SPOILERS!!! I'VE POSTED A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW BELOW... IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILM, SKIP DOWN TO THE NEXT BLOG ENTRY.
Ok... So, to those of you have seen District 9, I want to share my thoughts about how it relates to real-world heroism. To me, that's the most inspiring element of this film - even more important than the satire and commentary, when you get right down to it.
District 9 is the first film about how a real person, powerless in their circumstances, becomes a hero. This is a film about how someone who has made terrible mistakes can do something very, very right - and how History doesn't really care about whether or not it redeems them.
Clearly, Wikus did dispicable, horrendous things. Killing children is pretty much at the top of the war crimes list, am I right?
What I liked was that they let you see that he did them out of a sense of victimhood and disempowerment, borne of ignorance. It wasn't evil. It was human.
That's exactly how fascism looks from the inside out.
Did he redeem himself by buying the prawns a fighting chance?
In the end, that's a question Wikus has to answer for himself, and I think he does - he allows himself to love his wife, but not to live with her. He allows himself hope, but not ultimate redemption. Not yet. Maybe not for a lifetime.
At the same time, his attempts to forgive himself are lost in the broader context of history as it unfolds, which is where the documentary format becomes important.
Will the prawns see him as a hero? Maybe not. Who cares.
What matters is that Christopher got on the ship with his fuel, and that he's on his way to get help for the refugees. In the end, the prawns will accept the deaths in District 9, as well as those to come, in exchange for the help that's coming. At the same time, those deaths will leave wounds.
What happens when help arrives in three years? Clearly, the vessel over Joburg was not a warship. It's a safe bet that the weapons we've seen are not the only ones in the prawn arsenal. What does a prawn rescue mission look like?
Will District 10 show us the prawn "peacekeeping" forces, seen from the receiving end? Will Wikus become an advocate for human rights, in protest against the prawns? Is he even cut out for that monumental task? After all, he's just a horribly flawed man with some awful skeletons in the closet.
Isn't that history? Isn't that life?
As far as human connection, I WANT Wikus to allow himself forgiveness. I want him to own his choices, and to grow out of the cesspool he was in once and for all. At the end of the movie, I think that's what I got - barely!
Would he get a hero's welcome in District 10? No. Life just isn't that simple.
At the same time, he has the hope that someday, somehow, he can go home.
It hasn't occurred to him yet that home is totally unlivable. That there is no going home. He's got to create a new world to live in, or else live outside the old one.
In the real world, this is how heroes are borne. That's the story of Caesar, of Genghis Khan, of Abraham Lincoln, of the Founding Fathers of the US of A... of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. This is how great men are forged.
In the end, where they come from is just the thing that equips them for their role in History. Being a lawyer didn't stop Nelson Mandela from doing some awful things himself, or give him some kind of innate nobility that guided him through the dark times... What it did was teach him the law, which proved to be his greatest tool for change. Having that tool kept him from using other tools, like violence and sedition, more heavily than he did.
Great things may come of Wikus, or this may be the end of his story. Either way, his story is too real not to inspire feelings in me.
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