Downsizing (2017) and the Comic Eco-Hero

Our chapter, “Housing, Labor, and Comic Evolutionary Narratives in Downsizing (2017) and Sorry to Bother You (2018)” will address the intersection of race and class intertwined with efforts to address housing, labor, and over-population. The chapter centers its reading of this important environmental issue around the odd science fiction comedies, Downsizing and Sorry to Bother You, which offer drastic housing and labor solutions to life on an Earth that has become an environmental disaster plagued by overpopulation and the crime and starvation it produces.

In the social satire Downsizing, occupational therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) believes he will have a better life if he downsizes, shrinking himself to five inches tall to live in wealth and splendor. After his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) chooses not to downsize and divorces Paul, however, his dreamhouse turns into a one-bedroom apartment below party-friendly entrepreneur Dusan (Christoph Waltz). The film narrates Paul’s journey as a bumbling comic eco-hero who chooses to join forces with Vietnamese social activist Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau) to address real environmental injustice and racism in the downsized community of Leisureland, rather than escaping potential climate calamities in the caverns of Norway with Dr. Jorgen Asbjørnsen (Rolf Lassgård) and the original downsized community.

Paul and Ngoc’s story illustrates Joseph Meeker’s description of the comic way arguing that participants are successful because “they live and reproduce even when times are hard or dangerous” rather than proving themselves “best able to destroy enemies or competitors” (The Comedy of Survival 20). They have fulfilled, as Meeker explains, an effective evolutionary process, “one of adaptation and accommodation, with the various species exploring opportunistically their environments in search of a means to maintain their existence” (164). 

According to Joseph Meeker, these evolutionary narratives explore what might happen if humanity did learn from these more stable comic heroes, since, as Meeker explains, “Evolution itself is a gigantic comic drama, not the bloody tragic spectacle imagined by the sentimental humanists of early Darwinism” (164). Rather, the evolutionary process is one of adaptation and accommodation, with the various species exploring opportunistically their environments in search of a means to maintain their existence. Like comedy, evolution is a matter of muddling through.” (164). Paul and Ngoc choose to muddle through rather than pioneer a future that leaves so many behind.