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The Film District 9: Main Themes

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Words: 2403 |

Pages: 5|

13 min read

Published: Nov 5, 2020

Words: 2403|Pages: 5|13 min read

Published: Nov 5, 2020

Table of contents

  1. Racism, Class Inequality and Unemployment
  2. Nation, Representation and Hybridism in South Africa
  3. Neoliberalism and the Unemployed Aliens in District 9
  4. Ethnic Stereotypes and Racism: Wikus van de Merwe
  5. Deprivation and the Chiawelo Shantyscape

District 9 is seemingly involved with the arrival of extra-terrestrials in urban center, that explores notions of regulative management and economic control in ordinal century neoliberal Republic of South Africa. This comment and political resonance area unit found below, and additionally work with the action and CGI computer graphics. Several universe options as allegories among the film: post-apartheid racism, economic subjugation and concrete economic condition and the way, despite past economic constraints thanks to color, the new neoliberal rhetoric of innovation associated self-adjustment has replaced the white-centred nationalism of an older market economy, however with devastating consequences, area unit known. District nine may be a powerful film through that to believe the structural, abstraction and cultural failures of post-apartheid Republic of South Africa. The indifferences by the South Africans within the film carry sturdy philosophical and social significance to the past: the extra-terrestrials cipher the urban landscape that is then decoded by audiences as they interpret the haunting remnants of segregation and concrete economic condition currently alive by migrant aliens (doubling for Nigerians and Zimbabweans) within the narrative. Additional significantly, through the substitution of subservient extra-terrestrials for black immigrants new Republic of South Africa, the film bequeaths for discussion several discourses over race, politics, remembrance, difference and divulges decades-old issues recalibrated in District 9.

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Racism, Class Inequality and Unemployment

The province explores nine themes: racism, class inequality, and unemployment in dealing with post-apartheid South Africa. In fact, the visual temptation of mise-en-scène says something about the social, economic and ethnic conditions that exist in Johannesburg. This is achieved through a design-inspired digital aesthetic, which builds on the public's shock of social assimilation / species - xenophobia towards these new immigrants - which contrasts with questionable 6images of riotous crowds, dense informal cities and anti-foreign posters hanging on the walls.

Nation, Representation and Hybridism in South Africa

An urban wanderer and stranger in District 9 faces segregated immigrants and unemployed people in South Africa, post-apartheid. District 9 reveals the permanence of spatial and social inequality, even today, as a reciprocal mutation of the same crisis facing the ANC: sustainable urban poverty. Like the spirit, apartheid legislation, especially the Urban Act 1955, which strictly eliminated the removal of blacks living in white areas and places before the National Party and apartheid collapsed in 1991. The legal process of forced removal occurred in 1982 in District 6. According to content published in the Museum of District 6, District Six was named Cape Town's Sixth Municipal District in 1867. Originally founded as a mixed community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, workers and immigrants, the sixth district was a vibrant center with close links to the city and port. However, with the beginning of the twentieth century, the process of elimination and marginalization began. The first relocated were South African blacks, who were forcibly deported from the area in 1901. With the wealthy moving into the suburbs, the area became a neglected circle in Cape Town. In 1966, it was declared a white area under the Group Areas Act of 1950. In 1982, the most aggressive demolition phase began, with the black population being forcibly removed from their homes, causing much violence. The film explicitly and implicitly deals with post-apartheid social and cultural fluctuations.

District 9 concludes with visual, and contemporary action cinema codes, but without a comparison: poverty in the lower parts of South Africa - indigenous and immigrant - and between them. The strength of the film is not only about the complaints of apartheid, but it is clearly represented by the Nigerian galleons after the rest of Africa's migration. In this way, the collaboration of Black and white South Africans is very real. However, the decision to stay away from the current representation of racial and ethnic minorities in South Africa is to be deliberate: District 9 still has to comment on the problems faced by digital scammers, coastal creatures. Africans living in Johannesburg today. South African black substitutes (but also African migrants from Nigeria and Zimbabwe) with land-borders reveal a new, more sophisticated metaphor for finding inequalities.

As still felt during the post-apartheid era, the combination of CGI aliens based on racialized heritage allows for a double increase of these foreigners when driving in a changing social space. The extra-border border in District 9 is suffering from traffic galaxies (which can be interpreted as doubles for Zimbabwean refugees in the real world) and at the same time as other opposition parties - Nigeria in this regard.

