PARSING THE MEANINGS OF NEIL BLOMKAMP'S DISTRICT 9
Unlike many critics, I liked the $30 million South African-shot sci-fi feature District 9 better as it went along, finding the apartheid metaphor set-up a little awkward and unrewarding. The more I thought about it, the more I found some of the movie's strategies kind of contradictory to its implied social conscience. But the film works as a straight-out action film, which why its is looking like this week's box-office winner. It's easy to get off on the movie's pulp-y energy and a vibe that reminded me of Robocop and the first Terminator movie.
For a discussion of the metaphors of District 9, I recommend you head over to Blockbuster at L Magazine, which consists of a long dialogue between Benjamin Sutton and Henry Stewart entitled, "What's That in the Sky? Is it a Spaceship? No, it's a Metaphor!" They hash all this out in fascinating detail. It's the only piece of film criticism I can think of that references South Park, the Old Testament, Franz Kafka, and Gary Shandling.
Two excerpts. First, from Stewart:
So, Ben, the director of District 9, the fairly ambitious, sometimes fake-documentary about extraterrestrial settlements in South Africa and accompanying government perfidy, has been making the rounds, telling reporters his film is an allegory for apartheid. It’s unusual for a filmmaker to be so blunt about his film’s Meaning: it seems to imply that Blomkamp is a bit desperate to establish that his is a Serious Film—that the blockbuster-of-the-week guise is but a mere trapping.
That proves to be more of an albatross than a virtue: because District 9 packs some social-issues seriousness into its sci-fi wackiness, I’m tempted to hold it to a higher standard than it could live up to; the movie is superlative popcorn fare, but disappointing Cinema: wouldn’t you agree?
I think part of it might have to do with the Mississippi Burning Problem: Blomkamp tries to tell the story of an oppressed minority—the E.T.s—not through their own eyes but through the story of one of the oppressors—the humans. Not that, here, it’s something to be offended about, but it may serve as a hint as to why the film doesn’t quite work. Our protagonist, Wickus (the capable Sharlto Copley, in his feature debut), is a mid-level bureaucrat for Multi National United (take that multinational corporations!); he’s less an everyman than a schmuck, and not really a serviceable entry point into Blomkamp’s thoroughly realized alternate reality.
And, later in the conversation, from Sutton:
This brings up another of District 9’s most obvious intertexts: Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The despicable Wickus — imagine The Office’s Michael Scott transposed into a situation where he decides the fates of millions and his racist behavior is encouraged rather than awkwardly tolerated — is a perfectly Kafkaesque bureaucratic peon who begins to transform into the thing that disgusts him most. Of course, Blomkamp has neither the guts to abandon his hero to fate as Kafka did, nor the masochistic glee to hone in on the transformation’s unpleasant psychological toll, as David Cronenberg did in The Fly. This is a blockbuster, after all, and though it’s nice to see an action film that puts its politics front and center after so many damaging “apolitical” movies this summer, it’s hard (as you noted) not to hold Blomkamp to a higher standard because of his self-conscious foregrounding of subtext.
Over at First Showing, Alex Billington has a detailed account of the 380-day promotional saga that led up to the opening, and at Dork Shelf there's a whole host of embeds of Blomkamp's commercial work.
Here's Alive in Joburg, Blomkamp's short that kickstarted the project:
And here's Blomkamp's short for Halo 3, the aborted project that led him and producer Peter Jackson to shift gears and expand Alive in Joburg into a feature.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/15/2009 11:55:00 AM
Comments (7)
Yeah, it was a good action film. I felt baited and switched though. What got me excited about the film was the doc-style naturalistic acting from non-pro actors. That's something really difficult to pair with genre filmmaking, because while you can get really realistic performances out of nonprofessionals if you handle them skillfully, the more you ask them to react to imaginary stuff, or to deviate from their own natural reactions, the more you veer off into unpredictable and messy territory- but- if you can get those naturalistic performances in a fantastic setting, you get to breathe the rarified air of authenticity. That's something that Science Fiction almost never gets to do, and the films that make the fantastic feel authentic are almost always my favorite films. Realism doesn't have to always be banal, and you shouldn't always have to suspend disbelief when you are building new worlds.
