The Prosthetic Self — What Happened to Monday?
One day at a vegetarian dinner with a meat-loving friend, we were talking about the excess of everything in our world now. People. Cars. Bad ideas. There are enough universal problems to worry about as a species, let alone the intricate particularities of Hong Kong – he gave it up already. Leaving the restaurant at a greater loss of hope than when we came in trying to make a tiny difference with food choice, we fancied a film, and walked into the cinema for a timely one: What Happened to Monday.
I am not so much into sci-fi and dystopian film. It may just be my stereotype that they smell of disinfectants and metal, and they beam like your neon screen saver in the endless darkness that the fictional (or is it?) world has presumably become. But I didn’t mind this one. I was curious what it had to say about the talk we had just now, particularly when I found a new interest in anthropology.
In spite (or because) of my indifference to the genre, I ended up reading something else from the film, not about population control and massacre in disguise, but the flourish of our unconscious drives and our potential as human beings. My thoughts were inspired by several scenes and came about quite discrete until I tried to generalise them, then they took shape and spoke to me as a whole. What Happened to Monday tells the story of self-understanding, of how self-identity is built upon memory, develops through the myth of uniqueness, and finally gains might by coming to terms with the incongruities within the self.

When Child Allocation Bureau officer Adrian flirts Monday, saying he “just wanna be with [her] every day,” [1] the latent tension between the seven identical-but-not-quite siblings immediately rings loud and clear. It is sensible of their grandfather Terrence to require them to share all their experiences every day, [2] so the seven individuals can imagine and behave as a single identity at all times. It is their system of keeping Karen Settman, now a posthumous signifier, alive by unifying the memories stored in different bodies, forcing themselves to tell the same story in order to live. [3] What Terrence has not foreseen is that this near-perfect system breaks down when interests come into play, when there are incentives to not disclose everything, such as desire for ownership.
As ego inflates and breeds secrets, the seven parts of a self no longer add up to the whole, and the fiction of a stable identity becomes faulty. As seven individuals, they share virtually nothing but a name, which is told and contingently believed to be the same. How much then does a name, a common fiction, carry? It holds together common memories, and in Karen’s case, memories that may not belong to the same body but the owner wills to share. As a whole, secrets render Karen schizophrenic. She inhabits a number of inner worlds, each full-blown with its own wild experiences. Such precarious way of living is a disorder in our modern medical language, but the film represents schizophrenia the other way round and humanises it, giving us access to the multitude of memories, secrets and desires that can form within a character.

If we recognise that these distinct sets of emotions and experiences exist in parallel, they are prone to a major weakness: they need to be validated so long as Karen functions (as seven individuals) or stays sane (as one persona), but value is always elusive. When Terrence takes young Thursday to school, he says, not entirely accurately, that she is “the one and only Karen Settman.” [4] She is only the one and only Karen Settman the world knows of on Thursday, but Terrence’s words take on a special weight here, creating a myth of uniqueness for someone who is and can only be part of a whole. Is she alone any more special, or even more real, than the six other Karen Settmans on other days? The painful paradox is that Karen’s survival depends critically on the seamless joint effort of all seven siblings, and maintaining Karen’s singular identity in front of the outside world in secret seems to be the sole purpose of each sibling. It follows that the intentions and actions of any sibling only count when they connect with others’ in coherence. Uniqueness is not only discouraged; it cannot be spoken of at all.
Bleak as it may seem for seven siblings, who don’t always agree, to coexist in one unified identity, Cayman feels threatened by this literally larger-than-life being, warning her colleague not to “underestimate the Settmans.” [5] For Cayman, it is not only Karen’s existence toppling her own credibility that causes alarm, but also Karen being virtually a superhuman with seven minds (and indeed bodies) in one, which poses a challenge to the limits of human intelligence Cayman carefully monitors by keeping population in check. In exposing Cayman’s hypocrisy, Karen demonstrates what a new human is capable of: a kind of networked intelligence whereby the wits and blindnesses of each side of a character complement each other and ultimately strengthen oneself. This new human is not a monster, as dramatised in science fiction, but the state of an ordinary human coming to terms with one’s own many dimensions as an integrated self.
If we ask “what happened to Monday?” in this light, in a sort of psychoanalytical reading, we are actually living every day as Tuesday, Wednesday and beyond, trying to reconcile with our little traumas and jealousies and dark secrets of the day before: “what happened to me on Monday?” We live each day a tiny bit different from who we were yesterday, but we are still the selves we used to be. Though Karen prevails at the very end, on a Darwinist note, at the sacrifice of five (incompetent) siblings, it is the joint effort of all seven of them countering Cayman that makes them whole.
(The film was watched on 12 November 2017. This article was last edited in December 2017.)
References, afterthoughts and intertexts
- Film at 01:22:22.375 to 01:22:24.083
- Is it just me who find Terrence being a grandfather, not a father (original Karen Settman’s husband), telling? Is it pointing at the family structure in the future world?
- Joan Didion published a collection of non-fiction called We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live in 2006
- Film at 00:17:32.333 to 00:17:35.792
- Film at 00:51:24.292 to 00:51:27.333
