ABSTRACT
The antinomian implications of Neo's enlightenment run deeper: as he acknowledges, all of his memories prior to his awakening are false. Neill Blomkamp's District presents an unusual variation of the theme of enlightenment and disaster as potential invaders from another planet arrive in a damaged space craft in desperate straits and are given humanitarian assistance. Confronted with an ethically irrational universe without and the threat of a spiritual void within, it is not surprising that escape from the dialectic of enlightenment and disaster has become an increasingly tenuous, if not impossible, imaginative proposition. To the extent that the horizon of disenchantment is imagined as a form of gnostic imprisonment, escape from this dialectic would appear to be even more hopeless. Strangely enough, it is Wikus' banality that opens up the possibility of an escape from the dialectic of enlightenment and disaster. Alien is the story of the disastrous triumph of scientific and technological reasoning, the dominance of instrumental rationality.
