POST-HUMAN ANXIETY AND THE ARTIFICIAL IMAGINARY
IN NEILL BLOMKAMP’S DISTRICT 9
A RESEARCH PAPER
SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE
MASTER OF ARTS
BY
ROBERT J. HUNT
DR. ADAM BEACH – ADVISOR
BALL STATE UNIVERSITY
MUNCIE, INDIANA
MAY 2015
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In his article, “Allegory Bomb,” Joshua Clover establishes District 9’s connection to the
South African apartheid state. He argues that, although the location and content of the movie lay
a foundation for allegory, the South African setting alone is insufficient to make the allegorical
conceit viable. He suggests this is because the aliens in the movie do not represent an identifiable
group. Although this statement seems inscrutable at first—certainly a South African location
juxtaposed with codified segregation would imply black South Africans—on further analysis the
reason for Clover’s opinion becomes clear. Namely, one cannot make an allegorical leap from
black South Africans to aliens without first acceding to certain racist assumptions. Foremost
among these is the assumption that some humans are decidedly less human than others. In other
words, for blacks and aliens to be equivalent in District 9, blacks would need to be somehow
“other than” human in any other setting (and in light of the alien trope that prevails for most of
District 9, probably less than human). It is important to note that Clover in no way suggests that
the makers of District 9 are racists, inadvertent or otherwise. Rather, he contends that the movie
is simply better at critiquing human prejudice against other humans than constructing a coherent
allegory.
Another perspective on District 9 is Mocke Jansen van Veuren’s article “Tooth and Nail:
Anxious Bodies in Neill Blomkamp's District 9,” in which van Veuren suggests that
Johannesburg’s foreboding landscape represents South Africa's apartheid past. Van Veuren’s
analysis suggests that the built landscape in the movie corresponds in organization and
construction to the various types of bodies that inhabit Johannesburg, alien and human. Further,
this rigorous organization and regimentation of bodies, by segregation and other means, may be
construed as an essential plot element which foreshadows the protagonist’s contamination and
reconstitution as a hybrid species. Van Veuren’s claims support Susan Sontag’s assertion that, in
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contemporary science fiction, “characters do not fear animalistic regression as much as losing
one's self-awareness to an all-consuming Other” (579). Van Veuren also examines abjection in
District 9, a topic I will discuss at some length in this paper.
In “The Repugnant Appeal of the Abject: Cityscape and Cinematic Corporality in District
9,” Adéle Nel examines abjection as an attribute of the urban landscape and as a mapping tool of
the cinematic body. Nel draws upon the work of Julia Kristeva and integrates the actual
topographical surveys of Johannesburg into his analysis of the film. Taking an intertextual
approach, Nel addresses not only the mapping of bodies as a project, but also the cultural and
historical circumstances that have made Johannesburg a space of abjection, and therefore a space
conducive to cultural critique through filmic interrogation.
In this paper, I will also examine how, in District 9, extraterrestrial life forms, through
allegory, provide evidence for an examination of racialized social constructs in human society,
and give rise to a post-human refiguring of Susan Sontag’s “Imagination of Disaster,” from a
standpoint of insectile-cyborgnetics. At the beginning of District 9, Sarah Livingstone, a
documentary figure in the movie, notes that the world was expecting first contact with
extraterrestrial life to be a “transcendent experience,” an event not unlike a religious epiphany,
with “music from heaven and bright, shining lights.” In fact, a human expeditionary team
discovers a scene inside the spacecraft that seems closer to a scene from Dante's Inferno than a
vision of heaven, with prawn-like creatures scuttling amid their own bodily excretions. The
scene, evocative of abjected bodies immersed in the river Styx, suggests a corruptive social
paradigm at work. Additionally, individual members of “prawn” society are characterized by
insectile traits, physical as well as social, which make humans cringe. I employ the Stygian
allusion precisely for this reason. Here it suggests a condition not only of abjection but
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liminality, characterized, in this instance, by several concerns that cannot be subsumed by
normative social frameworks established exclusively for human society. Among the concerns I
will address in this paper is how District 9 aliens are, as liminal subjects, identified not by
species alone, as “prawns” or insectile others, but also by acquired cybernetic traits. They are
endowed with an auxiliary corporality of sorts, or cyborgic identity, derived from technology the
functionality of which depends on a cyber-genetic interface. Explicitly, the “auxiliary” identity
of District 9 aliens represents a personification—or otherly embodiment—of post-human
anxiety. In other words, while some in human society desire the prawn’s cyborgic potentiality
(specifically, in District 9, individuals holding top-level positions within the military-industrial
complex), nearly all humans regard the aliens themselves as repulsive organisms (the -org of
“cyborg” is in fact the “organism” itself, the organic part of corporeal identity), deserving the
strictest social segregation. This ambivalence gives rise to the definitive paradox of District 9’s
narrative aesthetic: human desire must, inevitably, lead to a post-human condition; however, the
act of becoming post-human cannot be regulated or entirely contained by human desire. Put
another way, the cyborgic capacity to which some humans aspire is a biconditional proposition—
of desire, on the one hand, and, on the other, the inevitable loss of identity that must follow. The
byproduct is a pervasive sense of anxiety.
