District 9

Amazing movie, one of my absolute favourites. When I watched it at home I was watching it for entertainments sake. Not to say that I didn’t take note of the social and inter-planet racism that took place in the film, I most certainly saw the film as a take on the racial injustice that occurred in South Africa but mostly I just thought it was a great film that showed the weakness of humanity in not accepting what’s different and the greed and money loving corporations and governments that will sacrifice anything to fill their pockets. My sister had a stronger impression of District 9 than I did in relation to South Africa. When planning to come here I made no connection to the movie in terms of what South Africa would be like but Melody went mental about it. She kept asking where all the Nigerians were and why didn’t everyone live in a slum. She would get so excited when she would see a township and would take lots of photos. Now obviously in exaggeration she would ask where the spaceship was but still it seemed like she really felt that South Africa looked like what the movie looked like which wasn’t very pretty.

Coming to visit she realised that people don’t get mugged every day and that she wouldn’t get shot just walking down the street, I think she even liked it here. For me I didn’t really know what I was going to get when coming here so District 9 was like a reference point for me. When I watched it at home I was with my little brother and at the end of the movie I’m sure we both would have said something like “That’s a heaps mad movie” and the following 10 conversations we each had with people would have started with “Have you seen District 9, it’s heaps mad”.

Last night me and Lunathi were deciding which movie to watch, I was reading out what I had and she stopped me at District 9, said she hadn’t seen it, I said “What?? It’s heaps mad” and then we began watching it. Now at this point I’ve been here for 3 months, I’ve seen Joburg which is what we will call the city, I’ve seen Rustenburg and Nelspruit which we will call out of the way and much more rural and I’ve been living in Port Elizabeth which is somewhere in between so I’ve had pretty reasonable exposure to SA. I’m sitting on my bed with Lunathi and the movie starts. Now I’m all like “Yeah this is such a great movie” and in my head I’m preparing myself for its awesomeness and it’s deep story and all the rest of it. I’m so intensely watching when Lunathi decides to start her commentary on the film.

“This movie is so weird”

“It looks like it’s being filmed on a hand held camera, it reminds me of the Office”

“OMG the aliens are disgusting”

“Just shoot it”

“This is so funny”

“That girls a Baha’i, she was in Isidingo”

“Oh hey they guys a comedian”

In my head I’m annoyed, she doesn’t appreciate this film the way I do. She called it funny and said it reminded her of the Office.. The Office of all things, a comedy series. But as I watch I start to think how different it must be from the eyes of a South African so I start to watch with my South African eyes. It was actually funny. When the main guy kept saying F**k with his accent and it sounded more like fok, or some of the slang that he would use, just his accent in general was amusing to me. The slums that the aliens were living in were familiar, that’s what a lot of the townships look like and especially the way they are all crammed together side by side. Gangs and rebels coming into these areas and taking over, this was all things that I had actually seen. The bit that got me the most was when they went into the alien area to hand out the evictions and they would pretty much force them to sign, completely denying them any rights and Lunathi says “This is what they did in the Apartheid era”. Suddenly it all became real, this wasn’t a movie. Replace the aliens with black people and you have the history of South Africa. The saddest part was that in this film it assumes that the black people would treat the aliens in the exact manner that they were treated and now I have to wonder if that would really be the case. If the circumstances arose would the South Africans who were treated like less than human during the Apartheid, treat others the same way? I hope not but you can see it happening already.

There is some resentment amongst the poor black community towards the wealthier black community. In a previous post I told you about the guy that said if people gave back what they had been given everyone would be better off. Here we have a race of people who were all equally oppressed by another race of people. Now that equality has been granted we see part of that before oppressed black community rise up, earn money, buy nice houses, drive nice cars...etc Then we have the rest of the community who are still poor, who live in shacks and travel by taxi. I’ve been told that this community is lazy, that it waits to be spoon fed. Whether it’s an unwillingness to better oneself or a lack of opportunity I can’t say but here we have a rift. This is what is said to have caused attacks against black people by black people. Besides what I have read in some reports and from discussions I’ve had with a few people that was the impression that I got. I would like to talk to some more people and see what they think, if they think the people have learnt from the past or if they would allow it to repeat itself.

I’m sure that the distribution of wealth in SA is not in any ways consistent. There are large gaps between rich and poor and I’m sure this causes resentment amongst those who have less especially when you are supposed to be ‘on the same side’ and all that kind of thing. I wonder if Melody has watched the movie again and had a change of understanding.

District 9 is a great movie, I still stand by that but it means something completely different to me now. This realisation is a sad one, most times the things we see in movies are make believe and we can toss the ideas out as garbage written to make money but not this time. Maybe one day we’ll look back at a film like this and be able to say that this kind of thing only happens in movies, we still have a very long way to go before that happens. Though it doesn’t hurt to hope