District 9's Intentions and the Road to Hell
In the 1940s two new critical scholars announced that a text should be considered separately from an author's intention in writing it. A text could and did mean things that an author never intended, they argued, and to suggest otherwise was to commit "the intentional fallacy." In the 1960s, deconstructionist critics pushed this further, arguing that the best criticism does not rely on pointing to an author's political views or national background.
Yet, in the 2000s-which started with fears of a Y-2K catastrophe, continued with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and concluded with the near-meltdown of the world economy-intention seems to be all. As the decade draws to a close, my U.S. students and colleagues regularly suggest that good intentions count and that those wounded by such should get a grip. (Can the expanded U.S. role as global policeman be incidental to this belief in the redemptive nature of intention?)
Thus, since South African director Neill Blomkamp intended to make a film interrogating race, and since such audience members as professors enjoyed the film due to that interrogation, then District-9 cannot be racially problematic. The intention of the director and sophisticated viewers (moved by the science-fiction film's depiction of the Hobbesian reality that results when aliens arrive in Johannesburg and are rounded up in concentration camps) is to lambast racism, not to perpetuate it, therefore it cannot be racist. But is this really what a century of literary criticism teaches us? Are good intentions sufficient? And can such be used to defend the film?
In my discussions about the film, three defenses regularly arise. The first is that it is clearly the director's intention to depict all groups negatively. And it's true, for instance, that the white South Africans in the film are largely stupid or greedy. But some do momentarily rise to moral challenges, feel love, or make astute observations. The moronic lead loves his moronic wife; she loves him even after he becomes other. The depiction of black South Africans is less nuanced, with a stupidly agreeable cop featured most, but at least one black South African is a whistle-blower who ends the film on a moral note. The aliens, depicted as disgusting scavengers at first, are redeemed through one smart and moral alien and his adorable son. They are scientists conducting complicated experiments to enable them to regain command of their vast and superior technology.
Therefore, my interlocutors argue, one cannot object to the depiction of Nigerians as bloody-thirsty cannibals who only live in the ghetto and who only work as butchers, prostitutes, and gang lords. Scenes depicting Nigerians dancing around dismembered white body parts and grinning while murdering or torturing others are no different than the depiction of lawless white business owners. Yet, the Nigerians have no exceptions. They have no lead who learns to love the other. They do not even have wives or sons to love. They have no character arcs, no moments of insight or moral clarity. To argue that this uniformly negative depiction is okay because the director intends through such negative depictions to question race is to ignore the non-uniform depictions of other races and to reify intention. The larger project does not justify collateral damage. As Judith Butler said, is this repetition with a difference, or just repetition?
The film includes many killings of South Africans and aliens, but the only audience cheer I heard came when the Nigerians were blown up. Thus, whatever the South African director's intentions--and clearly the film's depiction of Nigerians has more to do with South African xenophobia than U.S. racism--it is incorporated by the U.S. body politic in concert with its views of race. Cannibalistic dancing Africans have been a staple of the twentieth-century U.S. stage and screen. That not one of the mainstream newspaper reviewers commented on the uniformly negative depiction of Nigerians suggests both that reviewers found the depiction unremarkable and that the negative depictions of other groups in the film serves to disguise its secret beating heart--a depiction steeped in racial stereotypes.
The second defense of the film is that Nigerians depict themselves in their own films as engaged in ritual cannibalism, prostitution, killing, and so on. Some of the scenes in District 9 could be ripped straight from Nollywood, one professor told me. I cannot recall such a scene, myself, but even if this is true, such scenes are surrounded by others in which Nigerians love and think.
The third defense of the film is one that does not go clearly articulated but underscores all of them--"since I enjoyed the film and I am not a bigot, then the film cannot be racist. My intentions as a viewer trump your criticism." I myself have had the experience of enjoying a film, having someone later criticize its racial politics, and then experiencing guilt on having enjoyed it. Yet, what is the point of defending the film based on one's intentions in viewing it? Or one's good heart? Can one not accept that the film moved you to be more empathetic and also revealed the limits of your empathy?
One professor told me that he thought the film was brilliant and deeply flawed. It made me think of similar comments about Birth of a Nation. Perhaps it is genius to make a science-fiction film with documentary talking heads, grainy visuals from hand-held cameras, and white-collar office settings. And perhaps one can argue that District 9 is brilliant precisely because of its revivification of racial stereotypes. Years ago, the anthropologist Edmund Leach argued that the most powerful art is that which skates on the surface of taboo without falling in:
My thesis is that when we respond to a work of art we are 'unconsciously' recognizing the existence of a comparable coded set of ambiguities in the object we are looking at. ...My general proposition is that all true artists tend to devote their principal efforts to themes which contain elements of sensory ambiguity which are subject to taboo. This can be illustrated in all sorts of ways but one very obvious example is to be found in Christian religious art. In Christianity the symbol which stands out from all others as both supremely sacred (taboo) and supremely ambiguous is that of the 'Virgin mother of God.' We would all agree that many of the finest expressions of European art have resulted from attempts to express this manifestly impossible idea, but it is very striking that the most ravishingly 'successful' examples of this genre are those which introduced an element of forbidden sexuality into what purports to be a symbol of chaste maternal love. In Michelangelo's Pieta, for example, where the virgin bereaved mother and the dead son are manifestly about the same age, our emotions are stirred by latent incestuous emotions of the most complex kind. (231-232)
But if Leach is right, then District 9 is not successful because some viewers fell through the thin ice of the film's surface and deep into the film's id, feeling disturbed rather than aroused. When I try to imagine what might have been done to strengthen that surface, I imagine the director inserting not even fifteen seconds of film, just one more talking head, a Nigerian in a suit complaining in a posh accent that the Nigerians in the camps were giving all Nigerians a bad name and could they please stop behaving like they were in a Nollywood film. Then perhaps most everyone would have kept skating on the surface, ignoring that Nigeria is now among the most stereotyped nations in the world and that perpetuating the stereotype of Nigerians as criminal cannibals has a real-world effect on them that depicting white men as greedy does not.
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Perhaps even our intentions in writing these comments about the film must be questioned, since tens of thousands of web pages are now devoted to discussing the movie's representation of race and investors, for whom "there is no such thing as bad publicity," are currently pocketing a profit of over $85 million dollars.
Works Cited
Leach, Edmund. 1973. "Levels of Communication and Problems of Taboo in the Appreciation of Primitive Art." In Primitive Art and Society, edited by Anthony Forge. London, New York, Oxford University Press, for Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.