Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch District 9
2009 · Neill Blomkamp · District 9 on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice who the camera follows during the evictions. (camera)
The first act runs as handheld documentary: crash zooms, surveillance angles, news reconstructions. The lens follows the evictions the way MNU would file them, as the day's ordinary business.
Payoff: You are placed inside the company's own view of itself, which is why the cheerfulness curdles. In the reading: free indirect discourse (the camera that speaks-for). The reading calls this free indirect discourse: a camera that sees with a character and speaks for the institution behind him.
Watch Copley smile while he serves eviction papers. (performance)
Sharlto Copley plays Wikus as a cringing, likable mediocrity delighted by his own paperwork. Much of the dialogue was improvised, and the banality of it is exact.
Payoff: The harm gets done cheerfully by an ordinary man, which is this film's argument about how systems work.
Look at what the camp is actually built from. (setting)
Corrugated metal, garbage, improvised shelter, and the cat food the prawns crave. Blomkamp shot in Chiawelo and in derelict industrial zones, and nothing about the poverty is prettified.
Payoff: The district is a real place first, which is what keeps the allegory on the ground.
Notice how flat and fluorescent the MNU offices look. (staging)
Cubicles, clipboards, lanyards. The staging refuses anything spectacular wherever human institutional power sits, and saves the arresting imagery for the aliens and the abject.
Payoff: Bureaucracy is shot as boring on purpose, so the violence it produces reads as routine.
Listen for the clicks the prawns use to talk. (sound)
The alien language was built from clicks and vocalizations that register as expressive and specific. The weapons sound wet and biological rather than mechanical, and Clinton Shorter's score often arrives late.
Payoff: The prawns get a working language before the film asks you to take anyone's side.
Once you have seen it
Track the exact point the documentary frame falls away. (cutting)
Julian Clarke moves from interview-interspersed observation to punishing action cutting around the midpoint. The handheld grammar stays in place while the lighting turns expressionistic around it.
Payoff: The form comes apart along with Wikus, so the style is doing the same work as the plot.
Watch what Copley's body does after the fluid. (performance)
The fingernail, the arm, the panic, the self-pity. Meaning here gets carried by what happens to his flesh rather than by anything he decides to do about it.
Payoff: He becomes legible as a moral creature only once his body crosses the line he spent the first act policing.
Watch the interviews describe Wikus three different ways. (structure)
The talking heads call him a hero, then a traitor, then a biohazard, each with a straight face. The archive is authoritative and unreliable at the same time.
Payoff: The record is being assembled while the event is still bleeding, and nothing settles which version to trust. In the reading: fabulation / legending. The reading calls this fabulation, legending: an official story built about people while the event is still under way.
Watch how Christopher and his son are framed together. (staging)
Their scenes play in cramped shack interiors, ordinary domestic space, while the humans get processing centers and offices. What he wants is to leave, and nobody in authority hears it.
Payoff: There is no community for anyone to return to here, because it does not exist yet. In the reading: a people who are missing. The reading calls this a people who are missing: a population with no standing, which the film refuses to invent for them.
Carry this in: Watch who is holding the camera. The film's conscience changes when the camera changes hands.