Elysium and the Widening Wage Gap

by Christopher Barr

“ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS”

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.  He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits.  Yet he is lord of all the animals.  He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”            - George Orwell, Animal Farm

Social stratification is a concept involving the classification of people into groups based on shared socio-economic conditions.  Elysium is a film about the widening gap between the very rich and the unfortunately poor.  Elysium is a technological habitat for the white rich and powerful to dwell in luxury while the horrifying state they made of earth is left to the sick, poor lower worker-class.  This lower class fight and fend for the last bits of resource left on our decaying planet.

Elysium, mythologically speaking, is heaven.  The Elysian Fields is an oasis where the fortunate reside in the afterlife.  Hades (hell) is where everyone else lives.  In the film hell is on earth.  Passage to Elysium, a space station orbiting earth, is left for the Rothschild’s and Rockefeller’s of the world, a very elite group with all the technological advancements there with them to help maintain their health and prosperity.

On dystopian Earth there is an over-populated polluted mess.  People of poor ancestry and misfortune reside in deprivation and despair in urban packed, police states, where Homeland Security robots maintain a firm marshal law over the residents of Los Angeles 2154.  Medicine and food are hard to come by, leading to millions of malnourished and sick people living in dilapidated shanty-towns or stacked high in brittle apartment complexes.

Throughout the history of civilization, the well-to-do have always exploited the poor.  The poor have been kept strategically dumbed down and god fearing in order for this form of exploitation to flourish.  There are times I feel members of society are so naïve to the control over their lives that they would help manufacture guns and bullets, without ever realizing that they are creating the very tools to which their deaths will come about.

We truly live in a fantasyland.  People have been so misdirected and to mention otherwise can often be seen as an act of lunacy.  People seem generally convinced that they are in control of their lives and the choices they make as they navigate through consumer overkill and sociological detachment.  While their illusions of personal freedom prospers, the elite capitalist see this planet as a dead salvaging site, where machines destroy the planetary surface and pump oil from within it out.  Devastating this planets eco-system for profit and killing any wildlife that happens to be in the path of economic progress.  This once thriving planet has had its resources and life force technologically exhumed from its vast rich lands and its clear blue seas, leaving an almost unrecoverable mess with very little hope to stop or reverse this impending calamity.

It seems that the wealthy elite are on a greed-fueled train with their bags of money and the rest of us in tow, speeding down a hill with a cliff at the bottom, without any interest in stopping or spreading the wealth.  I guess in the case of Elysium, they have their way out while the rest of us fly off the cliff.

Obviously the elitists don’t fully succeed in the film because it’s a fantasy, where the poor represented by one man, overcome the corporate, governmental Goliath.  We can’t go see a film where this doesn’t happen because in the real world the elite and powerful do win at the end of the day.  So the film provides us with a fantasy of hope.  A dark place we can go with our popcorn and our M&M’s and sit with a group of like-minded strangers.  While we collectively delude ourselves into momentarily believing that this idea of the poor finally beating the rich and winning the planet back is actually achievable.

Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.  – Martin Luther King Jr.