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Landi Raubenheimer
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Abstract

This chapter explores and establishes a second important generic underpinning in District 9: science fiction (mockumentary is the first, discussed in Chapter 3). I explore how District 9 shares several motifs and conventions with the so-called retrofuturist and new bad future sub-genres of 1980s science fiction films, probing how the film incorporates the past of the science fiction cinema genre as well. The spaceship depicted in the film is explored in particular as a metaphor for both Johannesburg and the townships and as a microcosm of nostalgic dystopia.

1 Science Fiction Poetics

1.1 Retrofuturism and ‘New Bad Future’

While the mockumentary genre is predominant in the poetics of District 9, especially in terms of its cinematography, it is not the only genre at work in the film. Many scholars have regarded it primarily as a science fiction film, although I find it more productive to interpret District 9 as a mockumentary film that draws on the science fiction genre. Discussing District 9 as a science fiction film using the conventions of the documentary form, Mireille Rosello (2016: 43) discusses how these genres relate to each other. She points out that, while science fiction often asks the viewer to suspend disbelief in order to follow a story about aliens, for example, a documentary seeks to furnish the viewer with truthful information. Mockumentary simulates or parodies the pursuit of truthful information, complicating the notion of documentary. According to Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska (2006:11), science fiction is an intertextual genre that defies clear definition, as mockumentary does. Along the same lines, Vivian Sobchack (1998: 63), in her seminal book on the science fiction genre, describes it as less clearly defined than is often thought. She suggests that science fiction cinema engages both with science and its empirical methods, and with more cultural motifs related to the transcendentalism associated with magic and religion. Drawing on Sobchack, one may infer that an underpinning of science fiction with its own inherent complexity contributes to the complexity of how District 9 portrays nostalgic dystopia. District 9 reflects elements that recur in the science fiction genre in predictable ways. These include prevalent utopian or dystopian settings (Williams 1978) and the manipulation of temporality, which renders the past and present as unstable categories.1 The latter is uniquely pertinent in the case of District 9, which conflates aspects of two periods of time, the 1980s and the 2000s. The analogue nostalgia used in the cinematography is further enhanced by the temporal quality of the science fiction genre in the film, reinforcing its nostalgic effect.

King and Krzywinska (2006) also discuss several design styles that have influenced the look of science fiction films, such as futurism, gothic and post-apocalyptic design, and retrofuturism. In District 9 much of the alien technology is retrofuturist, which recalls visions of the future that were popular in the 1980s. Showing those as fallible and dated is in a sense allegorical of apartheid itself. The Johannesburg landscape depicted in the film echoes this retrofuturist design sensibility, focusing on buildings that, in the futuristic depiction of 2010, are seen as past their prime, and degenerating into slums. This, in turn, prompts the view that the city itself is in decline. As such, it may imply to even the sceptical viewer that in the past the city was ‘better’. Takayuki Tatsumi (2015: 139) describes how the depiction of the city and the spaceship in District 9 differentiates it from other science fiction films. It portrays a uniquely South African science fiction aesthetic, a “dirty, almost steampunk look” that reminds him of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime films, as well as the cyberpunk subgenre (Tatsumi 2015: 138–139).

