Tag: Dystopia

‘Elysium’: A Sci-Fi Immigration Parable

Elysium Movie Poster
I was surprised that I not only liked, but was impressed by Elysium. I had my doubts because it’s a Hollywood blockbuster, and their interpretation of the tenets of sci-fi usually leaves much to be desired. Also, I just really, really don’t like Matt Damon and his…face. The film centers around a poverty-stricken dystopian Earth and the lavishly constructed off-world satellite habitat, Elysium, where only the rich and powerful are allowed to live. Elysium doesn’t do much that’s interesting with gender, but its focus on class and race relations, particularly on immigration, is the heart and soul of this film.
There are only three women of note in Elysium. Matt Damon’s character, Max, is an orphan raised in a religious orphanage. There is one nun who doesn’t see him as a hopeless trouble-maker with no hope of a future. The film implies that many impoverished children who turn to crime have little in their home lives to bolster them and give them a sense of self-worth. This nun instills in young Max a sense of purpose, insisting that he has a destiny every bit as important as anyone on Elysium. Though this nun is compassionate, she exists primarily to show why Max is at his core a good person despite the hardness of his life and in spite of his path of crime. 
Then there’s Alice Braga’s Frey, a nurse who was Max’s childhood sweetheart. Frey has “made something of herself” and has a daughter, Matilda, who is dying. Frey, too, exists only as Max’s love interest and a symbol of motherhood. Frey is constantly under threat of rape by psychotic ex-military Kruger (played by Sharlto Copley) and his men who have kidnapped her in order to force compliance from Max. The looming threat of sexual violence only exists to showcase the effect such an eventuality would have on our hero. Frey would also risk everything to get her daughter to Elysium where healing machines are readily available in every home to cure her daughter of her terminal illness. The selfless, sacrificing mother is not a new or even interesting trope in cinema.
Frey becomes increasingly distressed as her daughter slips into a coma.
Finally, we have Jodie Foster’s Delacourt, Elysium’s Secretary of Defense. Delacourt is cold and casually cruel. Her power is not only emasculating, but she is a dangerous nationalist who resorts to illegality in order to protect the purity of Elysium from “illegals” who land on the satellite’s surface in rogue shuttles before scattering in the hopes of blending with Elysium citizens or at least acquiring medical care before being deported back to Earth. Delacourt has a great deal of power that she exercises freely, and she is extremely intelligent and even brilliant in the machinations of her overblown patriotism. However, the severe, emotionless, tyrannical female power figurehead is also not a new trope, and there’s little that makes Delacourt a complex or engaging character.
Jodi Foster’s sterile white pantsuit blends with the sterile white walls of Elysium’s “Administration.”
What is interesting about Elysium, however, is its overwhelmingly non-white cast. Most of the characters are Latino or Black, and it seems the primary language on Earth is Spanish. Our Earth setting is Los Angeles. Many of these disenfranchised inhabitants of Earth (including Max) are employed in manufacturing, spending their days making the very robots that secure Elysium against them. (They were pretty fucking cool robots, though.) Aside from Matt Damon, most of the white characters are either privileged people of wealth or figures of authority who are shown in a negative light. In fact, all the white characters with speaking roles are coded as “bad guys.” The racial dynamics in this film crystallize its sci-fi allegory for immigration. 
Technological genius and champion for immigrant citizenry, Spider, proposes a dangerous job to Max and his friend Julio.
After showing the desolation of Earth and the dire, unequal plight of its inhabitants, what is the solution Elysium poses to the so-called “immigration problem”? Indiscriminate citizenry for all. The tale becomes a fantasy of upending a brutal system that favors the wealthy few over the needs of the many, of destroying a government that privileges whiteness, denying rights and quality of life from people of color. That is a powerful, subversive fantasy that strikes very close to home. That, my friends, would mean revolution.

It certainly bothers me that Hollywood thinks our hero, Max, must be a white dude in order for his story to resonate with audiences, in order to lay bare the atrocities of the U.S’s immigrant situation (with Mexico in particular) in such a way that audiences can understand it. Without completely shifting the racial dynamics, Elysium becomes a version of White Man’s Burden, assuming that audiences can’t empathize with a hero of color and cannot put themselves in the hero’s shoes unless they can racially identify with him. There are two fallacies in this notion, 1.) that the default human being is a man, and 2.) that the default human being is a white man.

