Related text assignment – Utopias/Dystopias
Never let me go (2010 film)
The film, directed by Mark Romanek, is set in an alternate history and centres on three main characters named Kathy, Ruth and Tommy. These three are scientific specimens created in a laboratory to provide their organs to severely ill patients. The social structure of this society is that people such as the three main characters do not have very long lives as at a certain age they will have to give their body organs to severely ill people of the upper class. The position of the three main characters is that they are in a love triangle, in which Ruth and Tommy are in a relationship. Kathy does not like this because she had feelings for Tommy and so she breaks up her friendship with Ruth and Tommy and decides to become a carer so that she could delay giving her body. Ruth and Tommy hear rumours that if “specimens” can prove that they can fall in love then their bodies can be “spared” from organ donation. Ruth and Tommy go out of their way to try and prove this but they find out that this is not true and that they have to accept their fate that they will have to give their bodies up for organ donation.
One value that is explored in this film is that all humans are equal, no matter how you are built, what your social status is or your political or religious view is. This film depicts that even if the specimen is the most perfect “specimen” ever created, if the “specimen” is destined to become an organ donor, then that is the path that certain specimen has to abide by. Another value that is explored in the film is the importance of feeling like a human being and that no matter what or where the adversity is, it can be overcome, even if morals are being tested.