imagine
The most thought-provoking words spoken ?at the Boksburg Inequality Conference that we and our partners hosted in Gauteng last month were uttered right at the end, almost as an aside, by the conference’s closing speaker, Neva Makgetla. Reminiscing about her days studying philosophy in East Germany (as it then was), she said that what had struck her was that that the original motivation of those who had tried to create a socialist society ? the promise that they had struggled to fulfil ? was that socialism would enable a change in the quality of human relationships.? But in practice, trying to make a society work, they decided to focus on material things.? Money, social services, schools. Perhaps here in South Africa, she said, something similar had happened.? The struggle against Apartheid was linked to a dream of what could be possible in the new society, the possibility of something qualitatively different from the fear-filled disconnections constituted by Apartheid.? But a country had to be run, programmes designed.? And this is what we’re left with, she implied: BEE and social grants.
It was a sobering comment, for it made me think that perhaps we, the organizers of the conference, had somewhat lost sight of our topic.?? The conference had been organized in order to try to put the issue of inequality more squarely on the South African policy agenda.? All too often, discussions about social issues in South Africa proceed as if poverty is a residual matter, the result of some people somehow being left out of economic growth: as if all that is required is to provide them with the assistance and opportunities that are needed to raise their incomes (the current reach-for-my-revolver term is to ‘graduate’ them) ?above some (usually unspecified) poverty line.
We wanted to challenge those assumptions.?? We wanted to argue that the central and most urgent issue facing South Africa is not poverty but inequality; and that in South Africa, poverty and inequality were structural.? That our economy, while generating wealth for a few, is also a poverty machine, perpetuating and exacerbating steep and deeply rooted inequalities that threaten the basis of social stability and growth.?? We wanted to use the conference to cast a spotlight on this trend: to ask what kind of society was emerging, and to invite participants to explore what alternatives were possible. Could we imagine a different society, with different values?? What would such a society look like?
I was reminded of that aim on the first morning of the conference,? when the organizing committee met in the Birchwood’s faux-Italian coffee shop to discuss the start of the proceedings.? The conference would be opened by Deputy President Kgalema Mothlante? (on DVD, the man himself being required at the ANC NGC in Durban) ? after which there would be a recital by performance poet Flo.?? Flo was there, a shy, burly man with a ready smile.?? We chatted with him about his plans for his performance, and asked him what he thought he would recite.? What would his poems be about??? He thought for a moment and said, oh, social issues.? And love. There was a moment’s embarrassed silence. ?Love?? Well, I thought, perhaps that was precisely what we were here to talk about.? All my relations, and the world they exist in.
In the event, Flo’s poems were moving, thought provoking and disarming, ?and did their part to break ?the ice and get things moving. But pretty soon his words were forgotten, and the participants went ahead, doing what people do at poverty and inequality conferences: considering Lorentz curves, analysing political systems, discussing job creation and rural development. ? ?And at that level the conference was, as conferences go, successful. ?Makgetla’s presentation showed clearly how considering poverty on its own, in isolation, leads to narrow policies focussing merely on particular marginalized groups, while a focus on inequality leads to much? more searching questions on the need for social transformation. ?Other ?presentations illuminated various aspects of the structural roots of inequality ? the legacy of Apartheid, the failure to embark on an employment-intensive growth path, the continued dominance of capital- and energy intensive sectors, and the enormous levels of concentration and centralized corporate power in the formal economy. And there were searching discussions about particular policies and instruments ? social protection, small farmer development, community work programmes ? that could address these problems.
Thabo Mokale, a.k.a. Flo
But in the end, listening to Makgetla’s closing words, I realized that we too, by concentrating mostly on the material, monetary aspects of inequality and poverty, had missed the opportunity to think about the nature and quality of social relations.?? Sure, there were some good analyses on gender and?power relations in labour markets, and on the politics of pro-poor development.? But most of our discussions had focussed on material resources, on institutions, on money and social goods. ?Granted, this was not a poetry conference.? We were social scientists, government policymakers, development practitioners, community organizers; not philosophers or novelists. ?We talked about the things we knew.? ?But what about the more elusive issues? ?What about thinking about the kind of society that was emerging at more moral, existential or ethical level? ?What about the obligations and bonds between citizens? ?What about identity? What about the cordoned heart? ?What about the structures of feeling, non-feeling and disconnection created by how power, money and fear move in this harsh land?? In my own presentation at the conference, I had closed by asking what the scope was for a different project ? not technical poverty management, or adversarial populist struggle, but on civic solidarity. ?Stirring words. ? But how does one even start thinking about how such a politics might look? Somehow, it is hard to thinking about this issue without getting lost in clich?s and in potted thinking.
Hence this essay. ?My concern today is utopia; or rather, ?how to find a space for utopian thinking that can have grip or traction in this world. ?This blog is in the first place concerned with the myths we live by: the lenses through which we look; the resources at our disposal when we try to see what is found there, to imagine what it means, and to dream what’s possible.? And in the case of thinking about ‘equality,’ about social relations,? it’s hard to find a way of speaking that does? not cause us immediately to get lost in prefabricated stories.? Analyses of monetary inequality are all very well, but they are mistaken when they confuse the smooth curves that map the distribution of resources in society for social inequality which, as Charles Tilly has pointed out, is a thing of sharp distinctions, ?pregnant hierarchies, small differences with huge consequences: the difference between black and white, between master and slave, boss and employee. (Or to cite an example close to home for me, permanent university staff and talented researchers still on short-time contracts after 10 years of hard work.) The economists’ conception of perfect equality (everyone has the same income) is useful as a mathematical hypothesis, but it kind of misses the point. ?Utopian dreams of brother / sisterhood and inequality are deeply compelling (I still get choked up by that Lennon song…) but they’re closed, dislocated fantasies, shaped more by infantile longings for things not to be real than by a gritty assessment of what’s possible.?? And don’t talk to me about the South African variant: the way talk about racial relations shades so soon into sentimental fantasies about reconciliation, colour-blindness, impossible projects of reparation or essentialist lamentations about how terrible it is to be white.? It can be fun for those who do it, but it does not offer much help for those who have to learn to get along, accomplish tasks, feed kids and run businesses in a world in which difference and antagonism are irreducible, real, and maybe even valuable.
Income distribution in South Africa in 1996 and 2009 ((c) Global Insight).
So what can we imagine? What can and should we want? I don’t think I have answers.? What I have is some disconnected dots; and my guess is that thinking about them may not give me a route, but at least it may help us get a sense of how the map looks, and the lie of the land.
