Why We Love Aliens

Monsters vs. Aliens was one of the top grossing films of this year. Even Radiohead writes songs about them, wishing they’d “take me onboard their beautiful ship” and “show me the world as I’d love to see it.”

The new Hollywood movie District 9 furthers the lovefest—but with a twist. The dystopian thriller, set in South Africa, pits its squirmy-nosed aliens (known as “prawns”) as modern-day refugees, ghettoised and targeted by authorities. The allegory is obvious: District 9 shows us why no society should have two classes of citizens, as it echoes divisive decades of apartheid. Perhaps unknowingly, District 9 does something else, too. The movie drives home the point that we get a thrill out of watching fantastical, fictional aliens, but we have little stomach for real, human, illegal aliens.

District 9 dives directly into the immigration debate. In the film, the prawns’ plight is reported with a 24-hour-cable-news feel, curiously giving the impression that you are watching a real-life documentary. To the point, director Neill Blomkamp recently told New York magazine, “The film is about issues I grew up with—like segregation and xenophobia. I’m proud of the fact that we deal with those issues without beating you over the head with it.” Likewise, the studio’s clever marketing campaign plastered tongue-in-cheek ads on city benches and on the sides of buses making authoritative threats like: BUS BENCH FOR HUMAN ONLY. There are even refrigerator magnets—with a human and a prawn holding hands—declaring SUPPORT NON-HUMAN RIGHTS. The ad campaign is smart, but the biggest selling point is the aliens. There’s nothing we love more at the multiplex, and District 9 could be in for a surprisingly big weekend.

Think about that alongside the Emmy-winning documentary Made In LA. Coincidentally, it happened to also be showing this week, only, it was on public television. It tracks the real-life struggle of wronged Latina garment workers in Southern California and their long fight for rights and wages in the workplace. Filmmaker Almudena Carracedo has said that she struggled for years to find funding for her project. (The film was ultimately produced with hardly a fraction of the $30 million that made District 9, considered a modest film budget by Hollywood standards.) With Made in L.A., the aim was “to put a human face on the story,” Carracedo explained. Since coming out in 2007, she has been crisscrossing the country showing the documentary to universities and community centers. Unsurprisingly, there’s been no national marketing campaign.

Despite the documentary’s successes (it is heartbreaking and great), it seems that the country is much more content to deal with a scaly, mumbling alien face than a real, human face. When President Bush pushed his guest-worker programmes in 2006, Latinos poured into the streets of Los Angeles, and not soon after, immigration reform stalled. The facts today are daunting. Some 11 million people toil in the country’s shadows, cleaning toilets, cooking food, and raising others’ children. And President Obama recently said that the debate would be tabled, at least until next year.

Maybe District 9 will move the discussion forward. After all, allegory has long played a hugely political role. Just think of the biting critique of communism that George Orwell made with his novel, Animal Farm. But just as likely, its “sheer awesomeness” could very well prove just a slick marketing gimmick and be lost on a crowd enthralled by special effects.

©. Newsweek