Dystopian depictions of the future, particularly of the cyberpunk subgenre, are not uncommon in contemporary science fiction cinema, and were prominent in the Hollywood films in the 1980s and 1990s that Sobchack (2008: 271–272) describes in her “third map” of the genre of science fiction in American cinema. Films such as Blade Runner (Scott 1982), The Terminator (Cameron 1984), Robocop (Verhoeven 1987) and Total Recall (Verhoeven 1990) are marked by a paranoid, anxious outlook on urban life. Often, they both critique and eroticise the ills associated with dystopian urbanism.2 They depict garbage, decay and industrialisation as aestheticised, and Sobchack (2008: 262, 271) argues that the city becomes exoticised as a setting, depicting “excess scenography”. In Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1998), Sobchack bases an earlier iteration of this argument on Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984). She contends that science fiction films of the 1980s frequently emphasise the mediated qualities of postmodern society (Sobchack 1998: 229–262), and proposes that Jameson’s discussion of postmodernism could be employed to interpret the science fiction genre in 1980s cinema. Such films are postmodern in many ways: simulation and the real are often portrayed as intertwined, and immediate and mediated hyper-real experiences are seen as interchangeable, reflecting Jameson’s notion of “depthlessness” in postmodern society (Sobchack 1998: 254). In other words, these films problematise and romanticise the increasingly mediated quality of postmodern life. One may conclude that dystopian depictions of the future are endemic to this particular period of science fiction cinema, at least in Hollywood. The films are also known for how they conflate temporality (Sobchack 1998: 272–281), reflecting the collapse of history that Jameson theorises as uniquely postmodern.

What is intriguing with regard to District 9 is Sobchack’s argument that 1980s science fiction films are often fundamentally nostalgic (1998: 229, 274–281). She writes about how this nostalgia is constructed in a manner strikingly comparable to the analogue nostalgia employed in District 9 and by the fashion bloggers I described earlier. In films from the 1980s, such as Back to the Future (Zemeckis 1985), not to mention television series of the time, there is an intertextual approach to constructing temporality as fundamentally backward-looking and nostalgic for the 1950s. According to Sobchack (1998: 274), films like this exude a “pseudo-historical depth”, a term she takes from Jameson: history appears not as a realised temporal setting, but a set of aesthetic styles to be emulated at random. In essence, these films embody a kind of simulacrum of history. She further argues that history here is not so much remembered directly as it is remembered from popular media (Sobchack 1998: 274–276). I argued earlier that Blomkamp may have been influenced by popular science fiction depictions from television and cinema in South Africa during his childhood in the 1980s. Insofar as District 9 references newsreel footage from the 1980s, as well as several science fiction motifs of the time, it follows that the film shares some of the dominant motifs and themes of 1980s science fiction films, rather than the cyberpunk references Tatsumi suggests.

One 1980s subgenre that Fred Glass (1989: 7) identifies as “new bad future” resonates strongly with aspects of District 9. Glass identifies several codes of the subgenre that find their way into District 9. A standout element in new bad future films is the setting, which, in the films Sobchack (1998: 255–272) discusses, typically depicts the decay of modernist progress in future society. According to Glass (1989: 10–11), this bleak, dystopian vision is the product of pessimism about the transformation of technologies in contemporary society and their ability to bring about positive transformation. It also conveys cynicism about the political and cultural implications and power relations embedded in how such technologies are disseminated and used. In films such as Blade Runner, Robocop, The Terminator and Aliens, he identifies the premise that future society is considerably worse off than current society. Very often, such fictional societies are not set in the distant future but seem to be on the not-too-distant horizon, as fantastical yet plausible visions of what is to come (Glass 1989: 12).

While District 9 is not set only in the 1980s, the influence of media from that time has been acknowledged by Blomkamp (2020) and Opaloch (Holben 2009).3 One may therefore surmise that the film’s visual design draws on science fiction films from the 1980s: the dystopian setting of near-future Johannesburg certainly seems reminiscent of the post-apocalyptic settings of Blade Runner and The Terminator. The figure of the cyborg in such films was very relevant to the socio-political concerns of western societies in the 1980s, which subscribed to the values that Hollywood films unconsciously espoused, such as neoliberal capitalist thinking.4 In District 9 the cyborg is an essential motif that informs the body armour Wikus dons towards the end, representative of change or transition in society. Glass argues that the cyborg motif represents a transitional object in new bad future films, enabling the audience to make sense of the changing world in which they are living (Glass 1989: 26). The motif works almost like a fetish, assuaging anxiety.5 The cyborg in Robocop, for example, alleviates anxieties around dehumanisation in late capitalist society’s valorisation of instrumental reason, and serves to reassure audiences that urban decay can be curbed, and that humans and technology can coexist (Glass 1989: 39–40). These concerns remain relevant in society at the time of writing (especially South African society), where the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution is a driving force in much academic debate concerning the future of the world, industry and academia.6

