District 9 - Genre and National Identity PDF

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District 9: Genre and National Identity Genre:     

Easy to recognise, more difficult to explain. Genres based on plot pattern, emotional effects, setting, theme, aesthetic, form. Change, development of genres – hybrids. Conventions and expectations. “Genre, it had always seemed to me, was a set of assumptions, a loose contract between the creator and the audience.”

Science Fiction:      

“Literature of change”. Science fiction “deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.” Different worlds and different times, dealing with actual, here-and-now issues. “What speculative fiction is good at is not the future, but the present.” Possibilities and limitations, science and technology, humanity. Subgenres: o Time travel (Back to the Future). o Aliens (Men in Black). o Space Opera (Star Wars). o Dystopian future (Mad Max Fury Road). o Apocalyptic (Armageddon). o Monsters and mutants (Godzilla). o Cyberpunk (The Matrix). o Space Westerns (Cowboys and Aliens).

Mockumentary:      

Using elements of documentary form for comic effect, parody. Handheld camera. Direct address. Interviews. Newsreel. Grainy.

Neill Blomkamp:    

Born in 1979, in Johannesburg. Immigrated to Canada at age 18. Graduated from Vancouver Film School’s 3D and Visual Effects programme in 1998. Worked in animation.

District 9 – Background and Production:  

Preceded by short film Alive in Joburg (2005). Written and directed by Blomkamp, produced by Peter Jackson.

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Won the 2010 Saturn Award for Best International Film. Nominated for four Academy Awards in 2009: Best Picture, Best Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Visual Effects. Budget: $30 Million.

Themes:     

First contact, and what happens after. Aliens humanised. Dystopia. Xenophobia, discrimination (2008 xenophobic outbursts in SA). National identity.

References made:   

Spaceship hanging above Johannesburg syline: Armageddon, Independence Day. Body transformation: The Fly. CNN-style news coverage.

South African Touches:      

Large part of its success: being a South African sci-fi. Local vs international audiences. Language. Van der Merwe. Soweto – shacks. Local actors.

Blomkamp on District 9: “My upbringing in [Johannesburg] had a massive effect on me, and I started to realize that everything to do with segregation and apartheid, and now the new xenophobic stuff that’s happening in the city, all of that dominates my mind, quite a lot of the time. Then there’s the fact that science fiction is the other big part of my mind, and I started to realize that the two fit well together. There’s no message, per se, that I’m trying to get across with the movie. It’s rather that I want to present science fiction, and put it in the environment that affected me. In the process, maybe I highlight all the topics that interest me, but I’m not giving any answers. You can take from it what you will.” Social critique:   

“District 9 utilises the generic elements of the science fiction film to critique both apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.” It both acknowledges and subverts science fiction tropes. Globalisation – private military company MNU stand in place of the apartheid government.

Xenophobia – critiqued, or reinforced?

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Apartheid era – immigrants experienced violence, this did not improve post-1994. May 2008 riots – 41 people from other African countries were killed. April 2015 – ongoing attacks, 8 deaths. The treatment of the “prawns” is metaphoric of the xenophobic violence that keeps recurring in South Africa. Also a metaphor for disenfranchised Black South Africans. However, its depiction of the Nigerians is essentialist, stereotypical, and offensive. The film was banned in Nigeria. Nigerians reduced to cannibals, warlords, gangsters, linked to voodoo and superstition. Villain: Obesandjo. The name is very similar to that of the president of Nigeria from 1999-2007, Olusegun Obasanjo. Blomkamp’s response: o “There are huge Nigerian crime syndicates in Johannesburg. I wanted the film to feel real […] That’s just how it is.” “[Unlike the alien…] the Nigerian gangsters yield no such ambiguity […] The consequences are not only offence caused to Nigerians but also, for the film, the failure of the xenophobic allegory.” The film’s offensive portrayal of Nigerians seems to run counter to its critique of xenophobia, which is, in turn, collapsed into a faltering allegory of the State of Emergency in the 1980s. History erased – first contact in 1982.

National Identity and the Other:    

The “alien” becomes a literal thing. Wikus’s transformation as an examination of the crisis of whiteness in SA? Nobel Afrikaans hero – “white man gone native”. His body becomes the site of invasion, his mutation representing the fear of infestation that drives anti-alien xenophobia.

White man gone native:      

Familiar narrative. Based on colonialist, racist thinking. Wikus is far from the typical hero. His journey challenges and undermines this. Instead of going “native”, he becomes alien. Not the big white hero.

Effacing Apartheid and Time:    

According to the film, the aliens landed in 1982. The story takes place in 2010. Apartheid entirely erased – discrimination of Black South Africans replaced with discrimination against aliens. Armond White: it makes “trash of [South Africa’s] Apartheid history by constructing a ludicrous allegory for segregation”.

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Valdez Moses: “Wikus is transformed from a staunch (and unreflective) defender of the segregationist regime that employs him into a courageous dissenter and freedom fighter who struggles on behalf of the liberation of the alien.” Metaphor: suggesting that SA in 2009 was not all that different from apartheid era? Binaries: us and them. Instead of apartheid state vs black citizens, it becomes about SA vs aliens. Premise of so many sci-fi stories: once the alien “Other” attacks, we must stand together, as we are united by a common threat or enemy. But what about when that “enemy” is not all that evil, or that alien?

Nostalgia:   

Definition: sentimental or wistful yearning for the happiness felt in a former place, time, or situation. Michael Valdez Moses: “For all its progressive anti-apartheid energies, District 9 stands as a troubling lament on behalf of South African whites for the world lost with the end of apartheid.” The problem with nostalgia: o The past is not set – different people remember different things. o Easy to forget the less pleasant aspects – idealised notions of the past. o The “miracle,” the rainbow nation narrative. o Dystopia & nostalgia: Space of remembrance – volatility and uncertainty of present.

Quotes:     

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The film gives us an “almost obsessively focussed, insistently detailed account of the workings of the Apartheid state’s repressive apparatus as it existed during the regime’s most conflictual years.” “…the metaphors and tropes of science fiction are being used to engage rather more deeply and disconcertingly with the nature of racism itself – with the way that racist ideology and discourse deals with the feared, hated, despised (and desired!) ‘Other.’” It “confronts us with our complicity with racism, by making us identify with the perspective of the racist, inviting us to feel the revulsion of the xenophobe – and then pulling the carpet from under our feet.” “Affectionately patriotic, but it frames its local and regional content by consistently ridiculing it.” Kimberly Nichele Brown: District 9 “never really fixes the conundrum of using ‘Prawns’ as a metaphor for disenfranchised blacks in the face of the existence of real blacks in South Africa who are still mainly disenfranchised in the contemporary apartheid state” and Black people are “relegated to the background”. The film “functions to reinscribe old ways of national belonging in South Africa”. Wikus’s transformation “from a white Afrikaner to an alien Other and from company man to enemy of the state represents an attempt to reconcile South Africa’s racist past and white complicity in the apartheid state with a newer, albeit counterfeit, representation of white masculinity as empathetic to the plight of the Other”. “Against this social and historical backdrop, I don’t think District 9 is deliberately nostalgic. In fact, I think at the core of Blomkamp’s South African sci-fi is a decision to reconceive the country’s screen representation of itself. However, South Africa’s history is inescapable, and Blomkamp knows this too. As a result, he attempts to solve

the middle-class whinge that afflicts film discourse in South Africa – “but why does it always have to be about apartheid?” – by making a film that is both about apartheid without mentioning it, and about xenophobia even as it taps into a deeply xenophobic vein in contemporary South African society.”...