This is part four and the series The Aliens of 2009. 
These articles focus on how 3 films about ETs in 2009,
District Nine, The Fourth Kind and Avatar, suggest deeper
sociological issues emerging from our subconscious psyche in
regards to our potential cosmic cousins.

Encountering “The Other”
A greater unknown in the form of what we have yet to become
has cast it's shadow over a the face of human possibilities. -AS

The final comparable point regarding these works is a radical
alteration in the view in our relationship to the “Other”.

Evolution starts with the recognition of what we are not. 
The awareness that there are “more things in heaven and
earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”[i]  begins to
polarize us in a direction of growth and regeneration.  
The cognition of another that is like us but
different is known as “the other”.  On a deeper level it is a
re-cognition of ourselves.  

 Yet “otherness” in the minds of  our Western civilization (primarily  white European Christian ), has been a fabrication in order keep the pure from the impure.  This imperialistic attitude sought to demonized those that were marked first as heretics and then as scapegoats.  It ongoing development results in racism, nationalism, religious fundamentalism creating ghettos and genocides leading to Inquisitions and Nazis.

Looking at the history of European ideas we see that the German philosopher
Gustav Hegel was among the first to name this ideology as fundamental to human
awareness.  He claimed that our individual consciousness is prevented from finding
freedom and independence when it comes up against the barrier of otherness in the
external reality of the natural and social world.  However otherness cannot be destroyed
without the destruction of self, so we search for reconciliation.  But this is an ever ongoing
incomplete resolution leading to a relationship of the dominant and the obedient, or the
independent and the dependent.[ii]

 In many other cultures however, the stranger is often welcomed as guest,
friend and sometimes prophet of the ways of other worlds.

Aliens are now the quintessential other.  They are like us and so horrifyingly different.  
But because of their level of sentience, as discussed in part 2, they reflect what we call
consciousness in another form.   Separation or unity will depend on whether we are looking
at their material (form) or non-material essence.  The alien “other” is important step in
knowing the value of collective humanity.  It gives us a solid framework for welcoming
“Contact”.

Either way, as a planetary race, the way things are integrated and accepted is first through
our intellectual mechanism. We need comprehension to give us an emotional awareness
as to the existence of aliens and the way they can fit in with our world, which is why
academic scholarship will builds an openness to the possible existence of aliens.  This
kind of foundation will get us through the main stumbling block of public ridicule.  
In addition wide spread educational studies invite a mainstream response, which is a

key step in igniting an active campaign for government disclosure.

However these films represent a subtle turning point in human consciousness as
regards to this new other.   Embedded within each story there is a new resolution. 
There is a merging with the very thing that has been abhorred.  Integration begins
with this kind of identification suggesting that the time is not far off from a mass
psychological acceptance of their existence.

Post-Colonial theorist, Abdul R. Jan Mohamed says that the comprehension of
Otherness is possible only if the self can somehow negate or at least severely bracket
the values, assumptions and ideologies of his culture…This distance provides the
necessary free space from which to interrogate philosophy ‘anew’. . . .” [iii] This
is an important step in that we are now more psychologically and sociologically
ready to embrace the reality of the others existence. 

In D9, the ETs are segregated in apartheid type to their own slummed out neighborhoods,

making them the new lower class lackeys of planet Earth.  When the main character
accidentally injects himself with alien secretions, he starts becoming one of those dreadful
Prawns; hunted by his once human allies.   In 4K, the sense of otherness is so overwhelming
that it invades our minds so we can no longer exist as functional human beings.  And in
Avatar the whole idea of survival and communication on the hostile planet means changing
our genetics to take on the alien form.

How impure, yet psychologically nurturing, are these new myths “to be turned into the Other”,
the way Kafka’s alien-ated character Gregor Samsa woke up as a cockroach in Metamorphosis. 

This merging represents a metamorphoses of cultural values.  This fresh orientation  in the

mind of the collective demonstrates that we are at a nexus point in regard to our intellectual
make-up.  With the reception of our non- human association new potentials for transformation
arise in us. The presence of aliens would most likely bring out the commonness of our humanity. 
Meaning that a redefinition in terms of who we are in relationship to our cosmic environment  
will pull the planet together in  an evolutionary way.

The French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, argues that “the self cannot have a concept of

itself as self, without the other.“[iv]    This is integral to the comprehending the self.  