So, I don't want to dissuade anybody from seeing District 9- it's a very entertaining action movie, but I'm tempted to judge it by the wrong criteria based on what I am looking for, and what I thought the trailers might be offering. #posted by Wiley @ 8/15/2009 5:55 PM
I think the movie was great as an action movie...The acting was good...as well!!! #posted by magjay @ 8/15/2009 7:06 PM
The acting was fine, but it was stylized acting with some set-dressing naturalistic acting. When I say naturalistic acting, I mean that sort of startling, 'he must have shoehorned documentary footage about something else into a narrative format, Herzog-style' performing. I don't think those performances are necessarily better than stylized ones, except that if you want to be effective, you need to generally go with one or the other. Nobody is believable in Robocop, for instance (except the one kooky guy who gets interviewed about police strikes and says 'It's a free country but there ain't nothin' free') but that's not the point. There are still some awesome performances in it (Kurtwood Smith is fucking great), but it's over the top, goofy, fun. Acting style depends totally on the context and the mood that the director sets.
I felt a weird shift between Blomkamp's shorts, where his big selling point seemed to be blending that documentary-style acting (and I refuse to call people 'non-actors'. If you have a camera pointed at you and you know it's there, you're acting). I didn't see much of that in this, and it took me a while to shift gears and enjoy D9 as goofy, +20-points-for-headshots fun. #posted by Wiley @ 8/15/2009 10:14 PM
What a ridiculous, uninformed conversation. Genre films and sci-fi films, in particular, always take place in worlds that are clear reflections of the current, real-life world that we live in. And are always treated by intellectuals as second class films, while they continue to trumpet high brow junk with simplistic cinematic style and self-importance.
There were no mixed signals in the film just because the hero displayed some disgusting racism. The story was straight out of Watermelon Man, where the racist became black. Did you notice that there were more black people in this movie than in any Hollywood movie in recent memory that wasn't aimed at African Americans?
The scene where the thuggish clowns harrassed the smart, good-father prawn and his cute little kid was breathtaking in its cruelty, but only because the parallels in real life are so easy to pinpoint and so rarely seen in movies.
District 9 is, hopefully, the shape of things to come, a mainstream action film from another country. So you get a hero that is a bureaucratic clown instead of the workaholic tough guy whose only flaw is that he's too damn good. Imagine that getting through development meetings where studio heads worry about the character being sympathetic. I saw Taken recently, another foreign film in English, and the hero in that is unrelenting, cruel, cold - refreshing. And it has nothing to do with being politically correct.
Then there's the mishmash of styles, which I thought worked great. What was that film within the film, a documentary, a news show, a corporate video - it didn't matter. It reminded of Borat, which also broke ground with what Hollywood would distribute into theaters, and also, basically, came from England.
Hollywood can't make good films anymore. They're bogged down in economics that don't work, marketing meetings that dominate development, corporate fear of saying anything that might offend, broad international markets that have to be catered to. #posted by pangofilms @ 8/20/2009 10:04 AM
I saw the film last night and I'm still not sure what I feel about it. It had some serious flaws and at times it almost dropped in parody, but it's really got under my skin - which I guess is the sign of a good film. Plus the cinematography was stunning.
As pangofilms just said 'sci-fi films, in particular, always take place in worlds that are clear reflections of the current, real-life world that we live in' - the thing that jarred most for me was the whole economic thing - with so much money and technology at stake I can't really envisage a situation where the aliens would be abandoned in slums and frankly the MNU's research looked pretty half-arsed.
In the real world such slums and shanty town happen in situations where it isn't in enough of anybody else's economic interest to lift people from poverty. #posted by John @ 9/24/2009 6:40 AM
I really enjoyed this movie. Yes there are MINOR things that don't quite add up, but then it's possible to find faults with any movie. The story, the acting, the action are all great. It's a very refreshing sci-fi film.
The comparisons that the film makes towards apartheid made me think about the past and how things have changed. It also made me think about what still needs to change with regards to refugee camps, racism, poverty, crime. Any movie that can make people think deeply and at the same time take them on an adventure is a great movie for me. #posted by Steven Shergill @ 9/27/2009 7:30 AM
District 9 was very thought provoking. The way it used TV-like footage, news reporters, and commentary made one wonder if this has already happened. District 9 seems to address questions that have circulated for a long time, such as; have aliens really landed; what would they be like; what future alien landings will occur; and what is their purpose for the future? In District 9, Wikus van der Merwe, the agent who works for Multi-National United (sound like New World Order?) is helped by the two aliens after he had been exposed to a DNA-altering spray. Wilkus slowly transforms into an alien. He wants to get cured and turned back into a human. The two aliens promise to help him transform back into a human. They end up taking off, but they promise to return with a fleet of their fellow aliens. Interestingly enough, they plan on ending the human tyranny over their fellow aliens in district 9. It sounds like judgement. #posted by Joel Gray @ 10/05/2009 8:13 PM
