Close Textual analysis of a scene from Elysium

The same establishing shot used to display the carnage of Earth was also used to flaunt the glamour of the space shuttle of Elysium. This is interesting because it accentuates the contrast between the two settings. The resounding contrast in colour between both places also establish contrast between lavish and decaying. On the ravaged earth there is the prominent use of the colour brown. This choice of colour implies that there is famine thus implying poverty. On the contrary, the space shuttle, Elysium, is in abundance of crops with the dominant colour of blue and green. This use of primary colours represents a purity as well as a sense of wholesomeness which. On earth, the overcrowding is very evident as seen with the people living off the sides of the skyscrapers therefore accentuating this sense of poverty. With the use of the long shot, the buildings are made parallel with a decaying plant. This is done through the buildings having rubble stemming from the sides as well as the prominent use of colour black. The slow pace editing allows the audience to bask and to internalise the extremity of the contrast between the two settings. The use of positional communication further outlines the contrast between earth and Elysium. Elysium is placed above earth, looking down on earth thus creating heavenly as well as religious connotations. It creates the sense that the space shuttle is like heaven and for beings that are celestial and are holy. The fact that such a heavy contrast created right from the offset of the film, it instantly creates a binary opposition. This therefore acts as an enigma code for audiences as questions are raised as how earth has got into such a state. The establishing shot of the space station, makes it clear from the get go that this film belongs to the science fiction genre because the futuristic feel as well as the very typical setting of space in the science fiction genre. 

Through this contrast, it exposes the inequalities of wealth. This is created through the massive contrast in wealth; being extreme poverty to excessive wealth. Additionally, this opening sequence acts as social commentary. This is because in modern day society, social inequalities is becoming more and more evident, this supported by the rise in the pay gap. 



    

When both the protagonist and his helper infiltrate the space shuttle's main system room the choice of the colour white for all the appliances in the room shows how the space shuttle is for the pure and the holy because the colour has implications of purity. Also, the use of editing to create the slow motion of the special forces team trying prevent the coup, enhances the climax that is happening because it makes the whole situation more significant. This use of slow motion coupled with the opera music playing in the back accentuates the climax but also this use of parallel it makes the protagonist's sacrifice more moving and sentimental. Additionally, slow motion is used at the end when Max slowly dies. This intensifies the feeling of sorrow and emotion that the audience would feel towards Max's death because the audience are left slowly watching Max's death.   Moments before Max sacrifices himself for the sake of equality, he looks out the window to see Earth. This point of view shot of Max looking over the earth makes his sacrifice synonymous with the crucifixion of Jesus. This is because Max died for the sake of the Earth, just like Jesus this use of internationality further makes Max's sacrifice moving. The flash backs into the beginning of the film, to when he was a child creates a sense that death is near because it shows how he is looking over his life which therefore makes the ending much more climatic as well as emotional.       

Notes

Bill Thompson- What has the internet ever done for me?

1st Jauary 1983-Birth of the internet
Internet-Connects networks together
Freedom of speach, expression with a single connection
Why we use the internet: Connection
Information
Creates voices in your head . Engaging with others, Recreation of reality
Political Action
Campaigning
Fanancial Reward
Games
Learning
Friendship

Downsides: Bullying
Unwanted pron
Images of sexual abuse
Extremeism
Abuse
Scams + Rip offs
Frauds
Conspiracy Theory
The Dark Net

Open to diverse culture = expression and a social equality
The Internet=caused piracy and decline in music industry

Media, Publics, Protest, Power = Natelie Fenton 

Power Over: Media content
Audience
Journalists
Governments

Power to: Censor
Mislead
Set the agenda

Media+democracy: Healthy media=Blood of democracy
Explosion of mobile and internet news
Faster and faster but business' struggling to keep up
Copy and paste journalism effects plurality and diversity
Internet empowers audience: Able to create
Able to define world

The politcal elite court the media elites
Distortion of democracy caused with masive media institutions

UK: 3 Companies control 71% of new circulation

Is the media all powerful?
Journalism that holds power to account?
News enhances democracy?
What doesn't appear in the media, whats absent?

