"Elysium": (Tri-Star, 2013). WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Neil Blomkamp; DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Trent Opaloch; EDITED: Julian Clarke and Lee Smith; MUSIC: Ryan Amon; PRODUCTION DESIGN: Philip Ivey; VISUAL EFFECTS: Peter Muyzers; COSTUMES: April Ferry; RUNNING TIME: 1 hour, 42 minutes.
STARRING: Matt Damon (Max); Jodie Foster (Delacourt); Sharlto Copley (Kruger); Alice Braga (Frey); Diego Luna (Julio); Wagner Mora (Spider); and William Fichtner (John Carlyle).
Periodicals:
Manohla Dargis, "The Worst is Yet to Come," The New York Times, August 9, 2013, p. C1. ("Manohla" misses all of the major themes of the film.)
"Forum: Human Enhancement -- Rational Evolution," The Philosopher's Magazine, 3rd Quarter, 2013, p. 66. (October/December, 2013.)
Commenting on: P.W. Singer, Silicon Carnage: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin, 2013).
Films referenced in "Elysium":
1. Johnny Mnemonic/Existenz.
2. Code 46.
3. Equilibrium.
4. Metropolis.
5. In Time/Logan's Run.
6. 1984.
7. Brave New World.
8. I am Legend/Omega Man/Gattaca.
9. Soylent Green/Blade Runner.
10. Terminator Films.
11. Predator.
12. Dr. Strangelove.
13. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
14. Robocop.
15. Gladiator.
Books: The ideas dramatized in "Elysium" may be further explored in the following selective list of books.
1. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (New York: Ballantine, 1962) and Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed (London: W.W. Norton, 1966). (Parallel dystopian themes concerning the horrors of behaviorism and over-population, respectively, together with the corruptions of language.)
2. David Braine, The Human Person: Animal & Spirit (Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1992).
3. Ernest Breisach, Introduction to Modern Existentialism (New York: Grove Press, 1962), pp. 189-204. ("The 'No' to the So-Called Scientific Image of Man.")
4. Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 91-118.
5. Philip K. Dick, "The Android and the Human," in Lawrence Sutin, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (New York: Pantheon, 1993), esp. pp. 183-211. ("Do androids dream of electric sleep?")
6. Umberto Eco, "The City of Robots," in Thomas Doherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 200.
7. Umberto Eco, Travels In Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1983), esp. pp. 135-145. ("Semiological Guerilla Warfare.")
8. Carlos Fuentes, "A Harvard Commencement," in Reading Myself With Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981).
9. Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
10. George Greenstein, The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos (New York: William Morrow, 1988).
11. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), esp. pp. 127-149. ("A Cyborg Manifesto.")
12. Douglas Knellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 153-186.
13. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
14. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).
15. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay On Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).
16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 63-79 (Hugh J. Silverman, translation). ("Elysium" offers a fusion of Spanish-English for the proles; French-English for the upper-crust residents of "Elysium." The fusion of languages theme is found in a number of recent sci-fi films capturing an increasingly common reality in the world. See "Code 46.")
17. Ashley Montague & Floyd Matson, The Dehumanization of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983).
18. Christopher Norris, What's Wrong With Postmodernism?: Critical Theory at the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 164-194.
19. Arkady Plotinsky, Complementarity (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994). (Will we have sex someday with our flat-screen t.v. sets?)
20. David Rasmussen, Reading Habermas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
21. Richard Rorty, Contigency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 141-199.
22. Paul Roubisek, Existentialism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 161-185. ("The Irrational in Science and Religion.")
23. Johanno Strasser, "The Decade of the Experts," in Irving Howe, ed., 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism In Our Century (New York: Harper-Perennial, 1983), pp. 149-166.
24. Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper-Perennial, 1991).
25. Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991).
26. Mary Warnock, Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
I.
As I sank back in my plush leather chair and put my feet up at the newly revamped AMC Theaters on the Upper West Side to enjoy the Summer blockbuster experience of "Elysium," I was struck by the urgency of the themes explored in the movie.