Another motif Glass (1989: 12–14) identifies is the use of television within the films themselves. District 9 makes extensive use of television formats such as interviews and newsreel footage, and even portrays old cathode ray television sets as signifiers of the decay in the township setting of the camp. Glass (1989: 14) argues that, within the subgenre of new bad future films, there is a suggested symbiosis between social decay and television as a medium, but ironically these films employ the aesthetics of television formats despite their conceptual contempt for its effects on audiences.

The last and one of the most crucial elements of the subgenre, which is echoed in District 9, is the presence of extreme violence. Such violence is prevalent in the new bad future films that Glass discusses. He points out that extreme violence is often in tension with the seemingly leftist political messages of the films, which are, broadly speaking, critical depictions of capitalist society. He suggests that this incongruous element allowed the genre to attract varied audiences, including viewers who watch films for the entertainment of spectacle alone. In many films, the violence appears justified through audience identification with the reasons for it. In Robocop, for example, the violent cyborg figure of Murphy has the righteousness of the law behind him. Glass argues that audience identification with the cyborg’s power (which he refers to as phallic) even allows the violence to take on a redemptive tone. District 9 is surprisingly violent, given its salvific plot and Wikus’s character arc. Yet audiences can still see the film as redemptive as well as an indictment of apartheid and its concomitant violence (Wagner 2015). The violence is a deeply constitutive element of the contradictory nature of nostalgic dystopia at work in District 9. Although it might seem incongruous with critical outcomes, it is commensurate with the dystopian picture of Johannesburg in the film and reinforces Wikus’s need for redemption. The landscape, itself ravaged by violence, needs to be redeemed just as much as Wikus.

1.2 Spaceship/Township

An important aspect of the production design in the film, often overlooked in relation to the notion of landscape, is the depiction of the spaceship or alien mothership. The ship, pictured in the screenshot in Figure 25, hovers above the city but is not merely its allegorical antithesis. Rather, it acts as a mirror image to the camp and the actual township of Chiawelo. It represents the same concept the township does in the film: a space of abjection humans find repulsive. The spaceship can be read as representative of the township in terms of its design, with the ship’s decaying and rusted exterior reminiscent of the rusted corrugated iron sheets in the informal settlement of the camp. There are suggestions in the film that the spaceship could represent a dystopian view of the mining industry in Johannesburg as well.

Figure 25
Figure 25

The mothership hovering over the township. Still taken from District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009).

Blomkamp describes the aliens’ presence on earth as motivated by illness: they had no choice but to “land” in earth’s atmosphere and so are not conquerors but, as Rosello (2016: 36) suggests, more like migrants. This is evocative of the mining industry’s historical reliance on migrant labour.7 When the ailing creatures are finally broken out of the ship, the humans quarantine them in what is intended to be a refugee camp (Woerner 2009). However, the quarantine may also be seen as an allegorical reference to the historical States of Emergency, and how they impacted the townships in South Africa in the 1980s, as the camp rapidly becomes a prison of sorts (Rosello 2016: 38). The climate of surveillance and militarisation during the States of Emergency created a “state of exception” in many of the townships, which became isolated, and concentration-camp-like. Johannes Rantete (1984), for example, describes how, after the third of September 1984 (the first day of the so-called Vaal uprisings), people could not get food in Sebokeng, and how difficult it was to leave the township since the buses had been burned. In effect, the township became quarantined, not unlike the camp in District 9.