In District 9, post-human anxiety is largely a consequence of human beings having to
negotiate alien (prawn) identity in order to understand and ultimately exploit their cyborgic
technology. Many such interspecies encounters take place as a consequence of what may be
deemed “official policy,” but a narrative strategy that employs closed-circuit video footage and
“shaky” camerawork effectively blurs the line between the public and the private sphere. The
result of this strategy is a subtle myopia that permits individual characters, human and alien, to
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develop independently of the oppressive social structures that typify their respective species. As I
have already stated, alien technology, in order to function, requires cybernetic interface with
alien genetic material; only alien DNA will suffice to render alien technology operational. Thus,
for humans associated with the military-industrial complex, the act of containment is first and
foremost an exploitative enterprise, though one fraught with the perils of dual-messaging in the
public sphere. While most in human society express little concern for alien welfare, the general
public are deeply concerned with containment of the alien species. In the movie it is implied that,
should the public discern ulterior motives behind official policies affecting public safety, the
clandestine agendas of those involved will be jeopardized. As a consequence, containment policy
occasions a narrative of false equivalency, one in which an understood moral imperative is
balanced against a sense moral obligation. The moral imperative is, generically, to treat aliens
“humanely,” while the moral obligation is to keep the public trust and, through official policy,
maintain human dignity. The synthesis of the two results in both going unfulfilled. That is,
humans are fed a false narrative of secure but ethical containment; and, in turn, this allows aliens
to be segregated as chattel for purposes of experimentation. Arguably, at one level of discourse,
there exists an impulse to “exterminate”; however, this impulse is allayed, or so it would appear,
by the same underlying anxiety that attends the post-human paradox. Only in this case, I argue,
post-human anxiety is the byproduct of the filmic aesthetic—that is, representational visual
elements within the movie—rather than a specific discursive element expressing human
motivations.
In District 9, the spacecraft which occupies the airspace above the city of Johannesburg
is, for the human population, easily the single greatest source for collective social anxiety. Also,
it is by far the most conspicuous (and potent) visual metaphor available to the mise-en-scène.
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The spacecraft may be interpreted, or textually inscribed, in several ways. However, I find it
useful to think of it as an immovable object, arguably the spacecraft’s definitive attribute, and
apply that quality to a familiar (and intuitive) paradox. Explicitly, the spacecraft is at once an
immovable object and an irresistible force. It is an immovable object in that it constantly mimics
and hails the foreign bodies of its creators. Even though the alien bodies from within are said to
be securely contained, the immovable disposition of the spacecraft, a consequence of human
intellect being insufficient to overcome the complexities of alien technology, casts doubt upon
any official claim that containment, complete and impervious, has been achieved. Semiotically,
then, the stubborn persistence of the alien spacecraft represents the ineradicable threat posed by
first contact. By this understanding, the spacecraft also represents an irresistible force (that is, a
source of constant anxiety) in that it cannot be unseen or intellectually resisted, any more than it
can be coopted by a force of collective (human) will. It simply remains a Stygian tabluea of
sorts, and humanity stands at the brink.