Directly ahead of me a man was playing video games on a hand-held device as he interrupted himself, periodically, to respond to texts received on what appeared to be a Blackberry or new fancy cell phone. I have seen persons who think of themselves as "lovers" sitting next to one another on a park bench or subway train, each enthralled by a hand-held electronic device or "Nook," and/or "Kindle," and/or lap-top, while remaining totally oblivious to the equally alienated "person" with whom they are ostensibly "madly in love."
This is to say nothing of the presence of other human beings in the area of such lovers, persons who are antiquated enough to exist in a state of unattachment to an electrical device of some kind for more than a minute. Such "disconnected" persons are deemed fitting targets for drones in today's Manhattan. I may be one of the few persons to have entered a coffee shop and asked to "plug-in" my paperback book. ("'Oblivion': A Movie Review" and "'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")
Persons stroll through New York city seemingly talking to themselves in animated or passionate terms. About half of the time these persons have a listening device in their ears and appear to be involved in personal or business calls; the other half of such animated talkers are insane and do not require the assistance of technology to chat with aliens or whomever they talk to, often "God."
Mind/machine interfaces and symbiosis/complementarity are dialectical pairs subjected to timely dramatizations as well as interrogation in "Elysium." The etymology and definition as well as recent expansions of this word ("Elysium") are relevant to my argument. I will explain what I mean by this later in my essay.
Equally powerful, however, is the continuing sense of the mythological/religious need of a generation reared in an antiseptic environment that is hostile to meaning and speculative or moral theology to say nothing of "old time" religion.
Alienation produces a less than flattering image of American law and dealings with the state in the form of a mechanical parole official and robotic police officers. Judges in today's America are equally mechanical and their batteries are usually running low. ("The Critical Legal Studies Movement" and "Ronald Dworkin On Law as Interpretation.")
The primary concern of the film captured in a single master symbol is the question of Maximizing ("Max") Freedom ("Frey") in Community ("Circle/Sun") in situations of mechanical control and denial of freedom through grotesque inequalities.
The sun seen by the child-versions of "Max" and "Frey" is Plato's symbol of the Good. The tattoo on Max's body is a representation of the "dialectic" in Western thought from Plato to Hegel and Marx and beyond. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom" then "The Allegory of the Cave.")
This message tattooed on the "skin" of the protagonist/hero, gesturing at our origins as "star-stuff," makes the point obvious even as this same symbol serves to underscore the enduring relevance of the fundamental myth of our civilization Judeo-Christianity to the moral and political idea of sacrifice and the "other-regarding" essence of justice at least since Aristotle's ethics and politics. ("John Rawls and Justice.")
I will organize my comments on this movie in terms of three primary narrative threads in the work. All of these threads come together in the resolution offered to viewers at the conclusion of the story. It should be clear, however, that there are far more than these three themes in the movie and other readings of this complex work are certainly possible:
First, there is the question of the alteration of the human being in relation to technology. Mechanical "enhancements" of human capacities and powers may have altered persons to an extent where technologically "rich" persons come to achieve obscene disparities of privilege (or power) in their very persons, in terms of quality of life, food, living conditions as well as medical care and education, not merely as concerns the things they have. This situation creates a political, jurisprudential, and moral dilemma for all of the people of the world; second, there is the biting political satire commenting on America's social tragedy/comedy under the Obama presidency in the form of a National Security State (NSS) in which military and intelligence agencies, by way of a palace coup, have rendered the Chief Executive a mere "fundraiser" ("President Patel") who is irrelevant to true power in the state; third, themes of love as self-sacrifice or self-giving "for" the other are illustrated with a definition of heroism that engages with Niezschean-Heideggerian themes of self-becoming in the presence of death in favor of "moral realization," as in an ethics of self-transcendence understood in the tradition of idealism or existentialism.
