So the point of the Art Gallery was to show that they had souls, and then the lady asked if she understands and she says "yes." I was like "NO!" Way to say something totally random and uninformative and have the main character understand and leave the audience in the dark. Can anyone explain it to me?
'Soul' is a figurative term. (At least in the context of the film). Hailsham and the gallery were an experiment to show that the 'donors' were emotionally human.
Kathy understands very quickly that whether or not the donors are human is irrelevant and the deferrals are a myth.
Thanks. I got most of that but I didn't see the point to it, what was the purpose of the headmistress to prove they have "souls?" So when she asks 'you understand?' I understand what they are doing (proving they are emotional) but it makes no sense why they would be doing it, and IMO understanding would be the what and why combined.
Think of Hailsham as free range farming. After they (the donor program) stopped being progressive about the way the clones were educated Tommy said he had heard that most schools were like battery farms now.
The Hailsham project was trying to prove that the donors were as human as naturally born people. They were doing this to try and have the National Donor Program shut down. The donors are not thought of as fully human. This enables the society in the film to harvest them for organs until they die.
Miss Emily and Madame try to prove the donors were human. To show that the donors had a vibrant inner life, expressed through the medium of art.
The point of the scene is that no one cared about the donors having an inner life. People were willing to let the donors die so they could be free from crippling illness and death.
Kathy understands this. All throughout the film she seems to have some inkling about what the real truth is. That the donors are doomed no matter what they try to do.
That's only what I think though, again hope this helps.
Kathy understands very quickly that whether or not the donors are human is irrelevant and the deferrals are a myth.
For some reason, I had an even darker take on this, and thought that what Kathy understood very quickly was that the Hailsham experiment was interpreted by the powers that be, and the conclusion was (correct or not) that the clones do not in fact have souls. :-/ That was also how I interpreted the rage of screaming shortly thereafter from Tommy - not just grieving his personal loss of a deferral, but his state in general, as an organic yet soulless being.
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No, it's even darker (IMO). Society knows that the donors do have souls, but it's such a discomforting truth that they banish the donors to battery farms where they are raised like animals for slaughter -- even though they are fully human. "Your fate is too horrid for me to contemplate, so I'm going to keep you as far from my sight as possible where you will be treated like a soulless object." Shudder.
~~~~~~~ Please put some dashes above your sig line so I won't think it's part of your dumb post.
Indeed, your post was spot on. It's very much like the meat industry today. Many of us do enjoy a juicy hamburger. But would you want to know the name of that particular cow that was slaughtered for it? But maybe it's irrelevant because they don't have souls, right?