District 9 (2009)

3 months ago

SYMBOLISM and ‘SPLOSIONS: The Delicate Balance of District 9

by Mills Baker

That American culture in 1968 had as some of its chief preoccupations race, the Cold War, and the relationship of the persecuted individual against a sea of conformity made George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead subversive, resonant, even tragic. But it was only because Night of the Living Dead was thrilling that it became a classic: its symbolism, its intellectualism, had to be worn, and lightly at that, by something far more important: its appeal.

As Duke Ellington said of complexly artistic jazz, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing,” and it is even truer of film: the cleverly allegorical, profoundly serious, overweeningly didactic movie that bores is forgotten before it’s over, while a movie that audiences enjoy can carry into their minds the most revolutionarily provocative or difficult ideas. This is what story does: it experientially opens us. The plodding, moralistic movie lacks story and compensates with ideas: cheap currency in a world of mass literacy where we all consider ourselves pundits.

I thought of Night of the Living Dead after leaving District 9 because, as I reflected on how much I loved Neill Blomkamp’s movie I was also preparing for the onslaught of analysis I’d surely soon encounter: the film, it has been said, is a fable about apartheid, about the Iraqi occupation, about racism, about classism, about corporatism, about conformity, about war, about “othering,” about technology, and so on. I shuddered to imagine how, as after the release of the lamentably facile Matrix films, we’d have to endure an avalanche of self-congratulatory intellectual preening: “Dude, there is so much philosophy in The Matrix!” Thoughtful people, I worried, would run amok with District 9.

Thoughtful people have, indeed, run amok with science-fiction as a whole: it is a genre that seems to invite the subordination of storytelling to systems of ideas; it is an ideological genre, a political genre. Indeed, it is often the case that everything about a science-fiction story will be wonderful - the worlds, the imagined class structures, the technologies that exemplify how material change changes little, the myths - except the story. With flat, symbolic characters, conflicts as mannered as a bird’s mating ritual, and relations dictated by dry fiat rather than the internal logic of the story, science fiction movies are quite often as pretentious as any major motion pictures can be.

This is hard to forgive: the sermonizing science-fiction movie informing us, usually, that humans are cruel, war is terrible, pollution is bad, corporations exist only to profit, applauds itself and its fans for recognizing what all know, while punishing the rest of us by being as much fun as a lecture from a policeman. Yes, officer, I know how fast I was going; yes, I am aware that paving the planet will result in unseemly citiscapes in a permanent rain.

The problem is common to all narrative art: overtly didactic stories aren’t stories but vehicles for ideas which would be more persuasive in essay form. Characters which symbolize aren’t real, have no depth, bore us, serve as puppets for ideas; enacted conflicts which seek to “represent” our world tend to reduce our world in complexity, making good and evil clear in precisely the way they aren’t in reality.

Avoiding dull didacticism doesn’t mean a film must not have ideas, but that it must allow them to fall lightly onto its story, overlapping or coming into conflict as they may with what matters most: the narrative. Films from Blade Runner to Brazil have varying degrees of social commentary behind them, but they share propulsive stories that engage viewers viscerally. Ideas are allowed to emerge, not to dictate, the film; there is no moment of epiphany, no gentle lecture from a superstar, no Mission to Mars or The Day the Earth Stood Still faux-profundity. If you like, replicants are confronting the same mortality we all must and rage against their creator as we do; if you don’t, well: it’s quite a fight sequence.

Fight sequences are among the many riveting elements of District 9, as is a fascinating combination of cinematic styles: it shifts easily through the modes of a documentary, an assembly of surveillance footage, an ordinary action film, a moving character drama, and back again. One scarcely notices that what begins with standard documentary fare - such as academic interviews - slowly develops an omniscient camera perspective. This integration of documentary into cinematic narrative is both effective – making the audience more sensitive and attentive - and an idea in itself, a message about the way fact and fiction coexist.

In addition, the effect of the changes is unbalancing: one is never totally certain what sort of movie one is seeing, and therefore one doesn’t know – a rare pleasure - what sort of ending one approaches, the case with ordinary life as well. I teared up and I laughed and I raged and I pulled for certain characters over others, but was always afraid that another change in emotional tone, in structure, in outcome approached.

When Nabokov says “Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash,” this is what he means. District 9 is clearly preoccupied with style, structure, form, pacing, and the details of a great story. The great ideas present in its world – meaningful ideas about class and race and the UN/coalition style combination of militarization and bureaucracy, some of which I did think brilliant - are secondary and emergent. If they weren’t, they’d be more hogwash of the usual sort, the thinly-veiled polemics and patronizing lessons of so much cheesy science fiction.

There were some flaws, of course, principally a few purely evil figures who served a role but couldn’t exist in the real world – a world in which even Lenin wept at the opera - and some parts of the movie engage more than others. But the incredible ambiguity of the main characters, and the deft manipulation of the audience’s sympathies – which veer from person to person, group to group, in the same fickle and inconsistent way they do in real life - was brilliant. It was a movie that I enjoyed in very simple ways and more reflective ways at once, and which I’ve not stopped thinking about for several days.

That doesn’t mean it was a great film – whatever that entails - but for its scope and aims, it was extremely well-executed and, to me, exemplary of how to couple thoughtful ideas with a damn good story.