Hollywood's mojo no-no?

HOLY CRAP.

Let me just say: I love this week's blog topic BECAUSE I was just talking about exactly this in class yesterday. But only Julie heard me. SO, this will be new to everyone else.

Granted, I'm probably not the first to bring this up in the history of race and Hollywood, BUT I DIGRESS.

[Caps are cruise control for excited, btw.]

In chapter three of "Digitizing Race," Lisa Nakamura addresses several topics, particularly with emphasis on people of color (POC) and lending their "mojo" to a film. The films she taps in this discussion (with regard to mojo) are "The Matrix" trilogy.

Her argument, as I saw it, can be summed up as this:
POC represent the human, the organic, the steampunk, the uprising against a machine-ruled world. They represent the connection to the spiritual side, to a more analog time. (Neo, for those curious, qualifies as a POC, having claimed an Asian heritage early in the film.)
White can be summed up as "the man," oppression, nonhuman (Agent Smith = virus; The Architect = Program 0), Utopian sci-fi (which, in my mind, is worlds apart from steampunk), a pristine, ultra-sanitized sort of cleanliness. They represent a more secular existence, and have more intuitive connection to computers (gesture-based, rather than analog inputs through a mouse and keyboard).

BUT, more importantly is this distinction: White equals uncool. POC equals cool.

Think about it: Morpheus, Niobe, Neo, Trinity (who, though not a POC, dresses in black in her Matrix existence), Link, Zee, Chara: ALL KICK-ASS.

Agent Smith, The Architect: "old, white pricks," a bit on the nerdy side. (In part, both characters remind me of the head game developer in "Grandma's Boy," but that's neither here nor there.)

So let's bring this analysis into something new, something fresh.

I present, for your consideration, "District 9".

[SPOILERS AHEAD. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN "DISTRICT 9" (and shame on you if you haven't) PLEASE SKIP THE FOLLOWING. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.]

We start out with Wikus, your atypical sci-fi hero. He's a bit nerdy, works for his father-in-law, and doesn't command much respect from the military rangers he's been placed in charge of for the Prawn (the aliens of this film) eviction operation.

In fact, you kind of spend the first 30 minutes of the film laughing at this bumbling protagonist. What kind of sci-fi hero is this??

Well, he's the kind who gets sprayed in the face with a liquid from the alien technology while looking through an alien shack for contraband weapons.

AND THAT'S WHEN SHIT GETS CRAZY. :0!!

In short, his DNA begins to mutate and splice with the alien DNA found in the liquid. Throughout the course of the film, the viewer sees him slowly change from all human to a hybrid to, eventually, a Prawn. (Or so it is implied. The film never says outright that it's actually him at the end.)

During this transformation, he's tortured by the government company he works for (his FIL leads the experiments), he breaks out of his laboratory prison environment, and makes a break for District 9 to hide among the Prawns. The rangers try to find him, the Nigerian gangs try to take his transformed arm for their witchcraft purposes (which is another level of POC mojo altogether) and gunfights with aliens and Gundam mecha and Wikus and rangers ensue.

And by the end of the film, our former sweater-vest-wearing nerd is a complete, legitimate bad-ass. And he gets progressively cooler from the first exposure to the last firefight.

But during all this, he gets progressively closer to this film's version of "POC/other" and further away from white. Or closer to "cool mojo" and further away from "nerd."

The viewer sees the transformation, too. First a hand turns into an alien appendage, he loses finger nails, his skin comes off in chunks to reveal the new alien body beneath the surface, he loses teeth, hair, and one of his eyes changes size and color.

We are actively engaged in his transformation from nerd to mojo. And it is visually thrown in our face. It's not something like in Steve Martin's "Bringing Down the House" where we sort of see this white guy go from acting white to acting "black," and we have to make the correlation ourselves ("Oh, he's wearing baggy pants and a beanie and saying "yo," I guess that means he's black-ish?").

And we are made to feel uncomfortable for the way he is treated. The government doesn't try to save him, they try to harvest him so they can use his DNA to utilize the alien weaponry. Steve Martin's "transformation" is more for laughs; Wikus makes you pity him, want to cry for him (he is made to shoot another Prawn during the government's testing), cheer for him, and hope that he'll overcome the rangers and the government (mostly portrayed by white actors, it is worth mentioning).

[OK, SPOILERS ARE DONE.]

The Prawns are wild, they scavenge, they eat cat food (...what??) and cow heads, they are tricked and cheated, they speak in their own clicks and trills (but can understand the Johannesburg English spoken by the white characters; the white characters can understand the Prawn language as well). Their shacks are thrown together with what they can find, but they still manage to be technologically advanced as a race. But even in their advanced airship, which has gesture-based interface, they still have to "plug in" to a gelatinous operating device to get the bird going. (Also, to an extent, they remind me of the Troll race in "World of Warcraft," who are said to sterotype from Caribbean POC.)

But they also add Mojo to the film. Would we be as interested in this film if it were a bunch of Steven Spielberg's ETs running around? Perhaps not. But these guys, they are EXOTIC. They add a sense of steampunk and organic otherliness to this film's world of clean labs and white hazmat suits, just as the POC in "The Matrix" do.

Would the films be the same if POC weren't such a major part of the stories? It would seem weird to see a Zion full of white, clean, slicked-back white people; it would be weird to see aliens who looked "like us" taking up residence in dirty shacks and being treated with such hate and anger. Why is it OK for the rangers to shoot the Prawns point-blank? Would we support it if the Prawns looked like white humans instead of land-walking crawdads?

I'm.. not entirely sure where I'm going with this now. I think that using POC (as major characters or to base an alien race upon) is a step in the right direction for Hollywood, but until we start seeing Hollywood take a more active role in portraying POC in ALL aspects of life (and not just the bearers of Mojo for the film's plot devices or to provide a sense of "other"), it will continue to be just another cinematic gimmick.