Q. In District 9 , aliens land in Johannesburg and are forced to live in a filthy shanty town, segregated from human society. Can we get the giant apartheid metaphor out of the way first?
A. It isn't necessarily just a metaphor for apartheid. It's not. … What it is meant to be is a whole bunch of topics that had an effect on me when I was living there. Topics I became more interested in once I left.
Q. Such as?
A. Just everything that goes on in that country – xenophobia, the collapse of Zimbabwe and the flood of illegal immigrants into South Africa, and then how you have impoverished black South Africans in conflict with the immigrants. All that amounts to a very unusual situation. And South Africa is kind of the birthplace of the modern private military contractor … so there's a lot of other things besides apartheid that I wanted to touch on, such as segregation in general. ...
Q. How the world mistreats the helpless aliens struck me as very probable, sadly. Did you research histories of displaced peoples?
A. Not actively. But, because I grew up in South Africa, the topics I'm interested in tend to be that kind of thing. Israel and Palestine, I'm really interested in, displaced people wherever. The left side of my brain is very interested in these things that I, at the time, felt were unrelated to filmmaking. I just wanted to be a filmmaker – I like design, science fiction, weapons, I like the geekery of it. And this was separate; I read all of those world topics separately. So, at some subconscious level, it [refugee history] worked its way in.
Q. You come from a visual effects background, but yada yada off to a different topic ...
Is it really that hard for film writers to recognize that Neill Blomkamp is particularly interested in the topic of displaced persons because he is a displaced person? Are we that far gone into Who? Whom? thinking that Blomkamp's answers in dozens of interviews over the last month are largely incomprehensible to the great majority of journalists?
Blomkamp is likewise a homesick artist. Unlike Nabokov, he's allowed to visit his old home country, but downtown Johannesburg deteriorated so rapidly that it was kind of like if Stalin had let Nabokov revisit St. Petersburg just to taunt him. One of the last shots in District 9 is of Ponte City (the oval skyscraper with a "Vodacom" sign on the top). The Wikipedia article on the building points out the symbolism:
Ponte City is a skyscraper in the Hillbrow neighbourhood of Johannesburg, South Africa. It was built in 1975 to a height of 173 metres, making it the tallest residential skyscraper in Africa. The 54-story building is cylindrical, with an open center allowing additional light into the apartments. The center space is known as "the core" and rises above an uneven rock floor. Ponte City was an extremely desirable address for its views over all of Johannesburg and its surroundings.This kind of thing has nurtured a dystopian Garrett Hardinesque turn of mind in Blomkamp.
During the 1990s, after the end of apartheid, many gangs moved into the building and it became extremely unsafe. Ponte City became symbolic of the crime and urban decay gripping the once cosmopolitan Hillbrow neighborhood. The core filled with debris five stories high as the owners left the building to decay.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Nabakov was the best writer of English that I have ever read. Lolita, Pale Fire, Phinn. Maybe displacement is worth it.
ReplyDelete"Is it really that hard for film writers to recognize that Neill Blomkamp is particularly interested in the topic of displaced persons because he is a displaced person? Are we that far gone into Who? Whom? thinking that Blomkamp's answers in dozens of interviews over the last month are largely incomprehensible to the great majority of journalists?"
ReplyDeleteYes.
"Just everything that goes on in that country – xenophobia, the collapse of Zimbabwe and the flood of illegal immigrants into South Africa, and then how you have impoverished black South Africans in conflict with the immigrants. All that amounts to a very unusual situation. And South Africa is kind of the birthplace of the modern private military contractor … so there's a lot of other things besides apartheid that I wanted to touch on, such as segregation in general."
ReplyDeleteAlter the terminology a bit, and it sounds like he's describing the good ol' US of A. What it's increasingly turning into, anyway.
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
Blomkamp is partly to blame for the misunderstanding.
ReplyDeleteThe kind of people drawn to be entertainment journalists are not exactly the sharpest analytical minds.
