Elysium as a critical dystopia

MCP 12 (3) pp. 305–322 Intellect Limited 2016

International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics Volume 12 Number 3 © 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/macp.12.3.305_1

TANNER MIRRLEES AND ISABEL PEDERSEN University of Ontario Institute of Technology

Elysium as a critical dystopia ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

This article argues that Elysium communicates a ‘critical dystopia’ that illuminates and interrogates global capitalism’s worst social, political, ecological and technological conditions and shows them being resisted and changed, for the better. To this end, our article’s first section contextualizes Elysium by building upon recent studies of global Hollywood, the genre characteristics and politics of science fiction films and ‘critical dystopia’. The second section interprets Elysium’s dystopian future of society, the state, environment and technology, and argues it forwards a critique of present-day global capitalism’s class divisions and dispossessions, neo-liberal security state, ecological catastrophe and militarized technology. The third section excavates Elysium’s alternative to the fictional and actual dystopic conditions of capitalism the film critiques, thereby liberating the film’s imminent utopian content from the cage of its commodity form. The conclusion addresses some important criticisms of Elysium’s politics: its perpetuation of Hollywood’s ‘white saviour’ trope, regressive gender dynamics, and ‘single point of failure’ fantasy. Despite these problems, Elysium still has value as a critical dystopian film.

global Hollywood global capitalism cultural politics neo-liberalism ideology critical dystopia

INTRODUCTION Released to theatres in major cities in 2013, Elysium is a globally popular and profitable science fiction film. Set in the year 2154, the story centres on a conflict between a working class struggling to subsist on earth, and a propertied elite that lives on an orbiting space station called ‘Elysium’. Though Elysium’s story is set in the near future, director Neill Blomkamp asserted that his film is actually about today: ‘Everybody wants to ask me lately about my predictions for the future’, said Blomkamp, ‘No, no, no. This isn’t science fiction. This is today. This is now’ (Hiscock 2013). 305

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By contextualizing and interpreting Elysium’s fictional story about the future with regard to the actually existing conditions of twenty-first century global capitalism, we argue that Elysium is a ‘critical dystopia’ about ‘now’. We build upon the important work of Tom Moylan (2000: xv), who conceptualized the ‘critical dystopia’ as a science fiction sub-genre that expresses the social conflicts arising from the political-economy of our time while illuminating the ‘oppositional spaces and possibilities from which the next round of political activism can derive imaginative sustenance and inspiration’. Also, following Stuart Hall’s (1981) nuanced approach to interpreting the politics of popular culture, we aim to shed light on Elysium’s textual stake in contemporary ‘cultural class struggles’. Against the notion of popular culture being either a manipulative instrument used by capitalist elites to ideologically brainwash the masses or a direct expression of working class experiences, Hall (1981: 239) conceptualized popular culture as a terrain of hegemonic and counterhegemonic struggle: ‘popular culture is one of the sites where the struggle for and against the powerful is engaged. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured’. Hall (1981: 233) encourages a political analysis of popular culture that sheds light on a text’s progressive ‘elements of recognition and identification, something approaching a recreation of recognizable experiences and attitudes, to which people are responding’ while taking to task its regressive ‘false appeals, the foreshortenings, the trivialization and short circuits’. Taking a cue from Moylan and Hall’s path-breaking contributions to the political analysis of popular culture, we argue that Elysium is a critical dystopian film that registers and responds to some of global capitalism’s worst social, political, ecological and technological conditions and shows them being understood, resisted and then transformed by a working class, for the better. To this end, our article’s first section contextualizes Elysium by building upon recent studies of global Hollywood, the genre characteristics and politics of science fiction films and ‘critical dystopia’. The second section interprets Elysium’s dystopian social relations, the state, technology and environment, and argues it forwards a critique of present-day global capitalism’s class divisions and dispossessions, neo-liberal security state, ecological catastrophe and militarized technology. The third section excavates Elysium’s alternative to the fictional and actual dystopic conditions of capitalism the film critiques, thereby liberating the film’s imminent utopian content from the cage of its commodity form. The conclusion addresses some important criticisms of Elysium’s politics: its perpetuation of Hollywood’s ‘white saviour’ trope, gender dynamics, and ‘single point of failure’ fantasy. Despite these problems, Elysium still has value as a critical dystopian film.

GLOBAL HOLLYWOOD, SCIENCE FICTION AND CRITICAL DYSTOPIA Hollywood is a number of major film studios headquartered in Los Angeles, California, but their parent companies are ‘first-tier’ trans-national media conglomerates (TNMCs) (Mirrlees 2013). At present, Hollywood studios strive to overcome the ‘cultural discount’ associated with films that are too nationalistic in their storytelling by manufacturing globally popular films that have trans-national viewer appeal and box office returns. To appeal to as many viewers as possible, and collect optimal box office receipts across borders, global Hollywood designs de-nationalized science fiction films that often address planetary hopes and fears of about the world system.

