Comparative Study: Elysium and Animal Farm

Concept art for the film Elysium

This term I'm teaching Animal Farm to Preliminary Advanced English as part of a comparative study. I had every intention of teaching it alongside V For Vendetta (which is how I've usually seen it paired) but, for a couple of reasons, I changed my mind when I was programming/planning. Here are the reasons:

1. I like V For Vendetta but I hadn't seen it for a long time, so it wasn't all that 'big' in my mind.
2. A recent bit of professional learning with the delightful folks at Into English reminded me that, if I have the option, I should jump on the opportunity to teach a dystopian text of my own choosing. 
3. My choice of text was Elysium - which I feel is much more current and relevant than V For Vendetta.
4. I had recently read Alan Moore's dense and highly literate graphic novel V For Vendetta, which only served to highlight the ways in which the film betrays his vision of post-Thatcherite fascism. I have no actual problem with the film version an an entity of its own, but what I do find problematic is the idea of teaching a text that has a sense of conflicted duality (a film version vs. the original version), especially when I'm already seeking to compare it to another text altogether; Animal Farm. 
5. Elysium, on the other hand, is an original film with a context entirely of its own - it's not an adaptation or an appropriation. It's a film that reflects the now and isn't beholden to a graphic novel. It's that rare thing - a modern sci-fi film that isn't based on another text.
6. I really like Elysium. It's not without its flaws, but few texts are.

The world of Elysium looks very familiar to anyone who's visited or seen images of Latin American slums.

The starting point for looking at Elysium is introducing the students to some of the context. The basis of my comparative study is 'Texts in Time', the comparative module used in the HSC 2009-2014 syllabus. This involves first examining Animal Farm and the political and social context that fuels Orwell's powerfully allegorical satire. The comparison then moves to Elysium, where students are required to recognise the way an entirely different dystopian society reflects a more contemporary context. By the end of the module, students will be assessed on their ability to compose an essay that ties both texts together as reflections of their times. 

The Elysium part is kicked off with a PowerPoint that introduces and familiarises students with the political ideas and events that shaped Neill Blomkamp's Elysium. As the film is incredibly current (filmed in 2013, it was interpreted at the time as a direct partial allegory for the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011), it can be difficult to pull the various influencing threads out of it. Hindsight is, after all, something that can only truly be achieved with some degree of distance. I have therefore done my best to track backwards from the film's release to show a possible line of contextual cause and effect.

The PowerPoint covers the following:

• Neill Blomkamp's South African background and his previous film, the similarly satirical District 9.
• The Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011-2013.
• "We are the 99%" - the idea that influenced the Wall Street protests, and continues to fuel economic and political debate today.
• The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 that highlighted economic injustice and brought the '99%' debate into sharp focus for most Americans.
• The Arab Spring - not as important as most of the other things here, but still an influential factor for the Occupy Wall Street movement - the term 'Arab Spring' refers to the series of social media-led revolutions that radically changed the political climate of Northern Africa and the Middle East in 2011.
• Obamacare - the Affordable Care Act that made public healthcare an issue of debate in the U.S. from 2010 onward.
• Asylum Seekers - a worldwide issue that has continued to grow from 2001 to the present day, with increasing security in Western countries seeming to contravene the civil rights established by the United Nations.
• 9/11 - the 2001 tragedy that reflected and continues to shape America's strained foreign policy, and links to larger ideas of the West's impact on the Third World (particularly Africa and the Middle East), such as Nigerian bank scams and data theft, African mercenaries and war lords, use of drone technology, international commercial exploitation by large corporations, puppet governments, imperialism, and terrorism.

There's a lot there and I like to make the point to students that they don't need to know all of it. What they do need to know is some of it, and in well enough detail to draw links between the text and the real world, and then again from text to text. 

The PowerPoint ends with a couple of thinking questions on terrorism and how this phenomenon can reflect unequal power relationships, and then a prediction activity where students are asked to imagine how a science fiction film could allegorically represent all these points of context. Ideally, students will have seen Elysium before they work through this PowerPoint and can try and draw links themselves, but the activity should have some merit either way.

A good follow-up activity is to then reinforce student knowledge (or teach it to them for the first time) about the Left and Right wings of politics. This involves getting the students to draw a line and then plotting a series of ideas and events on the line from left to right - things like private healthcare, the Occupy Wall Street movement, drone surveillance, etc. Of course, some of these things are debatable in where they would sit on the spectrum, but then - that's half the fun, right? If you can get your students arguing about this then you've succeeded in engaging them in becoming more aware about politics and political context.

Resources:
1. Elysium - Context (PowerPoint)
2. Spectrum Plotting (Activity sheet)