District 9 Explained – The Allegory of Damnation

Ah, 2009. 

The world was obsessed with Twilight, Kesha released her hit single “Tik Tok”, and the global economy was tanking. Sound familiar? 

From this dark, pessimistic reality came District 9, a film about oppressed aliens forced into squalid living conditions on earth. Its protagonist quite literally loses his humanity as he’s transformed into one of these creatures. He loses his wife, family and friends, his fingernails start coming off, he’s made to live in a slum, people want to chop off his body parts and sell them for a profit, and by the end of it no one even knows whether he’s still alive. The whole movie is essentially a downward spiral into a bleak, proverbial hell, and…. that’s exactly why I think we’ll start seeing more movies like it.  

On one level we can read films solely on what is said and done by the actors, but it’s always an interesting exercise to take a step back. To ask ourselves, what does this film tell us about the society that produced it? For us to take what’s happening on screen seriously, it has to tie in with our wider cultural assumptions and so a film like district 9 can tell us an awful lot about the prevailing social values of the time.  

Of-course at one level, District 9 is a rather on-the-nose metaphor for apartheid in South Africa, but I think there’s a lot more to it. We know that the world was in a deep recession in 2009 and we often see that shifts in the material world are reflected by shifts in the cultural sphere. It’s unsurprising then, that District 9 fits into a wider, 21^st century context of uncertainty and doubt in western civilization. As David Brooks puts it “[m]any people have lost faith in institutions and the nation’s leadership. Many feel powerless, in decline and adrift”. In other words, people are losing faith in the idea that we’ll somehow reach social salvation through righting our wrongs and creating more perfect, just society. 

In District 9, humans are behaving badly and in dire need of social change. Ideally, some well-organised social movement would extinguish the racist social formation that is oppressing the alien Prawns and replace it with an egalitarian social order where all species live in peace and harmony. Throughout western history and ideology, we’ve seen that achieving such social change is viewed as a moral obligation. In the 19^th century, humans were intent on creating a better government based on democracy and after that came the establishment of universal human rights. It was never an option to just walk away, and yet this is exactly what happens in District 9. Wikus, our protagonist, leaves humanity for another species altogether. In doing so, the film reflects deeply held feelings of doubt towards the possibility human redemption through socially conscious action.  

The interesting thing here is that Wikus’ transformation into a prawn is not voluntary. He’s accidentally exposed to alien fuel that sets him on a path to dehumanisation. He’s dragged kicking and screaming into a state of being that he, along with most humans, absolutely disgust…and its easy to see why he’s not happy about it. The aliens are called prawns because they’re perceived as bottom feeders and scavengers; they eat cat food and endlessly fight with each other. Humans frequently break into their camps and eat their body parts to gain power. Interspecies prostitution and public urination is rife and all the while they’re constantly observed by a swarm of ominous helicopters.  

Since Wikus is an everyman, employed as mid-level newscaster, and is also our central character, its fair to say that he is us and we are him. That means that his journey from human to prawn is a powerful metaphor for a moral descent into hellish conditions…and the fact that this process is involuntary, suggests this may be our fate. At the end of the movie, Wikus sits alone, hopelessly depressed and no longer human. Any hope of social redemption is quashed.  

Now if the financial doom and gloom of 2009 provided the cultural context for a film like District 9, what can we expect from 2020? The world is facing a deadly pandemic, the global economy is in a far worse state than it was back then, and some political leaders seem to have lost their minds. Maybe this time, the prawns would develop a synthetic pathogen that turns all humans into some inferior species before subjecting them to an even harsher reality than the one they lived in their apartheid-like ghettos. Of course, this is a very pessimistic view, but the point I’m trying to make is that it’s a realistic one. People would believe what they’re seeing on the screen because it fits in to a wider set of cultural assumptions…and, to end this video on a tinge of hope, not everything that fits these cultural assumptions needs to be so bleak.  

Let’s take Avatar as an example, the film came out in the same year and has a remarkably similar plot. In Avatar, we have an alien species that is exploited by the humans but, instead of looking down on the extra-terrestrials, our protagonist envies them. He admires the Na’vi and actually wants to become one of them. Therefore, his transformation into an alien is more like ascending into heaven than the slow descent into hell that District 9 shows us. It gives us a much more optimistic view of human redemption, that through suffering we may reach some kind of heavenly goal. Even so, Avatar is still deeply cynical about the idea of collective, social redemption on Earth. It effectively tells us that If you can’t change your species, you should join another and if you can’t change your planet, then you should live on another. And maybe in a few decades time, that might be possible. So what do you think, do you think we’ll start seeing more films like District 9 or Avatar? Or do you think we won’t see any more films about species transformation at all?