Saturday, February 12, 2011

Multinational Corporations in District 9

I’m sure no one wanted to read another post about apartheid or something similar, so I decided to look at a different aspect to District 9. I thought the role that MNU played was pretty interesting in the movie. MNU is a good example of a multinational corporation that many governments rely on now to be their hired arms. Obviously, this can many times lead to dangerous situations when there is a group in a country that is nearly entirely outside of the government’s control. The result is often corruption, as seen in District 9 when MNU was pursuing their own biological research in order to control the alien weapons. This very negative view of MNU could perhaps be seen as a commentary by Blomkamp on this practice. The complete lack of control over multinational corporations is a recipe for disaster in District 9, just as it often is in real life.

1 comment:

  1. To expand upon Kathleen's comment, MNU is clearly the antagonist in D9. The film's mockumentary setup does a good job of showing just how two faced the corporation is. On one hand, the company is doing a tepid job of keeping the aliens and the humans separated, and providing the prawns with a habitat. Conversely, Wikus uncovers that the former motivation is completely outweighed by the goal of being able to use prawn weaponry.
    Wikus' experiences with the prawns and MNU is obviously comparable to the sentiment of the general public toward similar situations. It may seem like a bit of stretch as far as a comparison, but the situation between the US and Iraq that has pervaded the past decade resonates slightly with the dynamic between the MNU and the prawns in the movie. While the MNU (read US) was trying to keep the peace in District 9 (Read Iraq) they met a good deal of resistance from the native people. This was probably due to two things: the prawns (Iraqis) were unwilling to heed the recommendation of the MNU and the MNU was too busy pursuing an alternative directive to correctly solve the problem. In the end, the MNU (read US) was unable to obtain the prawn technology (read oil), the conflict escalated out of their control, and many lives were lost on both sides.

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