Dossier » Horror
From Santa Mira to South Africa
Updating the Invasion Narrative for the 21st Century
Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a film that neither expected nor received overmuch praise or attention when it was released in 1956, has quietly “snatched” its way into the film history canon, its place in courses and textbooks now as secure as the pods in Santa Mira.
Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a film that neither expected nor received overmuch praise or attention when it was released in 1956, has quietly “snatched” its way into the film history canon, its place in courses and textbooks now as secure as the pods in Santa Mira. This is at least partly because of its palimpsestic politics, because of the ease with which it can be read as an anti-Communist allegory and anti-conformist allegory all at the same time. Films with controlling metaphors that can be read from politically opposed ideologies are somewhat rare, and Siegel’s 80-minute fable has fascinated generations of scholars and generations of big-budget filmmakers, who have updated the story every twenty years or so without ever improving upon it.
However, in 2009, a worthy successor appeared in the form of Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, another “invasion narrative” with a controlling metaphor whose political commentary can be easily inferred from either end of an ideological spectrum. Like Siegel’s now-classic work, Blomkamp’s film mobilizes generic codes of traditionally liberal science fiction and traditionally conservative horror – and proves all the more trenchant for being somewhat understated. In the end, both films play upon a fear of the unknown, of men’s evil hearts and technology coming back to haunt us, but their differences reveal much about the political struggles of their periods. Contrasting District 9 with the original Invasion demonstrates a metamorphosis in political concerns, from 1950s jingoism and parochial repression to 2000s jingoism and frenetic globalization. If Invasion now represents 1950s politics on celluloid to cinema and even American history classes, then future students could do worse than learn of 2000s politics through District 9 – in useful contrast to the original Invasion.
INVASION NARRATIVES: SCI-FI MEETS HORROR
For some authors, Invasion is science fiction, for others, horror, and for many others, a hybrid; David Cook wrote that films like Invasion “pose the specifically modern (that is) postwar problem of how human evil and technology combine to threaten the existence of the race, and therefore they seem to straddle the generic fence between science fiction and horror.” In the last decade, Time magazine split the horror/sci-fi difference by featuring Invasion on “best-of” lists in both genres. (See links to Time best-of lists.) Likewise, District 9, starring aliens in featured roles, is most easily understood as science fiction, but can also be connected to horror. (Richard Corliss called District 9 “scare-fi” and said it “revels in its mixture of horror and goofy humor” (Corliss).) Stephen King once said that “it is hard to imagine a more boring, profitless, and terminally academic pastime than that of discriminating between horror and science fiction” (Kawin). King makes a good point; these distinctions would remain little more than a parlor game were it not for the political implications inherent to these differing generic expectations. Vivian Sobchack claims that in horror films, humanity is not in control of its own destiny, individuals are thwarted by their own limits, and a natural order must be set right. In science fiction films, by contrast, humanity is in control of its own destiny, and we are shown new human possibilities. Thus, by American definitions, horror is basically conservative, trying to reinforce the status quo, while sci-fi is liberal, presenting utopian potential or warnings against an ongoing status quo. For Sobchack, Invasion actually falls under both categories, and she ultimately allows both liberal and conservative readings of the film. (Sobchack) Likewise, District 9 is ostensibly sci-fi, but the story maintains a gross-out factor throughout and takes a somewhat conservative horror-like turn by the final reel.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers and District 9 are both understandable as what Mark Jancovich calls “invasion narratives.” (Jancovich) If Cook is right that the 1950s saw “the emergence of the science-fiction film as a distinct genre” (of course, he acknowledges forerunners like Metropolis (1926)), and if other scholars are right that Invasion and other invasion narratives represented something of a genre hybrid, we might say that such hybridity was almost inevitable in a new fantasy-based genre, that there had to be something odd, deviant, strange, peculiar, twisted, “othered,” even monster-like, about 1950s science-fiction films before the genre “grew up” with films like Planet of the Apes (1967) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Perhaps science-fiction needs to borrow from horror simply to regenerate its creativity: probably the most famous horror-science-fiction hybrid, Alien (1979), spearheaded “the new standards of gory violence established by independent directors” on a big-budget scale. (Thompson and Bordwell) We might see District 9 as marking another generational shift: the redoubtable Alien template (cross-bred, perhaps, with a Creature from the Black Lagoon) of “prawn”-like alien is, perhaps for the first time, given an interior life with doubts and dreams (the lack of which, in aliens in 1950s films like Invasion, had caused Sobchack to see such films as unable to transcend horror), and given the chance to evolve into the real protagonist of the story.