From the beginning, District 9 exhibits a quasi-documentary feel. The viewer's
perspective shifts from video blurbs of camera footage gleaned from CCTV feeds, to cable news
network segments, to documentary-style footage produced by the private contractor MNU within
District 9, to camerawork and esthetic compositions that function to complete the eclectic
tapestry of District 9’s mise-en-scène. As though incidentally, we are informed early on in the
movie, by yet another documentary-type figure, that “no one really knew what District 9 was,
and that there were a lot of secrets in District 9.” It may be surmised, then, that the film’s
documentary-style approach facilitates a mode of inquiry meant to expose the “secrets” of
District 9. Moreover, the secrets revealed constitute an allegorical framework which interrogates
human prejudice not only in terms of species but also in terms of race. As film critic Joshua
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Clover notes in a recent article, the movie is driven “by a profound and remorseless contempt for
present humanity [regardless of race, creed or color]—including the humanist desires of the
audience it hails” (8). This interrogation of humanist desires also conscribes the post-human
themes of the movie. As a film which channels colonial themes, District 9 is concerned with
boundaries and bodies, to be sure, but it is also concerned with the materiality (the literal
construction and makeup) of human bodies, and in particular with the commodification of bodies
not precisely colonial and decidedly post-human in their makeup.
In the Sontagian model described in “Imagination of Disaster,” Sontag contends that
“science-fiction films are not about science but about disaster.” She states that “the destruction
we witness in science fiction films is “rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive” (65).
Specifically, the dawn of the sci-fi disaster movie coincides with the rise of big-screen cinema,
during a time when the screens of movie theaters were growing larger and larger. Sontag
suggests that this coeval evolution gave rise to a sci-fi movie genre which valued the power of
visual spectacle; consequently, filmmakers tended to play up the “scale” of the disaster rather
than the hard science behind it (65). The notion of a “disaster of scale” marks an important
departure for District 9, which could be thought of as somewhat anti-Sontagian film. Put another
way, District 9 functions as a post-human expression of the science-fiction film; it revalues,
through subtlety, the materiality associated with humanist desires, rather than seeking to
devastate materiality in an effort to critique it. This is at least in part what Clover means when he
speaks of the film’s “profound and remorseless contempt for present humanity.” In District 9,
our view of humanity is contextually reoriented, turned inside out. Viewing events intensively
(from inside District 9) is more important than viewing them on an extensive scale, as one, for
example, views events in movies such as 1953’s The War of the Worlds. District 9, as a setting,
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is at once an endemically alien and pathologically human space. Moreover, it is a designated
“alien” space, as though the invasion contemplated by Sontag has, in advance of our inquiry,
been thwarted and contained. As such, District 9 effectively deconstructs Sontagian humanist
claims in place: amid the status quo the noble and moral qualities of humanity appear safe, and
even before the movie begins, the superiority of the human genome has been upheld. To put it
another way, the beginning of District 9 proposes an ending, a foregone conclusion, to the
humanist era (bracketed by Sontagian notions of sublimated disaster) and marks the advent of a
post-human condition, though we do not know as much at the outset of the movie.
The prior containment of District 9, not quite a quarantine, results in an inversion of the
Sontagian model, though one that is not completely unrecognizable. The constant presence of the
alien spacecraft hovering in place over the city of Johannesburg—an immense object that cannot
be overlooked or easily put out of mind—is a spectacle on a global scale that corresponds to
Sontag’s theoretical model. However, in this rendering of the post-human, the fear of impending
disaster has been replaced by a nagging anxiety about the corruptive influence of a nonhuman
species on human society. The aliens do not show up as invaders or conquerors but as castaways
with no concept of human society. The main character in the movie, Wikus Van De Merwe,
completes the inversion of the Sontagian model when, at the end of the movie, he conspires to
help one of the aliens escape to the stranded spacecraft in a bid to return home. Wikus is
intellectually corrupted by the alien life form, but his corruption is not brought about by
technological envy or by psychical duress applied by telepathic means. Rather, in the course of
the movie, he discovers that these “prawns” are in many ways more sympathetic, more “human,”
than human beings themselves. And although his physical body is ultimately transfigured, by
exposure to alien DNA, he does not forfeit his conscious awareness of his past existence as a
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human being, evidenced by the fact that he leaves a flower for his wife on the porch of the house
they once shared. Nor does Wikus become a simulacrum who can infiltrate human society for
devious purposes without arousing suspicion; rather, he is fully alien by the end of the movie,
indistinguishable, at least physically, from the creatures in District 9.
