Critical Reading Response to “Fresh Hell” written by Laura Miller
“Fresh Hell”, written by Laura Miller and published in the New yorker, an American
weekly magazine, is an informative magazine article that analyzes famous dystopian movies
intended for young audiences. Miller examines many dystopian films and books throughout the
article but draws more emphasis on “the hunger games” ; she also focuses her article on the idea
that all dystopian works of fiction have similar intentions the most frequent and most significant
being to spread awareness and warn us about affairs happening now or in the future in the world
in the hopes of not reaching a dystopian state.
Overall, I did not enjoy reading this article and had to reread it multiple times and still
couldn't grasp everything she said. One of the reasons is because the article was very dense and
everything was said very quickly. The approach Miller took in writing this article is to discuss
and examine the similarities between dystopian fictional works. As a result, throughout the paper
she can talk about a particular example of dystopian fiction and then discuss something different
and then go back to the same dystopian fiction which i find to be odd and not smooth as a result
while reading I couldn’t focus as much on the text compared to other reading we took this
semester in our course. For example, in the first page she introduces “the hunger games” and
then talks about the future of dystopian fiction and what it could be based on, then later on in the
article she goes back to touch on “the hunger games”. It made the article seem like a maze,
constantly having to go back and forth to understand what she’s trying to say. Another part of her
writing I did not like was that she would dive deep directly. For example, in the third page she
directly starts talking about “the giver” which is not very consistent in the article. In one instance
she summarises “the hunger games” and in another she talks about another movie in an instance.
We have to take into consideration that “the new yorker” is a weekly magazine, which is a
popular source. Researchers only use academic peer reviewed works in their work so it is safe to
assume that the intended audience of this article are most likely normal people which require the
information on the magazine to be fun and easy to read and understand which is something this
article highly lacks.
One thing that was very interesting that I found while reading this article was the near
identical approach Gameela Ismail did in her documentary “El Gouna: a utopia and exile” to
what Miller discusses in the last paragraph in the third page of how all dystopian fiction first
appear to be a utopia and then the protagonist finds out the truth that the society they live is
instead a dystopia which shocks the audience and helps them realise the same in their society.
Since dystopian fiction has the goal of spreading awareness of problems in today’s society or
problems that we will face in the future. And dystopias usually end with chaos or just a bad
ending which is something Gameela Ismail does in her documentary. She goes to El gouna
pretending it's a utopia and shocks the audience when it turns out that it hides another side that is
usually not seen where people live in inhumane conditions. Another example of this was “ghost
in the shell” a story about humans being cyborgs and the only human part of them is their souls
and at the end of the story the protagonist ends up merging with the antagonist, a rogue A.I.
program, and become an entirely different person. I believe this consistent ending found in
dystopian fiction is very helpful in achieving its purpose because the audience will not be
satisfied since they might be used to seeing happy endings which are found in many movies and
books and so it leaves them with a scar which helps them realise that something has to be done.