Bruce Kawin also insists upon a liberal-conservative distinction between science fiction and horror, which he identifies less with plot elements than with attitudes toward them: the unknown is welcomed in sci-fi but rejected in horror, in sci-fi the inhuman is engaged (if ultimately challenged, sometimes) but in horror “inhuman characteristics decisively mandate destruction.” (Kawin) In District 9, as in Invasion, we see a man’s body “taken over” by alien biology, but while the pods were always evil in Invasion, District 9 represents a more complex worldview – the “possessed” character is both working to destroy his inhuman aspect and eventually working to help some aliens. Peter Biskind aligns well with Kawin, who saw that the films like Invasion were at least a horrific sort of science fiction, because the persecuted protagonist had “to force the community to acknowledge the validity of the private vision, even if it violated the norms of credibility.” (Biskind) Reflecting a more diffuse and embittered world, the protagonist of District 9 only tries to convince his wife; he’s well aware that authorities are unconvinceable, calling any prospective encounter with them a “suicide mission.” Thus, Invasion and District 9, as uneasy hybrids of horror and science fiction, are categorically also uneasy hybrids of conservative and liberal politics. Likewise, it is not difficult to imagine future studies of District 9 which read the film as, on the one hand, embracing, and on the other hand, resisting the largest political trend of our time, that being globalization.
WHOSE BODY SNATCHERS?
Which interpretation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the right one? James Marriott succinctly says, “Invasion has been interpreted as both a damning indictment of McCarthyite witchhunts and a piece of hysterical anti-Communist propaganda, and there’s evidence to support both readings.” (Marriott) Marc Jancovich agrees, quoting novel author Jack Finney as being “amused by such interpretations,” while director Siegel considers Invasion “his most important film because of its political message. Unfortunately, he has never stated what he considers that message to have been.” (Jancovich) Both Marriott and Jancovich examine both the anti-McCarthy arguments and the anti-Communist arguments. Yet as they eventually acknowledge, anti-McCarthyism and anti-Communism should not be seen as so irreconcilable, at least as a reading of the political inclinations of the 1950s. Andrew Tudor says that films with a controlling metaphor like Invasion “teach us not so much ‘to stop worrying and love the bomb’ as ‘to keep worrying and love the state’, an admonition which accords perfectly with the nuclear conscious cold war culture of the period.” (Tudor) In other words, Invasion frets about over-fealty to Communism and to anti-Communism – this is why it represents a “paranoid” cycle.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ controlling metaphor is clearly a small American town being taken over by some sort of over-conformism, but that does not mean its dual politics are limited to anti-Communism and anti-McCarthyism. For instance, for Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, Invasion is harshly misogynistic (Steffen-Fluhr), and Sumiko Hagashi agrees, saying that “Ultimately, betrayal between men and women and their conversion into pods is a flight from heterosexual relations into technology, a flight motivated by fear and hatred of women and their sexuality.” (Hagashi) Ellen M. Pederson responds that the film isn’t anti-female at all (Pederson), and Marc Jancovich concurs, in that the pods take the male authority figures and rationalists first, and it is only the irrationalists – conspicuously including women – that can resist the pods at all. For Eric Avila, “The rise of Hollywood science fiction paralleled the acceleration of white flight in postwar America and not only recorded popular anxieties about political and sexual deviants, but also captured white preoccupations with the increasing visibility of the alien Other…” (Avila) Following up on this, Katrina Mann found that “Invasion of the Body Snatchers sutured audience identification to an idealized suburban whiteness besieged by outsiders who force a new and foreign version of ‘mongrelized’ homogeneity on a suburban town. Furthermore, this identity shift was forced on Santa Mira’s mythic white Americans by ‘foreign’ invaders.” Her analysis includes the compelling notion that the “iconic use of farm trucks” proves the true nature of the threat. (Mann) Again, Jancovich’s analysis opposes this – for him, the film is above all informed by the triumph of Fordism in 1950s American society, by all accounts a white male hetero-normative phenomenon.
