District 9
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ShazBo
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The Soundtrack is only $7.99 on iTunes. Well if you're poor, here's a taste.
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new D9 article up.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/sep/07/district-9-immigration-climate-change
District 9 warns us of a dangerous future
Johannesburg's alien shipwreck should be seen as the forerunner of upheavals to come rather than as a mere reminder of apartheid.
Sci-fi films are often read as allegory. The provenance of District 9 has led some to see it as a reflection on apartheid. Perhaps, however, it has as much to tell us about the future as the past. Apartheid, like its last-century sibling, the holocaust, was seen by its instigators a way of disposing of the indigenous other. District 9 deals with our response to intrusion from outside.
An alien spacecraft breaks down over Johannesburg. God knows, that city has enough problems, without a sudden influx of troublesome and unintelligible strangers. Why couldn't it have been Stellenbosch, the hard-pressed Jo'burgers might have inquired, just as Dover's beleaguered burghers ask why their unwelcome cross-Channel guests couldn't have been visited instead on the bleeding-hearts of Hampstead.
District 9 may remind South African audiences less of apartheid's victims than of the Zimbabwean refugees who in recent years have been flooding across the Limpopo; fugitives welcomed by their southern neighbours with 12-ft electric fences topped by razor-wire. Of those who've managed to breach these defences, scores have been murdered by South Africans fearful of the newcomers' supposed designs on their property, jobs and womenfolk. Survivors have been herded into insanitary, shelter-less camps even less inviting than those provided for their interplanetary counterparts in Johannesburg's District 9.
Audiences in other parts of the world may also recognise local analogues of the film's setup, as immigration disrupts communities across the globe. In Britain, we may not yet have resorted to concentration camps, but the apparent distaste of many for new arrivals has helped fill detention centres in France whose conditions have prompted self-mutilation, attempted suicides, arson and riots.
Climate change, with its consequential food and water shortages, seems likely to trigger population movements on a scale much greater than anything we've seen so far. More and more societies will face waves of would-be incomers bringing with them unfamiliar habits, downward pressure on wages, burdens for public services and strange cooking smells.
One of the many virtues of District 9 is that it doesn't duck the real threats immigrants pose to their hosts. Its aliens are unruly, ungrateful, slovenly and ill-tempered. They eat cat food, just as West Indian newcomers to England were once reputed to subsist on Kit-e-Kat sandwiches. They indulge in antisocial behaviour, usher in bestiality and perpetrate acts of violence.
Though they're treated with unthinking heartlessness by their custodians, they're also the beneficiaries of the kind of bureaucratic rectitude that our own asylum seekers would doubtless recognise. No one suggests that they should simply be exterminated. They can't be evicted from their camp until they've signed a consent form. Nonetheless, their predicament is far more affecting than you might have expected.
Plenty of films have pitied the poor immigrant. Yet, the adventitious status of District 9's hapless occupants turns out to make their plight more, not less, affecting than that of many of the big screen's human scatterlings. This time, we're not presented simply with one tribe muscling in on a rival but conspecific tribe's patch. We're shown a challenge to territorial control in the purest of forms.
You can't dismiss shipwrecked aliens as economic migrants, suggest that their homeland needs their services or demand that they should be repatriated. There's no escaping a direct appeal for a share of your space from fellow beings who need it.
As a result, you're forced to wonder why the chance inhabitants of any particular place are accorded so much privilege. Is it right that incumbents alone should determine the fate of would-be new arrivals? Possession may be nine tenths of the law, but what about the other tenth?
Maybe extreme exigency should invest the desperate with emergency rights of the kind currently enjoyed only by those in proven fear of persecution. Perhaps the dispossessed should be formally entitled to claim a share of turf whose more fortunate existing occupants seek only to repel them.