Elysium orbits Earth.

I can only hope that one day, Hollywood will realize it’s wrong about its insistence on white male leads in films…and that Hollywood will actually be wrong about it.  Hey, a blockbuster that wears its immigration agenda on its sleeve is something you don’t see very often, so maybe we’re getting closer to the day when we don’t have to hide behind genre to tell a topical political tale and the day when we don’t need to have a white man tell us such an important story.

The Exploitation of Women in Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Children of Men’

Movie poster for Children of Men
I like Alfonso Cuarón’s bleak, dystopian cinematic interpretation of Children of Men (based on the PD James novel) wherein the world collapses after an infertility pandemic strikes, causing there to be no human births for over 18 years. It poses remarkable questions like, “What do we value about life?” and “What do children mean to humanity’s sense of longevity and continuity?” and “Does the future exist if humans won’t be around for it?” Though this film appeals to my sci-fi post-apocalyptic proclivities, its treatment of women, children, and reproduction leaves much to be desired.

Children of Men immediately draws critical attention to this futuristic declining world’s tendency to turn women and children into symbols. The opening scene shows droves of people mourning the death of the youngest person in much the same way that celebrity deaths are mourned, setting up the 18-year-old man as a symbol of youth and a reminder of humanity’s impending extinction. The activist immigrant rights group, the Fishes, sees young pregnant Kee (portrayed by Clare-Hope Ashitey) as a symbol. She is not only a West African immigrant, but also the only woman to become pregnant in 18 years. She is a symbol of the humanity of immigrants, the salvation of the human race itself, and of a coming revolution. It is also made clear that women are forced to submit to fertility tests or face imprisonment, rendering these survivors little more than failed symbols of reproduction and shamed symbols of infertility. Though the film overtly critiques this desire to turn human beings into symbols, it indulges in it quite a bit.

The scene in the abandoned school is pregnant (pun intended) with symbolism.

“As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in.” – Miriam

As the young Kee sits alone on a rickety swing set, the camera pans the dilapidated building and Miriam recounts her experiences as a medical midwife at the beginning of the pandemic. The scene mourns imaginary children who never existed along with an imaginary future that proves likewise illusory. The empty school reinforces the crushing absence of children, which in turn represents the absence of a future.

The film apparently resists turning pregnant Kee into a symbol by showing that the only sane response to her pregnancy is that of Theo’s overwhelming desire to get her to a doctor so that she can receive necessary medical attention. However, when Kee reveals the fullness of her pregnant stomach to Theo, it is nothing but indulgent symbolism. She takes her shirt off in the middle of a barn full of cows, her posture of one hand covering her breasts and the other cupping her belly simultaneously one of modesty and fecundity. 

Kee is dehumanized and symbolized

This image of the pregnant black woman amongst livestock paired with the swelling music that evokes apotheosis is particularly offensive to me. Her humanity is transcended into grotesque female-coded symbols like earth, goddess, fertility, and nature. Her blackness is racistly used to reinforce the nature symbolism as well as the birth and beginning of mankind. The deliberateness of these symbols is even more apparent when the original PD James text The Children of Men is considered in which Julian (played by middle-aged white Julianne Moore) was the character with the mystical pregnancy. Though it is impossible to not read some symbolism into Kee’s pregnancy, her “revelation” scene is exploitative and is done dramatically and specifically to benefit the male viewer in the form of Theo.

Which leads us to the next issue I had with Children of Men: Most of the female characters are peripheral or marginalized. The midwife Miriam is portrayed as a religious nutcase who does some kind of spiritual Tai Chi, chants over Kee’s pregnant belly instead of using the hard science she learned in medical school, and believes in UFOs. Janice, the wife of Jasper (played by Michael Caine) is catatonic. Marichka is a Romanian woman who doesn’t speak English, babbles a lot, and has a bizarre relationship with her dog.

