If You Can't Say Anything Nice...

I've been a little on the fence about the movie District 9, but nonetheless went to see it a second time earlier this week. The first time I'd seen it to make sure that it was fine for Aidan and Brennan, the second time with them. Yes, people and aliens blow up, language is used, but we make a habit of talking about what we watch and the decisions that are made; those boys are learning to use their critical faculties when watching movies or TV, which is damned important.

Some friends have expressed concern or even dismay about the film. Tobias Buckell had an interesting response that I used later to talk with the boys, and Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor responded to a lot of problems she identified with the movie, especially the treatment of the Nigerians, which as you might be able to imagine was a subject somewhat close to her.

My take? Simply put, District 9 is not the astonishing and complex take on apartheid that many reviewers say it is, ("Jo'burg," Lisa? You've spent so much time there you can call it that?) and coming from a middle class white Canadian background, I can't very well speak to much of the background that leads to complaints from elsewhere about the director being a racist. But based on some concerns I've read (often in comment threads, and not necessarily in the two links I supply above) I can point out some of the things I did see:

• There did not appear to any conscious decision to make blacks appear worth less than whites by virtue of not giving them names during talking head interviews in the documentary section. If "man on the street" interviews were done, no names were given. If experts of major players were interviewed, they were identified. This included the head of MNU and Fundiswa (and more about him in a bit)
• Questions about why there only seemed to be one intelligent alien (I won't use the derogatory appellation) were answered to my satisfaction by the presence of the control module underneath his shack. Just how intelligent he was to lead them all there in the first place I'll leave to others
• Naming that alien Christopher Johnson was a definite nod to the colonial habit to either assign Anglicized names to slaves or servants, or for those same individuals to adopt such a name. Note that "Anglicized" does not necessarily mean proper so-called Christian names, since Nadine Gordimer's July's People (which I freely riffed on in my short story "Summer's Humans") has the whites name their servant July, rather than allow him his own name and thus denying him that one piece of humanity. In the movie, substitute whatever the aliens call themselves for the word "humanity."
  
• While it was heavy-handed and not handled very well, the Nigerian leader's desire to take and consume alien body parts was mirrored by MNU's desire to do the same, although in their case "consume" had a slightly different definition. That said, both "mystical" Nigerian gangsters and "rational" multinational scientists and executives want essentially the same thing, and both quite obviously will stop at nothing to attain it
• On first viewing even I was embarrassed by the female Nigerian witch doctor
• The name "MultiNational United" showed a real paucity of imagination
• Back to MNU's treatment of the aliens. In truth, the only human who really comes off well (aside from Wikus, who has a very late conversion) is Fundiswa, who we are told is in jail because he blew the whistle on MNU's illegal activities (a cursory search of the web seems to indicate that South Africa's whistle blower laws are not very good, so maybe his being tossed in the clink is accurate). It seems that every single human, black or white, is not on the side of angels when it comes to the aliens. The exceptions to this would be the "human rights" (really?) protesters, but we only see them as a faceless mob holding signs. They're background noise, a placeholder as MNU vehicles move from one locale to another. Otherwise, the eye cast on humanity in this movie is very jaundiced indeed
• The MNU military "cowboys" were an overt nod to Afrikaaner paramilitary forces, with token blacks allowed on board so we could pretend they weren't another cliche

All that said, I still enjoyed the film, although it isn't the highlight of the movie year. Not even the highlight of the SF movie year, which at the moment is Moon, with Avatar still to come.

Labels: movies, race