What can we learn by looking at the spaceship design in District 9? The ship is like a flying saucer, which has a particular history in western science fiction. Pilot Kenneth Arnold was the first to use the term “flying saucer” in June 1947 to describe unidentified flying objects he saw near Mount Rainier in Washington State in the US (Kinnear 2010: 85). The flying saucer became entrenched in popular discourse around the imagining of spaceships after the advent of the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957, and the dawn of the Space Age. The ‘saucer style’ of spaceship has consistently had a connotation of alien life, along with negative aspects, such as alien invasions or abductions (Clute et al. [n.d.] spaceships). Kate Kinnear (2010: 35–36) explains that science fiction representations of alien spacecraft are often designed to appear as foreign as possible, and the fact that a saucer has no clear indications of windows, a cockpit, or other directional indicators supports this.8 The round shape is disorientating to humans in that existing aircraft have less symmetrical structures, instead having a front-back and top-bottom asymmetry that connotes direction. The ship in District 9 is not just a saucer, however: although its horizontal contour is rounded, it has a particularly angular appearance in its structural details, reminiscent of 1980s military technology. The Lockheed F-117A stealth fighter aircraft (Figure 26), developed in the 1980s and test flown in the US is a good example. In fact, people who believed they had spotted ufos at the time are thought to have seen one of these aircraft from a particular angle, and mistaken it for a flying saucer (May 2018: 173–174). The angular and symmetrical details on the Lockheed F-117A aircraft resemble the design sensibility of District 9’s mothership.

Figure 26
Figure 26

The Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk Low-Observable / Stealth Strike Aircraft, first airborne in 1981. (Lockheed 2019).

The angular shapes of parts of the ship also recall the octagonal watchtowers erected on the borders of townships during apartheid, which appear in some scenes in District 9 (Figure 27). The panoptic structures embody the surveillance character of the apartheid regime, and the policing of the boundaries of the townships, suburbs and inner cities that occurred in South Africa in the wake of the pass laws and the Group Areas Act of 1950 (Jansen van Veuren 2012: 576).9 Rantete (1984) mentions several instances of security police closely observing township residents in Sebokeng during the unrest preceding the States of Emergency; the presence of police or security police is ubiquitous in newsreel footage from the time. In addition to the Lockheed aircraft and township watchtowers, the spaceship resembles apartheid-era floodlights, like those visible in Mofokeng’s photograph of Diepkloof (Figure 28). Many are still found in townships and along some highways, casting a characteristic yellow light.

Figure 27
Figure 27

Apartheid-era watch towers. Still taken from District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009).

Figure 28
Figure 28

A Taste for Life, Baragwanath Terminus, Diepkloof. Photograph by Santu Mofokeng, 1985. Silverprint, 30 × 45 cm, edition of 5.

© santu mofokeng foundation. image courtesy lunetta bartz, maker, johannesburg

Even though the ship is alien and its design emphasises how “other” it is, many aspects of its appearance and style relate to the landscape over which it hovers, mirroring it rather than differentiating the craft from it. The textures on spacecraft in science fiction films – what Kinnear (2010: 3) calls “nurnies” and “greebles”, serve to indicate technological complexity (Figure 29). Kinnear refers to this style specifically as “used future”, where many details, which would commonly indicate complexity and technological advancement, suggest wear and tear, rather than the sleek appearance in the human space station in Blomkamp’s subsequent film Elysium (2013), for example. The surface details in the District 9 spaceship reinforce how dated the ship looks, in addition to conveying the ship’s scale and providing a visual resonance with the township landscape below. There is even evidence of grease, dirt build-up and rust (Tatsumi 2015: 139), correlating with the appearance of townships, where they result from the informal building methods of accretion that residents employ (Dovey & King 2011: 13). Corrugated iron is the most common material used to construct dwellings, and it is often old, corroded material recycled from previous structures. The District 9 ship might not be made of sheets of corrugated iron, but its rusted and dirty metal surface, with many parts hanging from it like entrails, is still reminiscent of township structures (Figure 29). Its mechanical shape and character seem to reiterate a nostalgic view of technologies, rather than a futuristic one. It is in keeping with the backward-looking visual character of the film with its dated appearance evident in visual effects and the overall visual design.