If Blomkamp wants to get his point across, the answer to the question about researching displaced people should have been: "I can draw on personal experience. I am a displaced person. Given the choice, I'd like to be in South Africa but whites have been all but driven out of the country at the point of a gun".
Of course Mr Blomkamp may fancy a future as a multi-millionaire film director, building a long career. Expressing empathy with white South Africans is not going to endear him to the people who hold Hollywood's purse strings. That's why he's shrouding his views in alien metaphors and ambiguous answers.
Steve, do you have any thoughts on the Caster Semenya intrigue? Or did I miss your comments?
ReplyDeleteBTW, anyone out there that wants to get a glimpse of our favorite bullsh*t artist "Spengler" aka David Goldman and hear him speak can check out this video.
ReplyDelete"During the 1990s, after the end of apartheid, many gangs moved into the building and it became extremely unsafe. Ponte City became symbolic of the crime and urban decay gripping the once cosmopolitan Hillbrow neighborhood. The core filled with debris five stories high as the owners left the building to decay."
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like the most vibrant skyscraper ever built.
SPOILERS
ReplyDelete========
Come on now. District 9 is obviously an anti-apartheid, anti-Nazi movie FAR MORE than it is a rumination over the chaos of the modern South Africa.
-- white military, scientist, and corporate guys are the main bad guys
-- they are conducting Nazi style medical experiments
-- even the main protagonist Vikas, despite his smiles, treats the poor aliens in a "dehumanizing" fashion [note: aliens are not human, but you know what i mean], trying to get them to sign forms that they don't understand, obviously an allegory to discrimination against those poor Africans
-- the good guys are the concerned leftist professor types in voice over
-- the main alien "Christopher" is just as human as you or I, refrains from killing humans, and loves his son (even though they hatch them 50 at a time and would obviously be r-selected!)
The only things that complicate this are that
-- Nigerians are also bad guys
-- The aliens do kill people and are not completely innocent...though they are mostly portrayed as good hearted albeit a bit impulsive
Plus obviously if we're talking who/whom, I hope that it can be noted that Blomkamp is (nowadays) more likely to be on the side of the Whos rather than the Whoms.
ReplyDeleteThat's why South African white military/corp guys come in for a pasting in this movie as they do in all of Hollywood's other fare.
The message of the movie is that you should suspend your instinctive fear and disgust reflexes towards naturally repellent things (like the Parktown Prawn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parktown_prawn) and clasp them unto your breast.
ReplyDeleteThat's the message of leftism in a nutshell: all are equal. Men = women. Straight = gay. Black = white. And now alien = human! The aliens in the movie are shown to engage in human actions with human motivations.
The movie even has the analog of the super-smart black guy -- you know, the archetypoe you saw as Samuel L. Jackson in Sphere, as Connery's protege in Finding Forrester, as DMX the computer hacker, as the scientist in Terminator, and as the doctor in Gattaca at Anton's birth.
Think about the main alien in the red shirt and that scene where Vikas says, patronizingly: "I always knew you prawns were smart".
Somehow the filmmakers get to have it both ways -- this oppressed race of aliens nevertheless has technological capabilities far beyond man, just as the oppressed blacks are nevertheless stronger, smarter (see black male scientists above), and more moral (look at all those black female judges on TV).
It is worth noting that the South African Jewish community was extremely influential in the anti-apartheid movement. See here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.com/Community-Conscience-Apartheid-Institute-European/dp/1584653299
Many of them were the first to leave after they helped to bring the government down, in the same way that lots of liberal whites are leaving California. Very few of them will own up to the connection between their actions and the consequences.
There is another really heavy handed and obvious parallel.
ReplyDeleteWhen a guy calls them prawns near the beginning, his defense is that "well they do look like prawns, don't they"?
The implication to the audience is that you are supposed to recoil in disgust at the very thought of such a comparison. Bringing up the fact that there may in fact be more of a visible resemblance makes it somehow WORSE.
In fact, even if you took 3D scans of a human face, an alien face, and a Parktown Prawn face it wouldn't be exculpatory.
One can draw the natural conclusion regarding any anatomical generalization about a *human* population.
