District 9

Javaflix                                                                                                                                  DISTRICT 9

1.09.10                                                    Discussion Guide

 

Opening Statement:

“We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats and corrupts savage man. … [Men] will do as their kind has always done. What that will be if they meet things weaker than themselves, the black man and the red man can tell. …  I therefore fear the practical, not the theoretical, problems which will arise if we ever meet rational creatures which are not human. Against them we shall, if we can, commit all the crimes we have already committed against creatures certainly human but differing from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry heavens will become an object to which good men can look up only with feelings of intolerable guilt, agonized pity, and burning shame.” — C. S. Lewis, “Religion and Rocketry”

 

Apartheid -  a system of legal racial segregationenforced by the National Party government in South Africa between 1948 and 1994, under which the rights of the majority blackinhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and minority rule by whites was maintained

 

 

Zimbabwe Refugees - Zimbabwe has introduced millions of illegal Zimbabwean immigrants into South African cities. So you have impoverished South African blacks, hoping for a better life in their own country, faced with an influx of millions of impoverished Zimbabweans who have come to South Africa to build a new life for their families.

 

GENERAL

• Did you like it?
• What do you think of the premise of the film? 

• Did certain scenes stand out to you?
• What do you think of the ending?

 

 THEMES

Oppression / Racism / Refugees / Poverty

• “By presenting the aliens to us, not as attractive, noble creatures, by making them half-human and half insect, the film constantly trips us up by making the racist gaze our gaze. It confronts us with our complicity with racism, by making us identify with the perspective of the racist, inviting us to feel the revulsion of the xenophobe.”(critic)

      Agree or disagree?

 

• Does the movie confront you to be the racist? Did you think the aliens were ugly? How did their physical appearance effect how you felt about them?

 

• How is the treatment of aliens similar to other forms of oppression in our society?

 

• Xenophobia is a dislike and/or fear of that which is unknown or different from oneself

 

• In what ways are you a xenophobe? What is the remedy?

 

• “The film’s title and the relocation effort evoke the forced removal of over 60,000 black South Africans from Cape Town’s District Six, which was declared a “whites only” zone in 1966.

 

• That's a very serious piece of contemporary South African society that also finds its way into the film: some impoverished citizens wanting other impoverished citizens out.

 

• “Many of the man-on-the-street interviews used in the film are not actors but real South Africans talking about Nigerian slums.”

 

• Do the slum depictions reinforce negative perceptions about the poor?

 

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel taught that much of human history can be understood as the working out of what he called the “master/slave” relationship. Typically, people in power—politically, culturally, militarily—find a weaker, more vulnerable “other” whom they proceed to manipulate, dominate, exclude and scapegoat. Masters need slaves and slaves, Hegel saw, in their own way, need masters, with each group conditioning the other in a dysfunctional manner. Furthermore, almost all of history is told from the standpoint of the masters, and mastery is the state to which all sane people aspire. 

 

Character of Wikus

• The name “van der Merwe” represents the stereotyped butt of a genre of South African jokes, much like Polish jokes or blonde jokes, except that van der Merwe jokes target the privileged.)

 

• How did you feel about Wikus? Did that change throughout the film?

 

• “He is an unwitting doofus, and he is complicit in the injustices of his society; he is cluelessly privileged, but doesn't hesitate to grasp the nettle of power and oppression with both hands.” (critic)

 

• “Sharlto’s Wikus is a xenophobic racist rat bastard – who also happens to be a sweet family man.” (critic)

 

• What motivates him? Does that change throughout the film?

 

• Talk about Wikus’ transformation. How does it affect his character?

 

 

• Does he change? Is his change based on alien DNA or personal experience? (nature vs. nurture)

 

 

• Do you root for Wikus? Why or why not?

 

Aliens

• Did you think the aliens were good or evil?

 

• Why do they look like insects? (worker bees)

 

• What was the purpose of how they were presented?

 

• What were their ultimate intentions with the fluid?

 

• What do you think happened for their arrival?

 

• What happens when a group lacks a leader?

 

• How was using actual aliens rather than addressing apartheid/refugees directly work or not work?

 

 

Africa

• How does the film present Africa?

 

• Does this change or inform your perceptions of Africa? Does it reinforce any stereotypes?

 

• How did you feel about the films representation of Nigerians?

 

• “The bottom line is that there are huge Nigerian crime syndicates in Johannesburg. I wanted the film to feel real, to feel grounded, and I was going to incorporate as much of contemporary South Africa as I wanted to, and that's just how it is.” (director)

      (He also mentioned that it was meant as satire.)

 

Science Fiction

• What is the purpose of science fiction?

 

• “Certainly the film may be using science fiction to sneak a point of view past its audience's political filters, much the same way that, e.g., Gene Roddenberry did with Star Trek in the 1960s.” (critic)

 

• The science fiction is being used to engage rather more deeply and disconcertingly with the nature of racism itself – with the way that racist ideology and discourse deals with the feared, hated, despised  (and desired!) ‘Other.’ (review)

 

 

 Criticisms / White Savior

“It's a movie about an unappealing white man, who doesn't quite meet our approval in some way, who through a predictable turn of fate recognizes his own complicity in a racist social structure, and so through a moment of counter-intuitive self-sacrifice, manages to save an entire race from destruction, and along the way learns a very important lesson about love. Putting this same tired and racially problematic storyline into a South African setting simply reinforces the myth that what the world needs is a few brave white saviors to end all of our race problems.”

 

It’s been 33 years since South Africa’s Soweto riots stirred the world’s disgust with that country’s regime where legal segregation kept blacks “apart” and in “hoods” (thus, Apartheid) unequal to whites. District 9’s sci-fi concept celebrates—yes, that’s the word—Soweto’s legacy by ignoring the issues of self-determination (where a mass demonstration by African students on June 16, 1976, protested their refusal to learn the dominant culture’s Afrikaans language). (armond white)