As the first and only Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster set in South Africa's economic capital, District 9 was submitted from its release to superficial analyzes from critics superficially familiar with history and modernity. social context of the country of the film. These critics unilaterally assumed that the film's central message was an allegorical recapitulation of apartheid, the system of institutionalized racism that was officially maintained from 1948 to 1994. Exemplary reviews from Washington DC's NPR, London's Guardian, and the Johannesburg Mail & Guardian refer to District respectively. 9 as "an allegory of apartheid", a film with "allegorical connotations" of apartheid and an "allegory of apartheid and xenophobia". In all three articles, the emphasis on an allegorical reading is inspired by the film's emphasis on a forced expulsion of a non-human population motivated by segregation and a proposed historical parallel with the expulsions of the population non-white urban woman in South Africa. Later academic articles, such as "Apartheid, Spectacle and the Real: From District Six to District 9" by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and "The Strange Ride of Wikus Van de Merwe" by Michael Valdez Moses, also fit in in the same diagram. to assume allegorical intentions on the part of the filmmaker, and to assess District 9's socially progressive merit or lack thereof on these grounds, rather than on a direct interpretation of the film's symbolic content. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Unsurprisingly, critics writing furthest from the film's location were the most likely to set District 9's allegorical message in the past, and to set it outside of Johannesburg. The American magazine Newsweek published an article entitled "The Real District 9: Cape Town's District Six" which stated: "sure, [the film is] about apartheid and segregation, but for South Africans it is It is also about District Six of Cape Town, which has now disappeared, and the real slums which arose during their dismantling. Heller-Nicholas, an Australian academic, supports this view, writing that "the foreigners of District 9 are a reflection of the non-white residents of District Six, who were already victims of the most egregious injustices of discrimination sanctioned by the government before being forced.” moved. Blomkamp’s film reveals the horror and cruelty of this expulsion.” The implicit assumption of his analysis is that the "exposure" of historical injustice is the allegorical intent of the work, an assumption that rules out less laudatory and progressive anti-allegorical readings of the film. We find a contemporary allegorical interpretation in an article in South Africa's own Mail and Guardian newspaper also titled "The Real District 9". The author draws parallels between the fictional slum and the actual Soweto slum, Chiawelo, where District 9 was filmed. They also correlate the proposed fictional District 10 with the real-life refugee camps to which foreign slum dwellers were forcibly transferred when the slums were made unsafe by xenophobic attacks and riots before, during and after filming. Another Australian academic, Simone Brott, strongly defends these corollaries: "filming the sci-fi film in an evacuated cabin used real immigrants as extras, and saw these same dispossessed people forcibly transferred to the Reconstruction Program and Development (RDP). of thegovernment housing during the filming of the film, leaving behind a sea of ​​empty shacks. District 9 is not a hyperreality or a truth, it is reality. District 9 director Neill Blomkamp's statement that the dialogue used in the interviews in the film's opening sequence was slightly altered from the non-fictional interviews with black residents of the South African township about of foreign migrants, further supports his claim. identifying a thematic resonance between the film's expulsions and real-life events, but an allegorical reading of the film is confounded by the presence of two distinct real-world temporal/geographic contexts for the expulsion fictional of the film. If we follow film scholar David Christopher's proposition that "allegory could be broadly defined as any narrative that symbolically refers to events and people that make up an identifiable historical event", it becomes clear that despite its abundance of symbolic references, District 9 lacks a clearly identifiable singular character. event for an allegory. We can see this in the film's opening sequence, which focuses heavily on the timeline of the aliens' arrival during and after the apartheid regime. Time-stamped VHS footage of the ship's 1982 arrival is quickly juxtaposed with on-camera "documentary" style interviews with MNU employees, a sociologist and a modern-day journalist, with the new timeline visually confirmed by the 2008 calendar on Wikus's office. A few contemporary eye-level shots of signs prohibiting entry of non-humans into public places, the signs widely used in advertising and viral marketing of District 9, are followed by modern news footage, commentary and words on the subject. -street interviews that Brott confirmed were transcribed from the real words of xenophobic South Africans. The effect of this montage is a collapse of temporality: the audience follows the grainy historical footage of the ship's opening, the signage of the alternate present that carries warnings reminiscent of apartheid zoning for South African viewers and Jim Crow laws for American viewers, and scenes of protest and riots, all in the same visual field. The audience can then group these disparate visual metaphors of refugee arrival, institutional discrimination, and popular outrage into a single group symbolic of the social issues that the film's speculative elements seek to address. This grouping does not allow for a specific modern or historical reading of the arrival of the aliens, as the condensed timeline prevents the audience from feeling a significant difference in how the aliens are treated in the two time periods. Another group of images is evident in the cutting from news footage of human violence against aliens to news footage of alleged alien violence and property destruction against humans. The ticker tape messages progress from "Human-alien riots continue for four days" to "non-humans violently evicted from townships" and "humans want aliens out" in the first montage of clips, which is generally sympathetic to aliens. The ticker begins with "alien violence intensifies" and ends with "alien violence spreads to downtown" in the second montage, which includes footage of the slum shacks on fire and a train derailing. Viewer's sympathies may changequickly from one clip to the next, with aliens and humans alternately presented as victims of inter-species conflicts. Allegory