District 9 – TAP’s Movie of the Month for October 2014

One of the most fun things about running Minooka TAP is seeing how the teachers, students, and parents involved cause the program to grow and change over the course of time.  New ideas can be exciting and fun, and I’m incredibly excited about this one.  This will be the first month for TAP’s Movie of the Month.  For our first film, we’ve selected District 9, a science fiction movie that takes place in South Africa, made by South African filmmakers, incorporating South African history, and featuring music influence by South Africa.  That’s perfect, because South Africa is where our group is headed in just 8 months.  District 9 was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award in 2010 and was ranked the 24th best Science Fiction movie of all time by IGN.

Of course it’s always fun to dissect a movie and discuss the plot, the performances, and the special effects, but for this group we’re going to focus on what make’s District 9 a truly South African movie.

Neill and Sharlto

Neill Blomkamp, the writer and director of District 9, was born in 1979 in Johannesburg, South Africa.  Many of his movies, even though they are science fiction stories, are set in Johannesburg.  He’s been quoted as saying that, in the movie world “a lot of America is kind of done.  People have been making films about it for 100 years.  Everything to me feels used up.  But Jo-burg feels unbelievably inspirational to me.”

Growing up in South Africa, but then moving to Canada as a teenager, Blomkamp seems very interested in films about different worlds, races, or classes colliding.  D9 is a metaphor for anti-Apartheid, and his second movie, Elysium (starring Matt Damon) is about the meeting of the First and Third Worlds.  He tends to use science fiction films to tell very human stories.

When he was 16, Blomkamp met Sharlto Copley (Copley was 21).  The two began helping one another with various animation and film projects.  When it came time for Blomkamp to shoot his short film Alive in Jo-burg, Copley was there to help out, winding up with a small part in the film.  That led to his starring role in D9, and even though he wasn’t an actor prior to Joburg, Copley has now appeared in Elysium, The A-Team, and Maleficent, quite an acting career considering it started as a favor to a friend.

Copley grew up in Pretoria, South Africa and is an actor, producer, and director himself.

Story and Allegory

When you watch District 9, you’ll realize very quickly that it’s not a historical drama.  The story takes place in 2010 in Johannesburg, South Africa – the first city we’ll be visiting on our trip.  In the movie, you learn that in 1982 a beat up old spaceship carrying a large population of insect like alien creatures appears over Jo’ burg.  The aliens are unable to return to where they came from, so they are welcomed to live here on Earth with us.

Twenty-eight years have passed, and the temporary refugee camp the aliens were brought to has become their permanent home.  The aliens are segregated from human society, allowed only to inhabit this run-down camp, named District 9, that has become a ghetto patrolled by the human military.  In a lot of ways these living conditions, the policing of their society, and the limited rights the aliens (who are referred to by the derogatory slur “Prawns” because their insect/crustacean like appearance) remind me of the Jewish ghettos we encountered in our visits to Warsaw and Krakow in 2014.

In the movie, the aliens are being evicted from their homes by MNU, a big government agency.  They are being relocated from their homes to a new settlement further from the city so that District 9’s land can be used for the humans.  While you’re watching District 9, realize that this mirrors some actual events from South Africa’s not so distant history.

In 1966, during the apartheid era, a neighborhood in Cape Town called District 6 was declared a “whites only” area.  Before ’66, the neighborhood was quite diverse, but the government declared the neighborhood had become a poverty stricken, crime ridden slum that needed to be leveled. Over the next 16 years, over 60,000  residents were forced to relocate.  The non-white residents were resettled 15 miles away, much further from the city, the beaches, and Table Mountain.  Most of the homes and businesses in District 6 were bulldozed, and the few that were left were sold to whites only.

Much more recently, after the apartheid era ended, the South African government (for many different reasons) has evicted and sometimes forcibly removed residents from shack settlements like the ones the prawns reside in in the film.  On a few occasions, the residents of these ghettos have risen up and fought back to prevent the relocations.  This happened in the early 2000s in the Chiawelo shack settlement, which is where the scenes inside District 9 were filmed.  Many outbursts of violence happened in those shack cities, some of them stemming from the black South Africans living in poor conditions, then illegal aliens from Zimbabwe and Nigeria taking some of their jobs and resources.  This led to a great deal of unrest and conflict.