" ... Our electronic constructs are becoming so complex that to comprehend them we must now reverse the analogizing of cybernetics [Norbert Weiner] and try to reason from our own mentation and behavior to theirs -- although, I suppose, to assign motive or purpose to them would be to enter the realm of paranoia; what machines do may resemble what we do, but they certainly do not have intent in the sense that we have; they have tropisms, they have purpose in the sense that we build them to accomplish certain ends and to react to certain stimuli. ..." (Dick, p. 186.)
As more human parts and functions are replaced by mechanical or computational simulacra, in order to enhance organic lifespans or capacities, as humans come to possess synthetic livers, mechanical hearts, artificial intelligence systems for brains someday -- do they (or we), at some point, stop being humans or persons in order to become "constructs" or artificial devices? Have we become artificial devices already? Do we live inside Anthony Burgess's "Clockwork Orange"? Does the "Matrix" have us in its grasp? Are we in "Elysium"?
This film suggests that we are already living in a cinematic afterlife as our world crumbles.
"Have a good one!" the robot at Dunkin Donuts said this morning with a glassy stare in her eyes.
II.
Matt Damon plays "Max," a resident of a devastated landscape meant to be Los Angeles in 2154. The director's powerful sense of irony and black humor may be seen in the interweaving of images from Mexico City -- from which it seems that residents of this future Los Angeles are almost exclusively drawn -- with the unavoidably harsh conditions of the 99% in this sci-fi California and world, as compared with the privileged few (or 1%), whose obscene wealth makes very different lives possible off-planet, on "Elysium."
The 99% are actually asked or told to accept and witness the deaths of their children from starvation and curable illnesses, but never to seek to go to the highly secure "Elysium" without permission. This grim reality is already the situation of many persons in our world. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")
Max is obviously a Mexican-American in a context and time when this no longer matters. He is the counterpart of the blue collar Irish kids from Boston's tough neighborhoods that Mr. Damon has played, brilliantly, in other movies.
This performance by Mr. Damon in "Elysium" is even more brilliant -- also braver because it is far riskier -- for Mr. Damon's now well-established global stardom. Oscar nomination for Matt Damon? (''The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review.")
Mr. Damon has understood that "Max" is an American very much like his character in "Good Will Hunting," but for his ethnicity. The common humanity between those characters -- and, indeed, Mr. Damon's own status as a mere mortal substantially identical to other young men in his nation and the world -- serves to underline the solution to the mystery of humanity in a technological age that is offered to viewers at the conclusion of the movie for no extra charge: our capacity for empathy, concern for and sharing in the plight of others, through love, is the essence of our humanity that is untouched (so far) by our devices. This capacity should guide us in the future use of our technology and military power. Kudos to Mr. Blomkamp. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
"The Internet and computing are just external forms of cognitive enhancement. Biomedical interventions promise to internally enhance cognition. Whether, for example, MEMORY resides in a computer or in the brain makes no morally (or socioeconomically) relevant difference." (J. Savulescu, "The Philosopher's Magazine," pp. 69-70.) ("What is memory?")
"Frey" (played with sensitivity and gentleness by Alice Braga) is Max's childhood and life-long love. She is the only person to have escaped the neighborhood by "making something of her life."
People living in ghettos always hope that somebody gets out of the hell they are in, especially when it comes to the mental prisons created by ghetto life through denials of education and surroundings lacking in beauty, but also through drug use and other addictions, crime and indiscriminate sexual activity.
Frey has become a nurse. She cares for her sick child, whose illness might be cured, instantly, in devices that rearrange the "being" of persons at a molecular or atomic level to eliminate disease, but which are only available in "Elysium."
"Elysium" is both a heaven for heros who die in battle, according to standard definitions, and a place in this movie of exclusion and self-indulgence. Perhaps Mr. Damon's character is the only one who truly "makes it" out of this hellish future to a "heaven" made possible by his altruistic love, but only at the cost of his life. ("The Soldier and the Ballerina" and "Pieta.")
The orbiting dwelling that is "above" hunger, pain, poverty and stifling heat along with the dust that fills the screen-version of "L.A." is certainly "Beverly Hills America," a "lifestyles of the rich and famous" space of greed and cold insensitivity where the media asumes we all want to be today.