Jancovich writes that Invasion does not suggest that the threat is purely external, but that it is only the inevitable outcome of developments within American society and culture. It is not just communists and fellow-travellers who are the problem, as the McCarthyite witch-hunters suggested, but the structure of government, the media and technology within America itself; that is the very structure of modern American society. The pod invasion may have exacerbated and highlighted certain features, but they were already there before the pods arrived and will remain after they are conquered. (Jancovich)
While other 1950s invasion narratives were transparently pacifist, like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), or obviously supportive of military priorities, like Them! (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ unique power and relevance to studies of the 1950s lies in its careful, assiduous opposition to any sort of ideological conformism – to creeping Soviets and creeping anti-Soviets, to feminism and rationalism, to immigrants and Fordist philosophy. Our hero Miles is not unlike Tom, the titular Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (novel 1955, film 1956, about the same time as the novel and film of Invasion; the film’s Miles wears a gray flannel suit long after it’s appropriate) – besieged by enemies both foreign and domestic, searching for individuality in the face of rapacious conformity. Siegel’s original ending, before the studio decided to lighten the message somewhat, had Miles on the road warning the passing, passive drivers: “You’re next!!” By this point in the film, with all sorts of conformism metaphors intact, this (aborted) ending seems meant to send an equal, non-ideological chill down the back of all but the most independent of thinkers.
Outside the world of metaphor, Invasion’s very status as Hollywood product inspires opposing readings – and it is not hard to imagine District 9 experiencing a similar sort of tug-of-war. For critics like Glen M. Johnson, Invasion director Don Siegel proved a semi-auteur in B-film or cult film circumstances, making art within studio parameters (Johnson), but for critics like James Marriott, the film provides a clear example of too much studio interference. (Marriott) District 9 likewise straddles the line between B-film status and studio prestige; it was made for $30 million backed by the Hollywood-liminal Peter Jackson, a blockbuster-maker who works on his own terms outside the country. For some film histories, Invasion’s style is no more than perfunctory, while David Seed argued that low-lit shots “project huge shadows…emphasizing the pods’ function of duplication and erasure.”(Seed) The style of District 9 is deceptively documentary-esque: unlike most horror-science-fiction films (but like the recent Cloverfield (2008)), it adds edgy realism by looking as though it was shot with handheld cameras, available lighting, and untouched-up actors. Like Invasion, its style is more overdetermined than it may appear. Both films use touches of “realism” to sell the very unrealistic fantasy premise, as though such a thing could happen in the viewer’s backyard.
While viewers’ memories of Invasion of the Body Snatchers may align far too neatly with memories of the American 1950s as some sort of Mad Men-normative Paradise Lost, as a final vestige of a pre-pluralist, consensus-oriented society – just what, in fact, Invasion had warned against – District 9 represents the world as we have come to know it, in all its messy polyvalence. Its very setting suggests unprecedented inclusion: unlike any other film released on more than a thousand American screens, District 9 is set (and was made) in South Africa, a fact that the film uses for differentiation in the opening minutes: onscreen academics smile as they recall that the alien invasion “wasn’t in New York or Washington”, but right there in Johannesburg. The film might have said “New York or London,” but chose to highlight a striking contrast: this isn’t America, suggesting that this isn’t your familiar American invasion narrative.
This suggests that District 9 limits itself to the parochial, local concerns of Johannesburg – that if Invasion of the Body Snatchers was about aliens confronted by any small town in America, as represented by the fictional Santa Mira, then District 9, which never leaves Johannesburg, cannot help but limit itself to a story of aliens confronted by urban South Africans. This may be, but I argue that District 9 is both local and international, both attuned to South African politics and preserving its relevance to larger narratives of displacement, military over-reach, and terror. If the latter were not the case, it seems unlikely that the film would have earned $115 million at the North American box office in 2009.
A NEW BUT FAMILIAR DISTRICT
Perhaps District 9’s commentary on South African politics should be established first. To a South African, a film about the unwelcome status of “illegal aliens” might risk over-gilding the lily, as Martin J. Murray explains: “The incessant, cacophonous rhetoric about ‘illegal aliens’ – the unwanted presence of ‘outsiders,’ the pejorative images associated with them, and arguments about expelling or seeking accommodation with them – not only imposes essential characteristics on newcomers who often have little in common, but also reflects an anxiety about what it means to belong somewhere, anywhere.”(Murray) District 9, as well as Neill Blomkamp’s short film upon which it was based, Alive in Joburg (2005), was loosely based on events that occurred in Cape Town’s District 6 in 1966: the area was declared “whites only” and 60,000 blacks were forcibly evicted and relocated to Cape Flats, 25 kilometers away. (Corliss) To the West, these events were mostly reported as just another acute case of apartheid; had much of the Western press been in Cape Town to see the forced evictions, briberies, routine searches and seizures, unwarranted arrests, and other aspects of legalized discrimination, it might have seemed more like something out of Orwellian science fiction.