Here’s a quote from director Neill Blomkamp (from io9.com) about the filming in Chiawelo:

There was a very weird crossover between the film and the reality of filming.  We filmed in a area called Chiawelo, which is a suburb of Soweto, which is sort of a suburb of Johannesburg.  And there is this thing in Africa called RDP housing, which are government subsidized housing.  Were they will build you a brick house in a different area of the city.  And you get put on a waiting list if you’re a South African impoverished resident, until you are able to get one of these  houses.  So the area we filmed the movie in, what plays as District 9, every single resident in that area was being removed to be put into RDP housing.  Although not all of them had been given the green light on the RDP housing most of them had, but all of them were going to be moved, whether they liked it or not.  So we ended up with this open piece of land with all these shacks on it… each day we came to set, there were fewer and fewer people.

Perhaps while you’re watching District 9, it’s worth thinking about what the filmmakers are trying to say about South Africa’s political history with this human vs. prawn theme.  According to Mike Sargent from TOR.com, the movie asks some deep questions.  What if someone we didn’t want mixing into our society suddenly showed up and couldn’t leave?  If this group wasn’t violent or even particularly strong, how would we respond as humans?  How would interacting with them change the people that had to do so?  And, most importantly, given the setting of the movie – What if a country/culture that had a history of social and civil injustices was where they arrived?  Would people who were formally victims become oppressors?  Would the former oppressors continue to oppress the new others?  All things to consider while watching the movie.

The Original Short Film

District 9  was based on a short film that Neill Blomkamp made about five years earlier called Alive in Joburg.  Since it’s just six minutes long and doesn’t have quite the same science fiction conflict to it, the political message is even more apparent.  Just like D9, it’s made to look like a documentary or news program, but in Joburg, all of the black African people being “interviewed” in the shack settlements are not actors.  They are real residents of the neighborhood, and their responses are real. When you watch the movie, you hear these people being asked about the aliens that have been settled amongst them in their shack cities, but in reality those people were asked about the black Nigerian and Zimbabweans that had moved into their neighborhoods.  Those answers about the aliens were the real responses the filmmakers got about outsiders moving into town.

These interview clips help answer some of the questions asked in the section above.  Would people who were formally victims become oppressors?  The poor South African’s reaction to and treatment of the Nigerian and Zimbabwean immigrants mirror both the way black Africans were treated during Apartheid and human attitudes towards the aliens in both Alive in Joburg and District 9.

Watch the short film here –

The Real South Africa

Neill Blomkamp decided to set the movie in his native Johannesburg, because he already sees Johannesburg as a science fiction city.  “There’s widespread poverty among the masses, with pockets of wealth protected by high-tech gates with biometric fingerprinting devices.” His vision of the future is a city like Johannesburg, with its disparity between the have-lots and have-nots that you only see in a few places like Africa, India, and Los Angeles (which he calls diet-Joburg).

In the movie, Sharlto Copley’s character, Wickus, finds a dead cow in one of the shacks he enters.  It was a real dead cow that the producers found in the neighborhood they were filming in.  Later, Wicks defends himself by throwing a dead pig at a soldier.  Apparently dead animals were quite common in that area, and those kinds of unsanitary conditions were what led the government to evict everyone from that neighborhood to safer and cleaner housing.

One scene in the movie shows a sheep’s head cut in half.  This is a real South African dish called a “smiley,” because cutting the head in such a way makes it appear as if the sheep is smiling.  It’s a real snack food that’s sold in that region.  I will not be trying that one.

The MNU headquarters  were filmed in the Carlton Center, which is the tallest building in all of Africa.

In the middle of the movie, the alien character Christopher Johnson discovers an alien body that had been the subject of government experiments, reminding many viewers of the Nazis during WWII, but it’s also a reference to government attempts during Apartheid to create pathogens and poisons that would only hurt the black population of South Africa.

A male Parktown Prawn sitting on a person’ hand. I seriously don’t want to meet one of these things.

The last name of the film’s protagonist, Wickus van der Merwe, is a common last name in South Africa and in the Netherlands (it’s a Dutch name).  In reality, the name, in Dutch, means from the Merwede (from the area of wide waters) and was a common name in the Dutch country side in towns and villages along rivers.  Most South African people instantly recognized the last name, because it’s used in a series of common jokes about dumb, bumbling, clueless Afrikaaners.  Think about jokes here about blondes or rednecks, only substitute in the last name “van der Merwe” instead.  How many van der Merwes does it take to screw in a light bulb?  Check out some van der Merwe jokes here. Don’t click if you’re easily offended, they’re not all the cleanest jokes, but I suppose they give you a taste of South African humor.

