The problem with dystopias is that they’re often way too optimistic. Either what they warn us against is already happening, or the future they had envisioned turns out to be better than the actual one. To take a striking example, the kind of corporate fascism to be found in Robocop‘s Detroit is unquestionably more appealing than the Haiti-like heap of rubble and crime-ridden cesspool the “Paris of the West” has become.
Elysium is set in 2154, and we’re supposed to imagine what Los Angeles would look like “if current trends are not reversed.” Well, if the ongoing demographic overrun afflicting the West is not stopped, I wonder how there could still be factories producing droid robots. For that to happen, it would require a sufficient number of skilled researchers, engineers, technicians that will likely be gone in mid-22nd century Mexifornia. And given the imminence of this future, I don’t think they’ll have enough time to shut themselves in a space station, chiefly since space exploration has been sacrificed on the altar of racial inclusiveness. Today, the main use of American and European space rockets is to shoot satellites to outer space so that anyone can send that video of a dog peeing on a baby via their “smart”phone. Terraforming Mars or Venus is not a priority.
This was the main trouble with the movie Idiocracy. Because of centuries of dysgenics, the population has become so dumb that the hero’s lawyer attacks his own client during his Kafkaian trial, but there are still first-class medical facilities and fine cars.
As “nightmarish” as Elysium‘s L.A. seems to Dr. Kevin MacDonald, who is a direct observer of the city, it is what it would look like if things go well. And why should we wait a century and a half to see what will directly result from the coming amnesty?
The war within the liberal mind
This criticism aside, I really enjoyed Elysium and I wouldn’t follow Matthew Heimbach in saying that the movie is “anti-White.” I think there’s more to this movie than just open-border, pro-amnesty propaganda. It’s more accurate to characterize it as a war within the liberal mind, similar to what Richard had noted when commenting on World War Z.
A superficial analysis would lead to the conclusion that Elysium tells the story of a Rainbow Democratic coalition claiming its “right” to benefit from Elysium’s delights (healthcare mostly, which rings a bell, three years after the Obamacare bill), reserved so far to an overwhelmingly White, fascistic elite ruling the space station. I would argue exactly the reverse, that if liberalism is anywhere in this movie, it’s aboard Elysium itself.
Much like in Star Trek, the station is ruled by an androgynic, PC learned assembly. The president is an effeminate, racially undetermined progressive who doesn’t want to be too hard on the spaceships full of illegal immigrants that try to storm Elysium, just like today’s European politicians refuse to wreck the boats reaching Lampedusa every day.
Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster), though being a Frenchwoman, is the Secretary of Defense of what thus looks like a “Bilderberger” or Trilateral government. No one is forced to take “conspiracy theorists” seriously, but the fact that Elysium’s structure is a circled pentagram often shown inverted on the screen is certainly no coincidence. As for Elysium’s public buildings, they remind one of the ones in Metropolis or Hunger Games, the latter being troublingly similar to those of Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana.
Delacourt faces the usual liberal dilemma: she must resort to fascistic methods (coup d’État, hired killers) to preserve her progressive utopia. Elysium‘s director, Neill Blomkamp, belonging to the Afrikaner people, a progressive nation if there ever was one, it’s not too hard to see why this moral dilemma is at the heart of the movie. The name Delacourt is maybe a reference to South Africa’s French Huguenot co-founders. This character echoes more recent figures from a country ethnically related to the Boer people, and it is the Netherlands, with Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh and Geert Wilders who can best be defined as worried liberals. Further North, there is Norway’s Breivik.
Boring as Paradise
Elysium is a liberal wet dream: people are “nice,” they spend their days having lavish cocktail-parties along their lagoon-like swimming pools. Their suburban homes are reminiscent of the dying world we witness in American Beauty, with those ubiquitous white-picket fenced houses inhabited by Last Men hardly hiding their unspeakable boredom. If the Elysian life reminds you of some articles or speeches by paleocons and even White nationalists who “just want to be left alone,” it’s normal: conservatives are mainly outmoded liberals, waving a crippled fist at a world they no longer understand.
The problem being, of course, that you can’t preserve a White country when you transform a race of conquerors, creators, builders and navigators in a herd of sheep. Much like zoo lions and tigers, Westerners don’t procreate and die out since the only highlight of the week is to wait for their Friday BBQ with their drone-minded neighbors.
Elysium’s final invasion by third world hordes saddened me, as predictable as it was, but I couldn’t help thinking that it was inevitable. When Whites spend too much time in their comfort zone, their suicidal liberal policies are little more than a waking up from the dream they were stuck in. Elysium is a new Eden, and that’s why it looks so boring.
History implies pain, misery and suffering, but it’s also what it takes to feel really alive.
Outsourcing rebellion to the Third World
In comparison, what’s left of the Earth strikes me as particularly non-liberal. Men are masculine, women, though not very good-looking, are feminine, manly virtues are necessary to survive the day-to-day violence, and though the general population has little conception of honor, there’s still a warrior ethos embodied by some characters.
The “White Hispanic” character played by Matt Damon, Max da Costa (which sounds more Portuguese/Brazilian than Hispanic to me, by the way), for all his flaws, has renounced crime not out of fear like Zarathustra’s “honest” citizens, but out of choice.
To storm Elysium, Da Costa has to become the 22nd-century equivalent of a Medieval Knight by undergoing a surgical transformation into a droid. Dialectically, his main opponent, Kruger, who is Delacourt’s mercenary, has to follow the same process. To overcome the challenge imposed by the Machine, Man has to become a Machine himself, a dialectic process present in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as in the recent low-brow Pacific Rim, where brain-controlled robots bash giant lizards.
In his review of Elysium, Gregory Hood laments that Blomkamp, though conscious of the fact that a non-White take-over of Elysium will mean that the station will know the same fate as Los Angeles, offers no solution. Mr. Hood knows Hollywood too well to ignore that even if Blomkamp is a closet right-winger as Steve Sailer (who is captivating when he’s not sliding on the bell curve) thinks he is, he can’t release a film in which Delacourt is victorious and the Latina Frey can’t heal her daughter’s leukemia.
In a movie Hood’s become a specialist of, The Dark Knight Rises, we see the Wayne mansion turned into an orphanage for non-White children, something that is probably not to the taste of the elitist Christopher Nolan (whose right-wing leanings are more obvious than Blomkamp’s, despite the parallel that Sailer tried to draw in his review). We also see that Bruce Wayne has become a tourist, content with drinking chianti along the Arno river in the company of a woman who betrayed him quite a few times. That is mildly infuriating, but it’s the only way to have Hollywood display an un-PC message.
In Elysium, we have this vibrant coalition of non-liberal Mestizos and Blacks which defeats a liberal, White elite with token minorities, but we might as well reverse the roles in our heart of hearts and imagine a White coalition storming a White gated community to force its inhabitants to stop fleeing and thus letting their common enemies turn the West into hell on Earth. In what I see as an allegory of White flight, Elysium reminds us that there’ll be no victory for Westerners if they keep believing that shutting themselves in behind CCTV, armored doors, intercoms, code-encrypted gates and other reality-denying devices will suffice to save their and their children’s lives.
It should also warn White nationalists that if an Ethnostate or a collection thereof were to be established some day, it shouldn’t be about “going back” to some reconstructed version of “liberalism when it worked,” for the outcome will always be that of the film.