Wikus, in his inadvertent communion with the insect-like prawn, becomes central to the
film's conception of a fully containable alien conclave, to which access is regulated by corporate
interests for the purpose of exploiting and commodifying alien technology. Wikus, a vector of
vulnerability and communicability, complicates this dividing line, the notion of them and us, but
more precisely the notion of “self and non-self” (Haraway 224). It is through the discourse of the
self that the post-human quality of the film is attained. A post-human context is realized when
Sontag's imagination of disaster is artificially enhanced, so to speak, with what Donna Haraway
calls the imagery of “high-technology visualization technologies” (275). Haraway suggests that
the proliferation of this sort of technology has changed the way in which humans imagine
disease and invasion, both in microbiological and extraterrestrial terms. The contemporary
biopolitical imagination, she contends, exists as an extension of graphics-intensive technology,
computer-aided design and engineering software, to make no mention of CGI technology that did
not exist (at least not in the highly sophisticated forms it exists today) at the time Haraway
authored Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991). As a result of the proliferation of this and other
technologies, Haraway suggests that we conceptualize anxieties about external threats to the
collective body of society and individual bodies differently than we did before such technology
existed. Moreover, she suggests that a sense of “escalating diversity”—intensified by technology
that allows us observe life at the level of DNA, as well as reimagine evolution and invasion
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through visualization technologies—has resulted in new anxieties about our ability to
differentiate self from non-self:
When is a self enough of a self that its boundaries become central to entire
institutionalized discourses in medicine, war, and business? Immunity and invulnerability
are intersecting concepts, a matter of consequence in a nuclear culture unable to
accommodate the experience of death and finitude within available liberal discourse on
the collective and personal individual. Life is a window of vulnerability. It seems a
mistake to close it. The perfection of the fully defended, ‘victorious’ self is a chilling
fantasy, linking phagocytotic amoeba and moon-voyaging man cannibalizing the earth in
an evolutionary teleology of post-apocalypse extra-terrestrialism. (272)
According to Haraway, in the contemporary imagination the imagery of invasion has been
conflated with images of the battlefield, mechanized armor, wartime production facilities and
military campaigns against foreign aggressors. Special effects in movies such as Star Wars have
allowed us to envision warfare among different species, while at the same time the
extraterrestrial has come to represent a threat not only to human sovereignty but human
individuality. As Haraway suggests, these visual metaphors are so persistent that they have
become part of the biopolitical consciousness. Clinicians now use the visual metaphor of
mobilizing military forces as a therapeutic method of bolstering a patient's immune system. The
possibility that such visualization exercises may produce psychosomatic effects is indicative of
the extent to which Western society, and the Western psyche, is invested in notions of
individualism and a sovereign self.
In District 9, emergent biopolitical concepts of identity represent the theoretical
borderland between Sontag's “imagination of disaster” and Haraway's “chilling fantasy” of a life
without vulnerability. As Sontag points out, the imagination of disaster is a means of
experiencing one's own death innumerable times, and, by vicarious participation, sublimating the
traumas of the atomic age. Haraway's conception of life without vulnerability refigures this
notion not only in a post-human sense but also in a postcolonial one. The notion of an absence of
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vulnerability is also a metaphor for erasure. Postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha have noted
that the colonial narrative not only advocates for self-deception, but in the process of doing so,
facilitates erasure. In a sense, each step toward a post-human condition is potentially a step away
from a post-colonial one.
While general audiences may not be accustomed to analyzing films for post-colonial
motifs, audiences are certainly accustomed to critiquing filmic technologies—CGI and special
effects—based on the relative success or failure of these technologies to entertain audiences
through a sense of vicarious participation. Malcolm Turvey has proposed that film, as a
representational text, poses a series of specific problems related to the limitations of human
vision. This bears mentioning because the documentary-style aesthetics of District 9 challenge
the viewer to regard content selection as a documentary enterprise rather than as an open gesture
to the optical unconscious. In particular, Walter Benjamin’s theory of the optical unconscious
suggests that photography, as well as the motion picture, produced a visual medium that obscures
some content as surely as it accentuates other content. The documentary framework of District 9
mobilizes a set of specific cultural and technological referents, not least being the “wired”
society in which CCTV cameras constantly surveil every street and the inside of every building.