Notes and quotes doc.

http://revisionworld.com/a2-level-level-revision/sociology/mass-media-0/age-social-class-ethnicity-gender-sexuality-disability:

Representations of the upper class and wealth

Neo-Marxists argue that mass media representations of social class tend to celebrate hierarchy and wealth. Those who benefit from these processes, i.e. the monarchy, the upper class and the very wealthy, generally receive a positive press as celebrities who are somehow deserving of their position. The British mass media hardly ever portray the upper classes in a critical light, nor do they often draw any serious attention to inequalities in wealth and pay or the overrepresentation of public-school products in positions of power.

Newman (2006) argues that the media focus very positively on the concerns of the wealthy and the privileged. He notes that the media over-focuses on consumer items such as luxury cars, costly holiday spots and fashion accessories that only the wealthy can afford. He also notes the enormous amount of print and broadcast media dedicated to daily business news and stock market quotations, despite the fact that few people in Britain own stocks and shares. 

Representations of the middle classes
Four broad sociological observations can be made with regard to mass media
representations of the middle classes.

·         The middle class are over-represented on TV dramas and situation comedies.

·         Part of the British newspaper market is specifically aimed at the middle classes and their consumption, tastes and interests, e.g. the Daily Mail.

·         The content of newspapers such as the Daily Mail suggests that journalists believe that the middle classes of middle England are generally anxious about the decline of moral standards in society and that they are proud of their British identity and heritage. It is assumed that their readership feels threatened by alien influences such as the Euro, asylum seekers and terrorism. Consequently, newspapers, such as the Daily Mail, often crusade on behalf of the middle classes and initiate moral panics on issues such as video nasties, paedophilia and asylum seekers.

·         Most of the creative personnel in the media are themselves middle class. In news and current affairs, the middle classes dominate positions of authority – the ‘expert’ is invariably middle class.

Representations of the working class
Newman argues that when news organisations focus on the working class, it is generally to label them as a problem, e.g. as welfare cheats, drug addicts or criminals. Working class groups, e.g. youth sub-cultures such as mods or skinheads, are often the subject of moral panics, whilst reporting of issues such as poverty, unemployment or single-parent families often suggests that personal inadequacy is the main cause of these social problems, rather than government policies or poor business practices. Studies of industrial relations reporting by the Glasgow University Media Group suggest that the media portray ‘unreasonable’ workers as making trouble for ‘reasonable’ employers.

Curran and Seaton (2003) note that newspapers aimed at working class audiences assume that they are uninterested in serious analysis of either the political or social organisation of British society. Political debate is often reduced simplistically to conflict between personalities. The content of newspapers such as The Sun and the Daily Star assumes that such audiences want to read about celebrity gossip and lifestyles, trivial human interest stories and sport.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32824770

The gap between the rich and the poor keeps widening, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says.
'The OECD warns that such inequality is a threat to economic growth.'


http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/17/elysium-neill-bloomkamp-interview -

'The only way things will change is if we're smart enough to develop technology that can think us out of this, meaning augmenting ourselves genetically to be smart enough to change shit'

 ‘Earth is a giant slum, a totalitarian nightmare in which citizens live like rats with Elysium glowing above them, like "Bel Air in space," says Blomkamp.’

‘Elysium may be set in the future, but it's merely an amplification of an age-old problem. "The issues raised by Elysium have been in existence as long as homo sapiens,"

‘We have biological systems built into us that were very advantageous for us, up until we became a functioning civilisation 10,000 years ago. We are literally genetically coded to preserve life, procreate and get food – and that's not gonna change. The question is whether you can somehow overpower certain parts of that mammalian DNA and try to give some of your money out, try to take your wealth and pour it out for the rest of the planet."

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/apr/03/class-britain-defining-social-status-

 'The way that someone interprets their own place in British society can affect self-esteem, ambition and achievement.'

‘The Great British Class Survey results published by the BBC today claims to brush away the traditional upper, middle and working class categorisation and, based on the responses of over 161,000 people’

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/30/class-war-is-back-again -

'Social mobility is still very much alive: it’s just that it’s now going mostly in the wrong direction'

 “class relates to the way in which people make their living in the labour market, and status relates more to the way they then spend those earnings, their patterns of consumption and their lifestyle and social intimates.”

‘Over the last century we have seen a continual weakening in status distinctions’

 The Labour MP Emily Thornberry’s tweet. On the surface, it was simply a photograph of a house and a van with a factual caption: “Image from #Rochester.” But in matters of class, especially in England, it’s what under the surface that really counts. The St George’s cross and white van are symbols of a certain kind of England that is held in suspicion, if not contempt, by metropolitan opinion. To some, they evoke a belligerent nationalism and an aggressive maleness. There may be legitimate political or ideological reasons for this unease but it’s hard to disconnect them from a fear, or horror, of the white working class.

