(SPOILER ALERT!!! Don’t say I didn’t warn you)
Money-hungry, evil, military-industrial complex exploits a ghettoized, oppressed people. Said oppressed people poorly understood and frequently abused. So-called terrorist attack. Media misinformation. Fear-inducing propaganda. Why won’t both sides just sit down and talk?
Sound familiar?
No, I’m not talking about anything you’ve seen on the news the last three or four years. I’m talking about 
District 9, the latest sci-fi thriller produced by Peter Jackson. This film is not just a film meant to entertain 20-something males who religiously Tivo the Sci-Fi channel and attend Comicon every year. It actually has a message that it communicates in parable-like fashion.
If you did think I was talking about something in the news in the beginning of the post, that’s because the film’s director (Neil Blomkamp) is most certainly doing that on purpose; District 9 clearly is meant to parallel a very common narrative in our culture.
Blomkamp doesn’t waste any time drawing this parallel: within the first minute of the film (which is shown in mock-documentary-like fashion), one intervewee informs the audience that an alien spaceship didn’t stop over “Manhattan, New York, Los Angeles,” or several other grand international metropoli–it settled down over Johannesburg, South Africa. Anyone with a high school diploma and a pulse should recognize South Africa as the center of Apartheid, a system of racial segregation that was officially ended fairly recently in the 90′s. Hmmmm, the plot already thickens.
The ship just sits there for months, with nothing coming out. Finally, the humans decide to break in themselves, and they find over a million malnourished, directionless, insectoid-like aliens cowering in the dark. Supposedly their ship broke when a command module came detached and fell to the ground (or was that purposeful? Who knows.).
Humanitarians rush in to give food and shelter to the aliens, whose leader(s) have died off. We all know, though, what kind of bricks pave the road to hell: soon, the humanitarians find themselves in over their heads. The aliens, without their leader, behave animal-like. Fear of the different swarms in. The shelters become militarized, and a slum emerges. A system of rules and regulations evolves that is designed to keep the aliens separate from the humans. They are called “prawns,” a derogatory slur filled with images of trash-dwelling bugs and bottom-feeding crustaceans.
Violence swells. Riots are common. No human likes or trusts the aliens. The feeling is mutual. The humans want the aliens to leave. The aliens want to go home, but for some reason, they can’t. The film coyly suggests that they are prevented from doing so by the system that traps them in and keeps them oppressed.
A military weapons corporation steps in to be a mediator: Multi-National United. MNU feigns humanitarian motives, but it is clear they are in the mediating business for one thing: weapons. The alien weaponry is quite advanced, and MNU wants to learn the technology. The problem is that the weapons are designed to only work with alien DNA. No human can operate them, which is a bummer to MNU.
Enter Wikus van der Merwe, an inept and awkward bureaucratic paper-pusher. Think of a corporate Ned Flanders; that’s Wikus. He is merely a cog in a vast corporate machine, yet he is appointed to head up an eviction project that will usher the “prawns” out of their current slum and into a concentration camp via a tricky legalese slight of hand.
While he is no doubt inept, he seems like a nice guy. Soon it is apparent that the niceness, however, is only a veneer: he shows childlike joy in aborting a house of alien fetuses, barges in to the houses to confiscate anything he wants, and shouts slurs (“f****ng prawn!”) at the slightest provocation. In fact, he calls them the “prawn” slur with the same nonchalance that he’d call a co-worker “Steve” or “buddy.” This is just his reality, and he never stops to question it until he is forced to by a twist of events.
Even though it is hard to like the aliens, with their animalistic ways, the film doesn’t suggest any moral equivalency or relativism: it is hard to sympathize with Wikus. Even harder to like him. Perhaps pity him, yes, but we are clearly not supposed to identify with him.
But then Wikus is exposed to an alien fuel liquid, which causes him to start to morph into an alien. Seriously. No lie.
When MNU finds out, they seek to harvest his body for scientific research, making Wikus a fugitive. In order to hem him in, MNU spins a few lies to the media about Wikus, doctoring photos to make it look like he had sex with a “prawn.” Now, the public, even Wikus’ own wife, intensely fear an innocent man. Wikus’ only hope is to turn to the same aliens he gleefully oppressed just a few days earlier.
In so doing, he forms an unlikely partnership with alien Christopher Johnson (no joke. That is really his name.), who is secretly trying to run an operation to get back to the mother ship to start it. Wikus’ motives are wholly selfish, while Christopher’s motives are not: Wikus wants to save his own skin and clumsily tries to use Christopher and his son to that effect, but Christopher’s motives are to save “his people.”
There are several philosophical issues raised by the film, and unfortunately space permits me to plumb them all. The film raises questions about identity over time (Even though Wikus’ physical makeup completely changes, is it still Wikus? If yes, what grounds his identity?), issues about selflessness vs. selfishness and sticking by one’s friends, and even makes parallels between Christopher and various “messiahs” down through the ages (Moses, anyone? Though I doubt the film’s writers intended such a parallel, it is there. Christopher even calls his fellow aliens “my people.”).
