In which I talk about a movie
Which is something I almost never do! It's been a while since I've gone to the movies; most of what comes out these days can't overcome my inherent laziness, it seems. But after brunch on Sunday, Mrs. D. let me borrow D. and we went to see District 9.
District 9 is absolutely fraught with race, with the idea of the physical other. This preoccupation plays out in two ways: with the "prawns," the aliens who are never named but are always treated like animals; and with the Nigerian gang lords who exploit their ghetto, cunning enough to collect weapons and sell meat but not smart enough, apparently, to figure out that these aliens are sentient beings with motives.
Wikus Van der Merwe, a white South African, is slowly transformed, because of an infection incurred during an eviction operation, into a "prawn." As he becomes less human, he becomes more important to the corporation that once employed him, and that he thought was his ally. Through that transformation, he learns what his fellow humans have been up to in the past 20 years since the ship showed up overhead. And we learn that one alien man and his son have been hoarding technology, carefully hiding a control capsule, collecting fuel so that they can escape and bring help.
We never learn what the aliens call themselves, although they speak their own language the entire time. I would like to think that's a statement about how humans absorbed their presence: that they didn't bother to learn what they called themselves, although they clearly bothered to learn the alien language. (There are subtitles, humans talking with aliens in a back and forth of English and the alien language.) Worse than that, they bear assigned names: the alien whose hope finally gets transmitted into something that could be rescue, and who leaves with his adorable son, is referred to throughout by the humans who know him through bureaucratic means as "Christopher". The name never ceases to be ridiculous, a blatant imposition by a people too lazy to learn the real names of the people they're dealing with.
There are thinly veiled parallels to apartheid in the treatment of the aliens: they are clearly sentient beings with their own sociology and culture, and their own habits, and they're settled in a slum-like township. And, in fact, the film was made in South Africa, with mostly South African actors. Tellingly, most of the men (and they are all men) involved with the corrupt multinational corporation are white, and have Afrikaans names. (The government is MIA entirely; the corporation runs the camp.) The only rival power structure is the Nigerian gang in the camp, which started out as a nice illustration of opportunism but ended up, in my opinion, being a bad caricature. I refuse to believe that anybody savvy enough to conduct arms trade in a camp full of aliens would have been impervious to the idea that things don't work, i.e. if you eat the alien arm and it doesn't let you fire the weapon, then maybe you should try something else. To me, the weakest and most offensive part of the film was its reliance on Nigerian witch doctor stereotypes. Basically, the aliens and the (mostly white) corporate drones acted rationally, but the Nigerians' superstitions were the key to moving the plot from Point A to Point B, and... yeah.
On the other hand, the stereotype of the aliens as "prawns," as oddly crouching, cat-food-eating creatures, was clearly intentional and inherent to the film's point: that they were a big, giant Other, and that they had genuinely different physiology, but that they had a lot in common with humans--love of their children, sacrifice for the greater part of the people, empathy toward people who are capable of feeling the same things, no matter how different they look, no matter how different their background. What looks like desperate creatures sorting through mounds of garbage turns out to be technologically advanced people looking for parts that humans couldn't recognize for what they were.
Wikus was an ordinary (human, white, privileged) guy, and it took extraordinary things to shake him out of his worldview--and he worked with these aliens, saw their lives and spoke their language. He thought of himself as enlightened because he wanted to make the eviction legal, to get the aliens to sign the forms so that they could be moved to a concentration camp (his own words--he later admits that's what it was, that's what he knew it was all along); he didn't actively want to hurt anyone; he opposed the military organization's more brutal methods. And he thought aborting their young was a kindness; he casually called them "prawns"; he was an administrative cog in the machinery that made District 9 what it was. It took becoming like the aliens, and getting exiled from his own comfortable, dominant group, to make him understand. The first part of the film is a wonderful study in the benevolent face of bigotry. Wikus can't break out of his own assumptions until he literally starts transforming physically into the Other; the empathy he ends up developing springs from that outside intervention. And even still, he failed--he chose his own cure over the salvation of all those people by clubbing Christopher. And the he failed again by crashing the ship, their only hope. It's a shocking, disappointing weakness. He finally redeemed himself by letting Christopher get back to the ship, by fighting to let him get there, but that doesn't make him a hero; it just makes him not-evil. So who is the real hero in this film? Wikus is our viewpoint character, but the character who exhibits the most classically heroic traits is Christopher, the alien whose real name we never learn. There's a point where the two of them have broken into the corporation's basement labs, where they're doing all kinds of gruesome experiments on aliens. When Wikus was here before, it was because he was one of the subjects; his terror was for himself; and now he just wants to get what they came for and get out. But Christopher stops, stunned in horror; as bad as District 9 is, he hadn't imagined that the humans could be so terrible. The contrast in their reactions to that gruesome room is, I think, deliberate: Wikus's internal focus, his blindness to others who aren't like him at that point, and Christopher's inherent empathy.
