District 9: Just Another Hollywood Movie, Except for the Response
We have seen this movie before.
It's called Blood Diamond. It's called Rosewood. There are probably ten other movies I have refused to see which adopt this same story line.
It's a movie about an unappealing white man, who doesn't quite meet our approval in some way, who through a predictable turn of fate recognizes his own complicity in a racist social structure, and so through a moment of counter-intuitive self-sacrifice, manages to save an entire race from destruction, and along the way learns a very important lesson about love.
The basic premise is so basic that translating it into the South African context is actually offensive. According to the South African born and Canadian-educated director and writer, Neill Blomkamp, the film is about "a guy who starts off as a sort of unaware racist who is creating a lot of harm and a lot of poverty and suffering, and he goes from that to becoming someone who is aware of what he's done, and comes out toward the end of the film making the right choices instead of the wrong choices." Putting this same tired and racially problematic storyline into a South African setting simply reinforces the myth that what the world needs is a few brave white saviors to end all of our race problems.
Perhaps after a summer of truly dreadful films and, even more importantly, after decades of Hollywood neglect of African filmmakers and African issues, we might think this is finally a film we need to see, a film we need to discuss with our students. I'm disappointed to say it is not.
As far as action films go, the plot is pretty standard. The hero and his eventual alien sidekick are confronted by a double enemy - the powerful and ubiquitous military industrial complex and the potentially more nefarious cannibalistic Nigerians. Like the heroes in so many other action films, Wikus is compelled to make a change in his life through the recognition of his own complicity in a social order which is oppressive to people unlike him. By getting involved in subverting the dominant power structures, his own personal livelihood is also threatened by other enemies of the state ("the Nigerians") who have mistaken him for another regular white cog. This double bad guy trick is standard fare for the action film genre these days, though with a peculiarly specific second bad guy, which I'll discuss later.
In terms of its potential as a science fiction alien flick, we're disappointed again. District 9 has been touted as science fiction set in a completely novel space, and it has become required viewing for Africanists who wish to have anything to say to the general public. Peter Jackson, the producer of the film and director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, hopes that the film will appeal to people and that they will "experience a transforming adventure where you see things you've never seen before, taken to worlds you're never going to experience in real life."
The aliens in District 9 are reminiscent of those we see in the Alien series of Ridley Scott and of the Predator series, both of which are visions of alien life from the 70s and 80s. The plot line in which an alien presence confronts human beings and challenges our notions of what constitutes our humanity is also well-trod, even in the recent Battlestar Gallactica series.
It seems that what Blomkamp hoped to achieve in terms of science fiction in the film was to engage and perhaps undermine the standard narrative of an enormously powerful and terrifying alien threat confronting a weak and naïve human population. In District 9, the human population recognizes that the aliens are in a weak position because when they arrive they are in distress, diseased, and dying. The humans take advantage of their vulnerability to lay claim to their technology and segregate them so that they do not present any challenge to their domination. Is this the world Jackson thought we would never have experienced in real life? Never seen before? What fantasy world has he been living on all these years?
Blomkamp is a little less naïve about the implications of the setting of the film. The narrative is supposed to be an allegory for Apartheid South Africa. Blomkamp claims that the film is "about two groups, two races, meeting head-on" which he says is "just born out of me growing up in South Africa. That is what South Africa is about." As a result, the "worlds we've never seen before" are all too familiar to anyone who knows anything of the Apartheid era segregationist politics of South Africa. The state has decided that the alien race must be kept separate from the human race because of fears of contamination, violence, scarcity of resources, and general unease between the two races. An entire apparatus has been created to maintain order and segregation. Those aliens who disrupt that order or who resist in any (even vaguely perceptible ways) are met with immediate state-sponsored violence and elimination. Setting this in a science fiction narrative is not such a stretch, and as I want to argue, does not actually confront any commonly-held racist ideas, but actually reinforces them.
It appears that the film is meant to critique, as so many science fiction films do, present day relations between the races. The expert-witness/bureaucrats who work at the corporation unsubtly dubbed Multi-National United (MNU) all harbor racist stereotypes regarding the aliens, who they derisively call "Prawns." The bureaucrats lament that the aliens arrived "malnourished" and "aimless," which was why they were providing them with the aid and housing they could not provide for themselves. They claim that, though there may once have been intelligent leaders among them, all that is left of the aliens are the drones who don't think for themselves and who are only able to take orders. As a result, the bureaucrats consider the aliens to be disgusting, unskilled, lazy, vicious and unpredictable predators, who have too many babies and who feed off the very system that gave them life and protects them from self-destruction. It is clear that we are supposed to understand the bureaucrats as being racist, as they spout off all-too-familiar, unsympathetic and dangerous rhetoric which we, as enlightened 21st century American viewers are supposed to laugh off as preposterously uninformed and as passé antebellum and Jim Crow era rhetoric.
However, when we do see scenes of the slums in which the aliens are forced to live, they are just as hideous as the supposed stereotypes suggested. The aliens are jumping up and down on heaps of garbage, fighting one another over a piece of rubber or a can of cat food; they are urinating on their own houses; they commit violence against the human intruders and against one another seemingly unprovoked. At best, we can say there is an ambivalent representation of race in the depiction of the aliens - perhaps the idea is that this is what slum life creates of anyone who is forced to live that way. But this is not a particularly nuanced statement, and it does not constitute any radical revision of racial stereotyping. In fact, it simply reinforces misinformed notions of the natural state of impoverished people and undermines any real sense of agency or resistance that they might have.