“Status still matters,” says Goldthorpe. “The difference now is that when people who see themselves being of higher status adopt derogatory positions, there is a sharp response.”

The return of class, says Goldthorpe, has not come clothed in old Marxist fashions. Instead he notes that both in Britain and in several other countries in Europe “it’s the growth of what one might call rightwing popularism that attracts significant working-class support”.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/sep/03/social-class-achievement-school

‘social class is more likely to determine how well a pupil will perform if that child is white than if they are from other ethnic groups.’

‘cultural aspirations and expectations, as well as parental support for education. This appears to have been the case for Indian and Chinese pupils for many years’

‘They also discovered that African and Bangladeshi girls had vastly improved their GCSE grades in the last few years.’

‘Poverty affects grades less among non-white children with social divide noticeable from primary school’

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/26/britain-stop-obsession-social-class

‘You can tell a lot about a country’s neuroses by what’s on its television sets... Britain’s TV schedules, by contrast, are completely steeped in class, and have long been so. From laughing at poor people on Benefits Street to laughing at rich people in You Can’t Get the Staff, this is how Britain likes to unwind in the evening: by sneering at other classes, and sneering at people for sneering about class.’

‘All countries are interested in status – in the US this is usually expressed by a fascination with money and, increasingly, fame. But only in Britain is there this kind of paralysing myopia where a person is defined eternally by where their parents sent them to school, where snobbery and inverse snobbery clash with equal force and explode into a fiery ball of angry arguments involving such seemingly random – but actually deeply significant – things like grammar schools and John Lewis.’

‘Perhaps Britain’s class obsession is a way of consoling itself that old rules still exist, even if the empire doesn’t.’

‘You guys can barely hang on to Scotland – no wonder you try to distract yourselves by talking obsessively about schools and cutlery.’

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/16/karl-marx-ideas-resonate-today

Elite Theory

The theory posits that a small minority, consisting of members of the economic elite and policy-planning networks, holds the most power and that this power is independent of a state's democratic elections process.

The aristocratic version of this theory is the classical elite theory which is based on two ideas:

1.     Power lies in position of authority in key economic and political institutions.

2.     The psychological difference that sets elites apart is that they have personal resources, for instance intelligence and skills, and a vested interest in the government; while the rest are incompetent and do not have the capabilities of governing themselves, the elite are resourceful and will strive to make the government work. For in reality, the elite have the most to lose in a failed government.

Mosca emphasized the sociological and personal characteristics of elites. He said elites are an organized minority and that the masses are an unorganized majority. The ruling class is composed of the ruling elite and the sub-elites. He divides the world into two groups:

1.     Ruling class

2.     Class that is ruled

Mosca asserts that elites have intellectual, moral, and material superiority that is highly esteemed and influential.

Marx

According to philosopher Karl Marx, "class" is determined entirely by one's relationship to the means of production, the classes in modern capitalist society being the "proletarians": those who work but do not own the means of production, the "bourgeoisie": those who invest and live off of the surplus generated by the former, and the aristocracy that has land as a means of production. Class consciousness is not simply an awareness of one's own class interest but is also a set of shared views regarding how society should be organized legally, culturally, socially and politically. These class relations are reproduced through time.

http://juni.osfc.ac.uk/Aim_Higher/Media/class.asp

"The media tend to reinforce the popular prejudice"

"The lives of royalty and the jet setting lifestyle of the rich are portrayed as a glamorous world we can only dream about" This idea of audience dreaming is lined with the genre of science fiction.” 

Google Book: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy- Joseph A. Schumpeter 

"We have thus, fundamentally, two and only two classes, those owners, the capitalists, and those have-nots who are compelled to sell their labour, the labouring class or the proletariat."

"Marx defies capitalism sociologically by the institution of private control over means of production"

http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/class-in-contemporary-britain-/?isb=9780230238664

"Britain is one of the most unequal countries in the western world: the richest one per cent own a vast proportion of the wealth" 

http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Romantic-Comedy-Yugoslavia/Science-Fiction-SOCIAL-CRITIQUE.html

“Though some 1950s films contained anti-war messages, science fiction turned much more sharply to the left in the 1960s and 1970s, addressing issues such as corporate corruption, government duplicity, and ecological destruction.”

