FSF, January-February 2010 (27 page)

I am at the bottom of the stairs when he comes out of the bathroom in his robe, with the lap robe on his legs. He is turning to go back to his room when I take the handles of the chair and guide it the other way.

"What the hell are you doing? Goddamn it, let go! Take me back to bed!” His voice is loud as I wheel him to the front of the house, then reach around him to open the door. Mom won't hear him, not with her hearing loss, and the sleeping pill, behind a closed door. He is yelling hoarsely, with a note of panic in his voice.

The cold air takes my breath away and he cries out, then is gasping, pleading. I feel as if I'm floating down the ramp, and turn onto the driveway. Mr. McHenry keeps it plowed all winter.

It isn't far to the end of the driveway, fifty or sixty feet, and the train is drawing closer, the whistle like a piercing scream. I stop at the edge of the road and set the brake, and Dad is crying and cursing.

I leave him there to wait for the night train.

My bed feels warm after the cold outside, and I'm hardly even settled into it before I fall asleep.

It was a dream, a wish-fulfillment nightmare, I tell myself, coming awake very early. It is still dark outside, and I hurry from my room to go downstairs to turn up the thermostat and start a pot of coffee before Mom and Dad begin stirring. The house is very quiet. Too quiet.

While waiting for the coffee, I go down the hall to the bathroom and push the door open, and then on to his bedroom, where the door is already open, the way he left it in the middle of the night. In a panic, I run to Mom's room, but it is as empty as the rest of the house. A piece of paper on her pillow stirs in the draft from the open door. A handwritten note, dated and signed, from her to me, the letters spidery and uneven.

"My dearest Christy, I love you. I'm taking him out to catch the late night train."

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Invariably, when I find flaws with a film that the majority of people approve of, I'll receive an email or three that begins something like this:

Dear (your favorite epithet),

You must be a miserable person to hate on a film as beautiful and deeply spiritual as
Alien Super-Puma
. Do you drink the spinal fluid of a (your favorite cuddly life form) each morning in order to generate your vitriol, or are you just naturally an (your second favorite epithet)?

People take these matters personally, I've found, though why they would presume I'm more miserable than the average run of humanity eludes me, unless the inspiration for emails such as these springs from an excess of
joie de vivre
.

At any rate, I thought I might avoid such happy-go-lucky fan mail after seeing
District 9
, until a friend of mine said he understood why I liked the film, remarking that when one sees as many “retarded science fiction films” as I do, it's only natural that I react with enthusiasm on having seen a film that's merely “mildly retarded."

This has caused me to reconsider my opinion and have a second look.

Movies act upon me like opiates and that is what enables me to endure the often brain-damaging assaults of modern cinema and sit there for two hours chomping on a Twizzler and sucking down Diet Coke. With most movies, it's only as I exit the theater that my critical faculties kick in and I begin to realize what I've seen. In the case of
District 9
, it took a while longer.

A good bit of
District 9
is shot in a faux-documentary style, enabling South African director Neil Blomkamp to cover a lot of backstory in relatively little screen time. The situation is this: more than twenty years ago, a massive alien ship ran out of fuel and came to hover above Johannesburg, South Africa (à la
Alien Nation
), with a million or so malnourished insect-like aliens (derisively called “prawns” by the South Africans) on board. Off-loaded into a huge refugee camp that comes to be known as District 9, most of the aliens appear to belong to a worker class and are incapable of other than a squalid, subsistence level existence, mainly funded by selling their weapons (superior to ours, but inoperable by humans) to Nigerian gangsters in return for cat food, which has a narcotic effect upon them. When the South Africans no longer wish to be bothered with the “prawns,” they seek to move them to another camp far from Joburg. To do this, one of the most unsympathetic protagonists in science fiction film history, Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copely), an employee of a multinational, MNU, is enlisted to serve eviction notices on the aliens.