So bear with my meandering argument here. A good place is to start with where we are. Specifically, the Rosmead shopping centre, in Rosmead Road, Kenilworth, where academic Gubela Mji, head of the Centre for Rehabilitation Studies in the Faculty of Health at the University of Stellenbosch Health, was brutally assaulted in September of this year.? No-one knows what happened: Ms ?Mji was stabbed and had received blows to her head severe enough to leave her concussed, disoriented, and without a memory of the incident.? A security guard had found her: he thought at first she was a homeless woman, barefoot and bloody, vomiting blood and asking for an ambulance.? He sought help from? what the newspaper article coyly calls ‘a national private health care chain’ with offices nearby. But?in the eyes of staff there, Ms Mji, barefoot, dishevelled, incoherent and black, did not look like someone who could pay.? They assumed she was a vagrant, and vagrants don’t get care.? Only because the security guard who had found her persisted in his efforts did an ambulance service finally respond. ?The news story itself soon faded from view, with no follow-up after the first indignant headlines.
Ms Mji
Consider what is at play here ― both in the incident itself, and what makes it newsworthy.? Firstly, the story shows how stark the divide is between the existence of those of us who belong within the institutional grid of power and wealth at the centre of our economy, and those of us who don’t; and how harsh the consequences are.? It highlights the fragility even of privilege, and how easy it is to end up on the outside.? Critically, it illustrates with depressing force the continued reality of race in this country (had Ms Mji been white, would she have been so easily consigned to the streets, with only a security guard to fend for her?).? But the most shameful and perverse reality is this: the fact that this story is told at all only because Ms Mji is one of ‘us’, a member of the middle class; that we can identify with her and feel the fearful thrill of thinking, that could have been me. ?That’s why it’s a story. ? Homeless people are assaulted every day, and denied care. ?Everyday normality does not make the news.
This is the society we are creating, post-Apartheid.? Not only are we one of the most income-unequal societies on the planet. Not only is this inequality increasing. Not only have we created a society bisected by deeply unequal relations of power and privilege, in which the marginalized have, in truth, no rights at all. ?Worst of all, we live here heedlessly, comfortably. Our hearts and imaginations have been numbed.
And you can see how this kind of setup perpetuates itself, how it feeds the desire to build the walls higher, and how it drives the hungry ghosts of self-enrichment and pointless, conspicuous consumption.
So much for the obvious aspects of the story.?Gubela Mji’s assault is in this respect like any story of shocking crime, a event which can function as an example to illustrate some troubling aspects of our society. But there is more to say.
For Ms Mji is not merely the subject of a story, a mute exemplar.? She has a voice of her own. And by an irony rich and strange it turns out that in the past she has spoken eloquently and powerfully about these very issues. In a recent book about disability and social change, she is the author of a powerful and personal account on the exclusion and marginalization of the homeless disabled.? Entitled with eerie precision ‘Disability and homelessness: a personal journey from the margins to the centre and back’ she recounts a journey of self-discovery that began when, as part of an investigation into the conditions of disabled homeless people, she lived for a week in a homeless people’s shelter. Here she had to confront her own feelings of discomfort at being in the presence of people who she had been accustomed to experience as ‘rude violent and drunk.’?? Her subsequent reflections go right to the centre of the issue:
“…when I listened to someone’s life story, their problems, fantasies and struggles, something began to change. I was faced with the dilemma of wanting to hold on to something to distinguish ‘this kind of person’ from the kind of person I am. At the same time I found myself recognizing myself in their problems, fantasies and struggles….? I felt a deep concern at how far I had travelled from my rural childhood into the abstract violence of? Cape Town’s urbanity, a social violence underpinning and underpinned by the abstract violence of my professional training and its attendant medical-scientific categorizations, codifications and pathologies. ??I was discovering in conversations with others a capacity that had been slowly eroded by the rationality and instrumentalism of my medical training and the bureaucracy? and alienation of urban living”
This is the centre from which I think we can approach our question.? For the power of Mji’s story is not only that by an awful irony she eventually experienced the enactment on her own body, on her own person, ?of the abstract institutional violence of an unequal society.?? It is also the precision with which she fingers her own personal complicity in that institutional violence. Wanting something to distinguish ‘this kind of person’ from the kind of person I am: Write that in letters of fire on the Union Building. Write that ?on every coin and Rand note in the country. ? ?This is how the divisions of an unequal society are mirrored and perpetuated in the very capacity to relate, ?to engage with others. ?And at the same time, Mji insists that there is something that can be undone; something that can be reversed. We can recover our ability to identify.
I find these reflections helpful when I consider the debates and dilemmas that shaped the conference. In my experience, I was particularly struck by what seemed to be a polarization or a disconnect between two very different ways of thinking about inequality and what could be done about it.? Superficially, this disjuncture seemed to revolve around the hoary old sociological distinction between structure and agency. On the one hand, there were the researchers and analysts who emphasised the structural nature of inequality: the ways in which the domination of the economy by a highly concentrated, capital intensive corporate core undermined the basis for economic agency on the part of the poor.? On the other hand there were the voluntarist accounts of community response and self-help: presentations that seemed to suggest that all that was required to resolve the problem was optimism and self-belief on the part of the poor, with a little bit of help from the State. Obviously both views had value, and spoke to part of the truth. But they seemed to exist in parallel universes, dead to the truth of each other’s arguments, and unable to see their own blind spots
Seeraj Mohammed’s presentation of labour market trends in South Africa was a very good? example of the former.? Mohammed’s account of the distorted development of the South African core economy, the continued domination by the minerals and energy complex, the failure of the middle class to invest in productive capacity, the centrality of credit fuelled spending and the disastrous impact of these trends on employment intensity was lucid and compelling.? At the same time, what struck me most of all was the dispirited tone, and the disabling import, of this analysis. ? South African corporates and capitalists, Mohammed seemed to suggest, had acted selfishly to enrich themselves.? Would one expect anything different? Apparently not. This was simply the way things worked in late modern capitalism. As an analysis oriented at action, it did not seem particularly helpful.
At the opposite end of the spectrum was a presentation by Lebo Ramafoko about Kwanda, a project initiated by Soul City, South Africa’s public interest messaging television programme.? Charismatic and magnetic, exuding enthusiasm and confidence, Ms Ramafoko comes on like a South African version of Oprah, an impression strengthened by Soul City and Kwanda’s underlying message of emancipation through self belief and media attention. Poor local communities accessing funds for community works programmes are selected to participate in a national competition. Kwanda makes short documentaries about each community, showing their problems, highlighting the heroic efforts of local residents to address these issues; visits six months later, assessing the extent of progress made ? and then invites viewers to share their advice and opinions, and to vote for their favourite projects.
It is, ?in other words, social development through reality television, and pretty well done television too.?? The clip shown at the conference portrayed, with? the upbeat urgency and streetwise funky vibeyness that characterises youth television, the problems of a community called Peffertown, a peri-urban slum somewhere in the vicinity of Port Elizabeth.? Dreadlocked bergies puffed at white piles, depressed community members recounted awful stories of random violence.? The heroine of the story was a determined local girl called Denise, who worked to bring together community members to try to make things better.? Stocky and uncompromising, with a handsome, clear-eyed gaze,? she was a member of the local women’s rugby team, and she brought to her community engagement the same commitment and fierce passion she showed on the field.? It was ?compelling viewing; a kind of strange hybrid of Andy Warhol and Che Guevara: everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes ? but as a community activist.
