Under Construction - MHWA Retreat

The trailer deals with the concept of society turning people into villains. Do you think society has the tendency to make villains out of normal people? How so? Why or why not?
-I think that society can, yes. Or not even necessarily a "villain" but they look like one from a certain perspective. Like I imagine rich people would look at Robin Hood as a villain, because he stole from them, even though he was doing a good thing by helping the poor. Or for a more recent example, antifa. It's hard to see people who are anti fascism as bad, yet a lot of people/places portray them that way, through misrepresentation, etc. It's also hard to not become a villain, I think, when everything around you is awful and you're being treated badly, everyone you care about is being treated badly, etc. What else can you do?

What are some everyday dystopian elements that are commonplace in society? For example, I think it's a bit dystopian when society applauds crowdfunding for necessary medical treatments because so many people in the US don't have healthcare.
-I think that's a perfect example. It's freaking disgusting that it's necessary in any way to crowdfund just to be able to live. When people have to crowdfund for health care, for a place to live, for food so they don't starve, etc., it's horrible. You should not need to crowdfund or scrounge for it to be able to have the things you need to live. I feel like at the bare minimum, you should have housing, food, and medical care. I also think that it's dystopian when corporations are praised for things like "this CEO gave this employee a car after he walked 8 hours to get to work because his old car broke down!" Like...that shouldn't be a thing! You shouldn't have to be so afraid to lose your job that you have to go to ridiculous lengths to get there and then the CEO gets to look like they're so benevolent. No.

The trailer also shows a lot of bullying. What are some of the effects of long-term bullying on a person’s psyche?
-Low self esteem. You feel like you deserved it. You feel like it was your fault. You could have PTSD, so you get nightmares and flashbacks about it. Hypervigilance, avoidance of people and places. You could also end up with a lot of anger and want to get back at people, either the people who hurt you or the people who remind you of your original abusers.

How do you feel about mental health representations in movies such as this? Are they exploitative of mental health sufferers or do they draw much-needed attention to those issues? Are they too dark? How would you portray mental illness in a film character?
-Honestly, I hate it. I dislike any movie where the mentally ill person is portrayed as the villain. And it's not because I don't think that mentally ill people could be the villain, it's because it feels like, in a lot of ways, that's the only representation we have. I think that's been getting better, but there's still a lot of mentally ill villains, and their mental illness ends up getting distorted to fit in the plot line. Like with Split. People with DID can't change and contort their bodies like shape-shifters, depending on who's fronting, and it's extremely rare to have a violent alter in the way they've insinuated. I wouldn't say it's absolutely impossible or anything, but the movie is still yet another example of "DID is scary and all people with it have evil alters," like I've seen so many people with DID have stories about that, and people actually asking them that or being afraid of them. If I was going to portray mental illness, I'd like them to be the hero and I'd want to portray their illness as realistically as possible. I wouldn't try to make it more "entertaining," I'd just add more entertainment to the rest of the plot and sparkle that up instead.

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you."-Nietzsche