And of course once they can get you to deny vociferously what you see with your own eyes, how much harder is it to make you deny the behavioral things, which are at least mental and intangible?
During the 1990s, after the end of apartheid, many gangs moved into the building and it became extremely unsafe. Ponte City became symbolic of the crime and urban decay gripping the once cosmopolitan Hillbrow neighborhood. The core filled with debris five stories high as the owners left the building to decay.
ReplyDeleteWhoa.
South Africa is done.
Steve seems to have great sympathy for White South Africans living in Vancouver and Russians living in Ithica.
ReplyDeleteBut Hondurans living Postville, and Hmong living in...
There's been a prison riot in Kentucky:
ReplyDeletehttp://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090822/ap_on_re_us/us_ky_prison_melee
"Jude didn't immediately say what caused of the rioting, which began around 6:30 p.m. Friday.
Prison spokeswoman Mendolyn Cochran said Friday the prison had been on lockdown since Tuesday, when one group of inmates assaulted two others"
Hmmm . . . 3 groups of prisoners.
What is "Who? Whom? thinking" ?
ReplyDeletewhose Afrikaner family fled Johannesburg for Vancouver in 1997 when he was 17 because of street violence.
ReplyDeletewhose Afrikaner family fled South Africa to Canada/USA/Australia/Britain because the blacks had taken over the country. Everybody knows that's the reason why whites are leaving that country. Now that he's safe and sound he travels back there and trashes his kin. Seems like a useless, hypocritical bastard to me.
Tom Regan sez:
ReplyDeleteOf course Mr Blomkamp may fancy a future as a multi-millionaire film director, building a long career. Expressing empathy with white South Africans is not going to endear him to the people who hold Hollywood's purse strings. That's why he's shrouding his views in alien metaphors and ambiguous answers.
u nailed it. that's why Charlize Theron whored herself and refuses to touch on the plight of her people (Afrikaners) to this day. the power of Hollywierd to corrupt people seems to be immense. it's certainly something other than a plain film-making place.
To be fair, wiki says the tower has been revitalized by new management.
ReplyDeleteIt is possible that black South Africans will find an accomodation with whites -- leaving the latter to run the economy and skimming off a reasonable share of the profits. I note that in the Bahamas and other Caribbean Islands whites or nearly whites -- a combination of descendent of the old planters, 'backras' or former poor whites, and expats -- run most of the economy. Blacks have all the political power, of course. Perhaps this is a way forward.
Unfortunately certain factions in Hawai'i are committed to passing the Akaka bill (scheduled for a Senate vote in September) which will grant federal recognition (the political status that permits Indians to run casinos) to ethnic Hawaiians. The eligibilithy criterion is ethnic-Hawaiian ancestry of any amount. Since over 90% of ethnic Hawaiians are (far) less than 50% ethnic-Hawaiian (and truth be told the vast majority possess scant amounts such as 1/16, 1/8, etc..). Thus, Hawai'i's relative racial harmony will be destroyed by a race based bill that requires laughably small amounts of race. Change!
ReplyDeletePonte City Tower was undergoing redevelopment early in 2008 but news of it has mysteriously disappeared.
ReplyDeleteDoes Blomkamp know something about it?
Steve, speaking of movies, will you be reviewing "Inglourious Basterds"?
ReplyDeleteAlso, speaking of Jews going from underdogs to overdogs, and not being able to mention this historic shift in public, it seems like it's implicitly, indirectly acknowledged more and more these days. I mean, you see articles like the following in mainstream blogs in Newsweek Magazine: "Kish-Kish, Bang-Bang. A Cinematic History of Jews Kicking Ass."
Here is a Sailer-esque story of diversity really *working* in Government:
ReplyDeletehttp://tennessean.com/article/20090822/NEWS03/908220333/DHS+worker+accused+of+demanding+sex+for+food+stamp+assistance
DHS worker accused of demanding sex for food stamp assistance
August 22, 2009
Tennessee Department of Human Services case manager was arrested Friday after police say they secretly taped him admitting to having sex with a client in exchange for helping her get food stamps.
