Simon Amstell's Carnage and Pragmatic Utopias

Utopian thinking can be revitalised through art and culture

So recently I finally got around to watching Simon Amstell's new film, Carnage, available on IPlayer. Set half a century in the future in a Utopian world where veganism has become the norm and people openly weep at their memories of eating meat, it recounts a semi-fictional history of how humankind collectively decided to give up consuming dead animals for good. Indeed the sublime punnage of its title reflects Amstell's own attitudes towards the subject matter, but where the film stands out amongst its vegan contemporaries is the way in which it rejects that movement's self-righteous anger and rather bloated self-importance. Its cultural fabrications, including a vegan-themed Eurovision entry from Albania and an opera led by a cow, are somehow both utterly believable and hilariously absurd. Set alongside footage from actual incidents and occurrences, they simultaneously lampoon the vegan movement whilst paving a real road for the future. Yet, as it culminates in an overtly fantastical arcadian future where middle-class teenagers sit around in the countryside feeding each other vegan delicacies, one might wonder how sincere its message actually is. The film in this regard manages to be both wonderfully clear and wilfully obscure as Amstell shows that sometimes fact can be stranger, and a lot funnier, than fiction.

The same day I watched it, I also managed to finish Rutger Bregman's recent work Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There. Similar to Carnage, Bregman revitalises his subject matter and imbues it with a renewed relevance. He argues that it is essential for the Left to recapture the spirit of Utopian thought in order to provide a more effective resistance against a currently more dominant Right. The work reclaims the whole concept of Utopias from dogmatism, instead showing how they are, instead, pragmatic, all demonstrated in the following quotation from Oscar Wilde, "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias." Bearing this in mind, the fantastical, futuristic elements of Carnage suddenly become a lot clearer in their intentions. The faux-historiography the film creates evidences humankind's changeability where, in fact, rather than the fictional elements seeming real, the real elements seem fictional. Meat-crammed footage from today's celebrity chefs, including an excerpt of Nigella Lawson cracking a chicken's breastbone become darkly humorous and almost shocking under the posterity-gazing of a speculative future. One has to bear in mind that this isn't a current historiography, but a Utopian one. Perhaps it is one in the making; in a Q&A for the film, Amstell states that veganism is inevitable, but in the mean time it is, nonetheless, a product of Utopian thinking. And, as Bregman shows, Utopias aren't blueprints for the future, but vehicles for contemporary ideas.

Utopias also encapsulate our current hopes and dreams, they are more than just dry ideas. Like the Right utilises nostalgia, a fabricated past, for political effect, so too can the Left with a fabricated future. Utopias are products of the here and now, they guide rather than dictate. And, as such, they are discardable; they are best represented in art and culture. We look to the artistic Utopias of the past to understand bygone frames of mind rather than as failed political projects. We find cultural value in them despite their outdatedness. We can use them to empathetically engage with our ancestors, find a common cause, and evidence of a deeper, unchanged humanity.

The distinction between the cultural and the actual needs to be made in order for Utopia to become politically potent once again. Currently, Utopia seems to infer naivety and hollow radicalism. Utopias are swatted like flies by people who reject the idea of progress, they insist that these future worlds are unfeasible because "that's not how the world or people work". Utopias, to be pragmatic, need to be discardable and, through an ironic, self-aware distance, Carnage achieves this. Above all else, Amstell achieves it through humour, casting off the much disliked guise of self-righteous fury, echoed by one of its main characters, activist Troy King Jones, who distances himself from his angsty teenage self and accusatory first book, aptly named "Blood on our Forks". The future that the film shows is obviously a fantasy, but the road to get there seems almost analogous to our own reality. The future will still be plagued by problems, but we as humans have an insatiable wanderlust, a need to, as Oscar Wilde says, "look out" and "set sail" for a better country. Utopias should be about ideas, rather than ideology.  

Watch Carnage here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04sh6zg/simon-amstell-carnage