In Western society, and in particular in the post-9/11 world, such technology has become
synonymous with “security,” a means to separate them from us, and more importantly to identify
possible threats to our safety before they can inflict harm. The technology of surveillance and
containment is a potent metaphor for the contemporary consciousness which seeks to construct
complete invulnerability. The tapestry of camera footage, revealing human interactions with
aliens as well as Wilkus’s subversive and violent acts, serves to disrupt the narrative of erasure
that is taken up by both corporate and political interests. Moreover, the montage of camera
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footage from disparate sources signifies the biopolitical metaphor of immunological response
which Haraway proposes in her chapter “Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies”:
But how do narratives of the normal and the pathological work when the biological and
medical body is symbolized and operated upon, not as a system of work, organized by the
hierarchical division of labor, ordered by the privileged dialectic between highly
localized nervous and reproductive functions, but instead as a coded text organized as an
engineered communications system, ordered by a fluid and disbursed command-andcontrol intelligence network? (211)
In several ways, District 9, as a filmic text, poses a possible answer to Haraway's question. As
Haraway suggests, the notion of complete invulnerability not only complicates but runs counter
to the notion of biological and biopolitical diversity. By introducing the topic of biopolitical
defense, District 9 suggests a movement of Marxist motivations toward a new biopolitical
reality. Haraway speculates that certain (possible) incarnations of the cyborg have the potential
to disrupt and destabilize dominant biopolitcal narratives. This assessment assumes that the
proliferation of cyborgs will led to greater biopolitical diversity and an inevitable revalutation of
the individual’s purpose within established social systems. Here Haraway’s cyborg evolution has
something in common with Marx’s socialist revolution: the notion of containment, of a perpetual
maintenance of the status quo, is pragmatically unsustainable. The evolution is not only
necessary but unavoidable.
The sentiments of the public at large (“They are spending so much money to keep the
aliens here, but at least they are keeping them separate from the rest of society”) reflect the
overwhelming influence of political and corporate interests in District 9, and suggests that
relocation of the aliens, in accordance with public sentiment, provides a convenient excuse for
transitioning the alien colony from a concentration-camp-like environment to a field laboratory
environment , where experiments may be carried out with a greater degree of control, though
with fewer objective observers to question the ethical conduct of the scientists.
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The project of abjection involves the relocation of alien bodies from human population
centers near Johannesburg to a location that is separate and ostensibly secure. The prawn are
represented as bare life not only because they behave differently from humans, but because their
appearance is, by human standards, primitive and insectile . The term “bare life” was coined by
the philosopher Giorgio Agamben and describes a societal condition in which certain individuals
are not accorded the basic rights that uphold human dignity. In the film, the prawn colony is
described in terms of an insect colony or an instinct-driven horde. The colony consists of a socalled worker class of drones and a command-and-control structure. However, the leadership of
the colony has been decimated by illness during the long confinement aboard the spacecraft. As a
consequence, the “instinct-driven” component of prawn identity disproportionately impacts
human perception of the prawn. More precisely, in human society, an inability to resist “instinct”
and “impulse” is often associated with either childlike or criminal behavior. For humans such
behavior does not register as an “immutable characteristic,” the way, for example, race or
biological sex does—even though for the prawn the notion of acting on impulse may be as
organically basic to their makeup as race or sex. This means the aliens are not extended the
benefit of ethical, or so-called “politically correct,” social doctrine. Paradoxically, as a
consequence of being exceptional the prawn are rendered bare life. The conditions they live in
are not perceived as a possible consequence of being misunderstood. Rather, it is suggested that
“this is the way they are,” and from this attitude arises the Agambenian “state of exception.”
The real purpose of containing and controlling the aliens is to facilitate conditions that
allow for the procurement of alien weapons technology. By understanding this motive, one may
move beyond Sontagian concepts of disaster toward a post-human understanding of District 9.
