{ avatar & district 9: worlds apart }

[ note: movie spoilers ahead ]

I recently gave into the hype and bought my excessively overpriced ticket (13€, not including the 1€ charge for glasses) for James Cameron’s latest blockbuster, Avatar. And yes, I am completely and unashamedly OK with admitting that the movie was a thrill-ride of the highest order and hands-down, one of the most visually stunning things I’ve ever seen on the silver screen. Probably the only things that lacked any real sense of depth in this 3D adventure were the plot and the characters. But I’m not a movie critic, so I’ll leave its merits as a “film” there. What does interest me though, being prompted by a few conversations, is the juxtaposition of Cameron’s Avatar with Peter Jackson’s District 9.

Though they seem to be two very different films, here are some overarching similarities:

1) Both films focus on an alien population whose future is being threatened by a more powerful human population.
2) Both human populations want the land upon which the aliens live.
3) Both alien populations refuse to leave.
4) Both of the main human protagonists are central/key figures in the attempt to remove the alien population.
5) Both protagonists become acquainted/involved with a particular individual alien.
6) Both protagonists come to sympathize with the alien population.
7) Both protagonists become aliens in the end.
8) Both films end in a victory for the aliens.

So in Avatar and District 9, the plots start in practically the same place, end in practically the same place, and use essentially the same steps between. And it is this basic, shared structure that makes looking at the differences that much more of a tenable, and interesting, endeavor.

One notable difference is the aliens themselves.

{ Neytiri, from Avatar }

{ a "prawn" from District 9 }

Notice that Cameron’s aliens are much more anthropomorphic. They are practically really tall humans with a tail and elfish ears; they have all the appropriate joints and bone structure, even five rightly proportioned toes! The Na’vi are beautiful, alluring creatures, they are even attractive. Cameron obviously does not want you to have any trouble identifying with his aliens.

Jackson does not make it so easy. His aliens are deliberately insect-like. Instead of skin, they have exoskeletons, their hip joints are insect-like, and one would certainly shrink away from their hands it they ventured a touch. The only human-esque feature are their eyes (which is no small thing, and yet such a small, small thing). The “prawn” (a derogatory name given the aliens in the film) are decidedly non-human and unappealing.

But it is not merely their physical appearance that is off-putting. The prawn inhabit a S. African slum and Jackson goes to great lengths to depict real slum life: there is violence, drugs, even prostitution. Nor is the prawn community in harmony with the surroundings; the documentary-style interviews with the local human inhabitants make that abundantly clear.

Now contrast the slum of District 9 with Avatar's Pandora, with its lush Edenic landscapes; and then too the prawn's impoverished and crime-ridden society with the Na'vi's peaceful and environmentally harmonious lifestyle - a thinly veiled idealization of Native American culture akin to what you'd find in Disney’s Pocahontas (though, to Disney’s credit, they actually did more justice to human nature there than Cameron does here).

So already, in choosing how to depict the aliens and their lifestyle, Cameron and Jackson have determined your initial response. But I think these decisions not only set the stage for the audience’s response to the films' aliens, but reveal the general tenor and depth of both films.

Cameron’s aliens are idealized and utopian. Yes, you have the jealous and suspicious warrior, but he is singled out as such. As a whole, the Na’vi are never depicted in a negative light. They are easy to love because they (and their planet home) represent that illusory return to Eden we long for in the midst of our busy and overly-complicated, technologically-dependent lives.

The humans - or at least the social spheres of corporations and the military - are portrayed fairly consistently as the opposite of this. And because Cameron has given us two characters who each represent one of these entities, it is all the easier for us to project our hatred and frustration with our own world (especially in regards to these spheres) onto them. He gives the evil "they" a face.

And so, in Avatar, the “good vs. evil” conflict is over-simplified and wholly externalized. The sides are easy to distinguish, easy to choose. And luckily for us, the audience, the “good” aliens look enough like us that we don’t mind standing beside them in their struggle.

District 9's picture is, again, a bit more difficult. Is it the repulsiveness of the aliens' appearance or that of their lifestyle that makes us cringe and want to look away? I would venture that the alien's off-putting appearance is meant as a challenge: these creatures will be hard to love, you will have to work at it. In a sense then, their physical appearance makes manifest to us that reaction we all too often have to the disparaged and dispossessed in our own world. Simply put, we do not want to be one with these aliens, nor do we do want to inhabit their world. At all.

And the humans in District 9? Well, they’re a lot more human, a lot more complex. Given, there is still the fairly one-dimensional military, but it is not as fully collapsed onto a single actor. And our main protagonist, Wikus, is a good man and a loving husband, but he is also a bit goofy and inarticulate, and definitely not the most attractive of the cast. He’s honestly forgettable, a face and a personality that would easily get lost in a crowd. And he’s also terribly flawed, as his trials throughout the film reveal his general disdain for the aliens and even a willingness to betray the very one that has been helping him.

