Dear Reader,
Everyone knows how to defeat a big evil system, that exploiting humanity. You need:
1) thanks to a lucky chance get a key to The Very Main Computa, and
2) hack it, granting “happiness for everybody, free”.
You don’t need anything else: you don’t need to create fair, social system as opposed to evil and unfair; you don’t need to recruit an army of supporters; you don’t need to educate masses. You simply need to force evil system to philanthropy.
…if you're interested why this way of restoration of universal justice and equality has been imposed on the masses by an advanced movie industry recently – let’s talk about it.
The inspiration behind this text was the movie “Elysium” starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, which is running in the movie theaters across the world right now.
First, synopsis. The middle of the next century. Social stratification has reached near space levels. Eco-friendly resort city in a form of a donut is orbiting the planet. Its residents are mainly busy with two things: 1) partying at the pool, regenerating in the capsules from time to time, 2) shooting down illegal immigrants who are trying to escape cruelly exploited Earth on ramshackle space pods to the space donut.
A simple worker, portrayed by Damon, receives a lethal doze of radiation. He fired, left five days to live. After installing some military gadgets a lone hero captures an exploitator he used to work on, and by lucky chance lays his hands on a key from central computer of sky-high resort city. Again he luckly gets there, and at cost of his own life reprogram the Main Computa, so all the earthlings have become the citizens of the resort city. The End.
…there’s an opinion, Dear Reader, that this kind of screenplay is not an consequence of intellectual laziness of a screenwriter and director. After all Neill Blomkamp, the screenwriter and director of “Elysium”, previously has shot a smart in social aspect “District 9", a movie about aliens living in ghetto on Earth. And he didn’t make it look like system failures could be treated with philantrophy.
But there’s a difference. “District 9” was filmed as and independent movie from South Africa, with a nothing to brag about budget by the standards of Hollywood. While “Elysium” is wholly an Hollywood movie with an Hollywood budget of 115 million dollars.
So when he have got into so called “big Hollywood movie industry”, the author automatically got into its meaning and information field with its set of axioms. So nobody forced author to shot this stupid movie. No. It’s just generally accepted way in Hollywood. It’s accepted that the hero is alone, aka a lone hero. It's accepted that evil exploiting system has a single vulnerable point, where you can pinch it and everything goes well, aka a Death Star.
So the main question here is why this is accepted in Hollywood and not something else.
I have a theory, Dear Reader.
For the most part of its history Hollywood propaganda was fighting an enemy of communist ideology, that presumably posed all the evil in the world. Since the Soviets was another planet – realism wasn’t required. An effective image of Evil Totalitarian System was in place. Well, you remember: it forces all people to wear similar gray outfit, executes people for thoughtcrimes and runs from a single center (Ira Levin was first in 1970 who thought of central supercomputer that runs it all).
This’s a basic antiutopia scenario: a lone hero, symbolizing the free world, reaches the evil totalitarian machine and turns it off – beacause a single free man is stronger that million of slaves or whatever the message. Has worked for decades.
But then the source of all the evil have ceased to exist, the authors of an “actual myth” reached an impasse, and it doesn’t seem they were able to get out of it even today. Today we have a kind system, that respects freedom, private property, encourages initative, entrepreneurship, and doesn’t force to fear similar outfit anyone. Nevertheless it absolutely inhumane bomb and exploit majority of the earthlings, while minority has become even richer and makes touristic trips into near space.
In other words the genre of antiutopia fall and stays into ideological crisis. Instead today the over-development of recently advocated by the Holywood authors freedoms has lead to the development of segregation system before our very own eyes. Since the only, not fairy-tale, alternative to it is the form of social solidarity, the chances of it getting any meaningful attention are low, even for a “liberal” Hollywood in quite “socialistic” modern America. As much chances as, say, Hollywod filming a heroic epic about young Afghan boy on revenge mission against yankee occupants, who destroyed his village, or something.
As a result for the last decade or two the genre of social-satirical antiutopia rests in an awkward position. On the one hand, it fearlessly criticizes certain shortcomings of segregation system: police state, an abyss of inequality, illusiveness of social “elevators” and other forms of injustice and inequality – without criticizing an actual system. On the other hand, it’s accepted to consider that system that has Freedom, doesn’t have an alternative. So the only thing the lone hero is allowed to do when he reaches the Main Computa – is to hack it following by free bonuses to the poor. That’s basically what hacker Neo did in “The Matrix Revolutions”, or Timberlake in “In Time”, or Damon in "Elysium". What supposed to be movies about revolts turns out to be movies about philanthropy.
As a result a blatant stupidity. The further we go, the stupidier this mockery of freedom looks like.
