Christopher Johannson is somebody I went to college with. Not the alien from the movie.

So that's where that came from.

Carry on.

A particularly good commentary, guys. I agree with nearly all your points about the film's greatness and weaknesses. However, I find myself in stark disagreement on your broader political positions.

By the end, you very nearly conclude that apartheid is not a bad way of dealing with people you can't get along with. Good luck on the coin flip that puts you in the oppressor tribe vs the oppressed tribe.

Thruout history, the primary reason two groups who cohabitate don't get along is that one of them conquered the other and social stigmas of race or religion keep them from integrating. That's the source of the problem in Israel and was the source of the problem in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and the New World.... That puts the blame on the oppressors. You don't get a pass just by saying, "Well that was kind of a long time ago that we conquered you, stole your land, and forced you into ghettos. Why can't you be civil and stop setting off bombs? This is why we still actively discriminate against you, you know."

And apartheid wasn't established in South Africa until the 1950s, just when the entire rest of the world had collectively come to the realization that we all needed to try to enfranchise disenfranchised groups. So, yes, South Africa was just like America... only 300 years later when they should have known better.

However, for the record, I'm against trying to negotiate with komodo dragons. Those lying fuckers can't be trusted.

Last edited by Zarban (2010-02-17 05:25:29)

I'm not sure to what podcast Zarban listened to, but the points he made, to which Trey agreed, are exactly the conclusions come to in the podcast, as I remember it. Can you pull out some specific quotes where the DIF team came out in favor of modern societies oppressing other ones?

Okay, Gregory, here are some quotes, all from 1:18:40 to 1:31:00. I apologize for the length, but it was a really intense discussion. The beauty of the film is that you can say these things, and it's kind of okay. It doesn't make you a racists to parrot racist arguments from the 19th century because the movie isn't about human races. It's about aliens. Except that... really... it is about humans (as is pointed out a couple of times in the commentary).

Again, this was my favorite Down in Front commentary.

I really don't think you can call it even. Suggesting that scattered violence by oppressed peoples is equal to the conquest, oppression, and discrimination visited on them is just silly. However, I agree that you can make a reasonable argument that, if you have been conquered, you need to eventually get over it.

Trey then tells the PJ O'Rourke story and emphasizes the contrition instead of the oppression itself (this was 1989, immediately before apartheid was dismantled).

It's the difference between the guy who used to beat his wife and now treats her right and the guy who is still beating his wife. The first guy gets to tell the second guy that he's being a bad person.

Then everyone but Trey begins rationalizing the treatment as being actually pretty good, sounding hilariously like Barbara Bush after Hurricane Katrina. Then Michael comes to his senses and does a 180.

These are exactly the same arguments white men have made about blacks and Indians since encountering them. "This is fine, by their standards. They can't take care of themselves. They're savages in their homeland. They take each other as slaves." And so on.

Brian then makes up a back story that makes the humans sound magnanimous. "Presumably" we tried to help them, but "presumably" the prawns didn't do anything to help themselves. The film is at fault for not providing that back story, but you don't get to make up your own. You could just as easily say that humans ruined the aliens' potential to form a working society by giving them cat food, which seems to act like a drug on them. That's at least something we actually see.

The film makers would disagree with you. The movie is all about how the ruling class mistreats an underclass they don't like, because it's a nearly exact mirror of actual South African society with regard to impoverished foreign refugees. You can argue that the film fails in that the aliens really are different from those real-life people (we don't know; they never present the aliens' side), but that's not what Teague says, altho Michael sort of makes that point when he says the aliens should not have to be digging thru garbage.

But the reason for that historically among humans is that one group has conquered the other and failed to exterminate or assimilate them and/or it stems from religious and/or racial intolerance. All three of these are morally unacceptable in a modern civilization.

Brian immediately argues against Trey's premise, but Trey defends his premise to a point.

Michael and Trey then compare the aliens to raptors and Komodo dragons, which is contrary to the story the film is trying to present (they are clearly smarter than animals) but does square nicely with historical defenses of racism. (I'm not really suggesting they are 19th century social Darwinists, of course. As far as I know, they don't even own fob watches.)

Trey then uses Palestinians as an example of an angry people who can't be satisfied because the ruling class just doesn't want to give up their superior position (my wording). Brian seems to misunderstand his point and points out that it is only a small minority of unreasonable Palestinians who just really want to blow up Jews (most Palestinians have given up trying to get fair treatment, he seems to suggest approvingly). But Trey's point is, I think, that the problem didn't start with them. It started with Jews relocating to Palestine, taking over, and forcing Palestinians into second-class citizen status. But he doesn't actually say that.

