Elysium
is really about the political suicide necessary to pass universal healthcare in the United States, but with a sting in the tail
In a dystopian future, the planet becomes so heavily populated that the wealthy decide to withdraw completely to a protected enclave and leave the rest of the planet to suffer in deteriorating slum conditions. The only available work is the maintenance and construction of machines, and those lucky enough to get jobs are squeezed between the demands of their employers and the unemployed masses who would happily take their place.
Neill Bloomkamp has a solid track record with subtext. District 9 is one of the best sci-fi films of the past decade and is a perfect example of social commentary in pulp form. His follow-up, Elysium, is separated from District 9 by a number of flaws but also by the fact that it does not wear its underlying message as openly on its sleeve. District 9 spoke to the all-too-human pervasiveness of racism and xenophobia by embodying the madness and hatred of apartheid, but Elysium speaks to our present and our future.
*****SPOILER ALERT*****
This time around, Bloomkamp focuses on the working class and brings us into the sprawling slum of Los Angeles in the not-too-distant future. High in the sky above, orbiting the earth, the space station Elysium houses the wealthy of the world in splendour and comfort. Tattooed with citizenship identification, any inhabitant of Elysium has access to technology and healthcare entirely absent on the surface of the earth. Meanwhile, policed by robots, the surface-dwellers grind out their days in poverty and industrial-age labour, building and servicing the machines that enslave them.
Matt Damon, one such blue-collar guy, receives a massive dose of radiation while on the job as a result of supervisor indifference. With so many people more than happy to take his place, Damon can’t risk pissing off his boss.
Meanwhile, on Elysium, a coup is being hatched by a Christine Lagarde-alike played by Jodie Foster. We meet her in a scene where she destroys a shipment of illegal immigrants. The immigrants had all paid galactic coyotes to bring them up into orbit, giving a distinctly Mexican border run aspect to the affair. Her unflinching attitude to the mass murder of civilians is that to preserve the future of Elysium, the masses must be kept out and subjugated at all costs. One cannot watch the scene without recalling every politician (not only from the US) who has ever spoken stridently against immigration on the grounds that the country cannot absorb the hopefuls seeking entry.
Beneath this political rhetoric and hateful one-percenterish-ness is of course an ecological truth: Elysium is a spaceship and clearly only has so much room, so much oxygen, so much food and so on. The parallel to Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth concept is a powerful reminder of the environmental disaster being visited on Earth today, a disaster which has led to this division of people in the future suggested by the film. This creates an interesting wrinkle in the story, because while Jodie Foster and her ilk may be cruel and indifferent, they are not altogether wrong about the implications of acting differently.
On Earth, Damon has only days to live with his fatal dose of radiation and so he schemes to reach Elysium, where they have medical pods that can heal him. It’s not out of the question for those medical pods to be placed on Earth, but the denizens of Elysium have simply not done it. If there was ever a simpler and more direct comment on the state of healthcare in the United States, particularly as the gap between rich and poor continues to grow, this writer hasn’t heard it.
Eventually, Damon reaches Elysium in possession of both a citizenship tattoo that will get him treatment and a computer code that will reboot the Elysium mainframe and allow changes to be made to the master program (which can make the entire population of Earth citizens of Elysium and therefore eligible for healthcare). The catch? Using the code will kill him, whereas using the citizenship tattoo will save him. To act selfishly to save himself, he passes up the one chance mankind (read: the population of the United States) has to strike a blow against the unjustified withholding of basic healthcare by the Elysium-dwelling elite. If he uses the code, he will deliver universal healthcare to mankind but his life will be over. Let’s pause for a moment of suspense over which option he chooses.
This is an American movie and Matt Damon is a movie star, so of course he chooses the latter and dies. The ongoing obsession of Hollywood with Christ-like figures endures. He gives his life for all mankind, and thus do the robot drones of Elysium dutifully descend to the surface of the planet with medical pods for all.
Damon’s suicide represents the metaphorical political suicide necessary to pass universal healthcare legislation in the United States. As mentioned in the title, however, there is a twist.
You see, universal healthcare is still only available to citizens, and citizens must be branded with a tattoo identifying them. The robot dictatorship in the hands of the wealthy remains. Elysium itself remains, and of course the journey into orbit is still expensive, even if it is now technically allowed. So while the social and economic orders have not been altered or revolutionised in a truly structural or meaningful way, the poor of the Earth will at least be cured of leukemia and ear infections.
This nihilistic view of the trade-off which universal healthcare entails leaves a bleak echo behind as the credits roll. Healthcare for all comes hand-in-hand with the authoritarian social order necessary to implement it, or, viewed another way, universal healthcare will not ultimately change society in anything more than a cosmetic way. Damon’s self-sacrifice may have cured his old flame’s daughter and brought succour to millions of others around the world, but only if they agree to be branded with tattoos identifying them - and of course the impersonal machinery of the State, embodied by the robots who deliver the medical care, remains in place, possibly even more powerful than ever before.
And that’s the movie you didn’t see.
