District 9: South Africa's Best Kept Secret

Alien invasion texts often reinforce or criticize immigration policies and anxieties that are a part of a society's cultural politics. Lisa Parks acknowledges in her article “Satellite Panoramas,” the idea that technology and ideology are often used to reinforce Eurocentric ideals, citing the film The Arrival as her example:

“The Arrival is a highly symptomatic text in that it recombines and concretizes discourses alluded to throughout this chapter. Moreover, it clarifies the way astronomical observation and technologies are embedded within a broader system of cultural politics.”

In The Arrival, the alien race in the film are depicted as “Hispanic-looking” and had retrofitted defunct power plants in Central and South America that pump out quantities of greenhouse gases which is being “attributed” to causing global warming. The main message The Arrival reinforces is that immigrants and South and Central America are responsible for global warming and that white Americans should fear the “alien” civilization that is coming into the United States. While The Arrival reinforces the anxieties and Eurocentric beliefs regarding immigration and global warming, District 9 criticizes the immigration policies and the cultural politics of South Africa rather than reinforce them.

District 9 alludes to the South African government's mishandling and mistreatment of the immigrants and refugees that enter the country. The film also appears to support immigration reform and rights for the immigrants and refugees. The immigrants and refugees in District 9 are represented as “prawns,” a race of insect-like creatures which are similar to the Parktown prawn, a king cricket species native to South Africa.

The prawns in the film serve as a mirror of the people that were abused under the system of Apartheid; unfortunately some of the practices that have carried over from its dissolution continue to this day. The MNU is given the task to move the prawns from District 9 into District 10 by either asking them to leave their homes or evicting them by brutal force. This can be interpreted by many as a reference to the treatment resident black South Africans and refugees were given by their government during apartheid. The scene in which Wikus (Sharlto Copley) visits the home of a prawn family, he explains to them that they need to vacate District 9 and move into District 10, though Wikus later on acknowledges that District 10 is a much worse than District 9. This has a historical significance since in 1966 during Apartheid era, an area known as District 6 was declared a “whites only” zone by the South African government, forcibly removing 60,000 black South Africans into Cape Flats.

The Arrival and District 9 are discourses that deal with the cultural politics of immigration and its policies. The Arrival reinforces white America's anxiety about immigrants and immigration policies, which encourages white America to fear the “arrival” of Mexicans and other immigrants. District 9 criticizes South Africa's cultural politics by saying that its culture should show more compassion to the refugees and immigrants by welcoming and by supporting immigration reform. Though these films contain one aspect of interpretation, which is using an alien race as an allegory to immigration there are many others that people discover in both films.

-Maricruz