District 9

So, okay, I'm feeling a little foolish to be writing about this, but I watched the sci-fi film District 9 this week. And it was very gripping. As a teenager I used to connect emotionally with things we'd be watching on TV, to the point where I would feel compelled to talk to the people on screen, which used to annoy my family. That's how I reacted to District 9. I assume the cinéma vérité style had a lot to do with that—it made everything feel more real.

Anyway, here's why I'm writing about watching District 9 as my weekly spiritual reflection. Part of what made the film so gripping was how callously violent the MNU security forces are, and the Nigerian gangsters, and the technicians in the secret lab where MNU is experimenting on aliens and where Wikus is taken to be tested and vivisected. As viewers, of course, we're intended to be repelled, and it worked marvelously on me. Because when Wikus is finally able to turn the tables on the various people who are threatening his life, I found myself rooting for him to be even more decisive and indiscriminate in his use of violence than he was. "Shoot them all, you idiot! Don't spare any—they'll come after you later!" "Don't just threaten to cut out that technician's eye—do it! He deserves it! Think what he was about to do to you!"

That's what's deeply, insidiously wrong about cinematic violence. It creates a moral universe where you feel it is just for the characters you identify with to use the same kinds and degrees of violence whose use or threatened use aroused your sense of injustice in the first place. And this isn't just Hollywood. You see the same perverse sense of justice in the texts we call scripture. An eye for an eye, right? Films like District 9 recreate the same legitimation of violence that drives apocalypticism, or visions of final judgment as God destroying the wicked. The hope driving these visions is that someday the righteous will be the ones with the biggest guns on their side; they will secure a monopoly on violence and will enjoy the moral satisfaction of seeing done to the the wicked what the wicked once did, or wanted to do, to them.

I entirely understand the appeal of this kind of moral vision. There are plenty of postings on this blog where I have vented my frustration and anger at certain powerful agencies by longing to see them at the receiving end of violent scriptural wo's to the wicked. But that is not the response to which Christ ultimately summons us.

If I evaluate the story of District 9 from a Christian perspective, then the most important moment is when Wikus forfeits his chance for salvation—his chance to escape MNU, his chance to have his genetic transformation reversed—in order to provide cover for Christopher Johnson as he and his son make their escape. That's the moment where Wikus really redeems himself and his humanity. There's a kind of partial redemption preceding that when he makes the decision not to flee when he has the chance, but to turn back and rescue Christopher Johnson with guns blazing. But from a Christian perspective, his most important moral decision is the moment when he becomes not the violent savior, but the self-sacrificing savior. A savior who, instead of blowing away his archenemy Koobus in a final showdown, is helpless when Koobus finally gets to him and survives only because the filmmakers bring in some aliens at the last minute to finish Koobus off (thus satisfying our violent cinematic sense of justice).

This may be reading too much into it, but I wondered if Wikus's transformation into an alien represented a kind of incarnation, making Wikus a Christ-like savior not only because of his self-sacrifice but also because of his total solidarity with— becoming one of—the aliens. I'd be surprised if the filmmakers intended that reading, but it's conceivable that those Christian concepts percolated into their work, having circulated for so long in the larger culture.

And since I'm feeling a little foolish for having written at such length about a science fiction film, I'll stop there. (Though considering how seriously I take the Book of Mormon, I'm not really sure why I should feel embarrassed about engaging so seriously with—ahem—another work of sci-fi/fantasy.)