Alexander Payne’s Downsizing is a finest experimental art piece. Maybe we can call it as a thought experiment.

There’s this idea of downsizing humans to fit into a world with a goal of reducing global consumption. Movie begins with this great premise, a promising and novel idea to tackle the exponential growth of population. Right? Not quite right, unfortunately this premise is not what the movie is about. It is simply a kind of movie that runs not with you but against you, your train of thought is totally negligible to it. The whole life of individual, the existential journey, the life as it is at “your” level is what captures the meaning of this movie. Payne painstakingly made a whole world that is beautiful and interesting yet you are made to react and feel small. How small? 5 inches. That’s the size of an average smartphone. Taking it figuratively : we all have our phones and can access anything we want, virtually, but still feel small. Sometimes small enough to think less about a movie that is particularly not made for you, the common man.

Same thing happens with Payne’s work. He is not concerned with the world, he insists to find a world within that downsized world. Paul Safranek (played by Matt Damon) is a man whose life is far interesting than Forrest Gump’s (minus the disability). The genre blending, as the key, indeed resembles with Gump’s narrative but it puts more emphasis on one’s suffering with choices they make. Safranek is no different about that. It is hard to navigate what’s this story has to offer at its beginning, first half deals with a macro world and the second half fits in the hands of an existential victim.

Payne’s inner world reeks of themes about human relationships. His point seems to play with recurrent theme of how larger the world is and it is destined to make you feel small; how smaller the world is that chances are more to make you feel, even, smallest. A life is but a negligible speck in the game of chaos. A conundrum in the continuum, a choice in the midstream between having no clue of where it began and having no interest in where it began.

Sociopolitical Perspective

So, if a person has been downsized does he get the same benefits as a person who hasn’t been downsized (non-downsized person being the actual driver of the economy)? Do they get voting rights to decide the future of the state? Can they claim affirmative action? Minority benefits? Health care benefits? They’re tax exempt, it is their social privilege now. They are offering a service to mankind to participate in a social experiment in a luxurious miniature world (not so luxurious), thus they enjoy and reap the benefits of it. What kind of benefits? The same benefits military employees benefit from. There is also a population of lower rung in this world, most of them are immigrants and poor people who got in there because of the benefits or opportunities they were offered, or they might be doing it to provide means to their non-downsized kin or simply people hired for manual labor. There are also social activists forced to be a downsized people, against their consent as a prison or political punishment. There are also illegal immigrants trying to cross the borders, travelling via a TV box.

Economical Perspective

Here’s a perfected model. Since the size of the individual has been downsized, he’ll be using approximately 1/17th – 1/20th (in size) of the natural resources than the actual driver of an economy consumes. They’ll have an exponential growth in the supply of resources. The excess of supply reflects the lower cost of production. So, the cost of an average burger is $1.57 (with 2K18’s inflation) and to produce the same for a downsized person would cost around 8 cents (approximation is based on the manufacturing costs). A diamond earring and necklace set light would cost just $83.

Free from the shackles of limited transportation and storage, people can venture anywhere for their exotic vacation; they use FedEx by the way, to travel I mean. That’s not the only thing, let’s come back to necklace and burgers, the small size helps in easing the transportation and gives us the maximum control of the available storage units. Thus, it is also a factor in reducing the prices.

“Downsizing is the permanent reduction of a company’s labor force through the elimination of unproductive workers or divisions.” But that’s not what’s happening here, there is a Labor unit within the miniature land. They’re not actually having a social benefit at the fullest. Simple enough, bad choices design the fate. Assuming the state of luxury, or simply overestimating it. Our protagonist loses his occupational license, thus forcing himself to take a job, an obvious go-to job. When it comes to run-of-the-mill survival game it still follows the capitalistic rules. We also find two other characters who seemingly benefited a lot by importing cigars and booze from Serbian wholesalers to pocket profits through the miniaturized retailers. And the drugs too.

Ecological premise

Hypothetically speaking, this thought experiment might reduce our carbon footprint. Reduction in wastage production and management. Reduces the chemical emissions. Encourages humans to build electrical vehicles than the ones that depend on non-renewable resources. As NYU bioethicist S Matthew Liao said 15 cms of reduction in height translates to around 23-25% of mass reduction for men and women, respectively. This movie is about seeking remedies within the earth itself, though it is a pipe dream but not a pipe dream of Dyson’s or Mars colonization.

The End of the world

The crux of the story is an unexpected deviation with a plot point that is independent of the actual premise. Matt Damon’s character has to choose, a choice : it is either his “lovefuck” with Vietnamese activist or the people of Nordic cult-like group seeking to avoid a climate change catastrophe, due to excessive methane release. A modern man’s answer to disasters — modern day’s Noah’s ark. (spoiler alert : he picks the first one)

“The tunnel leads to a vault, 1.6 kilometers inside the earth’s lithosphere and encased in the double layer of Inconel Alloy 625 (nickel-based superalloy). In addition to maintain broad spectrum of diversity, the vault equipped with fields for growing foods, forests for lumber, livestock for animal husbandry. The residential areas are spacious and easily expandable to provide for future generations.” says a character.

How about the power, is it nuclear?

“No, no! 100% Geothermal.” replies another character. “And we have interoperable organic systems to manage production of artificial sunlight, oxygen, CO2 elimination, water purification, and so on.”

This vault is to protect them from the disaster and will last 8000 years till the surface levels are safe for humans.

Narrative Structure

Actual downside, if there is one, of the plot could be its inconsistency with the narrative order or lack of such an order. If we trivialize lack of order then the movie is an off-beat Utopian genre blended with anti-coming-of-age dramedy. It is neither a mainstream nor a passionate art-house film. In the own words of Alexander Payne, it is :

“Not a major statement. Who the hell can make a major statement? But Jim Taylor and I, when we started conceiving this screenplay 10 years ago, certainly had the idea to make on some level a political film – not literally or directly political, but something with a metaphor that would allow us to open the gates to certain hideous elements going on in current society. In an interview with Guardian

“The movie takes a very ridiculous premise and treats it very earnestly. That’s the ridiculousness of the film.” Ibid. Payne

So, this movie is a serious take on the absurd. Maybe a satire of the ridiculousness of the absurd. No wonder people flushed it with mixed reviews, for all their poor souls’ needs this movie doesn’t even meet; the artificial order and discipline they lack themselves. Sometimes certain movies that failed at its initial release work well at another time, maybe we should deterritorialize the term art-house : an art-house movie is an art-house movie even if it is not considered as such, initially. It took on the aura of art-house after being rejected by the philistines, the common lot that toil a lot.

Remember the state of Fight Club, it has more fans to its masculine aesthetic than the time of its release. Maybe we can get a female themed fight club if we were to deterritorialize it. At the final note, any good story doesn’t always happen or end in the same way you (or the common lot) expect it to end. It doesn’t run parallel to your needs but it cuts perpendicularly, negating an unneeded common requisite.



Can there a future to this Downsized world?

I think this thread might answer that question.



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