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When making science fiction films, studios often recognize global dreams of a better future or collective nightmares of a world transformed for the worse and then ‘transcode’ these bits and pieces of social life into popular cultural commodity forms (Ryan and Kellner 1988). As such, science fiction films are important popular political forms that may give expression to global social conflicts, warring ideologies and the movements behind them. Science fiction stories tend to be set in a distant time and global space, in an altogether different world. They almost always speculate about the future, but frequently draw their fictional content of the future world from the real material conditions of our own. As a popular genre, science fiction extrapolates from the circumstances of present-day societies when telling future-oriented stories – utopian or dystopian – about real world conditions (Perkowitz 2010). Over the twentieth century, science fiction communicated utopian and dystopian stories about the future, but now, dystopian stories are dominant. According to Sargent (2005: 11), a dystopia is ‘a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in a time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which they reader lived’. Moylan (2000: xi) historicizes and politicizes the dystopia as being a ‘product of the terrors of the twentieth century’, those being, the intensification of capitalist production, the expansion of state coercion (i.e. securitization, surveillance and warfare) and the system’s failure to meet the world population’s subsistence needs. In this respect, all dystopian science fiction works against the grain of capitalist modernity’s somewhat Utopian meta-narrative of universal human progress, which represents a night-watchmen state, laissez-faire markets and new technology helping individuals everywhere to live and lead a good life. By showing viewers a near future that is not better than the past, but much worse, dystopias challenge the neo-liberal ideology that casts planetary wellbeing inevitably ‘advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets and free trade’ (Harvey 2007: 22). That said, dystopian stories can be politically progressive or reactionary, radical or conservative, or both. The specific politics of these texts is found in their ‘critical’ or ‘uncritical’ fictionalization of a future time and place and their use of this future to interrogate the capitalist present. Critical dystopian films can be defined as those that give expression to the social antagonisms arising from the real political-economy of our time (Moylan 2000). The futures of these films interrogate present-day capitalism and suggest that if the system persists, its worst dynamics and effects will be exacerbated. The critical dystopian film tells a story about a future society to critique the existing one and aims to help us understand the world with an eye to changing it, and for the better. Progressive filmmakers may use the critical dystopia formula to magnify the latest configuration of capitalism and enliven the utopian hope that a different and better world is possible. Like the critical dystopia, the uncritical dystopian film recognizes our world’s social problems, but it does not link them to capitalism. Regressive filmmakers may script uncritical dystopias that encourage viewers to see the bad conditions of the present as unchangeable and as inevitably getting worse in the near future. But by dampening the hope that things could be different, the uncritical dystopia film is anti-utopian; it implies ‘there is no alternative’ and fosters apathy and nihilism (Flisfeder 2014: 104–15). ‘Critical’ and ‘uncritical’ dystopias both

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address the traumas and terrors of the present; the former offers a materialist clue as to how or why these bad conditions came about and offers hope for a better life beyond them; the latter does not. In the following section, we contextualize Elysium as a ‘global’ Hollywood film for dystopic times and then interpret Elysium as a ‘critical dystopia’ that critiques global capitalism and points beyond it.

INTERPRETING ELYSIUM’S CAPITALIST DYSTOPIA: SOCIETY, STATE, ECOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY Elysium is a global Hollywood commodity produced across many cities in a ‘new international division of cultural labour’ (Miller et al. 2005). Elysium was co-produced by US-based Media Rights Capital (MRC) and QED International Studios and Tri-Star Pictures, which is owned by Culver City California-headquartered Sony Entertainment Pictures (SPE). Elysium’s Earth scenes were shot in slums and dumps on the peripheries of Mexico City (Mexico), the space scenes were shot in the wealthy suburbs of Mexico City and Vancouver (Canada) and the special effects were engineered by Weta Workshop (New Zealand), Image Engine (Canada) and Industrial Light and Magic and Whiskytree (United States). Elysium had global box office draw and popular appeal, as its US release garnered Hollywood $93,050,117 (32.5 per cent of its overall gross) and its trans-national exhibition in theatres in cities from Shanghai to Abuja pulled $293,090,583 (67.5 per cent of its gross) (Box Office Mojo 2013). As a global Hollywood film, Elysium is not a story about one country’s way of life or written only for one national audience; it avoids the cultural discount by representing a future-oriented time (2154) and place (the Earth and an orbiting space station called Elysium). Elysium’s protagonists and antagonists are not a one country’s citizens, but divided between Earthlings (the earth’s working poor) and Elysians (Elysium’s ruling class). As a global Hollywood film, Elysium was scripted to overcome the ‘cultural discount’ associated with narrowly nationalistic stories. At the same time, the real analogue of Elysium’s future time and space is the logic of Hollywood to endlessly and permanently expand, both temporally and geographically, in a push to achieve a globally singular time and space of accumulation that is boundaryless and borderless. Elysium emerged in a conjuncture when the term ‘dystopia’ is often used to describe the real world system. The 2007 global capitalist slump and the revolutionary upheavals initiated by the Arab Spring in 2010 and Occupy Wall Street in 2011 instigated and popularized a new round of social class analysis and radical criticism of neo-liberal hegemony. Outright anti-capitalist activism was accompanied by the venting of anxieties about global eco-catastrophe, fears of world-civilizational collapse and panicked ruminations that humanity had arrived at the literal end of history (Klein 2014). A sense that capitalism’s longue durée led humankind to a catastrophic Dystopia was widespread (Lilley et al. 2012: 126) and expressed in news stories like ‘Highway to dystopia: Time to wise up to the looming risks’ (Crawford 2012), ‘Have we sown the seeds of dystopia?’ (Howell 2012) and ‘Dystopia: Corporate rule breeding “Global Class War”’ (Common Dreams Staff 2012). In early 2012 – about one year into Elysium’s production – the world system’s economic power-brokers and neoliberal ‘leaders’ were even contemplating the reality of Dystopia. The 2012 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for example, hosted a ‘Seeds of Dystopia’ panel and released a Global Risks Report that documented human