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Specifically, Sontag points out that it is (human) technology which forms the basis for a
significant part our identity:
According to science fiction films, man is naked without his artifacts. They stand for
different values, they are potent, they are what gets destroyed, and they are the
indispensable tools for the repulse of the alien invaders or the repair of the damaged
environment. The science fiction films are strongly moralistic. The standard message is
the one about the proper, or humane, uses of science, versus the mad, obsessional use of
science. (45)
In District 9, the weapons manufacturer MNU seeks to appropriate alien technology while at the
same time purging the alien bodies from human environs. However, the weapons technology is
calibrated to the DNA profile of alien bodies; thus the notion of integrating alien technology and
human bodies, while at the same time subordinating alien DNA to human bodies, without fear of
contamination, poses a stunning inversion of the Sontagian conceit. On the one hand, humans
seek to become more alien-like through the alien technology. On the other hand, they continue to
defend their humanity, ironically enough, through the abjection of the alien bodies.
Wilkus uses the codification of exclusion, an allegorical element which harkens to
colonial conversations involving slavery and segregation, to try to take the alien’s child due to
“unsafe living conditions.” Before he can achieve this goal, however, Wilkus becomes violently
ill, an aftereffect of having been exposed to the transmutable concoction in the alien’s hovel.
This marks the beginning of Wilkus’s transformation. Moreover, we witness the film's transition
from a more humanist perspective to a postmodern/post-human model. As previously noted,
Haraway asserts that a great deal of contemporary biopolitical anxiety about invasion occurs as
an immunological metaphor, whereby escalating diversity and complexity (of species and of
technology) necessitates the advent of the more thoroughly, if not completely, defended self.
Such defense must surely occasion an elevated sense of self-awareness in the biopolitical
consciousness, even hyper-awareness about the boundaries of self, for increased vigilance can be
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the only viable response to escalating threats increasingly complex. Arguably, it is at this
juncture of self-conscious hyper-awareness that Marxist-humanist concerns merge with posthuman, biopolitical anxieties. Moreover, the prawn of District 9, as insectile foreign bodies,
represent the convergence of Haraway's anxiety of multiplicity and Eric Brown's notion of
insectile sovereignty as multiplicity (from Insect Poetics):
[I]t is partly this innate distortion, derangement, and fragmentation-their world ever
fractured from our own-that marks insects as humanity's Other, even as their swarming,
hiving, and colonizing behaviors reproduce various self-identifications in human beings.
It may be part of this individual sovereignty, under the guise of vast multiplicity, that
begins to unsettle the stable containment of insects as spectacle. And in effect it seems
often the form, rather than the material, of the insect that first repels humans. (xi)
The beginning of Wilkus’s transformation is marked by an expulsion of vomitus, the reflexive
desire to be safe and whole again, to cleanse his body of foreign bodies, or more precisely this
multiplicity which imperils personal sovereignty. From a filmic standpoint, the visuality of his
struggle is excruciating. Only by witnessing it does one recognize the double-bind in which
Wilkus finds himself: by degrees, his own body is rendered abject against a backdrop of other
abjected bodies (bodies which not only imperil his sense of identity but foretell his future). By
degrees, Wilkus himself becomes a figure of abjection, the literal embodiment of otherly,
insectile anxieties itemized by Brown. At one point, he experiences a nosebleed, evidence of an
escalating physical transformation. His body (his identity) is coming undone: he loses a
fingernail, later teeth. This harkens to the Sontagian claim that our physical body is an
expression of the technology which surrounds us. But in Sontag's model, the machinery of our
implicit perfection, of our ostensible invulnerability, is human technology. The double-bind of a
post-human condition brought about by alien technology moves the discussion beyond
boundaries in which human technology and human flesh are the only compatible identifiers.
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In District 9, the human imaginary is refigured to suggest that technology not only
defines the materiality of human existence but also reconstitutes and invades it. One of the most
important motifs available to us in District 9 is a seeming cessation of commercial, material
identity by which we qualify and validate our existence—specifically, the point at which
technology merges with our bodies and ceases to be merely material but also coporeal. Thus, the
implications of District 9 are twofold. The first part of the narrative describes a familiar, much
discussed theme of abjection, the codification and speciesification of abjection. This sets in
motion a transition to a condition in which notions of race and species cease to matter. Flesh and
blood materiality are overtaken not only by a merging of species and races, of ethnic identities,
but ultimately by a merging with technology. In this sense Sontag predicted the cyborg of
Haraway’s conception. District 9 questions how humans arrive at this evolutionary point (or at
least one possible point of evolution).