Figure 29
Figure 29

The mothership from below, with the command module beaming up. Still taken from District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009).

Another reference to dated technology is the ruined alien body armour that Wikus can use because of his now mixed dna. Such mechanical armour was a topical motif in science fiction films such as Robocop and The Terminator, and also in an animated Japanese television series, Robotech (Maceck 1985), which aired on children’s television in South Africa (Figure 30). Takayuki Tatsumi (2015: 130–142) suggests that Blomkamp’s influences may include references to several anime films and television series from the cyberpunk genre in the late 1980s and the 1990s, and that the body armour also resembles giant robots in the Gundam (Tomino & Yatate 1979) and the Neon Genesis Evangelion (Anno 1995) series (Tatsumi 2015: 133).

Figure 30
Figure 30

The mechanical robot from the series Robotech (produced by Carl Maceck, 1985). Still from video (Robotech-Intro ... 2011, screenshot by author).

Like the ship, the body armour in District 9, as seen in Figure 31, evokes retrofuturist notions of space travel and warfare prevalent in the 1980s. It appears rusted and in disrepair, having languished in the camp for many years. Mechanical armour like this might have seemed highly futuristic in the 1980s, conjuring cyborg visions that would enhance human physicality and power, as in the film Robocop. However, here there is little to show for such notions of progress, as the body armour seems unimpressive and defeated, a thwarted futuristic dream. Once again, it is symbolic of the failure of the rationalist modernism espoused by apartheid South Africa (Gaule 2005: 2338–2339). When the body armour is understood within the rubric of used future and draws on the new bad future subgenre of the 1980s, it indicates several things: it could signal a collapse of faith in technology, which is typical of the genre (Glass 1989: 11), as well as indicating the transitional potential of the cyborg identity that Wikus is assigned near the end of District 9.

What Wikus represents might also be said of the landscape as well: it reflects the unrealised transformation that Wikus embodies. Wikus has been interpreted in terms of his allegorical representation of hegemonic apartheid-era whiteness, or his Afrikaner identity.10 As he transforms into an ‘other’, he is rejected by his own people, even though his transformation into an alien is still not complete. I interpret this incomplete transformation as symbolic of whiteness in contemporary South Africa; he is in a state of unrealised metamorphosis, but also of becoming alien to the place where he grew up. The landscape echoes this uncertainty. It is neither urban nor rural, and it seems decayed and beyond hope, yet there is also evidence of everyday lives lived in the dwellings. Townships persist in the democratic life of contemporary South Africa, despite being the conceptions of colonial and apartheid agendas of racial dehumanisation.

Figure 31
Figure 31

Wikus in the mechanical body armour suit. Still taken from District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009).

The ship represents many of the same things as the body armour; it is also, in some senses, the landscape’s ‘other’. It is the dark side of the city, the city’s “upside down”, as the phrase is used in the recent retro science fiction television series Stranger Things (Duffer & Duffer 2016).11

Figure 32
Figure 32

Humans break into the alien mothership to rescue the sick creatures. Still taken from District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009).

Notably, some of the introductory sequences in District 9 portray the spaceship in a manner that recalls mining, as in the screenshot in Figure 32. The aliens had to be broken out of the ship, and they are depicted as starving in the dark, like trapped mineworkers after a mining accident. The rescue teams look remarkably like workers descending into a mine. I consider the history of mining in the area later, but it is pertinent here that the mining industry in South Africa was from its inception marked by racial inequality. Most of the workers were from the African continent, exploited as cheap labour, while the mines were run by the so-called Randlords, chiefly English settlers who had the capital to invest in the industry (Harrison & Zack 2012: 554). There is a long history of labour disputes around conditions in the mines, the safety of mineworkers, and the abhorrent compounds where they were housed. Such a state of bare life existence is echoed in the spaceship’s interior, where the aliens are trapped, warming themselves at fires made in large oil cans – like those commonly used in the townships for warmth and cooking. Iconically South African, the brazier motif appears in contemporary artworks by Kagiso Pat Mautloa and William Kentridge, as well as photographs by Andrew Tshabangu. Tshabangu’s photograph Brazier – Joubert Park I (Figure 33) depicts homeless people living in Joubert Park in the inner city of Johannesburg. The dense smog from the fires gives the park an otherworldly character that invites comparison with the set of a science fiction film.

