The Other “Other”
I didn’t want to make too much out of District 9’s political message since “racism is bad” is really not the most challenging theme in the world, but David Sirota’s appreciation of the film did get me thinking about one thing that I thought was nicely done:
Even more important than the visuals, though, is the plot. By setting the movie in South Africa, the refugee camp/anti-alien racism is a powerful allegory about the universality of oppression. One of the film’s most powerful messages (and there are a number of messages in this movie) is that even groups that have been oppressed can themselves turn into oppressors. In the movie, South Africa’s black population is just as anti-alien as its white population. In real life, we have plenty of examples of the same kind of thing. As just one of many examples, in Israel, some (but certainly not all or most) Jews – despite their own history experiencing oppression – express extremely racist views about Arabs.
Something that I noticed watching the movie was that District 9’s version of South Africa seemed pretty free of racial tensions. There was a tendency, as in real-world South Africa, for whites to disproportionately occupy high-status social and economic roles. But class dynamics weren’t explicitly racialized, and nobody said anything related to black-white (or, for that matter, anglophone-afrikaaner) tensions. Instead, the introduction of Prawns and, to a lesser extent, Nigerians into the dynamic apparently helped build a greater sense of human and South African solidarity. That kind of thing isn’t the prettiest element of human nature, but it rings pretty true—broadening the circle of tolerance often entails identifying a new “other” against which the new, broader “we” can be defined.
45 Responses to “The Other “Other””
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August 19th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Great. Because Petey shitting all over your comment threads isn’t enough, you have to go and provoke SLC.
August 19th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Racial (or any type of)prejudice is an ingroup vs outgroup phenomenon.
Once someone “more different” than the current outgroup comes along, they become the enemy.
I thought it was great in District 9 that over the course of the film, they demonstrated that all of the negative prawn behavior was a result of the social situations imposed upon them rather than some inherent biological inferiority.
Except for the cat food stuff. Just weird.
August 19th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Really, Matt? The message of District 9 is “racism is bad?” No wonder I tend to disagree with you on pretty much every movie ever made. All those images of private contractors forcing the prawns to leave their shacks through dubious legal tactics…what does that have to do with racism? It’s about the fate of “disposable” people in a post-industrial world economic order. The Prawns are stand-ins for the slumdwellers of every major city, the surplus population that must be managed and controlled, increasingly by private sector actors, in the global south.
August 19th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
…Jews – despite their own history experiencing oppression – express extremely racist views about Arabs.
Only individuals, real individuals can experience oppression, not imaginary abstract concepts like “Jews”. Some individuals experience oppression, some individuals are racists, some experience oppression and are racists simultaneously. And there’s absolutely nothing profound about this observation.
August 19th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
sailer-bait!
August 19th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
In Israel MOST, if not ALMOST ALL of the Jewish population is racist and at the very least xenophobic. If you don’t know that, you don’t know much of anything about Israel. I’m continuously surprised by your mild pro-Israel assertions. Regardless of natural blogging dispositions, some of what you’re saying about the Israelis is simply not sufficiently based in reality, let alone evidence-based. Seriously, Israeli racism is so fundamental to its essence as well as its day-to-day life situations that, defying belief as it may, is essential to understanding anything about its people. I know I’ll probably get flagged out, but…
August 19th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
reagan was obsessed with the idea that the us and ussr would find peace and cooperation if we were attacked by ufos. he tried it out on gorbachev and shevardnaze both. his aides had to work hard to keep reagan from including little green men in his speeches.
it’s detailed in lou cannon’s book “reagan, the role of a lifetime,” pp. 40-43.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
One thing to keep in mind is that it is easy to be non-prejudice when it costs you nothing. Rich white Americans find it easy to criticize others for treating different races differently. But point out the suffering the rich what American is causing to other species by eating them, and their “liberal” tendencies fly out the window in their desire to eat what they are used to / what their friends eat.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
A much better analogy would be support for Jim Crow legislation in Italian American and other European immigrant communities in America. A tragic history that was conveniently ignored by folks who claimed that Frank Ricci’s heritage didn’t carry any of the baggage of slavery.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
broadening the circle of tolerance often entails identifying a new “other” against which the new, broader “we” can be defined.
