Three years later, I’ve finally finished watching District 9. Peter Jackson and Neill Blomkamp’s film is my younger brother’s favourite movie. He bought it for $6.99 a few years ago at a local Blockbuster when they were phasing their extra copies out of their “new release” section and has cherished it ever since.
Prior to watching the film in ASTU, I’d seen about half of it, right up to the bit where Wikus is unceremoniously removed from the surprise celebration of his promotion and taken to… well to be honest, before tonight I hadn’t watched enough to know.
Fast forward to Monday of this week, and I began writing a post called “The Aliens Among Us.” From my limited knowledge of the film planned to write a concise, tame, and (somewhat?) intellectual discourse on dehumanization and the true nature of “humanity” by highlighting similarities between Obasan and District 9. But there was a definite flaw in my plan. I stopped watching District 9 three years ago for a very valid reason: I simply could not stomach it.
Gore on its own is a put off- I’m not a big fan. However, what made District 9 so repulsive to me, right from the get go, was the same thing that puts me off of war films, makes it impossible for me to read serial-killer thrillers, and prevents me from watching documentaries about the war crimes I am so comfortable reading about (that’s relative, mind you. Everything is relative; words on paper are easier to swallow than videos on a screen). I have no spine for this stuff. It devastates me. I started crying shortly after Wikus’ father in-law tells Tania (Wikus’ wife) that she wouldn’t likely see him again and didn’t stop bawling until well after the credits stopped rolling.
All that to say, if you’re looking for my tidy post, look somewhere else. I lost track of it somewhere between the bit where the MNU scientists attempt to vivisect Wikus and the gruesome scene in which several aliens rip Venter’s head off his body.
Here’s what I could salvage:
Depending on which archaeologist you speak to, you’ll hear different reports about what makes modern humans unique among our hominin relatives. Many start at the genesis- we have the ability to speak, to think conceptually, to think symbolically. We have the cognitive capacity to plan, to create complex tools, to use complex tools. But the archaeological record points to another distinctly human gift: the ability to create art. Creating art utilizes both our gift of symbolic thought and our capacity to create and use tools. Art is the definitive human pursuit. We incorporate aesthetic, myth, mysticism into other aspects of our day to day lives, but art is something beyond even these. Art is the marriage of our most indefinite symbolic notions and our most concrete tools- our bodies and our surroundings.
The Johannesburg of District 9 is an artless world. The buildings are functional, the people dull, no one moves with any grace or behaves with any sincerity. Amidst the mess of people scrambling tooth and nail to make their way in the world there are two creative minds, one striving in secret to find a way to head back home against the backdrop of a hostile and oppressive society and one a bumbling bureaucrat with a small inclination to whimsy.
“Wikus was always making me things. He said that way, they just mean so much more.”
Wikus’ creations for his wife are clumsy at best, but they are wrought out of a place of genuine meaning- his love for her. Over the course of the film, as Wikus devolves from mindless bureaucrat into something resembling the sentience and empathy that, in an ideal world, would be the hallmark of all humans, Wikus’ love for his wife is the one constant he holds. Every other thing he holds dear is stripped away. By the end of the film, when Wikus sits amidst the junk of district 9 folding a flower from scrap metal, his love for Tania is all that remains of the man he was the day he was sent into the alien slum to begin evicting the “prawns.”
There are a lot of speculations about why people create art. Archaeology provides no answers as to its origins, and similarly, the explanations of any field seem profoundly lacking. If I, uneducated as I am, could make an unsubstantiated and indefensible suggestion, it would be that art is born out of our desires to make our most symbolic hopes and ideas concrete. Christopher Johnson’s ship is the physical incarnation of his hopes to return home and his longings to set all the wrongs in his reality right again. Wikus’ metal flowers are the physical incarnation of the same hopes and longings, and the essential indicator of his humanity long after all other trappings of it have ceased to be.
If to be human is to be an artist, a dreamer and a visionary, these two “aliens” are the only humans to be found in or outside of district 9.
Apologies for the length and desultory nature of this post. Thanks for reading.