Darius Willis, 38, of Nashville, was arrested in his DHS office at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
The 28-year-old woman told police she had sex with Willis in his office on Thursday after he convinced her she would not get help with her food stamp request if she did not submit.
She told police, who monitored a conversation Friday in which she confronted Willis. Police say he admitted having sex with her then and later when questioned.
He was charged with rape by coercion.
— STAFF REPORTS
I wonder if our new army of 'diverse' bureaucrats in the Health Care Scheme would ever pull any stunts like this?
"I wonder if our new army of 'diverse' bureaucrats in the Health Care Scheme would ever pull any stunts like this?"
ReplyDeleteIt happens in the "diverse" parts of the private sector as well.
Ponte City Tower was undergoing redevelopment early in 2008 but news of it has mysteriously disappeared.
ReplyDeleteOK, it shouldn't be very difficult to figure out where it stands. 6 degrees of separation and all that. More than one person reading this blog has friends or relatives living in Joburg. How about asking and reporting back - is it still sensible and safe for a middle class professional, married with children, to rent at Ponte City?
Anyone???
u nailed it. that's why Charlize Theron whored herself and refuses to touch on the plight of her people (Afrikaners) to this day. the power of Hollywierd to corrupt people seems to be immense. it's certainly something other than a plain film-making place.
ReplyDeleteOrwell pointed out that he who controls the past controls the future, and that he who controls the present controls the past.
To which I would also add that he who controls the media controls the present.
Now it's back to my own endless software work for me...
"Also, speaking of Jews going from underdogs to overdogs, and not being able to mention this historic shift in public, it seems like it's implicitly, indirectly acknowledged more and more these days."
ReplyDeleteI'll say. In 1941, The Atlantic was putting out stuff like the following from Albert Jay Nock: "The Jewish Problem in America."
Today we see in The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg's article "Hollywood's Jewish Avenger" with many interesting and revealing passages:
(Goldberg recounting a dream he had as a child)"I parachuted into Nazi-occupied Poland as the leader of a team of Brooklyn-born commandos. We landed in a field not far from the train tracks that fed Jews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. My team laid explosive charges on the tracks, destroying them utterly, and then I moved quickly on foot to the death camp itself, where I found Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, in bed. I shot him in the face, though not before lecturing him on his sins. Before I killed him, he cried like a little Nazi bitch."
"But it is the unapologetic depiction of an alternate reality in which Jews torture and murder Nazis that made this film particularly interesting to a veteran REM-state Mengele-killer such as myself."
"Roth told me recently that Inglourious Basterds falls into a subgenre he calls “kosher porn.” “It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling,” Roth said. “My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day."
"Tarantino’s producer, Lawrence Bender...told Tarantino, “As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.” Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the film’s executive producers, also reportedly enjoyed the film’s theme of Jewish revenge."
"Tarantino...received only positive reactions from his Jewish friends. “The Jewish males that I’ve known...they’ve just been, ‘Man, I can’t fucking wait for this fucking movie!’” he told me. “And they tell their dads, and they’re like, ‘I want to see that movie!’”"
"Neal Gabler, the author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, told me that Jewish revenge fantasies aren’t entirely alien to the movie industry, but they’ve always been exercises in sublimation, Superman being only the most obvious."
"Eli Roth told me that Tarantino came to his home for Passover...He understood that we are still pissed off about things that happened to us 3,000 years ago...we talked about how the Jewish thing was to remember, that there was no absolution.”"
"When I came out of the screening room...I was so hopped up on righteous Jewish violence that I was almost ready to settle the West Bank—and possibly the East Bank...Some of this was informed by my own experience in the Israeli army, in which I saw my fellow Jewish soldiers do moral things—such as risking their lives to prevent the murder of innocent Jews—as well as immoral things, like beating the hell out of Palestinians because they could."
