Super-old news but here're some of my thoughts on District 9 and Avatar. It's reposted content from my blog if you were wondering. Reading it again after a month or so, I'd probably want to rewrite it or add/take away some points, but I'm too lazy to do so now.

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District 9 is by and large a very good film and a very hard film to dislike, but here I have managed it. If only because District 9 and James Cameron’s Avatar are two versions of the same film. At the heart of both films is the phenomenon of interspecies transformation, which can easily be understood through the base ideology of racial/cultural transformation. In Avatar the transformation is from white man to noble savage. In District 9 the transformation is from white man to poor black man. What is so startling about both films is that, in taking Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves to its logical conclusion, the main character does not only assimilate the “alien” culture but rather transforms bodily into the “alien” itself.

In this lays a key tenet of today’s liberal ideology first espoused by Jesus as the second foremost commandment; “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”. Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek is highly critical of this notion of “an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard” and frequently cites it in his books and talks as a major flaw in our conception of multicultural relations.

Imagine for a moment if instead of basing District 9 off of the events surrounding 1970s District Six, Cape Town, Blomkamp instead chose to shoot a historical fiction mockumentary about District Six itself, all the while reincorporating analogous events related to the escape of one of the aliens and a white turncoat. How would these two films be different? Apart from the obvious lack of the looming alien mothership and alien technology, the emotional impact of Christopher’s escape—whether by boat or mothership—is the same. As is the final defeat of the racist villain Koobus Venter by Wikus’s fellow blacks/prawns. We sympathize with the “aliens” precisely for the same reason as we sympathize with the residents of District Six when we read about them or see photos of their slum. In the same vein, Blomkamp admits to interviewing the South Africans about Zimbabwean refugees in order to achieve the impressively natural reactions of District 9‘s surrounding citizens to the alien refugees.

I was not intentionally trying to deceive the people we interviewed. I was just trying to get the most completely real and genuine answers. In essence, there is no difference except that in my film we have a group of intergalactic aliens as opposed to illegal aliens.

So what does Blomkamp mean when he says this? Does he not mean that the reaction is precisely the same? No matter what kind of alien, it will always be alien. There will always be the interminable gap. Whether its cultural or physical the gap will always remain, and though physical characteristics can be made to hardly matter, cultural differences can never disappear.


What is Avatar‘s and District 9‘s solution to this problem? We can call it the “walk two moons” solution. As is said so innocently in Sharon Creech’s 1994 children’s novel, “don’t judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.” What is interesting is that our turncoat hero Wikus van de Merwe did indeed find himself walking two moons before his final “spiritual” transformation into a Prawn. Or at least until he is able to turn himself around and save his Prawn friend Christopher from being executed. What must be remembered here is that this is only after having heard Christopher’s story. In other words, the only way to break down cultural barriers and racial prejudices is to immerse yourself into the alien culture and see life through their eyes, so to speak—this is not merely figurative in the film, as Wikus’s left eye actually transforms to a Prawn eye. However, this solution, Žižek claims, is a fake and paradoxically an avenue for even greater intolerance.

District 9 is honest when it shows Wikus’s disgust with his own transformation. This is where the film differs itself from Avatar in a crucial way. There is always something horrible about being separated from your own culture; whether physically or mentally, it is always an inherently violent process. Arrogance is usually what emerges from this disgust as a form of mental distancing. When Wikus is first taken down into Christopher’s hidden spacecraft, his Prawn son points to Wikus’s deformed arm and his own arm and says that they are both the same. Wikus is immediately disgusted by this comparison, and brushes the comment aside. Never is it shown in the film that he accepts his transformation. By the end of the film he is probably still waiting for Christopher to return in 3 years and transform him back.

Yet this hatred, Žižek claims, is the key to successful multicultural relations and the end of racism. What occurs in Avatar and District 9 cannot occur for each and every culture on our planet with each and every other culture. We can never learn to be universally aware of everyone nor should we be forced to. What Žižek proposes is a universalized “battle space”, an international discourse that recognizes our differences and embraces them in a harmless manner. Žižek points to the derogatory racial humor in his birthplace of Yugoslavia as precisely this kind of harmless battle space. With hyperbolic racial humor, differences are brought out into the open but at the same time made ridiculous and deprived of their racism. To pretend to immerse yourself into another culture is only condescending and much more likely to breed stereotypes and hatreds.

The main problem with District 9 is that it cannot help itself from redeeming Wikus’s hatred and disgust of the Prawns with a heroic act of sympathy. It is only then that he finally finds the courage within himself to stand up for what is now his own kind. What saves the film in the end is its ambiguity as to Wikus’s true motivations. Did he rescue Christopher because he wanted to save a Prawn “brother” or because he knew that Christopher was his only chance to escape from being a Prawn “brother”? However much “better” the former option seems in terms of heroism and morality and so on, the latter perspective is ultimately the more honest one. Anyone who has seen the film understands that Wikus’s line “go before I change my mind!” is meant to suggest the former option. He does not say “go so you can change me back!” It is the Prawn Christopher that promises to return and save Wikus. He gives Wikus enough respect to realize that he cannot possibly enjoy being a Prawn.


Avatar fails in providing this ambiguity. It relishes in the white turncoat’s acceptance of his transformation. It is only through his walking several months in the body of a Na’vi that he has gained understanding of their culture. The film calls for all of us to take avatars when approaching multiculturalism. What would it be like to be Arab? What would it be like to be Japanese? And as soon as we do this we find ourselves looking down from a helicopter or looking through the lens of a microscope. Or, if we are truly torn away from our own culture like Wikus was, hating the very thing we are becoming even more than we had before. We cannot even maintain the arrogant distance that we had before. We may now truly hate because what we are hating is ourselves.

If we take a look at the final battles in both District 9 and Avatar—that is, the one-on-one between our white turncoat hero and the racist villain—we can see a clear exemplification of the difference between both films’ stances on racial objectification. In Avatar, the racist villain Colonel Quaritch nearly kills the main hero with a powered exoskeleton but is stopped by a Na’vi spear. In District 9 the main hero nearly kills the racist villain Venter with a powered exoskeleton but is stopped by modern weapons technology. Superior military technology is clearly signified by the presence of the combat armored suit, a relatively common sci-fi trope of military power spanning from 1986′s Aliens (actually from even before this) to 2003′s The Matrix: Revolutions. In other words, the Prawns are the “actual” superior species or at least equals, the hovering mothership being a constant but dulled reminder; they are “kept dumb” by the apartheid regime—kept from their true potential. What Avatar posits is that primitivism is inherently superior to any kind of technology. Though white man is obviously superior in his technical achievements, he is still missing a crucial connection with mother nature; this is what allows the naive, native Na’vi to win. To be clear, District 9‘s hypothesis is the same kind of logic that leads to avocation of affirmative action programs and could be called the prevailing liberal attitude, at least when dealing with practical matters. The alien Christopher “rising” to his ultimate potential with the tractor beam should be a powerful and humbling image for “white man” (which in this case actually includes blacks), and yet, all the people on the streets are cheering with relief when the mothership finally leaves Johannesburg in exactly the same way the Na’vi cheer when the military leaves Pandora. At the end of both films the question of whether the aliens will ever return is left unanswered.

This is intolerance at its most insidious: when we fear the report of their ambassador.

Thanks a bunch man. And yes, wordpress is awesome, but they won't let you edit CSS for free, you know. You can only stick with their templates. Some are more variable than others.

I'm not sure if the quote was necessary, but thanks.

Do you have an account? Pick a template and then try to edit it. It makes you pay.

Unless I'm wrong, because I could be. I didn't really want to edit the layout that much anyhow.