Political Seafood: What's Real in District 9

Attention: Contains spoilers.

District 9 is well worth seeing. It may look sensationalist and sci-fi (it does star prawnish aliens slumming it up in a militarized Johannesburg) but it contains enough realistic elements to keep the plot current, and often scary, in the way that catastrophic news is scary, subverting our everyday ease with the knowledge that well being is ephemeral.

The basic story takes place 20 years after an alien ship has broken down in the sky above Johannesburg. Well intentioned humans have retrieved the ill and starving aliens and established them in filthy refugee camps that are eerily reminiscent of both the post-Katrina FEMA trailer parks and the real slums of Johannesburg. As the aliens grow despondent in the face of unemployment, racism, interment in refugee camps, and permanent estrangement from home, they begin to act out, sometimes committing acts of violence against humans. As you can guess, the South African populace and government respond to the aliens' behavior with that particular blend of militarism, ownership and fear of the unknown that is the trademark of the modern nation state. When the movie begins, the alien affairs branch of the government (MNU) has decided to issue eviction notices to the alien inhabitants of District 9 and move them all 250 kilometers outside of the city.

If you know a little about the history of apartheid then you will get this reference to the independent homelands that the white South African government set up as a means of sequestering, denationalizing and controlling black South Africans. Like the alien homeland being established in District 9, these homelands were policed; likewise, both homelands devolved into crime-ridden ghettos full of angry people. The sociopolitical disaster that was apartheid evolved into a protracted and violent struggle for black independence, but it is not this struggle that the movie copies as the plot progresses. Instead, the movie seems to follow the more recent violence in South African slums between black South Africans and illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe. In the past year Zimbabweans and other aliens have been murdered and burned out of their homes by furious citizens afraid that the immigrants are taking the few jobs available in South Africa's weak economy.

This intra-slum violence is referenced in the relationship that District 9 explores between the aliens and a Nigerian gang squatting in District 9 in order to supply the aliens with desired goods (cat food, for some reason) and acquire alien weaponry (which no human can actually use). The Nigerian boss also engages witch doctors, who tell him that murdering and eating the flesh of the aliens will allow him to acquire their strength, intelligence, and ability to use their advanced technology. Ritual amputations and murders like this do still occur in parts of Africa today, and the movie makes a strong visual statement about the barbarity and idiocy of such "magic."


Alien rebellion is mentioned in the film, but the true focus is on the fears and actualization of miscegenation, and on the ways in which we tend to underestimate the abilities of people when we don't speak their language or understand their culture. The film highlights the political tactic of impoverishing people in order to disenfranchise them; its images of aliens corralled into fenced compounds resonate because there are people in South Africa and elsewhere who really live this way. I referenced Hurricane Katrina earlier; what violence and hopelessness are we engendering by treating our own citizens like aliens, too antithetical to the American dream to touch?


It's impressive that District 9, a mock-umentary that indulges in human-alien sex humor, sight gags, and stereotypical characterizations of shady, sadistic government agencies and brutish soldiers, manages to be simultaneously hard-hitting and entertaining. While the government and military characters are painted with broad strokes, the main characters--Wikus, a clumsy MNU officer, and the ironically named Christopher Johnson, alien genius--are given pathos and greater dimensionality. Wikus's horror at turning into an alien and his growing, grudging respect for Christopher, while well-trodden movie fodder, are sincere and engaging. And Christopher defies alien film convention by eschewing violence; if anything, Christopher's technical genius and self-appointed savior role mark him as the movie's hero.

District 9 doesn't do anything new as a blockbuster sci-fi film, but it's the first high budget fantasy I've seen that acts so simply as an allegory for contemporary political and humanitarian issues without being polemical or contrived. The viewer isn't lectured to by the film's focus on human inhumanity; rather, she is implicated in it, and forced to watch what we do to ourselves and our own.

And we wonder why extraterrestrial life won't come to Earth.