Class Struggle

A philosopher once said that human history was moved by class struggle. It means that there is one dominant class who always try to dominate another subordinated class. On the other side, the latter one fights for their domination as well.

The idea can be found in some movie titles. Elysium (2013) explicitly confronts the rich and the poor in a futuristic context. Meanwhile Parasite (2019) depicts the fight in recent era.

Lately, I found another film that projects similar idea: The Womb (2022) or locally entitled Inang. At the glance it may seems mereley a horror movie. 

Inang tells the story of one poor women named Wulan, who found support to take care of her pregnancy. Then, she met a couple of rich family who provides her the needs. And unbeknownst of Wulan, the dangers are facing her.

The plot clearly place Wulan as protagonist and the couple on the opposite. As we follow the storyline, the antagonistic acts of both elders reveal some horrific premise—of which I cannot tell you more. 

Before we delve deeper on class struggle in the movie context, here's an interesting facts in regards to why the riches are tend to be vilaineous. The reason is that they have "privilege".

It was based on a research conducter by Paul K. Piff and his team from University of California. They show that there is a correlation between social class and ethics. The title of publication paper, cites its conclussion: higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior.

Another research conducted by Michael Krauss shows that the rich tends to look things from personal perspective. Exploitation to another social class (the poor) was emerged from disempathatetic behavior that was combined with provilege to access resources.

However in the movie, we cannot really examine how can the couple get the financial resource since the moviemaker behind The Womb, chose to only show them on some characteristics that was in-line with the storyline. In facing the ridiculous situation, we must suspend our disbelief. And in terms of film study, "suspension of disbelief" is important to enjoy the movie.

To that end, The Womb was implicitly implement the formula that had also been planted to some titles in Indonesian history of cinema. In Sri Asih (2022), the antagonistic rich real estate businessman exploits the poor slum area residents.

Both of them, introduces us to the theory of class struggle through the medium of film.