Trey then uses Iraq as an example that assimilation is about the only way to resolve these things, even if assimilation comes in the form of extermination (rather than education, tolerance, and anti-discrimination laws). That's an oversimplification of what has happened in Iraq; the Sunni and Shi'a haven't really exterminated each other. They were forced to stop fighting by the surge in US troops. That seems (as much as I hate to admit it) to have provided a cooling off period that may create a lasting peace.

But it's also pretend-realism. Just because the solution to these problems is really hard doesn't mean it's impossible and we shouldn't try to achieve reconciliation. After all, different races and religions really do live together in harmony in many places around the world, even if there is an occasional racist murder.

Overall, it was a really stimulating discussion, but I feel like everybody sometimes fell right into the film makers' trap of feeling like the humans' treatment of the aliens was justified even tho, intellectually, you know perfectly well that that sort of treatment is never justified (like watching Cops and going, "I would just beat the shit out of that guy with my stick and then taser him.").

I take issue somewhat with the film makers in making the aliens so unlikeable and never presenting their point of view. It needed even just one alien saying, "We weren't like this before we came here. We traveled across the fucking galaxy. We're a civilized people. We just need a structured environment, that's all. There are no jobs for us to do here. And the cat food, man. The cat food turned us into bums."

Last edited by Zarban (2010-02-17 17:19:23)

Wow. This is fascinating, I eagerly await Gregory's response on this subject.

Where in Indiana, Zarban? I used to live north of Indy.

I think you hit an important and overlooked (by us) nail on the head there, we really wouldn't have anything to say if the filmmakers ever gave us an idea of what these people were like before they arrived.

OK, I guess I hit a nerve in another thread by saying that District 9 has some racist stuff in it, and that the ignorant monkey ghetto-bots in Transformers 2 weren't actually racist. This is gonna be a long-ass post, so I apologize in advance.

First of all, I will say that I was disappointed by District 9 is a number of ways, but it has it's good points - mainly concerning Wikkus, Christopher and his son and how their relationships evolved throughout the film. I will wait until after I get the racism stuff out of the way before I go further into the film as a whole and why it bothered me a lot, but I don't hate it or anything. After having seen it a few times, I just think it could and should have explored some of the interesting culture-clash potential. The reason the film didn't actually do that, in my opinion, was because the writer wanted to put in this allegory and some neat effects stuff instead of exploring his basic concept and taking a more interesting direction.

It's an allegory for apartheid, right? The film takes the idea of segregation and removes the human element from the equation. Instead of these things being black humans, they are a really ugly alien species. Now it's not just white humans repressing black humans, it's all of humanity repressing aliens. I think that's an interesting idea, but if you look at it in a certain way, it's really sort of insulting. These aliens are described as being lazy, shiftless idiots with no direction or motivation to better their situation. They eagerly trade everything they can find for cat food, which gets them high. They go out and steal shit to trade it for
cat food.

There's this one alien that seems intelligent enough, but the rest of them are a basically one step above wild animal.

Now, while I can see the parallels the film is trying to draw, where the people are making the broad generalized statements about the aliens, about how they're all stupid violent idiots who wallow in filth and have this dangerous addiction to cat food that can get out of hand, or they're these naive morons who get taken advantage of and can't help themselves because they just don't know any better, etc. Drawing a line between those aliens and black people during apartheid I feel is just a bit insulting.

You may as well just come out and say that most of the black people in south africa were crackheads who went around stealing shit to get their fix, and when they weren't doing that they were just being lazy and letting their living conditions become terrible because they didn't have anyone intelligent to tell them how to live. The thing about real racism and repression is that people who otherwise would go out and work and do the best they could to try to better themselves, support their families, etc can't do that because they are of a certain group and thus are restricted either by law or by society and that makes it very difficult for them to survive and prosper. These aliens don't really make any attempt to better their situation, and that comes off as a very unsympathetic trait to me and breaks a lot of the racism stuff going on. It turns them into a species of bums rather than a group that I can feel any empathy for.

Christopher just becomes "that one alien" who is different from the others, thus emphasizing how all the other aliens behave in basically the same manner. He's the one smart one, the one that seems to understand what's going on, the one that isn't apparently addicted to cat food, etc.

All of them are the same, except for this one. It's like the movie is just trying to tell me that because I identify only this one alien as being different from the others, that it is actually me who is the racist. Like "Oh, I hate most of them but this one guys is cool..." If I were to say that about black people it would be racist, because black people all behave differently because they're human. But saying that about these aliens seems to make sense to me, because they all actually do act the same.

