Dirty Alien Shadow-selves: Synthetic Dirt in District 9

by Cheryl Stobie

Art was intended to prepare and announce a future world:

today it is modelling possible universes. (Bourriaud 2002: 13)

In this paper I triangulate three theoretical strands, using Nicolas Bourriaud on aesthetics, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay on science fiction, specifically representations of aliens, and Mary Douglas on anthropology. Although Bourriaud privileges the art exhibition, many of his comments on contemporary artistic practice and its cultural potential are suggestively applicable to the film District 9 (Blomkamp 2009). Bourriaud refers to a contemporary trend in the art world of “learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution” (2002: 13). He elaborates that “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real” (13). Further pertinent concepts of Bourriaud’s include the city model of cultural forms (14), and the shift from art as a space to be traversed to “a period of time to be lived through” (15), like a film narrative. Bourriaud also notes the semiotic power of the image to generate empathy and connection. He places contemporary art in the zone of the interstitial, and within this zone he emphasises the significance of human gestures of connection in representations, in dialogic relationships with prior formations, in ethics and as expressions of desire.

Cheryl Stobie: Synthetic Dirt in District 9

Beginning with a contextualisation based on pertinent ideas of Nicolas Bourriaud about the function of and effects associated with contemporary art, I move on to an analysis of the representation of literal and synthetic dirt within the film District 9 (2009), directed by Neill Blomkamp. The film mixes genres, but is mainly to be viewed as science fiction. Its gritty grounding in the realities of the South African cityscape acts to reintroduce the element of pressing social reality which has retreated to the background in much recent science fiction film, which has emphasised clean and clinical special effects. I use Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s critical work on the implications of the significance of the encounter with the alien as the ultimate contact zone between self and other to analyse District 9, quoting his suggestive observation, “Aliens are our shadows, and we are theirs.” Ways in which entry can be made into the consciousness of the other include the perceptual, sympathetic and symbolic.

Using this starting point, I concentrate on the physical, emotional and aesthetic effects achieved as the main protagonist of District 9 moves from a human to an alien embodiment. I chart the progress of the body-horror and ethical development entailed in this change of state, making reference to ideas first developed by Mary Douglas in her anthropological work, Purity and Danger. The viewer’s responses are shown to be complex and muddy, composed of warring impulses of revulsion and admiration. This is appropriate as aliens are ambiguously depicted in the film as technologically advanced but consumers of human flesh.

As the central character, Wikus, becomes an alien his body becomes a rich symbolic ground. His ingestion of cat food and his increasingly leaky, abject body reflect ideas which can be interpreted universally, but more specifically within the South African context reveal anxieties about the cohesion of a minority group. I conclude by analysing the end of the film, which is moving, future-directed and insistent on the significance of art in society.