Soul City's Edutainment Model
But how realistic is all this? Lebo’s enthusiasm tempted one to believe that this is how inequality could be combated in South Africa ? simply by using the connective capability of social media to create a virtual community founded on optimism and self-help.? But virtual communities are evanescent,? community works programmes are temporary measures that can only ameliorate the worst effects of neglect and under-investment.? If the core economy fails to generate jobs, can Kwanda do more but create hype and excitement around what is, after all, band-aid?
Those are important questions.? But at the same time, much would be lost if we simply dismissed? Kwanda and the voices it gave space for.? This is where Mji’s thoughts help us see something of value that we might miss.? For Mji does not treat the loss of community feeling,? the abstract violence of the withdrawal of social solidarity, as inevitable.? She reminds us that capacity for it still exists.? She links this capacity very much to her own cultural resources as an African woman from a rural area.? But the capacity exists in us all. It is nothing more than psychological projection ; the ability and the willingness to recognise something of oneself in another.
Kwanda thus highlights two key points.? Firstly, it gives an indication of how close to the surface our South African utopian imagination still lives; how real the underlying inclination of goodwill, fellow feeling and solidarity still is. ?And secondly, it has found a way of mobilizing this energy: it has used the power of television and media to allow parts of South Africa to have a kind of love affair with itself.
Love affairs are interesting things.?? The one we thought we saw is never there.? ?Projection is, after all, illusory. ?But it’s a productive illusion. It can start a journey of fruitful disillusionment, ?a? process of discovery and change. ?Much can be given and gained. ?For all its naivety? and cheesy optimisim, in other words, ?Kwanda does something the leftist critique of structure often fails to do: it constructs a subject position from which action is still possible.
So despite its limits, Kwanda suggests the possibility of a different way of proceeding.? In a way, it’s like the World Cup, where the dream of welcoming ‘the world’ allowed us to feel, for a few weeks, that the country where we would like to live really existed.? Not Singapore, not Switzerland, not Sweden, but a warm hearted, vibey, ordinary country in the South.? But the World Cup as an ideological project pivoted, really, on our deeply charged, troubled, relation with the North;? our desire to be recognized and seen by something we call the World.?? It was, in other words narcissistic ?in the strict sense of the word; a desire to appear in a certain way in the eyes of an authoritative Other. The moment that Other disappeared, the moment we were no longer on the TV screens,? the moment we could no longer see ourselves reflected in the distorting mirror of? the World’s gaze, the warm glow disappearted.
My question is really about the space, in South Africa, for a discourse of civic solidarity. ?Can we define ourselves not in relation to the world’s gaze, not in relation to a feared interloper, but to each other? ?Can we find a way to ?meet ourselves, “at our own door, ?in our own mirror”? ? Can we act as if ? in some way — divided by antagonisms, to be sure, riven by hurts, burdened by memory — ?there is, ?in the end, an ‘us’? ? Can we imagine that?
leaving the world: avatar
‘If a man could pass thro’ Paradise in a Dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, and found that flower in his hand when he awoke — Aye, and what then?’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As my friend Liezel said, it’s not ?Woody Allen, is it?? I know what she means.? Not that Allen’s movies are particularly cool or cerebral these days anyway; and Emmerich knows there are plenty cruder, more clich?d films.?? But there are few movies on the commercial circuit that convey their clich?s with such starry-eyed conviction, or ?where the stakes are quite as high.? In a decade of CGI-dominated, predictable films, what sets Avatar apart ?―?what makes it both worth fascinating and troubling―is the na?vet? of its message, ?the lyricism with which it presents its utterly unconscious material, the starkness of its moral universe, and the manipulative and crude way it resolves its central contradictions.? I’ve seen it twice now: ?each time I came prepared to see its flaws ―?the first time because of negative word of mouth; the second because, well, it was the second time ― and each time I found myself swept along heedlessly, transported by the sheer lyricism of the moviemaking.? And each time I felt flat and disappointed the next day, as if whatever had held me the night before had turned to dust.
The plot is simple: humanity is colonizing a jungle planet (actually a moon orbiting a gas giant) ?rather wonderfully named Pandora. The RDA corporation is strip-mining Pandora for a valuable mineral with the cringe-making name of ?Unobtainium.? The chief obstacle in their way is not only the local environment (the atmosphere is poisonous; and the jungle is a dense, teeming Darwinian hell) but also the natives, a humanoid species called the Na’vi. ?They are physically formidable (they have carbon fibre in their bones, ?are about twelve foot tall and ―the leathery Marine captain in charge of security tells us ―?they ?hard to kill); but more to the point, they ?are opposed to the human presence in their forest. ? ?A team of anthropologists ?have been trying to ‘civilize’ the ?Na’vi and to study them; as part of doing this (to build trust, I guess, and to avoid being killed) they don’t meet them physically: instead, they have their consciousnesses projected into vat-grown alien bodies ? the Avatar of the title.???The hero, Jake Sully, gets lost in the jungle in avatar form and accidentally ends up among a clan of the Na’vi called the Omaticaya. ?Instead of violent barbarians, he finds, they are sophisticated primitives; prelapsarian stone-agers living poetically in tune with their environment. Far from being a hell-hole, the forest is their paradise, and their spirituality is the worship of Eywa, a Gaia-like Mother Goddess embodied in a sacred tree.? Forced to make a choice, Sully goes over to their side, and organizes the resistance that sends the colony ? and humanity ? packing.
This is all familiar territory, of course.?? The plot is an old science fiction standard; large sections of it (particularly Miles Quaritch, the redneck ex-Marine security man) seem to have been lifted bodily from an old Ursula Le Guin novelette called The Word for World is Forest (Quaritch is the spitting image of Le Guin’s Captain Davidson, whom she calls the most one-dimensional character she ever created). ?And within the frame of this story, James Cameron and John Landau have decided to bludgeon us with every noble-savage, white-man-loved-the-Chieftain’s-daughter clich? and stereotype in the book.? From the word go, you know how it is going to unfold. It’s going to be Pocahontas meets Platoon.? It’s going to be The Mission meets Dances with Wolves.? The natives are going to be noble savages; the chief is going to be dignified and wise; his wife will be a sangoma with dreads and second sight; there will be a jealous brave who wants to kill Jake in the beginning but who becomes his comrade in the end;? the aliens will be willowy and high-cheekboned; they will spout Buddhist koans; ?they will be wisely in touch with nature and the spirit world …??but most of all, it will be a white man ? oops, sorry, a human being ??who awakens the natives from their rapturous trance and rescues them from the evil corporation.?? And so it all in fact unfolds. Moreover, all of it happens without a trace of irony, cheesy dialogue and all.