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misery, hardship and despair (Blodget 2012). The Report surveys global unemployment, rampant poverty, income inequality, market volatility, climate change, food and water shortages, population growth, slumification, terrorism and failed states to highlight the dystopic planetary situation we face. We now interpret Elysium’s future-oriented interrogation of our time’s capitalist class society, security state, ecological catastrophe and militarized technology. Capitalist society is torn asunder by a class division between the private owners of the means of production and the workers paid wages to serve them (Marx and Engels 1848; Harvey 2007; Wood 2005). In the early twenty-first century, this division is acute. One per cent of the US population, for example, controls about 23% of total US wealth and 1% of the world’s population controls at least 40% of the world’s total wealth (Piketty and Goldhammer 2014). The average US chief executive (CEO) is paid approximately 300 times more than the typical US worker and wages as a per cent of GDP are at an all-time low while profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high (Common Dreams Staff 2012). Yet, in capitalist society, waged work appears to be ‘free’ (because owners do not technically coerce workers to work for wages) and ‘equal’ (because owners and workers meet in the market as sellers and buyers of labour power). However, this basic social relation in capitalism maintains substantive unfreedom and inequality. Workers depend upon their wages to live, which means that they are compelled to sell their labour power to owners as a commodity in exchange for the wage they require to buy their basic needs. And the ostensibly ‘equal’ exchange relationship between the worker (seller) and owner (buyer) of labour power leads to an unequal outcome (i.e., the worker’s labour power is exploited to enrich the owner, which reproduces social class inequality). Furthermore, in capitalist society, the worker’s experience of labour is ‘alienated’. At the core, workers are autonomous beings with immense creative and self-actualizing potential. But by making them dependent upon wages to live, subordinating their time and energy to the wishes of the owning class (and its managerial strata), reducing them to tools of capitalist production, and compelling them to make commodities that they do not themselves own and which bear no trace of their own identities, capitalism alienates the working class (Marx 1990; Marx and Engels 1844, 1848). Elysium forwards a blunt geo-spatial mapping of capitalist society’s division between owners and workers. In the film’s opening, viewers are told that ‘Earth’s wealthiest inhabitants fled the planet to preserve their way of life’ (Blomkamp 2013). Indeed, the Elysian owning class has literally taken flight from earth (an overpopulated, destitute and crime-filled slum for the working poor) to Elysium (an exclusive, luxurious and securitized gated community in space for the propertied rich). Elysium, then, renders capitalism’s rigidifying class division as a global spatial metaphor, with immobile workers gazing upwards at Elysium and the mobile Elysian owning class literally looking down upon them. There is no mobility in this world system; the workers are literally trapped on earth and stuck doing exploitative jobs for corporations owned by Elysians. Registering Mike Davis’ (2006) magisterial exposition of capitalism’s slumification of the planet and the geographical class division between the more than billion urban proletariat currently living in dumps, shanty-towns and barrios and the rich, who enjoy the comforts and luxuries of gated communities (Davis 2006), Elysium displays the Earth’s proletariat barely subsisting in slums while the Elysian owning class flourishes in white mansions surrounded by manicured gardens and swimming pools.

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On Elysium, the minority rich live healthy, happy and extended lives. They each own a private Med-Bay, an automated total health care machine that in addition to curing any disease and injury, can reverse the aging process and give their users reconstructed bodies and faces. On Earth, the working poor are sick, miserable and frequently dying due to a dilapidated healthcare system. For the working class, Earth is a neo-liberal dystopia of immiseration. For the ruling class Elysians, Elysium is a neo-liberal utopia of leisure, abundance and customer service. By magnifying social class division in the future, Elysium reminds us of the class division in our time and poses a radical counterpoint to the neo-liberal image of capitalism as a coherent, meritocratic and class-less society of free and equal individuals. Furthermore, in scenes focused on what the Armadyne Corporation does to Max, a ‘blue-collar’ worker, Elysium interrogates the dispossessions and degradations of labour in capitalism. In an early scene, Armadyne Corporation’s owner John Carlyle takes a private shuttle from Elysium to earth to ensure that his militarized droid factory is producing optimal profit for the firm’s Elysian shareholders, who demand returns at a meeting conducted via holographic tele-screens. Carlyle admits he does not ‘enjoy breathing the air on earth’, but he is committed to do ‘everything possible to restore profitability’ to his firm on behalf of his investors. To achieve this capitalist goal, he presses Armadyne Corporation’s earthly managerial strata to optimize efficiencies by squeezing an ever-larger portion of surplus value from the workers. While Carlyle and his shareholders live off the profits generated by the corporations they own and the labour of the workers they exploit, Max and his co-workers endure labour as a brutally alienating experience. Deprived of a ‘basic income’ and with no advanced welfare state to turn to, Max is literally dependent upon the wage Armadyne Corporation pays him. Without the job, Max could not afford to buy the goods he needs to live (i.e. rent for shelter, food and water). Max’s work for Armadyne Corporation is not a ‘free choice’ made in the absence of consequences, but something that he must do to survive. Elysium represents Max’s waged work for Armadyne Corporation as compulsory, not free. Dependent on the wage to live, Max cannot freely or creatively determine what he is producing and he has zero power to determine how the output of his labour is used after it is consumed; this is determined by the Armadyne Corporation and the Elysian state, the chief consumer of its weapons. In fact, Max must assemble the security droids that the ruling class Elysians use to monitor and coerce him and other earthlings inside and outside the workplace. Max has no control over the labour process while on Armadyne Corporation’s time-clock. Commodity production in the Armadyne factory is Taylorized into repetitive human-machine interactive steps while a pre-recorded voice regularly tells workers they ‘must meet weekly quotas’ (Blomkamp 2013). The sprawling and machine-filled floors resemble China’s FoxConn complex or some other production city in one of the world’s export processing zones. On the job, Max is watched by Armadyne supervisors and by Caryle, whose managerial gaze beams over the shop floor’s mechanized forces and relations of production from an office, high above. In this future factory, Max suffers many indignities. An Armadyne foreman treats Max as a disposable member of a large ‘reserve army’ of workers, docking half a day’s pay for showing up with a cast on his broken arm and reminding him, ‘you are lucky to have this job’ (Blomkamp 2013). The foreman even forces Max to enter a droid assembly chamber to fix a ‘door malfunction’. The