Figure 33
Figure 33

Brazier, Joubert Park ICity in Transition Series. Photograph by Andrew Tshabangu, 1994. Archival print. 120 × 84cm.

from the imago mundi collection “art theorema #2”

Blomkamp also refers overtly to this motif in Alive in Joburg, depicting the aliens using such cans to make fires (Figure 34). The brazier is another feature contributing to the allegory of apartheid racism constructed in District 9, and equates the aliens to Black people during apartheid, as discussed in considerable detail in research on the film.

Figure 34
Figure 34

Aliens huddle over braziers. Still taken from Alive in Joburg (Neill Blomkamp, 2006).

The spaceship is not entirely dystopian and ruinous. It is the key to the future and the liberation of the aliens. In this sense it becomes almost like an archaeological site to be excavated, one that holds the promise of treasure to be unearthed. Unlike an archaeological site, however, the spaceship points to the future, not the past. The treasure here is the liquid, an alien substance essential to their survival, unrecognised by Wikus when he accidentally sprays himself with it.12 In an interview, Blomkamp described the mothership as a vessel where the aliens could live for thousands of years (Woerner 2009). One might note that, in the science fiction genre around the 1960s and 70s, spaceships often came to signify permanent escape (Clute et al. [n.d.] spaceships). The notion is especially pertinent to District 9, where the alien ship is not only the means for the aliens to escape from their capture in Johannesburg, but also the only hope for Wikus’s escape from his mutated alien body.

Figure 35
Figure 35

The command module drops from the mothership. Still taken from District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009).

Near the opening of District 9 something is shown falling from the ship; a “command module”, which is visible in Figure 35. Experts in the mock interviews at the beginning of the film surmise that the loss of the module is why the alien ship became inoperative and could not return whence it came. However, the module is not lost: the alien Christopher lives in it, buried underground, with a shack built on top of it that looks like every other cheaply constructed dwelling in the camp. Only towards the end of the film is the command module revealed as the basement of his shack. When Christopher can return the module to the mothership, the ship itself can leave (Figure 36).

Figure 36
Figure 36

The command module rises from the ground. Still taken from District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009).

The scene in Figure 36, taking place near the end of the film, depicts the command module being beamed up, to the accompaniment of an ethereal soundtrack. Biblical associations with such an ascension into the sky, and the attainment of freedom in this manner, are commonplace in science fiction with its pervasive religious motifs.13 Sobchack (1998: 55–63) devotes a section of her book to exploring how magic, religion and science interact in the genre: religion in fact serves as the only “answer” in many science fiction film plots, where the unexplained or forces beyond human control (such as aliens) affect human fate. In District 9, the township is the unlikely setting where this almost religious redemption of the aliens and the humans is set in motion.

Focusing on ‘the how’ over the last three chapters makes it clear that District 9 employs analogue nostalgia to construct its vision of Johannesburg, as do Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema and The Battle for Johannesburg, and the work done by photographers such as Goldblatt, and Subotzky and Waterhouse, as well as amateur fashion bloggers I See A Different You, Khumbula and the Sartists. It is significant how the interplay between digital and analogue media technologies has shaped this emerging idiom in depictions of Johannesburg across these diverse examples, where practitioners represent very different social contexts. In many respects, Johannesburg has become visually defined by the analogue aesthetics and analogue nostalgia of these portrayals. This implicates media technologies and practices of the time in the nostalgic dystopian image of the city. The change from analogue to digital technologies impacts professional and amateur practices alike, in both film and photography. It has far-reaching and diverse implications, which cannot be understood solely as the product of particular technologies or media forms. More than a mere technological development or media practice, analogue aesthetics is ultimately decisive in how the idiom of nostalgic dystopia is shaped. The coherence of the visual vocabulary across diverse examples lies in the result rather than the individual processes or techniques employed.