And yet, and yet. ?And yet the movie ?draws you in; and at times manages to move and enthrall. What is interesting about Avatar is the way in which it manages to bring off this predictable story, manages you to suck you into its world; not in spite of but because of the clich?s.
Roger Dean's floating islands
One of the ways in which it does this is through its gorgeous visual texture.? In one sense, the centre of the movie is not its story, nor its actors, but the visual technology of the film itself ? the hallucinatory beauty achieved through the mixing of 3D digital film making, live action and computer animation. ?Cameron famously waited for more than a decade for motion-capture technology to become advanced enough for his project, and it seems in this respect at least he is completely vindicated. ?The sophisticated animation techniques give ?filmmakers an imaginative reach and power not seen in film before: if nothing else, science fiction and animated films will never be the same again after Avatar. ? More specifically, the film works because Cameron has succeeded in translating ?into movement (and into three dimensions) the visual and imaginary language of decades of psychedelic SF art.? For me, that was a large part of the visual pleasure of the film.? As a boy who loved science fiction, one of my greatest treasures was Brian Ash’s sumptuous Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ?which I got, I seem to remember, for my thirteenth birthday; a book that ?catalogued the way in which SF art progressed from those crude early twentieth century magazine covers (Frank R Paul’s garish covers for Amazing Stories, for instance) to the psychedelic and otherworldly images invented by the airbrush artists of the 1970s. I remember hours spent gazing raptly at the strange, evocative visions of those artists : Stephen Hickman, Michael Whelan, ?and, above all, Roger Dean.
This, by the way is one rather interesting aspect of the film: no-one who has encountered the art of Roger Dean (many will know him from those Yes album covers) could fail to experience a shock of recognition.? Those strange, spindly, dragonfly-like spaceships; the unearthly sculpted landscape, the flying lizard creatures, ?the flying islands ? all of these seem not just to be quotes from Roger Dean, but straight cribs.??? Yet Dean does not seem to get any recognition in the credits.? As one fan site notes, when life imitates art, it’s one thing, but when art imitates art, it’s another.
But more is going on here than visual wizardry and artistic plagiarism.? In a way, what the movie does visually is to split the world into two realms: the technological world of the Corporation, all steel and bulkheads, shot in grim, greyed-out colours, and the magical world of the jungle, which is presented as a fairyland.? And I mean that literally.? In a sense, the visual disjuncture in the movie marks (or perhaps hides) ?a genre disjuncture, for it seems to me that in emotional, genre and mythographic terms the jungle aspects of the movie are not science fiction at all, but fantasy. ? In entering the world of the jungle, Jake Sully enters the realm of Faerie ? not another physical realm but another world entirely.? This is particularly ?obvious in the sequences where Jake first arrives at Home Tree, ?the natives’? city-in-the-branches.? Butterflies all round, glowing mushrooms, silver leaves, gargantuan trees with buttresses spiraling into the light: this is not Pandora, this is Lothl?rien; and the aliens are not humanoids from another planet, they are Tolkien’s Elves, imbued with all the powers and qualities proper to them.
Lothlorien. Original image at www.lilithschilde.com/LOTR/lothlorien.jpg
Middle-Earth, of course, is an interesting place.? It serves many ideological and psychological functions and holds many projections; but one of the most important achievements of Tolkien’s mythos is ?how it connected myth and archetype with, on the one hand, a distinctively late twentieth-century environmental imaginary (remember this about ?Gandalf: ?he was always the only wizard who really understood trees) and, on the other hand, a wistful, fey, elegiac romanticism.? At the heart of this romanticism, I always think, is a longing for lost innocence, for youth departed; a yearning for the mythical memory of the time that magic was real, when we were one with the world, before we ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
This is the psychic and symbolic terrain occupied by Avatar; this is what gives it its emotional and psychological charge: its seduction lies in the starry-eyed conviction, the unblinking na?vet?, with which it evokes the the possibility of Paradise, of being at one with the world, of living before the Fall.? Nowhere is this fey, wild magic more passionately conveyed than in the long sequence where Jake Sully, as part of his rite of passage into Omaticaya manhood, has to capture, vanquish, “imprint” , and ride one of the? flying lizards that live in the floating islands? in the sky above the mother tree.? Again, we are in solid science fiction clich? territory ( in this case, most obviously, the movie evokes Anne McAffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books, a series of fantasy bodice-rippers where dragon-riders form a similar life-long bond with their mounts).? But the sequence is ravishingly filmed. This is where the Roger Dean imagery really comes into its own. The camera gives us scene after unreal scene of unearthly beauty: the warriors swarming up a steep hill, snagging a passing root-tendril from a floating island, climbing up into the sky… each shot tops the previous one in eldritch weirdness and picturesque unreality. And the animation makes it all seem more real than real, bringing home on the screen ?the romance of the floating, flying world, the brutal, scaly weight of those lizard bodies, and the sheer thrill of flight. We understand, with a wrench, what this means for Sully, who in real life is wheelchair-bound: his ?rite of passage seems to have ripped him loose from reality altogether: ?an ex- Marine with a shattered body, ?locked in a metal pod connecting him to an artificial avatar, he is transported into this astonishing wonderland, scary and beautiful, in which anything can happen. And we the audience are taken along. ?Suddenly the plot is forgotten as we watch the lizard riders fly free through the sky; diving down sheer cliffs like so many BASE jumpers, lost in the exultation of flight. To my mind it is one of the most visually intense – and intensely lyrical – sequences cinema has ?given us in a long time.
But where to take all this?? Just as the film’s effectiveness lies in its power to evoke the dream of life before the fall, it is in the context of its evocation of ?this dream that the film’s ultimate ?immaturity, and its betrayal of its narrative responsibilities, ?needs to be grasped.? Having created this dichotomy ? between the broken world of humanity and the whole one of the aliens, between industrial, technological life and the magical one ??the film is posed with the challenge of figuring out how to resolve it. How indeed?
'Arches at Dawn', by Roger Dean
One way is the way charted by Tolkien, at least in the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. ?As you will remember, ?in both these stories ?we are continually being reminded that the time of magic is ending.? The elves are leaving Middle-Earth; and though Frodo can go with them, sailing to the Western Shores, the last words in the book belong ?not to ?Frodo but ?to Sam. ?Sam does not get to remain in Fairyland; he has to return home to Rose and the Shire (a Shire which, though it has been spared Pandora-like mining and Industrial Revolution, ?is now increasingly part of the real world); ?here Sam will have to labour in his garden and take up adult responsibilities, his feet on the ground. ?‘Well I am back,’ he says to Rose, turning his back on the Elvish world; and I have always thought it is a well-nigh perfect ending.
Arches at dawn, on Pandora...
