your racism, let me show you it
So, District 9 - voted Film Most Likely To Resist Coherent Review For Anything Up To Weeks. I've found it extremely difficult to formulate a response to this movie, not only because of its own political and narrative qualities, but because there's such a buzz about it. Everyone seems to have seen it; everyone has some sort of reaction, either positive or negative, but always involved. Are we so starved, as science fiction fans, of genuine South African texts in our preferred idiom? I suppose we are. I don't think, though, that that should be permitted to detract from the film's achievements, which are many, powerful and frequently sly.
I came to South Africa in 1988, at the tail-end of apartheid; despite attending Moscow On The Hill I really saw a very minimal remnant of anti-apartheid activism and the attendant police presence. I was also, I have to say, stubbornly and almost wantonly unpoliticised. Nonetheless, the first ten minutes or so of District 9 bloody well broke me. There's something basically emblematic about lines of police Casspirs rumbling through the township, and I'm apparently South African enough for the image to make me cry. I know that the film is talking about xenophobia as much as about apartheid, but make no mistake, apartheid is the stuff of its basic vocabulary. As with many aspects of the film the devil's in the detail, the pass-law- and apartheid-evoking signage and regulation, the engrained, background, taken-for-granted divisions between us and them, human and non-human. If nothing else, District 9 rubs our noses viciously in the fact that apartheid was about blind, unenlightened dehumanisation. It uses sf's classic trope, the alien as both other and self, with fairly straightforward unselfconsciousness, no different to the multitudes of writers and filmmakers who have brandished the alien to talk about gender or religion as well as race and, here inescapably, class. Where it's different is in its unique sense of place, not just the instantly-familiar dusty harshness of Jo'burg, but in the political layering which invokes an extremely specific view of race rooted in an equally specific socio-economic and historical reality.
I know a lot of African writers have responded very negatively to District 9, labelling it as racist and stereotypical. I'm saddened by how completely they've missed the point. Of course the aliens take on all the orientalist baggage of poverty, ignorance and filth; the film is not about race in Africa, it's about perceptions of race in South Africa, about the way we construct race as idiom. Its power is at least partially in its ability to trace a trajectory, in the symbol and vocabulary of the science fictional, between the historical racism of apartheid and the current racisms of xenophobia. Of course its viewpoint is largely white rather than black, the xenophobia elements ultimately overshadowed by the focus on Wikus as an apartheid dinosaur; the film is after all an artefact of white experience and given who the director is, I think to try to create it in any other terms would be specious, patronising and doomed. I agree with pumeza that it would be interesting to see the story re-told from the point of view of Wikus's black side-kick, but it would be a very different film, far less authentic and, given the complexities of genre and symbol it constructs with its apartheid vocabulary, far less interesting.
What drives the film for me is its ability to transcend utterly the obvious allegories of black African as prawn-like other to present an altogether more complex, layered and uncomfortable dissection of the white experience as well as an appallingly visceral representation of black poverty, and of xenophobia in general. Wikus is quite one of the most compelling and telling creations of recent science fiction; his banal, naive and limited evil is absolutely worthy of condemnation but is also horribly recognisable. He's the product of his time and place; he's also, through the arc of his transformation and destruction, simultaneously comic, pathetic, revolting and ultimately human. The sf trope of transformation makes him the alien and thus provides the point of entry to the realisation that the alien is also us, that we alienate ourselves and each other with unexamined complicity.
I find it interesting, in retrospect, to see that I drift immediately to talking about the film in political terms, despite my own very strong bent towards narrative implication. Narratively the film is exceedingly clever, balancing with virtuoso precision on the slippery edge between idea and action. It's not a great sf film in isolation: its plot is full of holes, however much I enjoy its resolute refusal to explicate the origin and purpose of the aliens. But there are explosions. Alien weaponry makes people sploosh. (Ah, yes, this is the early Peter Jackson). It clearly functions perfectly well as a slightly thought-provoking actioner to the average non-Saffrican sf fan, which I find surprising given how much of the pleasure and effect of my own viewing was about recognition, wincing or moved. To read this film without its South African political subtext is to impoverish it beyond belief, and I'm amazed it stands up.
On the whole, however, I'm largely inclined towards allowing the film's palpable flaws to be subsumed into its overall structure and purpose. The whole edifice is either fabulist in construction, uninterested in realistic logic and explanation, or full of plot holes. I go with the former, because it works. And, yes, the Nigerian gangsters are stereotypes, cardboard-cut-out "local colour" with all the orientalist trappings of cannibalism and muti. That's not what Nigerians are, obviously, but that's how we slip into seeing them, in the secret, unthinking bits of ourselves. That's why the prawns hurt to watch, because they externalise in grimy glory the assumptions we unconsciously make about the feckless subhumanity of the township dweller. This film is designed to dig the knife of perception into our privileged white guts, or even, to a lesser extent, our xenophobic black ones, and twist. I think it does it extraordinarily well.