Destroy the South!!!
Only individuals, real individuals can experience oppression, not imaginary abstract concepts like “Jews”.
Out of curiosity, how could we oppress you?
August 19th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
@3: I highly disagree. I don’t think the aliens can be reasonably viewed as a stand-in for slum dwellers and poor people in general. This is because the Prawns did not live in a slum, they lived in a Refugee Camp, what with them being a large group of displaced peoples who were set up in one large (though small on a per person basis) area within a foreign nation. Which of course makes the governments actions much more believable as governments rarely force mass migrations of their own people from one slum to another slum but a government with a Refugee Camp in close proximity to a major metropolitan area would have a large incentive to move that camp to a less populated area.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I’ve been making the “expanded sense of other” argument on a few blogs that bought into the “District 9 is racist” meme. It’s as if all that they saw were the “Nigerians”, and didn’t notice the white collar and uniformed local blacks.
OT: Matt’s allusion to Afrikaner culture reminded me of my recent discovery that among those who speak Afrikaner as a first language, white Afrikaners are outnumbered by “Coloreds” 2 to 1.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
I know two movies in a season doesn’t make a trend, but still, this is the second alternate-history movie this year, after Watchmen, when in the past alternate history movies have been very rare to begin with, and those that existed were very rarely about historical events in the real world rather than one person or family altering their own past. Weird.
I’m tempted to read it as a sign of greater sophistication in audiences, and/or in science fiction writers, that they’re willing and able to write about something that’s different from the real world in very small but subtle ways.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Racial tensions are, to a significant degree, based on perceived threat. I grew up in an almost completely white neighborhood. There was one Chinese family. They were completely accepted. I never saw any instances of prejudice against them. When it was announced that the local elementary school was going to be integrated to about 25% black students, the whackos came out of the woodwork.
In South Africa today, is the tiny white minority seen as a threat?
August 19th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
In Israel MOST, if not ALMOST ALL of the Jewish population is racist and at the very least xenophobic.
Definitely almost all, but I wouldn’t call it “xenophobic”. More like a petty case of provincial ethnic supremacism. That’s the whole point of Zionism.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Cyrus, I think it may be due to the increasing body of published alternate history sci-fi. Not exactly a wave, but I’ve noticed it in the bookstores.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Njorl: In South Africa today, is the tiny white minority seen as a threat?
Small, but not tiny:
South Africa United States
79.5% Black..........79.8% White
09.2% White..........12.8% AA
08.9% Coloured........4.5% Asian
02.5% Asian...........1.7% Multiracial
......................1.2% Native
August 19th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
@3: I think you’re mistaking the movie they advertised with the one in the theaters. It would have been a much better film if it had been about illegal immigration, or the urban underclass or the “surplus population” in the global south (and we see flashes of this in the film’s documentary sequences). But the movie ultimately chickened out, opting to go the summer popcorn route. Thus, you have a savage, barely sentient prawn population save for one supergenius motivated only by love of his son and his people, and an evil corporation that shoots them for fun, with a private army run by by Bloodthirsty Killsalot McMercenary. There was very little nuance, or desire to engage with a problem more complicated or relevant than “Apartheid sure did suck.”
August 19th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
I was reading an interesting sci-fi book a few weeks ago, written in the 50’s. A minor plot point in it, which anyone would find quite remarkable today, was segregation in South Africa. Except it was segregation forced upon the white minority by the vengeful black majority. This coming from a writer (Clarke) well known for having very liberal and progressive attitudes towards race for the time. I wasnt even close to being alive yet in the 50s, but i wonder if that was a popular fear, that the newly “freed” minorities would rise up and immediately extract their revenge by oppressing their former oppressors.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Why are they shooting at Jamie Hyneman?
August 19th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
The Star Trek movie was also alternate-history, in a peculiar way.
