Jan 03 2010
District 9
I can’t help but to sing praise to the movie District 9. Upon knowing how old the director (Neill Blomkamp) is, I was very impressed. The kid certainly has wisdom beyond his 30 years. Of course, he is from South Africa. Still, being able to distill an almost biblical human sin into a short movie, he’s got talent.
The reason it moved me so much is that it says so much about we Socio-sapiens. There is an exclusive impulse that is innate to us, not unlike the territorial instincts in beasts from who we evolved. But now that we did evolve and call ourselves creature-of-sapience, we therefore have to invent so many words and so much pretense to cover up our beastly inner-self, in order to carry on whatever brutality without a guilty conscience.
In fact, we don’t need a whole lot words in order to achieve that. One is enough, and that is the word ”alien”. Besides direct citations such as ”illegal alien”, there are other synonyms such as “terrorists”, “rogue nation”, and in an earlier ear, “the Communists”.
Once a collection of people is attached with the “alien” (or alien-alike) label, the cruelty, the violence, and the suppression of humanity directed toward them is henceforce justified. Such a pattern permeates time and space, so much so that I can pick out stories like this easier than picking the blackberries in my backyard in late August.
I grew up in Shanghai where people from Subei (and their descendants) were considered second class. If something goes wrong involving a native and a Subei-ren, it is without question the fault of the latter. On a more grand scale, the Old Testament is an epic tale of God-Man collaboration of alienizing “the other”. A more secular story, from a different angle, tells a similar belief. My father told me that when Deng Xiaoping visited the U.S. in the late 1970s, he hugged and kissed the girls greeting him at the tarmac. This simple gesture apparently left a deep impression with Jesse Helms who said something like: a Commie can do that?
Having observed endless stories like such, I found District 9 a very powerful rendition of who we are. In this case, Blomkamp stripped all the pretense and left the story to a bare-bone scenario—what if we are to live with aliens? Not the illegal immigrants, not people who speak different languages or practice different customs, or of different skin color or sexual preference. But real aliens.
More to the point: what if the reality–however it was lead to or sustained–offers us plenty of excuses to despise them. And we have the power to dispense them too. What do we do? The main character, Wikus van de Merwe, however cheerful, is a bureaucrat-henchman: he has no strong sense of right-or-wrong. If he had problem with soldiers carrying too much ammo it is because making-a-scene would hurt his career growth. Once at work, he is courageous, effective and even creative (as he improvised ways to get around the problem of the Prawns don’t know how to sign their names). So he is the perfect executioner of our collective judgment. The fact that the aliens have feelings like us–the desire to procreate, caring for their young and grieving for their dead–does not bother him at all. In a way, Blomkamp portrays John Yoo better than Yoo himself would recognize.
The movie didn’t try to come up with an answer. That is another reason I like it. It is hard to stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. Sometimes I wish I could lose a few pounds or to grow more muscles. But in the end, I have to live with the image in the mirror. To give the movie a wishy-washy ending would have ruined it altogether.