The movie comments on America as a gated community of structural injustices based on wealth, paranoid at the moment, frightened, flirting with fascism, defensive against the unwashed masses beating a path to its door. However, the same criticism is made and APPLIES against all First World elites in the UK, France, Germany, Latin America, or Asia. No one escapes whipping by Mr. Blomkamp.
The wealth of a tiny elite in the First World is based on exploitative economic relations with the global masses -- including "our" own fellow citizens (the film makers include themselves in this criticism) -- whose presence and pains the rich few wish to forget when they retire to their technological caves and resorts.
Technology has reached a point when the "human essence" may be altered out of all recognition by, say, nutrition, education, advanced medical care, synthetic or prosthetic devices, cosmetic surgery, access to information, even capacity or power to create world culture. Not every society can spend $200 million to make a single movie.
This scientific "power" is also the power to define the reality that all of us must live. Rich persons often become -- or see themselves as -- a "superior" species. This alleged "superiority" justifies in their eyes the cruelties, sadism, inequalities that ensure the continuation of their privileges. It is difficult to imagine how they could not see themselves in such terms. ("Oblivion': A Movie Review.")
Max, by contrast, recognizes the "entanglement" of his destiny with "Frey's" fate and her child's recovery, but also with the fate of all others in his world. The little girl's parable of the hippo and cat delivers the wisdom of the film as the urgent need for cooperation and mutuality of effort in order to achieve fairness that makes sense for everyone or even survival. America and the powerful few are the "hippo"; the vast bulk of humanity is the "cat."
Will we learn to share and play nicely with others before it is too late? It does not look good right now. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" and, again, "John Rawls and Justice.")
Max struggles to avoid returning to prison. His encounter with a robot parole officer and cops (who are also robots) is a critique of America's currently dominant legal positivism contrasting rules against justice (justices loses!), law against equity, or the conscience of the court (we have no consciences) with convenient results. ("What is Law?" and "Richard A. Posner On Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
Max is made to accept insane risks with his life in a low-paid factory job creating the instruments of his own oppression. This may be the plight of many Mexicans in America. An indifferent boss -- who is more of a robot than the machines -- gleefully forces Max to be exposed to lethal levels of radiation. Max's injuries are handled pretty much the way American workers' compensation courts work today: Max gets two copies of a piece of paper informing him that he will die in five days.
Max, the existential hero, is awakened to his human predicament by the sudden arrival of death. Max's friend "Julio" (Diego Luna in a role usually played by Casey Affleck or his more obscure brother last seen in a Batman costume) will die through sharing in Max's adventures and out of loyalty to a friend.
Jodie Foster's "Delacourt" is a combination of Mr. Boehner, Senator Graham, and Hillary Clinton in a pant suit. She is definitely scary, but also slightly satirical and a more nuanced plot ingredient than a cartoon villain. You sense that this character is utterly sincere, that she sees herself as defending the gates against the barbarians rather than becoming the barbarian threatening civilization. Delacourt is appalled by "Kruger" (Sharlton Copley), for instance, even as she makes use of him when necessary. Is this how we feel about "drones," Mr. Obama? NSA surveillance? ("America's Drone Murders.")
Do Americans really want to know about intelligence wars and special ops or surveillance? Delacourt suggests that we leave the thinking to her. This includes President Patel ("Yes, we can!") who must not be kept from his "fundraisers."
Wagner Moura (Spider), like any enterprising criminal or his billionaire counterpart in the movie, displays the single-mindedness of such persons in pursuit of illicit gains even at the risk of his life. Spider wants the access codes and status designations of "citizens" for "Elysium" which Max must download into his brain.
For this criminal purpose, Max receives some amazing bio-mechanical "aps" from Spider. Is Max still human? The capacity for love and heroism are not affected by these "enhancements" suggesting where the essence of humanity may be found. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" then "The Galatea Scenario and the Mind/Body Problem.")