In a way, the movie isn't really an allegory about racial injustice / equality so much as the film needed that sort of character arc for Wikkus. It wasn't really crucial to the plot or anything. you could have made the aliens quite happy on earth and well integrated, and just had Wikkus be the one asshole on the planet who hated them and he was the one in charge of some aspect of their society or whatever. You cook up some other insane reason for turning him into an alien and his character goes through the same sort of arc, and possibly causes everyone else to suddenly fear the aliens as well, making the event even more significant.

But, you know, it wouldn't have been as 'subtle' as making the film mimic apartheid.

I hope this all makes sense. My brain isn't very good at communicating ideas well with words.

As for Transformers 2 and it's supposed racism...  Making them look like monkeys could be argued as racist ,but their behavior, on the other hand, is totally not. If they didn't behave the way they do, then would the fact that they look like monkeys even matter? If the robots were voiced by white guys who just spoke the way the average white dude speaks be racist? I mean, wouldn't that imply that white people look like monkeys? That's totally racist, right?

I never got why people consider Jar Jar to be racist, either. Is it just because they have a black dude kinda swagger and talk funny to do the voice? I mean, is there some rule that says black people aren't allowed to play dumb people in any media because it would misrepresent their race as a whole? No other race I can think of has that problem. You see white guys play morons all the time. You see mexicans play morons, you see asians play morons... but a black guy plays a dumb guy or comedy relief and it's just racist?

Don't get me wrong, there's some pretty racist shit out there in films, but the transformer twins' behavior can be found in films that have entirely black casts and were written and directed by black people. Suddenly the ignorant ghetto talk is perfectly normal and OK? I mean, it doesn't seem to bother the tons of black people who are there working on the movie, right?

EDIT
I guess what I'm trying to say is that while the portrayals of the twins in T2 relies on stereotypes, you can find the same stereotypes in films that are made by black people, or for black people, or however you want to think about it. I like a lot of movies like Friday and Undercover Brother and Black Dynamite. The characters all behave in stereotypical ways and a lot of the jokes hinge on those stereotypes. I guess it's just the fact that a white guy made T2, or that the rest of the cast is largely white and they're supposed to be comedy relief, so that made it racist? Like Al Jolston making fun of black people? But if you made them human characters in a movie like Belly or Friday or Big Momma's House, they would just be another character. Hell, they'd probably seem more like straight characters when you put them next to someone like Chris Tucker or Martin Lawrence.
/EDIT

Anyway, blah on the racism stuff and back to District 9 and why it angers me:

See, I think the racism thing is a decent angle to take that story in, but I think they missed a whole lot of opportunities to add some depth to it. I think in the end they ultimately wanted to make it an action-type movie. If he had stuck with a more drama / suspense sort of plot he probably could have explored some really interesting things. The kids were a really good idea that they never explored. It bothered me that Christopher's kid didn't consider the planet he had been born on to be his home. Maybe as he had grown on earth he would have hit his teenage years and figured out that he'd been on Earth his whole life. May as well try to make it home, you know?

I would have liked to have seen the aliens here for a longer period of time and seen a couple of generations of aliens and their differences. You'd think the younger ones would be a lot more eager to try to integrate with the human society, and that would have probably made them a lot more sympathetic as characters than their parents.

I would have liked to have seen the story be more of a slice-of-life drama that just happened to be about a couple of aliens and maybe a couple of humans. The film as it is turns me off at the beginning because the characters are all totally lifeless, then it switches out of POV mode and Wikkus' plot takes over and it starts getting really really good, and then they start lining up action sequences for the last half hour of the film, and while there are some nice moments in those, the story went from interesting and unique with a couple of really great characters to genre-cliche predictable bullshit.

For what it's worth, tho, between when the characters stop being caricatures and archetypes up until Wikkus smacks Christopher over the head with that 2x4 in his shack... That's a pretty solid 45 minutes or so of great character building, great acting, great pace, pretty decent action with some nice little comedic bits and some nice dramatic moments with christopher. It's like this really awesome movie that's bookended by stuff I just didn't care for.

Last edited by Squiggly_P (2011-01-14 05:41:59)

Just to further Dorkman's rebuttal point above, science fiction stories are usually allegories for contemporary issues rather than literal representations. The prawns remind us of the apartheid, but they're not supposed to be a direct substitute for those under apartheid.

So calling the film racist for its portrayal of the prawns is taking the allegory too far. After all, prawns fly space in ships and black South Africans don't.

I never picked up on that either. I'm gonna watch it again and see if it holds up. I was really bothered by the fact that the film is trying to work in this racism stuff, but the characters - especially in the beginning of the film - are all these over-played caricatures. Even if your theory pays off and that's actually being done in the film, the caricatures remain when the film is dealing with the 'bad guys'. It would have been nice to have seen more intelligence coming out of the other prawns when Wikkus is in D9.

