I saw Elysium about a week ago, and I’ve been thinking about
it a lot. For the first
thirty minutes, it’s a devastating film, portraying a world that does not feel
too distant from our own: a land where the one percent of the one percent of
the one percent (literally) floats above most human miseries, safe in a space station from the chaos below. Folks down on the ground still work for their
distant overlords, but their lives are as bad as any third world ghetto: not
enough food, no reliable medical care, and a brutal police force that seems more
concerned about bullying civilians that stopping gangs. In fact, the residents of our future Los
Angeles (the year is 2154) use the
Brazilian term, favela, to describe
their shanty-towns: full of stolen cars, run by drug lords and crossed via dusty
roads. Spanish is spoken as often as
English, and either car designs have stopped changing much or people are
driving frames that are about 150 years old (which, given other means of
locomotion in very poor parts of the world, might not be out of the realm of
possibility).
 |
| What the surface looks like in Elysium |
The movie’s plot is pretty stupid, and I’m not going to
spend a lot of time talking about it. Matt Damon plays Max, an orphan raised by
Spanish-speaking nuns who’s childhood best-friend and first-love, Frey
(Alice Braga) manages to get out (not to Elysium though) and become a
nurse. Meanwhile, Max did some time for
stealing cars for the local kingpin, Spider, and is trying to get his life back
on track and maybe even convince Frey he’s worth another shot. But then, conflict! Max gets nuclear radiation
poisoning, has five days to live, does a few favors for Spiders, and winds up
with information that could literally save everyone on Earth with the push of a
button. Like I said, it’s pretty stupid,
and if you’re going for the plot, don’t go.
But the first hour—well, really just the first 30 minutes—is
spellbinding. Director Neil Blomkamp has
already proven his ability to portray abject poverty with compassion, even
beauty, and yet somehow also without sentimentality. In his science fiction apartheid parable, District 9, he flipped the typical alien invasion story,
portraying refugee camps full of
mysterious aliens who brought terrifyingly powerful weapons without a lot of
knowledge of how they worked, or, for that matter, knowledge about much at
all. They were unskilled migrants who
just showed up, provoking xenophobic anger from the natives and setting
nefarious corporate interests to work, figuring out how to exploit yet another mass
of unprotected labor, or, if not labor, then just plain flesh. Perhaps because that movie’s grand finale is
a bit less ridiculous—and also because it’s just a lot funnier—that movie is
worth seeing both for the plot and for it’s devastating social conscience.
That conscience is also what makes the first 30 minutes of Elysium so remarkable, given Blomkamp’s
unapologetic insistence on throwing our fat American asses right into the deep
end of global inequality. It’s perhaps
no coincidence that a director with roots in Africa doesn’t show us the perils
of American prisons, the insecurity of inner cities, and the dangers of drugs. Instead, he shows us the diseases that
kill because their easy cures can’t be afforded, the homes made of cardboard, the
very real possibility not of our kids being malnourished or diabetic or obese
but, simply and slowly just not eating until they die.
That’s not to deny the very real problem of the North
American inner-city, and it’s certainly not to claim that all of Africa (or the
rest of the developing world) is that poor.
It is to say that such poverty actually exists in the world, with real
people dying from it everyday, and it’s not just a welcome relief to have a
director talking about something else but
it’s also incredibly important for us to be reminded. Because look, we might not have a magic ship
in the sky that immediately cures our cancer, but we do have access to drugs
and treatment that keeps us alive, access others lack, and so they die. It is simply unimaginable to me that people
in the United States still want to deny people this basic care, but we’re still
a long ways away from having conversations about access to health care for
everyone else in the world.
It’s not just conscience-pricking that makes the first 30
minutes great. There’s lots of ways to
prick a conscience, and most of them are annoying, sanctimonious, and cloying. What’s
remarkable about District 9 and Elysium is that their presentations of
poverty are not cheesy feed-a-kid commercials: they’re real worlds, with decent
people trying to make a living, and other people who aren’t so decent, but who
still care about somebody else, and then cops who are nearly always mean, but
not always, and then kids who try to steal your stuff but then you laugh about
it with them, because honestly, what do you have to steal, and then everyone
else. I’m fascinated by the worlds
Blomkamp creates, and, especially for Elysium,
the rock-em, sock-em adventures distracts from our exploring it. Frey has a house in what looks to be a
lower-middle class suburban neighborhood.
What’s that like? How do the
pretty rich—but not rich enough for Elysium—live? We see factory owners commuting between the
space station and the surface, but we don’t know much about how the world
works—either on a global level—there appears to be a one-world government but
what that means is unclear—or on a local one.
How does Max get his life back together?
What would have happened if he had just tried a more straightforward
unionization effort instead of the ridiculous idea (spoiler) that a
reprogrammed computer could change everything?
While machine labor seems to be replacing just about everything—there’s
a great scene in which Max’s parole officer is a robot—they clearly still need
humans for something.
Yet what was most exciting about the first 30 minutes was an
insistence that good old-fashioned socialist cinema is still around. In the United States (and in South Africa, I
imagine), our class consciousness can too often be clouded by racial
kumbayaism: because the U.S.'s many races are getting along a lot better (and they
are, though, if you look at 1965, that’s not saying much), clearly class isn’t
a problem. Class and race are too easily
conflated, and if we’re making progress on race, then by golly we must be
making progress on class too, right? Yet
that’s obviously not the case, as our country’s (and globe’s) rapidly
increasingly inequality keeps showing.
Elysium is part of a grand tradition of movies and books (War of the Worlds, Metropolis, among
many others) to imagine a future in which the very rich mercilessly dominate
the very poor. Those works warned their
audiences about what would happen if the workers of the world did not unite. It’s a warning we still need. And what’s nice about Blomkamp’s work (well, District 9 anyways) is that, unlike the
terrible socialist realism of the mid-century, it’s actually good.
Yet we can’t be too smug watching the movie. Like all those intellectuals and petit
bourgeoisie and everyone else who’s neither living in a cardboard box nor on a
yaught, we’re in a weird class position. The movie’s first thirty minutes was a
knock-me-over-moaning punch in the gut, forcing me to think hard about my class privilege
and what I can do to change this world.
Compared to that, getting nuked with five days to live is nothing, and unlike Max, there's no button I can push.
No comments:
Post a Comment