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foreman says the malfunction is ‘holding up the line’ (and disrupting optimal production) and tells Max: ‘Either you go in there right now, or we find someone who will and you can go clean out your locker. That’s the deal, in you go’ (Blomkamp 2013). Faced with the choice of being fired from his job or putting himself in harm’s way to keep it, Max selects the latter option, but gets trapped inside the chamber and jolted with a lethal dose of radiation. Max’s lifeless body is then extracted from the machine by a droid and diagnosed by another, which dispassionately says Max ‘will experience catastrophic organ failure. In five days, you will die’ (Blomkamp 2013). When this ‘accident’ brings Armadyne’s production to a halt, Carlyle, only concerned about the bottom-line, is infuriated. Accompanied by security droids, he storms down to the factory flow and angrily asks the foreman: ‘What is going on? Why has production stopped?’ (Blomkamp 2013). The foreman explains Max has been exposed to radiation poisoning, but Carlyle cares nothing for Max’s wellbeing. Worried that Max’s skin will fall off and ruin bedding he does not want to pay to replace, Carlyle orders the foreman to fire him and remove him from the factory. The foreman says, ‘Yes sir’ and a factory droid forces Max to sign a release form, drops pills that will keep his body functioning until he dies and says, ‘Thank you for your service’ (Blomkamp 2013). Max is not valued as a person by Armadyne, but as labour to be exploited and thrown away. While neo-liberal ideology depicts a person’s sale of their labour power to a corporation in exchange for a wage as a free choice and work as the site of empowerment, Elysium forwards a radical counterpoint; work in capitalism is brutalizing, degrading and deadly. Elysium also interrogates the ‘capitalist state’. Marx and Engels (1848) famously declared: ‘The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. Wood (2005: 17) avers: ‘The nation state has provided that stability and predictability by supplying the elaborate legal and institutional framework, backed up by coercive force, to sustain property relations of capitalism, its complex contractual apparatus and its intricate financial transactions’. In the twentyfirst century, the ‘neo-liberal state’ explicitly functions to facilitate and legitimize capitalist accumulation, and has become ever more obviously partial to trans-national corporate class interests (Harvey 2007: 22). At the same time, the post-9/11 Global War on Terror diminished the foundations of liberal democratic governance in many countries, as powerful security states now grow and thrive in permanent ‘state of exceptions’, with hierarchical, exclusionary and increasingly centralized executive branches acting without public oversight or accountability. In country after country, neo-liberal security states subject populations to near total surveillance and increasingly use brute force as a means to pre-empt or control public dissent and protest. In the aftermath of the global slump of 2007, the sense that liberal governments ‘by the people for the people’ were actually neo-liberal security states by ‘the rich, for the rich’ proliferated and undergirded mass protest (Nichols and McChesney 2013). Elysium offers a bold image of the capitalist state. The Elysian state does not represent the many and is not a neutral agency, but is an expression and instrument of the rich, designed to uphold a division between citizens (the bourgeois residents of Elysium) and non-citizens (the working class). In liberal governments, citizenship is the basis for social inclusion and abstract freedom and equality, but Elysium critiques citizenship by showing it to be the source of social inequality, unfreedom and exclusion. On Elysium, citizenship

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is not a human right, but a commodity, bought and sold. The rich belong to Elysium because they have the means to pay for it; the poor are excluded because they cannot. The Elysian state’s cybernetic service systems recognize and include Elysian citizens as citizens in this political community by biometrically scanning a DNA-code tattooed into their flesh at birth. Conversely, they ‘Other’ and exclude non-tattooed worker-earthlings as threatening non-citizens. Elysium’s corporate citizens enjoy their state’s national security and health care; earth’s workers are deprived of these even though they need them. Though the Elysian state does not extend its citizenship rights to Earth’s working class, its coercive apparatuses encompass Earth so as to ensure that capitalist production continues without interruption. In much dystopic science fiction, states rule populations with coercion and propaganda. But the Elysian state rules Earth with brute force, not propaganda, because Elysium has no legitimacy in the eyes of earth’s dispossessed. To protect and preserve its lavish ‘peace’, the Elysian state wages war against Earth’s poor with robotic parole officers, police droids and drones that administer Elysian’s Law and Order regime using a combination of total surveillance and repression. In one scene, Max waits to board a bus to Armadyne and is accosted by two police droids. The droids identify Max as having a criminal record and then ask what is in his bag. The shaved-headed Max jokes, ‘Hair products’ and explains, ‘I am just going to work’ (Blomkamp 2013). The droids interpret Max’s humour as ‘misdemeanor: disobedience’, throw Max to the ground and break his arm. After checking the bag and finding nothing, they explain: ‘Zero tolerance policy applies to civilians’ (Blomkamp 2013). In another scene, a rebel community of earthlings led by ‘Spider’ hijacks three shuttles, fills them with sick and dying earthlings and flies to Elysium. Their goal is to use Elysium’s Med-Bay technologies to heal and save their immiserated comrades. In response to this ‘security threat’ and ‘unauthorized entry into Elysium airspace’, the Elysian Defense secretary Delacourt activates ‘sleeper agent’ Kruger, an earth-bound mercenary (Blomkamp 2013). From earth, Kruger fires missiles into space which destroy two of the three ships, killing all of the earthlings. The third ship outflanks the missile and crash lands on Elysium. Earthlings scatter and run to the Elysian mansions, searching for Med-bays to heal themselves. Delacourt orders ‘everyone coming out of that vehicle apprehended’ and deploys droids, which attack and arrest the ‘illegals’ (Blomkamp 2013). Elysium’s robot police round up the earthlings, kettle them into giant rusty cages and then deport them to back earth. Overall, by representing a future security state blatantly serving the minority interests of a capitalist ruling class at the expense of the majority interests of the working class poor, Elysium may invite viewers to question the prevailing liberal pluralist theory of the state/society relationship, which represents states as neutral mediators of the contending interests of all citizens. At the same time, by depicting the Elysian state as one that relies on brute force to maintain social order, Elysium addresses real fears that state coercion, not persuasion, is the norm for maintaining law and order on behalf of the power of the few to exploit people, and nature. Elysium furthermore interrogates capitalism’s ecological catastrophe. Marx is sometimes framed as eco-naïve cheerleader for capitalist development, but Marx was actually quite attuned to capitalism’s domination of nature and the incompatibility between unfettered capitalist growth and environmental and human survival (Bellamy Foster 2000). In the early twenty-first century, the

