Analogies in space
Filed Under Cinema, Dale Cooper, Entertainment, TV
This week comes the Peter Jackson-produced “District 9,” which is building such great buzz for a little ($30 mil) production, it scarcely requires the endorsement of this special agent. I certainly plan to be there this weekend, though. It would be especially hard to stay away after reading the usual pre-release media hype pieces, which – besides explaining who in the hell director Neill Blomkamp and lead actor Sharlto Copley are – have also mentioned that “District 9″ is about apartheid.
Well, it’s about aliens, I guess. But it’s REALLY about apartheid. The aliens this time around aren’t conquering cosmic imperialists, or human-hunting high tech vaginafaces. They are extraterrestrial refugees, crashed in a place they don’t understand and swiftly consigned to a decrepit ghetto in the harsh wasteland part of South Africa. As metaphors go, this ain’t shading anywhere near subtle. But subtle doesn’t often result in trailers this great.
Genre films and TV shows have a long history of stabbing at political and social issues. For the thoughtful, college-educated geek, this kind of entertainment is like manna. I’ve long enjoyed the works of George Romero, for instance, who can’t film zombie one before he has a clear idea what insidious force of societal disrepair it embodies. Lately I’ve been watching HBO’s “True Blood,” which isn’t content to just be a trashy, sexy, gory supernatural romp. It also piles on metaphors for racial strife and (more predominantly) prejudice against homosexuals. The excellent intro (which I think is 50% of what keeps me watching the show) includes a brief shot of a sign glowing in front of a church like a beacon in the darkness, with plastic letters spelling out GOD HATES FANGS. Again, not much subtlety here.
Sometimes they don’t quite get it right though. “True Blood” has a serious problem with its central analogy, which is that it seems pretty reasonable for people to fear and perhaps destroy vampires. Every single vampire in the show, with just one exception, either is or was a murderous psychopath who treats human life like people treat insects. Upright vamp citizen Bill was recently seen in flashback tearing a woman’s throat out and rolling around in her blood with his lover. And you could make a good case that the only reason Stephen Root’s vampire character wasn’t out killing was because he was so flabby and pathetic. If vampires = gays and vamp rights = gay rights in the “True Blood” conceit, then the show seems to inadvertently argue that we heteros should arm ourselves and take matters into our own hands before we’re wiped out. It’s not a small problem. But I still smirk every time I see the GOD HATES FANGS sign. I can understand why the show’s writers find it impossible to get away from this idea. And they’re showing signs of understanding the difficulty, recently introducing an uber-vampire named Godric who seems to be the befanged Martin Luther King, Jr. or Harvey Milk. Maybe. It’s hard to slot these oddly-shaped pieces into the standard circles and squares.
George Romero is also not immune to metaphor failure. His “Land of the Dead” set up a Dennis Hopper stand-in for George Bush, and created a walled city (metaphorical United States) keeping out a nation of undesirables (presumably illegal aliens and, especially, Middle Easterners). The problem is that it’s a zombie movie, and those folks outside the walls are flesh-eating zombies. The movie tries to portray that their subsequent incursion into the city to slaughter everyone is sort-of-kind-of justified as an act of revenge. But it’s really not. Because, George, we saw your previous three zombie flicks, and zombies are completely awful. Only Bub seemed like a decent feller.
Anyway, my hope for “District 9″ is that it gives me entertainment a-plenty and also something to chew on. And I hope the writers (Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell) handle their metaphor more sure-handedly than some of these other recent screenplays/teleplays. You don’t get a “Dawn of the Dead” or “Children of Men” very often. Horror and sci fi writers can tell us a lot about ourselves through their art – they just shouldn’t shoot themselves in the foot in the attempt.
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One Response to “Analogies in space”
Neill Blomkamp has a long, fascinating interview in The Onion AV Club today: http://www.avclub.com/articles/district-9-director-neill-blomkamp,31606/
Apparently there’s a big spoiler in one of the last questions, so if you want to go into the movie fresh, click off the page when the word spoiler pops up.