Too Many of Us ? What's to be done?

Overpopulation - of planet Earth: a delicate, yet important, subject. Articles pushing the need for population control are persuasive, but without much searching, an article dismissing those needs can be found. I have to remain a don't know on this issue, though I do lean towards voluntary control of family size. In truth, nobody knows for sure how the matter of overpopulation will develop; in known history, on an Earth-wide scale, overpopulation hasn't happened before. In extremity, would nature itself step in? I do wonder!

Sir David Attenborough, naturalist (born 1926):
“The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrolled way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us.”

It makes sense that couples ought to voluntarily limit the size of their families, for numerous reasons, and not only environmental. This has happened in recent history already, without regulation being needed. Families of 10 or more were not uncommon a century or so ago. Life spans were considerably shorter then, even for those who survived childbirth, childhood diseases, and went on to live a reasonably healthy life. My father's parents brought forth 10 children, but none of those ten have parented more than two offspring apiece. As a very loose pattern I'd guess broadly similar applies generally, both in the UK and in the USA ( excluding families whose religion dictates life choices).

Also, on this topic, an archived post from 2012:
Every Sperm is Sacred - or so they say.


Overpopulation is a concern oft approached by writers of dystopian speculative fiction, and film makers of that ilk. We watched one such movie, via Netlix last week :
What Happened to Monday? In that movie, set in the year 2073, the world is in turmoil, a Child Alloocation Act dictates and enforces (without pity, and with Gestapo-style tactics) a one child per family mandate. Any surplus children are rounded up to be (euphemistically)"cryogenically frozen until overpopulation is solved"...for "frozen" read the opposite! Glenn Close plays the evil leader in charge of all this unpleasantness.

What Happened to Monday proved to be something of a collage of ideas already used in several other movies in the dystopian genre. This movie's trade mark, though, is somewhat shared with a TV series, Orphan Black, in that one actress, in this film Noomi Rapace, plays several different personalities of identical physical appearance. She plays seven siblings, septuplets born during a spate of multiple births thought brought about by various environmental or food-related factors. The seven girls' grandfather has named them after days of the week - Monday is girl number one, and she goes missing.

I found the movie interesting, but suspension of disbelief was severely taxed, particularly in the premise that, in order to protect themselves, the seven girls could act as if they were the same person, while undertaking the same employment, one day at a time. Passing on necessary information on work and relationship issues, by word of mouth, to one another each evening. In my view that was just, well, silly - far beyond belief that such a plan could be workable.

Afterwards, I got to remembering a couple of other overpopulation tales in film. First to come to mind, one from the 1970s Logan's Run (my blog post here is relevant). That film could sorely use a good re-make! In the year 2274, the remnants of human civilization live in a sealed city contained beneath a cluster of geodesic domes, a utopia run by a computer that takes care of all aspects of their life, including reproduction. The citizens live a hedonistic life but, to maintain the city, at age 30 all must undergo a ritual, when they are "renewed" a.k.a. vaporized. Population size and consumption of resources are maintained by killing everyone who reaches age 30.

Also from the 1970s, Soylent Green, set in 2022 (today that's just around the corner!) Dying oceans and year-round humidity due to the greenhouse effect, result in suffering from pollution, poverty, overpopulation, euthanasia and depleted resources. 40 million people live in New York City; housing is dilapidated; homeless people fill the streets; many are unemployed; those few with jobs are only barely scraping by and food and working technology are scarce with most of the population surviving on rations produced by the Soylent Corporation. Their latest product is Soylent Green, a green wafer advertised to contain "high-energy plankton" from the World Ocean, more nutritious and palatable than its predecessors "Red" and "Yellow" but in short supply. Most passing readers will know the true content of the green wafer!

There's also The Thinning (2016) I've yet to see this one. Synopsis tells that in the year 2039, Earth's resources are nearly depleted by overpopulation, so the United Nations declares that all nations must cut their population by 5% each year. While some countries remove their elderly, others enforce a one-child policy. The United States implements a policy known as 10-241 or the "Thinning", a standardized test taken from first grade to twelfth grade. Those who pass continue to the next grade, while those who fail are executed. This film's story is set in Austin, Texas.

Margaret Atwood, novelist (born 1939):
“The world is finite. For everybody in the world to have the same lifestyle that we [in the West] have now, at only six billion people, would take four additional Earths [in resources].”

"DIVERGENT"

We watched Divergent on HBO recently. It's yet another of the ever-growing Young Adults in Dystopia genre, and the first of yet another trilogy, this adapted from the novels of Veronica Roth. The movie didn't meet with much critical acclaim.

