DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (21)
By:
June 17, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
How could I have deferred my pleasure, suspended my enthusiasm, in subjecting myself to this glorious mess of a movie?
In 2009, Director Neill Blomkamp had shown his chops with District 9 which everybody read as a meditation and critique on anti-immigrant hatred and I took to be an apt allegory for the then only stewing anti-Mexican and anti-Latinx hatred that has taken full flower of late, during our 18th Brumaire of Trump. Somehow, I had starved my eyes of Blomkamp’s 2013 follow-up film, which literally drops us into a hellish Los Angeles of the future. I had meant to see it, made a note to see it, fully intended to see it, and then, in a flash, nada. That is a tragedy, as surely it would have loomed large in my co-authored opus with Frederick Aldama, Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen, 2019.
Elysium was anything but infernal for me in my recent viewing. And its future is not so hellish for Chicanos — if anything, it is a home of sorts, mi casa, mi barrio.
The 2154 Los Angeles conjured by Art Director Philip Ivey is all poverty, sprawl, and worker drones, patrolled by menacing android policemen. LA is the center of resistance to “Elysium,” a floating island now orbiting earth, a haven for latter-day Trumps, Musks, Bezoses, Zuckerbergs and their ilk, the one-percenters, who live not in the off-world colonies of Ridley Scott’s imagination, but just above our rotting blue orb.
The Chicanos/as/xers and other assorted Latinx miscreants in the film are rasquache rocket scientists, repurposing discarded technology to sneak folks onto the island in the sky. This sky haven though is filled with evil stepchildren from Gulliver’s Book Three, wonks and government officials, scheming how to keep the unwashed swarthy Latinxers off their pristine island, their Shangri-La, that looks like a cross between Spacelab and Beverly Hills. It’s an all-star cast with Jodie Foster playing the evil Delacourt, security chief and would-be Czar of Elysium; Matt Damon; Diego Luna (deliciously handsome); and Alice Braga (earnest Mom of a dying child seeking the magic medical powers of Elysium).
Blomkamp films hatred of the other like no other, revealing a human animal that revels in the suffering of perceived rivals, and revels more in the suffering of what we call “Los de abajo” — those from below, the working underclass of immigrants and “illegal” aliens, so needed by the ruling classes to trim their flowerbeds and wipe their decrepit asses, so loathed by the same for, if nothing else, their poverty, their language, their accent.
Allow me to close this cinematic squib with a peek at the mise-en-scène of one frame from the film:
Damon, excellent as “Max De Costa” (human now, soon to be cyborg), walks to work, harassed by working class Xicano and Latino friends with whom the amiable gringo shares close ties (especially to Diego Luna’s “Julio”). Covered in dust and dirt, with trash malingering in the background, one imagines Blomkamp’s viewers are to conceive of the arrayed detritus as dirty and unwelcoming, as when Luis Buñuel’s unhoused drunk hobos drop wine on the lace tablecloth in Viridiana, but what I see here is the joy and happiness of the working class, breaking balls, going to work, and praying that the Man, the eye in the sky, the surveillors in chief just leave us the fuck alone.
DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | Mandy Keifetz on FAITH | Heather Quinlan on THE GRATEFUL DEAD | Carlo Rotella on SMOOTHER GROOVES | Art Wallace on MICHIGAN | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on TAYLOR SWIFT | Josh Glenn on ART | James Scott Maloy on BE-BOP DELUXE | Jake Zucker on LIGHT SLEEPER | Gabriela Pedranti on THE BIG BANG THEORY | Adam McGovern on DOGS | Tana Sirois on COLLABORATIVE EVOLUTION | Rani Som on LED ZEP | Holly Interlandi on HOT SAUCE | Jeff Lewonczyk on TWIN PEAKS | Nikhil Singh on PRE-TEEN DAVID LYNCH PROBLEMS | Christopher Rashee Stevenson on O’NEILL & THE SEA | Fran Pado on SHARKS | Juan Recondo on BEN GRIMM’S INNER LIFE | Miranda Mellis on KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD | Mimi Lipson on SOBRIETY | William Nericcio on ELYSIUM | Crockett Doob on SLEATER-KINNEY | Marlon Stern Lopez on PAT THE BUNNY | Crystal Durant on SEX AND THE CITY | Wendy Chin-Tanner on MY PARENTS’ ART STORE.
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