is defined as taking place in a specific time and place and within a historical narrative, so the rapid jump between time, place and narrative tone in this scene, and throughout the film, brings into focus question any allegory that might arise from the similarities between the plot of District 9. and real-life events. Another critic of allegorical readings, Joshua Clover of UC Davis, argues that what "excludes allegory...". . is the impossibility of establishing who the extraterrestrials “really are”; after all, it can only be an allegory if they stand in for an identifiable group. The film's first five minutes of expulsion sequences portray the non-human characters so radically that, despite their common circumstances with real refugees and victims of apartheid, no parallels can be drawn with their reactions to imposed poverty. If the film's documentary segments are taken as canonical truth in the fictional context, the aliens are revealed to be literally mindless and monstrous, with a biological drive toward addiction, a tendency toward wanton destruction, and a superhuman capacity for murder. At their most inhumane, we see aliens enthusiastically colluding with their predatory drug dealers in a cockfight between their (presumed non-sentient) larval offspring. Beyond this point, it is impossible to characterize aliens as direct stand-ins for a distinct group of South Africans in history or modernity. If these scenes are taken literally, they imply that the filmmaker presents the victims of institutional racism as inherently violent. and disgusting, pitiful for their lot, but not respectable as people. This is at odds with positive allegorical depictions of alien victimhood presented by film critics, but not with the analysis of scholars who argue that Blomkamp's film has racist and regressive tendencies. After describing District 9's depiction of Nigerian gangsters as a "distillation of some of the most negative contemporary South African stereotypes of Nigerian immigrants," film scholar Michael Valdez Moses asserts: "If Nigerians are a returning to the negative colonial stereotype of the "primitive Africans", the "shrimps" correspond both to the old stereotype and to a new one, no less negative to be current: that of the African urban lumpenproletariat, inconstant, violent and degenerate. » Christopher similarly echoes a naturalized stereotype inherent in the depiction of extraterrestrials: "the aliens' addiction to cat food is a genetic predisposition and echoes racist notions that addiction to narcotics is a similar genetic predisposition of races ostensibly inferior racial groups. » Despite the layers of irony in the film's meta-fictional structure – the "documentary" about the alien ordeal could arguably be biased at times to present aliens in an unpleasant light – the literalness of the stereotype is highlighted by the fact that “Wikus is already addicted to his alien transformation” in a scene shown outside the “documentary” framework. These analyzes indicate that, because our inability to locate fictional/non-fictional analogues for the aliens and their shantytown destabilizes an allegorical reading of District 9, the film opens itself to broader critique and analysis of its metaphorical content . Christopher uses this lensto argue that “the cinematic narrative explicitly addresses social and political inequalities and, in doing so, creates the illusion that it cannot reproduce them – a convenient political tool of the film itself, a kind of false consciousness of criticism entertainment. » Valdez Moses continues this argument by conceding that the film, once dissociated from any allegorical expectation, becomes open to interpretation, but nevertheless reflects in a major way the filmmaker's convictions: "Certainly, the degraded condition of the extraterrestrials could be interpreted in a different way. 'a liberal view as a result of the mistreatment and oppression suffered by the South African authorities and the UNM, rather than as a manifestation of their inherent wickedness. But this progressive view of things does nothing to explain the most disturbing aspects of District 9, its thinly veiled portrait of post-apartheid South Africa as a political dystopia. people engaging in forms of violence with which they are naturally sensitive could be read metaphorically as an ironic representation of a particular real-life narrative, used worldwide by police and "counter-terrorist" forces. The narrative vision of the subaltern's innate capacity for insurrectionary violence is frequently invoked to justify the hegemon's domination over subaltern bodies. Popular belief in this narrative recently gained national attention thanks to the testimony of white American police officer Darren Wilson, describing his African-American shooting victim, Michael Brown, as a monstrous figure capable of superhumanly injuring him. The film exhibits hallmarks of this narrative in each scene in which a shrimp proves superhumanly capable of extreme violence. One such scene is the introduction of the aliens' biologically coded weapons, which prove highly destructive in a "documentary" segment. In an interview excerpt, a journalist says it "just doesn't work with humans, and it's as simple as that." Other clear examples of the aliens' innate capacity for violence are the two times in the film where aliens tear off human limbs. There is compelling evidence that the film does not take a “progressive view of things” against the dominant cultural narrative of innate violence. subaltern aggression, but on the contrary reifies its hold on our imagination. The presence of innate alien violence in the film is presented not by the film's state propaganda stand-ins (MNU interviews and mainstream news footage) but by the "documentary" footage used to add a "objective realism" to the film's plot, which is otherwise mediated by the opinions of the storytellers. The literalness of these scenarios supports, rather than satirizes or challenges, the popular belief in an innate capacity or propensity for violence among disenfranchised populations. Blomkamp has clearly expressed in the press his intention not to make a film focused solely on metaphors of apartheid but to satirically imagine what an alien landing in his home country would look like, incorporating elements of xenophobia, organized crime and South Africa's corporatized militarism. When asked by a Canadian interviewer to "put aside the giant apartheid metaphor first," Blomkamp responded by asserting that the film "isn't necessarily just a metaphor for apartheid." . . it's supposed to be a whole bunch of topics that struck me when I lived there. . . the collapse of Zimbabwe and the influx of illegal immigrants into South Africa, and then how you impoverished conflicting black South Africans 2.2 (2013) :>.