The story is told from a documentary viewpoint, using a shaky hand-held camera. (Between the shaky-cam and the high splatter quotient, this is not a film for the weak of stomach.) There are a few stark breakaways to show Christopher and his group, and I think those scenes really broke the structure in some ways. We never learn what brought the aliens to Earth or why they couldn't fly their ship before, and as long as the story is told strictly from the human POV, I think that's okay--I can well believe that the humans never learned, for one reason or another. But the film breaks that wall and shows us a few scenes from the alien POV, in order to explain some plot points; however, those scenes don't do any more to explain what the aliens thought they were doing when they came to Earth, or what motivates them beyond survival, or, really, anything else about them.
I did like that that lack of knowledge makes the end so ambiguous and depressing, though: what is going to happen when they come back to rescue their people? How will we be judged? When it comes down to it, will the aliens treat us better than we treated them? If nothing else, District 9 felt distinctly different from most of the big-screen science fiction that's come out in the past few years: grimy and small-scale, distinctly lacking in epic heroics. I'm glad I saw it simply because it was trying to do some interesting things, even if it didn't entirely succeed. In the film's final scenes, after Christopher has taken the alien ship to get help, we see Wikus's wife, sitting in her comfortable house, showing the camera a metal flower that she clearly thinks he left for her. And then we see Wikus, transformed now entirely into an alien, surrounded by the misery of the camp. The film makes it clear that sex between humans and aliens is possible; both are sentient beings capable of emotion; and yet that difference is still a gulf too wide for both of them.
District 9 is absolutely fraught with race, with the idea of the physical other. This preoccupation plays out in two ways: with the "prawns," the aliens who are never named but are always treated like animals; and with the Nigerian gang lords who exploit their ghetto, cunning enough to collect weapons and sell meat but not smart enough, apparently, to figure out that these aliens are sentient beings with motives.
Wikus Van der Merwe, a white South African, is slowly transformed, because of an infection incurred during an eviction operation, into a "prawn." As he becomes less human, he becomes more important to the corporation that once employed him, and that he thought was his ally. Through that transformation, he learns what his fellow humans have been up to in the past 20 years since the ship showed up overhead. And we learn that one alien man and his son have been hoarding technology, carefully hiding a control capsule, collecting fuel so that they can escape and bring help.
We never learn what the aliens call themselves, although they speak their own language the entire time. I would like to think that's a statement about how humans absorbed their presence: that they didn't bother to learn what they called themselves, although they clearly bothered to learn the alien language. (There are subtitles, humans talking with aliens in a back and forth of English and the alien language.) Worse than that, they bear assigned names: the alien whose hope finally gets transmitted into something that could be rescue, and who leaves with his adorable son, is referred to throughout by the humans who know him through bureaucratic means as "Christopher". The name never ceases to be ridiculous, a blatant imposition by a people too lazy to learn the real names of the people they're dealing with.
There are thinly veiled parallels to apartheid in the treatment of the aliens: they are clearly sentient beings with their own sociology and culture, and their own habits, and they're settled in a slum-like township. And, in fact, the film was made in South Africa, with mostly South African actors. Tellingly, most of the men (and they are all men) involved with the corrupt multinational corporation are white, and have Afrikaans names. (The government is MIA entirely; the corporation runs the camp.) The only rival power structure is the Nigerian gang in the camp, which started out as a nice illustration of opportunism but ended up, in my opinion, being a bad caricature. I refuse to believe that anybody savvy enough to conduct arms trade in a camp full of aliens would have been impervious to the idea that things don't work, i.e. if you eat the alien arm and it doesn't let you fire the weapon, then maybe you should try something else. To me, the weakest and most offensive part of the film was its reliance on Nigerian witch doctor stereotypes. Basically, the aliens and the (mostly white) corporate drones acted rationally, but the Nigerians' superstitions were the key to moving the plot from Point A to Point B, and... yeah.
