Hollywoodland: District 9 and the ‘Old' South Africa
"Johannesburg plays itself." Shaun de Waal, Mail and Guardian
District 9 can count much of the mainstream South African press among its most fervent supporters. This is reflected in uniformly rapturous reviews and sky-high box office receipts, despite the country's ongoing and painful iteration of the international financial crisis. The cinematic experience of the movie only accounts for part of its South African success, however; more telling is the glee South Africans of all stripes have expressed about District 9 as an international cultural phenomenon. This glee is about more than nationalist pride, with its story-lines of local (emigrant) boy done good. Nor is it the self-satisfaction of a nation-on-the-make, poised to ascend the international stage as World Cup hosts in only a few months time. No, when South Africans celebrate District 9, I think they are experiencing that moment of bashful hubris we all know - the recognition of one's voice, one's face, broadcast to rapturous applause. District 9 is the world we know! South Africans seem to say. For good or for ill, that's "us" up there on the screen! And they (especially the American film audience) like us! They really like us!
'There is much to critique in both the film and its success - from the obviously racist depiction of the Nigerian gangsters, to the film media's evident self-satisfaction for so quickly identifying the historical tropes and analogues that make the movie work. But I will leave that heavy lifting to others and will instead grind a much lighter axe - interrogating the politics of self-recognition within District 9. Is it really "them" that the world is watching? And, more provocatively, after generations of seasoning by Hollywood representations of South African reality, can South Africans recognize themselves anymore?
Science Fiction is a useful genre, able to repackage familiar issues in unfamiliar guise. Analysts know this and once the lights come back on, set out immediately to match theme for theme and epoch for epoch. And so, they conclude, District 9 is about apartheid, with some post-apartheid political challenges tossed in for flavor. Yes, but. District 9 is also about representations of apartheid - and especially about those filmic representations that made the National Party government's last years a cause célèbre in the English speaking and media-consuming world. District 9 thus is less about apartheid and South African history, than about how South African history is packaged and sold, to both the international and domestic markets.
Consider how similar the movie is to those of the 1980s Hollywood / anti-apartheid heyday. The locale is the same - dry, dusty townships - the villains are the same - evil, Afrikaans-accented scientists and soldiers - and the hero is the same - the lone white with so much to lose, who 'crosses over' - sees the humanity of the other ('they care about their children!') and sacrifices / is forced to sacrifice his own safe, secure position. This movie, in other words, is 'Dry White Season' or 'Cry Freedom,' updated. Absent here, as in so many of the movies of the '80s, are well-developed black South African characters; those onscreen were one-dimensional witnesses to the white hero's sacrifice and even their suffering servant analogues were outsourced to Christopher Johnson and the heroic Prawns. Despite the South African locale and Sci-Fi update, at its core this movie tells quite a familiar story, with which many Americans are comfortable, as are many South Africans.
That flush of pride? Of self-recognition? More, ‘we're back!' then ‘they really like us,' present tense. Director Neill Blomkamp, famed producer Peter Jackson, and the rest have performed an act of cinematic transformation no less remarkable than alien jet-fuel's ability to turn well-meaning Afrikaners into artistically-inclined prawns. They have turned South Africa's inarguably messy present back into its tidy Manichean past, wherein souls, brave in spite of themselves, can transgress social norms and reach that remarkable threshold that we were taught would bridge all of our divides and solve all of problems: they can achieve empathy. Empathy is the imaginary construct at the heart of classic Western liberalism. All evil will fall away once sympathetic subjects share the world. In this intellectual tradition, complex social challenges - Jim Crow, apartheid - are overcome once the ‘Other,' becomes, as Hollywood would have it, ‘the buddy.'
And what has recent South African mythology been if not the triumph of empathy? The coming months will see at least two more South African - themed films on American screens. One, based on Coetzee's Disgrace will be critically acclaimed; the other, about Mandela's "buddy" moment with the 1995 Rugby World Champion Springboks, will be successful. Empathy is at the heart of the liberal fantasy that was 1994's "miraculous" elections and "peaceful" transition to majority rule in South Africa (now replayed with once-threatening Jacob Zuma teaching Afrikaner businessmen in Bloemfontein how to sing "mashini wami.") South Africa's problems were solved by the millions who saw into the heart of the frightening ‘other,' recognized their common humanity and completed that long walk together. Or so the myth goes, as the movies said it would. Neill Blomkamp is one of those other millions, who kept walking to Vancouver, London, Perth, Dallas. From his displaced pen and his camera, he has repackaged today as yesterday, with a Sci-Fi twist. No, Johannesburg does not play itself in District 9. The movie is not an allegorical representation of South Africa and its myriad problems, in the best tradition of Sci-Fi. It is just old myths, false, yet renewed and sold to an audience hooked on sweets.