As Hollywood's first and only science fiction blockbuster set in the economic capital of South Africa, District 9 was subjected upon release to cursory analysis by critics who they are superficially familiar with the historical and modern social context of the film's country. These reviews unilaterally assumed that the film's central message was an allegorical recapitulation of apartheid, the system of institutionalized racism that was officially upheld from 1948 to 1994. Exemplary reviews from Washington DC's NPR, London's The Guardian, and Johannesburg's Mail & Guardian they refer respectively to District 9 as “an allegory of apartheid,” a film with “allegorical overtones” of apartheid, and an “allegory of apartheid and xenophobia.” In all three articles, the insistence on an allegorical reading derives from the film's focus on the forced eviction of a non-human population motivated by segregation and a proposed historical parallel with the evictions of South Africa's non-white urban population. Academic articles written later, such as "Apartheid, Spectacle and the Real: From District Six to District 9" by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and "The Strange Ride of Wikus Van de Merwe" by Michael Valdez Moses, also fall into the same pattern. to assume allegorical intentions on the director's behalf and evaluate the socially progressive merits or lack thereof on that basis, rather than on a direct interpretation of the film's symbolic content. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Not surprisingly, reviewers who wrote further away from where the film was set were more likely to locate District 9's allegorical message in the past and locate it far from Johannesburg. . The American magazine Newsweek published an article entitled “The Real District 9: Cape Town's District Six” which stated: “of course [the film is] about apartheid and segregation, but for South Africans it is also about the now defunct District Six of Cape Town, and the real-life slums that sprung up when it was dismantled. Heller-Nicholas, an Australian academic, supports this view, writing that “the aliens of District 9 mirror the non-white residents of District Six, who were already victims of the most flagrant injustices at the hands of government-sanctioned discrimination before they were forcibly transferred. Blomkamp's film exposes the horror and cruelty of this eviction." The implicit assumption in his analysis is that the "exposé" of historical injustice is the allegorical intent of the work, an assumption that discounts anti-allegorical readings less brilliantly progressives of the film. We find a contemporary allegorical interpretation in an article of the South African newspaper Mail and Guardian, also entitled "The Real District 9". The author draws parallels between the fictional slum and the actual Chiawelo slum in Soweto , where District 9 was filmed. They also correlate the proposed fictional District 10 to real-life refugee camps where foreign national slum dwellers were forcibly relocated when the slums were made unsafe by xenophobic attacks and riots before, during and after filming. Another Australian academic, Simone Brott, strongly supports these corollaries: “the filming of the science fiction film in an evacuated shack settlement used real immigrants as extras, and saw those same dispossessed people being forcibly relocated. to the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP). state housing during the making of the film, leaving behind a sea of ​​empty shacks. District 9 is nothyperreality or truth, it is reality”. Further supporting his claim is District 9 director Neill Blomkamp's claim that the dialogue used in the interviews of the film's opening sequence was minimally altered from non-fictional interviews with native black residents of South African townships on foreign migrants. Both popular press articles are correct in failing to identify a thematic resonance between the film's evictions and real-life events, but an allegorical reading of the film is confounded by the presence of two distinct real-life temporal/geographical contexts for the film's fictional eviction . If we follow film scholar David Christopher's statement that "allegory might be broadly defined as any narrative that symbolically refers to events and people that make up an identifiable historical event," it becomes clear that, despite its abundance of symbolic references, District 9 lacks an unambiguously identifiable singular. event for an allegory. We can see this in the film's opening sequence, which focuses heavily on the timeline of the aliens' arrival during and after apartheid rule. Time-stamped VHS footage of the ship's arrival in 1982 is quickly juxtaposed with on-camera "documentary"-style interviews with MNU employees, a sociologist, and a modern-day journalist, with the new time frame visually confirmed by the calendar 2008 on Wikus' desk. Some contemporary eye-level shots of signs prohibiting nonhumans from entering public places, the signs widely used in District 9 advertising and viral marketing, are followed by modern news footage, commentary, and words about the -interviews of street words which Brott confirmed as transcribed from the actual words of xenophobic South Africans. The effect of this montage is a collapse of temporality: the audience follows grainy historical footage of the ship's opening, signage in the alternate present bearing warnings reminiscent of apartheid zoning for South African viewers and Jim Crow laws for American viewers, and scenes of protests and riots, all in the same field of view. Audiences can then blend these disparate visual metaphors about the arrival of refugees, institutional discrimination, and popular outrage into a symbolic set of social issues that the film's speculative elements seek to address. This grouping does not allow for a specific modern or historical reading of the aliens' arrival because the condensed timeline prevents the audience from perceiving a significant difference in how aliens are treated in either time period. Another group of images is evident in the clipping from news footage of human violence against aliens to footage of alleged alien violence and property destruction against humans. The messages in the news ticker go from "Human and alien riots continue for fourth day" to "nonhumans violently evicted from townships" and "humans want aliens to leave" in the first montage of clips, which is generally in harmony with aliens. The ticker begins with “alien violence increases” and ends with “alien violence spreads downtown” in the second montage, which includes images of burning slum shacks and a derailed train. The viewer's sympathies can shift quickly from one clip to the next, as aliens and humans are alternately cast as victims of interspecies conflict. Allegory is defined as taking place in a specific time, place, and historical narrative, so the rapid jump between time, place, and narrative tone in this scene, and indeed inthroughout the film, defies any allegory that might arise from similarities between the plot of District 9. and