Monday, March 28, 2011
Alive In Joburg
This is the original short which served as the inspiration for District 9. Think about what's similar and what changed over the course of the adaptation. The interviewees on this version were not actors. They were asked to consider or respond to the recent surge of Zimbabwean refugees fleeing from political turmoil related to Mugabe's transitions to autocracy. How should we read this? What point is Blomkamp making? How does his decision to ask black South Africans to weigh in complicate the allegorical relation in the face of South Africa's history of apartheid?
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In both District 9 and Alive in Joburg the aliens are perceived to be threatening to humanity. They each exploit fears to “knock down anything that would rise up against their institution” through a militaristic environment (Alive in Joburg). The aliens are also forced into slums in which their living conditions are minimal and their aspirations repressed. However, in the six-minute short the aliens actually appear to be much more critical of their oppression. Through their own dialogue viewers witness the alien’s acknowledgement of their desperate communal neglect. “Give us electricity…Give us water so that we may hydrate…The biology is not fighting bacteria” are the pleas of one alien. The aliens are aware that “They don’t want us here” but “We are stuck.” They are denied freedoms, yet they are criticized when they strive for their own liberties such as catching free rides on the top of trains. A distinct similarity between the two films is how the native South African’s feel about these intruders. In D9 one citizen states, “This is our land will you please go,” which is a more polite version of “They make us uncomfortable. We don’t know what they think, what they do, so they’re going to make us unsafe…sometimes they will do things you don’t expect them to do and we will be in trouble” (Alive in Joburg). Considering the former came from an actor and the latter was the response of an actual citizen expressing his opinion toward Zimbabwean refugees rather than aliens; the true hostility among South African perceptions of “us and them” is on display. Blomkamp uses the metaphor of the alien to explore the extremely hostile relationship between the natives of a country and those who have been unwillingly forced upon them, the refugees. The aliens in the film are stuck in these slums because their hopeless situation among absolute poverty and repression reinforces their dehumanization and strengthens the public perception towards them. Poverty breeds more poverty. If you are not allowed electricity, water, and medicine, how can you possibly elevate your culture to a socially acceptable status? A street vendor arms himself with a bullet-proof vest and firearms to protect his meat from thieves (aliens or refugees). However, if these “thieves” had any platform with which to raise their social status they wouldn’t need to steal meat for survival. Moreover, this perception is further strengthened and encouraged by governmental propaganda to make it look like things are stabilized, when they are anything but. In District 9 the government agents are concerned with using legal measures to strip the aliens of all legal privileges (which they are already denied) and to force them into what Vickers identifies as a concentration camp. Under a timid disguise of respectability for the law they actually threaten the aliens into signing over their rights. The government then has a piece of paper legitimizing their actions by proving the aliens compliance and acceptance toward their own misery; disregarding the fact that the signature was only granted with a gun to the aliens head or aided by the threat of taking away their children.
ReplyDeleteThe Alive in Joburg comes across as the preview for the D9. Blomkamp places tangible social anxieties under the microscope by sifting them through the prism of the imaginary influx of aliens. Alive in Joburg is more dramatized compared to D9. For once, the music charges it emotionally. The helicopter sounds like a harmony to the melody that is grounded in African tunes and drum sounds organically merging the violent and the native elements. In Alive in Joburg, the white interviewee reveals the author’s agenda from the start that pierces the D9 too. He talks about local minorities, and how government exploits their fears to “knock down anything that rises against their institutions”. What D9 does is it blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality first combined in the Alive in Joburg. D9 depicts social fears as institutionalized though the officially carried out “politics of fear” that Tacics writes about. In Alive in Joburg, Blomkamp applies his lens rooted in fantasy onto the cultural exhibit of fears expressed in the Alive in Joburg by real interviewees. Reflecting the institutionalization, D9 presents MNU - the authority on alien affairs that handles their matters. Now South African identity is united based on the “fear of common foe [that is] presented as the only viable means of constructing national solidarity”, as expressed by Takacs in relation to the politics of fear paradigm (4). Be it as it may, the hostility that South African minorities express towards the aliens is ironic. Having been subject to decades of apartheid, they externalize the mistreatment they experienced by projecting it as the prejudice on the aliens, i.e. Zimbabwean refugees. “There are rules. We are all living by the rules in this world,” says a black interviewee in D9. While conforming to the current South African social status quo, she ignores the fact that these seemingly just rules created the slums of the D9 and perpetuated the misery of the aliens. These are the same rules that decades ago institutionalized the politics of apartheid in South Africa. Resonating with Ingebretsen’s observation, South Africans epitomize their anxieties in a refugee monster, stake it, and expel it in order to create an illusion of societal harmony. Therefore, D9 undermines the power of denial and exposes the internal anxieties that South Africans try to evict from their social realm.
ReplyDeleteBoth 'Alive in Joburg' (2005) and 'District 9' (2009) by Neill Blomkamp explore the plight of political minorities (i.e. minorities more in terms of weight of their voice and not necessarily in terms of actual numbers) be it Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa or the blacks who were forcefully evicted from District 6, Cape Town during apartheid. Both films highlights the economic deprivation, inhuman living conditions of these groups as well as the animosity of the local communities towards them.