Levinas says:  “I am defined as an ‘I’, precisely because I am exposed to the other.  It is my
inescapable and incontrovertible answerability to the other that make me an individual ‘I’”. [v] 
We cannot exist without seeing something we are not.

Being the Other
Being “the Other”, called Alterity (alter -Latin for “two”) or “Otherness” was proposed by
 Lévinas as an idea of exchanging one's own perspective for that of the ‘other’…[vi]    The
Other can be seen as aspects of that which constitutes the self.[vii]   Levinas says in one of his
original essays on the topic: “…the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is
before one can express, or know one's freedom, to affirm or deny. One instantly recognizes
the transcendence and heteronomy of the Other.[viii]  

Lévinas maintains that subjected-ness is formed in and through our to re-cognition of the other.
Here again the question of sentience comes into play because there must be an equal level of
consciousness present in order to be aware of otherness.  Through our very connection we
must incorporate the outer reality of not self into the self.   It is because sentience in the
aliens is what we can see at the very core of ourselves. Consciousness as a sort of universal
language of being merges one with the other.   As the bad boy of European Symbolist
movement, Arthur Rimbaud said: "Je est un autre" [I is another].  Meaning only the subject
cannot only see what it is.  The other is us, in whatever guise we put on it.  In this sense we
are the other.

Conclusion
All the films and television programs about aliens are an attempt to
grapple with possibilities greater than our imagination.

Strieber says that they “are just radically different from us. I mean,
incredibly different.  Unimaginably different. It's not that they
are more intelligent, I don't think, but that they have had the level
of mind that we are just beginning to touch on for a very long time, as a
result of which they see reality quite differently.”[ix]

Films have always created the new myths that modern society chooses to integrate into the

collective unconsciousness.  To quote Daniel Pinchbeck: myth resolves oppositions through

symbol and image, without need of rational explanation. A society that reintegrates mythic
thought at a deeper level of awareness will be able to handle seemingly contradictory

perspectives without breaking down.[x]

What these movies tell us are about our own unconscious concepts of aliens are:   
1) We can only see them in terms of who we think we are not.
2) What we think they are is an aspect of our own psychological dark side. 
3) We really have no idea who or what an alien actually is, because it is all based on our
limited subjectu-logical perspective.

Lisa Onbelet in her analysis Imagining the Other:  The Use of Narrative as an
Empowering Practice makes a significant point:  “While stories have the capacity

through their use of imagination to move their audience toward seeing and empathizing

with the other, they may not always be successful.  Some will “get it”, some will not.”

Some will not want to get it because in seeing the other they may feel like they are being compelled to give up too much.”

Whatever and whoever the aliens really are - if and when they arrive publicly, they will have a

quality of sentience that will be demanded of us.  Because of the film narratives sighted here

and others, we will have already a partial realization of the Other in  terms of human

consciousness, making their welcoming, ah well, -less traumatic, for some….anyway.

The idea of change and embracing something other than what we know of ourselves

might be too big a threat to the local worldview which wants to keep everything they

know in a tight little box.  But whether we like it or not - stories of alien civilizations

are already starting to seep into the collective understanding -- creating a psychological

intimacy to the other.

Onbelet goes on to say: 

However, though narratives may not change how we see
others, they can at least ensure that the other will not be ignored. 
By creating tension between the self and other, stories
draw attention to the other’s existence, demanding a response, good or bad. 
Stories are a way of keeping the other in our face and maintaining
‘the sense, the belief, and awareness that at some fundamental
level, everyone and everything is related to everyone and
everything else.’[xi]

In other words we can’t embrace what you don’t acknowledge.  Therefore in
light of our frenzied urge to witness these dramas in the form of popular cinema a
relationship to these beings, whoever they may be, is already happening. Well, at

least they are on the map.  We are not ignoring them.  We have identified them.
And yes they are us…for now.

We must however acknowledge the final sobering reality that Whitley Strieber makes
regarding the first public admission of an alien presence:

“...will change the human species in absolutely
fundamental ways, either driving us collectively
mad or transforming us in such a way that we can,
at last, begin to understand who and what we are and
how we relate to other life in the universe. …We will begin
what is the greatest of all journeys
for any species, which is the journey into a real
relationship with the cosmos.”
[xii]