"Lawrence Bender, Tarantino’s loyal producer, is one of Hollywood’s more famous liberals—he produced the Al Gore climate-change film, An Inconvenient Truth, and he is on the board of the Israel Policy Forum, a left-leaning pro-Israel group. Bender told me he could not view Inglourious Basterds without remembering his own experience with schoolyard anti-Semitism. “I was taunted and thrown into lockers, and I’ve never forgotten it.”"
How about a hospital movie where the chief surgeon has down syndrome? Some groups are never let out of the mailroom.
ReplyDeleteHere are some more gems from a recent Jeffrey Goldberg blog post in The Atlantic:
ReplyDelete"In any case, the presence of gay people, just like the presence of blacks and Jews, makes a place cosmopolitan and enlightened and interesting. I have a friend who argues that cities, in order to reach greatness, must be at least 10 percent gay, 10 percent black and 10 percent Jewish. Someone has to organize poetry slams and start galleries and dance companies and fund the ballet and argue for libraries and generally make a disproportionate amount of noise. You know what they call a city without enough gays, blacks and Jews? Boise."
Well I guess all those galleries, foundations, museums, libraries, symphonies, charities, societies, etc. founded and established by Old American WASPs just don't exist or don't matter in Goldberg's mind. I guess that 3,000 year old memory has some holes here and there.
Anony-Mouse says:
ReplyDelete"Steve seems to have great sympathy for White South Africans living in Vancouver and Russians living in Ithica. But Hondurans living Postville, and Hmong living in...
I have great empathy for everybody who is homesick. That's one reason I don't assume all immigrants will happily assimilate -- they tend to be homesick ... unless they can set up a recreation of their own society.
I have a friend who argues that cities, in order to reach greatness, must be at least 10 percent gay, 10 percent black and 10 percent Jewish.
ReplyDeleteMore of a good thing's always better, right? I say 10 percent homosexual, 45 percent black, and 45 percent Jewish sounds about right.
All I want is the right to cut my nose off to spite my face and live apart from this cosmopolitan glory. The fact that 95% of liberals (Jews and blacks very much included) would refuse this expression of my natural rights belies the author's assertions about the glories of homosexual Jewish blackdom; no one ever insists on "giving" me anything I actually want.
You know what they call a city without enough gays, blacks and Jews?
I dunno, home? Target?
What do they call a city with too many? Note the author's tacit assertion that there has to be enough white "filler". Why not just change your name to "parasite" while you're at it there fella?
He understood that we are still pissed off about things that happened to us 3,000 years ago
Is a comment really necessary? Time to grow up, I think. The 3,000 year old man-child thing is getting stale.
“I was taunted and thrown into lockers, and I’ve never forgotten it.”"
And now he's justified his tormentors; they picked on him for his "accidents of birth," and he's returned the favor by attacking an entire society for theirs. His mother should be so proud.
How about speculating on why this freakish movie (District 9) is so popular. Is it that people like to watch their own future from the safe distance of the present ?
ReplyDelete"Anon -- and yet South Africa and Israel, both the subject of international boycotts, were very close. They cooperated in nuclear weapons development, and it is widely believed that the Israelis helped SA develop it's nuclear weapons program, providing scientific expertise."
ReplyDeleteTesty, please. The South African's hearts may have been in this relationship (similar to our very own idiot Zio-Fundies) but for the Israelis it was strictly cash and carry. Once the Jewish state had milked as much as they could from SA they dropped them like a hot stone.
I have great empathy for everybody who is homesick.
ReplyDeleteThanks Steve, I'm grateful for that. I left South Africa for the same reason that Blomkamp's family moved out. The difference is I am honest about the reason whilst he obfuscates it to please his new overlords. I f. cannot understand that people have so little self-respect as to degrade themselves like that. As far as I am concerned we were politically defeated and are the losers of this modern multicultural age. But at least you can maintain your self-respect and not grovel before these new bastard overlords. At least diss them in attitude and talk.
I am doing well in Europe but I badly miss the old country, I mean the old South Africa. It's just getting worse as the years go by.
