This year saw the remaster of critically-acclaimed Akira, probably the movie most credited with introducing anime to a Western audience. Like 1982’s Blade Runner from which it draws inspiration, Akira imagines a future so proximate that we are now living it, in this case a vision of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Remasters generate renewed interest and the potential to bring a classic to new audiences, as well as the chance for the more elderly among us to indulge in nostalgia. It also presents an opportunity for a critical contemporary reappraisal of art that, by virtue of the passage of time, has taken on a second nature as representative of a specific cultural and historical context from which it is ever further removed. Such reappraisals have seen some movies retroactively acquire cult status, while others have fallen from grace and found themselves relegated to the dust heap of history.
Akira appears however to have escaped such re-evaluations, with recent reviews generally reaffirming its cult status and importance to the cultural exchange between Japan and the West, in particular with regards to animation. This is a missed opportunity given both Akira’s richness and its historical and cultural specificity, which should provide plenty of stimulating touchpoints for dialogue with our present moment, especially considering our dystopian zeitgeist and the enduring popularity of the cyberpunk genre. A film that dared to imagine our present moment deserves better than being engaged only in terms of its cultural legacy.
Write.as does not come with a standard navigation menu or archive. Instead it organises posts using hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page with all the posts with that hashtag, in descending date order. All my reviews come with hashtags to help you find others that are similar.
You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.
Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:
#boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
#protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.
There are two common misconceptions about meritocracy. The first, that we live in one and that our position in society results from merit rather than luck, wealth or other structural factors. Second, that living in a meritocracy would be desirable in the first place. We have forgotten that ‘meritocracy’ entered the English vocabulary as a pejorative and something to avoid. Evaluating people on merit rather than connections or wealth is certainly desirable, but the corollary of granting power based on merit is the disenfranchisement of everyone considered insufficiently deserving.
The Ten Percent Thief, Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s debut novel, skillfully takes aim at both misconceptions. It is a bold, creative and excellent satire of contemporary fixation on merit and productivity, true to Ursula K. le Guin’s dictum that the best science-fiction illuminates the present rather than prophesises the future. The title of the book is derived from an eponymous stratum in Lakshminarayan’s fictional society, which divides its citizen into an upper 20%, middle 70% and lower 10% based on their productivity. One’s placement on this curve within the corpocracy of BellCorp, a self-described ‘meritocratic technarchy’, determines one’s rights, privileges and access to consumer technology, creating a constant race to the top. Failure to perform results in demotion, expulsion from BellCorp’s Virtual City to the adjacent Analog slums, or a one-way trip to the vegetable farm. The Ten Percent Thief is not always subtle in drawing its parallels with the present, but that makes it no less effective.
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, is an observation attributed to Marxist critic Frederic Jameson and popularised by Mark Fisher. And indeed, our culture is rife with stories that tell of the end of the world, often as a result of capitalism, yet rarely do we see stories about capitalism’s transcendence. Post-apocalyptic stories walk a fine line between serving as a warning, and expressing our fears that the trolley can no longer be switched to a track where it will not kill all of us. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake sits within the latter category, being less a warning and more a bleakly cynical tale of human powerlessness.