The unsavory Marichka driving Theo & Kee to a filthy room for the night

Julian, though a strong woman, is too often shown from Theo’s perspective as the beautiful, unattainable bitter ex-wife and forever mourning ex-mother. Not only that, but she dies suddenly very early on in the film. Her death itself is the most important thing about her because it’s an inside job, showing that the so-called immigrant rights activist group has questionable morality and can be trusted no more than the oppressive government regime. Therefore, Julian’s death is highly symbolic and paradigm shifting.

The Fishes scorn Julian’s non-violent methodology and murder her in order to exploit Kee’s baby as a symbol for revolution.

Not only were there few representations of non-symbolic women, but the entire film, a film about fertility, motherhood, and childbirth, is told from the perspective of a man. The most flagrant example of a marginalized female character is Kee. She is a child herself with no true agency, who knows nothing of pregnancy and motherhood, who must rely on the experience and protection of Theo. Kee’s lack of agency and complete reliance on Theo set up yet another patriarchal iteration of genesis wherein the rebirth of the human race isn’t due to Kee and her baby girl, Dylan; it’s due to the perseverance of a lone man whose ideals may be jaded, but he feels compelled to “do the right thing”  no matter what noble sacrifices it might require.

Theo sacrifices his own life to protect Kee and her baby, ensuring they make it to safety first

Not only is Theo the martyr and savior of this film, but he knows more about motherhood than Kee does. He delivers the baby, coaching Kee on how to breathe and push, motivating her when she is overcome. He then delivers Kee and her baby to the so-called safety of The Human Project (a secretive group purporting to be searching for an infertility cure). 

I ask you, why is this story told from Theo’s perspective? Why isn’t Kee our heroine? She’s the one with messianic qualities and an epic quest who undergoes a mystical pregnancy, sneaks her way out of West Africa only to become a hunted “fugee” in Britain, before traversing war-torn areas only to give birth in a filthy flophouse before escaping via rowboat to the elusive, mythical Human Project. Why is her tale told once removed in the form of Theo? Her femaleness along with her Otherness as a black woman and her status (in our current day culture) as a pregnant woman apparently give Cuarón license to strip her of real humanity and complexity. Her lack of agency in her own story and the way that she’s relegated to supporting-character land make it easy to inscribe meaning upon her, to turn her into a symbol in a way that Theo and his friend Jasper aren’t really because they’re men…children of men. 
Kee’s pregnant body is turned into an icon.
In the novel version, it is the male sperm that becomes nonviable, causing the infertility pandemic. In the movie version, it’s the women who are suddenly infertile after repeated miscarriages. This puts the blame on women for the pandemic while identifying men (i.e. Theo) as the solution to the problem. It even makes me wonder if the way that the film depicts infertility as full of despair (as if civilization must collapse if we can’t make babies) is some sort of derailment of a masculine ideal, wherein reproduction and the passing on of one’s genes is a vital component of manhood. Yes, it would suck if humanity’s extinction was imminent, but the implosion of cultures and societies does not necessarily logically follow. Even now, we destroy our environment and use up our resources at an unsustainable rate, and first world countries do not fail because of it. The slow march toward extinction is one we’re increasingly familiar with as war over oil spreads across the globe and our climate Hades-heats up.  

Children of Men‘s depiction of women as props, tools, symbols, or cardboard underscores the notion that women’s true purpose is reproduction, and when women can’t reproduce, they’re not only useless, but society itself collapses under the burden of their neglect of duty. Despite many of the intriguing themes this film explores (including a scathing denouncement of the treatment of immigrants), Children of Men ends up falling in line with its mainstream contemporaries to assert that women are merely bodies, that a woman’s value lies in her ability to reproduce, and that she has and should have no control over that body or that ability to reproduce.

