District 9 is great myth, better seen than read about. So go see it if you haven't. In the meantime, I'll do my mythology-scholar thing, and you can read about it if you want when you come back.
Image here.
I went in to District 9 thinking it was going to be a major triumph for me in the iron stomach department. I'd read a review of the movie warning that it had graphic violence, and lots of it. I believe the phrase "multiple dismemberments" was mentioned, along with more f-bombs than exploding ones. Usually that's a deal breaker for me, but the film has been getting such positive buzz I figured I'd take one for my readers and post about it.
I saw the film with impressionable young sprout dear son, who is a newly-minted junior in high school and driving now. He was seriously bent by seeing the director's cut of Blade Runner on DVD, so I told him that if he wanted, we could leave early. Son brushed off my suggestion like a wildebeest slapping his tail at a fly.
The simile is apt. District 9 is shot in South Africa, a place that would seem to be fertile for good stories. I posted on the Iliad-like Tsotsi (made in Botswana) a couple of years ago. Both these films are gritty and grace-filled with the kind of all-or-nothing urgency of grace pushed to the edge.
But unlike Tsotsi, District 9 is at its core a "summer movie," (as someone who'd seen it said afterwards), one that's intended to be an exciting, fun-filled romp.
Gritty, grace-filled, and fun. Like I said, great myth.
District 9 is science fiction, which is to say it has aliens and an Independence Day-like flying saucer hovering over a city (here, Johannesburg). But unlike the 1996 blockbuster, which trades on earthlings' dread of extraterrestrials as incomprehensibly hostile to all things earthly, the aliens in this movie are pitiable refugees, their mothership disabled.
As the movie explains via its documentary-style storytelling, the aliens are given a section of the city called District 9, which becomes a slum set apart from human society by a wall. The movie revolves around what should be done for and to the aliens, who in addition to being pitiable, are also disgustingly inhumane.
So what qualifies District 9 as great myth?
First of all, great myth entertains. It holds us for the entire time the story is being told. There wasn't a moment during the movie when I wasn't enthralled. This happens very seldom to me, since I am so analytical about stories. There is a moment where the ordinary guy hero, Wikus van de Werwe (played by Sharlto Copley, a walking amphetamine overdose), is shooting his way into an underground bunker. It had been a while since the movie started, so I thought, "This is the end. He won't get out of this, and this will be the end of the movie."
In fact, we were only something like halfway through.
A couple more times I thought the same thing. What can happen now? Obviously this is the moment where the hero dies. And yet the plot continued to unfold.
Second, great myth hits us where we live. The South African writer and director, Neill Blomkamp, takes pains at first to build up the aliens as ugly, disgusting, subhuman, and unworthy of our esteem. But gradually, gradually, with the introduction of two alien characters (importantly, a father and son), we come to see the aliens as the good guys and the multinational exploiting corporate mercenaries as the villains (Blackwater International, anyone?).
There's nothing like finding an underdog where there was no underdog before, and finding a villain where there was no villain before. This is a summer movie in that there are men (and aliens) in white hats and men in black hats, and it's not tough to figure out which is wearing which.
That's why towards the end people were cheering whenever an evil mercenary was splooshed by the super-powerful alien weaponry. What a turnaround: the aliens are killing the guys with the helmets and the guns, and we're cheering.
Third, we welcome the humanity, grace, and tenderness within the destruction. A great story has depth, and levels. Within the serendipity of cheering for the aliens, there is the honest surprise of a relationship that develops in the triangle of the human, Wikus, and the alien father and son. Americans, as a nation, do value community within diversity, we do want to give people second chances, we do want to think the best of others, despite our racial past.
District 9 carves out for its viewers a tender awakening to the "humanity" in the aliens, with not even a smidgen of sentimentality or emotional cheating. The film is shot with a brutal filter that washes out color, and most of the movie is set in shantytowns that are among the ugliest places I have ever seen in the world. Yet, you can't help feeling optimistic about the ability of the human (and alien) spirit to transcend its circumstances.
I like about South Africa that despite its painful history, it continues to try to be honest as a country about the ability to heal and not to deny. That corresponds with my ethos for sure. So I'm going to love a movie that shows what South Africa is about.
That's the tip of the iceberg. There's plenty more here, but for now we'll call a halt. As I've written before, I don't consider myth to be exclusively ethereal stories about the gods that were told thousands of years ago. Myth is here, today, with us, allowing us to cope with our everyday anxieties and the tough paradoxes of life. It may be that District 9 will be forgotten in a few weeks, years, or months. But stories just like it will continue to be told, as long as we are human.
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