Where to find accounts of living underground?

February 27, 2008 1:48 PM

Writing a script about a military coup in the near future. Any suggestions for reading/viewing material?

The story follows a married couple as they get involved with the underground activities of a revolutionary cell and find themselves part of a cause that has no real chance of suceeding. The best way to describe it is an emo-ish version of Children of Men (but I totally came up with this way before the movie came out, I swear). I'm looking for any ideas you guys might have on things that can give me an insight to what it's like to live underground, actively resisting a military dictatorship. Any kind of media is appreciated, but I'd love to find some biographical accounts or histories of revolutionaries who had to scrape by with little to no material or political support.

posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth to society & culture (17 comments total)

This is probably going to be a different take to other suggestions in the thread, but my favourite (fictional) expression of what it's like to live under a dictatorship is Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister. In the same way that Eichmann in Jerusalem emphasized the "banality of evil", Bend Sinister underlines the incompetence of dictatorship, the emergence of gaps and exceptions and spurious party-serving 'laws', the feeling that random viciousness looms over your head but that no-one has control over society any more.
posted by Paragon at 2:14 PM on February 27

I would say this metafilter post on a hypothetical coup in 2012 is a must read.
posted by forforf at 2:14 PM on February 27

Not exactly what you're looking for, but you might want to read The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012, if you haven't already. The author, Charles Dunlap, was the co-winner of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 1991-92 Strategy Essay Competition when he entered it.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 2:16 PM on February 27

"Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel 'It Can't Happen Here' envisioned an America in thrall to a homespun facist dictator. Newly reissued, it's as unsettling a read as ever." [full text of book]
posted by dersins at 2:42 PM on February 27

To get some idea of what life is like in a police state, perhaps some of Solzhenitsyn's books might help.

Or read a book about the French Resistance in WWII.
posted by Class Goat at 2:49 PM on February 27

Write fast! :)
posted by hexatron at 3:24 PM on February 27 [1 favorite]

"Fifth Column" and "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" both by Robert Heinlein may make interesting fictional plot fueling material. "FC" is about a small group resisting a Chinese invasion of the US. "TMIAHM" is about revolution on the moon and is a classic of speculative fiction.

For the deteriorating society/ military dictatorship feeling of movies I like "Salvador" directed by Oliver Stone and the young Mel Gibson film "The Year of Living Dangerously".
posted by Jahaza at 3:40 PM on February 27

Oh... You must read Mao Tse-Tung's (Zedong's) "On Guerilla Warfare". Che Guevera's book on guerilla warfare might also be useful. Check out "Small Wars" and the U.S. Army Counterinsurgency manual for the opposite task.

The IRA movie "Michael Collins" is a must watch. And then "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" for a less romanticized and more tragic view.
posted by Jahaza at 3:49 PM on February 27

American coup d'etat: Military thinkers discuss the unthinkable.
posted by washburn at 4:46 PM on February 27

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is about the 2002 Venezuelan coup aginst Hugo Chavez, which had some military components.
posted by beerbajay at 5:14 PM on February 27

Chile.
Argentina.
Peru.
Brazil.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 5:15 PM on February 27

I apologize for answering a question you didn't ask.
posted by beerbajay at 5:17 PM on February 27 [1 favorite]

Coup d'Etat: a practical guide is a classic on the process of coups.
posted by shothotbot at 5:34 PM on February 27

Wasp by Erik Frank Russel is a classic sci-fi account of an infiltration that pretty much fits the bill. It's also a quick, easy read.
posted by Jakey at 5:36 PM on February 27

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, as mentioned above, seems perfect. The computer-mediated, highly decentralized, cell-based revolutionary party exists right now in the Islamic right's jihad. I cannot imagine that a Western revolution wouldn't employ similar methods in this day and age.
posted by Netzapper at 7:53 PM on February 27

There was just an excellent article in Salon about this, reviewing a book by a sociologist who followed around a gang leader and documented life in the Chicago projects:

"What he did find was an economy, and a rough social order that the residents had assembled out of the broken pieces left to them by society at large. Without meaningful police services, they cobbled together a security force of sorts. Without much in the way of social services, they figured out how to extract some of what they needed from the main economic engine in their environment: the gang. Within the borders of a major American city, they lived in the equivalent of a corrupt third-world nation."
posted by sparrows at 7:08 AM on February 28

You could (and should) start with the most famous underground dweller of them all: Anne Frank. Shocking meta-normalcy. Not really revolutionary per se, but there's no better work on what its like to be hiding out which I'd imagine to be the true grind in such a scenario, activity being both revitalizing and an escape.

I'll push some aligned fiction which is probably worth several grains of salt, but perhaps it will help thematically: For Whom The Bell Tolls is, of course, wonderful. I'll whore common culture (since that's what we're all soaking in) with Red Dawn. BS in a lot of ways, but has lots of nice contemporary American moments. The Man In The High Castle is another dictatorship-in-America overlay or you could go the more Canadian route with The Handmaid's Tale. Both are more like Anne Frank in being tales of individual resistance rather than a confrontational collective, but again, not necessarily is this unrelated.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 2:04 AM on March 4