SF Lunch Eaten! Film at Eleven!

I saw District 9 last week. It is one of the few movies worth the hype. Essentially, it's the story of a broken spaceship that ends up over Johannesburg. Thirty years later, the resulting refugee camp is no longer tolerable to the South Africans and they're going to move them to a "better" camp 200 km distant.

It's not for the squeamish.

Sure there's a some blood and guts. Not as much as in Spielberg's wretched War of the Worlds. It's not the violence. It's the way the violence is used. Neill Blomkamp is from South Africa and the violence done in that country under Apartheid shows in every frame, every scene and every prop. It also has the best special effects I've ever seen. I want to see it again to see if, possibly, this time I might see some seams. Go see it.

Now, consider also The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. It's an alternate world story where, in effect, the Holocaust did not happen. The resulting collective guilt didn't happen and Isreal was not handed over to the Jews. A brilliant conceit. Chabon is a brilliant writer and no one, Jews included, reach the end of the novel unscathed.

Usually, we flinch. In a film, we slip to one side and glamorize a piece of the action or sentimentalize it or just neglect it. Harry Turtledove has written several alternate Civil War novels with astonishingly little to do with slavery. What race relations there are show up as straw men, easily dealt with and, thereby, trivializing the material.

It's not just SF. There's a subgroup of empowerment movies and books that pander to their various demographics with pretty much the same plot. Demographic representitive has a bad thing happen to them and through will and (sometimes) talent get through an epiphany and have a happy ending. Pick your demographic: women, men, race, etc. It doesn't matter. The story is the same. If Joe Campbell's Monomyth didn't exist before modern media, it does now.

But the characters are all beautiful. They live in expensive homes. They have or get fulfilling (but often vague) jobs. Whatever happens to them leaves few scars. All is right with the world at the end.

All of these works flinch when they look at the world.

Now, let's return to Chabon and Blomkamp. The common ground between their two works is the courage of their execution and the courage of the publishers and producers to see the work presented to the public.

Let's face it. District 9 makes Star Wars and every other piece of crap like it look like bad cheese. TYPU makes every alternate world story ever written prior to it stale pudding.

What saddens and infuriates me is that this is my field: SF and fantasy. I've been working in this field for years. We should have had this courage-- both the writers and the publishers. We invented the alternate world story. We invented the alien refugee story. But Chabon and Blomkamp create art with it while we're churning out toasters.

I don't think it's a lack of talent in our field. I hope not, anyway. But I do think it's a lack of nerve. An unwillingness to move out of our comfort zone.

A lack of courage.

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Wall of Idiots
Betsy McCaughey

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