So the “good vs. evil” conflict in District 9 is convoluted, complex, and located not so much between characters, but within them. You want the best for the Wikus, but more out of pity, and his fearful and self-serving conduct makes us shrink back from fully supporting him. And moving from a charitable pity to a true empathy with the aliens is a transition not fully guaranteed either.

It is within these over-simplified or realistically complex worlds that each director wishes to guide us, by way of their main protagonists, to discern what is truly human. What makes these films peculiar is that that discernment takes place as the main characters become more and more alien. But how that transformation takes place and is utilized in Avatar and District 9 makes all the difference.

In Cameron's version, Jake Sully (the main character) mentally inhabits his "avatar," which is an alien body he remotely controls from the safety of the human camp. As the film progresses, we begin to see Jake - and he begins to see himself - as more and more a part of the alien tribe due to his enculturation into the Na’vi (via his avatar) and the romantic relationship that develops between himself and his alien tutor. (Think Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves.) It is only in the last scene that Jake gives himself fully and permanently to inhabit his avatar and will thus, implicitly, go on living with the Na'vi on Pandora.

The transformation of Wikus in District 9 could hardly be more different. Here, our protagonist accidentally sprays himself with some alien fluid early on in the film. Throughout the rest of the movie, Wikus is slowly, and very unwillingly, transforming into an alien due to his exposure. This is met with horror, disgust, exploitation, and violence - by both himself and those around him. By the end of the film he is fully alien and living in the refugee camp himself, left only with the hope that the aliens whom he helped will return in 4 years with the promised antidote.

So how do these transformations work as far as revealing what it means to be human?

In Avatar, Jake's enculturation and final transformation is not at all dramatic, for it is what the audience did at the outset of the conflict: as soon as Cameron established the sides, we chose to identify with the aliens. And so we like Jake more and more as he gradually changes sides in the fight between humans and aliens (evil and good, respectively). The general message of Jake's transformation then, I think, might be that we often do not recognize and may actually be struggling against what is the most human (and "good") thing to do because it may appear so foreign to us.

But blunting the edge of this "scalpel" (which we need to cut away our own skin for self-examination) is that we, as the audience, recognized this truth right away. Neither Jake's acts specifically nor the film generally lead us into uncomfortable, new territory of what it might mean to be human; we were simply waiting for them to resolve where they did. So the moral edge to Avatar is only internalized as potential ammunition to use against others: we say to those who disagree with us as we said early on to Jake, "How can you not see the error of your ways!?"

But whereas we needed no encouragement or coercion to give ourselves to the aliens and their world in Avatar, District 9 has to drag us there kicking and screaming. In District 9, we (and Wikus) spend the whole movie hoping for a miracle that will reverse the transformation process. He does not want to be an alien. We do not want him to be an alien. Wikus' transformation is only a horrible disruption, a tragedy without poetic justification.

What Wikus' transformation does do, however, is force him (and thereby, the audience) into the world of the aliens. It is his search for a cure and the threat he faces from the humans (especially the military) that force him to take refuge in the camp and seek help from a particular alien. And it is through this interaction with the alien and the realization of the aliens' plight and, for lack of a better word, humanity, that Wilkus slowly begins to be an courageous and self-sacrificing person. And while this can be said of Avatar as well, the difference is that District 9 takes us somewhere difficult and asks us to love those who we find, if we are honest with ourselves, truly repulsive.

Moreover, it is Wilkus' own reluctance (which mirrors ours) to enter this world and act with compassion towards these creatures that make Jackson's depiction so much more honest. Sometimes it takes having our lives unpredictably entangled with those we'd choose to keep a "respectable" distance from to make us realize our shared humanity, and which actually calls us to a higher humanity. I would even venture that part of the challenge of District 9 is not to go about saving the world (like Jake Sully), but to acknowledge that our lives are already entangled, that the distance we put between ourselves and the slums is not so significant, and more illusory, than we think . . . or want.

I think that much of the difference I find between Avatar and District 9 boils down to the realities left in the midst of each work of science-fiction. Avatar simply asks me to take one step too far into unreality – it asks me to imagine a world (or universe, which is just “world” writ large) where there are no conflicted individuals and where good and evil are easily disentangled. In other words, where there is no such thing as the “human experience.” District 9, however, retains this reality, amplifies it, banks on it. In Jackson’s sci-fi world, humanity does not become subsumed into an imaginary "alien" perfection, but has to work damn hard to live up to its very name, and, as it turns out, it is the companionship with the unwanted "alien" that's most helpful - if not necessary - in doing so.