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ABSTRACT
In his 2009 film District 9, Neill Blomkamp employs a handheld camera to create the effect of an embedded documentary film, which ostensibly is devoted to an objective treatment of the escalating tensions between a stranded alien race – known only (and derogatorily) as the ‘Prawns’ – and the increasingly agitated citizens of Johannesburg. Mobilizing the self-critical perspective afforded him by this mise en abyme, Blomkamp demonstrates the extent to which the presumption of objectivity allows the documentary filmmaker to frame the new reality to which a reluctant populace gradually accustoms itself. As depicted in the embedded documentary, the new reality is that human–Prawn relations have been damaged beyond repair. As such, the proposed relocation of the Prawns, which initially may have been utterly unthinkable to most residents of Johannesburg, rounds into view as the best and most reasonable option for all involved. According to Blomkamp, that is, the anonymous documentarians not only report the slow, incremental embrace of genocide – represented in the film by the unseen District 10 – but also play a largely unacknowledged role in promoting this transition.
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Notes
1. See Morello, “A Grammar of Peripheralization,” 42–45.
2. Woolfolk, “Escape from the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Disaster?” 183–85.
3. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 277.
4. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 287.
5. Here I follow Nel, “The Repugnant Appeal of the Abject,” 551–552; and Mizoguchi, “What Languages do Aliens Speak?” 170–71.
6. See Jansen van Veuren, “Tooth and Nail,” 570–71.
7. For an instructive account of this situation as an expression of hysteria, see Kapstein, “The Hysterics of District 9,” 159–61.
8. See Wagner, “District 9, Race, and Neoliberalism,” 44–45.
9. See Woolfolk, “Escape from the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Disaster?” 183–84.
10. See Jansen van Veuren, “Tooth and Nail,” 576–77.
11. See Rosello, “A Grammar of Peripheralization,” 38–38.
12. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 252.
13. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 49.
14. The inspiration for Blomkamp’s District 9 is believed to be Cape Town’s infamous District Six. See Nel, “The Repugnant Appeal of the Abject,” 556–57; Wagner, “District 9, Race, and Neoliberalism,” 47–48; and Kapstein, “The Hysterics of District 9,” 165–66.
15. See Jones, “District 9,” 121; and Langer, Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, 81–85.
16. See Note 4 above.
17. See e.g. Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, xix–xx; and Cesarini, Becoming Eichmann, 16–17.
18. I develop this interpretation in greater detail in Conway, “Banality, Again,” 47–51.
19. As Woolfolk observes, Wikus may be said to approach or approximate an authentic existence, but only when he begins to take on the characteristics of the Prawns and, as a result, begins to suffer accordingly at the hands of his fellow South Africans (“Escape from the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Disaster?” 185–86).
20. See Mizoguchi, “What Languages do Aliens Speak?” 171–73.
21. See Note 4 above.
22. See Butler, Parting Ways, 170.
23. See Conway, “Banality Again,” 81–84.
24. Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 417.
25. Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 417. See also Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 276; and Conway, “Banality, Again,” 55–59.
26. Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 159.
27. I am pleased to acknowledge the generous support of the Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts at Texas A&M University.
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Daniel Conway
Daniel Conway is a professor of Philosophy and Humanities and affiliate professor of Religious Studies and Film Studies at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas (USA). He is the editor of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: A Critical Guide (Cambridge UP, 2015); and Nietzsche and The Antichrist: Religion, Politics, and Culture in Late Modernity, contracted for publication in 2018 by Bloomsbury Academic.