Societal Structure

     Hello blog. This post is going to be more of a pondering space for my wandering mind! In less sarcastic tone, I have questions that form while I dive deeper into the plot of our story, which directly relates to the opening and what we will include in the first two minutes of our film. While thinking about the concept of social experiments and explanations for aspects of our story/ chosen characteristics, I came up with a list of questions that I wrote down on my notes app (previously mentioned in my “Social Experiment- Intro” blog post). In addition to those questions, over the past few days ere are a few that lead to other connected questions:

• Why is the mother (tentative name: Beth) doing the social experiments (apart from the obvious questions of what are they testing), and what makes her actions morally okay? 

• Why did the social experiments begin?

• What time period are we thinking for the movie to be set in, and does that imply we are trying to say about that futuristic world/ our current society? 

•What is the backstory of our dystopian world? Is it a future version of our current world, or is completely disconnected?

Societal Structure

     With these questions, I was able to begin to establish some characteristics of our dystopian world that relates to our previous plot points of experimenting on children. While we previously thought that the world would be pretty similar to our current one, after genre research on dystopian fiction (literature and film), we decided to implement some characteristics. To start, the conflict of governmental control is one that we want to possibly connect to the secret experimentation group. In other words, the "independent" organization will be secretly funded by the government/ aligned with the government, as imposing threat coming from more than one source ( government, secret society) could be interesting. Additionally, the actual rules of the society, or the society's "normal" includes the following:

• Children are seen as vessels for adult progress, not as valuable for overall future development/ continuation.
• Children are exploited, with kids as young as 10 going out into the world to work and serve.
• There are some that don't agree with exploitation: protests.
• The system of bringing babies into the world consists of surveillance and control- illegal to independently have baby/ not put in system of work, etc...)
• There is a specific job dedicated to women: "babymakers". They have to get pregnant (artificial insemination) and continuously reproduce, so that a majority of children can serve the current adult population (still not quite sure how that would've come to be- this system couldn't have been in use for long as the exploited kids grow up to be adults, not stay children together and the current adults grow and eventually pass away.)
• Possible scientific progression that allows one to dictate gender of baby to birth could be found (has to do with experiments...)
• Quite literally ageism. 

    These possible societal marks invite social commentary and posed questions into mind for our movie, an aspect of dystopian fiction that is obviously/ effectively intriguing, and part of the nature of the genre, as dystopias provide social commentary and popularly try to indicate warnings about specific trends and possible future consequences. Possible commentary includes mockery of lack of action towards future stability/ security, specifically regarding to the global climate crisis and how we are hurting ourselves (environmentally), which will result in later catastrophe, such as in the abuse of future-adults for short-term power by the current-adults in our world. Also, the feeling that we want to ignite in the audience is one of foreign, and unthinkable chances (regarding type of world being depicted), to touch on the normalized/ unspoken injustices that happen in our own world that don't feel so foreign anymore, but rather part of a routine/ not surprising (which is terrible, but not false).

    Some questions that we would like to raise mainly revolve around acceptance/ conformity to world one grows into, vs. detecting flaws in "reliable" world and trying to undo them, checking out the gutters for mold. Questions include ones like... 

• Is it okay for owner/company head (Beth, mom of Doran) to be doing this to her own kids (if society creates distant relationship between children and adults in nature of system)?
• Is it okay to do something because its accepted by society? 
• Authority questions: Who dictates what's "right"/"wrong"? Does a persons "label"/ position grant them automatic justification/ trust?

    Regarding the opening, questions will be primarily about the type of world the audience is entering, as our editing we envision to use is one that creates an underlying tone of mystery, and begins the movie with no explicit context to directly guide the viewer, which is a part of our goal for audience-relationship for our opening (and overall film). I will once again do a blog post on this topic later!