For large urban areas like Johannesburg and Cape Town, the migration of Nigerians has become one of the largest roadblocks in South Africa. However, their presence is reflected in the mistrust, fear and admiration of many citizens. The spread of prejudice against Nigeria is the South African media. From covering the stories of the evolutionary experiences of those communities, it often shows them in invisible light, in the habitat of predators, black magic, zombies, to high-tech pyramid schemes. Common to the public . But these troubling issues have changed with little attention in District 9 forecasts. In fact, Nigerians in District 9 are politically incorrect and their credibility is a serious problem. In the story-line, Nigerians play as a repulsive, even disgusting, gangster, with their neighbors, robbers and robbers. Nigerian characters will become villagers and, moreover, no less obvious characters than random characters, like random characters.

Neoliberalism and the Unemployed Aliens in District 9

District 9 addresses these facts through excessive terrestrial unemployment and the illegal methods they exploit in. In a few flights to District 9, we see extreme terrestrial people trying to buy food of cats from Nigerians at a shameless price increase. The Nigerians have been shown to be food insurgents with guns forcing the aliens to pay either through addiction or threats of physical harm. In other short combinations, we see Nigerians selling slaughtered animal parts and starving non-terrestrial extremes. Hungry, some are seen running away with their food or even devouring it on the spot. These interludes are not just a nod to the occult economies outside of the District 9 plots, but a bona fide cultural reference to real problems with the mixture of magical superstition and neoliberal opportunism. In other words, Hilton Judin writes that in Johannesburg there is a double economy, rural and urban, and many versions with distinct customs, beliefs, desires, stories and organized environments that can never travel in any direction. The extraterrestrial settlers of Region 9 are also forced to commit the most desperate acts: begging, excavation, crime and prostitution because of their unemployment. Some scenes show that aliens are lamenting what appears to be a kind of exposure, depicted with black bars covering their genitals, as can be seen in such scenes at 6:00 news. In other more vulgar images, you can see the man having sex with aliens.

In Johannesburg and District 9, small live centers such as slums host aliens facing impotence and depressing situations, beyond their control, which are central to the film's narrative. In a slightly different way, while the characters in Dirty Pretty Things are struggling to stay alive in District 9, there is no obvious use for aliens. The film neither shows nor comments on their work. They have become a wageless class. For the most part, the aliens live as soil-eaters, as the government subsidies they can live on are limited. They torture their livelihood as stateless and wordless immigrants, a problem that is compounded in host countries where immigrants from the real world are subject to constant deportation. In addition, District 9 extraterrestrial proletarians may also be tied to a displaced class, signaling their desperate nature. Their livelihood depends on clean-up and individual activities (some fetishize discarded items such as women's clothing or cat food) - a situation that allows one to regard these creatures as a helpless class. They are what Makhulu calls new issues, i.e. individuals who are less affected by consumption practices than self-denial (or negative consumption) - they are not only moral or rational, but have a very pragmatic orientation to the lived world. In the first half of the movie, extraterrestrial Christopher Johnson and his son seek the missing fuel to power their command ship. They rummage through heaps of discarded garbage to finally retrieve the elusive material, which in this regard exemplifies such self-denial by using used objects instead of consuming new ones. Such hard work to improve their socioeconomic conditions and return to the mother ship is not through material consumption, but through intelligent gathering. Christopher's abandonment of an unemployed proletarian, however, underscores the infinite possibilities of these underclass species, realized only through solidarity with his son and the most unlikely brotherly attachment: with Wikus van de Merwe, the central protagonist of the film.

Ethnic Stereotypes and Racism: Wikus van de Merwe

The Wikus figure in District 9 is a cheerful jerk. It begins as a foil for the aliens and then becomes the radicalized protagonist of the film. His physical appearance and gestures are typical of a comfortable, yet apathetic African middle-class manager. The most striking thing about Wikus, at least in the first half of the film, is that he lives up to the ambitious ideals of the status quo, which Gramsci described as a minor class. One could say that there is a Blomkamp technique to show the submission of Wikus through costumes. In the film, he looks almost boyish, wearing a beige chinos and a pale short-sleeved shirt, to a greasy, but neatly divided hairstyle - a naive uniform and a kind of style. The audience gathers its first impression of Wiku's second in the movie as he seems overwhelmed by the size of the mass eviction he's about to watch. The different cuts at the opening of District 9 shows how Wikus stumbles through the headquarters of Multi-National United (MNU), which was recorded by a cameraman on the day of eviction as the units prepare to mobilize for District 9. One can see from Wiku's mannerisms that he is tense about the political implications of illegal land seizures. To hide his nervousness and political concern, Wikus deals with flat, badly timed jokes that do not lighten the mood. Such stupid traits fit the Wikus surname, which is an important cultural reference point in South Africa: 'van de Merwe' is a generic name for characters who make ethnic jokes against Afrikaners s, but also jokes that circulate between white city dwellers to strengthen the ethnic self-image. In general, these are spoken by black South Africans over white South Africans, and the joke is so popular that hundreds of blogs offer different variations. In addition, the targeted character name Wikus establishes him as an African Everyman. Such colloquial and sometimes unpleasant jokes fill the dialogue exchange of District 9. In particular, the gross maltreatment of the aliens by Wikus is important.

