Understanding how cultures work fail
Saturday, July 17th, 2010I finally saw District 9, courtesy of Netflix’s awesome live streaming feature. Many of my friends had talked a lot about when it first came out, so I already knew that it was a pretty obvious allegory for apartheid. heck, it’s even set in South Africa!
Now first of all, real South African apartheid was a morally repugnant system because black people are in fact the equal of white people. There existed no good reason for the state-imposed discrimination against them save for fear and racism.
District 9 seems to completely miss this crucial point by portraying the aliens not as the intellectual and cultural equals of humans, but as animalistic child-creatures. In fact, the aliens are even introduced as having been found aboard their own vessel malnourished, impoverished, disorganized, and generally unable to fend for themselves. And yet we’re supposed to believe they somehow constructed the metropolis-sized spacecraft they inhabit? Then when the aliens are brought to the surface, ostensibly due to compassionate and humanitarian impulses on the part of the South Africans, they demonstrate no real understanding of their situation or even the ability to communicate effectively with one another, let alone any leadership or work ethic.
Really, aside for two aliens we meet who are intelligent, have goals, and use technology, 99% of them are portrayed as little more than vermin. They have no desire to better themselves, can barely understand one another, and they spend most of their time squabbling over trash and fighting with Nigerian gangs over cat food. Seriously!
And yet they have weapons of such titanic power that greedy human corporations are rushing to try and figure out how they work. Who made these weapons? It clearly isn’t the bestial creatures we see playing with tires and getting tricked by semi-literate teenagers. So who did? Who made the spaceship itself, for that matter? Where did all the high tech gadgetry come from if most of the alien species is hopelessly primitive?
Perhaps this the alien society is supposed to be a caste system with wise leaders who guide the unwashed masses. This is supported early on with the revelation that the vessel’s command pod detached and plummeted to Earth while it was floating over Johannesburg. Now it all makes sense! The leaders were separated from their people and their technology, leaving the masses virtually powerless. As soon as they’re re-united, the alien society will begin to re-cohere!
Wrong again. Though the two intelligent aliens we meet are indeed from the command pod, when the remaining aliens are flown down to Earth, the intelligent ones appear to have no influence over them at all. I found myself wondering how the alien society ever managed to evolve past the “hitting each other with rocks” stage of cultural development considering how primitive and disorganized the vast majority of it is.
Over two decades, the aliens’ conditions worsen. I found myself incredulous, as later on in the movie, we see the aliens’ martial technology in action: bio-mechanical battle mechs and devastating energy firearms, both of which can pretty effortlessly disintegrate entire platoons of South African commandos. Soooooo…. why don’t the two intelligent aliens use the weapons to improve their situation? For that matter, why didn’t the stupid ones? They seem to like fighting a lot, so why don’t they ever turn their hellcannons on the humans? The movie specifically makes the point that humans can’t use the alien weapons, so the aliens are at an enormous technological advantage for the entire movie and never use it. Feh!
All in all I was extremely disappointed. With so much of the movie’s underpinnings making no cultural or logical sense at all, I found myself frustrated by the excellent CG and high-tech action scenes.
