Downsizing: A Bad Movie About Capitalist Degrowth
Image: Paramount Pictures
Downsizing is a high-concept movie driven by a technology that allows people to shrink themselves down irreversibly to about five inches and some change. We follow white "everyman" Paul as he weighs the merits of the procedure and ultimately moves to a retirement-esque community called Leisureland.
Downsizing is not a good movie. It's tonally inconsistent as the film moves from a vicious satire to a deconstruction of those who slip through the cracks of capitalism to an existential treatise on the end of the world. The jokes start out quite funny, only to sputter into an ending that feels like it belongs in an entirely different movie.
Much has been written about the casting and acting of this movie (see Hong Chau's accent and, separately, Matt Damon's sexual assault and harassment allegations), but something I want to talk about today is how this movie discusses the philosophy of Degrowth and its incompatibility with our economic system.
Degrowth, what now?
Degrowth is an economic philosophy that claims to prioritize social and ecological well-being over the vices of our economic system, such as corporate profits, over-production, and excess consumption. Proponents of this school of economics argue that current free market ideologies fail to factor in environmental laws such as the laws of conservation and entropy. As written in the piece, The Economics of Degrowth:
“…economic growth of the productive economy depends on energy and materials, and on the availability of sinks for waste such as carbon dioxide. We see the building industry or car manufacturing as part of the “productive” economy but they depend on exhaustible resources. “The entropy law and the economic process” by Georgescu-Roegen (1971) insisted in the fact that energy cannot be recycled, and that materials are recycled only to some extent. Fresh supplies are needed, and this is problematic when we rely on exhaustible fossil fuels and on materials which are ever more difficult to obtain at the commodity frontiers….”
Most advocates of Degrowth are coming from the left because current market economies demand continuous growth, which is hard to do if you believe overall consumption and pollution must be capped and reduced. Downsizing provides an interesting counter to this tradition because its conceit — i.e., a magical technology that allows us to cut our emissions without changing our behavior— allows its characters to theoretically cut emissions while still operating within the confines of our capitalist system.
In the movie, the inventor of Downsizing, Dr. Jørgen Asbjørnsen (as well as the Institute he represents), investigated this technology to reduce emissions, believing that "overpopulation" was the main driver of climate change. As one of his comrades says during a Ted Talk-esque presentation:
“…overpopulation [is] mankind's single greatest long-term threat. The cause of all catastrophes we are seeing today: extreme climate and weather events and the devastating impact on food and water security…And [so] today, we are proud to unveil what we fervently believe to be the only practical, humane, and inclusive remedy to humanity's gravest problem.”
Several years after the introduction of the Downsizing technology, companies have emerged to provide downwardly living Americans the ability to downsize in exchange for a higher standard of living. It's advertised as a chance to save the world, but really, it allows companies to capture a significant amount of life savings from such individuals as these new littles live off the big-to-small exchange rate. Little people don't have as many expenses, so a little, the argument goes, goes a long way.
Yet, there are problems with this transition. As many current DeGrowth activists have indicated, the neoliberal economy actually can't survive an economic contraction. People who downsize are effectively taking themselves out of the economy or, at the very least, reducing their consumption significantly. This removal from the economy unsurprisingly leads to a social backlash. As an anti-small bigot tells Paul and his wife Audrey at a bar:
“…do you think in your that small you should still have all the same rights as the rest of us normal-sized people? I mean, like the right to vote?… You're not buying as many products; you're not paying as much sales tax. Some of you aren't even paying any income tax. You're not really participating in our economy…..In fact, you're costing us money and jobs….I think you should have a quarter of the vote at most. I think that’s pretty generous.”
This man's rhetoric is abhorrent (someone's citizenship should not be linked to their productivity), but he does underscore the reality that the current economic system can barely support a status quo in consumption, let alone a widespread economic contraction. Men such as Dr. Jørgen Asbjørnse may believe overpopulation to be the problem, but in reality, our economic system is what cannot be separated from the unlimited growth destroying our environment — Downsizing is only a bandaid to this problem.
Another criticism of the films is that even when this technology is introduced, it doesn't mean everyone will adopt it. Indeed, only 3% of the global population undergoes Downsizing by the film's end. Contrary to popular opinion, markets are not the best tool to get people to adopt a necessary technology in a very short period. If that were the case, solar and other such renewables would have already been widely adopted (behavioral changes require different incentives, and our system seems very good at sabotaging those).
As we can see, most people avoid Downsizing, and there are excellent reasons not to in the logic of this world. Apart from the cost ($7,500 a person for a downsizing procedure), the most obvious is the power dynamic between big and small people, with the latter being physically weaker and less dominant than their bigger counterparts. It's made quite clear that governments use Downsizing as a punishment against dissidents. We even see an example of the government of Vietnam secretly shipping dozens of dissidents in a television box, killing most of them in the process.
It's not easy being small and on the margins. As one character says of this reality:
“That’s the wonderful thing about becoming small. Because you're immediately rich. Unless you’re very poor. Then you're just small.”
A shrinking conclusion
Downsizing is a poorly executed movie, but that doesn't mean we cannot mull over its ideas. The lesson that capitalism won't save us — even if we invent a magical technology to combat climate change, it won't solve our fundamental problems — is an important one to consider.
To this day, there are oil executives and think tanks pushing the idea that we are days or months away from a magical technology that will scrub carbon from the atmosphere so we don't have to change our underlying behaviors of consumption and pollution. These cases are often overstated, but even if they are invented (a big if), texts like Downsizing call into question whether our current economic system will allow them even to be implemented properly.
There is no magical technology coming to save us, and we will properly have to engage in degrowth (willingly or unwillingly) as an act of survival. We ultimately don't need to shrink down to comprehend this fact — just a little perspective.