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by Thornton Kimes “It’s about the gentrification of all aliens Sometimes I think Peter Jackson is God. I read “The Lord of the Rings” before going into high school, but didn’t really understand it until Jackson started directing the movies and I re-read the whole thing. Tolkein may or may not have understood eco-consciousness, but his Ents sure as hell did, and the Hobbits got theirs back when the Fellowship of the Ring returned from their adventures. Jackson has struck gold, again, with “District 9”, an original science fiction dystopian present/future movie, a story about aliens crashlanding right in the middle of one of the most infamous poverty-stricken areas on Earth—South African shanty-towns (and places like Lesotho, which I think are still classified as “countries” inside South Africa) which, despite the “end” of Apartheid, haven’t disappeared into economic prosperity for all. Which happens to be true, as well as brutally displayed on the big screen. There is so much to talk about here, whether or not you like/love science fiction/fantasy (my first love in reading, along with superhero comic books…which I can’t afford to buy anyway…). District 9 reminds me of “Alien Nation” (A. N.), the movie (1988) and the tv series (1989), but the D-9 aliens, nicknamed “Prawns” (replace that with “Wetback”, “Nigger”, “Redneck”, “White Trash”, “Fag”…) aren’t as cuddly and human-looking as the stranded A.N. ex-slaves. One of the “Alien Nation” aliens became a cop, teamed up with a human. There have been numerous novels written based on video games, tv series (Star Trek, for one), etc. In one “Alien Nation” novel, SLAG LIKE ME (“Slag” was the nasty slang term for the you-know-who), a Black journalist became a Slag via plastic surgery—and was discovered to be a black-skinned human by a White racist…who murdered him. Simple motives for devastating events like murders tend to generate unintended consequences and ricochet through peoples’ lives like old-school steel pinball game balls. The “Prawns” crash-land and their mother-ship hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa, for 20 years before the events of the movie begin. Anti-gravity anyone? The alien mothership and the alien ghetto have been getting on everyone’s nerves, and encouraging the local crime bosses to ever greater outrages, so the authorities decide to move their uninvited guests to “District 10”, much farther from the city and, at least on tv, “cleaner” and not chaotic. So you get the idea nobody would hire one of these guys to be a cop. The lie-of-the-budget-cut that POOR Magazine frequently talks about, poor folks given only crumbs, forced to fight other brands of poor folk for the limited supply of crumbs, and then forced to endure things like San Francisco Mayors and California Governors dissing us and slashing the crumbs into ever smaller pieces…comes out brilliantly, and with a subtle visual twist of the knife—a poor Black South African talks to the television news media about hating and fearing the Prawns, because they steal their stuff and then kill them…as a Prawn digs through a dumpster behind the person being interviewed. The aliens have human names, we never learn any others (echoes of American slavery). Did humans just decide this didn’t matter, or is there some other reason for this unanswered detail? “Bad News” Bruce Allison, elder scholar and so much more at POOR Magazine, also saw District 9. “People were walking out of the theater, acting like they were looking for ‘Star Wars’, or maybe they’d left their brains at the candy counter,” he said in a conversation with me. “District 9” isn’t “Independence Day”, though I enjoyed that movie. It turned the aliens into the eco-nasties, instead of little ol’ us struggling with self-inflicted global warming, but did anyone notice? District 9 forces you to take time to understand whazzup. A fictional documentary with bursts of “real life” events as the eviction/gentrification of the Prawns gets rolling, awkwardly and chaotically, the construction of the characters and how much we develop any sort of empathy, dislike, or hatred for them, is as skillfully done as in Slumdog Millionaire. The Prawns’ language makes it even harder to identify with them. Imagine my shock at discovering how much I did as the movie went along, and the various heroes and villains get under your skin in so many interesting and disturbing ways. I even learned to like and/or respect the man appointed to “lead” the effort to move the Prawns (a man you could trust to maybe do your plumbing, or file your income taxes, but--), a character who I think is the best definition of “fictional love/hate relationship” I’ve so far encountered. Walking a mile in someone’s shoes, or traveling light years that way, is a staple of magic realism and science fiction. Think Kafka and the man who became a cockroach. There are science fiction tales that take Kafka’s cockroach for a ride on that boobytrapped bus in “Speed”, but few better than this one. If it is difficult for you, the reader, to wrap your head around someone wanting to be a different sex, how about being forced to change species? You think he’s the perfect man to take the fall for his boss when things inevitably go wrong, but when this gentrification-on-steroids goes bad, it becomes what POOR Magazine staff writer Vivian Hain calls “Wrongology”. You think he’s a really shallow, If Peter Jackson never makes a “District 10” sequel, that’s okay with me. The reverberations and what-came-next ruminations will be rattling around in my head like dice for a long time. The only thing currently moving in any sort of perceptible forward-like direction in my life is POOR Magazine and POOR Press—DISTRICT 9 came along at a good time, doing what art is supposed to do, kick (insert appropriate name or pronoun) in the metaphorical ass. Ruyata’s poem does the same thing: “We didn’t create them yet and still we put them up |
Original Post Date
2000-01-01 12:00 AM
Original Body