Witness to Self-Identify or Self-Identify to Witness?

#12 in thriteen questions in Children of Invention

Are we more equipped to self-identify or to witness/observe with narrator/characters?


Children of Invention tried to make audience "witness to self-identify" and "self-identify to witness". First of all, the film starts with a scene in which Elaine’s son, Raymond sneaks into the door and watches how people deceive each other for money and people are blindly agreed to join to the fake company. Just like Raymond we are designed to see the company as questionable and our witness starts without any knowledge. Though Elaine comes back to the place to earn profit, she doesn’t get any profit and even she faces an economic tragedy to sell her house and get out with their children. When she drives her car to home, she seems to know her fault. However, she tries another fake marketing job to overcome the situation. The director of the film, Chun said in his interview that he wrote the scenario based on his actual memory when he was young. Because it is not just dramatized imagination but most parts of the incidents in the film is originated from one’s past experience, was really prevailed in 1990s, the film specifically expose what happened to the people who are involved the notorious organizations and why they had to blindly choose the way. But when the film accuses the society and the people who are involved to illegal history as a particular phenomenon, the director also emphasizes their painful economic situation and desire to easily resolve as soon as possible. In this way, the director underlined people’s common emotions - fear and hope, which we may understand and feel if we assume we were in the same condition Elaine is now struggling. So we witness to self-identify.

However, the film starts to use another way of recognition after the beginning of the film. Because two young characters start to appear as main character, it provides to the audience familiar memory and thought most people used to have when they were around 10. For example, when Tina and Raymond wake up, they always see their mother hurry to go work. And they worry when Elaine doesn’t come early at night with feeling hunger. Though they fully don’t understand what she is doing and what actually it is, they perceive her job is related to the reason why they leave the home with wandering and why have to eat instant food all day, if they are left home. Suddenly, mom doesn’t come back, they are remained alone. In this time, they find out their home is sold and there is no one who can help them. Once we feel empathy to Tina and Raymond with familiar images and common memory, we start to see the world with a mask of two kids. Hence we may get an opportunity to feel how tragic episodes started to come to the member of family and how do they respond to the world which made their father or mother to participate into the pyramid schemes constantly. This approach tries to describe about what it’s like actually to live in a family which is involved into the fake marketing rather than explain or define the trend. So we identify to witness.

Two different viewpoints naturally change their turns and help to deliver the mixed viewpoints, the pyramid scheme threatening the family, and living in the family ruined by pyramid schemes. This composition helped me to think not just about the past social issue, but also individual's life within the issue.