Philip Pullman makes the same point, in a different way, in the Dark Materials trilogy ? not only in Will and Lyra’s courageous decision to close the door between the worlds, but also in Pullman’s intellectual debt to ?Kleists’s essay on the ?Marionette Theatre. ?In this essay, Kleist ?argues that the state of grace embodied in lost youthful innocence cannot and should not be regained. ? For Kleist, and for Pullman, there is no way back. ?We are thinking beings now, separate from the world. ?An angel with a burning sword guards the gate of Paradise. ? Re-attaining grace requires us to build the ?Republic of Heaven in this world: we have to go forward,??use what we learned from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, forsake innocence, ?take up adult consciousness.
But the film does not follow this path. ?It could have done so: we can imagine a movie in which Jake leaves Pandora in its unspoilt wildness, taking the Corporation with him. ?Or the film could give us the real ending, the outcome we secretly know is inevitable: the World Tree killed, the aliens enslaved and alcoholic, Pandora terraformed, the jungle destroyed or preserved only in isolated natural parks. ? But this is not the story the film tells; it dares not tell it like this. No: somehow the garden of Eden must triumph… ?no, more; it must triumph and maintain its original innocence.? That is what infantile desire (read: Hollywood convention) requires.
But the problem is that this cannot be achieved without breaking the unwritten rules of satisfying and true fiction. ?For a fictional victory to be psychologically true, for it to be resonant and satisfying, ?something must be lost. Frodo has to lose his living connection to Middle-Earth; Will has to lose Lyra; ?Ged has to give up his power. ?If nothing is lost, the prize offered by the story will be a hollow clanging shell. ?And so the movie descends into bathos: a pitched, ?armed confrontation between the Omaticaya and the forces of the Corporation. ?With this, despite all the visual ?wizardry, the movie loses its magic.? We are back watching some kind of post-Nam jungle firefight.? The point is not only that the Hollywood plot mechanics here are grimly familiar and utterly predictable, right down to that last physical battle between Sully, Neytiri and Quaritch (how many Hollywood movies right now are ending with one key figure fighting a desperate battle in a disintegrating exoskeleton? ?I count Iron Man, I count District 9, I count Avatar… ?) ?It is that, try as we might, we cannot ignore the uncomfortable fact that Sully prevails only by turning the Na’vi ?into that which they oppose.? One horrible jarring note is struck when we realize that somehow (it is never explained how) the Omaticaya appear to have acquired a lot of modern day electronic battle-comms gear, whispering tersely to one another over ?earbud headphones and microphones.? Another is when the wild beasts of the jungle rise up together against mechanized invasion.? This was not supposed to happen: ?As Neytiri explained earlier, Pandora’s ?mother-goddess looks after the balance of life and death itself; praying to her for help in an actual battle meant to go one way or the other is to misunderstand what she is about. ? ?The creatures of the wild are not supposed to be recruitable for tactical military maneuvres. But this is a Hollywood movie. ?Paradise may be Paradise, and the Balance of Life and Death is all very well, but if Nature really knew what was good for her, she would be revealed to be at heart American, viz. able to use organized aggression in the defense of Freedom.
Wild creatures, fighting for freedom
And so it goes. The movie supposedly ends in triumph, but there is something anticlimactic about it, with the Earthlings sent packing like so many British colonialists after a particularly successful Boston Tea Party. It all feels contrived and dishonest. ? And the heart of the dishonesty lies in the film’s refusal to contemplate the possibility of waking up, of coming back from Faerieland.
Waking up, of course, is a difficult challenge. As Jungian analyst Julian Davis often liked to remark (apropos, I think, of the myth of Orpheus), it is easy to enter the Underworld; the hard thing is to bring back into the real world the treasures and the wisdom you found there.? As I have argued elsewhere, Chihiro manages it in Spirited Away, going back into teenage life with her unsatisfactory parents, but having established her own connection with the River Spirit. ?The eponymous heroine in Coraline does not: ?she abandons the magical world, closing the trapdoor on the possibilities of yearning and desire.? Jake Scully, in contrast, ?follows the path of Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth: Ofelia, you remember, ?chooses not to go back to the real adult world, opting instead to live in Faerie ?forever. Similarly the real climax, the final punchline of the movie is not the political resolution of the humans leaving Pandora: it is the last shot, in which Jake’s Avatar’s eyes open, ?signifying that he has died in his human body, and can live transferred to this artificial one, in this fantasyland, forever.
What is this saying about the culture that made it? ?Two things stand out. ? ?Firstly, and most obviously, like Dances with Wolves and The Mission, the film’s psychological immaturity reflects and enables an underlying political dishonesty. ?It enables an American, first world audience both to have its cake and eat it. ? On the surface the film seems to critique present day American imperialism (the head of the mining operation, Parker Selfridge, is a smug, golf-playing, chubby ?Bush lookalike, and the beefy Quaritch at times appears to spout verbatim Bushisms) but it never undermines the underlying dichotomies and splits that emanate from the colonialist, imperialist viewpoint. ?The most obvious and juvenile manifestation of it is Scully’s role as rescuer, and the movies cheesiest, falsest note — worse even than that Unobtainium, worse than the battle radio — is the moment when Scully leads the Na’vi in the preparations for battle. ‘This is our land!’ he cries; and the appalling dishonesty of that ? moment is the dark mirror of the breathless yearning of the dragon flight sequence.??Less obvious, but as insidious, is the movie’s shameless exploitation of the??noble-savage myth. ? A lot of what is queasy-making about Avatar is what is queasy-making about a certain kind of alternative modern consciousness in the real world: I am speaking here of the creepy ‘new age’ ideology that deals with an awareness of the unsustainability and violence of modern, industrial life by making ‘primitive people’ and ‘first nations’ the screens on which all our own spiritual and political needs are projected. ?Queasy-making ?because of the detachment from real life this split requires and enables: ?its refusal ?to acknowledge the reality of our existence in this broken, post-industrial world and its failure to recognise ?the physical and political reality of the ‘others’ upon which these golden fantasies are projected. (This is what made District 9 so fascinating: in all its evocation of xenophobia and racism, it is a much more honest attempt to imagine the encounter with the alien ‘Other’).
The first Avatar: Hiro Protagonist, in Snow Crash. Image by nClaire, posted here: http://nclaire.deviantart.com/art/Snow-Crash-Hiro-Protagonist-132297300
The second thing is this: linked to this detachment is the way the film evokes the power and centrality of notions of virtuality in modern imaginative life. ?The film’s title and central device is crucial here. ?Jake Scully’s avatar, at least, is flesh and blood (and, presumably, carbon-fibre strengthened bone), and is, we are told, worth millions.? But in the real America, avatars are a dime a dozen. ?These days, ‘avatar’ does not stand for a divine manifestation; instead ?it is a word for a few lines of code, a pictogram with which you can denote yourself? – and thereby assume a whole new persona — when interacting with others on the Internet.? This usage of the ?word originally comes from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, where people use avatars to inhabit an imaginary virtual universe called the Metaverse.? Ten years after Stephenson’s novel, the Metaverse has attained actuality, for example in constructs like Linden’s Second Life, where you (or you avatar) can transport your whole social life into a virtual world,? interacting with others, having (virtual) sex, and (crucially) buying property. It all sounds rather awful and boring; but at least it is not real.? Reality… ?reality we don’t want.? Not in our dreams.
