Utopia and Dystopia in German Literature and Film

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DOI :10.26650/B/AH09SSc16.2024.034.012   IUP :10.26650/B/AH09SSc16.2024.034.012    Full Text (PDF)

Forever Young: A Multimodal Approach to the Dystopian Portrayal of Eternal Youth in Paradise

İrem Atasoy

Dystopias are usually recognized as anti-utopias or negative utopias that include a fictional society which is characterized by oppressive, totalitarian, unequal and undesirable conditions. The dystopian settings appear through various ways of strict control such as restriction of individual freedom, limited access to knowledge, violence, and punishment which is exercised by hegemonic powers over the citizens. In movies, it often refers to the representations of nightmarish visions of a future based on advanced technologies and science. This study will focus on the dystopian portrayal of eternal youth in Netflix’s movie Paradise (2023) directed by Boris Kunz. The film describes a futuristic dystopia in Germany. In Paradise, eternal youth is attainable through advanced technology and wealth. Youth is transferred from one person to another by an international biotech company called AEON which is based in Berlin. The film depicts a world in which every citizen has the opportunity to stay forever young as long as they can purchase it. The society’s structure revolves around a time-based economy, in which individuals in need of money sell years from their lives, and those seeking to reduce aging buy time. In the form of an eternal youth utopia, the film contains a sharp dystopian totalitarianism which depicts itself as a challenge between different social classes. Considering films as multimodal texts, this paper aims to analyze Paradise within the concept of dystopian impulses as well as the film’s distinctive multimodal structure on the basis of multimodal film text analysis. Moving towards a multimodal oriented semiotic method, the results of this study will demonstrate how filmic modes are used as film’s narrative to create a dystopian setting.


Keywords: Dystopia, Dystopian Films, Film Text Analysis, Multimodality, Paradise

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