ReplyDeleteThere are several cinematic and symbolic differences between the two films:
1) There are multiple space ships in 'Alive in Joburg' whereas there is only one in 'District 9'.
2) Similar to District 9, events in 'Alive in Joburg' have been recounted via several interviews but still there is one main interview with an elderly individual that helps knit the entire story together in the latter.
3) The local residents use the derogatory term 'Prawns' for aliens in 'District 9' whereas in 'Alive in Joburg' these aliens are called 'Poleepkwa'.
4) Multinational United (MNU) as well as the Nigerian arms-dealer Obesandjo were after Aliens' advanced weapons in 'District 9' whereas the government was mentioned as being enamored with aliens' bio-suits in 'Alive in Joburg'.
Fear is a "powerful source of social unity and, therefore, the state should cultivate and direct public fear so as to persuade people that they had a common interest in maintaining the social order" (Takacs 3). The same idea is employed by the South African government in responding to this influx of refugees from across the border as one interviewee explains "they were exploiting those fears. So that
anything that rises up against their institutions, they would just knock down" (Alive in Joburg 2:34).
The fact that the short film "Alive in Joburg" interviews black South Africans in 1990 is rather ironic since it was the time when apartheid was still very much present in South Africa and in effect these black South Africans were themselves aliens in their own country (having been denied political / social / economic freedoms at the hands of the white minority).
Why extraterrestrials should always be presented as a menace towards humanity? If we can consider Alive in Joburg as a preview for District 9, the fear of the unknown is what has not change in the course of adaptation. However, in D9 this fear become even more personalized with the transformation of a human to an alien. Although, in both Alive in Joburg and District 9 the accidental invasion of aliens on earth serves as a perfect alibi so as for the authorities to keep the masses under their control and exercise their “politics of fear” as Takacs well stated in her article. For centuries now, those in power have to maintain their people in unstable conditions in order to present themselves as necessary to them and thus do their dirty political and economical works. The idea of slums and immigrants’ campuses has always being a matter of political game in continents like Africa. In the real world humans are struggling to coexist with humans, in the since fiction world aliens are those you take the place of the unwanted ones. People are turned out to be ultra selfish beings and when it comes to property sharing, the community spirit disappears. Thus with the fear of strangers invade their land people are eligible to obey even in the most antidemocratic regulations. In both films, the aliens’ slums provide the ultimate context of fear towards the masses so as for the state to freely play its political game. Moreover, both in Alive in Joburg and District 9 the aliens are those you have the technological advances in weapons that the humans want to copy for them. The later is another aspect why humans are so afraid of them, because they have develop the unknown army technology that people have not being expose to it yet. Besides this is the idea on which the Cold War was based on; the two major powers to be were not familiar with the advances each of them had develop.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that makes District 9 such a unique film is the feeling of realism that it brings to its subject. While many alien movies depict over the top, apocalyptic nightmares, District 9 went the completely opposite direction. It instead exhibited what Stephen Harper called “cultural verisimilitude” in his “Night off the Living Dead: Reappraising an Undead Classic.” This means that the movie attempts to be “true to life” in that it imagines a scenario of aliens coming to Earth that is at least somewhat plausible. Alive in Joburg takes this further and creates an even more realistic feeling film, the use of actual interviews being a clear example of this. There are many other ways that this is accomplished, the primary of which is in the humanization of the aliens. Alive in Joburg suggests that the humans think of the aliens as very different from them but still maintain some, although very little, respect for individuality. This is evidenced by the fact that the aliens’ faces are blurred to preserve their anonymity. In District 9 no such attempt is made, implying that they do not need to be blurred because they are not individuals whose privacy needs to be protected. Furthermore, Alive in Joburg does something else that District 9 did not; it implies that the aliens have acted at least somewhat aggressively towards humans. In District 9, when the aliens are discovered they are starving and incapable of taking care of themselves, let alone really hurting us. They do not seem to pose any threat. However, in Alive in Joburg, they are seen using their superior weapons against humans. This makes them seem more dangerous and provides more of a background for the humans’ actions. Alive in Joburg also states, “the apartheid government noticed that these aliens were moving into new areas and this is when the government started to get tough, this is when things started to get out of hand.” This further suggests that the humans felt threatened and only reacted to that perceived danger. Finally, the aliens respond in what seems to be a realistic way by making demands. They plead, “Give us electricity. Give us water.” They want to better their conditions and are denied. This justifies their aggression, which in turn justifies the human behavior towards them. By creating this circle of misunderstanding and hostility, Alive in Joburg creates a more realistic tension.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sean's claim that poverty only leads to poverty. Indeed, individuals living in impoverished, destitute conditions, are often tragically subjected to the cycle of poverty. With no means of access to education or opportunity, they are left with very few option, and as such, unfortunately often turn to violence.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the claims of a few of my classmates when they said that Alive in Joburg seems to capture a slightly more realistic tension as the aliens seem to be much more active and vocal in expressing their needs and demands. Likewise, I agree with Alexandra when she writes that unlike in District 9, Alive in Joburg references the alien threat when explaining the human reaction to this threat. The aliens in District 9 are starving and physically unwell, thus the human treatment of them comes across as all the more harsh and unwarranted. In Alive in Joburg, though the human reaction is still drastic, the mention of the alien's superior weapons, at least attempts to explain the humans' strong reaction.