And this is what Avatar seems to promise, with its gorgeous visual textures, its sumptuous three-D, its notion of projecting your consciousness into another body, another world.? It seems to be a metaphor for the experience of cinema itself, for what it can promise.? The tagline for the movie ?is evocative, double edged.? Enter the World, it says.? But what it really means is, Leave it. ?The real world is too broken. ?Industrial civilization may be raping the planet, but dealing concretely and practically with our accountability for our impact in the real world is asking too much from us. ? ?Let us rather sleep. ?Let us depart into the virtual, disembodied world. ?Let us ?dream.
Walking out the Cinema Nouveau after seeing Steven Soderbergh’s new movie The Informant!, which tells the true- life story of Mark Whitacre and his role in the investigation into price fixing at ADM, I was suddenly aware of a crawling, itching sensation of dread. All at once, fearful thoughts about the past week at work came crowding in — struggles with financial reports to donors, attempts to develop new funding proposals, my own career plans and decisions — ? and it all seemed too much: doomed to fail, puny struggles in the uncaring eyes of the Powers that Be. ? ?In the car on the way home, my father — ?usually not someone given to complaint — started telling me about his hassles with his pension company. ?The date stamp on his ‘life certificate’, which he has to send them every year to keep the payments coming, had been wrong, and for weeks now he had been on the phone to faceless voices at the call centre, trying to convince the company he was still alive. ?I found it an unsettling story, ?an unwelcome reminder of how powerless we really are — ?we, the supposedly valued consumers at the centre of our present-day culture of money and consumption — when we lose our foothold in the distributed systems of process and information that undergird our lives.
It ? reminded me of a few lines from Lao Tsu which have ?been pinging around in my head for some time now. We don’t know who ‘Lao Tsu’ was. ?The name (Laozi, in the new orthography) apparently means simply ‘the old master’; ? ‘he’ may in any case not have been just one person: there might have been a whole line of old men (and women, I am sure). ?But the poems collected in the Tao te Ching, obscure and evocative, often seem uncannily resonant of lessons to be? learned today. ?When the Way is lost, it ?says in ?Chapter?38, there is always goodness. ?When goodness is lost, there is love or kindness. ?When kindness is lost, there’s justice. ?And when justice is lost … well, then you’ve got HR and Customer Relations Management. ?Well, that’s not the way he put it – the text says ritual ?- but you get my ?drift: ?we’re in trouble. In my current job as manager in a small university-based research unit, I have been much concerned with thinking about the systems and processes that can make working life either rewarding, empowering, enjoyable, or a living hell. ?(And those worlds, let me tell you, can be a hair’s breadth apart.) ?Systems are important, all right, and so are procedures, and so are policies aimed at addressing gender discrimination, or racialized exclusion, or unfairness. ?But the more I do this work, the more I am convinced that it is the integrity of our relationships with one another and ourselves, ?the quality of attention that we can bring into the workplace ? that really makes the difference. ?I am not sure whether a policy research organization operating in today’s divided, disconnected world can ever manifest the Way that ‘Lao Tse spoke about. ?Even “Goodness” (real virtue, which does not seek to be recognised as such) seems improbable. ?But Kindness seems to me to be a minimum requirement, and you’d be surprised how hard that is. ?Well, not really. You are also a subject of present-day neoliberal capitalist bureaucracy — who isn’t? — ? so unless you are delusional, you’ve felt it too:? that the rules and systems that regulate our lives in the present day world are not only impersonal and unfeeling, but dangerous? too, and that underneath their rationality there is something deeply disconnected. Ritual and empty form, they rule our lives, and so, ?indeed we’re truly lost.
Which is what this film captures so beautifully. When I first thought about the bare bones of this story – a whistle-blower alerts the FBI about price-fixing in his company, but is then revealed to be involved in blatant fraud on his own account, and loses both himself and his FBI handlers in an ever-deepening tangle of lies and delusion — I wondered, what would the point of such a story be? ?It is indeed a strange and baffling tale, and Soderbergh’s movie accentuates its bizarreness. ?The cast lurch about from frame to frame in expensive suits, like so many earnest penguins, accompanied by chirpy instrumental jazz; ?changes of scene are announced in absurd purple day-glo 70s lettering: ? you cannot take this seriously. ? And the action’s just surreal: the seriousness of the characters themselves is continually undermined by the ludicrousness of ?what is happening, as the plot itself descends deeper and deeper into unreason. ?Over and over again, the movie repeats what is in essence the same gag: Whitacre, who’s until now assured his handlers that this time he’s really been telling them the whole truth, calmly and without warning reveals a whole new layer of larceny and lies, laying them on the table with naive confidence, like a deluded poker player triumphantly displaying a losing hand. 
And what we laugh at is the silent consternation evident in the carefully blank face of his handler, or his lawyer, as he watches his client self-destruct and leave them in the lurch. ? This is what the prosecution in the Selebi case must be feeling right now, as their star witness calmly destroys his own testimony. The film plays it for laughs: ?they sit slack jawed and ?goggle eyed, immobilised by horror as they watch their case fall apart before them.?It’s funny, but it’s also not funny: though we laugh, it is with an undertone of discomfort. And no wonder. ?It’s a scary thing, getting lost in the layered realities of a pathological liar.
‘What was Mark Whitacre thinking?’ That’s how the movie’s official website frames it, and it’s a good question. ?Initially presenting as the unlikely hero in a story of white collar crime — ?a slightly geeky guy motivated by the wish to be the hero’ — ? he is slowly revealed to be a lunatic, a fabulist: all that is solid melts into air; you do not know what or whom to you believe; and you’re left wondering, with horrified ?fascination, what could be driving such spectacular self-destruction. ? Most accounts of the film explain it by referencing the facts of the actual story on which the movie is based. ?Whitacre was suffering from bipolar mood disorder, they say; and in any case, being an undercover snitch for the FBI ?would drive most people bats. ?And don’t you think that it is unjust that he got imprisoned for so long for stealing a paltry nine million dollars when AMD stole hundreds of millions?
Well, personally, I don’t think it that is ?a very satisfying explanation. ? For one thing, the real-world veracity ?of a story is actually one of its ?less interesting aspects when you consider it as a story. ?What matters in a story is how it is told, ?how the events cohere. ?That ?a particular thing actually happened is in a way neither here nor there; ? the question is what does it mean, what role does it play? ?And in this regard, when you look at what is actually shown on screen, the real-life explanation clearly does not hold. I am no clinician, ?but what we see on the screen is not a bipolar individual. ?Bipolar people may be grandiose, but they don’t act like this. ?This is something far more disconcerting and edgy. ?Whitacre’s ?steady stream of lies, his apparent lack of morals or shame, his utter disconnection from people around him, and, above all, his ceaseless projection of ?a confident, sincere exterior, in the teeth of all the facts and all shared realities: these are symptoms not of a mood disorder, but of a much more severe disturbance. ? I may be mistaken here, but I say ?unto you: DSM IV. Axis II. Cluster B. Check it out, and be afraid. ?And ?be ?very glad if you have not encountered this in your personal or working life. I am talking psychopathic, narcissistic, or borderline tendencies at the very least.