The film offers an explanation for Christopher via the theories on the prawn being drones and that there were more intelligent leader prawn that ran everything. I just assumed that Christopher was one of these higher-ranking leader prawn because the film shows us that theory. It could be that that's more human prejudice, tho, since it's only a theory.

I've just never seen a movie that deals with this sort of subject matter try so hard to make the group being repressed so unlikeable.

If they aren't actually supposed to be mindless drones, then it bothers me that they don't do something with all of the military hardware they apparently have stashed all over the place which they trade for cat food. Are they making this stuff out of trash? It seems unlikely since it's apparently some kind of bio-tech. Do they grow it? Why would the security forces who put them in D9 allow them all to keep their weapons and walking tanks and shit, especially since they apparently raid the place every other week and arrest prawn who stockpile this stuff or computer parts or what have you. And why, if they have all of these things, would they not use them to defend themselves? If the Nigerian wants to use these weapons in some attempt to become a powerful crime lord or whatever, why doesn't he just hire on some prawn to shoot the guns and run the mechs for him? He could pay them with cat food, apparently...

They could have added more of an underground organized crime aspect to the film, they could have had a prawn resistance force that was going out and attacking targets, they could have had prawn trying to work within the system to free their people, they could have had prawn trying to get jobs at McDonalds or SOMETHING. The prawn don't really do anything. They're just there to be bullied. I get that the film is really about Wikkus, but you don't see any prawn do anything that doesn't play into the apparent stereotypes these people have for them with the sole exception of Christopher. I guess it's supposed to be implied that they're all like Christopher, but Christopher doesn't do a lot of the sort of stupid shit that the other prawn seem to do. I get that it's human nature to hate things that are different or that we don't understand, but the scenario is too one-sided for me in this film. I want to see more of the prawn doing shit and trying to deal with their situation.

I mean, you say that there's not supposed to be a 1:1 correlation going on, but the prawn are living in filth and don't try to fix their situation and take it up the ass all the time and the excuse the film gives us is that they're all naive idiots and need to be lead around, yeah? But they took the situation from a real event that really happened and shot the film in a real location that actually existed. People really lived in that squalor. If Christopher is different from the rest of the prawn the way I see it, then the comparison is pretty harsh.

If the theory you have pans out and the early footage is a lens that shows us how humans see the prawn, then they should have given more examples of the prawn being more diverse.

About the monkey bot stuff, tho, you're totally right. Those things are racist as fuck. They're just the sort of racist that you see all over the place coming from lots and lots of sources. I just find it interesting that one of the guys who did the voice said he played it like the robot was just trying to acquire human-like behavior and was learning from TV and movies and shit like that, so that's how he acted. As an alien robot, they probably consider all of us to be monkeys, so making himself look more ape-like probably just made sense to him / them. As far as them being illiterate, Wheeler couldn't read the stuff, either, cause it's not their language. The twins just said that in a really stupid and racist way. Not defending or anything, just sayin'.

Next time I watch it I'll take this conversation into account and try to see it from that point of view. When I saw it in the theater I found it hard to imagine a series of events that would have created a situation like the one presented in the film. The movie tries to show you elements that give them some 'humanity', but then like you say, it also tries to make them seem as inhuman as possible.

I mean, I liked it well enough. The ending made me very happy, I love the character stuff in the middle, and the opening set-up doesn't annoy me that much. I will go see Neil B's next movie, cause I think he's a good director. The movie is just 30% questions with no answers, and part of my brain is saying "they couldn't have given answers because those answers would not have made any sense in the world they created".

If nothing on Earth can do that (turn a human into an alien creature), then it's even more unlikely that something from somewhere else could.

This is why smart sci-fi has abandoned tropes like "space diseases" and alien/human hybrids, etc.    Humans can't cross-breed with coconut trees*, and coconut trees come from here.   And we stopped quarantining astronauts when it was decided that the odds of something from another world infecting human biology were *ahem* astronomical.    Humans can't even catch Dutch Elm disease, and we're mostly the same as elm trees, biologically speaking.

I stand by what I said.   To propose that the alien's propulsion juice just also happens to have the side effect of turning people into prawns is a plot contrivance that ignores everything we know about everything.    To chalk it up to "alien technology" is no more plausible than saying "a wizard did it".   It's mostly a good film, but that detail definitely falls into the magic bean category. 

On the plus side, you're gonna love the script I'm working on now - it's about a guy who invents a new form of diesel fuel that accidentally turns him into a horse.

* and produce offspring, obviously is what I mean.   You can do whatever you like with a coconut tree if that's your thing, but don't bother decorating the nursery, is all I'm saying.

Only if he gets in a giant metal Trojan horse decked out with top of the line weaponry to save his horse buddies at the end.