia being made Jack wanted his own which lead to the groups dividing and leading to many severe deaths and total disruption on the Island. Without delay the value to a utopia was lost, like Romeo without Juliet. Ralph’s utopia was all work and getting the island set up with shelter. Ralph wanted to be rescued fast, but all Jack wanted to do was hunt, so the boys started to follow him. This created the other utopia, Jack’s ‘utopia’, which was more like a dystopia, “a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and