Film review - District 9

Illegal aliens

I happen to be interested in the semiotics of films involving aliens as they relate to a potential overarching propaganda effort to condition us to fear and shun genuine and friendly extraterrestrials when they deign to make their presence undeniably known to us.

But that's just me.

The recent record on this has been dismal. I’m talking about jingoistic and religiously minded alien hate-fests like Independence Day and Signs. If it’s true that you can tell a lot about a culture by the metaphorical fears expressed in its fantasy fiction (and I don't know if it is), then what does this trend of portraying ETs as embodiments of pure, mindless evil say about ours? Is it reactionary to equate an audience who finds common ground with films demonizing aliens to those who just might consider whether the current president is a “real” American?

Yeah, that's probably a stretch. But the self-doubt evident in such anthropologically pessismistic films as Planet of the Apes,  2001, and The Man Who Fell to Earth was a healthy trend borne of a zeitgeist of consciousness. (For a film of this stripe two decades ahead of its time, see the still-terrific The Day The Earth Stood Still.) Even a born propagandist like Steven Spielberg found it beneficial to pit gentle space creatures with half-child/half-pet aspects against homo sapien meanies.  But Spielberg and Lucas were the twin pillars butressing the aesthetic bridge to the age of Reagan, and a more martial post-Vietnam American cinema. Star Wars took place in a galaxy far far away, so we could spectate the good vs. evil  destructive pyrotechnics without ever connecting it to a fate of our own. And I've always thought of Spielberg’s shriveled, Disneyesque homonculus who just wanted to phone home as a stand-in for Reagan himself—a wizened pseudo-oracle manipulating us with the most puerile of messages. With these Manichaean confections attracting paying customers on a mass scale, the logical next step—swapping the hero/villain roles in the human-alien dialectic—was only a matter of time. Why, after all, put the onus on the audience?

And that is why, for all its faults, I applaud a film like District 9, which takes a dim view of human nature as it relates to interaction with the “other.” The scenario: A humongous space vehicle carrying a million aliens has washed up in our atmosphere, stalling out over the skies of Johannesburg. Unable to return home, these accidental visitors, taken in as refugees by South Africa, have come to form a despised underclass. Humans call them “prawns” because of their resemblance to crustaceons and have confined to a filthy ghetto in which they are free to eat rubber and trade their interstellar arms for cat food, which they consider delicious. Humans can’t use these weapons because they’ve been bio-engineered to interact only with alien physiology, but a Nigerian warlord is stockpiling them anyway in hopes that one day he’ll be able to find the key to their activation.

All this exposition, by the way, is swiftly handled in a pseudo-documentary at the film's start. The documentary form gradually gives way, but not before we gain perspective on a controversial para-military operation to transport the aliens from their already despicable surroundings to what is clearly a concentration camp. Thus, it takes all of two minutes before an ironic allegory emerges of South Africa’s past racial woes. (The director and co-screenwriter is Neill Blomkamp, who grew up in Johannesburg in the 1980s and 90s, the waning years of  apartheid.) Metaphorical elements include the practice of assigning   Anglo names to the aliens, like Americans did their slaves, and a brief interview with an entomologist commenting on the societal structure of the aliens. Connotations of Nazi extermination policies, South Africa’s apartheid past, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict abound. The head of the relocation operation, which is run by a sort of combination Blackwater/Lockheed Martin contractor, is a fatuous Afrikaner, Wikus Van De Merwe, who feels the need to justify the forced transfer by hoodwinking aliens into signing a legal consent form. Wikus is the kind of genial racist (or speciesist) who can destroy a nest of alien young on-camera without batting an eye, because he has dehumanized them to such a degree as to be blind to his crimes.

South African racial dynamics drive some of the more nuanced scenes. Even in this post-apartheid era, the men in charge are white and the shock troops are black; and the amiable Wikus has a condescendingly jokey relationship with his black military aide. But ultimately, the lesson on race runs long and heavy-heavyhanded. After a particularly obvious switcheroo occurs involving one of the characters, the film devolves into a chase resolved by a trite poetic justice enhanced by special effects. The bad guys wear their evil so unselfconsciously, we're not exactly awash in the edifying revelations of a Hannah Arendt, here.

A variation on this theme was done better by Alien Nation, 20 years ago. Still, though District 9 pulls on your emotions in a blunt way, its heart is in the right place. And the ship hanging over Johannesburg like a floating mountain is a sight to see. Let's hope we see more of this type of sci-fi in which we meet the enemy and he is us.

Linkateria:

• More "District" reviews
• Neil Blomkamp interview
  
• Video: E.T. The Extraterrestrial
• Religious Symbolism in E.T.
• Video: Close Encounters of the Third Kind - the aliens land
• Sci-Fi Insight on Current Events: The Slave’s Right to Punish His Persecutors
• List of films featuring extraterrestrials (Wikipedia)
• UFO Evidence