Kruger's bizarre antics as an NSA or special forces operative, whose mind and morals are casualties of his adventures, is a warning concerning what we may become in our pursuit of safety in the National Security State. Is Kruger still human? I doubt it.
Max achieves his "beautiful death" through the supreme act of loving sacrifice for others (loved-ones and strangers). "Everyone is a citizen." The subtle music borrowed from Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" underlines the point for audience members who are brain-damaged, like the "Times" reviewer who missed it anyway: Love and compassion is what makes us human. Let us pause to be clear on this issue. By the way, I think that Mr. Blomkamp is right:
"The image of man which behavioristic psychology suggests and which it transmits to the social sciences is based on the Darwinistic theory with its shaping and re-shaping of organisms and their tools of adjustment according to the demands of a changing environment, and Pavlov's experiments with dogs which led to the formulation of the concept of the 'conditioned reflex.' According to it a certain stimulus will through proper conditioning of the organism evoke a particular and desired response. Far from being accepted as merely a valid insight into one aspect of organic, including human, behavior, the whole idea of MECHANICAL conditioning soon came to be considered the fundamental theory of learning. As far as behavioristic psychology is concerned, all further development in knowledge about man will be more and more detailed illustrations of these basic insights achieved by an ever-increasing refinement of the methods and tools of observation. Man is thus seen as an organism with specific and highly favorable abilities for his survival. Although these make man the crowning achievement of nature, ["the paragon of animals,"] they in no way lift him out of the realm of nature. Actually all the human capacities and creations are merely refined instruments of adjustment. Everything from art to religion, from philosophy to the most intricate scientific theory, is understood as a tool of survival under given conditions. Consequently the supreme aim of man's life, like that of any other organism, is the mere satisfaction of all his wants [let's go shopping!] and drives, [let's have sex!] of which the physiological are the basic ones. All the ideals of man expressed in various customs, whether monogamy or the democratic form of life, are viewed as habits, which have proved to be successful means of need gratification and, thus, survival. Their value is purely temporary since it depends on the changing environment." (Breisach, pp. 188-189.)
The humanistic response to this behavioristic ideology, that is dominant in America and Europe today, is total rejection and denial of the reduction of persons to their animal natures precisely because of the human need for and creation of meanings as well as systems of meanings (including this deflationary ideology with quasi-scientific pretensions called "behaviorism" that is largely a response to the Holocaust).
Meanings are not exclusively empirical phenomena, but created by interpretations, very much like ourselves, as evidenced by this movie, "Elysium."
III.
A final thought about "Elysium's" political satire which is a rare element in cinema today.
It is highly dangerous to have security people make political judgments and decisions about what citizens can know. Everything will be declared a "secret" very quickly if military or intelligence people decide such matters.
The Framers of the American Constitution did not want ultimate legal or political power in the hands of people with guns, but hoped for "reason-governed proceedings" unfolding exclusively in the civil branches of government. They feared secret courts or Star Chambers, torture for any reason, and undeclared wars. ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.")
The goal of the nation's founding documents was to protect human dignity and autonomy. If we no longer believe in these values, then let us acknowledge this fact frankly and honestly. We must not and cannot continue to do -- secretly and yet visibly -- what we claim not to do or believe in, because our contradictions have become absurd and obvious to the world.
Similarly, it is too late for New Jersey to change the subject by commenting on my "ethics" or character: "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's Legal System is a Whore House" then "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!"
Surveillance, monitoring, loss of privacy, holding persons without charges or trials, undeclared wars against abstract nouns, interventions in multiple countries, drone killings of thousands of innocents, targeted assassinations of thousands of persons (including Americans afforded NO due process) makes us a different people than what we have been for two centuries.
"Elysium" is forcing us to ask some of these difficult questions in the context of a work of art that is also commercially successful. For this reason alone -- to say nothing of Mr. Damon's stellar performance -- the movie deserves Oscar consideration.
"Elysium" may be the best movie (so far) of 2013. Congratulations to everyone involved in the film and thank you for a fun experience.