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ongoing ‘drive to capital accumulation is disrupting the planetary metabolism at cumulatively higher levels, threatening irreversible, catastrophic impacts for countless species, including our own’ (Bellamy Foster and Clark 2016). Capitalism’s infinite logic of growth in an ecology of finite resources is calamitous (Klein 2014). As capitalism expands individual private wealth at the expense of common public wealth, including nature, it puts the ecology and humanity in dire jeopardy (Bellamy Foster et al. 2011). The threat of ecological catastrophe is real and present, as capitalism-caused climate change, ozone depletion and biodiversity destruction are happening and well documented (Klein 2014; Bellamy Foster et al. 2011; Bellamy Foster and Clark 2016). Elysium highlights capitalism’s ecological catastrophe in a number of poignant visual sequences. The film’s opening, for example, visually tours viewers around Los Angeles 2154, showing them one giant sprawl of interconnected barrios interlaced with burning pits of garbage that spew smoke into the smog of an ozone depleted atmosphere. Skyscrapers and condominiums and apartments crumble, are stained with soot and overgrown with algae. Their dilapidated facades boast mangled remnants of advertisements for beauty products – perhaps relics from an earlier time when planned obsolescence was normal. As the camera shows us this ecological catastrophe, captions tell us what the planet has become: ‘In the late 21st century, Earth was diseased, polluted and vastly overpopulated’. The planet has become this because the Elysian rulers transformed it into a factory for extracting value from nature and people in order to produce commodities for themselves, and then, upon realizing it was no longer hospitable and habitable, they took flight to their ‘bell air in space’, building and maintaining it by continuing to dominate earth’s nature and workers. By depicting a future in which capitalism and the class system persists in spite of the earthly ecological and human catastrophe they cause, Elysium suggests that current neo-liberal solutions to our world’s really present ecological problems (i.e. the greening of markets plus eco-friendly technologies) are ineffective. By showing the ruling class insulating itself in outer space from the catastrophe of a destroyed planet and doing nothing to ameliorate capitalism’s worst effects, Elysium suggests that capitalism negates environmental and human needs. Moreover, Elysium interrogates the growth of the military-industrialcomplex (MIC) and the ruling class’s development and use of militarized technology to preserve and reproduce their privileged way of life. For five decades, neo-Marxist scholars have examined the growth of the MIC (symbiotic relationships between militaries, universities and weapons corporations), the role of permanent war and military expenditure in underwriting and shaping the research and development (R&D) of new technologies, and how the benefits of these weaponized technologies accrue initially and primarily to private corporations and security states (Schiller 1992). In the early twenty-first century, the MIC grows larger. The United States Department of Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for example, brings together military agencies, universities and corporations to ‘advance knowledge through basic research and create innovative technologies’ to ‘prevent strategic surprise from negatively impacting US national security and create strategic surprise for US adversaries by maintaining the technological superiority of the US military’ (DARPA 2016). DARPA allocates billions in public money to the R&D of technologies for war and then the DOD procures these technologies as commodities from corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman (Ruttan 2006; Singer 2009; Turse 2008).

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Elysium examines the collusion between the military and corporations that form the MIC’s base, presenting it as a ‘conspiracy’ of sorts between Secretary of Defense Delacourt and Armadyne’s CEO, Carlyle. At a meeting between these two villains, Delacourt explains that she and Carlyle have a common interest in orchestrating a coup of Elysium’s president, Patel, who had earlier scolded Delacourt for using covert coercion to keep the working class down, on earth, and away from Elysium. Patel does not disagree with the ends, but the means; he wants Delacourt to ‘deal with illegals quietly’, perhaps to mitigate image problems and revolutionary blowback. Delacourt, a military hawk, tells Carlyle ‘there is a political sickness that needs to be removed’ and that Armadyne is ‘in need of revenue’ (Blomkamp 2013). Delacourt says that if Carlyle overrides Elysium’s ‘servers’ and encodes her as the ‘new president in power’, Armadyne will have a defence ‘contract secured for the next two hundred years: missile defense batteries, droids, everything we need to protect our liberty, all guaranteed of course, by your new president’ (Blomkamp 2013). Carlyle consents to the coup. Here, Elysium’s framing of the MIC as a conspiracy is unnecessary, as its working are widely documented (Ruttan 2006; Turse 2008). Nonetheless, the film registers social anxieties about the machinations the real MIC in our time, and in our world. Furthermore, Elysium casts technologies currently in-development by today’s MIC as being embedded in the future. Elysium displays militarized brain-computer interfaces, biometric surveillance and identification systems, autonomous robots, drones and exoskeletons (Benjamin 2013; Biello 2013; Cooney 2012; de Chant 2013; Regalado 2014; Wagstaff 2014; Winston 2008). Elysium frames the ownership, control and use of these innovations as securing the interests of the already powerful. Brain-computer interfaces are used by Carlyle to protect his intellectual property and financial secrets from earth’s hackers; biometric surveillance maintains class divisions between Elysian citizens and earthly non-citizens; robots and drones are deployed the Elysian state to monitor, police and sometimes kill the working poor; exoskeletons are worn by the state’s mercenaries (‘Krugar’) to enhance their power to kill rebellious and inusrgent earthlings. In Elysium, technology is largely part and product of Elysium’s power structure; the class divide between Elysium and Earth is expressed and sustained through a technological divide between Elysian rulers and earthly workers. Against the present-day determinist view that technology is an autonomous force that is changing the world in fundamental ways, the instrumentalist idea that technology is a value-neutral tool used for whatever ends whichever user decides, and the utopian notion that new technology empowers us all, Elysium shows technology to be an expression of power that is used by the class privileged few against the poor and under-privileged many.

