After watching What Happened to Monday, Magdala led a discussion on power. The government in the movie has total control over the entire population–how did it get to be like that? Well, it’s obvious that the government had constant surveillance of the population (with checkpoints, ID bracelets), but I think the growth/development of power in just a small group of people (Nicolette Cayman, for example, the mastermind behind the no sibling policy) comes from events that are even before that.
One thing I think that contributed to the rise of power of this small group of people is perhaps the desperation of the population when the Earth was facing a famine (introduced at the very beginning of the film). The result of the starvation of the population probably led to a few people standing up to say, “hey, here is a solution”–and really desperate people are willing to try anything, including outlawing siblings and not questioning how they’re making them fall asleep. I feel like this is a trend seen in history as well–when a nation or a group of people is facing a lot of hardship, they are willing to turn to practically anyone with a potential solution. And if that person happens to have ill intents, then that person or group of people who end up holding the power will hold the power for quite a while until someone challenges the status quo and bring them down.
The genre of dystopia is quite interesting because it draws on a little bit of history to make a “prediction” on what could happen. Hopefully something like what happened in this movie would never happen, but I can definitely see where parts of the plot line came from. For example, checkpoints could be inspired from martial law in different parts of history where checkpoints are/were effective, and the no siblings policy is pretty much exactly like the one-child policy that was in China (of course without the whole freaky, processing siblings and killing them part…).
Interesting and thought provoking movie, especially with the discussion at the end. I do wonder what the meaning of dystopia (or dystopian genre) is though. We’re quite far away from everything that happened in this movie, so I’m not sure if this is truly a “warning” to society. So I guess that leads me to wonder–what’s the motivation behind this film?