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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
Apartheid-era watch towers. Still taken from District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009).
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
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).
The mechanical robot from the series Robotech (produced by Carl Maceck, 1985). Still from video (Robotech-Intro ... 2011, screenshot by author).
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
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
Humans break into the alien mothership to rescue the sick creatures. Still taken from District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009).
Brazier, Joubert Park I – City 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.
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
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).
The command module rises from the ground. Still taken from District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009).
…
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.
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
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.
King & Krzywinska (2006: 54–55), Nel (2012) and Sobchack (1998: 254) all consider temporality in the science fiction genre, indicating its typical complexity.
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.
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”.
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).
See Glass’ (1989: 26–33) discussion of Peter Fuller’s work on object relations.
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.
See Philip Harrison & Tanya Zack (2012: 555).
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.
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).
Wikus is written about by Jansen van Veuren (2012), Nel (2012), Walder (2014), Wagner (2015) and Brott (2013).
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.
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.
John Clute et al. ([n.d.] Religion) and Sobchack (1998: 288–289) spend considerable time on this topic.
As with Wikus’s redemption discussed above, one might again question the implications of this strategy.