We are told “certain facets of Nigerian gangs want to extract technology from District 9
and have been trying to do so for many, many years.” Here the notion of “extraction” is a term
both subtle and ominous, for it does not imply “weapons smuggling,” as one could easily
assume. Rather it speaks to the desire of some Nigerians to extract, through evasive processes, as
well as by the act of ingestion, a DNA profile that would conceivably bind their own flesh to the
alien weapons. This raises another Sontagian fear, although a new fear which is strictly posthuman, arguably postmodern, namely that the Nigerian gangs seek to reify their identity by
extracting technology from the aliens, though they are unable to fully utilize it. The fear, then,
becomes that, as humans seek to repurpose alien technology for human purposes only, that the
technology itself will, like insects or viruses, infiltrate the human consciousness and human
flesh, forever changing humanity.
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The quandary here becomes not one of species per se, or of the weapon itself, but of the
desire of humans to transcend the human condition in a quest for power. This again echoes the
Sontagian notion that humans condition their values according to their physical possessions and
that humans in the quest for transcendent power through technology will ultimately be corrupted
by the technology; the technology in District 9 in this sense exists outside of Sontag's claim
because the technology itself represents the merging of the alien species; it is not about a
takeover of the human condition but rather the reconfiguration of the species, such that notions
of abjection, defined by codification and the violence of hegemonic language, are no longer
effective in purging the alien seed (45).
Another important distinction from the Sontag model presented in the movie District 9,
occurs when Wilkus is used by the weapons manufacturer MNU to fire the weapons which
heretofore they have been unable to utilize, due to the DNA-specific design of the weapon. This
is an important turning point in the film’s post-human model, distinguishing it from the
Sontagian model, in that, as Sontag explains, the scientist once infatuated by the technology
inevitably turns against the extraterrestrials when he discovers their inhumanity and, thus,
sacrifices himself to save the earth. However, as critic Joshua Clover points out, in the movie
District 9 the allegory is broken because, if anything, it inveighs against the state of being
human. The movie is not a critique of racism, or of one race or ethnic group in opposition to or in
domination over another, but rather a critique of the entire human race as generally less than
virtuous. This sentiment is nowhere in better evidence than when the Wilkus is forced to fire one
of the alien weapons at one of the prawns. Here, the Sontagian model gives way to a post-human
model: the protagonist is abhorred by the actions of his own kind, cultivates sympathy for the
innocent alien he kills (or is forced to kill indirectly) and begins to feel solidarity with the aliens,
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of which he is becoming one. This post-human model confers sympathy on to the alien, who has
become a victim of human inhumanity.
The scientists assert that what happens to Wilkus is not important. What is important is
that they harvest from him what they can, before the balance between human and alien (prawn)
has progressed too far. In other words, at this point in the movie the human scientists,
collectively, have switched places with the scientist of the Sontag model—the only scientist who
has sympathized with the aliens now betrays them (because of something unsavory he sees
within). The MNU corporate scientists have become the alien outsiders (outsiders to human
dignity and humane alliance), and the protagonist has come to represent, individually, the once
noble qualities of humanity at large. Here we witness an inversion of inside and out, predicated
upon abjection, an event set in motion not only by human anxieties about the alien presence, but
by the codification of the aliens as outsiders. For Wilkus, humans are no longer viably human,
nor is Wilkus himself strictly a mutant outcast. His body, it is said, represents hundreds of
millions of dollars in biotechnology. He has been commodified, his human identity subsumed by
the regulatory prowess of corporate and political interests. Similarly, in Sontag’s model, nobility
of spirit and human dignity, the traits that make individual humans worthy of survival, are
subsumed by the invasive prowess of intellectually cold and decidedly un-human
extraterrestrials.
Roughly halfway through the movie, as Wilkus is about to be surgically dissected by the
doctors in the employment of MNU, audience sympathy arguably shifts to Wilkus’s less than
human character, while the human doctors take on the ominous aspect of an extraterrestrial
typology known to wield probes and scalpels for purposes of vivisection and acts of remorseless
torture. Once again, the notion of the protagonist as cross-species artifact is evocative of Sontag's
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claim that human beings identify themselves first and foremost by the materiality of culture and
commodity. The protagonist’s commodification by the MNU Corporation verifies the posthuman trending of the movie, as human flesh is repurposed and redesigned for the purpose of
weaponization. Yet another Sontagian claim is inverted: humanity's power in the face of an alien
invasion is expressed by its ability to field weapons of mass destruction, tanks, armor, and rocket
launchers, as opposed to the actual faces of the soldiers, who merely become secondary to the
mechanized principles of the battle. But in District 9 our protagonist becomes that mechanized
operative, only as the object of a manhunt instead of as a defense against an un-human onslaught.
