Back in 1981, I read William Golding’s novel “Lord of the Flies” (published in 1954) for the very first time. A harrowing story about a group of children and youth stranded on an uninhabited island following a plane crash, “Lord of the Flies” posits the viewpoint that, without societal structures and adult supervision, most young people will succumb to their savage proclivities. As a 9th grader, I remember being deeply but meaningfully unsettled by Golding’s literary exploration of the possibility that human beings, at their core, are not inevitably moral (as Enlightenment thought consistently maintained). Rather, according to “Lord of the Flies,” human beings are only a few laws removed from bloodthirsty savagery.
On Monday afternoon, Tara and I saw a film that reminded me of “Lord of the Flies” in its anthropological implications. That film was “District 9,” directed and co-written by South African filmmaker, Neill Blomkamp.
On its surface, “District 9” is a science fictional story of refugee aliens who come to earth searching for a new beginning on a new planet. As the film unfolds, the spectacle of the science fiction gives way to unsettling social commentary as the human community, resentful and fearful of the otherworldly outsiders, begins to force the aliens into a barbaric and militarized refugee slum called “District 9.”
Enforcing the boundaries of “District 9” in often brutal fashion is a munitions corporation called “Multi-National United” (MNU). MNU’s management of aliens is overseen by Wikus van der Merwe, a mild-mannered operative and the film’s protagonist. At the heart of the film is Wikus’ personal and reluctant transformation (the specifics of which I will refrain from describing) that enables him to see things from the perspective of a hunted and enslaved alien.
The fact that the action in “District 9” takes place, not in New York or Washington, D.C., but in Johannesburg, South Africa gives to the film a contextual freshness normally absent in the cultural myopia of most American-made science fiction. The South African setting, with the horrific injustice of apartheid still fresh in the memory of the global community, brings an historical heaviness to the matter of social unrest between species (instead of races).
In fact, in one of its most subtle but powerful artistic devices, “District 9,” which is shot in the style of a documentary, regularly introduces its audience to people who experienced firsthand the injustices of apartheid and yet do not hesitate to perpetuate the same kind of injustice against the aliens.
I can only conclude that, in creating such a cinematic scenario, “District 9” is suggesting what Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” suggested way back in the year 1954—specifically, that the experience of evil will not make human beings more prone to resisting the evil when it comes around again. Quite the contrary, according to the author and filmmaker in question, the “lord of the flies” (which is a naming of the evil that Golding perceived in all human hearts) will find expression whenever people give to this “lord” the opportunity to flourish without boundaries. This evil can find a comfortable home on an island populated by children surviving a plane crash. It can also find a comfortable home in the dynamics surrounding an alien refugee camp called “District 9.”
The only way out of the dark oppression of the human proclivity to apartheid, suggests “District 9,” is to become (in some fashion) the ones we are endeavoring to oppress. The film brings tangibility to this process of “oppressor BECOMING the oppressed” in a way that I will not reveal in this post. But the lingering questions for the moviegoer are more spiritual in nature: “How can I experience this ‘becoming’ on a personal level? How can I experience the kind of personal oneness with those who are marginalized and oppressed that would enable me to see things from their perspective and thereby resist the temptation to participate in the perpetuation of their oppression?”
Interestingly, I have always believed that such “becoming” is what Jesus references when he tells us in Matthew 25 that “what we do to the least of these we do to [him].” He is telling us, in order to be fully invested in the kingdom he came to inaugurate, we must resist the temptation to treat the marginalized as “other.” Instead, we must be perpetually aware of the oneness that Christ experiences even with the least soul (because of his intimacy with every portion of the created order). In turn, our recognition of Christ’s solidarity with the marginalized equips us with the spiritual wherewithal to “become” marginalized ourselves, at least in the sense of standing with the marginalized on the sacred ground of their journey. When we do so, we are standing, not only with other souls, but with Christ himself.
In “District 9,” people are not willing to see the face of Jesus (or, for that matter, the face of anyone) in the “prawns” (which is the derogatory name given to the aliens because of their crustacean appearance). The fact that the film rings so true in its depiction of the human community reminds me that we have a long way to go.