The Women of The Walking Dead: A Comparative Analysis of the Comic vs. TV

Written by Amanda Rodriguez
*Spoiler Alert*

If you’re at all like me, you’re constantly frustrated by the characterizations of the women of The Walking Dead AMC series, their choices, and their actions. The show has received significant criticism for its paternalistic attitude, its throwback gender roles, and its lack of strong, capable female characters. Though the current season (Season 3) has made some positive changes with the greater development of Maggie, Andrea, and Carol as well as the addition of the samurai sword-wielding Michonne, a lot is left to be desired. As a huge fan of the sometimes flawed, but overall intelligent and compelling graphic novel series by Robert Kirkman, I feel it is my duty to show you what you’re missing. Through a comparison of the women of The Walking Dead comic and TV series, it’ll become clear that the negative and weak representations of women are conscious, deliberate choices that the writers of the show have made in a departure from the original source material of the comic series.
Let’s start with Lori Grimes, the pregnant wife of Rick and mother of Carl who dies in childbirth in Season 3 of the TV series.
Yes, TV Lori does a lot of laundry & traditional “woman’s work.”
Lori has an affair with Shane, Rick’s best friend, when she’s under the impression Rick died during the zombie outbreak. Interestingly enough, the TV Lori is given far more reason to believe Rick is dead because Shane lies to her, telling her he saw Rick die. In the comic, she, like most people, can’t realistically hope that loved ones survived the outbreak, especially because Rick was comatose in a hospital. Despite the fact that she is given ample validation for seeking comfort in the arms of a long loved and trusted friend, TV Lori is consistently villainized. Her character is unlikeable, weak-willed, flighty, and she refuses to take a stance on important issues for her group, then blames others when things don’t work out. In fact, she Lady Macbeths (that’s a verb now) Rick and Shane into fighting over her to the death. Shane dies very early on in the comic series, and his beef with Rick is only partially his rabid love of Lori (the rest being their fundamental disagreement concerning how best to protect the group as well as Shane’s growing mental unbalance). 
Together, comic Lori & Rick look adoringly upon their new baby
Though Lori wasn’t my favorite character in the comics, we empathize with her affair, and her bond with Rick is cemented and deepened when they choose together to raise the baby she’s carrying as their own, regardless of its parentage. Her TV pregnancy and resulting death in childbirth are punishment for her affair and for the continued implication that she’s a bad mother to Carl. It seems the writers believed that the only way for Rick and the viewers to forgive Lori was to have her die in unspeakable pain; she is given a C-section with a dirty pocket knife and no anesthetic in a dingy basement. The only way for her to redeem herself, they seemed to think, was for her to selflessly sacrifice her life for that of her infant. In the comic, Lori lives through childbirth along with the infant, Judith, and they die together during an attack upon the prison that proves to be a bloodbath. Comic Lori’s death is shocking and tragic, revealing to the readers that no one is safe in the most visceral way imaginable. Her death in its chaotic meaninglessness becomes the most meaningful death in the entire series thus far.

Then there’s the badass Michonne who is deadly with a katana blade and makes her first appearance during the season finale of the TV show’s second season.

Both Michonnes are gallows serious & stone-cold warriors

Luckily, there’s not too terribly much different between the comic and TV Michonne characters…yet. TV’s Michonne is even more laconic and untrusting than her comic counterpart, though. Comic Michonne is obviously intelligent and admits to being a lawyer before the outbreak. She also suffers from some schizophrenic tendencies as a result of enduring the harsh road alone for so long (she hears the voice of and talks to her dead boyfriend). Unlike her TV version, comic Michonne knows she needs Rick’s group to keep her sane and to fight back those symptoms of mental instability she experiences early on. Her fierce independence is tempered then by a knowledge that working together with a group is the only way to survive and thrive. I’m seeing tendencies, however, in her TV version toward an almost debilitating anti-authoritarianism and a propensity to go rogue. This is evinced by her inability to “play nice” with the Governor even just to find out answers as well as her separating from the Rick group during their raid on Woodbury in order to exact her personal revenge. Her behavior makes Rick eager to send her packing, unlike in the comic where she is one of the most valued members of the group upon whom Rick relies always.

