District 9 is a film that seems to trumpet its own allegorical significance. From its setting (post-apartheid South Africa) to the pseudo-documentary style of the film’s bookends, the film seems to instruct its viewers that, though it is a film about grizzly tentacle aliens, it’s really about human social and political issues. However, in the process of trying to figure out who the “prawns” really represent, it is easy to forget that they are not simply “animalized,” as one reviewer on Jane Dark’s Cultural Revolution argued; rather, these are aliens that are already non-human animals. Obviously the prawns look like Bug Eyed Monsters, at times they lope around on all fours, they scavenge, they eat cat food and raw meat, and on and on. Their animalistic qualities might be passed off as part of the extraterrestrial-as-alien conceit—superficial differences that must be overcome so that we might realize we’re all human underneath the chitinous scales—were it not for the fact that the District 9 aliens seem to lack all of the specificity that we’ve come to expect in a genre-typical alien culture. We learn about their variant reproductive functions and their carnivorous diet, but not about their rituals, beliefs, art, etiquettes, etc. Their translated dialogue is completely prosaic and utilitarian, free of alien idioms or allusions. Even their social structure is presented as biological or hive-like—the ruling caste disappears so the workers disintegrate like queen-less ants. Other than their language, the prawns seem to have no culture of their own.
It might be countered that the film—being an earthling documentary following a sort of Eichmann figure—is only modeling a particular, narrow, human perspective. For example, we never learn what the aliens call themselves or even what the more neutral human term for them is: they are always just “prawns.” Perhaps they have a very rich cultural life that we just don’t know about.
I think that the revelation of this bias or ignorance is certainly part of what is going on, but the view of prawns as ethnic or racial others or as an underclass fails to account for the sheer amount of animal gore in the film. Part of what makes the prawns so alien is that they are exclusively meat eaters, pictured in the film buying, eating, and feeding their gestating young skinned animal carcasses. We see prawns feasting on not only the bodies of animals—hanging from the roofs of huts or slung about by butchers—but also entire animal heads. It is difficult not to make the connection between the broken bodies and severed faces of animals and the trafficking of prawn meat and prawn vivisections also featured in the film. Indeed, it often seems as if the splatterpunk horror of exploding flesh is the one thing that connects all life forms in District 9: the ray gun turns out to be the great equalizer in more ways than one.
My point is not that we should ignore the clear analogies the film wants us to make between prawns and various oppressed groups. Instead, I would argue that the film uses the animal to reinforce these connections. Nor is the animal simply a metaphor for degradation. While the metaphor is at play, I would argue that the film sketches out an ethic of shared vulnerability—there is a continuum of suffering between human, alien, and animal in the film as each are shown exterminated or reduced to bare life. This, I think, is part of the reasoning behind the more banal, conventional, violent action sequences of the film. By the end of the movie, we experience a reversal: the casualized violence inflicted upon the prawns is brought to bear upon their human oppressors. While there is some action flick exhilaration, and a little “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” sentiment involved, we are ultimately made to feel squeamish and uncomfortable about each death, regardless of which species is killed. It is no surprise, then, that the symbol of the protagonist’s new kinship with the prawns is his bloody, wounded hand transformed into an alien claw that seems to suggest that an injury to the alien or the inhuman equals an injury to ourselves.
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