According to Murray, after apartheid, Johannesburg repositioned itself as a global city, and many immigrants (and non-immigrants) flocked there to join a new era of opportunities. This is partly why Murray finds that today, “the epicenter of anti-immigrant xenophobia is the Greater Johannesburg metropolitan region.”(Murray) African scholars agree that an apartheid mentality has continued in the post-apartheid era, with much of the establishment animus directed toward immigrants: “Regardless of their different paths and trajectories, these newcomers are routinely portrayed in an unsavory light, denounced by locals as job-stealers, ‘woman snatchers,’ drug dealers, con artists, and career criminals. Such stereotypes reduce and flatten the real complexities of disempowered and marginalized populations.”(McDonald, Gay, Zinyama, Mattes, de Vletter) Murray goes on to explain that “According to Human Rights Watch, police in South Africa arrest more people for violating immigration laws each year than for any other reason.”(Murray) This aligns with the film’s controlling metaphor of off-planet aliens as on-planet aliens – without stating a preference for segregation or integration.
In District 9, the aliens arrive in Johannesburg in 1982; after a few establishing scenes, most of the action takes place about twenty years later. Ostensibly, this span of time provides plausibility for limited mutual language-learning and impetus for drastic action when the film’s MacGuffin, a vial of fuel, is lost (“twenty years of work,” Chris sighs). But this plausibility and impetus might have come about in other ways, so why 1982, and why the generation gap? As of this writing, Blomkamp has not offered reasons, but one possible explanation is that 1982 was in some ways the beginning of the end of apartheid. In 1982, the President’s Council proposed “power sharing” reforms with nonwhite populations which eventually led to the Tricameral Parliament; 1982 also saw a rise in state violence against the African National Congress and affiliated groups. Blomkamp may be suggesting that 1982 represented a sort of opening of a door to aliens, and that in two decades since, with the formal dismantling of apartheid, the more things have changed, the more they’ve stayed the same. If these are the nuances of the film’s controlling metaphor, it would appeal to the main arguments on either extreme of an ideological spectrum: it aligns with liberals who feel as though racism hasn’t changed since apartheid’s dismantling, and it aligns with reactionaries who feel that apartheid reform has only brought more needy, useless outsiders into the system.
Neill Blomkamp said that 1980s films inspired District 9; he “didn’t want the film to feel glossy and slick. (Desowitz) 1982 has a filmic significance as well: this was when Steven Spielberg produced two remarkable forays into science fiction and horror, respectively: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Poltergeist. E.T. probably represented the apex of a certain sort of child-friendly, human-forgiving sort of sci-fi that is nothing like District 9. By beginning his film for no discernible reason in 1982 and continuing most of it a generation later, Blomkamp gives a faint suggestion that this may be what happened had the E.T.s remained. Poltergeist may not be an obvious inspiration, but the ubiquitous tag line in its advertising campaign – “They’re heeere,” – points to perhaps the most extraordinary element of the unslick-looking District 9, the ever-present alien spaceship. While most cinematic spaceships visit Earth for brief intervals, the city-sized “prawn” mothership has been left floating above Johannesburg for decades, its out-of-focus yet conspicuous part of urban blight surely a significant aspect of the controlling metaphor. Hollywood aliens and monsters are always flirting with presence and absence – now they’re “heeere,” now they’re not – but Blomkamp has split the difference quite cleverly. These prawns are visible yet marginalized, part of the urban jungle but excluded from it, both present and absent. The premise of District 9 is as radical as any in sci-fi or horror: if alien monsters were to arrive on Earth, we would first accommodate them, then force them into ghettos, and eventually treat them no better than animals (Planet of the Apes had a similar premise, but never asked viewers to see the aliens as a mild, dismissable irritant). Blomkamp, a South African, can rely on his countrymen to understand, and even chuckle at the irony when a black man tells the (supposed documentary) camera: “They don’t deserve equal rights with the rest of us.” According to IO9’s interview with Blomkamp, some of this footage is actually unrehearsed on-the-street comments about immigrant aliens. (Woerner) (While Blomkamp mentioned the 1980s, the 1950s clearly provided some inspiration: the original The Fly (1958) is perhaps the archetypal story of a man slowly changing into a monster, and District 9’s true hero, the alien Chris Johnson, wears a red jacket throughout the film that echoes James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).) These scenes further extend the controlling metaphor without clarifying its ideological leanings.
Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, District 9 can find partisans from opposing worldviews. Many of District 9’s eviction scenes were shot at exteriors of a real place called Chiawelo, from where some indigent citizens actually were being evicted. For Richard Pitmore, District 9 this fact leads to a laudable liberal critique of South Africa:
"These scenes are also a hyper real description of contemporary evictions. The bureaucrat who is 'here to assist you' by destroying your home, the clipboards, the helicopters, the red ants, the casual and contemptuous exercise of arbitrary violence, the assumption that the shack settlement is a zone outside of the ordinary rules of society and the relentless presumption of criminality are all very real aspects of our society right now. Shacks in Johannesburg have always housed aliens. Apartheid turned most black South Africans into aliens in their own country. In democratic South Africa we turned Mozambicans and Zimbabweans into aliens. The obvious value of turning the shack dweller into a real alien is that the film can deal with the continuities in the processes by which we turn people into aliens, contain them, criminalise them, beat them and then evict them 'for their own good'. District 9 confronts these continuities head on and so although it is a fantasy it contains more reality than we're likely to find in many of the spaces that produce, circulate and authorise the official consensus. It shows contemporary development-speak in which the only real issue is the ‘pace of delivery’ to be a fantasy as ridiculous as it is perverse." (Pitmore)
Yet Pitmore may have missed aspects of District 9 that are less progressive. The lead character is oddly called Wikus Van De Merwe, a name that bears a passing similarity to the word “makwerekwere,” a South African racist term for an illegal alien. The aliens are actually called “prawns” by every human in the film, which may seem a clever moniker to most westerners, because it may or may not be read as racist. But it has a darker meaning to South Africans: the Parktown Prawn is a king cricket species considered a plague in South Africa. Perhaps the clearest reason not to over-read the film as another secular-humanist, liberal-minded complaint about xenophobia and discrimination is its blanket treatment of Nigerians as criminal cannibals. In fact, the film has been banned in Nigeria, partly because the leader of the District 9 Nigerians is an unrepentant maleficent gunrunner and warlord named Obesandjo, and this name is not very different from that of actual former President Obasanjo, who ruled the country for most of the last decade. Conservatives can relax as they watch District 9: it’s hardly condemning all prejudice.
District 9 essays the new South Africa, but it goes further. The antagonist of the story is MNU, which stands for Multi-National United, apparently under government contract – yet MNU are the only ones viewers ever see performing any government functions. “MNU” is written on the film’s many white humvees and helicopters in a font that looks suspiciously like UN: the United Nations. Blomkamp intentionally calls forth images of the recent past, in places like Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Indonesia, where the United Nations has intervened with the best of liberal intentions and arguably made matters worse. At one point, the MNU building is made up into Wikus’ birthday cake, and its shape is maybe 40 stories tall with a wide section at the bottom – like the New York UN building. But before anti-internationalism conservatives rejoice, they should know that Blomkamp likes to have his cake and eat it too (Wikus falls onto the cake). While the South African government can be faulted for hiring these mercenaries, they are still a private military organization behaving immorally, an implicit criticism of Blackwater, Halliburton and similar NGOs. MNU is eventually revealed to be subjecting prawns to vicious, Mengelesque human experiments, demonstrating the brutal danger of “outsourcing” government functions to private companies. The main plot involves MNU trying to secure a monopoly on alien weaponry, devices that the aliens are never allowed to use. This parallels the diamond trade in Africa, and mineral exploitation throughout the third world: slum-dwelling laborers are savagely punished if they attempt to lay claim to their land’s resources.