“The film portraying the greatest ecological disaster is surely Soylent Green , in which the greenhouse effect has made Earth into an inferno and overpopulation is extreme.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction_film#Genre_as_commentary_on_social_issues

“The science fiction film genre has long served as a useful vehicle for "safely" discussing controversial topical issues and often providing thoughtful social commentary on potential unforeseen future issues.”

“Most controversial issues in science fiction films tend to fall into two general story lines, Utopian or dystopian. Either a society will become better or worse in the future. Because of controversy, most science fiction films will fall into the dystopian film category rather than the Utopian category.”

“In the 1970s, science fiction films also became an effective way of satirizing contemporary social mores”

“More recently, the headlines surrounding events such as the Iraq War, international terrorism, the avian influenza scare, and United States anti-immigration laws have found their way into the consciousness of contemporary filmmakers.”

Black Space Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film By Adilifu Nama 2008 

http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/namblk

“the genre offers the audience the opportunity to vicariously experience a world without many of the challenges a society presently faces and, in doing so, to contemplate ramifications of and potential responses to an urgent social problem and present a hypothesized outcome or solution.”

“Science fiction films, with their fantastical plots and far-off worlds, have the luxury to create any kind of character, social system, and world within the confines of their narratives.”

“common sense tells us that biological traits such as eye color, pigmentation, or hair texture does not entitle one group of people to rule over the other on the false pretense of racial superiority.”

“Both SF cinema and the social construction of race rely on the acceptance of fictions of the highest order to work”

Media Magazine Issue 47

“its impoverished inhabitants abused and herded by robotic police.”

“the super-rich have escaped the deprivations of Earth to live in a utopian idyll where any sickness can be cured at the flick of a switch.”

“the space station was a form of gated community, the ultimate version of the well-guarded estates where capitalism’s super rich keep themselves isolated from the ordinary public.”

 “The most recent parallel is the tragic and continuing death toll of migrants, who in their desperation to escape poverty and war, attempt lethal crossing from Africa in leaking overcrowded boats, to reach their own version of ‘Elysium’ in Italy and the rest of Europe.”

“The Sci Fi notion of the rich escaping to an ultramodern paradise whilst leaving the massed poor behind can be found way back in Metropolis itself.”

“Science fiction can be a uniquely poetic and thoughtful genre.”

“Yet with the modern blockbuster, the underlying assumption seems to be that audiences cannot handle – and do not want – depth.”

“Eye-catching spectacle, always a part of the genre, becomes everything, with splashy visual set pieces needing to be laid on every few minutes.”

“Hollywood has often been accused of infantilising its content to appeal to young audiences”

Media Magazine Issue 50

“1930s, science fiction was not a film genre as such, but a type of narrative that lent itself to adventure, fantasy, horror or spectacle.”

“they wanted to distinguish themselves from ‘sci-fi’, and to promote SF as a ‘proper literary genre.”

Media Magazine Issue 51

“sci-fi film and TV has come to be seen as a place where a diverse range of sexualities are represented.”

“These relatively rare examples of female sexuality – as something other than submissive and virginal damsels in distress”

Media Magazine Issue 50 (Sci-fi fans and the power of the tweet)

“sci-fi on TV has gone from strength to strength.”

“sci-fi generally has flourished because of the power of audiences in using social media to create a commentary around their favourite sci-fi texts.”

“Sci-fi audiences are traditionally seen as articulate, intelligent and passionate”

“while Sci-Fi at the cinema has generally been quite poor (too much CGI in place of character development, too many explosions in place of ideas)”

Media Magazine 51 (Representation Old and New)

“that media products were constructed carefully in order to create meaning. It is the combination of media language choices that construct a representation. Understanding how representations are created, and how they create meaning, is central to an understanding of the media, as everything that appears in the media is in fact a representation.”

“Traditionally, the power to create representations has been in the hands of media producers working within media institutions.”

“Representations are always, in some way, filtered through someone’s point of view, and carry particular meanings or values. In other words, they are ideological.”

“Hall’s critique is known as the ‘Encoding/Decoding Model’…Hall argued that audiences do not necessarily accept the ideology of texts passively, but instead draw on their own cultural and social experiences to create their own interpretations.”