I kind of doubt this is related, but the English major in me can’t help noticing that there was also an upsurge of alternate-history humor after the 2000 election. E.g, the alternate future where Al Gore invented a machine that eliminated all hurricanes, so Katrine never happened …
August 19th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
@ SC, #20;
That is the greatest comment I have ever read. I half choked to death laughing! You are absolutely right.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
cmholm @ 17: That looks like a wierd breakdown of US population. Where are all the hispanics?
August 19th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
It’s noteworthy that for Vickers to actually identify with the prawns (and he’s far from the least sympathetic to begin with) he must (absurdly) be turned into a prawn. But even that is not enough. He must also meet an intelligent and sympathetic prawn.
Didn’t anyone else notice how all of the prawns except for Christopher were depicted as, essentially, drooling morons, easily distracted by cat food, prone to outbursts of violence but essentially incapable of coordinated action?
I’m not trying to draw a deeper meaning from this. I don’t think there is one. Either the storytelling was lazy, or there is some vague idea that Christopher is one of the “higher echelon” of prawns hinted at near the beginning of the film.
Regardless, this fact undermines any sort of deeper anti-racist message. The vast majority of the prawns are to be feared. A small minority can be sympathized with.\
At least that’s how I started. And don’t even get me started on the scads of unanswered questions and outright plot holes in this thing. A decent movie, but hardly worth so much attention.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
My mistake…
South Africa.........United States
79.5% Black..........64.8% White
09.2% White..........15.0% Latino
08.9% Coloured.......13.2% AA
02.5% Asian...........4.5% Asian
......................1.7% Multiracial
......................1.2% Native
August 19th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
I adjusted the US demographic so that non-AA Latinos are listed as “Latino”, and AA Latinos are lumped into “AA”.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Rob Mac, given the state of destitution the prawns are in, and the vast cultural chasm between an actual “off-worlder” and *any* human, I wasn’t too concerned about the fine points of how they were portrayed.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
@19 Aqua Regia I wasnt even close to being alive yet in the 50s, but i wonder if that was a popular fear, that the newly “freed” minorities would rise up and immediately extract their revenge by oppressing their former oppressors.
That’s pretty much the history of the South.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Rob Mac @24: I got the very strong impression that this was because Christopher and his son were the only surviving Brain Caste and all of the rest were Worker Caste, which given that this is very insect like explains why all of the prawns with those 2 exceptions are pretty dumb and shiftless. Intelligence, ambition, and drive are the jobs of the higher castes so the lower castes don’t have them. Granted that explaination comes largely from the humans in the documentary portions of the movie, but it seems to match what we observe of the aliens.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
@19:
I was reading an interesting sci-fi book a few weeks ago, written in the 50’s. A minor plot point in it, which anyone would find quite remarkable today, was segregation in South Africa. Except it was segregation forced upon the white minority by the vengeful black majority.
Childhood’s End, right?
@MY:
That kind of thing isn’t the prettiest element of human nature, but it rings pretty true—broadening the circle of tolerance often entails identifying a new “other” against which the new, broader “we” can be defined
Hm. I wonder how Obama could exploit this to achieve true bipartisan unity on health care.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Well I’ve got to say that this takes the cake in terms of figuring out a way to work your obsessive flagellation (or self-flagellation) of Jews and Israel into the mix.
August 19th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
@24 This is something I’ve been thinking about since I saw the movie. For an advanced race, most of the aliens were rather dim-wited and well….primitive. Maybe I missed the part in the beginning of the film where they hint at the caste system. My other thought was that because the first part of the film was shot “documentary-style”, perhaps the aliens appeared so barbaric and uncivilized because that’s how they were seen from the human POV. I don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters, but apparently there is enough footage out there to make some juicy special features on the DVD/Blue Ray…so we’ve got that to look forward to.
August 19th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Writer-Director Neill Blomkamp has given numerous interviews trying to explain to Americans what his movie is about. I quote them extensively in my review of District 9:
http://www.takimag.com/article/alien_nation/
August 19th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Few Americans (except the black critic Armond White, who has made himself wildly unpopular with fanboys of District 9 by pointing out the film’s strikingly caustic portrayal of black Africans) seem to grasp writer-director Neill Blomkamp’s subversive perspective, even though the exiled Afrikaner keeps giving interviews more or less spelling it out.