I love that,as one poster quoted,Jewish males saying,"Oh boy! I cant wait for this movie!" That seesm to be a quintessentially jewish reality twisting thing: the goyim get to go and fight Hitlers army,do the dying and the limb-losing and live with the PTSD and the memories and pain,while in the movies jews get to courageously give Adolf his comeuppance! B)Charlize Theron must have no soul. C)Moshe Dayan when asked the secret of how the Israeli army is so able to secure victory after victory,replied,"Fight Arabs." D)We fought a war against the Japanese,remember? The manpower thrown against them was smaller than that vs the Germans,but some speculate the death rate per troop was higher. How come Hirohito is not remembered as the Ultimate Evil?It would be amusing to hear Sean Hannity et al blubbering about that Iran guy being the "next Tojo." (BTW the best way to remember that difficult name is to think of your mom in the kitchen:"Ah ma,dinner yet?" Matches up pretty well with Achma-whatever.) E)OT but shows the effect of reading iSteve. I was watching one of my used to be fave TV show,MASH the other day when it suddenly hit me:Why is this show so stupid? Hawkeye is the better surgeon,funnier,bettr looking;Frank is a Total loser. Why not lert Frank have some good qualities// Frank is..US! The goyim!!
ReplyDeleteI think Sailer's review sums up the director's themes pretty well.
ReplyDelete>>>
The movie even has the analog of the super-smart black guy -- you know, the archetypoe you saw as Samuel L. Jackson in Sphere, as Connery's protege in Finding Forrester, as DMX the computer hacker, as the scientist in Terminator, and as the doctor in Gattaca at Anton's birth.
Think about the main alien in the red shirt and that scene where Vikas says, patronizingly: "I always knew you prawns were smart".
>>>
The thing is, I don't think 'Christopher' or his son were meant to be like the other Prawns. In the introduction they were talking about how there was a command caste, and showed footage of an object dropping from the bottom of the ship 'for reasons unknown', which they believed was holding the ship's commander. By the end we learn that the object was a small shuttle of some sort which Christopher had under his shanty--isn't that a subtle hint that he was, in fact, NOT like the other Prawns?
The rest of the Prawns were written to be every bit as dumb and vicious as the humans believed them to be. Even Christopher's friend/helper was too stupid to follow a simple order to cooperate with the MNU pukes, and they lost their precious liquid entirely for that reason.
ML
Disposable Identity,
ReplyDeleteThanks you said it so well. I started writing a post to this tread basically saying what you did, but it got long-winded and I asked myself why I should bother lose a tear over such a one-sided, useless deal. The worst thing about the "relationship" was that National Intelligence embarked on a program of massive reeducation in the schools and churches w.r.t. Israel. Call it a brainwash. I guess the reason was that Afrikaners were traditionally moderately anti-Semitic, so the "relationship" with Israel demanded new attitudes. On my 4th trip to Israel the blinders came off my eyes and I knew that we had been had. That's also when I dropped my Christian-Zionist beliefs. Since that decision, observation and knowledge have been falling into place.
>The thing is, I don't think 'Christopher' or his son were meant to be like the other Prawns.<
ReplyDeleteThat, as well as the rest of your analysis, is exactly on target, anonymous. The director clearly means that Christopher belongs to the prawns' smart caste, their “talented tenth.” That no one on this thread had pointed this out until now surprises me. Perhaps everyone was too eager to assume that Blomkamp is yet another PC stooge to perceive correctly what was actually in front of their noses, up there on the screen. Blomkamp deserves much credit for being very cunning is using the science fictional trope to put forth some uncomfortable truths.
Most critics have traditionally scorned science fiction, and I thank God for that. Their contempt allows SF great latitude in subverting whatever the reigning dogma happens to be. “District 9” shows that this much-maligned genre can make people understand, if only on a subliminal level, the implications of immigration and human biodiversity, all of it disguised as some tale of bug-eyed monsters and ray guns. The concerns and anxieties of the Steveophere are being breathed in by the general public, even if they don't know it, and soon, I am sure, there will be more such examples along the lines of Blomkamp's film, both in print and in the screen, some rather more blatant and shocking--after all, there's money to be made.
