Worrying About What's In District 9

I've been spending a lot of time over the past couple of days trying to decide how I feel about Neill Blomkamp's apartheid-with-aliens movie, and I think I've come to the conclusion that it has a chance of being remarkable.

It's somewhat surprising that there haven't been more mass-market movies about the anti-apartheid struggle, other than Cry Freedom (1987) about the life of Steve Biko, and Invictus, the Oscar-bait due later this year about Nelson Mandela's efforts to get South Africa to host the rugby world cup as an act of reconciliation. In some ways, I understand it: South Africa was somewhat overshadowed by the end of the cold war, the machinations that brought it down were a complicated combination of internal and external economics, ranging from boycotts and divestment campaigns to efforts by the Congress of South African Trade Unions, armed and peaceful struggle, and a complicated landscape of African political factions, Indian immigrants, Jews, Boers, etc. None of those things are easy to synthesize. But I am surprised that there hasn't been a significant movie about Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress (okay, maybe I'm not so surprised. The investment in Nelson Mandela's non-violent resistance image is considerable.), or a huge Mandela biopic, or even a movie about Winnie Mandela, who would be a remarkable and complex character for some actress to dig into. Or a movie about the decision to disband South Africa's nuclear weapons project. It may just be that I'm a South Africa history nut (I almost wrote my college thesis on the Congress of South African Trade Unions' decision to accept a neoliberal economy to pursue majority rule). But these are fantastic stories.

So how does all of this relate to District 9? The movie is set in South Africa, and the trailers have featured folks with a variety of local accents, and the details of the plot we know so far, that a group of aliens have been set up in a restricted zone for 30 years, sets up a very clear parallel with the township and pass sytem used to restrict the movements of black Africans under apartheid. And the more I've thought about it, I think an alien-human confrontation might be a useful metaphor for apartheid. It's one I'm slightly uncomfortable with, because it relies on an assumption that the people being imprisoned and the people imprisoning them actually are fundamentally different, which supports an underlying assumption that supported apartheid. But District 9 appears to be in part a movie about what happens to people who perpetrate an oppressive system, and what happens to people who are isolated entirely from the civilization that's chosen to imprison them. Maybe using aliens to represent a justifiable violent resistance makes us more comfortable with Umkhonto we Sizwe--or at least about talking about the fact that violent resistance to apartheid may have been necessary, even as anger against apartheid helped spur resistors to forms of violence that seem horrifying and unjustifiable, like necklacing. The attitudes of the apartheid regime are reprehensible--this was a government that did biological weapons research for use in controlling internal dissent--but it still seems worthwhile to learn how those attitudes developed, accreted, and became morally debilitating. The trailers for District 9 so far seem to suggest that the aliens just want to leave peacefully, though they are shown in violent confrontation with humans.

In other words, I think District 9 could be remarkable if it manages to walk a very fine line in terms of how it deploys and explores otherness. If its aliens can be hugely different but also sympathetic, if we can understand the humans fear but also judge it to be wrong, Blomkamp might make a movie that explains how we see things that are strange to us and grapple with them. Or it could just be a cool alien movie with eerie visuals.