ELYSIUM’S UTOPIAN HORIZON: BEYOND DYSTOPIA Throughout this article, we’ve unpacked Elysium’s dystopic story about a future society of class division, security states, ecological catastrophe and the MIC run amok and argued that Elysium addresses and amplifies the dystopic conditions of our capitalist world system. As a ‘critical dystopian film’, however, Elysium also forwards a story of resistance and transformation of the dystopic society. In Elysium, many earthlings are hopeless and seem to accept that ‘things are just the way they are’ and will never change. But alongside mass despair,

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there exists a small but well-organized community of rebel-activists led by the disabled Spider. This subaltern community subsists by smuggling goods and engaging in petty crime while struggling for a future society that is different and better than the current one. This future is one in which the Elysium-Earth class system is abolished and every earthling has equal access to and enjoys Elysium’s technological riches. This utopian kernel is what makes Elysium a ‘critical’ as opposed to ‘uncritical’ dystopian film. Indeed, Elysium shows us a multi-cultural working class developing the capacity to transform the circumstances that ‘deny or inhibit the further emancipation of humanity’ (Moylan 2000: 199) en route to an alternative type of society capable of supporting a different and better life for all. Elysium’s glimmer of hope comes in the image of a community committed to a radically different principle than the underlying Elysium and in the transformation and action of Max, who resists the dystopic social order, first for reasons of self-preservation and then out of genuine solidarity with this community’s struggle to liberate Earth from Elysian rule. Elysium introduces viewers to Max, its proletariat hero, on a workday. We watch Max wake up, put on his blue-collar slacks and shoes and walk from his dilapidated home towards a crowded bus stop. On the way, Max is mocked by lumpen-proles for ‘having to get up early to work the line’ and surrounded by peasant children, who beg for money (Blomkamp 2013). Max has a criminal record and is on parole, but has retired from crime, stopped ‘doing that stupid shit’ and is trying meet his basic needs as a waged worker at Armadyne Corp (Blomkamp 2013). Even though no meritocracy exists in 2154 and the Elysian-Earth class positions are spatially and genetically locked in place, Max, perhaps suffering a form of ‘false consciousness’ (Marx 1990) about the real capitalist power relations that keep him down, seems to believe that obeying the law and working for Armadyne corporation will give him a chance to one-day fulfil his childhood dream of going to Elysium. As Elysium’s narrative moves forward, Max’s best efforts to obey and submit to the system’s dictates fail to pay off and it becomes obvious to him and to viewers that his dream is a delusion. While Max waits to board a bus to work, security droids assault him and break his arm for making a joke. After going to an overcrowded hospital to try to get a cast put on his arm, Max meets an automated parole officer to explain his earlier ‘conflict’ with the droid police. The automated parole officer tells Max the droid police officers reported Max’s ‘aggressive and antisocial violent behavior’ and as a consequence, extends Max’s parole term by eight additional months (Blomkamp 2013). After detecting Max’s elevated heart-rate, it offers him a ‘pill’ to sedate him. Police droid brutality, slow and substandard health care and an automated parole officer pushing opiates make Max late for work. He nonetheless shows up to Armadyne, eager to put in a day’s labour. But the manager threatens Max with job deprivation, docks a half days pay for lateness and then forces him into a droid assembly chamber, where he is poisoned by radiation. In one workday, Max is brutalized by police, silenced by the Law and almost killed by the corporation that exploits him. This objectively bad experience of the workday fundamentally transforms Max from being a worker who submits to the reigning order of the dystopic society to one who resents and then challenges it. Broken, bruised and near death, Max confronts the painful truth of the dystopic society: he and other earthlings like him die, not because the technological means to heal and cure everyone do not exist, but because they are exclusively and privately controlled by Elysium’s privileged few. After