Except in the case of one, completely atypical alien, named Christopher Johnson, who against all the odds has hidden his enormous intelligence and his clever and curious son from the violence of both his own kind and the MNU. Only through masquerading as just another cat-food-eating, garbage-collecting, uncaring, surly alien is he able to hide what only he can understand - the ship which will take him and his son to safety on the mother ship and will eventually mean the safety and survival of all the other aliens trapped on Earth. This exceptional alien storyline is no surprise, either, to those of us who pay attention to the way race is typically depicted in Hollywood films.
And let us not forget the narrative of the "tragic mulatto" that this film naively attempts to take on. Like Imitation of Life's Peola and Pinky's title character, racial contamination provides the pretext for Wikus' alienation in District 9, after the victim-hero blunderingly sprays himself with an alien liquid, which quickly begins to transform him into a "prawn". As soon as it is known that he is part alien, his father-in-law releases him to MNU for experimentation, his wife refuses to be with him, people in a restaurant refuse to eat near him, folks on the street run away in horror. It is only as a hybrid that he begins to recognize the hideous oppression of non-humans, and it is only through this transformation that he is able to comprehend the intelligence in the exceptional alien Christopher Johnson. However, this transformation does not completely change Wikus, as Blomkamp would like to think it does. Wikus wants to chop off his own alien-infected arm because he cannot stand the part of him that is not human. Then he is driven to save himself enough to partner with the alien, but when he sees his opportunity, he still abandons the alien to save himself. He learns so little that he vociferously denies the accusation that he's slept with an alien because, of course, his transformation has done little to actually make him (or the filmmakers) understand or sympathize with the aliens in anything more than a superficial level. He doesn't want to have to live in a slum, but he's not going to change his mind about how disgusting inter-species intercourse can be. There is no real change in Wikus. And there's no real change in how race is portrayed in Hollywood-funded movies.
When Wikus is hunted and nearly defeated by both the Nigerians and the nefarious MNU, mournful music plays, and apparently we're supposed to sympathize with this small-minded, self-serving, superficial man. By the conclusion of the film, Wikus is supposed to be seen as the self-sacrificing savior even though Christopher Johnson would not have been in trouble if it weren't for Wikus (and, I suppose, others like him) in the first place.
So in the end, I would have to say quite regretfully that this film doesn't even merit academic discussion beyond what we're having here. I think it has gotten too much press as a think-piece, as a commentary on Apartheid, and as a new African take on science fiction. It replays so many old story lines that we can hardly discuss the film without finishing each others' sentences and "un-hunh"ing the whole time.
What I think might be the most interesting thing about this film is not what is in the film, but what has grown up around the film. The obvious omission from my critique of the film above was the overtly negative depiction of Nigerians in the film. The film portrays Nigerians as juju-tranced cannibals who take advantage of the oppressed aliens in order to gain power and wealth for themselves. The Nigerian women are all prostitutes who sleep with aliens despite a clear cultural taboo against it. The Nigerian men are all gangsters with enormous illegal weapons caches. This representation reinforces wide-spread stereotypes of Nigerians as vultures on the capitalist machine who feed off the vulnerable carcasses of those whom capitalism has left behind. And we cannot forget that the worst of the bad guys is named Obesanjo, almost certainly a play on the former president's name, Obasanjo.
In response to this misrepresentation, Nigerians all over the world have cried out in protest, even forming a Facebook group called "Nigerians Offended By District 9" and another named "District 9 Hates Nigerians." Though there are many thoughtful critiques which directly address the consequences of the negative portrayal of Nigerians on the discussion board, the first discussion is dominated by vitriol against the directors of the film, the people who acted in it, and most importantly perhaps, South Africans in general. In part, this is in response to some few very talkative South Africans who claim that they can confirm the portrayal of Nigerians in their country. Between the angry Nigerians and South Africans, a panoply of negative portrayals of Africans in general get tossed around and reinforced. To name a few: that Africa is a breeding ground for AIDS and that people are spreading it intentionally. That Africans are too inept to stop AIDS or corruption in their countries. That the women are prostitutes. That the men are scammers, thieves, and drug dealers. That they are junkies. People on both sides claim that their opponents are the source of the bad reputation Africa has around the world.
What this reveals to us and forces us to think about is the very real non-fictional, non-exaggerated tensions that exist between Nigerians and South Africans - not just in those countries, but around the world. Nigerian and South African participants living abroad were just as likely to spew hate-speech and confirm African stereotypes if the target was the opposing country. As the economic front-runners in the race to prosperity in Africa, the two countries represent enormous potential. What's interesting is how much this does seem like a personal competition - how much the average Nigerian or South African (at least those with internet access) has internalized a sense of competitiveness with the other and can see that competition extending to popular media such as film and Facebook. Often discussants set aside the content of the film altogether because they see the film as an opportunity to engage in a conversation about how economic advantage is won and how the two teams are manipulating capitalist structures to gain the lead.
There are others, however, who see this competition as counter-productive, and believe that what needs to be done is to take this portrayal seriously, as a message about what people around the world think about Nigerians. Many Nigerian respondents call for a house-cleaning of sorts - they think that instead of banning the film which would be undemocratic, they hope it will provoke Nigerian citizens to stand up against the corruption and thieving that they contend is endemic among the general population and within the government.
What all of this adds up to is that the response is much more interesting, compelling, and complicated than the film could ever hope to be.