Scarcity, Conflicts, and Dystopia

In cinema, as in life, scarcity shows up everywhere. In the decisions characters face, the time and financial constraints limiting their choices and influencing their relationship with other characters. Economic models and film fictions tell stories about imaginary characters who make decisions over a finite horizon and live finite lives constrained by limited amounts of time and money. This chapter revises the extreme economies portrayed in post-apocalyptic films, dystopian movies, and in Westerns. These genres are the ones that have best-reflected conflicts over scarce resources, the social unrest due to rampant income and wealth inequalities, and the negative economic consequences of the lack of an effective rule of law.