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This paper argues that audiovisual fiction can serve as a valuable empirical and theoretical resource for critically engaging the future through utopian analysis. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s notions of utopia and the political unconscious, we propose engaging with audiovisual fiction as a mediated projection of collective desires, antagonisms, and constraints. We illustrate this approach through a qualitative analysis of codes derived from episode diaries of the first season of the Fallout TV series. Our findings are organized around three interpretive practices: identifying structural problems, barriers to imagination, and utopian openings. These interpretive practices, combined with contextualization of the work's historical and production conditions, can reveal suppressed utopian imaginaries, which can be a source of insights on latent collective desires for the future. Therefore, we contribute by reconceptualizing utopia as an analytical lens and proposing a guide to utopian analysis.
Leandro et al. (Mon,) studied this question.