An extreme case is found in one of the eviction scenes in which Wikus completely disregards the new species and their incubating (and non-hatched) extraterrestrial fetuses. He demonstrates in front of the camera how to break off one of the forty eggs in a barrack by pulling out the incubator and cutting off the aliens from the food supply. Then he radiates ground support, whereupon a soldier arrives and flares the hut with a flamethrower. Wiku's utter lack of compassion for this speculum is appalling even in the fictitious context. This is Wikus' most unsympathetic and controversial point in the movie. But his behavior also points to the absolute fetishization of time as a neoliberal ideal. On the one hand, Wikus is a figurehead for time management and watch in District 9. On the other hand, the fast pace of the film points to the speed of Wikus' professional, biological, social, and political metamorphosis, evolving from the once cold and bigoted middle manager to the later alien. Wikus becomes aware of the serious inequality that can be felt from his new view of the underclass (and the treatment of his former capitalist employer). Time is a central tenet of neoliberalism. By and large, the efficiency of managers is related to time management, and it is not surprising that Wikis District 9 divides this over its unused and unused extraterrestrials and separate areas in a neo-liberal, autonomous city, as I see it Johannesburg designed.

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Deprivation and the Chiawelo Shantyscape

We get an idea of the physical edges of Chiawelo, but also the size of these shantytowns. At a point in the film where Wikus evades capture after meeting the MNU scientists, we see him on a hill flanked by endless greyish-white garbage bleached by the African sun that falls out in every conceivable way Direction for miles. In the distance, we get an insight into the modernist architecture of Johannesburg and the floating spaceship of the aliens. And it is such a cinematic design of Wikus that is crucial for my idea of illustrating the poverty that is anchored in the narrative to make the battle environment realistic, but at the same time these environments downplay such action patterns. Finally, the viewer is aware that he and she see poverty as a backdrop that can be understood both as a compelling social critique and as an artful staging. These images of poverty cast a spell over the observer by the sheer otherworldlyness of the appearance of row after row of corrugated iron. In many ways, the audience in this zone is in despair as the characters and narrative plunge into this chiawelo labyrinth. Impoverishment is what the onlooker looks at, what is given to him above all else, and in my view, the momentum of science fiction action is predominant. In other scenes, Wikus begins to operate a high-tech battle droid stolen by Nigerian drug lords from the MNU. After Wikus has commanded the droids of the drug lords to attack his MNU enemies, we get another example of urban rendering, since most of this scene is shot in the first person. Of equal interest are the diagonal camera voyages of Wikus, who jump and maneuver Chiawelo huts in combat droid suits. Acrobatic cinematography, which sometimes enlarges close-ups of barracks, provides details through multi-colored chipping of paint or graffiti tags from local gangs that reinforce the native contours of the staging. The cartography of suffering in the last chapter of the film reinforces the desperation of his characters and could be understood as an allegory of African poverty.

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This essay was reviewed by
Dr. Charlotte Jacobson

Cite this Essay

The Film District 9: Main Themes. (2020, October 31). GradesFixer. Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/analysis-of-the-main-themes-presented-in-the-film-district-9/
“The Film District 9: Main Themes.” GradesFixer, 31 Oct. 2020, gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/analysis-of-the-main-themes-presented-in-the-film-district-9/
The Film District 9: Main Themes. [online]. Available at: <https://gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/analysis-of-the-main-themes-presented-in-the-film-district-9/> [Accessed 28 Mar. 2024].
The Film District 9: Main Themes [Internet]. GradesFixer. 2020 Oct 31 [cited 2024 Mar 28]. Available from: https://gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/analysis-of-the-main-themes-presented-in-the-film-district-9/
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