Things We Have Learned Today: the penalty of brooding about a movie for two weeks is, apparently, unashamed verbosity, not to mention unrestrained polysyllabic outbreaks. Sorry. Also, the universe really doesn't want me to talk about this film, I've had no web access for most of the day, yay Cherished Institution and apparently insoluble DNS problems. On the upside, strawberryfrog can now stop leaving reproachful handfuls of tiny etched frimpt shells in the comments.
I came to South Africa in 1988, at the tail-end of apartheid; despite attending Moscow On The Hill I really saw a very minimal remnant of anti-apartheid activism and the attendant police presence. I was also, I have to say, stubbornly and almost wantonly unpoliticised. Nonetheless, the first ten minutes or so of District 9 bloody well broke me. There's something basically emblematic about lines of police Casspirs rumbling through the township, and I'm apparently South African enough for the image to make me cry. I know that the film is talking about xenophobia as much as about apartheid, but make no mistake, apartheid is the stuff of its basic vocabulary. As with many aspects of the film the devil's in the detail, the pass-law- and apartheid-evoking signage and regulation, the engrained, background, taken-for-granted divisions between us and them, human and non-human. If nothing else, District 9 rubs our noses viciously in the fact that apartheid was about blind, unenlightened dehumanisation. It uses sf's classic trope, the alien as both other and self, with fairly straightforward unselfconsciousness, no different to the multitudes of writers and filmmakers who have brandished the alien to talk about gender or religion as well as race and, here inescapably, class. Where it's different is in its unique sense of place, not just the instantly-familiar dusty harshness of Jo'burg, but in the political layering which invokes an extremely specific view of race rooted in an equally specific socio-economic and historical reality.
I know a lot of African writers have responded very negatively to District 9, labelling it as racist and stereotypical. I'm saddened by how completely they've missed the point. Of course the aliens take on all the orientalist baggage of poverty, ignorance and filth; the film is not about race in Africa, it's about perceptions of race in South Africa, about the way we construct race as idiom. Its power is at least partially in its ability to trace a trajectory, in the symbol and vocabulary of the science fictional, between the historical racism of apartheid and the current racisms of xenophobia. Of course its viewpoint is largely white rather than black, the xenophobia elements ultimately overshadowed by the focus on Wikus as an apartheid dinosaur; the film is after all an artefact of white experience and given who the director is, I think to try to create it in any other terms would be specious, patronising and doomed. I agree with pumeza that it would be interesting to see the story re-told from the point of view of Wikus's black side-kick, but it would be a very different film, far less authentic and, given the complexities of genre and symbol it constructs with its apartheid vocabulary, far less interesting.
What drives the film for me is its ability to transcend utterly the obvious allegories of black African as prawn-like other to present an altogether more complex, layered and uncomfortable dissection of the white experience as well as an appallingly visceral representation of black poverty, and of xenophobia in general. Wikus is quite one of the most compelling and telling creations of recent science fiction; his banal, naive and limited evil is absolutely worthy of condemnation but is also horribly recognisable. He's the product of his time and place; he's also, through the arc of his transformation and destruction, simultaneously comic, pathetic, revolting and ultimately human. The sf trope of transformation makes him the alien and thus provides the point of entry to the realisation that the alien is also us, that we alienate ourselves and each other with unexamined complicity.
I find it interesting, in retrospect, to see that I drift immediately to talking about the film in political terms, despite my own very strong bent towards narrative implication. Narratively the film is exceedingly clever, balancing with virtuoso precision on the slippery edge between idea and action. It's not a great sf film in isolation: its plot is full of holes, however much I enjoy its resolute refusal to explicate the origin and purpose of the aliens. But there are explosions. Alien weaponry makes people sploosh. (Ah, yes, this is the early Peter Jackson). It clearly functions perfectly well as a slightly thought-provoking actioner to the average non-Saffrican sf fan, which I find surprising given how much of the pleasure and effect of my own viewing was about recognition, wincing or moved. To read this film without its South African political subtext is to impoverish it beyond belief, and I'm amazed it stands up.
On the whole, however, I'm largely inclined towards allowing the film's palpable flaws to be subsumed into its overall structure and purpose. The whole edifice is either fabulist in construction, uninterested in realistic logic and explanation, or full of plot holes. I go with the former, because it works. And, yes, the Nigerian gangsters are stereotypes, cardboard-cut-out "local colour" with all the orientalist trappings of cannibalism and muti. That's not what Nigerians are, obviously, but that's how we slip into seeing them, in the secret, unthinking bits of ourselves. That's why the prawns hurt to watch, because they externalise in grimy glory the assumptions we unconsciously make about the feckless subhumanity of the township dweller. This film is designed to dig the knife of perception into our privileged white guts, or even, to a lesser extent, our xenophobic black ones, and twist. I think it does it extraordinarily well.
Things We Have Learned Today: the penalty of brooding about a movie for two weeks is, apparently, unashamed verbosity, not to mention unrestrained polysyllabic outbreaks. Sorry. Also, the universe really doesn't want me to talk about this film, I've had no web access for most of the day, yay Cherished Institution and apparently insoluble DNS problems. On the upside, strawberryfrog can now stop leaving reproachful handfuls of tiny etched frimpt shells in the comments.