The Man Without a Self
This is where I think ?the casting of Matt Damon is particularly brilliant. ?Matt Damon comes to us from the Bourne trilogy, the story par excellence of the Man Without a Self — ?the man who does not know who he is, and whose only means of survival is continuous, improvisatory dissembling. But while in the Bourne movies we are invited to identify with the hero — those films are structured so that we continually share his confusion and his burning, single-pointed desire to survive – The Informant! puts you in the shoes of those who have to deal with the mounting chaos of all the ever deepening pile of lies. ?If you have been around it, you?will know how disorienting, how scary it is to encounter this kind of personality disorder, and how much chaos and confusion ?can be sown. ?The thing is not only that you are dealing with a disturbed or damaged person; it is that their essential malfunction is often disguised by ahigh degree of apparent competence, a persona of considerable force and conviction. ?But this mask is all there is. ? When it slips, you will find, not an ordinary vulnerable human being, but another mask, another cover story, an another impenetrable ?surface, presented with unflappable conviction. ?And it’s scary, because the trick is that we very soon start feeling we are the crazy ones: we find ourselves in a dizzying mirror-world where the ?ordinary rules of human behaviour and compassion simply do not apply.
In other words, it’s corporate culture. ?This, I think, is the real point of this film. For the most noticeable aspect of the film, other than the frightening comedy of Whitacre’s ever more surreal lies, is its relentless evocation of the banal ?surface of corporate life. Every frame is a picture of Guys in Suits, of bland hotel interiors, of boardrooms and golf courses. ? Every image is of a world which asks you to conform while never giving you any safety; ?a world in which there is no access to anything natural, spontaneous, unconditioned or real; a world in which your future depends on your fooling the system into thinking you are what you think it needs you to be. ? In one of the most evocative ?moments of the film, the soundtrack plays a long Aspergerish monoloue by Whitacre, a story ?in which one company executive notices another’s tie ?is the mirror image of his own, and then falls down dead. ?The visuals show us a long, still shot of one of the FBI operatives — a representative of one paranoid, conformist, conspiratorial organization sent to spy on representatives of another — crouching over a box of cornflakes, contemplating it like Rodin’s thinker: a shackled man, clutching a box of artificial food. ?The image captures an important aspect of the film: though this is a study of corporate power, no-one appears powerful. ?The men wear ?suits, but they are stripped of dignity; hunched; their bodies tense. ? Everyone in the film — cops, executives, secret agents, judges — leads a life ?subject ?entirely to impersonal, ?bureaucratic organisations; but even conformity cannot guarantee survival, for to depend on them is to depend on something ?entirely arbitrary, unreasoning, untrustworthy, baleful.
So how else to deal with such an irrational, baleful reality except by turning lying into a way of life? ? ?Marc Whitacre’s most poignant characteristic is his deluded desire to be the good guy, the guy in the white hat. Well who doesn’t want to be that?? But the co-ordinates he has chosen, the values by which he lives, are those of corporate America. ?And the point about corporations is not so much that they are soulless or impersonal. We should be so lucky. ?Think about it: endlessly grandiose; obsessed with appearances; lacking any sense of ?interiority; no capacity for vulnerability; ? bereft of compassion; ?virtuous only when trying to conform with the auditable, measurable indicators of virtue; and with only the most tenuous relationship to truth. ??If companies were people, they’d be psychopaths. ?These are the masters we have created.? No wonder sociopaths do so well in business. There’s a? deadly synergy between such folks and the culture they inhabit.? And this synergy is the secret of both Whitacre’s initial success and his eventual failure.
Whitacre and the ADM lawyers. Who's the real sociopath?
But failure kind of saves him. Most of us learn sooner or later that heroes exist only in stories; that we have to be learm to be the flawed,? ordinary people we really are.? Marc Whitacre’s tragedy is that for most of the film he is unable to make this shift: he can only try, over and over, with increasingly ornate fabulations, to be the hero he thinks he needs to be.?? By the end of the film it is unbearable to watch: we watch him soldier on, unstoppably, caught like a fish on his own hook of lies.? Only one person is able to release him.? His wife, who all along has been playing along with him, maddeningly supporting him in his insanity, softly says to him during one of his meetings, Darling, you have to stop this.? It is a terrible, delicate moment.? It is the only time love speaks in the film.? I’m not sure whether it is goodness. But it is ?kindness. She dares, oh so gently, ?to speak the truth; and at last he can be liberated from his cage of lies.
To be like us: ?Vulnerable. ?Slightly pathetic. Slightly lost: ?and therefore not so lost.
growing UP
UP is ?a typical Disney product: which is to say that it is goofily funny and thoroughly, unashamedly sentimental. ?It is also ?a Pixar product, which means it is ?it is witty, clever and technically sophisticated.? Above all, it is an American movie, so you know right from the start that you are in for an upbeat, moralising experience. More specifically, you know that? the movie will deliver a message,?? and that the message will most likely ?be the time-honoured hold-on-to-your-dream,? be-true-to-your-family, you-can-always-be-a-kid romanticism that has made Hollywood such an effective purveyor of opiate for the masses.
Except that it is not.? What struck me about UP was that, though it is funny, upbeat and sentimental, it is in the end also a very sad film.? Though its visual effects and artistry are ‘magical,’? gorgeously picturesque and charming, its main? concern is not with ‘living your dream’ but with relinquishing it; not with holding on to youth but letting it go.
As in the case of some of the other movies I have reviewed on this blog, much of its impact pivots on the way in which it uses the visual language of animation to create its imaginary world.? In a way, I suppose, the film that UP most clearly references in this respect is The Wizard of Oz: like Oz, the crucial dichotomy in the movie is? between its beginning in the quotidian real world, grey and grim, and the way the plot is suddenly relocated — ?literally by way of a leap into the sky — into a technicolour dreamworld. ? In this particular case, much of the charm of the film lies in the kooky, zany world the art of the animation allows us to enter. There’s a ?lot of absolutely standard Disneyesque fare – the broad comedy of Charles Muntz’s pack of dogs, for instance. ?But the film goes well beyond that, and takes us on a truly surreal flight of fancy. ?One moment we are watching Carl Frederickson ease grimly, resignedly into his day on a wonky Stairlift; ?a few minutes we are seeing ?a grumpy old man trudge through the jungle, towing behind him a fat Asian-American boy, a motor-mouthed dog… and a house, suspended in the sky by a multicoloured cloud of helium balloons. ?The loopiness becomes truly florid when the boy and the dog befriend a huge iridescent tropical bird – a kind of outsize ?Seuss-look cross between an ostrich and a dodo, ?which falls in love with the boy Russel, attempts to swallow Carl’s walking cane, and is given to huge, wailing, passionate cries for no discernable reason. ? ?We have left behind not only ordinary reality but also the cutesy world of Disneyland. What is being referenced here is not Jungle book or Oz, but the rather more fey, surreal, cartoonish fantasyland of Krazy Kat. ?Krazy Kat is the moment at which American cartoons left popular culture behind and turned into something far more philosophical-poetical; and the surreal visuals of UP works in a similar way to signal that we are now in much more complex metaphorical territory.
