Elysium, Misanthropy, and Technophilia

Is the star of the movie the one looking away
from us, or the one looking at us?

From The A.V. Club - Elysium | Film | Movie Review by A.A. Dowd:

As allegory, Elysium is less risible than its predecessor, in that it doesn’t equate apartheid victims to slimy space bugs. But it’s ultimately even less concerned with the social issues it pretends to tackle; any focus on wealth inequality or the failures of the health-care system basically evaporates once the heavy artillery comes out.

I do not wish to take umbrage with Dowd for having found District 9 to be "risible," criticizing him for suggesting that Neill Blomkamp's masterpiece about how we dehumanize minorities—say by likening them to "slimy space bugs"—was somehow laughable, but instead suggest that here Dowd simply doesn't understand what Elysium is about either.

District 9

In District 9 Blomkamp called attention not only to our ability to dehumanize those we consider to be alien, but how our alienation of others can become so engrained that we experience genuine horror at the idea of losing our sense of self by in any way mixing with said aliens.  As Sharlto Copley's Wikus slowly becomes one of the aliens we are made to witness the sad truth that, contrary to our idealistic hope that we can evolve a sense of empathy, it is only by such a sudden and violent transformation that we can take on the perspective of the alien, of the other, and see the world through their eyes.

In Elysium we find Blomkamp returning to these themes once more, only now the alien other is a human other, a poor, polluted, unhealthy other.  Yet here the central figure is already one of the others, for which reason the transformation that we witness is the obverse of that of District 9, as Matt Damon's Max becomes instead one of the elite.  The elite he becomes however is not of the wealthy, godlike Elysians, but rather one of their robotic servants.  If in District 9 we had the hierarchical dualism between humans and aliens, in Elysium we find instead a hierarchical tripartite structure of Elysians, robots, humans.  In other words, Elysium presents us with the idea that we are moving towards a future in which it is humans who are the aliens.

Clash of the Titans

The Elysian space sanctuary is thus a Mount Olympus, and, much like the Olympian gods of Homer and of Harryhausen, they see the humans below as mere playthings at best and as insects at worst.  Hence whereas Dowd believes that this movie is meant to be a commentary on inequality with regards to resources, I believe that this movie is meant to be a commentary on inequality with regards to identity.  If we cannot become gods, then we'll take becoming robots as consolation.  Anything to stop us from having to continue as frail, weak, mortal humans.

It is thus a mistake to think that the real social issues in the movie "evaporate[] once the heavy artillery comes out" as it is our fetishization of heavy artillery that is the real social issue at the heart of the movie.  Much like Pacific Rim, this movie centers around the plot device of being able to connect ourselves with machinery if we have any hope of achieving our goals.  It is no coincidence that I am only able to achieve my goal of writing this blog by connecting myself with my MacBook.  You likewise are connected to whatever device you're using to read this right now.

If we are concerned with wealth and health inequality today it is almost entirely because we are living in a world divided into technology-have's and technology-have-not's, as is the world of Elysium and as was the world of District 9 (remember the interest in the aliens was for their ability to create weapons much as the only remaining interest in humans in Elysium is for their ability to create robotic weapons). It is for this reason that Blomkamp is not dropping the ball when it comes to the issues that confront us but is rather addressing the issues beneath these issues, issues like our hatred of all things human and love of all things technological, robotic, cyborg.

And if you ask why we hate humanity and love the idea of the Singularity, Blomkamp has Damon tell us the answer over and over again: "I don't want to die."  For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death will we not part from our beloved dreams of machine immortality.

So go watch Elysium, but remember to turn off your iPhone during the movie.  You have a psychic link with it by now anyway don't you, so it's never really off is it?

Update: Our local NPR station's movie reviewer Ryan Wilson discussed this post recently on his show Take 5, which you can now listen to here:

The Philosophy of Cats and the Cats of Philosophy

My cat tells me all the time, "Do not listen to Wittgenstein..."

From Aeon Magazine - If a Cat Could Talk by David Wood:

Stop reading this, read Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne, in An Apology for Raymond Sebond (1580), captured this uncertainty eloquently. ‘When I play with my cat,’ he mused, ‘how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?’ So often cats disturb us even as they enchant us. We stroke them, and they purr. We feel intimately connected to these creatures that seem to have abandoned themselves totally to the pleasures of the moment. Cats seem to have learnt enough of our ways to blend in. And yet, they never assimilate entirely. In a trice, in response to some invisible (to the human mind, at least) cue, they will leap off our lap and re-enter their own space, chasing a shadow. Lewis Carroll’s image of the smile on the face of the Cheshire cat, which remains even after the cat has vanished, nicely evokes such floating strangeness. Cats are beacons of the uncanny, shadows of something ‘other’ on the domestic scene.

The longer I have been with Stella (pictured above)—and I say "been with" to hint at where I'm going with this, insofar as it seems patently absurd to suggest that one "has" much less "owns" a cat—the more it has become obvious to me why cats have long been considered mystical and worthy of worship.

Stella meows, I assume she is hungry, I give her food, she sniffs it, seems unimpressed, returns to meowing.  I beg, plead, pretend to eat, anything to save me the humiliation of realizing I have wasted 79¢ at the supermarket on a can of cat food.  She leaves, triumphant and yet dissatisfied.  I leave, defeated and yet hopeful.  For when I am in another room, close enough that she knows I'm watching but far enough that she knows I can't take credit, she will eat.  She will then let out an unfathomable bellow, perhaps a lament that her meal was from a can rather than a hunt, and then slink off to pee immediately in front of her litter box.

Derrida and Logos

Wood points out that Foucault named his cat Insanity, and Derrida named his Logos, names which he takes to signify how "to experience the animal looking back at us challenges the confidence of our own gaze—we lose our unquestioned privilege in the universe."  When I go to sleep at night Stella is staring back at me.  When I wake up in the morning Stella is staring back at me.  Did she ever turn away?  Rationally I know that she must have—for how else could so much from the bedside table have ended up on the floor?—and yet at a deeper level I know that her stare persists regardless of her physical location or mine.  I am more interested in finding out what she's thinking than what any human thinks, including myself.  Dave Chappelle is likely right that to become Aquaman would mean not conversing with the undersea world so much as discovering how little they have to say.  Yet Stella always appears to be thinking, pondering, working out moves in her head, such that I know were I gain the power to converse with her, I would be the one to bore her.  So in other words, our relationship would remain unchanged.

Cats supposedly have nine lives.  I am desperate that this is true, but I am unsure if this desperation is for Stella's sake or my own.  Humans have invented many words for boredom—"anoy," "sloth," "spleen," "ennui," "Langweile"—and yet cats appear to know an existential depth to boredom that neither Sisyphus nor Heidegger could grasp.  Were cats to live nine lives it surely would have to be out of karmic retribution for some devilishness in their past.  Stella appears to both enjoy life more than I am capable of and to be world-weary to a degree that even my nihilism finds staggering.

It is certainly not the case that all philosophers live with cats, nor that all who live with cats philosophize.  But it is certainly the case that cats make us all more philosophical, and for that we should be forever thankful both for their peccadilloes and their willingness to put up with ours.