Batgirl #1, vol. ????

The new BATGIRL comic doesn't entirely suck. If it did, that would almost be better.

That said, if DC Comics wants to publish a book with two young women in the lead, could they at least find a writer who speaks girl? Or someone like Joss Whedon who can at least fake it?

Urgh.

Not Going Gently into the Good Night

I am exhausted from boxing and not enough sleep last night but I can't quite turn out the lights and settle in so I am watching CORALINE, which is quite lovely and something of a mental corrective to all the heavy and ultimately fruitless thinking I've been doing about DISTRICT 9.

D9 is a shocking, exciting, mind-shredding movie, at once familiar and unexpected. Even though I had a better idea of the film's plot from the preview reel they showed at Comic-Con, D9 still took me buy surprise. For one thing, it is a far gooier movie than I expected and it earns its R-rating with brutal violence and unfliching depictions of bodily effluvia. When so many SF movies now come tailor-made for kiddie meal marketing tie-ins, DISTRICT 9 is satisfyingly adult both in content and theme. D9 is the first film I've seen in a long, long time worthy of critical engagement in its own right.

At the same time, I find DISTRICT 9 difficult to engage with because of my shocking ignorance of Africa. Reading and attempting to write critically about D9 only highlights how my perceptions of Africa are informed by popular culture and, in turn, the extent to which that cultural attitude is based on a Eurocentric colonialist outlook that views Africa as a monolithic, ineffable 'other'. The preponderance of movies and stories about Africa (whether set in Kenya, Rwanda, Congo, Tanzania, Namibia, South Africa) that I am familiar with are not about Africa but about European encounters with various peoples, cultures, geography, wildlife of Africa. They conform to a narrative that is essentially colonial, falling into a tradition of accounts of life on the frontier for an audience on the homefront.

District 9 conforms to this narrative in some ways, transcends it in others. I think ultimately, how you view the movie depends on whether you regard it as a movie set in South Africa or a South African movie, reflecting local culture and concerns rather than those imposed by an outside point of view. That difference is, I think, all-important. But to really interrogate that idea, I'm going to have to see D9 again, if only to see the bits I missed while hiding my eyes behind my fingers.