Elysium – Max’s Irradiation
Neil Blomkamp’s post District 9 movie Elysium was always unlikely to touch the out-of-left-field success of that first film, but it certainly staked Blomkamp’s claim to mainstream movie making. One of Elysium’s most impressive elements is its presentation of the ruined, dystopian future Earth, which is literally piled sky-high with people, waste and squalor. The comments on the ethics of overpopulation, health care, class and exploitation are not just undercurrents, but blatant pararells with the possibllities of real life upon which the whole story is based.
But in among the wider moral motifs there is a more isolated moment, in which a question of practical ethics appears that is nothing to do with the situation overall and everything to do with those sudden, simple and painful questions of what is best to do.
Max de Costa (Matt Damon) works on the assembly line at Armadyne Corp, building Elysium weaponry and robots. When a palette becomes jammed inside the radiation chamber of his work station, the chamber malfunctions and stops. The foreman – concerned about losing valuable production time – insists that Max clear it himself. While Max is inside the chamber the palette shifts, the door slams shut, and the chamber returns to normal function, trapping Max inside as the radiation is emitted. Several nearby workers run over to the station and attempt to rescue Max, but the foreman stops them. As a result, Max is left inside and exposed to what will undoubtedly be a comprehensively lethal dose of radiation.
What we actually have in the foreman’s action here is something that should perhaps be titled ‘surprising ethical moment,’ rather than unethical, because unlike his motive for demanding that Max get in the chamber in the first place, his reason for leaving him there once the accident had begun is different; it is not simply that Max is dispensable, or that they are wasting time – it is because even if they had managed to somewhat limit the dose of radiation Max received, he was still certain to die from the poisoning, which is essentially to die one of the worst deaths imaginable.
In allowing Max to receive the full dose, the foreman was actually trying to ensure that Max’s death was quicker. (In fact, the radiation chamber itself is probably guilty of the most unethical behaviour here; as soon as the chamber closes it emits an ‘Organic Matter Detected’ alert – and then promptly proceeds to lock up and dispense the radiation anyway; it may as well just have shouted out ‘come and enjoy the show’).
Still, whatever the reason for it the foreman did make the call to actively leave a man being irradiated to death, and it is still highly uncomfortable to watch him interrupt the rescue efforts with Max struggling and screaming inside the pod. It is another great example of that timeless dilemma of whether to do something awful in order to prevent something worse. On these sorts of questions, the jury will most likely forever be out.