Along with analogue nostalgia, two sets of generic underpinnings characterise how District 9 portrays the analogue landscape: the mockumentary and science fiction genres. In the mockumentary genre, District 9 emulates 1980s documentary and newsreel conventions to construct an analogue landscape that imitates the actual apartheid past of Johannesburg, including the violence in the townships during the 1980s. By mimicking analogue newsreel footage, as well as using digital grading and cinematographic techniques to emulate analogue flaws and achieve a “low-resolution realism” (Lucas 2014:143–146), a depiction of the ‘real’ Johannesburg landscape is constructed.

It is no accident that the photographs and films I have analysed share a visual vocabulary on so many levels: they draw on the idiom to capture the realities of the city, reflecting a concern with (historical) actuality or authenticity. In Goldblatt’s depiction of Johannesburg’s mine dumps, and in Subotzky and Waterhouse’s project documenting the landmark building Ponte City, there is a particular poignancy in the depiction of a ‘document’ of Johannesburg, and in capturing it with analogue cameras, an element which the films also flirt with in different ways. However, in District 9, the mockumentary genre lends additional complexity to the depiction of Johannesburg, undermining the sense of documentary fidelity in its humour and hypermediacy, which emphasise the mediatic qualities of the film. The constructed media quality of the depiction of Johannesburg is flaunted, imbuing it with an analogue character that suggests authenticity. But it also creates an artificiality that ambiguously softens some of the gravity of the allegorical content of the film. The humour inherent in the mockumentary genre allows the film to construct the apartheid past as nostalgic, despite this being preposterous. By relying on media nostalgia to reiterate the reflective nostalgia, the film permits viewers to indulge in the visual aspects of nostalgia without focusing on the allegorical politics that are depicted as if they represent a documentary truth.

The softening of the allegorical content through the mockumentary genre might further be argued to lend credence to the redemption afforded to the film’s main character, Wikus. In a sense, he can ‘rewrite’ apartheid history in a manner that redeems him, and releases white Afrikaner masculinity from the shame of the atrocities that the regime committed. Such redemption has justifiably been argued to be deeply gratuitous. Yet the mockumentary genre employed by Blomkamp is instrumental in enabling the dystopian landscape of the township under siege to attain a redemptive quality. The dystopia of the township becomes the site of hope for the aliens and of allegorical redemption for white South Africans in the figure of Wikus.

As is the case in District 9, popular photography for Instagram and fashion blogs by the collectives I See A Different You, Khumbula and the Sartists does not emulate particular film stocks or cameras faithfully, but rather seeks to convey a ‘feel’ of historicity and authenticity in their portrayal of Johannesburg as nostalgic dystopia. This strategy allows them to recreate the apartheid past as a place they can reminisce about, re-casting themselves and the landscape in a hopeful light. Referred to as “subversive resistance” by Farber (2015), this approach can be understood as fundamentally critical, enabling the “freedom to” reimagine the city and the townships in new ways (Lees 2004: 24). The Black photographers present a significant counterpoint to the supposition that nostalgia creates a white perspective on the city; they employ nostalgia in ways that articulate their own senses of identity and belonging in the context of South African history.14

The second generic underpinning of District 9 is 1980s science fiction and retrofuturist production design that romanticise the city’s decay, which can further be related to the new bad future subgenre. In the 1980s, Hollywood science fiction cinema was itself characteristically nostalgic, according to Sobchack (1998: 229), and District 9 shares several motifs with these films: a dystopian setting; the figure of the cyborg; the portrayal of historical television forms and technologies within the films; and the depiction of extreme violence – all reflected in District 9’s Johannesburg landscapes. The power of Blomkamp’s science fiction poetics doubles nostalgia by recalling both 1980s visions of the future as well as 1980s Johannesburg.

