Max – a new revolutionary icon?

Dave Kellaway, from Hackney Left Unity, reviews Elysium (102 mins) Directed by Neill Blomkamp, starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster.

All science fiction films are like the future perfect tense, they have to have a connection between our present lives and sometime in the future. If they don’t they become too dense and incomprehensible. However a lot of the time the links they make with the present time reproduce a false ideology of our lives and society. So we see a crude extrapolation of a supposed conflict between humans and technology or between humanity and some mad scientists.  It is rarer to see a science fiction film that makes the links with a more accurate reading of today’s  political, class or ecological contradictions. Blomkamp achieved this feat with his 2009 film District 9 where he told the story of the use of concentration camps to confine a horde of alien insect creatures – set ironically in his native South Africa.  His latest film is similarly accomplished although now produced within the constraints of a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster.

Elysium* is the name of the immense space station world set up by the world’s elite one hundred and fifty years from now to protect the lives and interests of the richest 1%. The world has suffered ecological catastrophe and the working masses live in hellish overcrowded conditions to service the needs of their masters in Elysium. Health is the great metaphor in the film since treatment on Earth appears to be at about the same level  or worse than  today whereas in Elysium there are special health treatment beds (a bit like you see in tanning shops) that can heal practically anything.  Getting in and out of Elysium is brutally controlled. There is a marvelous early sequence when the resistance on earth organise three space vehicles to transport people needing treatment up to Elysium we see Jodie Foster as the chief of homeland security (a name pointedly chosen one thinks) managing the annihilation of all these illegal migrants on the big screens in front of her. Images of migrants dying as they try and get into fortress Europe or across the Mexican border come to mind.

 The story turns around the efforts of the Christ-like figure of Matt Damon’s Max to reach Elysium to get himself and his friend’s daughter cured.  He has been given cancer courtesy of the labour relations prevalent in the factory where he helps make the robots. Just like in some factories today he was told to risk his health to keep production going.

Unlike most science fiction films projecting a dystopian, totalitarian future, open conflict and struggle is represented. There is a resistance group led by Spider, a computer whiz who has banks of monitors and high technology used in opposition to the authorities. His group is heavily armed so we are talking urban guerrilla warfare here rather than a network of workers councils and militias.  In any case as a Hollywood blockbuster it spares us much detailed analysis of social and political relations.  The plot is pretty predictable and the characters are fairly one dimensional but the look and feel of the film makes a lot of telling visual points.

Stunning widescreen shots of urban slums are compared to the ethereal beauties of Elysium.  There is a scene reminiscent of the West Bank where the impoverished, earth citizens have to pass through robot-controlled police checkpoints. Max makes a casual joke which the robot, who has not been programmed to understand irony, takes umbrage at and breaks his arm. It happens again when in the social security office, that looks unbelievably familiar,  Max has an interview with another robot, this time he has a smiley face, unlike the fearsome police robots. At one point smiley face robot offers him a pill and the possibility of seeing a human staff member. Two scenes that capture how different state apparatuses function in a remarkably succinct way.

 Another series of scenes shows the relationship between capitalist enterprises, in particular the military industrial complex  and the state. The big manager peruses the computerised screens and whinges about how he can keep the enterprise profitable, later on he does a deal with Jodie Foster to help with her projected military coup. She says if he gives her a reboot programme to take over Elysium he will have the military contracts for 200 years!

The film implicitly highlights a number of today’s inequalities. I remember seeing  a striking contemporary photo of a shanty town in a big Brazilian city where it seems there is a total fault line running down the middle of the image: on the one side there is disorder, dust and dirt and on the other are verdant gardens and colourful, luxurious apartments. Of course the central line is a high, well defended wall. The extreme social segregation satirised in the film is already well developed in the gated communities in many countries where black people like Trayvon Martin are shot. Today’s Observer (25.08.13) front pages a National Children’s Bureau report that millions of children are ‘growing up in social apartheid’. Work by Marxist geographers, David Harvey, Manuel Castells and Daniel Dorling,  has examined the class organisation of space in great detail.  Governments have an interest in socially segregating the classes, it is harder to convince salaried workers from the middle layers of society to support radical change if they are totally isolated from the life experiences of large parts of the working class.

Unequal access to health is in one sense the theme of the film. Probably Matt Damon, who is a well known radical,andBlomkamp  understood the resonance of this in the USA where 40 million people do not have adequate health insurance. Rich people today can buy expensive health care in most places that allow them to jump the queue. There are even informal routes for buying kidneys and other spare parts from poor desperate people in places like India. If anything the disparities in access to good health care are increasing in places like Britain.

Control of the digital mainframe and operating systems is shown as crucial to the domination of Elysium. We have seen this exposed recently in the Snowden revelations about the way the NSA in the US has a hold over Google, Facebook and all the other supposedly ‘cool’, ‘free’ social networks. The key means of production today, that working people will need to control,  is the digital computer and communications network. The film is clever in  showing that the state will never be able to close down opposition. The Spider-led resistance in the film challenges the state within cyberspace. Just as today there is a conflict and a battle over the control of the web.  A form of advanced drone system is also a disturbing presence in the film although Damon, with a throw a test cricketer would be proud of, does knock one out with a well-aimed stone.  The team behind the film truly manage to get a lot more interesting ideas into this science fiction film that we see in the Terminator, Transformer or Wolverine series.

The older members of our group who saw this film got a bit tired with the dizzying fight sequences that took up a lot of the latter part of the film. More examination of the social and political relations would have also suited us (would workers still be making robots rather than robots making robots?) but you cannot expect Farenheit 911 (Truffaut) or Solaris type philosophy (Tarkosky) from a mainstream movie. We just don’t engage with the video game world I suppose. But the advantage of this sort of film is that it should pull in a massive audience of younger people and the basic thrust of the film is a progressive one. Indeed it is ideal if you are old enough to treat younger family members and their friends.  The two teenagers in our party loved it and it is a great starting point for a whole series of discussions with them.

*The place at the ends of the earth to which certain favoured heroes were conveyed by the gods after death [classical mythology]