In this sense, Wilkus has become the simulacrum of Sontag's claim, only more human than the
forces behind his regimentation. Indeed, the methodical way in which the MNU corporation
orchestrates the manhunt for Wilkus construes a metaphor that, on the one hand, suggests a
capitalist machine, and, on the other, recapitulates Haraway's notion of an immunological
response. Wilkus is the inversion personified, the insider who becomes an outsider by
circumstance. The scientist Sarah Livingstone points out that “the entire world was watching
[Wilkus], every eye was upon him.” Here is in essence Sontag’s claim that the alien invader
must be a world spectacle, a threat on a global scale. In District 9, the example is both upheld
and inverted, for the alien spacecraft which hovers above Johannesburg is both a symbol of
human anxiety, of the imagination of disaster, and a reminder, following Wilkus’s infection, that
the threat of invasion is never fully contained, and never really recedes.
Here District 9 captures the greatest Sontagian fear: at the end of the drama, the scientist
no longer longs to be human. At the end of the film, Wilkus leaves us scanning the skies for
aliens, partly in fear of reprisal but also in anticipation of change and possible revolution—the
seeds of which have been planted in his DNA. When Wilkus visits the underground ship, he
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discovers that his alien counterpart is in fact quite intelligent, a point he had discerned early on,
after his first encounter with this individual. He begins to see the aliens for what they are and not
what they appear to be: here is the realization of Charlotte Sleigh’s claim that aliens are
everything that we are not, human beings turned inside out. There is “something fundamentally
wrong about insects,” and yet Wilkus discovers that there is nothing in humans that is
fundamentally superior. At the end of the movie, Wilkus’s family members and associates
speculate about his fate. A journalist speculates as to whether the alien who escaped in the
spacecraft will come back “to affect rescue” or possibly “declare war on us.” But despite these
inquiries, the viewer is left with the impression that the world has not really changed very much,
has without fanfare moved on from the extraordinary events which have taken place. This raises
a number of provocative questions about the staying power of materiality and capitalist doctrine
in human society. Now that the alien spacecraft has gone, are humans willing and able to sustain
a coherent, cultural memory of it? Or will it simple be elided from the human imaginary over
time? Was it perhaps the presence of the spacecraft that gave the post-human impulse meaning in
the first place?
In order to better interrogate post-human anxiety in the contemporary science-fiction
film, I believe it will be useful to pursue research which focuses on how humans (filmgoers) in
the twenty-first century extend notions of materiality to extraterrestrial objects and bodies. If
“destruction” is no longer the primary signification of the sci-fi film (and I submit that it is not),
how, then, does the materiality of extraterrestrial objects and bodies (CGI-generated,
commodified, and fetishized) affect conceptions of human identity, and post-human anxiety, fifty
years after Sontag’s Imagination?
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Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University
Presss, 1998. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York: Classic
Books America, 2010. Print.
Brown, Eric C. Insect Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota University Press, 2006.
Print.
Clover, Joshua. “Allegory Bomb.” Film Quarterly 63.2 (2009) 8-9. JSTOR. Web. 11 Oct. 2013.
Grunebaum, Heidi. “Unburying the Dead in the ‘Mother City’: Urban Topographies of Erasure.”
PMLA 122.1 (2007) 210-19. JSTOR.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.
Nel, Adéle. “The Repugnant Appeal of the Abject: Cityscape and Cinematic Corporality in
District 9.” Critical Arts: A South-North Journal of Cultural & Media Studies 26.4
(2012) 547-69. EBSCO.
Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster.” Commentary Oct. (1965) 42-8. Print.
Turvey, Malcolm. Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008. Print.
Van Veuren, Mocke Jansen. “Tooth and Nail: Anxious Bodies in Neill Blomkamp's District 9.”
Critical Arts: A South-North Journal of Cultural & Media Studies 26.4 (2012) 570-86.
EBSCO.