One of the main themes that I want to comment on is on the human proclivity to fear. This is something that you just can’t miss in the film. It’s clear the aliens aren’t understood and therefore are feared. People want to keep them away, and a system of rules and mores are erected to keep it that way. Signs on the street declare “no non-humans allowed.” Restaurants serve only humans. The aliens’ names are changed (There’s no way that Christopher Johnson is his real name). Even the District 9 website is set up to reflect this system: when you go to it, a message instructs you to enter as either a human or non-human. The website drastically changes tone and message from there. Fictitiously run by MNU, the website has a soothing female voice for the human side, that encourages the humans that MNU wants to help them live “safe, prosperous lives.” The voice tells humans to report alien sightings to help make District 9 a safer place, and also informs them of several “career” opportunities for “outstanding,” ambitious candidates.
By contrast, the non-human side of the MNU website features a commanding, authoritarian male voice that instructs the non-humans to follow all rules and regulations, and informs them that any who choose to break the rules will immediately be taken into custody and experience consequences. Non-humans must work to be “productive members of society.” Even the access code for the job offerings has radically different connotations: “career” for humans and “labor” for non-humans. There are other inequities in the website.
In the movie, the eviction campaign run by MNU and headed by Wikus is an extension of this system. The aliens are duped and coerced to sign eviction papers. Even when an alien chooses to swat at the paper rather than sign it, that counts, legally, as signing the papers and giving consent. It’s obvious that the place they are being evicted to, amazingly, is much worse than their current slum. Humans want to get rid of the aliens, and MNU wants to get a hand on their weapons. In the film, the humans are the oppressors, the aliens the victims.
Are the aliens even totally to blame for their animalistic behavior, or has the humans’ fear made them that way, turning them into barbarians by putting them in ghettos and taking away their dignity?
At the end, when Christopher Johnson takes the mother ship away, I thought, “now, was that so hard? Why’d that take 20 years to do? Couldn’t both sides, who wanted the same thing, just have sat down with each other and figured out how to make that happen? There was no need for all that bloodshed and violence.” Again, fear kept both sides from realizing the ultimate goal.
This has become so ingrained in the culture that Wikus accepts it as self-evident. That’s how he can call the aliens “prawns” yet continue to have a joyful smile on his face. Like I said above, he only starts to question this way of thinking until he is forced to identify with them and rely upon them for his survival.
A friend of mine remarked that you could substitute pretty much any people group on earth for the aliens, and it would still work. That’s because that has been the story of human interaction several times throughout our history in this world. Whether it’s been apartheid, the Scottish during the time of William Wallace, slavery in this country and the civil rights struggles that followed, Egyptians enslaving the Israelites in the time of the Exodus, or religious persecution in China, people have been exploited ad nauseum since the dawn of time.
Why? The deepest root is good, old fashioned sin and human wickedness. The heart, the prophet Jeremiah says, is deceitful above all things. Who can understand it? An outgrowth of that wickedness, though, is fear of difference. I guess you could say that while wickedness of the heart is the ultimate cause, fear is a penultimate cause.
I need to point out that the film doesn’t intend this analysis to extend to all difference, and it’s good the writers drew the line somewhere. Some lifestyles and actions aren’t just different: they are morally wrong for one reason or another. As I mentioned above, the film doesn’t really question this, leaving the viewer in a relativistic morass where all actions are and lifestyles are mere cultural expressions and therefore equally valid. No, there is a definite right and wrong in District 9 which is clearly violated.
Despite the fact that aliens from outer space visit earth, there is no Prime Directive a la Star Trek. The D9 universe is a moral one, with a clear right and wrong. We recoil in horror when the MNU execs, one of which is Wikus’ own father-in law, coldly pause to calculate how to harvest Wikus’ body parts for scientific research. Wikus, who hears the conversation, pleads for help, but the father-in-law simply rebuffs the effort. Despite the uncouth behavior of the aliens, our moral intuitions rise when we see their oppression. Their tendency to violence, too, is subject to this moral judgment.
But still, the film suggests that we fail to understand because we fear, and this leads to much chaos and suffering.
This narrative can only be carried so far in paralleling the real world, though. Some might try to connect the war on terror to this movie. Though fear is definitely involved in exacerbating things, I don’t think it’s that simple. “One man’s terrorist is another man’s (or alien’s) freedom fighter” might work in District 9, but not in the world of September 11, car bombings, and beheadings. Some might also try to make an analogy between the movie and the current state of many urban neighborhoods, but the root causes that have brought chaos with the latter have more to do with disintegration of the family and other internal moral problems than continued systemic oppression.
In addition to the parallels breaking down at certain key points, another thing that is a negative on the film is that it resorts to making humans the boogeyman. This is a tired narrative that seems to never die: we are the scourge of the earth, like parasites, raping the planet, and we even oppress poor aliens who arrive on our doorstep, blah blah. Hollywood and the media loves that story, but I’m tired of seeing it trotted out in cliche’ like fashion so much.
All in all, I give the movie a B for philosophical depth, and a B- overall–the ending is quite unsatisfactory, and the violence is just too much…very bloody, not for the faint of heart. While the parallels break down at certain points between District 9 and our world, and though it trots out a few hackneyed cliche’s, it raises several important philosophical questions.
