District 9 - Disgust and Abjection PDF

Preview

Summary

Movie done in 3rd Year English. ...

Description

District 9 tells the story of Wikus van de Merwe who works for the MNU which is multinational corporation that has been charged with the removals of an alien species dubbed as Prawns. These prawns are housed in District 9, however, government and the JHB population want these prawns moved to the outskirts of the city. Wikus, an inept bureaucrat modelled on the image of Afrikaans apartheid era functionaries, is appointed to manage the removal operation. Amidst this farcical bungled process of notifying the Prawns of their imminent relocation – Wikus is exposed to an alien substance. This substance causes his body to undergo genetic mutation through which his body gradually and painfully transforms into that of a prawn. Hunted mercenaries and Nigerian gangsters for hybrid DNA, Wikus takes refuge in District 9 and forges a shaky alliance with one of the Prawns, Christopher Johnson, who escapes with Wikus’ help. The story is one of place and geography. It plays on the xenophobic attacks in SA in 2008. South-Africans felt illegal immigrants were encroaching on SA living space. JHB is divided and the spaces shown in the film are filled with violent relationships – someone is always profiting. The film also plays on District 6 evictions as well as Sharpeville events which were characterized by police invasions and Sharpeville events. The townships were spatially engineered to have wide roads because the Apartheid government knew Casspirs would have to be there at some point – which are Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles. Throughout the movie, the one main focus is the disintegration of Wikus’ body from human into alien. Focusing on the body, the film works with the affect of disgust which is the feeling of strong distaste/revulsion which registers in the body in the face of unassimilable otherness. It is a state of alarm or an acute sense of self-preservation. Disgust is characterized by 3 key features namely repulsion, proximity and fascination. We are not disgusted by things that are far from us. Disgust increases when something is closer to us. We are also fascinated by that which disgusts us. The film evokes disgust through the aliens who are disgusting to us due to their non-human form. They are insect-like creatures which make them entirely other. When shown the alien spaceship, there is slime everywhere which increases our disgust in them as it pictures them as unhygienic. They eat cat food and go through human waste both of are disgusting actions which humans find unassimilable. Showing Wikus’ transformation from human into alien further evokes disgust. The human body is in close proximity to us and creates discomfort in us as we watch it disintegrate and leak. In the early stages of his transition, Wikus bleeds black blood from his noses, starts to lose his fingernails and vomits black liquid all over his cake at his surprise party. He also eats cat food and contorts halfway through the tin with disgust – this indicating that some of his humanity remains intact. The abject is a source of anxiety around the integrity and borders of the self. The movie identifies 3 aspects relating to the abject and the human body – 1. The actualization of the self’s fear of contamination from the Other 2. The rupture of the boundary between the inside and outside of the body 3. The feeling of absolute rejection The act of abjection is an expulsion of objects that call into question the integrity of the subject and is an essential process in the formation and maintenance of a functionally

coherent subjectivity. The violent expulsions under the Group Areas Act is such a struggle – the attempted genesis of a coherent, exclusive, white Afrikaner social subjectivity necessitating the excision and disavowal of its own historic ties with creolization and the foreclosure of its integration into a larger, more complex social matrix. The fact that Wikus’ body is unable to be classified places him literally outside the realm of signification which makes him a threat to the disciplinary regimes embodied by his father-inlaw. The anxiety that is being played out here is the anxiety of the maintenance of boundaries and borders of a social order based on racial classification. The issue of hybridization is explored through the visceral body of Wikus. Wikus’ deepest fear upon seeing his hybrid arm for the first time is that his identity will be consumed by the blackness/alien. Anxieties about interracial sex are parodied in the smear campaign mounted by MNU against Wikus after he escapes from their illegal genetics’ lab. The Immorality Act had been a cornerstone of the apartheid regime’s imperative of racial purity and focus only on the purity of the white gene pool. There is question of power present in the film where hybridity is concerned. While Wikus can only register horror at his transformation at first, he soon realizes that his half-breed status allows him to use alien weaponry. This makes him desirable to both the MNU who want to harvest his organs and the Nigerians who want to eat his arm to gain access to the alien arsenal. The use of the power gained through the hybrid object of Wikus’ alien arm is liberating in the end. Wikus’ humanity is juxtaposed with Christopher’s humanity. Wikus is the embodiment of Western Humanism which is focused on the individual versus Christopher’s African Humanism which is geared towards the community. Wikus’ journey is underlined by his own selfish desire to become human again in order to avoid persecution as an alien. Christopher’s journey is underlined by his desire to free his people from the suffering here on earth in District 9. Wikus regains his humanity at the end, firstly after having run away from the battle in which the MNU captures and beats Christopher, by turning back and fighting for Christopher’s survival in order to get him and his son safely on board the mothership. The movie makes use of different modes of story telling to get the point across which creates a dialogic effect within the movie. The modes of story telling include parody which is the imitative use of words, style, attitude and tone in such a way as to make them appear ridiculous. Social critique which is picking apart reality and televised images of struggle and conflict which is reminiscent of 1980’s Apartheid-era films. Stereotype in its figurative meaning is precisely that which fails to register the real but instead reduces individuals to a type. Caricature which exaggerates as to make the subject appear ridiculous and laughable....