Birthday, at the Movies
It's my birthday - not the best time of year to have a birthday really, when you're an academic, but at least teaching doesn't begin tomorrow - we have another week's grace before eleven weeks of heavy-duty class time. It's not a major birthday in the sense of a landmark birthday-with-an-O in it either, but I'm getting steadily older, and it seems so strange still to double-take and realise what age I really am. After a stressful week I had a nice relaxing glass of wine or two with another tutor in the pub on Friday, and we talked about the ageing process - how the pleasures and positives of it can take one rather by surprise, but can definitely make it an interesting experience - particularly I think if one has not been the most confident of people in earlier years.
Anyway, so, after yesterday's retail coat therapy, a quietish day but culminating in something K- and I don't normally find the time or energy to do; get out to the cinema to see a film on current release. We caught 'District 9' at Islington Vue before going on for some dinner, and in fact found ourselves discussing the film's effects and implications throughout most of the meal - the sign of a good movie.
Analogies much discussed in the reviews I've read (Guardian and Telegraph) concentrate on the clear parallels between this film set in parallel-world South Africa and a society only recently freed from the divisions and injustices of apartheid. This is true, and obvious throughout the films; the disenfranchised, cooped-up aliens, subject to criminal and official exploitation and the hatred of neighbours. Fascistic behaviour - the new concentration-camp style accommodation; the gruesome medical experiments on individual aliens - was not difficult to identify.
But this wasn’t just a political film as there were plenty of equally obvious sci-fi referents, particularly the idea of body-horror, as a human character was infected by some dodgy alien fluid (also needed to help one of the ‘Prawns’ make his escape bid) and starts the transformation process into this alien species. This coincides, as it sometimes does in the sci fi world, with the character actually becoming wiser, more courageous and ethical; more ‘human’ just as he loses the ostensible markers of physical humanity. It wasn’t particularly clear why the alien spaceship had arrived, twenty years prior to the dramatic present of the film, with its ailing populace of insectoid life forms, and neither is it clear whether the ineptly named (by the dictatorial bureaucracy) ‘Christopher Johnson’ really will return to rescue the transmogrified Vikus van de Merwe or bring massed military retribution to humans who have done little to welcome or integrate his kind. These were obviously the take-away discussion factors. And there were constant twists and turns which kept me watching and willing the action to go against the increasingly nasty humans, particularly the mainly white MNU, corporate and soulless. But in a way these sci fi indices were happily unsubtle, the skeleton of the film worn on the outside, like the largely exoskeletal aliens themselves. The genuine discomfort comes from the appalling selection of human behaviours on offer. No one really displays any diplomacy and long term thinking regarding these displaced aliens, let alone any compassion. The only female character, de Merwe’s wife and his boss's daughter, is an emotional wreck with no detectable powers of original thought.
Talking of body horror – I remember ‘The Fly’ of course, but my primal experience of the alien metamorphosis plan comes from Doctor Who's 'The Ark in Space', the first of producer Philip Hinchcliffe’s really distinctive gothic horror pastiche stories, where human colony-in-transit leader Noah is infected by goo from a stowaway alien (also large and insectoid, funnily enough). A ghastly concept, but hilariously bad effects as so often in those days (mid seventies) – green coloured bubblewrap taped on Noah’s hand. Terrifying to an eight year old of course. But at least in that story there was some ambiguity over the qualities of the human race. Not all great, although Tom Baker’s Doctor hails them as ‘indomitable’ for their bravery in seeking a new home planet. But not all manipulative evil either.
I am old enough to remember this and to want to hold onto it.
Anyway, so, after yesterday's retail coat therapy, a quietish day but culminating in something K- and I don't normally find the time or energy to do; get out to the cinema to see a film on current release. We caught 'District 9' at Islington Vue before going on for some dinner, and in fact found ourselves discussing the film's effects and implications throughout most of the meal - the sign of a good movie.
Analogies much discussed in the reviews I've read (Guardian and Telegraph) concentrate on the clear parallels between this film set in parallel-world South Africa and a society only recently freed from the divisions and injustices of apartheid. This is true, and obvious throughout the films; the disenfranchised, cooped-up aliens, subject to criminal and official exploitation and the hatred of neighbours. Fascistic behaviour - the new concentration-camp style accommodation; the gruesome medical experiments on individual aliens - was not difficult to identify.
But this wasn’t just a political film as there were plenty of equally obvious sci-fi referents, particularly the idea of body-horror, as a human character was infected by some dodgy alien fluid (also needed to help one of the ‘Prawns’ make his escape bid) and starts the transformation process into this alien species. This coincides, as it sometimes does in the sci fi world, with the character actually becoming wiser, more courageous and ethical; more ‘human’ just as he loses the ostensible markers of physical humanity. It wasn’t particularly clear why the alien spaceship had arrived, twenty years prior to the dramatic present of the film, with its ailing populace of insectoid life forms, and neither is it clear whether the ineptly named (by the dictatorial bureaucracy) ‘Christopher Johnson’ really will return to rescue the transmogrified Vikus van de Merwe or bring massed military retribution to humans who have done little to welcome or integrate his kind. These were obviously the take-away discussion factors. And there were constant twists and turns which kept me watching and willing the action to go against the increasingly nasty humans, particularly the mainly white MNU, corporate and soulless. But in a way these sci fi indices were happily unsubtle, the skeleton of the film worn on the outside, like the largely exoskeletal aliens themselves. The genuine discomfort comes from the appalling selection of human behaviours on offer. No one really displays any diplomacy and long term thinking regarding these displaced aliens, let alone any compassion. The only female character, de Merwe’s wife and his boss's daughter, is an emotional wreck with no detectable powers of original thought.
Talking of body horror – I remember ‘The Fly’ of course, but my primal experience of the alien metamorphosis plan comes from Doctor Who's 'The Ark in Space', the first of producer Philip Hinchcliffe’s really distinctive gothic horror pastiche stories, where human colony-in-transit leader Noah is infected by goo from a stowaway alien (also large and insectoid, funnily enough). A ghastly concept, but hilariously bad effects as so often in those days (mid seventies) – green coloured bubblewrap taped on Noah’s hand. Terrifying to an eight year old of course. But at least in that story there was some ambiguity over the qualities of the human race. Not all great, although Tom Baker’s Doctor hails them as ‘indomitable’ for their bravery in seeking a new home planet. But not all manipulative evil either.
I am old enough to remember this and to want to hold onto it.
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