Ben:
Just when you think you might be watching a unique and engaging scenerio become a fully developed treatment of its potential, District 9 gets stupid and then stupider and then even stupider. Totally squandering an initially intelligent premise, politically reactionary from the get-go but conceptually creative nonetheless, District 9 soon morphs into a The Fly, The Fugitive and RoboCop, in that order, with a little Escape From New York hood colour to boot. All the while trying to make good on a plot that gets so threadbare halfway through, one can only reckon that the film's producer reckoned the audience would simply stop caring and take it for being the excuse for action that it is.
In an attempt to stifle my vocal criticism of the CGI illusion of guts splattering against the camera lens, Max declared that it was essentially a video game. Out of the mouths of babes, his intention to defend the film notwithstanding. The failure of the narrative to congeal on its own terms is only outdone by the discombobulated motivation of the protagonist. This lacks coherence not because the unfortunate character is compelled to undergo so many terrible transformations. No, the absence of a meaningful psychological core to the man is due to the character being nothing more than a meat puppet for the ludicrous tale, which has the unmitigated gall to take on a moralistic air before the smoke clears.
This last aspect is what really pisses me off about District 9. Ostensibly an allegory about the plight of the refugee subjected to draconian xenophobia (complete with a quasi-Arabic soundtrack in case any WASP missed the righteous relevance for the world today), District 9 is at bedrock what my dear ol' dad would have called pre-fascist shit. Instead of uniting humanity through sheer collective awe and common purpose for peace, the arrival of the aliens does not alter the nature of humanity or the course of civilization in the slightest. It's concentration camp business-as-usual when you park your ship above our earth, you freaky crustaceans; don't say we didn't warn ya, why dontcha just go back where ya came from?
But even more offensive to me is the presentation of a massive population previously in possession of the most advanced technical knowledge reduced to lumpen proletarian ghetto barbarians. As if they would not as a society carry their higher intellectual ability into whatever challenge confronted them, however hostile and destabilizing. And not just their gizmo know-how; their kinship structures, their educational methods, their traditional ethics, their metaphysical concepts, etc. The film strips the aliens of any shared subjectivity whatsoever. They are wholly without community, culture, consciousness. Yet District 9 has the nerve to look upon these downtrodden souls as oppressed people and the film takes it upon itself to save them. To say this is patronizing speciesism in the film's fictitious future is to touch upon what is actually racist today about the film.
But wait. There is a single alien household in the shanty town that is positively personified. It contains a lone scientist-type who has lost his only nameless friend to police brutality and has assistance only from his young son, little more than a functional extension of himself. In short, he is a solitary figure. Miracle of miracles, he has cobbled together a lab that will enable him to fire up the trippy toys he needs to lead his tribe out of Egypt... blah blah blah. Of course, this is your run-of-the-mill liberal individualism at work yet again in movies; you know the line, drama demands attention to specific, concrete persons and doesn't work with social groups. And the deeper political ramification is just as standard, to deny the need for a broad-based resistance movement, a network of cells supporting an organized mass formation engaged in struggle. This is ideologically offputting in the extreme. But it hardly matters this time out because this would-be rebel alien is even more of a hollow character than the main human character; indeed, the former feels like nothing more than a plot device for the lame maneuvers of the latter.
And Dan:
Ben, here is my original take on the film
2 comments:
Monica P's review:
I watched District 9 on my iPod while in transit on an airplane, then read your review on Cinemania. I agree with most of what you say, although it was a summer action movie and should be considered in that light despite its more original plot (more original than Transformers anyway) in that genre.
I feel you were a bit hard on how downtrodden the aliens are in their situation; no intelligence, community, resistance and solidarity is evident. This is true. But this is also a group that has been totally oppressed and brutalized over a 20 year period. Brutalizing oppression tends to lead to brutal behavior. So if we are to take the allegory in the film at all seriously, we have to see the breakdown of the aliens' culture in light of realities like members of black townships in apartheid South Africa killing each other with rubber tire 'necklaces' set on fire, or of West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinian young people who have grown up to believe the only thing worth doing is to be a suicide bomber, or of inter-gang violence in US urban ghettoes. These people have been to some extent dehumanized by their
longterm oppressions.
Therefore, I don't have the problem you did with how savage the alien slum was. Plus, there was a brief mention that these were the 'worker-bees' of their own civilization, lacking the skills possessed by the engineer and his son who escape. Is this more individualistic Hollywood Christian mythology bunk? Of course it is! Is it a video game? Yes, Max gets points for that. But was I entertained by it,and even at moments genuinely engaged by the Kafka-like journey of the protagonist? Yes to that too. Unlike The Fly, where there is little room for empathy (in the hero himself) as the hero becomes 'the Other', here we see him developing empathy (albeit of a highly destructive bent as he slaughters his fellow humans) towards the 'prawns' he has helped to oppress and is now mutating into himself. I too wish the screenplay was better-written and characters more developed, but overall I took it as it came and got the metaphors at work in the midst of the carnage.
Ben's L's retort:
Ms. P, while I refuse to consider a film in light of the fact that it was released as a summer action movie - this is some sort of genre excuse? - I thank you for your comment. Your defense of the film is for me unconvincing because it rests on ignoring the plot premise that these are aliens from another planet. You skip this in order to grasp them as allegorical for the Other. I also address in my review the presentation Otherness in the film, but not idealistically as you do; i.e., disregarding the physical embodiment of the subjectivity recognized in the allegory. But let's pay attention to this material form.
It is highly problematic having non-human beings stand in for the allegorical dehumanization of humans beings. I appreciate your moral sensitivity to the allegory but my point is that a critique of dehumanization cannot get off the ground unless you have first established that it is happening to humans to begin with. You must start with whatever it is you designate as definitive about humanity and associate this with the subjectivity portrayed . You must acknowledge this from the get-go in the narrative. This is not done by the film, as I am at pains to point out in my review. Indeed, I go so far as to suggest that the allegory at work in District 9 has racist implications, so impossible is it for the audience to identify with the aliens as a society. As a society. This is what's at issue. The individual engineer with the brains to escape is not enough. Because according to Mr. Cracker, the rare nigger who can keep up with Mr. Cracker is the exception that proves the racist rule.
The problem is entrenched by the fact that these are not aliens metaphorically, Other-fied humans, as it were. No, these are literally aliens. A species from another planet that has travelled across the universe to Earth no less! If anything, they would be more advanced than humans; i.e., more human than humans, so to speak. And excuse me but this braininess would apply to the 'worker-bees' of their civilization too. You would have me believe that 20 years of brutalizing oppression would have stripped them of their species-being, (to use a term from the young Karl Marx). This is bullocks. It's unconvincing enough that we would be ruling over them and not vice versa. But even accepting this, they would not be 'just brutes'.
Add the final insult for maximum bio-aesthetic shock value - they are basically big bugs. Did we stay awake in Sunday School long enough to empathize with the plight of these poor, ugly critters who are nevertheless also God's children? Thanks heavens, we did. We can feel good about ourselves for not exterminating all of these brutes, these bugs, these Others. But do scuttle back to your spaceship, you filthy insects, and do go away forever. Cleanliness is next to godliness. We run a tidy planet in this neck of the cosmos.
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