Ingredients are as per popular YA in Dystopia recipe: Young female (or male) heroic figure, set in a city or country in post-war, post-environmental catastrophe, or amid some pre- or post-apocalyptic state of affairs. Visions of the future in YA novels are always dark and post-something nasty. Whether such scenarios are meant as an allegory for general adolescent and teenage angst, or as a precient peep into the future by the authors of these novels and the movie-makers, is up to audiences to decide, if they even think that deeply about what they've watched or read.

Divergent is pretty run-of-the-mill YA dystopian fare. Husband wasn't keen on it, while I quite liked the movie. An astrologically-tinted lens applied to some parts of the storyline is an interesting experiment.

The story is set in a walled-in, devastated, Chicago. (Nothing is mentioned about other parts of the USA, or indeed other parts of the world - perhaps the novel or sequel enlightens readers on this front). The city's population is segregated into "factions", determined by individual temperament. People within each faction provide the service for which they are best fitted, personality-wise. The factions are: Abnegation (public servants - they pretty much run things for the community); Erudite (highly intelligent egg-heads who would like to overthrow Abnegation's seeming seniority); Amity (the farmers and peace lovers); Candor (lawyers, judges); and Dauntless (the brave and fearless "protectors").

At age 16, after going through some techno-assisted aptitude testing, each person must decide to which faction they choose to belong - for life. To be outside of these distinct factions is a definite no-no. Factionless individuals, those who decline to belong to a single faction, or are thrown out of the faction they chose at age 16, are relegated to remain a part of a poor, hungry, and homeless group.

Anyone with a "feel" for astrology might understand why I soon began, from time to time, viewing the movie through a wider, astrologically-slanted lens. The humors: sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic ; the elements: Earth, Fire, Air, Water; the modes: Cardinal, Fixed, Mutable; and, naturally: "What's your sign?" Human nature, identity, conformity..... labels. Labels can be useful, but are never a good thing when taken to extremes, ignoring diversity.

This, first film of the trilogy, sets the scene. We watch development of the young heroine, Beatrice, who comes from an Abnegation family. At age 16, somewhat conflicted, she chooses to join the Dauntless faction and changes her name to Triss. We're taken through her initiation and training, her learning to confront and deal with her inner fears. We meet her Dauntless companions, some of whom are clearly sociopaths! We also meet the Erudite faction's leader, Jeanine - another version of Thatcher/Clinton/Wicked Witch of the West, this time played by Kate Winslet.

Ms Winslet is one of a couple of slightly older and more widely known star names in the cast, no doubt included to entice adult bums onto cinema seats. Ashley Judd is the other, playing Beatrice's mother. The rest of the cast were new to me, including the lead actress Shailene Woodley, and her love interest (well there always has to be one) Theo James, who I would have recognised had I been a fan of Downton Abbey. Full cast list HERE. The two young leads played their parts very well, I thought.

Beatrice/Triss has no sociopathic tendencies, she doesn't fit in completely with the Dauntless faction - this is something gradually realised by her, as well as by shrewder members of the Dauntless leadership. I'll reveal no more detail, except to say that the film's title describes its heroine, and others who have become factionless, the Divergents, and are feared by leaderships because of their ability to think and act differently from those whose diversity of thought and skill have become stunted by continued segregation and manipulation.

Whether young adult audiences will watch this film and realise that, as well as a tale of a young woman's rite of passage, padded by a mild love story, there's a not very veiled criticism going on, an allegorical representation of some of today's problems. A potentially menacing whisper of what it would be like to live under a totally controlling leadership is there for any paying attention.

Jeanine (Thatcher/Clinton/Wicked Witch of West) says more than once during the movie that the original plan to segregate the city's population came about because of human nature. Human nature had been responsible for the horrendous war that left the city (and presumably the world) in such a calamitous state . I have to, reluctantly, agree with Jeanine on this point. I've often written on this blog that human nature (which astrologers contend is brought about by the place planet Earth has in our galaxy, and perhaps in the universe as a whole) is at the heart of our troubles.

No doubt, initially, segregation was tried with good intention, but arrangements and rules had been allowed to become too extreme, overly authoritarian - human nature at work again. (They say, "You can't fight city hall" - even less human nature!) The city had become nothing less than a fascist regime, using social engineering, mind manipulation via chemicals, and no doubt other nasties, possibly to be revealed in sequels. Chemically-induced mind manipulation was at its worst in Divergent's version of dystopia when used on members of the Dauntless faction (supposedly the brave and fearless "protectors") to force them to follow orders - orders which would result in genocide - or at least in "factionicide".

Divergent uses elements which have appeared in just about any other Young Adults in Dystopia movie or book one could name, whether of the blockbuster or lesser-known variety. While it's interesting to discover how many different ways there can be of cobbling these elements together, it'll surely soon be time to create some new ideas and fresh material!

