Dystopia?

Dystopia. The opposite of a utopia. What makes those frightening for me at this point in my life is that a lot of those stories have a chance to happen depending on what choices we as people cause. Having had experiences that I don’t usually share with people, and maybe you don’t even know, gives me a kind of glass half empty outlook on life. What happened to Monday? Is a movie with that kind of outlook. This movie was premiered on Netflix in August in France.

I want to look at the plot and how it fits a dystopian outlook. Dystopian novels are classified as, “a genre of fiction writing used to explore social and political structures in a dark, nightmare world.” (Booker, “Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide”) When explained in high school my teacher used the most widely used definition: the opposite of a utopia. So instead of finding a story with shoed everything we wanted out of this world, instead of finding the American dream, I found a movie about despair and what could happen based on poor decisions or better yet on decisions made for me, not by me.

In What happened to Monday? the world’s population has grown and is continuing to grow exponentially, weaning the world of our resources. The more people on the earth meant more mouths to feed, but the amount of crops weren’t growing. So they genetically engineered them. That enhancement also affected the people eating them though; whatever they did to the crops made it so nearly every woman only got pregnant with multiple births. Doesn’t help their cause right? So how they continue to deal with the overpopulation is to do what China has had from 1979 to today and according to them will continue in the future: a one child law. You had to choose which of your children you would keep because you could only have one, and the families were told that their other children are being cryogenically frozen until a time comes when they can live freely on their world.

Spoiler. They lied. The main characters’ grandfather decides to keep all seven of his identical granddaughters and name them each after a day of the week, and that is the only day they are allowed out of the house, unless they want to be killed. They all live one life, with one name on their day. Only in their home could they be themselves, and as assumed by the title one day Monday doesn’t come back.

Just from that description I would say that this movie classifies as a dystopian film. This film explores a political and social construct currently in use in one part of the world. It takes this idea and shows what could happen if we continue in that route, but in a dark and almost sinister light. The morals shown in this movie are what make dystopian novels so compelling. No one who would watch What happened to Monday?  Would think that this movie ends like a fairytale romance.  This type of movie or book is made to make you think about humanity and where we are headed. Is that world somewhere I would want to live? How would we go about fixing that kind of world? I personally liked What happened to Monday?, but if you know me, you know I love dystopian things.