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vomiting, Max tells his friend Julio that ‘they can fix this shit on Elysium’; he demands to ‘see Spider’ in hopes of getting a shuttle ticket to Elysium and using one of the Elysian’s Med-Bays (Blomkamp 2013). Spider says tickets are scarce and little children are more in need than he, but nonetheless offers Max a ticket in exchange for supporting the rebel group’s activist cause. Helping Spider steal data (‘bank codes, passwords, log in data’) from ‘the Elsyian asshole and billionaire’ Carlyle’s brain would give his revolutionary community ‘access to billions’ (Blomkamp 2013). Max and some of Spider’s activists are tasked with hijacking Carlyle’s shuttle, downloading Carlyle’s organic data into his own brain and bringing it back to Spider. To prepare him, Spider and his surgeons strengthen Max’s disabled body by equipping him with a ‘third generation exoskeleton suit’ that makes him ‘strong as a droid’ (Blomkamp 2013). Here, Elysium suggests that weaponized technology designed as tools of repression can be appropriated by the underdog and used to fight back. The exoskeleton implant is excruciatingly painful, but it gives Max the strength he needs to fight Elysium’s apparatus of coercion – Kruger, police droids and surveillance drones – on behalf of his class, on Earth. As Elysium’s narrative proceeds, Max steals secrets from Carlyle’s brain, destroys the droids that he was once paid by Armadyne to assemble, battles the crazed Kruger, and delivers Carlyle’s data to Spider, who discovers in it a reboot program for Elysium’s entire political-economic system. Spider says ‘whoever has this [reboot program] has the power to override the whole system; open the borders, make everyone a citizen of Elysium. This can save your life; we can save everyone’ (Blomkamp 2013). Spider tells Max that with this reboot program, ‘we would control the system, we would be in charge, we can change the course of fucking history!’ (Blomkamp 2013). Spider wants Max to immediately share the data with him while he and his rebel hackers work to put it to collectively beneficial uses, but Max, desperate to get to Elysium before he dies, gives himself up to Kruger, who takes him there. On Elysium, Max realizes that activating the Elysium reboot code will kill him. At the film’s climax, Max defeats Kruger and then, in one last moment of empathy for humanity, activates the reboot program, making everyone on Earth an Elysian citizen and therefore able to benefit from all of Elysium’s services. In the film’s denouement, Elysium’s artificially intelligent system identifies all of Earth’s ‘new citizens in need of medical attention’ and dispatches shuttles filled with Med-Bays and med-droids to provide healthcare for all (Blomkamp 2013). The ending is open to the possibility that a positive Utopia, or an ‘Eutopia’ (a society that is better than Elysium’s time and space, and ours as well), is possible. At the beginning of the film, the horizon of Utopia is introduced as Max’s somewhat individualistic boyhood dream of going to Elysium to live among the rich and powerful. At the end of the film, Utopia is something that is practical and achievable for all, by all. This Utopia does not derive from abstract principles, but develops through a struggle by earthly rebels, in solidarity with the working poor and immiserated, who use many means to achieve their emancipatory ends. Elysium’s working class heroes use illegal tactics such as computer hacking, data theft, hijacking, armed robbery and violence against Elysians to achieve their revolution. But in the end, they make Utopia by re-programming and rebooting, not destroying, Elysium’s infrastructure. Revolution comes not by literally ‘smashing the system’, but by re-designing and reforming the system so that it will serve human needs as opposed to the profit wants of the propertied few. Elysium suggests that the techno-structure

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that currently serves the reigning system of dominance could be transformed and repurposed for radically different ends.

CONCLUSION: CRITIQUE OF CRITIQUE OF ELYSIUM Elysium has been criticized as politically problematic for two reasons. For critics focused on the film’s identity politics, Elysium’s first political problem is its perpetuation of Hollywood’s ‘white saviour’ narrative (Metz 2013). A ‘white saviour narrative’ depicts a white messianic character discovering something special about themselves while liberating people of colour from unfamiliar, dangerous and bad conditions (Hughey 2014). This recurring Hollywood trope depicts a few good white people taking up a struggle to emancipate racialized others from the machinations of bad white people and perpetuates Hollywood’s long-standing over-representation/inclusion of white people as history’s key protagonists and under-representation/exclusion of non-white others who make up the actual multicultural demographic of the United States and the world. Furthermore, this trope is problematic because it reproduces an unhelpful neo-colonial binary of white people as powerful and non-white people as powerless. By representing white people as having the power to intervene in and fundamentally transform bad worldly conditions that afflict racialized others, and for the better, it defines white people as superior, intelligent, competent as distinct from people of colour, who appear inferior, dysfunctional and unable to solve their own problems without white help (Fitzgerald 2014; Hughey 2014). Elysium is criticized as a ‘white saviour narrative’ because of its casting of the white global superstar Matt Damon as the primary action hero (Metz 2013). For example, Metz (2013) calls Matt Damon ‘The Great White Hope in Elysium’ and speaks of the difficulty of immersing herself in the film because people of colour are ‘relegated to the margins of the storyline’. Metz says that given that ‘racialization is a form of oppression for the global majority of those being exploited for the benefit of those with the most privilege’, Elysium, ‘even just in terms of accuracy […] should have a person of color as its lead’. Metz says, ‘Hollywood loves a white saviour’ and frames Elysium as just one more bad example of this: ‘one white dude is actually taking the lead on building a better future for us […] which just makes me want to throw up in my mouth a whole bunch’. Moreover, because the character Max is the white Matt Damon, Metz’s desire to ‘engage in a bit of escapism’ at the theatre comes at the ‘cost of total erasure’. The critique of Elysium as a standardized ‘white saviour narrative’ is important, but there is a much more nuanced and redemptive reading available which cuts against the ideological grain of this trope. First, the white saviour narrative usually scripts a white guy who begins on the side of the evil white ruling class, but after living with and experiencing the life of the racialized oppressed others, joins their fight. Max, however, does not belong to a white ruling class, but is an orphaned, destitute and totally immiserated worker, trying to scrape out a subsistence from dispossessing capitalist conditions experienced by all. Max is borne into and part of an earth-caged multiracial working class that is commonly exploited by the Elysian elite. Contra the strange reading of ‘Max is the only white guy on earth’ and everyone else is being black (and thus, needing to be saved by white people), Max lives on earth among a hybridized working class. He does not descend to earth from a ‘white ruling class outside’, but is very much inside a multiracial working class from the outset of the flick, the human flesh,

