The South African film District 9, written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell and directed by Blomkamp29, celebrated its global release in 2009 following a publicity campaign that proved hugely successful in intriguing and exciting critics and audiences alike. The campaign consisted of a series of viral videos showing a mysterious space ship hovering over Johannesburg accompanied by clips of news reporters speculating as to what this unidentified object may contain, and what its purpose may be. These trailers, as well as the ‘For Humans Only’ signs found on bus stops around the country, did not disappoint science fiction fans, with District 9 widely hailed as a breath of fresh air for the genre, transposing classic motifs to a modern ghettoised South African setting.
District 9 explores the consequences of a spacecraft full of desperate alien refugees appearing above an alternate-reality Johannesburg. The aliens are forced into a ghettoised slum called District 9, fenced off from the city proper, and are prohibited access to Johannesburg, its facilities and opportunities. At the beginning of the film we are introduced to Wikus Van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), the bureaucrat in charge of the aliens’ resettlement in a new purpose-built internment centre called District 10. The rest of the film follows Wikus’ contagion and subsequent painful transformation into an
29 After having started his career in the visual effects industry, Neill Blomkamp found success with the short film Alive in Joburg (2006), the themes and styles of which were extended and enhanced to create the his debut directorial feature District 9. Blomkamp and long-time collaborator Canadian screenwriter Terri Tatchell are married.
alien and his experiences contending with the simultaneous threats of multi-national weapons manufacturers and Nigerian gangsters. Wikus’ mutation represents a Kafkaesque metamorphosis, in which the subject becomes an alien —as in foreign, or unknown— Other. Just as in The Metamorphosis (Kafka 1915) Gregor’s masculine status is diminished by his unexpected transformation, so is Wikus’. Both lose their jobs and therefore their positions as household provider, and become vulnerable at the hands of the humans who now regard them as non-human, animalized Other. These texts form part of a cannon including films such as David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), which deal with the horror of losing control of one’s body to the extent that it becomes unrecognisable, it becomes other to the self.
District 9 acts as the central text in this chapter examining the monstrous transformation from male subject into alien other, and the possible vulnerabilities and empowerments this metamorphosis entails, as well as the relevance of this kind of monster when considering alternative articulations of masculinity and configurations of the male body. In this analysis I introduce and examine the models of masculine identity presented in the film, before moving on to a discussion of how masculinity is intertwined with the representation of monstrosity in the depiction of man becoming alien. I also analyse the intersection of the monstrous masculine with ideas of posthumanism in the technological and biological enhancement of the protagonist’s corporeal form. Firstly, however, it will be necessary to provide a brief overview of the District 9’s socio-historical context, which is key to its narrative and visual construction.
As District 9 is generally considered an action-packed, fast-paced, thriller movie, it could be easy to forget that this is not a Hollywood production —if it weren’t for the constant references to South African socio-cultural specificities. The director
declares his intentions in the first minutes, using docu-realist footage with local (non)actors filmed in the Johannesburg townships to set-up the story and setting. All classes, races and communities are represented here, along with the social and geographical differences that separate them, from the urban, poor, black population to the white Afrikaner and English experts hired as talking-heads to give an explanation of the aliens’ arrival on Earth and its immediate aftermath.
This emphasis on the patchwork nature of the South African reality is maintained throughout the film, as the director consistently highlights the country’s contrasts both visually and narratively. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is District 9’s focus on architecture and urban planning, using emblematic images of the Johannesburg skyline, with its jumble of sleek skyscrapers and rundown social housing, to underline the huge socio-cultural differences between rich and poor, despite their geographical proximity. A key element in making this contrast is the depiction of borders and barriers. The Johannesburg of District 9 is a labyrinth of walls and fences, which define and divide social groupings. These, along with the signs denoting the
‘human only’ areas, are a clear visual link to South African Apartheid —the period lasting from 1948 until 1991, during which the minority white ruling class enforced a system of segregation of white and black, and coloured, peoples.30 It is impossible to formulate a reading of District 9 without taking the historical realities of Apartheid into account, as it is an ever-present element in the film, with parallels inevitably drawn between the forced eviction of the film’s aliens and the Group Areas Act of the Apartheid era. This legal act paved the way for the ‘relocation’ of 3.5 million non-white South Africans from their inner-city homes to ‘locations’ found outside the city
30 Apartheid was introduced by the South African government in 1948, following the National Party’s ascension in that year’s election. Negotiations between the African National Congress led by Nelson Mandela and the De Klerk government, as well as other parties, lasting from 1990 to 1993, finally brought Apartheid to an end in South Africa with the formation of a democratic government in 1994.