The American press constantly refers to District 9 as an “apartheid allegory,” but the 29-year-old Blomkamp was ten when Nelson Mandela was released. Blomkamp’s press statements can hardly be more explicit that the movie is largely a post-apartheid parable about illegal immigration and Malthusian despair.
In fact, Blomkamp is personally a victim of the gradual ethnic cleansing of southern Africa. Rampant crime under the new black government drove his family from Johannesburg to British Columbia in 1997.
But Americans just don’t get it because they haven’t paid attention to South Africa since 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected President and then They All Lived Happily Ever After.
Blomkamp told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Everybody in North America thinks of South Africa for white oppression of the black majority.” Yet, 15 years later, “what we’re not familiar with is this screwed-up Johannesburg setting.”
Just as 1981’s Road Warrior, with Mel Gibson as Mad Max, memorably re-imagined the defining Australian experience of living on an empty continent, District 9 symbolizes the lesson of Afrikaans history: on an increasingly full continent, the weak can eventually triumph over the strong by outbreeding them.
Much of District 9 is a video game-style shoot-‘em-up complete with the predictable teaming up of the rebel human hero and the single smart, nice alien hero (the Mandela stand-in) to battle the evil corporation.
Nonetheless, what gives the film its distinctive ferocity is its bitter Malthusian wisdom distilled from the Afrikaner diaspora. History may be written by the winners, but some of the most bracing fiction—for example, Disgrace, the 1999 novel about gang rape in the new South Africa by J.M. Coetzee, the Nobel laureate who fled to Australia in 2002—is written by history’s losers, such as the Afrikaners.
August 19th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
Matt’s sentiment was neatly summed up by the great Terry Pratchett, who described his multi-species Discworld as being somewhere ‘where black and white lived in perfect amity and ganged up on green.’
August 19th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
> Writer-Director Neill Blomkamp has given numerous
> interviews trying to explain to Americans what his
> movie is about. I quote them extensively in my review of
> District 9:
“Well, so you are. But tell me young man: what makes you think you understand what you put in your books?” – professor of English to Isaac Asimov after Asimov slipped into a lecture hall and questioned the professor’s interpretation of one of Asimov’s novels. (quoted from memory from one of Asimov’s 843 autobiographies)
Cranky
August 19th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
If anything, District 9 is much closer to the current situation in South Africa vis-a-vis Zimbawbean refugees who’ve fled to South Africa. A lot of the documentary footage was of South Africans expressing their dislike for the Zimbabweans.
August 19th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Matt misses the tension in South Africa: who is the fall guy who goes to prison? The black South African, despite that he’s the ONLY guy who acted with any caution or restraint, and that he of all people was wholly blameless.
People overlook that character in digesting the film, but he’s key to looking at it from a racial angle.
August 19th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Judging art by a theme? Nerts.
Themes are for essays. Art is for pleasure.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:15 am
I remember TNC saying something over at your old home. I think he was quoting someone else, but maybe this was an original. He said “blacks didn’t object to slavery; they objected to being the slaves.” Douglas Adams had a great passage in one of his books that noticed basically the same thing about the Electric Monk and his horse.
We have just done a good job of ignoring those whom we dominate in order to make our lives more comfortable. Sometimes that is racially tinged; other times it is based on class or gender or whatever. Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants, which was true, but we also all stand on the necks of midgets.
August 20th, 2009 at 3:24 am
…but it rings pretty true—broadening the circle of tolerance often entails identifying a new “other” against which the new, broader “we” can be defined.
Isn’t that the thinking behind Ozymandias’ strategy at the end of Watchmen (especially in the comic book version)?
August 20th, 2009 at 5:06 am
Sailer seems to want us to think that Nobel laureate Coetzee shares his own (Sailer’s) loathsome views on race. That’s probably bullshit.
August 20th, 2009 at 10:47 am
There were a lot of interesting dynamics going on in the backstory to District 9.