As District 9's credits roll, we learn that South Africa's encamped alien population has come to be numbered in millions. Eventually, their human counterparts may be billions-strong. It's time we faced up to what that's going to entail. This film gives us a much-needed prod.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/sep/07/district-9-immigration-climate-change
District 9 warns us of a dangerous future
Johannesburg's alien shipwreck should be seen as the forerunner of upheavals to come rather than as a mere reminder of apartheid.
Sci-fi films are often read as allegory. The provenance of District 9 has led some to see it as a reflection on apartheid. Perhaps, however, it has as much to tell us about the future as the past. Apartheid, like its last-century sibling, the holocaust, was seen by its instigators a way of disposing of the indigenous other. District 9 deals with our response to intrusion from outside.
An alien spacecraft breaks down over Johannesburg. God knows, that city has enough problems, without a sudden influx of troublesome and unintelligible strangers. Why couldn't it have been Stellenbosch, the hard-pressed Jo'burgers might have inquired, just as Dover's beleaguered burghers ask why their unwelcome cross-Channel guests couldn't have been visited instead on the bleeding-hearts of Hampstead.
District 9 may remind South African audiences less of apartheid's victims than of the Zimbabwean refugees who in recent years have been flooding across the Limpopo; fugitives welcomed by their southern neighbours with 12-ft electric fences topped by razor-wire. Of those who've managed to breach these defences, scores have been murdered by South Africans fearful of the newcomers' supposed designs on their property, jobs and womenfolk. Survivors have been herded into insanitary, shelter-less camps even less inviting than those provided for their interplanetary counterparts in Johannesburg's District 9.
Audiences in other parts of the world may also recognise local analogues of the film's setup, as immigration disrupts communities across the globe. In Britain, we may not yet have resorted to concentration camps, but the apparent distaste of many for new arrivals has helped fill detention centres in France whose conditions have prompted self-mutilation, attempted suicides, arson and riots.
Climate change, with its consequential food and water shortages, seems likely to trigger population movements on a scale much greater than anything we've seen so far. More and more societies will face waves of would-be incomers bringing with them unfamiliar habits, downward pressure on wages, burdens for public services and strange cooking smells.
One of the many virtues of District 9 is that it doesn't duck the real threats immigrants pose to their hosts. Its aliens are unruly, ungrateful, slovenly and ill-tempered. They eat cat food, just as West Indian newcomers to England were once reputed to subsist on Kit-e-Kat sandwiches. They indulge in antisocial behaviour, usher in bestiality and perpetrate acts of violence.
Though they're treated with unthinking heartlessness by their custodians, they're also the beneficiaries of the kind of bureaucratic rectitude that our own asylum seekers would doubtless recognise. No one suggests that they should simply be exterminated. They can't be evicted from their camp until they've signed a consent form. Nonetheless, their predicament is far more affecting than you might have expected.
Plenty of films have pitied the poor immigrant. Yet, the adventitious status of District 9's hapless occupants turns out to make their plight more, not less, affecting than that of many of the big screen's human scatterlings. This time, we're not presented simply with one tribe muscling in on a rival but conspecific tribe's patch. We're shown a challenge to territorial control in the purest of forms.
You can't dismiss shipwrecked aliens as economic migrants, suggest that their homeland needs their services or demand that they should be repatriated. There's no escaping a direct appeal for a share of your space from fellow beings who need it.
As a result, you're forced to wonder why the chance inhabitants of any particular place are accorded so much privilege. Is it right that incumbents alone should determine the fate of would-be new arrivals? Possession may be nine tenths of the law, but what about the other tenth?
Maybe extreme exigency should invest the desperate with emergency rights of the kind currently enjoyed only by those in proven fear of persecution. Perhaps the dispossessed should be formally entitled to claim a share of turf whose more fortunate existing occupants seek only to repel them.
As District 9's credits roll, we learn that South Africa's encamped alien population has come to be numbered in millions. Eventually, their human counterparts may be billions-strong. It's time we faced up to what that's going to entail. This film gives us a much-needed prod.
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