real-life events. Another critic of allegorical readings, Joshua Clover of UC Davis, argues that what “precludes allegory. . . it is the impossibility of establishing who the aliens “really are”; it can only be an allegory, after all, if they stand in for an identifiable group.” The first five minutes of eviction footage in the film alters the non-human characters so radically that, despite their shared circumstances with real refugees and victims of apartheid, no parallel can be drawn with their reactions to imposed poverty. If the film's documentary segments are taken as canonical truth in the fictional context, the aliens are shown as literally mindless and monstrous, with a biological drive for dependency, a tendency for wanton destruction, and a superhuman capacity for murder. At their most inhumane, we see the aliens enthusiastically collude with their predatory drug dealers in a cockfight between their larval (presumed non-sentient) offspring. Once we get past this point, it is impossible to label aliens as stand-ins for any distinct group of South Africans in history or modernity. If these scenes are taken literally, they imply that the director presents the victims of institutional racism as inherently violent. and disgusting, pitiful for their situation, but not respectable as people. This is at odds with the positive allegorical depictions of alien victimhood presented by reviewers of the film, but not with the analysis of scholars who argue that Blomkamp's film has racist and regressive tendencies. After describing the portrayal of the Nigerian gangsters of District 9 as a “distillation of some of the most negative contemporary South African stereotypes of Nigerian immigrants,” film scholar Michael Valdez Moses argues: “If Nigerians are a throwback to the negative colonial stereotype of ' primitive" African, the "prawns" correspond to both the old stereotype and a new one, no less negative because current: that of the inept, violent and degenerate African urban underclass." naturalized stereotype inherent in the depiction of aliens: "alien addiction to cat food is a genetic predisposition and echoes racist notions that narcotic addiction is a similar genetic predisposition of supposedly inferior racial races." Despite the layers of irony in the film's meta-fictional structure – the “documentary” of the aliens' ordeal could arguably be distorted at times to cast the aliens in an unpleasant light – the literalism of the stereotype is made evident by the fact that “Wikus is already dependent on his alien transformation" in a scene shown outside the "documentary" frame. These analyzes indicate that, as our inability to locate one-to-one fictional/non-fictional analogues for aliens and their slums destabilizes an allegorical reading of District 9, the film opens up to broader critique and analysis of its metaphorical content. Christopher uses this lens to argue that “the film's narrative explicitly addresses social and political inequalities, and in doing so creates the illusion of. not being able to reproduce them – a convenient political tool of the film itself, a kind of false consciousness of entertainment criticism." Valdez Moses follows this argument by admitting that the film, once dissociated from an allegorical expectation, becomes open to interpretation, but it nevertheless reflects in some key ways the director's beliefs: "To be sure, the degraded condition of the aliens could be interpreted from a liberal perspective as the result of mistreatment and oppressionby the South African authorities and the MNU, rather than as a manifestation of their intrinsic evil. But this progressive view of things does nothing to explain the most disturbing aspects of District 9, its thinly veiled portrait of post-apartheid South Africa as a political dystopia. people engaging in forms of violence to which they are innately attuned could be read metaphorically as an ironic representation of a particular real-life narrative, employed around the world by police and "counter-terrorism" forces. The narrative vision of the subaltern's innate capacity to resort to insurrectional violence is often invoked to justify the hegemon's dominance over subaltern bodies. Popular belief in this narrative was recently brought to national attention by white American police officer Darren Wilson's testimonial portrayal of his African-American victim, Michael Brown, as a monstrous figure superhumanly capable of harming him. The film presents the hallmarks of this narrative in every scene in which a shrimp is shown to be superhumanly capable of extreme violence. One such scene is the introduction of the aliens' biologically coded weapons, which prove highly destructive in a "documentary" segment. In a clip from the interview, a reporter says that "it just doesn't work with humans, and it's that simple." The other clear examples of the aliens' innate capacity for violence are the two times in the film where the aliens tear off human limbs. There is compelling evidence that the film does not take the “progressive view of things” against the dominant cultural narrative of innate ability. subaltern aggression, but instead reifies its hold on our imagination. The presence of innate alien violence in the film is presented not by the film's state propaganda stand-ins (MNU interviews and mainstream news footage) but by the "documentary" footage used to layer "objective realism" into the film's plot, which is otherwise mediated by the narrators' opinions. The literalism of these scenarios supports, rather than satirizes or challenges, the popular belief in an innate capacity or propensity for violence in disenfranchised populations. Blomkamp made clear to the press his intentions not to make a film focused solely on apartheid metaphors but to satirically imagine what an extraterrestrial landing in his home country would be like, incorporating elements of xenophobia, organized crime and the corporate militarism of South Africa. When a Canadian interviewer urged him to “get the giant metaphor of apartheid out of the way first,” Blomkamp responded by saying that the film “isn't necessarily just a metaphor for apartheid. . . is meant to be a collection of topics that had an effect on me when I lived there. . . the collapse of Zimbabwe and the wave of illegal immigrants in South Africa, and then how you impoverished black South Africans in conflict with immigrants. This all amounts to a truly unusual situation. And South Africa [as] the birthplace of the modern private military contractor. . . many other things besides apartheid. . . Unfortunately, this cluster of themes necessarily includes the director's perspective as a white expatriate who grew up during apartheid, who now sees modern Joburg as violently degenerating due to integration and lacks the perspective to see the roots of this phenomenon. historic disenfranchisement in such a development. Blomkamp's exploration of "segregation in general" falls back on tired clichés of an Other naturally and violently unsuited to human civilization, all in an earnest attempt to speculate without 2.2 (2013):>.