District 9 as Science Fiction

I am unconvinced that District 9 is a science fiction movie. I’m not entirely sure where District 9 falls in the spectrum of movie genres, but I feel that its different styles and emphases make it a hybrid of SF and Monster elements encased in a Historically analogical Narrative.

In my attempt to definitively determine which genre I would place District 9, I referred to Sobchack for aid in defining the difference between Science Fiction and other closely related genres, like Horror or Monster films. Sobchack runs through her distinctions between SF and Horror genres thoroughly, detailing the differing emphasis in themes and attention. For instance, Sobchack believes that Horror films are characterized by their focus on the disruption of natural order and individual moral struggles, whereas SF films are focused on disruptions of social order and the alien other (30). While District 9 certainly includes the aliens, I am not sure that it includes the “other,” especially when SF trends today to “embrace alien Others as ‘more human than human’ or finds it can barely mark their ‘otherness’ as other than our own” (293). Although including a couple of shots of pro-alien protesters, the documentary style footage in the beginning half of the film is tinted with anti-alien sentiments, “humans only” posters, and derogatory references to the aliens as “prawns.” The people in this film do not see the prawns as themselves, but their mistreatment of them, such as packing them into slums, causes the audience, almost immediately, to identify with their abuse and begin to see in the prawns their own history, most specifically the South African Apartheid. The coldness and calculability of the humans in the film is alienating to the audience, who beg...

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...t through Vikus, Christopher Johnson and his son. If the novum is becoming the “Other,” then that too is contemplated very little by the people in the film after it is played off as a sexual deviancy and details beyond Vikus’ indiscretion are not released in full to the public for them to ponder and reflect on what it might mean for the race as a whole. In all, I think District 9 has managed to transcend and complicate classification into any one genre while acting as a bridge between several different types of genres, perhaps making the film itself a novum for filmmakers everywhere.

Works Cited

District 9. Dir. Neill Blomkamp. Perf. Sharlto Copley. TriStar, 2009. Film.

Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. 2nd ed. New

Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987. Print.