WE watch movies all the time. Today’s technology enables some people to enjoy the products of major motion picture studios and independent film makers in their homes and vehicles whenever they desire. These films are important because they shape our understanding of history and contemporary social issues, including the nature of social inequality. Perhaps it’s an inevitable consequence of living in a country which has the most unequal societies in the world that I find stories of inequality so compelling. One of South Africa’s biggest creative exports, film director Neill Blomkamp is steadily building an impressive career out of telling stories of inequality, no doubt greatly influenced by his South African background. Blomkamp may dress up his tales of inequality in the garb of a multi-million dollar action movie but there’s no mistaking the social critique under all of that CGI.
Blomkamp’s 2009 indie film District 9 didn’t explicitly present itself as an apartheid allegory, though its title does evoke the forced District Six removals that took place under apartheid and the film’s wikipedia page cites District Six as an influence. Post-apartheid is a more readily identifiable inspiration in the film as the viewer is bombarded by series of distressing images of cruelty, violence, destitution and filth that many South Africans are all to familiar with. The slums inhabited by the film’s maligned alien ‘prawn’ community (who we understand to be stand-ins for the marginalised poor in post-apartheid SA) are more-or-less accurate reflections of the conditions in our informal settlements which are home to more than a million South Africans, something that’s remained virtually unchanged since 1994, despite government’s claim to have provided three million homes during that period.
Although Blomkamp’s latest film (which is yet to be released in SA) is being marketed as a Hollywood blockbuster, it seems to share a thematic affinity with the director’s break-out hit. A parable of a society radically divided along class lines, Elysium tackles the same socio-economic/socio-political ideas on a grander, more globalised scale. Taking its cue from the worldwide trend of the widening inequality gap, the Elysium trailer depicts a crime-infested and pollution-choked Earth comprised of the poor “99%” separated by altitude from the filthy rich “1%” who live in a healthy orbital space paradise. It’s District 9 for the Occupy set. The film seems to depict class-warfare taken to the extreme, and it will be interesting to see whether its ostensible social commentary holds up to scrutiny or if it falls flat under the weight of all those Hollywood millions.