On the surface, it appeared that Black and White South Africans had achieved a pretty high level of equality, and did not seem to be terribly suspicious of each other. However, it was also clear that whites still occupied a priviledged place in society – whites ran MNU. There were black employees, but the people in charge were all white.
When black south africans were shown – with the exception of a few MNU employees, they typically were shown occupying a bit lower a social strata than whites – the black folks interviewed on the street appeared dingier in dress than the whites, then the fast food restaurant Wikus stopped at after escaping was filled with black south africans, and it looked pretty ghetto.
I thought it was a bit of an interesting choice – the whites were shown as the primary oppressors of the prawns. I think that, given the apartheid subtext, showing black south africans actively oppressing the prawns might have gone a bit far for south african audiences – and this is a south african movie. The movie showed that they were complicit in the oppression, but avoided showing them as active oppressors.
On the other hand, you have the Nigerian gangs. I’ve seen some people, including friends of mine, say that the movie was racist due to its depiction of black people. I point out that the movie delineates between South African Blacks and Nigerian gangs. They are different. I also point out that we, as americans, did not personally experience the apartheid regime in SA, so the depiction of these gangs of Nigerian immigrants acting to oppress and take advantage of the prawns may not be an unrealistic depiction of life in slum communities under apartheid.
That said, the Nigerians did act, overall, as one would expect a criminal gang that is made up of an immigrant community. They are preying on those “immigrants” who have less power than they have. They enforce their status through fear and intimidation.
The leader of the gang shows religious practices that are not exactly unrealistic amongst people from certain parts of Africa. There are those who believe that consuming human body parts will impart the power of that person on the consumer – NPR recently reported on the growing trade in albino body parts in east africa.
So, while brutal, its not an unknown practice.
Furthermore, the prawns were fairly willing participants in the activities of the Nigerian gang. From the depictions of Prawns scavenging for stuff they could sell, and committing a variety of petty crime, that they didn’t have much in the way of currency. They did have weapons that were useless to humans, and really to the prawns, but that the nigerians were willing to accept in the place of money.
Why are the weapons useless to the prawns? Yeah, they can actually fire them, and they are much better weapons than humans have. But human weapons still kill prawns pretty good, and human weapons can take out prawn artillery.
And, while there are a lot of prawns (when they arrived, there were about a million, and by the end of the movie there were a coupla million), there are a lot more humans.
So, going to war against the humans was suicidal. So, why not sell your useless weapons to a human for a commodity that you don’t have the money to buy anyway?
The other interesting angle is how dehumanizing (or is that deprawnizing) the “media” coverage of the prawns was.
This is a very technologically advanced species, highly intelligent, and highly capable. They’ve not only mastered interstellar travel, their technology is designed to prevent non-prawns from utilizing it. Its useless for a human.
But humans think they are stupid and animalistic – when it was the stupid and animalistic way the prawns were treated that made them desperate enough to turn to petty crime. When they were forced into a refugee camp/slum to live. When they were systematically denied the right to exist in human society. They could have brought fantastic gifts to human society, and instead they were forced to into inhumane conditions with no way out.
And, of course, in humanity’s greed for better weapons and fear of the prawns, they denied themselves the most valuable thing the prawns had.
Fuel. Energy.
That little tiny vial contained enough “fluid” to power the mothership and cause it to fly home in about 1 to 1.5 years (based on Christophers promise to return in 3 years – so a year to a year and a half to get home, then to return, along with some downtime, one would imagine, to get a fleet together to bring his people home).
Obviously, that fluid must allow the ship to move very quickly. Since, it must travel signficantly faster than a communications transmission could be received by the homeworld. One would imagine a communications transmission would take in excess of 30 years to get to the home world, given that the aliens were stranded on earth for almost 30 years, and the return time for Christopher was 3 years. (or that’s just a logical inconsistency, which is entirely possible)
August 20th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Christopher will return in 3 years because that’s how long it takes to make a sequel.
August 20th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
[...] Yglesias (and David Sirota) discuss interesting themes in the new film District 9. The film is worth seeing, and it is also very [...]