Come to think, I have one or two story ideas along those lines myself…
The difference is I am honest about the reason whilst he obfuscates it to please his new overlords. I f. cannot understand that people have so little self-respect as to degrade themselves like that... But at least you can maintain your self-respect and not grovel before these new bastard overlords. At least diss them in attitude and talk."
ReplyDeleteHeadache, I have great sympathy for your people (and many Afrikaner friends when I lived in the UK and Germany) and saw American whites' fate in what happend to them. However, I find it hard to condemn Blomkamp. He did a very clever thing with District 9, subtlely getting out a subversive message. Sure he had to accomodate himself to the current power structure, but if he is successful, he will gain more freedom and independence. By continuing to push the boundaries the acceptable discourse further away from PC, important subjects can be broached in the future and people can be rallied and de-brainwashed. Would you rather Blomkamp had been explicit and denied funding and another PC trope been made instead? We have to deal with the exigencies of what is, not what we wish were so. Besides, Blomkamp is astoundingly honest in his interviews - it's just the reporters who are too stupid to get it.
"You know what they call a city without enough gays, blacks and Jews? Boise."
ReplyDeleteAh, Boise. I have friends in Boise. You know what I call Boise? Heaven.
"isn't that a subtle hint that he was, in fact, NOT like the other Prawns?"
ReplyDeleteExactly. We also see the difference in his reaction to the "eviction notice" - the other prawn didn't even understand what "eviction" was, and just lashed out blindly. Christopher was able to read the document and realize it wasn't legal (so he obviously has studied the human legal system) My guess is that Christopher was the last surviving member of the "ruler caste" on the ship after some sort of incident (maybe a battle? They did have weapons aboard, after all...)) and needed to effect repairs - but all the drones on the ship would have died before he could do it. So he found a planet where they could survive until he could fix the ship. He may or may not have counted on the presence of humans on the planet he found.
“District 9” shows that this much-maligned genre can make people understand, if only on a subliminal level, the implications of immigration and human biodiversity, all of it disguised as some tale of bug-eyed monsters and ray guns.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. I suspect such subconcious recognition is one of the main reasons why FPS zombie-fragging games like Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising are increasingly popular.
What is "Who? Whom? thinking" ?
ReplyDeleteIt's nothing. Just something Sailer made up 'cause he likes opaque phraseology. Go back to sleep.
>What is "Who? Whom? thinking" ?<
ReplyDeleteIt is the eternal question of which owl does the oppressing, and which owl gets oppressed. There's a really cool Animal Planet episode that explains the whole thing.
What is "Who? Whom? thinking"?
ReplyDeleteIt's Steve's favorite quote from Lenin. In one of his speeches, Lenin, referring to the ongoing class war, said something like this: "Who [over] whom? - this is the most important question of our times".
We whites do love ourselves even if we have Hamlet like issues with our existence. We whites apply anthropomorphism to darn near everything in the universe, and we consider this the natural order, no questions asked.
ReplyDeleteObama is first generation, not second.
ReplyDeleteStari - It is possible that black South Africans will find an accomodation with whites -- leaving the latter to run the economy and skimming off a reasonable share of the profits. I note that in the Bahamas and other Caribbean Islands whites or nearly whites -- a combination of descendent of the old planters, 'backras' or former poor whites, and expats -- run most of the economy. Blacks have all the political power, of course. Perhaps this is a way forward.
ReplyDeleteWhite folks, welcome to your future as high caste slaves! Its notable the arrangement is tolerated as long as whites are allowed no political power. Its in fact immoral that a white minority should have any political clout. If they start exercising any undue influence then the mob is always ready to be deployed against them.
Five stories of garbage sounds unreal doesn't it? I knew an electrician who was sent to re-lamp a courtyard in a NYC housing project, he discovered that there was nothing wrong with the lights-they were buried in garbage-he said the garbage was raining down even while he was assessing the situation-he called his boss and told him to call the city and send some garbage trucks.
ReplyDeleteThat was pre-Guiliani. Memory is short.