Some people believe that the prawn characters in the movie were partially inspired by a species of insect called the Parktown Prawn.  The Parktown Prawns are a very large species of crickets that can be found all over the Parktown area of Johannesburg.  These bright orange pests grow to be almost three inches long and have incredibly hard exoskeletons.  A popular urban legend claims they were the result of a genetic experiment at a local university, explaining their bright color and huge size.  Historically, the bugs didn’t live in the dry environment like Johannesburg, but as the city and suburbs began to expand and more gardens and green areas emerged, the Parktown Prawns began to show up in force.  Many residents love them, because they don’t harm the gardens, but do eat many pests that do.

The Music

Clinton Shorter, a Canadian composer that is friends with Neill Blomkamp, wrote the music for District 9.  Blomkamp wanted Shorter to compose a score that maintained the South African roots of the movie, but he also wanted something dark and ominous sounding.

Shorter found this to be a huge challenge, because most of the South African music he listened to was happy and upbeat.  He found that the couldn’t get the African drums to sound heavy and dark the way he wanted them, so he used a combination of Japanese taiko drums and synthesizers to create the rhythm of the score.  Shorter experimented with a lot of different instruments, computer programs, and sounds to get the mood he and Blomkamp wanted. They both wanted the African feeling to be present in the music, so in the end, the South African feel comes from smaller percussion instruments and vocals.  In the District 9 score, the vocals combine two indigenous African languages: Fulani and Malinke.

The vocal portion of the score was sung by a male Kwaito artist.  Kwaito is a South African version of hip-hop or house music, slowed down to a lower tempo.  Kwaito incorporates synthesized music, African instruments, and vocals.  It is very popular among the black youth of South Africa.  I was going to embed a video of Kwaito music, but I don’t know enough about it to pick one song that represents the genre well, so just do what I did – go to YouTube and search Kwaito.  You’ll find hundreds of songs to choose from.  I spent about an hour listening to different ones, and I’m glad that I did.

As you watch the movie, listen closely to the score to see if you can pick up on that South African feeling.

The Language

When thinking about the alien language used in District 9, two questions immediately popped into my head.  First, are the aliens speaking an actual language? and, how can the people and the prawns understand one another if they don’t seem to speak the same languages?

In one article I read, Blomkamp explained that there are 11 official languages in South Africa.  He says that it is not uncommon in Johannesburg to see two people having a conversation in two entirely different languages, both understanding what the other is saying.   This may seem odd to us here in America, but often times, in smaller countries, you become familiar enough with your neighbor’s language that you can understand, and maybe even read a bit, even though you can’t speak the other language.  We’ve actually encountered this a few times in TAP.  Last summer, Denny, a Croatian man who was our tour guide in Slovakia, spoke English, Slovak, and Croatian.  Our bus driver, Grzegorz, spoke only Polish.  When Denny spoke Slovak and Grzegorz spoke Polish, they were able to understand one another.  However, our tour director, Michael, spoke English and German, and Grzegorz couldn’t understand a word he said.  In Spain, we had a Portuguese bus driver.  Juanito, our tour director, spoke Spanish to him, and the driver spoke Portuguese back, and they worked wonderfully together.

According to Blomkamp, the logic is that the aliens have been in Johannesburg for decades, so many South Africans, especially people with a job like Wickus’, can understand the clicking language, they just can’t make those sounds with their own vocal chords (and the other way around for the aliens).

However, the language they’re speaking isn’t a real one.  One actor, Jason Cope, played the part of all the aliens (except the little kid one, who was CGI).  Cope “spoke” all the alien parts, and the sounds that the aliens make are mostly sound effects producers rubbing the skin of pumpkins.  They threw in some mechanical sounds and a series of clicks that are reminiscent to several languages, most obviously Xhosa.  The Xhosa language, which is spoken by 18% of the South African population, uses click consonants – even the word Xhosa (which I have no idea how to say) begins with a click sound.  So, just like the music, the language spoken in District 9 has a little South Africa feel to it.

__________

District 9 is a fun, exciting science fiction movie.  It’s much darker than Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy and hits closer to home than the Terminator or Alien movies.  In many ways, it reminds me of the 1980’s film (and later TV show) Alien Nation, but with much more basis in real social and political issues.  Sci-fi fans everywhere are clamoring for a sequel, debating the origins of the prawns, and wondering about Wickus’ fate.  However, for those of us lucky enough to travel to South Africa, the movie is so much more.  It’s a social commentary.  It’s a history lesson.  It’s an insight into South African culture and language.  It’s a taste of African music.  It’s well worth your time to take a closer look at this fantastic film, thinking about your upcoming adventure in Africa as you watch.

We ask that all of our South Africa travelers take the time to watch District 9, then come back here to discuss the movie, the social commentary, the language, the connections to reality, and the music.  The longer and more in depth our discussion gets, the better it is for all of us.