1 | John Sanbonmatsu

September 6th, 2009 at 12:28 am

I just saw the film, and I was shocked at how racist it really is. Let’s start with the fact that all of the main characters–90% of them, excluding of course the aliens–are white Afrikaners. Rather strange, no, in a country that was liberated from white apartheid fifteen years ago, and in which 80% of the population is black? The whites, Whether as physicians, journalists, talking head experts, leaders, or even Bad Guy mercs, are generally treated as distinct individuals, never as a faceless mass. To the extent that there are evil whites–and there in fact are plenty of them–their whiteness is incidental to their evilness. That is, their complexion neither adds to nor subtracts from their brutality as, e.g., speciesist soldiers or sadistic scientists in secret government labs. Now consider the black characters. There are a few black bureaucrats in the film, but they are given few lines and no action. The blacks of any consequence are the vicious, superstitious blacks in the bantustan, especially the “Nigerian” criminal gang run by a psychotic with a penchant for voodoo. A telling moment comes late in the film when the gang’s leader (who believes that by consuming alien flesh he will absorb their technological powers) is finally killed by an alien “Robocop”-style machine, his death is both idiosyncratic and lovingly rendered (an alien drill drills into his forehead, and his body explodes). The audience laughs. By contrast, when the equally brutal leader of the white mercenaries/Special Forces unit is eventually killed by a group of aliens, we only see his death at a distance, and through the inevitable lens of primitive “tragedy.” The images cannot help but recall the killing and mutilation of American soldiers by angry crowds in Somalia in 1993, and the burning of US mercenaries in Iraq in 2004.

So: the blacks living in District 9 (the film’s satirical version of a bantustan) are depicted as sadistic, superstitious monsters and criminals, while the whites are depicted in a differentiated way. The latter may be “savages” in their own way. But the source of their savagery could not be more different. The blacks are savage by nature (just as the aliens, we are led to believe, are scavengers and hot-headed by nature), while the whites are only savage “accidentally”–by association with the bureaucratic, militarized nation state. It is no accident that a “half-breed” white man, injected with the genes of the alien race, ends up saving the day and helping the aliens, while the sole black character of any centrality, the warlord, is shown getting screwed in the forehead and blown to smithereens.

Some film, to teach the masses about the dangers of xenophobia and militarism by embracing racism and getting its audiences off on scenes of video game-like violence!

2 | selbina croft

September 8th, 2009 at 4:36 pm

I wish I could articulate myself as well as John Sonbonmatsu above. Anyway saw the film yesterday, and I thought I had gone back in time, to the 1970′s, where in every movie the black people were depicted as either: grateful, childlike, evil, voodoo loving, uneducated, criminal and just plain stupid. And the white people, well what can I say, even the criminals were intelligent, brave or macho to say the least.

I walked out of the cinema and felt embarrassed, embarrassed that I was among many white people who seemed to enjoy it. I caught the gaze of a black guy who like me seemed unamused. Nothing new there I suppose. Got to be in the kitchen to feel the fire as they say.