So, so much badassery

Her introduction to the Rick group on the TV show is problematic in the way that it diverges from her comic introduction. TV Michonne shows up at the prison badly injured, falling unconscious from her wounds after an impressive display of her skill at dispatching walkers. As the remaining walkers descend upon her inert form, the Rick group rushes to save her and treat her wounds. When she regains consciousness, she growls to Rick, “I didn’t ask for your help,” which is, of course, ridiculous because we all know she would have died without it; this is more of that display of self-destructive anti-authoritarianism. In the comic, she rescues Otis (yup, he’s still alive at the prison) from a zombie horde. Otis vouches for her, which gains her entry into the prison and the basic trust of the group. Instead of joining the group as a valued, proven member as she did in the comic, TV Michonne remains of questionable trustworthiness and is immediately indebted to Rick, his rescue of her a display of innate dominance. Even the fact that she rescued and cared for Andrea for months in the series becomes a strange downplay of her comic rescue of a male member of the group, as if the life of Andrea, a woman, isn’t as worthy as the life of Otis, a man.

Finally, we have Andrea. Tsk. Tsk. Andrea, Andrea, Andrea. Sigh.

I promise you’re missing so much Andrea awesome if you don’t read the comic

The paths of TV and comic Andrea are unrecognizably dissimilar, and her character, more than any other, proves that the TV writers cannot bring themselves to fully empower a female character. TV Andrea claims to be a good shot, but we have no evidence of it…other than her shooting Daryl instead of a walker. She is suicidal for quite some time, randomly sleeps with Shane, and ends up being sheltered and protected by Michonne for months as she recovers from sickness. Not only that, but she ends up ignoring Michonne’s warnings about Woodbury and having an affair with the psychotic Governor. In the most recent episode “The Suicide King,” the Governor’s unjustifiably erratic and cruel behavior becomes obvious even to Andrea (pitting brothers against each other in a fight to the death, admitting that he held Glen and Maggie without telling Andrea, and refusing to provide much needed leadership to the community he built). Andrea says to him, “Don’t push me away. Not now.” With my eyebrows climbing all the way to my occipital lobe, all I could think was, “Girl, why aren’t you running for the hills?!” TV Andrea lacks self-esteem and is consistently making bad choices with regards to men as well as her own safety. She takes orders from the Governor even though she knows better and can’t seem to realize, despite a plethora of evidence, that the Governor is simply bad news bears.

Now comic Andrea’s badassery rivals that of Michonne.

Blam, Blam, Blam is right
Between comic Glen and Andrea, I’m not sure which of them is the MVP of the group, both having a skillset that would be really difficult to train into a replacement. Glen’s ability to hide, scavenge, and stealth his way past walkers may actually be trumped by Andrea’s uncanny sharpshooting talents. She saves the group on countless occasions, and she’s the real reason why the body count after the prison raid wasn’t 100%, as she stood up in the guard tower picking off attackers like they were soda cans at a carnival. The scar across her freckled face is a manifestation of the toughness and survival instinct that defines her character. Not only that, but she does not have an affair with the repugnant Governor; her romantic relationship is with a much more likeable comic Dale. The two form a unique and lasting bond that brings them both solace amidst unspeakable loss and terror. They are together until Dale dies.

Comic Andrea is always an asset and never a liability to the group. Her stalwart character is too robust, too invaluable for the TV writers to translate to the screen, so they undercut her at every opportunity in a blatant attempt to make her weak, dense, and unlikeable to the audience. Both Michonne and Lori suffer similar fates in that many of their finer qualities of strength, perseverance, and cooperation are lost in translation. It’s hard to see these changes as anything less than the creators of AMC’s The Walking Dead being threatened by or at least incredulous at the prospect of powerful female characters. For any of you who think they make these changes for the sake of drama, I’ll tell you a little anecdote. I once had a friend who said, “I want to watch a horror movie where the characters do all the right things; they’re smart and skilled, and shit still goes sideways.” For the most part, that is the case with the graphic novel series. It’s a page-turner, a gut-wrencher, a heartbreaker, and without fail all the characters are more well-rounded, empathetic, and ass-kicking than their TV counterparts. The drama is in those pages, along with plenty of strong women. I hate to say this, but the writers need to STOP being “creative” and stick to the complex, morally fascinating dystopian story that inspired the series.