Society Eye

District 9. What is it? Thin allegory to South African apartheid? Vague metaphor for immigration? General condemnation of racism? Kick-ass sci-fi film?

In order to maximize my enjoyment of the film, I’ve decided to settle with the latter description, and just stick with that.

Human rights advocates stubbornly use allegories to compare something we can relate to to a given ethical dilemma. The result, supposedly, is to convince us of the moral logic of needing to “act” in aid of a given issue.

Such allegories are almost always fairly useless.

Take this metaphor, for instance. In Peter Unger’s Living High and Letting Die, the writer sets up imaginary situations to serve as allegories. Borrowing parts of Peter Singer’s paraphrase in “The Singer Solution to World Poverty”, here’s the gist of it:

Bob has an expensive vintage sports car that gives him pleasure and will provide him with a retirement fund once sold. One day, he parks it just off of a train track, on a side rail. Looking down the track, he sees a child playing in the path of an oncoming train. He could throw a switch to divert the train and save the child, but this would destroy his sports car. Bob chooses to do nothing and goes on to live a happy life.

Singer argues that we are all in this situation – every day, we can choose to sacrifice luxury in order to save the life of an innocent child. Clearly, Bob’s actions appear reprehensible. Argument over – we’re morally obligated to help out, if we want to lead a decent life.

The paradox of this article is that, in spite of the equation we’re essentially presented with…

(a) You are morally decent.
(b) Morally decent people give money to charity if they can afford it.
Therefore (c) you should give money to charity.

… We still don’t feel particularly compelled to do anything. Allegory does nothing to convince us of our guilt. By taking the ‘other’ and make it into the ‘familiar’, the subject in Unger’s allegory immediately is removed from the necessary context.

This is the same problem I’m seeing with District 9. Yeah, it’s a cool sci-fi movie – but you really can’t create an allegory for a human rights issue. By replacing the context, you’re divorcing the issue from itself. You take the concrete and make it abstract. This simply perpetuates our distance from the situation.

The aliens are unavoidably the “other” in this film, and I found myself never blaming the humans for “othering” them. Shouldn’t the point be to show the essential similarity between us all, in spite of our desire to perpetuate difference? The aliens are ugly, dangerous (able to rip a human’s limb off) and not particularly bright. To cap it all off, they eat cat food. If that’s not something close to a dumb animal, I don’t know what is.

Still, I really did enjoy the film. To me, it was more useful if viewed as a sort of extended metaphor for using difference to justify racism. Rather than being a complex allegory for anything particularly easy to relate to in our world, it simply asks us: if ugly, dangerous and dumb aliens came to our planet and lived in slums, is it OK to be racist towards them? Regardless of their intellect or demeanor, the answer is no: these are sentient things that don’t deserve this treatment.

Where the film gets interesting though is when it moves beyond black and white racism and into the questions of humanitarian aid. One thing that drives the anger of humans in Johannesburg is the fact that so many resources are spent on giving the aliens a space to live (even if that space was a slum). Obviously, the support is barely enough to allow the aliens to survive, and the resultant question reveals a moral grey area – but again the question is hypothetical fantasy: should we be responsible for ensuring the aliens’ survival?

Though these questions are strictly hypothetical, they do raise interesting thoughts about how far human morals would stretch to help an “other”. At the end of the day though, this is still just a sci-fi movie about “othering”; not a metaphor for human racism.

Over at Ultrakillbot, DJ Dan Jo Jo McGoats asks if District 9 itself is racist. A warning though: Dan is from Texas, and is therefore a de facto racist himself.