The spaceship in District 9 is portrayed as a dated and decaying technology and, like the apartheid township in contemporary portrayals, as a failure that haunts Johannesburg. But although the ship is depicted as a site of abjection, it transforms into a ‘way out’ for the aliens when Christopher finally manages to repair the command module and ascend to the mothership. By implication, the township too, although embodying apartheid’s historical urban segregation, becomes a symbol of redemption or escape from the city’s history. The city’s portrayal is far from simple, however.

What the analogue nostalgia and the analogue aesthetics in District 9 and related depictions ultimately point to is that nostalgia can be geared towards divergent and complex outcomes. In this way, Johannesburg incongruously becomes a place to be nostalgic about, a place where history is rewritten and where the victims and perpetrators of apartheid may gain the unlikely “freedom to” shape the representation of the landscape in new ways (Lees 2004: 24). This contradictory dynamic characterises many of the aspects of Johannesburg as nostalgic dystopia. It is both in decay and vibrantly alive, both shocking and arresting to look at, and both repulses and fascinates the viewer. In all this, it offers a unique aesthetic possibility of transformation that would not occur in beautiful, untroubled depictions of place.

1

King & Krzywinska (2006: 54–55), Nel (2012) and Sobchack (1998: 254) all consider temporality in the science fiction genre, indicating its typical complexity.

2

Janet Staiger’s (1988: 20–40) discussion of the future noir genre is also pertinent in some respects. She discusses Blade Runner and its cityscape in some detail, referring particularly to the links between urban architecture and class in this dystopian depiction of Los Angeles. As with District 9’s Johannesburg, the city is depicted as a failure, with only the privileged – mostly those occupying top positions in corporate business – residing in skyscrapers that overlook the squalor of the future city. As discussed in the previous section, landmark buildings such as Ponte City and the Carlton Centre play such a role in District 9, indicating a skewed balance of power.

3

In his interview with me, Blomkamp mentioned how important it was for him to use older, earlier generation digital cameras such as the ex1, to achieve an unpolished look, which he describes as “washed-out” and “burnt out”.

4

An interesting point here is a debate in 2012 around the relevance of science fiction to Africa. Author Nnedi Okorafor (in Kapstein 2014: 158) quotes Professor Naunihal Singh as saying that, if The Terminator were to screen in West Africa, it would not be popular at all: it might not speak to people who are grappling with poverty, and who do not have the luxury of imagining the future and technology. Implied here is the mismatch between neoliberal ideas of progress and the reality of people living in impoverished societies. On the other hand, the recent popularity and topicality of Afrofuturism, which imagines Africa as the epicentre of human development within the context of technology, speaks to a different impulse in relation to science fiction (Womack 2013).

5

See Glass’ (1989: 26–33) discussion of Peter Fuller’s work on object relations.

6

See Klaus Schwab’s (2016) seminal book on the topic, Bryan Edward Penprase (2018: 207–228) and Michael A. Peters (2017: 1–6) for the impact on the Fourth Industrial Revolution on education.

8

In her Masters degree study on the aesthetics of spaceship design in science fiction film and television, Kate Kinnear (2010: 39) examines how flying saucers became the most common shape for alien spaceships in western science fiction.

9

The pass laws required all Black people to carry a passbook or ‘dompas’, which recorded where they were allowed to reside and could be used to track their whereabouts (Peffer 2009: xvi).

11

In this series the ‘upside down’ is depicted as the underworld and is the shadow side of the ‘real’ world. It shares the same geographic location, but is a site of distortion and abject horror, just as the townships are when they are depicted as zones of indistinction.

12

In the recent film Black Panther (Coogler 2018), there is also reference to such a mineral resource, vibranium, as the key to freedom from colonial rule.

13

John Clute et al. ([n.d.] Religion) and Sobchack (1998: 288–289) spend considerable time on this topic.

14

As with Wikus’s redemption discussed above, one might again question the implications of this strategy.

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