While the MNU logo resembles the United Nations, MNU behavior is just as reminiscent of a large number of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). We know that MNU is an NGO because it brings western military expertise to a third world slum that hasn’t asked for its help, because it apparently helps indigent slum-dwellers with efforts like registration and relocation, but, as Mike Davis explains in Planet of Slums, defines globalization through its base interest in resource exploitation by any means necessary. (Davis) Globalization has many definitions, but can generally be understood as an ongoing process of regional economies, societies, and cultures becoming gradually, but unstoppably, integrated through increased commerce, communication, and technology. On its face, District 9 seems quite skeptical of globalization: MNU is our villain, and the scrappy aliens are our eventual protagonists. In this way, District 9 is less comparable to science fiction, with its traditional liberalism,or horror, with its traditional conservatism, than to recent international hit films like Amores Perros (2000), Cidade De Deus (2003), and Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which purport to show minor indigent heroes emerging from under the tin shanty roofs of the over-crowded slums of the third world. There is something conservative about these films, because of their focus on individuals succeeding despite difficulties, but generally they have more in common with Pitmore’s sort of liberal critiques of poverty and destitution. If District 9 were simply another chapter in that mini-trend, it could be fairly read as of a piece with Joseph Stiglitz’s basic critique: “Globalization has made the countries of the entire region more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the global market, without strengthening their safety nets.” (Stiglitz)
District 9 is more complex than that because of the character arc of its ostensible protagonist, Wikus, a mid-level employee with MNU. When the story gives viewers no other rooting interest than Wikus, he manifests many of the stereotypes of an NGO bureaucrat, wearing a white-collared shirt with short sleeves, walking from shanty to shanty with a clipboard, patronizing child aliens with sweets. After a chemical spill begins to change him into an alien-human, he forms an unsteady alliance with Christopher Johnson, an alien (named by humans) that Wikus believes can help him become completely human again. Even after they learn of MNU’s Mengelese experiments, Wikus surprises Chris and knocks him unconscious when Chris seems to be delaying Wikus’ treatment. Wikus only fights off MNU when they prevent him from curing his condition. In other words, Wikus doesn’t have a standard liberal comeuppance; more like the lead in a horror film, and right up until the final shot, Wikus is more interested in survival and reconciling with his wife than with any sort of challenge to the evil system. Also, in the end, the martyr who has donned “Christ” as the first six letters of his name rises from near-death to leave Earth, promising to return and bring salvation someday. Surely this particular deus ex machina allows some sort of conservative reading.
District 9 is a powerful invasion narrative for the 21st century. If 1950s invasion narrative films can be read as Cold War reactions, District 9 can be fairly read as a reaction to globalization. If the 1950s, particularly in retrospect, was the decade of a protective, paranoid consensus, then the globalizing 2000s are typically seen a very different sort of decade, a pluralistic, porous-bordered world where paranoia is almost impractical. If Miles in Invasion of the Body Snatchers could be said to be aware of a process like globalization, he would probably use it as another occasion for a speech about encroachments on his liberty and the vitality of human feelings and emotions. Wikus and Chris in District 9 don’t make speeches; they accept globalization as a given, even as they pick through its scraps. For all its virtues, Invasion finally did paint itself into a corner, coming down to Us-versus-Them even as resistance appeared increasingly futile. District 9 dares to imagine a no less relevant, no less paranoid political world – but with harder choices. For Miles to have become a pod would have ended the story; Wikus becoming a hybrid alien-human is just the beginning of his series of problems. Miles manages to resist takeover and Wikus does not, but eventually, Wikus resigns himself to a reconciliation with at least some of the aliens. In the film’s final minutes, Chris goes where Miles could have never imagined – back into outer space. If there is any escaping globalization, surely it means leaving the globe. This solution is neither pro-reform nor pro-market; more like Miles, it stands for liberty from such conflicts.
CONCLUSION
Invasion narrative films can be usefully read for their political reactions to events of their times. Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers has survived as well as any, and better than most, because of its adroitness in capturing the dominant opposing political ideologies of its time – its controlling metaphor is easily understood as both anti-Communism and anti-McCarthyism. Sequels and remakes have done little to improve upon the Siegel film, but in 2009 a worthy successor emerged in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. District 9 imagines an alien invasion not as a hostile, all-consuming virus or seething threat, but instead as just one more inconvenient group of immigrants who occasion problems of resource distribution. This controlling metaphor captures two opposing views of the dominant political trend of its time, globalization. Invasion alerted us to the horror of alien takeover; District 9 tells us that the horrific alien takeover has, in some sense, already occurred, and we’ve lived with it for at least a generation. In Invasion, the monster was conformism; in District 9, everyone is monstrous sometimes, except perhaps Chris(t?), who departs from the planet. Chris repeatedly promises Wikus that he will return to the planet in three years; if this is Blomkamp’s way of promising District 10 in 2012, he will no doubt find it difficult to be as ideologically inclusive as he was in District 9, an exceptional invasion narrative for the 21st century.
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Woerner, Meredith. “5 Things You Didn’t Know About District 9.” IO9 website, August 9, 2009. http://io9.com/5341120/5-things-you-didnt-know-about-district-9 Accessed November 7, 2009.
JGCinema - Jura Gentium Cinema - Cinema and Globalization