boundaries (Adler 2016). Ben Walters observes the following similarities between the situation of black South Africans during Apartheid and that of the alien refugees in District 9:
The ‘prawns’ seem a fairly obvious analogy for black South Africans, especially under apartheid: they are barred from participation in large parts of society and live in townships subjected to violent raids by the authorities. The clicks of their language even suggest Xhosa. (2009: 57).
To focus on the Apartheid allegory within District 9 is somewhat problematic, however, since, as Andrew M. Butler notes, “The ‘prawns’ may be an allegorical denotation of a race, but the denotation risks being racist” (2015: 101). While the audience will inevitably draw parallels between the film’s narrative and Apartheid, it is also important, as Joshua Clover argues, to consider its divergences from that history as
“Though there are elements of Apartheid’s history mixed throughout the movie —as with the forced relocation of the the aliens from Johannesburg to distant townships—
that history doesn’t provide a consistent or coherent structure” (2009: 8).
Some critics look back further than Apartheid in their readings of District 9.
Lorenzo Veracini, in his article on District 9 and Avatar (2009), argues that both films are settler colonial narratives. It is the need to enforce the displacement of the aliens that produces a crisis, just as in any instance of colonisation. “The aliens of these movies, like indigenous peoples in other cinematic representations are primarily expected to move on” (Veracini 2011: 361). The fact that the principal alien character of the movie, Christopher Johnson, wants to return to his home planet responds, Veracini maintains, to settler fantasies about aliens wanting to leave settlers alone. The fact remains, however, that the aliens of the film are not natives, they are refugees, somewhat undermining the settler colonial reading. That said, the elements outlined by Veracini remain present, colouring the film with a hue of colonialist sentiment, particularly in the
decision of the MNU to assign ‘human’ names to the aliens, thereby undermining and attempting to erase their culture. He is no doubt correct when he writes that the fact
“that neither director wanted to present a settler colonial story […] confirms that settler colonialism in many ways still goes without saying” (364, original emphasis).
It is equally important not to ignore the contemporary realities of the South African socio-political landscape. It is essential, as Eric D. Smith maintains in his discussion of District 9, to bracket and re-historicise the standard allegorical reading that “the transformation is from white man to poor black man” in order to “clearly perceive that such a description is as applicable to […] Wikus […] as to the alien multitude” (2012: 158). Furthermore, the lack of representation of the nation-state makes it clear that within the film it is the corporate sector that controls and runs the country, not only in the economic sense, but also the socio-political. This is interpreted by Smith as a criticism on the part of the director of a South Africa that is constrained by a mostly white internal corporate sector that is allied to powerful external forces of globalised capital (150). Smith goes on to argue that the film criticises both the ascendence of this symbol of corporate capitalism and the “liberal humanist social discourse that reinforces its political and cultural authority” (151). Another pertinent contribution to the discussion comes from Charles Ramírez Berg, who argues that films depicting “the sympathetic alien”, represented in District 9 by Christopher Johnson,
“provide a cinematic arena for the unconscious reflection on the immigrant ‘question’”
(2012: 403). It is my contention that the aliens of District 9 not only symbolise non-white South Africans of Apartheid, but also those African refugees and immigrants who have arrived in South Africa over the past decade. These individuals and communities have suffered exclusion and violence of the sort experienced by Blomkamp’s aliens. In May 2008, for example, at least 70 immigrants were killed by rioting South Africans,
and thousands were displaced (Harris et al. 2018: 228). In short, the cultural socio-cultural context of District 9 is as complex as that of South Africa itself, with no one historical event or social group influencing a reading of the film more heavily than any other. When interpreting this film it is important to keep the patchwork nature of South Africa’s past and present in mind at all times, as I attempt to do here, avoiding simplistic readings which respond to but one of the country’s many historical, cultural, geographical, political or social facets.
4.2 Soldiers, Civil Servants and Aliens: Deconstructing Hegemonic Masculinity in