It seems ironic that we should have to go out of our way to highlight, celebrate, and acknowledge good fiction in today’s market, but that’s exactly the situation in which we find ourselves.
We’re living in a world awash with bad fiction where none of the stories work and they don’t mean anything. The vast majority of what we consider “entertainment” is really just a colossal waste of our time. This brand of entertainment teaches us nothing, tells us nothing, reflects nothing of reality, and changes nothing except to get us a few more hours farther down the road in our lives toward our eventual and inevitable demise.
Successful fiction leaves us satisfied at the end—not just because the story came to some conclusion. Any story can do that. Even a bad story comes to some conclusion at the end.
Successful fiction leaves us satisfied by making a point and drawing the entire narrative full circle to its starting point.
Successful fiction accomplishes the purpose it set out to accomplish. It actually tells us something so that, at the end, when we finish reading or watching it, we think, “Yeah, I got it.”
We get the message. We see what the writer was trying to create and we understand all of what they were trying to communicate and convey through the story.
Bad art asks no questions. Bad art leaves us unsatisfied because we understand intuitively that it isn’t worth our time. We understand that consuming this material accomplishes nothing. The artist is insulting our intelligence by implying that this is all we’re capable of. We don’t respect the artist, either, because we understand that this is all he is capable of. We expect better and he didn’t deliver.
Mediocre art asks the questions and answers them for us. Great art asks the questions and leaves them unanswered. Great art asks questions about what human life and the world are all about. Great art shows us a slice of life and lets us answer those questions for ourselves.
If the artist did his job, his work leads us to come to the conclusion he wants us to come to. He makes his point by painting us a picture of life from a unique perspective. He doesn’t tell us what to think. He lets us do that on our own. This is how he communicates his message if he’s doing his job correctly.
This is how art can teach us something, show us a perspective we may never have considered before, improve our lives, tear down prejudice, and cause massive social change.
Charles Dickens accomplished this with his work. He didn’t go around telling everyone that the child labor conditions in England were appalling, abusive, and in some cases, deadly. He didn’t tell anyone anything they didn’t already know.
He simply showed people a side of the issue that made it obvious what horrific conditions these children were living under. His work caused a groundswell of public sentiment that got the laws changed for the better.
This is why it’s so important for us as artists to make our work mean something. We have incredible power over our audience’s thinking.
The vast majority of the fiction market asks nothing of us. It barely asks us to pay attention enough to understand what the story is about. In some cases, it doesn’t even do that much.
This is why it’s so important when a piece of fiction actually does challenge us to think and presents us with a story that tells us something meaningful.
This is the case with District 9, a 2009 sci-fi action film directed by Neill Blomkamp. The story premise covers events thirty years following an alien race landing on Earth and staying to live here. These aren’t invaders or conquerors nor are they bent on annihilating the human race. These aliens are intergalactic refugees seeking asylum and protection from the disaster that destroyed their homeworld.
The humans of Earth react to the aliens’ arrival by confining them in a ghetto known as District 9. The company tasked with policing them treats the aliens as worthless criminals. The aliens are denied civil rights and treated as unintelligent animals even as the company attempts to plunder the aliens’ advanced technology for its own profit.
The story follows Wikus van de Merwe, a company agent in charge of relocating the aliens to a new camp. A series of unfortunate incidents cause him to get infected with an alien substance that causes his body to start to mutate into an alien.
The company starts to experiment on him in horrific, inhuman ways—ways the company has been experimenting on the aliens all this time. Wikus escapes, goes on the run, and the company sets out to recapture him. This leads him on a journey to discover what the aliens are really capable of and where his loyalties truly lie.
This movie was set in South Africa, directed by a South African director, and acted by a South African cast. The most obvious allegorical implications would lead us to believe that this movie is a commentary on South African Apartheid and the movie works as that.
This movie actually covers so much more important and deeper territory. The same process of one population scapegoating, isolating, and dehumanizing another has taken place countless times in human history.
The process follows the same sequence of events in which one group vilifies the other, assigns malice to their actions based on scant or no evidence, applies these stereotypes to the entire group, and ghettoizes the subject group to isolate the “others” from the rest of society.
The dominant society treats the subservient group as less than human, turns a blind eye to their suffering, and even deliberately inflicts additional suffering on them as punishment for these fabricated crimes and imagined malicious intentions.
The dominant society inflicts exactly the same mistreatment on anyone who sympathizes with the subservient group or displays even the most marginal indication of resembling them.
Looking like they do, believing as they do, behaving as they do, and actually belonging to the other group isn’t necessary to get a person treated the same way. In some cases, the dominant society will even kill a person thinking or saying out loud that the other group might deserve some better treatment.
Our current culture likes to blame this behavior on the White race when, in reality, every culture on the planet has done exactly the same thing. Africans do it to each other. Asians do it to Africans. Asians and Middle Easterners do it to White people. Every race on the planet even does it to their own kind. No one is innocent in this.
Blaming it on the White race is the flimsy argument of people who know nothing about history. History teaches us a very different lesson about what human beings are capable of when they ostracize and dehumanize each other based on things like racial characteristics, political views, religion, or social affiliation.
History teaches us a very different lesson when it comes to certain individuals waking up to their own prejudice and actually seeing the ostracized group as human who deserve decent treatment and basic civil rights.
These are the stories of true heroism, compassion, and self-sacrifice that counterbalance the horror of humanity’s atrocities against our own kind. These abuses bring out the worst in people, but they also bring out the best in us when we break the bonds of prejudice and give each other the care and dignity we deserve. These are the situations where humanity really shines.
This is the story District 9 tells us. It’s the story of humanity at its worst and the circumstances that bring out the best in us when it counts the most. It’s the story of one person who is willing to sacrifice everything for what he knows is right, to rectify the wrongs of the past, and to give someone else a chance at the happiness he knows he can’t get for himself.
District 9 is what all of us as fiction writers should be striving to achieve. It tells an awesome, entertaining story, but it also makes a comment on history and human nature that teaches us and inspires us to do better. The story leaves the audience with a strong message of what is possible when it comes to overcoming our differences and seeing the humanity in each other even when our entire society is pressuring us to do the opposite.
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