Wikus, essentially a low-level corporate goodfella who has achieved his position due to nepotism, is something of a dork with a blond Afrikaans wife and no conscience to speak of, and he goes about his work with excessive zeal and good humor, going so far as to chortle over the sounds of alien eggs burning, commenting that they sound like popcorn popping. While doing his duty, he gets spattered with rocket fuel manufactured by a “prawn” named Christopher, who obviously is of higher status and intellect than the majority of his fellows, and inhabits an alien ship that somehow managed to bury itself in District 9 during the disembarkation. As a result of the accident, Wikus is infected with alien DNA (alien technology, it seems, is DNA-based), and begins to transform into a “prawn,” first growing a claw-arm that enables him to operate alien weapons. This makes him a target for the wheelchair-bound human monster who masterminds a Nigerian gang—he wants to eat Wikus's arm in order to acquire his power—and for MNU, who want to dissect him. Desperate and increasingly motivated by panic, Wikus joins forces with Christopher in an attempt to reverse the transformation, something that Christopher claims he can do.

Reviewing a movie like
District 9
presents a challenge, for it will mean to American audiences (the majority of whom think of South Africa as it was during the euphoric dawn of Mandela's presidency) something different from what it means to audiences cognizant of the fact that the nation has undergone a decline under the leadership of President Zuma. To quote one South African with whom I spoke:

"Most SA whites hold black Africans in contempt—the degree varies, but even the more idealistic whites have become ever more jaundiced as premature affirmative action and politically motivated public service deployments undermine any hope of creating a better life for the poor, and unemployment and crime soar. President Zuma is viewed by many whites as our version of Dubya—stupid, indulgent and cronyistic in the extreme. At the same time, black dislike of whites is on the rise as a result of such attitudes and as scapegoats for government failures are sought. Things are really ugly here these days."

However one feels about the sentiments expressed above, they appear to be a fairly accurate representation of the state of South Africa at the moment, one that is reflected to a large degree by Blomkamp's movie.

Another point: Most Americans perceive the film as an unstated dialog about apartheid, and it does remark upon the subject; but more to the point, the basic circumstance of the movie paints a picture of South Africa's xenophobic reaction to the massive influx of refugees in recent years from Zimbabwe, Somalia, and other African nations. When, say, Somali shopkeepers in Cape Town begin to undersell the indigent shopkeepers, an adverse response is guaranteed. Without a knowledge of these and other social realities,
District 9
becomes, as I've said, quite a different film, a shallower film almost incomprehensible in its excesses. For instance, the characterization of the Nigerian gangsters in the movie as bad animals may be no less palatable if one is armed with this knowledge, yet is somewhat more understandable. And the characterization of corporations.... Well, some may differ, but having witnessed first-hand the operations of Dole and Chiquita in Central America, I have not the slightest problem with the portrayal of corporations as evil entities capable of murder and dissection and much, much more, so the suggestion implicit in
District 9
that MNU takes advantage of and even foments nationalism of the sort depicted for its own gain strikes me as a sharp and timely and something that cannot be overemphasized.

This is not to say that
District 9
is a preachy political film. Far from it. Its politics are not talked about but revealed, and it is first and foremost an action picture, a mingling of Cronenbergian ick with
Aliens
-style shoot ‘em up, yet differs from most such movies in that it has a brain and (as is made clear when Wikus begins to come to grips with his fate and evolves as a human being even as he grows more alien in aspect) a heart.

There are a number of what may seem plot holes to audiences accustomed to having things explained and explained again, as if they were mentally challenged, but the lion's share can be covered by extending the logic of the film—that only those with alien DNA can operate alien technology. As for those that are legitimate flaws or omissions, I tell my writing students that if they were to fix every plot hole pointed out to them in a workshop, instead of a short story, they would wind up with a novel—they need to be selective in making their repairs. Even a masterpiece can be picked apart by a sufficiently determined critic and much of the art of writing has to do with writing strongly enough to carry the reader past one's plot holes; the same can be said, roughly speaking, for cinema. For me,
District 9
has enough originality and narrative vigor to overcome its failings and, if one is aware of the politics that informs the movie, it becomes a very strong and interesting movie, indeed.

