From Afilmic Reality to Demodystopia: Demographic and Age-Related Anxieties in Logan’s Run and White Plastic Sky
From Afilmic Reality to Demodystopia: Demographic and Age-Related Anxieties in Logan’s Run and White Plastic Sky

Summary/Abstract: Coined by Andreu Domingo, ‘demodystopias’ refer to a specific subset of dystopias “that make population matters a salient concern” (“Demodystopias” 725) and, as such, are drawn to read societies through demographic variables, particularly age. In these narratives, external stressors (e.g., the scarcity of life-sustaining resources such as food) call forth measures that are both radical and deeply unsettling, thereby foregrounding the dystopian worldbuilding of such fictions. Showcasing an especially horrendous possibility, certain demodystopias present age-based genocide, framed by authorities as a ‘civic duty’ that must be fulfilled—usually by older adults—to ensure the survival of younger generations. This article delivers a comparative study based on two such filmic demodystopias, the American science fiction Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson, 1976) and the Hungarian-Slovakian science fiction animation White Plastic Sky (Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó, 2023). As I’ll argue—with the interdisciplinary support of science fiction studies, demographic research, and cultural gerontology—these films are heavily marked by the afilmic realities of demographic and age-related anxieties, which not only influence the building of these dystopian worlds, but concurrently push these films to position the possibility of growing older as a utopian prospect.

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