Running is the plight of the proboscis

Saw District 9 last night. Go see it! Seriously! It’s the best (albiet only) South African science fiction allegory featuring talking shrimp I’ve ever seen.

(Reader beware: spoilers ahead). The film’s protagonist is Wikus van der Merwe, an affable if occasionally unnerving bureaucrat, who contracts a nasty alien virus that begins to recode his DNA and turn him into a “prawn.” (Prawns are the film’s spindly, slimy aliens who–in a deft reworking of the space invaders trope–show up in an enormous ship over Johannesburg, South Africa as malnourished refugees from an unspecified interstellar conflict, and who find uneasy harbor in the slummy compound of the film’s title.) Wikus’ gradual transformation from man to intergalactic crustacean is bio-horror at its finest: black ichor drips from his nostrils, his toenails and teeth plop out, he vomits up grey goo, and, in the final stages of his metamorphosis, black insectoid ridges erupt from underneath his skin like freaky tectonic plates.

Cool, huh?

What’s remarkable about District 9 is its sensitive treatment of Wikus’, uh, lifestyle change. Unlike similar films featuring extraterrestial parasites/viruses (Alien, The Thing, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers), the audience isn’t encouraged to dismiss Wikus as an abomination in need of extermination. Or to condescend to him as a freaky creature necessitating a mercy killing. You, squirming in your seat as your girlfriend turns your phalanges into powder in her why-am-i-watching-this grip next to you, live his transformation with him. One of the hardest scenes to watch happens early on, when Wikus grits his teeth and agonizingly deciding whether or not to lop off his mutated tentacle-hand with a rusty hatchet. The film gets away with grody, but captivating scenes like this one thanks in no small part to Neill Blomkamp’s delirium tremens cinematography, which lends District 9 a veneer of gritty realism.

The film, as you’ve probably guessed, got under my skin. (Wakka wakka wakka.) Not only because it’s a superb and tightly wound exercise in science fiction, a genre that seems to be enjoying an indie rennaisance of late between District 9, Moon, and Cold Souls. But also because, with its focus on corporeality and justice, it made me think specifically about the reasons that I like running, a sport and practice that is intimately tied to flesh and fleshly appearance. One reason many people take up running, especially at the beginning, is to sculpt their body until it glistens and glitters like one of the Greek gods and goddesses regularly featured on the cover of Runner’s World. (An old friend-of-a-friend once made up a rhyme that she’d chant while running that went, “Jog all day / Jog all night / Jog until those buns get tight!,” which always sounded to me like something you’d hear in a Lenin-era Soviet Olympic training camp for talented children.)

Personally, I blame ultramarathoner and ultra-asshat Dean Karnazes for inflaming an already-scary strain of body dimorphia among runners. Yeah, okay, so Dean is probably the “fittest man in America.” And yes, it is quite an accomplishment that he ran 50 marathons. If I have to stare at his cheese grater abs one more time, or read another Outside interview where he spews up some narcissism-posing-as-enlightenment bullshit about “making a life plan journal” and “turning your passion into your vocation,” I’m going to burn a gasoline pentacle into his front lawn while bumping “In The Air Tonight” from my Civic’s stereo.

The cosmology that Dean Karnazes’ image and philosophy presupposes–that we live in a prosaic world in which things are fundamentally Under Control and in which your Bootstraps are always Available for the Pull-Uppance–is a conservative wet dream underwritten by invisible classist and gendered mobility.

The worldview of District 9, while wholly unnerving, is probably more accurate. Anything, at any time, could go horribly and irrevocably wrong. Your toenails can turn black and fall off. A shadowy multinational corporation can evict you from your shack without legal recourse. Your shit can be vaporized by alien weaponry. You’re at the behest of the tyranny of your genes, gender, and national origin. Running through the South African slums is not an act of Karnazesian self-gratification, but a reminder of the ugly contingency and positionality of existence. Or, better, a means of basic survival. To quote Babette’s Feast: “What is fame? The grave that awaits us.”

And to further the intellectually onanistic direction this post is rudderlessly drifting in, I’ll call upon my fave feminist body theorist, Elizabeth Grosz, who analyzes fitness fads of the 1980s (!!) in her landmark book, Volatile Bodies, as follows:

The preferred body was one under control, pliable, amenable to the subject’s will: the fit and healthy body, the tight body, the street-smart body, the body transcending itself into the infinity of cyberspace. A body more amenable, malleable, and more subordinate to mind or will than ever before. Just pick the body you want and it can be yours (for a price). Such a conception never questioned the body’s status as an object (of reflection, intervention, training, or remaking), never even considered the possibility that the body could be understood as subject, agent, or activity. This pliable body is what Foucault (1997b) describes as “docile,” though with an unforeseen twist: this docility no longer functions primarily by external regulation, supervision, and constraint, as Foucault claimed, but is rather the consequence of endlessly more intensified self-regulation, self-management, and self-control. It is no longer a body docile with respect to power, but more a body docile to will, desire, and mind” (2).

Long live the insubordinate body! Long live stubborn zoology! Long live slimy and brackish unwilled tentacles erupting from our mouths!