Looks like I won't be getting that fan mail, after all...unless I've ticked off some psychotic
District 9
haters.

Shane Acker's animated film,
9
, shares not only a numeral with
District 9
, it also began life as a short film that can be seen on YouTube (Blokamp's
Alive in Joburg
, too, can be viewed on YouTube). Acker's film is ten minutes long and presents a smoky, vaguely European post-apocalyptic world empty of human life, populated by small sock puppet-like robots and the huge, nightmarish mechs that prey upon them. The film is dialog-free and has an allusiveness that is utterly charming and compelling, qualities mainly absent from the feature film, which adds sixty-five minutes, piping cartoon voices that serve to dispel the drear, moribund mood of the visuals, and an excess of explanation that removes every last vestige of mystery from its wafer-thin,
Lord of the Rings
-ish plot (the titular character is voiced by the head hobbit himself, Elijah Wood). The youthful Acker (twenty-nine) is a vastly talented animator who shows his influences (Svankmajer, the Quay brothers) yet goes beyond them, and his short film is so good, one suspects that producer Tim Burton, whose work has become increasingly predictable and uninspired, may have had an undue influence. If you like pretty pictures, this
9
's for you, but if you're expecting more, stick with the short film, because in this instance less is definitely more.

Where are the Diabolo Codys of yesteryear? Hailed as the second coming of the Great Scriptwriter, you can almost hear the hiss of evaporating hype as her second picture,
Jennifer's Body
, hits the screens.
JB
is a tired, done-to-death stab at feminist horror comedy that doesn't have even half the bite of predecessors such as Mitchell Lichtenstein's transgessive
Teeth
(a movie that will seriously challenge one's manhood) and is about as scary as a flip-book presentation of a spider crawling across a blank page.

Directed by Karyn Kusama (
AEon Flux
), who here generates flashbacks to her depressingly cliched female boxing picture,
Girlfight
, and starring the mega-untalented Megan Fox,
JB
offers the story of a demonically possessed cheerleader who seeks to liberate her hometown from the oppression of teenage boys by eating them. When she seeks to snack on childhood friend Needy's boyfriend, her GFF sets out to put an end to her evil ways, though not before the pair engage in a make-out scene that has no function in the script and comes out of the blue. Gratuitous is too kind a pejorative.

Cody's too-cool-for-school, Oh-look-I-made-a-funny dialog falls flat and lifeless as an armadillo squashed by a semi, and is, in fact, the main reason for the film's failure, though Kusama and Fox provide her with ample assistance. Frankly, I was fed up with Cody's dialog style by the time the second act of her previous film,
Juno
(for which she mysteriously won an Oscar), rolled around. Here, perhaps feeling her oats after the Oscar triumph, she jams, crams, and squeezes every piece of slangy shorthand available into each scene, until the movie begins to feel like an overstuffed suitcase, a vehicle for her cleverness to which all else—story, character, the important ideas of the movie—are subservient, neglected, and buried beneath the concerns of ego. For all her labored attempts at humor,
JB
's just not that funny. I'm reminded of David Mamet, of movies in which he's not on his game and his dialog signatures (repetitions, incomplete sentences, et al) become over-formalized and stale and devoid of meaning; but after sitting through
Jennifer's Body
I'm starting to believe that, unlike Mamet, Cody is the scriptwriting analog of a singer who can only perform one shallow, silly song.

And while I'm rounding up the recent movies, I suppose I should mention
Pandorum
, a film that echoes deep space horror flicks like
Event Horizon
, wherein two astronauts awake to find that their cargo—60,000 men and women—has been transformed into what appears to be messed-up versions of little person Peter Dinklage.

Looks like I'll be getting those disapproving emails after all.

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Dean Whitlock's last
F&SF
story was “Changeling” in our Jan. 2009 issue. He returns now with a very different sort of tale—a broadly comic story that has its tongue in its cheek (right beside its oversized canines).