Dystopia became a trend in entertainment culture. According to the Royal Spanish Academy, it is “the fictitious representation of a future society of negative characteristics that cause human alienation.”
It is difficult to escape unscathed from good dystopian stories in a world like today’s. Yeah Before, fiction focused on the cosmos and spaceships type Star Warstoday the gaze points to the human future that is torn between the abuse of technologies and the consequences of climate change.
Some examples are the series Black Mirror, The Walking Dead o The squid game; the movies Blade Runner (pioneer) or there; and the books Kentuckyby our Samanta Schweblin, or the brilliant Roadby Cormac Mccarthy, which had its film version.
“The science fiction of the ’60s or ’70s was not dystopian, but rather it tried to produce other scenarios for the future, scenarios that were not crossed by survival and horror”, he tells her Viva the Spanish filmmaker and writer Luis López Carrasco (Murcia, 1981), whose novel discovery on the subject has just been published: the dystopian The White Desert (Anagrama), which has earned him the prestigious Herralde Prize.
“The white desert also tells how the extreme right or the populist right grows without us seeing it, it grows in the least obvious places, in those speeches that one laughs at first“, Carrasco warns this magazine from his home in Madrid, Spain, where he has just moved.
And he remembers: “About ten years ago, when I went down to the cafeteria in my popular neighborhood, I was amazed when the lady at the bar blatantly spoke in a racist manner. After the Arab Spring and the global feminist strike, those collective, popular and transformative movements They received a violent reaction. We live in a violent time that we do not know how long it will last. That seems terrifying to me. If we add climate change and natural disasters, desperation worsens globally.”
Also a documentary filmmaker, he started writing The white desert in 2017 as if it were a puzzle of stories. In one of them, the fierce competition is for a job. In another, a man tries to return to the past to recover, among other things, the feelings from your childhood as if time had not passed. He writes those feelings by e-mail to his brother, who will read them in the future.
Carrasco published a book of short stories in 2011, Europa, which was the impetus to continue writing. The six years that separated both literary works were alternated between documentaries and notes for that future novelwhich ended in confinement due to the Covid 19 pandemic.
If for Carrasco literature is fiction, documentaries serve to tell social realities: “I am interested in everyday memories, which in some way are opposed to the official accounts that are organized within power.”
Seeing what is happening in the world, how not to be tempted by dystopias: “Regarding the future, we are in a critical and at the same time transitional stage. Global warming puts us in a unique situation. We live in reactionary times in an unprecedented way, because crises, uncertainties and natural issues will be increasingly intense. In the midst of this, power is being rearmed so that societies do not revolutionize.”
Carrasco also received awards for his audiovisuals. The documentary The year of discovery -about social protests in Spanish Cartagena- earned him a Goya Award. But there is another recognition that he especially values: Best International Film at the 35th. edition of the Film Festival in Mar del Plata.
“I am very linked to Argentina,” he surprises. Then she is happy to remember that he participated in BAFICI. And he adds: “Argentina is a place where I have friends, which I visited three times. Also I have a relationship because my great-grandparents met in Buenos Aires. When I was there for the first time I realized that it had the same latitude as southern Spain: it felt like I was in Murcia. Watching Argentine films, reading Argentine literature, is like a permanent gift that we Spaniards have,” she praises.
He says that in the audiovisual field he admires the Argentine Lucrecia Martel (“crucial in my training”), Lisandro Alonso and Martín Rejtman. Among the writers, Juan José Saer, Antonio Di Benedetto (“The suicides y Exist they guided me”), Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar: “See? My coincidences with Argentina are solid.”
He still, he says, feels like “a newcomer” to the publishing field. Still, when he thinks about it, he sees himself as a filmmaker. In his head, every text or news item he reads is viewed as a documentary. This is what happened with The year of discovery, based on workers’ protests after the fall of large Spanish companies: “I am interested in how cinema or art can reconstruct or collect the social memory of a territory.” Since 2008, more or less, Carrasco has focused “on the collective, on the little visible, on the peripheral territories.”
Just as it happens with audiovisuals, the literary bug also bites within itself. This is where he marks the division: when he thinks about what to write, he does not see documentaries but rather literature: “When I write, I do not think that this text can be filmed cinematographically. The cinema I make is fueled by non-fiction, with the interaction of human beings. On the other hand, what is written does not. I write to enjoy, I would never direct something I wrote.”
In that sense, he does not see that The White Desert is adaptable to the audiovisual format. Although: “The huge amount of audiovisual production that exists in these times makes literary production also think about the possibility of adapting the text to the image. I imagine that there are authors who think that their novel is not in the final version but that it will be adaptable to audiovisual content.”
But there is something that Carrasco prefers not to fall into, a limit that – he maintains – cannot be crossed. The one with the spoiler: “There is like a tendency of certain cultural agents to say that they don’t care about spoilers and it seems that that gives a certain status. There are movies or books that if they tell you the ending they destroy them. Because not knowing how they end is part of the experience. And you don’t have to break it.”
