A review of District 9 with a look at race issues. Probably spoiler-tastic.

Is there any kind of brief summary you could give? I'm curious about it, but don't want to read the spoilers.

I went to see District 9 last night, pretty much only based on this post, and the comments. I expected social commentary, but I got an action movie. It was a very good action movie, so I'm ok with that, but the race thing wasn't front and center.

From here it gets a bit spoilery, so read with care. Is there such a thing as an lj-cut in comments?

The difference between blacks and whites in the movie is that the blacks are much more direct ("We should kill them all!"), whereas the whites try to, ahem, whitewash what they are doing ("We built you this camp, in which you have space to grow and prosper."). I found the whites in the movie a lot creepier. In fact, I can't remember the real shudderworthy quotes from the whites; That one is a paraphrase.

It's true that the witch doctors are all black, but it's set in contemporary South Africa. I don't think you'll find many whites living in slums, trading weapons and tiger penises there right now. Putting them into the movie would have been unrealistic.

Well i don't know how they're referred to in the movie itself, but according to the cast page on IMDB the character isn't a "witch doctor," but a "Sangoma." (Which it seems is technically a witch doctor, though that term is considered derogatory these days.)

And according to wikipedia, "Sangomas far outnumber western-style doctors in Southern Africa, and are consulted first (or exclusively) by approximately 80% of the Black population."

So it would really depend on how it was handled in the movie i think.

On a kinda related note, i saw a trailer for "the Princess and the Frog" before Ponyo last night. It looks like it's got an all black cast and is set either somewhere in the Caribbean or New Orleans. Oh, and the frog was "cursed by a witch doctor," who looks like he's supposed to be a Voodoo priest/whatever. I'm kinda curious how that's gonna fly. Yeah, the Disney fairy tale movies always have an evil witch of some kind in them, but on the other hand...

Well that's certainly fair. I was just hesitant to criticize them for including shamans in the film by itself, given that there apparently still are quite a lot of them in South Africa. Not without having seen/heard how they actually handle them in film first anyways. Obviously if they do treat them as stereotypical witch doctors rather than as real shamans that would be an issue.... although i don't really know enough about how the actual shamans behave to make a reasonable comparison against the stereotypes =P

But in any case it sounds like you have a lot more points to go on than just that :)

So have your sources said anything about "The Princess and the Frog" yet? Or is that not going to happen until the movie is actually out?

"I was delighted that Up had an Asian American protagonist"

*blinks* It did? The kid i presume? I'm afraid all i can remember about him at this point is that he was a bit chubby. And he was a scout. And... SQUIRREL!

It is set in New Orleans, and it looks like there is a "evil" houngan and a "good" mambo (that's the priests and priestesses in Haitian vodou, I can't remember the Louisiana Voodoo spellings).

Disney has had to do some adjusting already regarding race - they changed the princess' name and dropped her being a chambermaid. They probably won't depict Voodoo accurately, but we'll see how much they mangle it :)

This is going to be extremely spoilery, but I don't think you should see it anyways. It touches a lot of buttons.

There are really only two heroes in the movie. One is an alien, and the other is a white guy. Everyone else is evil. It's true that the whites are evil in stereotypically white ways, and (most of) the blacks are evil in stereotypically black ways. Some of that is certainly unnecessary, but some of it is just the times it plays in. Whites are still far richer than blacks, even in South Africa, which gives them different means to be evil. That is reflected in the movie. If I wanted to be generous, I could say that the movie is saying "Look, we can still see the effects from the last time we fucked up, and we're already doing it again!".

Now the white guy starts out as quite evil himself, in a Heinrich Himmler kind of way. A (physical) weakling himself, he organizes a forced relocation, separates family members, orders beatings, and, in the most harrowing of the scenes, delights in burning down a shack full of alien eggs. All the while he is certain, even cheerful, that he is doing good work. It takes him a very long time to turn just good enough to make for the right ending (but not so good that you'd be comfortable in his presence). I think for a plot like this one, there was just no way out. If he had been cast as a black man, the charge of racism would stand even stronger.

I can buy a white guy cheerfully suppressing because he is to small-minded to know what's really going on (or very good at ignoring), but a black one, and a South African at that? I'd have a hard time believing that someone who was at the other end of the baton just a few years ago could block out the true state of affairs as much as the male lead in this movie does.

I actually got it from Audible sometime last year. I liked it a fair bit but would have enjoyed it more if not for the obviously forecast incredibly depressing ending.

I actually thought it was very much science fiction though, since it made the time traveling a genetic condition and then did a good job of exploring the repercussions of that, including attempts at a a medical treatment, inheritance, etc.

It actually did a better job of examining the implications of its SF elements than some books that are actually classified as SF. Off the top of my head, Linnea Sinclair's stuff is often very good romance but really glosses over the SF background of the various universes she's created.