Watch '2081,' the Film Adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Dystopian Short Story

It is Monday, the day that we have made a national pastime of hating. Or professing to hate. Hating Mondays gives us a modicum of solidarity to express with our fellow beleaguered co-workers, which is kind of nice, because we can grumble in unison in elevators and at the coffee maker.

But Mondays in the United States of America are not that bad. In an effort to assure you that there are possible worlds out there far worse than this one, I present to you your Monday morning dystopia: 2081, a 23-minute film directed by Chandler Tuttle and starring a number of recognizable faces. It's a pretty faithful adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron," a story first published in 1961.

The short story, which you can read in full here, is about a possible world in which ultimate equality has been achieved by government force: the strong wear weights to make make them weaker and the smart have brain inhibitors that distract them in order to prevent them from having an unfair advantage over others. All this is carried out by the Bureau of Handicapping, an agency acting towards the aim of making all things absurdly equal for all people. Of course, in an unpleasant world like this, unpleasant things happen, and you will have to watch the film to see what, precisely, those unpleasant things are.

The film was released in 2009, and is actually pretty damn good. It may have been uploaded to Daily Motion surreptitiously, so it might be yanked sooner rather than later. Watch it while you can.

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