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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch who is holding the camera, and whose view of the camp you are given.