Viewing: DISTRICT 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009)

So let’s speculate on an alternate reality in which these aliens parked their mother ship over Johannesburg in 1989, a few year before the end of the official system known as Apartheid.

Twenty years later, these aliens, who are more like refugees, live in a racially segregated slum called District 9 (reminiscent of District Six), which are much like townships populated by black South Africans during Apartheid.

We can speculate that in this alternate reality, Apartheid never really did come to an official end, there is no Nelson Mandela like world leader figure to speak out against racial segregation and repression, and that the alien refugees were merely absorbed into this official system of racially segregated slums.

[Spoilers below.]

I believe this is the premise for Neil Blomkamp’s District 9. I can’t remember now whether we even learn the name of this alien species. Humans use the derogatory term, “prawns” to refer to these aliens, whose backstory is not really revealed to us. For example, we never really learn why they fled their homeland. We just know that their mother ship is parked over Johannesburg, and that even within this mother ship, the conditions in which they live are filthy and deplorable. Add these newcomers into an already volatile racial system, and it’s no wonder that in the film’s partial documentary format, it’s mostly whites of Dutch descent who represent the power structure, and mostly black South Africans telling the camera that these newcomers really need to leave, and go somewhere else, and become someone else’s problem. The documentary portrays these aliens as criminals and thugs; the Nigerian gangs living alongside the aliens inside  a filthy and depraved District 9 are free to exploit them.

This film is chaotic, ugly, and violent, just like human societies are.

I think this is a good premise for a film about extraterrestrials, except that this film is really not about the extraterrestrials. This film is really more akin to Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” in which the government official placed in charge of forcibly relocating these alien “prawns” from District 9 to the new and supposedly improved District 10, slowly metamorphosizes into a prawn himself, and must deal with being publicly maligned, sought after by the powers that be in order to become some top secret military experiment. There is a kind of poetic justice about Wikus Van De Merwe’s metamorphosis, given his newly appointed official task. Still, he’s enough of a middle-man in a Kafka-esque system (read: “The Law”) to warrant his victimhood.

And so while the viewers are never really given the space to develop compassion for these aliens, we experience horror at the grotesque transformation that our protagonist undergoes. Any act of Wikus’s rebellion against the institutional violence which represses, obliterates, and performs scientific experiments upon the aliens is satisfying to us, but not because he is acting righteously  or morally upright. He initially acts in favor of his own personal interests. That District 9 is really about Wikus and not the aliens is my biggest gripe.

As for my own experience as a viewer, I realize I’ve come to feel the most compassion for the CGI alien, Christopher Johnson — isn’t that something, they’ve taken or were given human names — and his little son. He is the only alien whose intentions or agenda into which we are given any amount of insight. He is portrayed as the only “smart” one; he is the only one who questions in an articulate manner the legality of this forced relocation. He is also the one with the plan to resurrect the mother ship and save his people.

Mind you, “articulate” is relative in this film; we hear their subtitled language of clicks and more clicks, about which Roger Ebert writes, “Nor would it escape a South African ear that the alien language incorporates clicking sounds, just as Bantu, the language of a large group of African apartheid targets.”

Anyway, I have already said too much about this film. I still think it was generally satisfying, if only because it portrays us human beings in a very grotesque way, as intolerant, xenophobic, violent, self-serving, and generally beyond redemption as we truly are.  Yes, even in Wikus’s apparent act of camaraderie with Christopher, I am not entirely convinced of his generosity.

Oscar’s write-up is here.