District 9: A (Belated) Movie Review

By John David Ebert

I finally got around to seeing Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, which is, indeed, a better film than Avatar. The difference between the two films is instructive, for Blomkamp’s film succeeds because it inherits a cliched premise–an alien invasion of the earth–which it then proceeds to subvert by turning upside down, while Cameron merely lines up a string of sci-fi cliches and assembles them with all the craftsmanship of a prefabricated tract house. Cameron’s film is the celluloid equivalent of styrofoam packaging: it makes a lot of noise, but there’s not much to it; Blomkamp’s movie, on the other hand, is fresh and inventive.

Let’s take, for instance, the premise of alien invasion, which goes back to H.G. Wells’ novel War of the Worlds: the version of it which Blomkamp inherits, though, was crystallized by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End, in which alien spacecraft begin their invasion by first mysteriously appearing and hovering over cities around the world; this scenario is standardized and repeated all the way down through the television mini-series V and Shyamalan’s Signs. In every case, though, the premise is structured around a colonialist semiotic of Masters and Subjects, of aggressive dominators (as Clarke’s “Overlords” clearly imply) and their subjugated human victims. The scenario, indeed, is a vestigial survival from the days of the nineteenth century colonialism of the earth by the British, French and German empires. The Belgian lords of the Congolese natives in Heart of Darkness is structurally isomorphic to Clarke’s Overlords and subjugated humans.

For the first time in the history of the genre, however, Blomkamp turns this scenario upside down and provides us with a “passive” invasion: we are surprised in his film to find that the alien spaceship has stalled in the air over the city of Johannesburg and that no invasion takes place: instead, humans travel up to the spaceship and crack it open like a can of sardines, where they find starving, emaciated aliens which the humans themselves then bring down to the earth and immediately cordon off in a zone which they call “District 9.”

The scenario of alien invasion has lost its colonialist signifiers because history itself has changed: today’s problem isn’t a matter of colonialists and their subjugated peoples, but an entirely new, and altogether unprecedented problem: that of what Giorgio Agamben terms peoples living in a “state of exception.” These are groups of people who, all over the planet, find themselves falling through the cracks of nationhood as globalization tightens down around the earth like a single gigantic dome. The laws of these states do not apply to such individuals since they are not considered “citizens” of their respective geographical locales. They exist in a state of exception: the law does not apply to them and they can therefore be treated with impunity. Thus, the Palestinians in Israel; or the Bantus in South Africa; or the Kurds between Iraq and Turkey; or the Bosnians in the Balkans. Such peoples find themselves largely without legal status, and are treated as “sub-humans” by their respective neighbors.

Hence, Blomkamp’s metaphor: the “aliens” in the “New World” of “Globalization” are those who find themselves without the protective macrosphere of a state. They belong to no nation and have no home: they are, to use Zygmunt Bauman’s phrase “wasted lives.” And they are, furthermore, a growing problem. The new anxiety in the age of all encompassing globalization is precisely that of who belongs where: the paradoxical effect of globalization is that it has made the issue of boundaries more evident than ever before. As we are all sent crashing pell-mell into one another, confusion and anxiety mount, for where one finds oneself on the geographical map says just about everything about one’s situation in the new era. Human rights, you say?

Under whose jurisdiction?

But of course, the side effect of the situation of a disfranchised people which finds itself playing the role of the “cultural inferior” has many historical precedents: we know the process which soon begins to take place and we know it well. It’s called “acculturation,” and it is the revenge of the natives against their subjugators. The displaced and dispossessed blacks soon invent jazz and rock ‘n roll; Native American deities turn up right in the middle of Manhattan as comic book superheroes; in the case of India, the subjugated Harappans soon begin teaching the Vedic Aryans about their native religion of yoga; in Conrad’s narrative, Kurtz “goes native” and begins to transform himself into a god.

In Blomkamp’s film, this occurs when the protagonist, an annoying and (white) racist news reporter stumbles across a hidden canister which contains a “black fluid” which the aliens have been secretly working on, a fluid that will work as fuel for their hidden underground airship that will carry them up to the mother ship, which they will then be able to restart and head back out to the cosmos. This “black fluid”– borrowed, perhaps, from The X-Files–sprays onto the reporter and begins to genetically alter him so that he becomes the first alien-human genetic hybrid to actually survive. One of his arms transforms into an alien arm which confers on him the ability to use alien weaponry, hitherto impenetrable to white (or black) know-how. The racist news reporter soon finds himself sympathetic to the aliens, especially because he is now an outcast in his own (human) society. His goal is to help the aliens get back to their mother ship, if only because they have promised him that in return they will reverse his genetic malformation.

In a battle scene at the film’s climax, the reporter finds himself encased inside the mechanical exoskeleton of one of the alien’s robotic technologies: this enables him to fight the whites with superhuman abilities (this motif of the mechanical – hydraulic exoskeleton is itself becoming something of a cliche: it featured prominently in the climaxes of both Iron Man and Avatar). But it is also an image of the human soul fallen like the Gnostic Anthropos into the prison of his own machinery. Just as in Gnosticism, so too, the goal here is “Up;” the universal direction of salvation in all the world’s traditional cosmologies. “Up” equals salvation; “Down” equals ruination.

These are categories, perhaps, of an outdated “bivalent ontology,” as Peter Sloterdijk has pointed out in his essay “The Operable Man,” and belong in the same rubbish heap along with all such other (now deconstructed) bivalent oppositions as “spirit” vs. “nature,” “man” vs. “machine,” “subject” vs. “object,” “interior” vs. “exterior” and so on. Sloterdijk insists that current humanist condemnations of the machine are reacting from the standpoint of such outdated bivalent ontologies which have failed to keep pace with the new network – polyvalent ontologies which new technologies like the Internet are making possible. He does have a point here.

However, the images and narratives of our contemporary cinema come out of the archaic imagination, which is structured and patterned by millenia of such “outdated” and “deconstructed” bivalent oppositions. Though the postmodern consciousness of contemporary humanity may find them “irrelevant” to the new situation created by the marvels and wonders of our own wondrous technologies, the archaic psyche obviously still thinks that they are quite relevant and, as is evident from Blomkamp’s film, “Up” is not the new “Down,” for it still means “Salvation” while “Down” means “Fallen” and “Corrupt.”

According to the semiotics of Blomkamp’s film, then, modern humanity has gone “astray” and is fallen just exactly as Heidegger once pictured him: he is a spark that has become entombed in a metal sarcophagus that has so far proved to be his ruination, as the catastrophes of the twentieth century have proven. The situation is not just a matter of developing the right philosophical vocabulary: modern man is fallen and he can’t get up. He is still in need of rescue from his fall into Technics, for the situation created by globalization (made possible by these very new “network” technologies Sloterdijk speaks of) has not improved his condition one bit.

The problem of those living in “states of exception” is catastrophic and proves that we are not in any way “progressing.” Machines will not help us to escape from ourselves or our essential humanness, no matter how “spiritual” or “complex” they may become. We are still fallen and still searching for the Light of another World.