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bones and blood of a totally scorched earth. The workers Max waits with at a bus stop, toils for wages with at the Armadyne factory, is disciplined with at the police station, is cared for with at the hospital and fights against the Elysian ruling class with, are white, black, brown, dirty, long haired, bald, tattooed, male and female. Apropos the actuality of intersectionality, Elysium forwards a compelling portrait of racialized and sexualized class exploitation and oppression by the few of a multitudinous many. Second, the white saviour narrative usually has one special white guy turning against the white ruling class of which he is a part, taking up arms for and with the racialized oppressed, but Elysium offers a less predictable binary; on Elysium, the Elysian ruling class is not just white (as some reviewers have suggested). Rather, the Elysian ruling class, like earth’s working class, is multiracial. The Board of Directors of Armadyne, for example, are represented as a white woman, an aging black man, and an Asian, and together, these figures perhaps symbolize an emergent ‘trans-national capitalist class’ of owners who are not united by race, but rather, by their class interest in making shareholders happy and optimizing their own returns (Robinson 2004; Sklair 2001). And this is a much more plausible and accurate portrayal of emergent twentyfirst-century class power than the residual binary of white bourgeoisie and racialized proletariat; white, black and brown capitalists exploit workers of all skin colours. And the executive of the Elysian state which supports the affairs of the Elysian bourgeoisie are not all white either; there are two white women and one white man, but Elysium’s male President is brown, and there is one Asian and one black female politician too. As it is in the actually existing 21st world system, it is in Elysium: state politicians criss-crossing colour and gender lines facilitate and legitimize capitalist accumulation on earth. Third, the white saviour narrative casts a white hero as the centre and director of the cinematic action and tends to relegate non-white characters to subordinate and passive follower roles, but in Elysium, the revolutionary leader is not Max, but the Latino Spider, and Max takes orders from him and follows his plan. Spider, not Max, developed the revolutionary plot to overthrow the Elysian ruling class and directed the action of others, including the dying Max, to execute it. Spider is the technocratic brain and Max is the soldier brawn. It is Spider and his cadre that compel and persuade Max to realize why revolution against the status quo is necessary, to join them in the struggle. And Max joins Spider’s struggle, not because of white guilt or a paternalistic impulse to improve the conditions of the other, but first, out of his own selfish necessity to survive radiation poisoning, and second, due to a profound empathy for every wretched earthling he coexists with. Max kills himself because he knows it is the right thing to do for earth’s intersectionally exploited and oppressed class. He martyrs himself for the cause and for the well-being of future generations. This reading complicates the reduction of Elysium to a simple white saviour narrative. A more compelling critique of Elysium centres on the film’s regressive gender dynamics. Elysium’s privileging of Spider and Max (two heterosexual men) as working class heroes is certainly problematic with regard to gender politics, as women and trans-sexual, gay and lesbian people do not really play a role in the revolution. This film depicts strong men plotting and struggling, sometimes to save weak women, old and young. Max, for example, defends his childhood friend Frey from sexualized violence perpetrated by Kruger and the Elysian mercenaries; he also protects Frey’s daughter Matilda from these mercenaries and gets her to a Med-Bay to save her from leukaemia. For the

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most part, Elysium depicts active men fighting to protect the lives and livelihoods of passive women and children. It comes close to suggesting that the aftermath of the revolution would be reconstituted heterosexual normative family units, but doesn’t quite go there. In the end, Max fights and dies for every oppressed earthling, not just poor women and children. Another substantive political problem with Elysium is its ‘single-point of failure’ trope, which typifies much ‘science fiction about revolution (i.e. the computer on Elysium is the structural equivalent of the exhaust port on the Death Star, attack just that point and the whole artifice of dystopia crumbles)’ (Canavan 2015). Undoubtedly, our dystopic capitalist system is too complex to be taken down by focusing on one single point and too big to be brought down by a small group (Canavan 2015). A superior critical dystopian film for our time would deal explicitly with the complex potentials and pitfalls of hegemony in revolution, perhaps staging the successes and failures of the working class’ war of position and war of manoeuvre through the trenches of trans-national civil society, and via states, as opposed to just at the level of the system’s flawed design. The flawed gender dynamics and simplicity of revolution in Elysium, however, do not invalidate its status as a critical dystopian film. The film’s staging of rag-tag revolutionaries emerging from earth’s multitudinous working class as protagonists in conflict with the system, organizing against and triumphing over its rulers by targeting one point, is perhaps a wish fulfilment and source of the its global popular cultural appeal. With its simplistic fantasy of exploiting a single-point of failure, Elysium perhaps appeals to a growing global awareness that the system has hit a wall while resonating with and wetting popular appetites for some radically singular and efficient means of bringing fourth its demise. Elysium registers global mass discontent at what is and invites viewers to dream about what could be. By distilling our age’s dystopic capitalism into a popular form that tells a story of a revolution that is actually winnable, Elysium is a popular resource of hope for the parties and movements that seek to understand and change the world for the better. By contextualizing the real conditions that weight upon Elysium’s existence and unlocking the film’s imminent utopian content from the cage of its Hollywood commodity form, this article has tried to demonstrate the value of a political and class conscious interpretation of popular culture while shedding light on how critical dystopia can be a resource of hope in the dystopic global capitalist system.

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SUGGESTED CITATION Mirrlees, T. and Pedersen, I. (2016), ‘Elysium as a critical dystopia’, International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 12: 3, pp. 305–22, doi: 10.1386/macp. 12.3.305_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Tanner Mirrlees is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). His research examines the geopolitics, economics and ideologies of communications media and popular culture. He is the author of Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization (Routledge, 2013), Hearts and Mines: The US Empire’s Culture Industry (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), the co-editor of The Television Reader (Oxford University Press, 2013). Mirrlees’ writing has appeared in scholarly and popular venues. Contact: Communication and Digital Media Studies, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Bordessa Hall, 55 Bond St E, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, L1G 1B2. E-mail: [email protected] Isabel Pedersen, Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media and Culture, is the Director of the Decimal Lab and an Associate Professor at the University Of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). Currently, Pedersen holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant for her research into wearable media and is a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Pedersen is the author of Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-Shifting Media (Parlor Press, 2013) and she researches how humans are framed in light of the ‘digital evolution’ that is celebrated so extensively in mass communication, popular culture and transhumanist theory. Contact: Communication and Digital Media Studies, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Bordessa Hall, 55 Bond St E, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, L1G 1B2. E-mail: [email protected] Tanner Mirrlees and Isabel Pedersen have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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