On the other hand, the stereotype of the aliens as "prawns," as oddly crouching, cat-food-eating creatures, was clearly intentional and inherent to the film's point: that they were a big, giant Other, and that they had genuinely different physiology, but that they had a lot in common with humans--love of their children, sacrifice for the greater part of the people, empathy toward people who are capable of feeling the same things, no matter how different they look, no matter how different their background. What looks like desperate creatures sorting through mounds of garbage turns out to be technologically advanced people looking for parts that humans couldn't recognize for what they were.
Wikus was an ordinary (human, white, privileged) guy, and it took extraordinary things to shake him out of his worldview--and he worked with these aliens, saw their lives and spoke their language. He thought of himself as enlightened because he wanted to make the eviction legal, to get the aliens to sign the forms so that they could be moved to a concentration camp (his own words--he later admits that's what it was, that's what he knew it was all along); he didn't actively want to hurt anyone; he opposed the military organization's more brutal methods. And he thought aborting their young was a kindness; he casually called them "prawns"; he was an administrative cog in the machinery that made District 9 what it was. It took becoming like the aliens, and getting exiled from his own comfortable, dominant group, to make him understand. The first part of the film is a wonderful study in the benevolent face of bigotry. Wikus can't break out of his own assumptions until he literally starts transforming physically into the Other; the empathy he ends up developing springs from that outside intervention. And even still, he failed--he chose his own cure over the salvation of all those people by clubbing Christopher. And the he failed again by crashing the ship, their only hope. It's a shocking, disappointing weakness. He finally redeemed himself by letting Christopher get back to the ship, by fighting to let him get there, but that doesn't make him a hero; it just makes him not-evil. So who is the real hero in this film? Wikus is our viewpoint character, but the character who exhibits the most classically heroic traits is Christopher, the alien whose real name we never learn. There's a point where the two of them have broken into the corporation's basement labs, where they're doing all kinds of gruesome experiments on aliens. When Wikus was here before, it was because he was one of the subjects; his terror was for himself; and now he just wants to get what they came for and get out. But Christopher stops, stunned in horror; as bad as District 9 is, he hadn't imagined that the humans could be so terrible. The contrast in their reactions to that gruesome room is, I think, deliberate: Wikus's internal focus, his blindness to others who aren't like him at that point, and Christopher's inherent empathy.
The story is told from a documentary viewpoint, using a shaky hand-held camera. (Between the shaky-cam and the high splatter quotient, this is not a film for the weak of stomach.) There are a few stark breakaways to show Christopher and his group, and I think those scenes really broke the structure in some ways. We never learn what brought the aliens to Earth or why they couldn't fly their ship before, and as long as the story is told strictly from the human POV, I think that's okay--I can well believe that the humans never learned, for one reason or another. But the film breaks that wall and shows us a few scenes from the alien POV, in order to explain some plot points; however, those scenes don't do any more to explain what the aliens thought they were doing when they came to Earth, or what motivates them beyond survival, or, really, anything else about them.
I did like that that lack of knowledge makes the end so ambiguous and depressing, though: what is going to happen when they come back to rescue their people? How will we be judged? When it comes down to it, will the aliens treat us better than we treated them? If nothing else, District 9 felt distinctly different from most of the big-screen science fiction that's come out in the past few years: grimy and small-scale, distinctly lacking in epic heroics. I'm glad I saw it simply because it was trying to do some interesting things, even if it didn't entirely succeed. In the film's final scenes, after Christopher has taken the alien ship to get help, we see Wikus's wife, sitting in her comfortable house, showing the camera a metal flower that she clearly thinks he left for her. And then we see Wikus, transformed now entirely into an alien, surrounded by the misery of the camp. The film makes it clear that sex between humans and aliens is possible; both are sentient beings capable of emotion; and yet that difference is still a gulf too wide for both of them.