Why Hollywood loves to shrink people

There's a funny moment in Downsizing, Alexander Payne's new film about life in a gated community of the future, where telephone sales rep Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) snaps at a caller who is dithering over which colour of a product to choose. "Don't you be short with me," she complains.

The joke is that, having recently undergone "cellular miniaturisation" to enter Leisureland, a pleasure dome in New Mexico where the artificial sun is always shining and tiny electric cars buzz around like motorised Tic Tacs, Paul is only 13cm tall.

The billboards proclaim that Leisureland is a place "Where the Grass is Greener", and at first sight it does appear to be a perfect scale model of the American Dream. Here Paul's savings of US$100,000 ($136,230) equate to around US$12.5 million in purchasing power, allowing him to move into a mini-mansion.

Even the self-esteem of Leisureland's inhabitants seems to be proportionately larger. A much smaller ecological footprint means they can congratulate themselves on saving the planet even as they're eating doll-sized plates of gourmet food and playing endless rounds of miniature golf.

Of course, the real price of this lotus-eating lifestyle turns out to be much greater. One extended sequence shows the medical procedure that Paul has to go through before he is shrunk. To begin with, all of his body hair is shaved off, including his eyebrows and eyelashes.

That is followed by colonic irrigation and dental extractions to prevent any messy explosions when he is miniaturised. Finally he is injected with a mystery liquid and exposed to radiation until he is small enough for a nurse to scoop him up with a fish slice.

Payne shoots the sequence in an appropriately chilly style, making it clear that Paul is being processed as unsentimentally as the animal carcasses in the abattoir where he used to work. An earlier scene shows where the director's heart truly lies. At a research institute in Norway a white-coated scientist opens the door of a microwave-like contraption to discover what has happened to the mouse he placed in there earlier. "It works!" he cries. It's like the first half of a 50s B-movie compressed into less than a minute of screen time.

It's also a reminder that Downsizing is just the latest attempt to put little people on to the big screen. Whether physically, in films such as Fantastic Voyage (1966) or Innerspace (1987), or in more emotional ways, tiny figures like Paul have proven to be especially good at getting under our skin.

Kristen Wiig and Matt Damon in Downsizing.

Fairy tales abound with little people, from Thumbelina to Snow White's dwarfs. In some ways Leisureland is like a man-made Lilliput from Gulliver's Travels (1726).

From doll's houses to snow globes, fantasies of miniaturisation often involve similarly fixed borders.

Nor is it a coincidence that we tend to associate these stories with children, who have to make sense of their own place in a world full of outsize dangers. In Charlotte Yonge's children's book The History of Sir Thomas Thumb (1856), a version of the adventures of the eponymous Tom first published in 1621, the digit-sized hero falls into a bucket of milk, is almost eaten by a giant, and is swallowed by a fish.

In Mary Norton's The Borrowers (1952), a tiny family living under the floorboards of an English manor house use safety pins for grappling hooks as they set out on expeditions into the land of the giants clumping around above them. Both are like elaborate fantasies spun around a child's-eye view of the world, in which many of the experiences that adults take for granted carry an air of unexpected menace.

Films are also good at recalibrating the world to make us look at it with fresh eyes. In Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (1989) an ordinary garden becomes an urban jungle full of unexpected dangers, as some accidentally shrunken children are confronted by dive-bombing bees and a lawnmower's whirling blade. Similarly, in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), one of the greatest threats to the hero turns out to be his own cat.

Children may be especially keen on stories that allow them to feel bigger than the characters they feature. Telling off your doll is like a rehearsal of the day when you will be big enough to do to other people what mummy and daddy do to you.

As a boy, Lewis Carroll made a set of tiny carpenter's tools that he packed into a box 5cm high, and this interest in miniature life extended far into adulthood. Not only does Alice shrink so much in Wonderland that she almost drowns in a pool of her own tears , but in Carroll's later novel, Sylvie and Bruno, the author introduces a "Minimifying glass" that can reduce an elephant to the size of a mouse. Shrinking people is an equally popular plot device in science fiction. In 1858, just a few years before Alice's tumble down the rabbit hole, Fitz-James O'Brien's story The Diamond Lens described a scientist discovering a tiny woman living in a water drop. Later examples range from Edwin Pallander's The Adventures of a Micro-Man (1902) to Marvel Comics' Ant-Man.

What links them is the anxiety that if natural processes of growth are subject to human control, they might also be reversible. If scientists can create new strains of giant crops, or breed animals to be fatter than ever, what would happen if they tried to make some organisms smaller instead?

Yet it can also be a means of reminding us of our own relative smallness in the universe, and perhaps reassuring us too. As the hero observes at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man, even if he becomes sub-atomic, "To God, there is no zero." Or as Dr Seuss put it in Horton Hears a Who! (1954), "A person's a person, no matter how small."

In other words, films like Downsizing aren't about size alone. As Susan Stewart points out in her book On Longing, "There are no miniatures in nature," because smallness is a category that people have invented to help them make comparisons and draw distinctions. It is a relative rather than an absolute term.

In The Borrowers Norton's little creatures pride themselves on finding new uses for the objects they "borrow", but Norton is the real champion of improvisation. Seen through her eyes, a stack of matchboxes becomes a chest of drawers; a champagne cork a stool, as the world is reimagined.

Ultimately, stories about little people remind us that seeing things as they really are doesn't necessarily mean thinking big. It could also mean thinking small.