Monday Movie ~ Code 46

I can never resist a dystopian tale, I haven't seen or read 'em all yet, but I'm getting there. Code 46 , released in 2004, was a new one to me. I picked up the VHS tape in a junk store for $1 recently, we watched it on Friday evening. It's different overall, but still with a few similarities to other movies of its genre, and with a weird echo of a well-known Greek tragedy embedded.

Code 46 is a British written and directed movie, but doesn't come over as British in any way.

Michael Winterbottom directed, Frank Cottrell Boyce wrote the screenplay. They are both northern English guys, born in Blackburn and Liverpool respectively. (She chuckles)... the Beatles, from Liverpool, wrote about Blackburn, Lancashire once, remember:

I read the news today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall

But I digress.

I enjoyed Code 46 but was left with numerous questions. I wish it had been a novel adaptation, so I could go read the detail I felt was missing in the film. As one reviewer wrote, "For at least half the movie, you need a code book a few inches thick to decipher Code 46." That's exactly how I felt, but a novel would suffice.

Code 46 is set, we are led to believe, in the "near future". The impression I got was that the setting had to be much further ahead than "near" - at least 50 years or so ahead, maybe more. Budget restrictions probably dictated that background scenarios couldn't be CGI'd to appear much different from today - so what we have is the perception of simply more of the same, more of everything in cityscapes, less of everything outside of those.

The film's theme uses current issues, current fears, extrapolating them into a futuristic scenario which still looks uncomfortably familiar, but sounds odd. Dialogue is a mix of English with liberal splatterings of Spanish, French, Arabic and other languages. It's as though characters had swallowed several tourist phrase books!

Writer and director use the Code 46 version of dystopia to highlight our well-known class struggles, cultural boundaries, personal identity crises and various "freedoms" or lack of them. It's clever and thought provoking - much more so than some other, high budget CGI-filled offerings.

In Code 46's dystopic world cities are heavily controlled, accessible only through checkpoints. Outside of the cities we see only miles of desert wasteland and ragged struggling refugees eeking out an existence in shanty towns - people without papelles. "Papelles", a futuristic version of the passport/visa are essential for travel. Counterfeiting of these valuable items has been discovered and is the focus of an investigator's trip to Shanghai from the USA.

William, the investigator (Tim Robbins), has the advantage of using an "empathy virus" to enhance psychic insight and emotional sensitivities - and perhaps also, in the process, breaking down his learned societal inhibitions. He investigates a corporation, "Sphinx", where papelles are produced. He is able to identify the counterfeiter, Maria (Samantha Morton) quickly, then proceeds to have a love affair with her. He provides cover for Maria's crimes on his return to Seattle. Later, ordered to return to Shanghai, he discovers Maria has disappeared. He uses his authority to locate her in a medical facility, only to find that her memory of him, and their affair, has been "wiped".

Greek tragedy element coming up!

Maria had been pregnant, following the pair's brief affair. She had undergone a forced abortion and memory removal because, unknown to both of them, they are genetically related. Maria is a genetic clone of the investigator's mother, one of a set of 24 (I read this later in a synopsis). But why, I asked myself, would this future civilisation be cloning humans when the habitable areas of the planet seemed already overburdened with the natural variety? Anyway, Code 46 is the rule, or law, which states that genetically related humans must not be allowed to reproduce together, or even conduct relationships. That has been informal rule in our world for centuries. We, though, have always (or almost always) known exactly who are our close genetic relatives, thus avoiding problems arising from in-breeding. Cloning, especially if carried out in secret, could open a veritable Pandora's Box on this front.

The love story between William and Maria is the film's main theme. William is married, by the way, back in Seattle, with a young son. There was never going to be a happy ending for all. For more detail of the film's plot see Wikipedia's page linked at the top of the post.

Whether wholesale cloning, viruses designed to infect humans with such things as empathy or (another one mentioned in the film) rapid learning of a language, will be part of humanity's future remains to be seen by our youngest generation, or their kids and grandchildren. Life on a planet whose habitable surface has shrunk to a fraction of that we know, through climate change or war damage, or bio-hazards, yet still with technological know-how, lends itself to many scenarios, some of which have been explored already in novel and film. It's a never-ending source of fascination to me.

In closing, I feel like harking back to the Beatles. They were already mentioned, earlier, as the film screen-writer's fellow Liverpudlian Merseysiders. With no need for an empathy virus in 2014, most (not all) of us understand the deep-rooted truth which can soothe some weird and increasing feelings of dis-ease. The Beatles sang it for us, years ago:
"All you need is love".

RIP ~ Richard Attenborough. He died Sunday, aged 90. Below, in his part from one of my favouite movies The Great Escape. I think all the Great Escapers are gone now - the greatest escape of all, one could say; some went long ago, some more recently.