Judge Dredd and Eugenics: Artificial Selection, Social Control and Technology in a Cinematographic Dystopia

Abstract

Eugenics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, influenced by social degeneration theory, alleged a degradation of the individuals in society in a way that sought to appeal to the State’s responsibility to carry out practices that would avoid the degeneration of the population and even improve it qualitatively. The objective of this article is to analyze, using neohistoricist methodology, these conservative nineteenth-century ideas collected in the ideological discourse of the late twentieth-century film narrative, Judge Dredd. Thus, the State in this dystopian narrative, filmed in a conservative and crisis historical context, uses social control, artificial selection and technology as mechanisms to strengthen and perpetuate the social and political structure.