Movies like V for Vendetta and The Hunger Games depict police states imposed from above — regimes sustained by surveillance, armed enforcers, and fear rather than genuine popular buy-in. The population complies because it must, not because it believes. Such pure top-down authoritarianism is actually rare. More often, repression becomes totalitarian: a significant fraction of the population internalizes the ideology and helps enforce it.
That latter form is more dangerous — and more ethically disorienting. Famous fictional depictions of totalitarianism, from 1984 to The Handmaid’s Tale, show how narratives evolve to justify everything the system does. The arguments feel morally compelling to those inside the system. Neighbors inform on neighbors. Citizens repeat slogans and monitor conformity, convinced they are upholding what is right. Under such conditions, it becomes easy to doubt your own perception of reality.
While pure top-down authoritarianism is more fragile, its moral clarity sets it apart. There is no ambiguity: armed thugs enforce obedience; the population knows it is being crushed. There is no righteous narrative gnawing at the victims, no fear that others secretly endorse the cruelty, no maze of ideological justification. The fear comes from guns, prisons, and batons — not from social consensus.
This clarity is why cinematic evil so often looks this way. Our moral intuitions grasp tyranny most readily when it is naked and imposed by force. It is simple: oppressors and oppressed, evil and good.
And this rare form of societal evil — the “movie” kind — is what we are witnessing in Iran. What you hear are the voices of victims unified in pain yet strengthened by shared clarity. Under totalitarianism, the sound is different: silence, isolation, darkness. Here, the pain is visible, the unity audible, and the regime’s brutality laid bare.