A panel from Krazy Kat
So just what is Carl up to here? ?Dealing with his unlived life, is what; and it is this that gives the movie its particular mix of uplifting positivity and sadness. ?The most interesting aspect of the film is the contrast between the visual madness of the journey across the rocks towards paradise falls and the story of age, unacted desire and loss tersely summarized in its first few minutes. ?The point film very effectively makes in the initial set-up is not only that Carl is settling grumpily into old age; it is that we know his crusty testiness is a defense against loneliness and pain. ?We know that the loss of his and Elly’s dream – flying off into adventure, visiting Paradise Falls – is but part of a greater loss; ?the loss, firstly of Elly herself; but also the loss of what their marriage could have been. ?We are never told what went wrong with Elly’s pregnancy, but this is the moment at which the tone of the film is set: ?the images whirl past, the story of a young marriage economically told in an overlay of images (I thought of Buster Keaton’s Johnny and Anabelle at the end of The General) – and suddenly we are seeing them in the obstetrician’s office: Elly’s being comforted; they’ve lost the baby; and though we see them settle into a kind of happiness, ?it is the thin happiness of the childless couple, making a life for themselves after the future they’ve seen in the clouds has been taken away. ? A sad and grown-up note to strike in the middle of an animated feature; and the artistry 0f UP lies in the way it bridges this moment of loss with the dizzy adventures that follow.
So: what, in mythopoeic terms, is Carl’s task? ?The risk for him is that he dies, never having fully entered into life. ?He has to make his soul, on his own, as a grown man, without his childhood hero and without his Elly; he has ?to embark on the journey traveled by of Dorothy in Oz -and of Chihiro, Coraline and Ofelia, and of Alice. ?He he has to enter into relation with the dreamworld: with desire, and with the powerful forces that slumber in himself, behind the facade of the mild, grumpy middle class man he seems to be. ? This is the first interesting thought thrown up by the movie: that while it might seem that the compromises Carl and Elly make — giving up on their dream of traveling to South America, ?putting their savings instead to the demands of adult, capitalist life — are adult choices, realistic ones… ?these choices also mean that Carl at least, is ‘stuck’ ?in time; or stuck in relation to the dream. It remains a dream, idealised and unchanging, symbolized most evocatively in the movie by Elly’s scrapbook of her plans to travel to Paradise Falls; after the page titled ‘ Stuff I am going to do’, the film suggests, the book is blank; the acts unacted.
And the second interesting thought is that to live your dream, to act it out, is to lose it. ?This is what Charles Muntz, the great explorer never realises: ?in love with his image of himself, he is stuck in perpetual narcissistic adolescence: his self-contained existence with his army of slavish dogs is not admirable at all but faintly ridiculous. ?And that’s what Carl too has to learn. ?When he finally arrives (he thinks) at the end of his journey, ?mission accomplished, it is a moment of anti-climax. ? We know that ?he is wrong: ?we know his real mission is not to act out his promise to Elly, but to help Russel save the bird from the clutches of the horrid Muntz. ?Didn’t he cross his heart? ?He sits down in his easy chair to look through Elly’s book – and he realises he misunderstood her. ?The pages in the last part of the book are not blank after all. The book is full: it is filled with pictures. ? She had her life –but he has not had his, not all of it. ? His last ?job?is to relinquish her ?and to be true — ?not to the past, but to ?his promises to the living.
The conclusions are interesting and complex. ?You should not give up your dreams, the movie seems to say, because if you do, they will never let you go. ? You should act on them; enter the dreamworld. But ?what that will give you is not a spot by Paradise falls, but your bum on a kerbstone, ?watching cars pass by, sharing an ice cream with a winsome, garrulous, enthusastic boy. ?The blue bird of happiness, the film suggests, is never where you think it is. ?It is eight feet tall, ?ungainly, ?and ?completely flightless: its cry is a preposterous yawp of love; ?name is Kevin, and he’s a she. ? On no account ever try to capture it. ?Feed it chocolates, and defend its freedom to disappear into the labyrinth where no-one else can follow. ?You will be rewarded with danger, and craziness, unpredictability. ?And you ?just might make some new friends. I’m in.
the comfort of enemies, or two unconsciousnesses
So, how interesting. ?As the terrible stuck-ness that framed our political debate in the dying years of Mbeki’s reign recedes, we are entering a time when the national debate seems both hopeful and frightening. ?Hopeful, because so many things are up for discussion again, and because there is space for a new, more grounded realism. Frightening because of the ugliness and narrowness that so many of us seem to allow ourselves.
On the whole, it is a time of interesting, alarming crisis. Everything is on the boil; every national institution is in trouble. ? ?The first lot of can-do technocrats ?are looking somewhat crestfallen. ?Although there have been some success stories (we’re good at collecting tax!) there have been some massive blapses (quite a lot in fact: think Eskom, SABC, SAA; think JSC, Telkom, OBE; think communications policy!) ?We’re speeding down a twisty mountain pass — and folks, the bus belongs to SA Roadlink. ? ?But we’ve not rolled over the cliff’s edge yet, and there’s some benefit in our current situation. ?To be sure: some of the disasters are truly dire. ?Of all that’s happened, ?the horrendous ?legacy of Mbeki’s ?HIV / AIDS policy and the massive betrayal (I can think of no other word) of our youth by our education policy and institutions will cast long dark shadows over our future: here Nkosazana Zuma, Mbeki, Manto, Bhengu, and their ilk have truly done us lasting damage. ?But most of the other problems, though serious, are fixable. ?Our political class ?have learned that they are not infallible – or if they haven’t, the voters have. ? ?There’s a lot of egg on a lot of faces. ? The shine is off the rainbow nation: we’re battered, bruised and tarnished. ?Nationally, you might even call it a depressing time
And that’s good news. ?For remember what Melanie Klein, for one, had to say about depression. ? The depressive position, she argued, was a developmental stage. It arises when the infant realises that Bad Mom and Good Mom are one and the same: when fantasies of magical redemption and fantasies of endless persecution make way for something much more painful, and much more healing: living in the real world, whose sweetness can only truly be experienced when we realise that we are alone, that we ?will die, that everything’s a fuckup: that I’m not magical, and neither are you, and we have to start the difficult business of being grown-ups — a thankless task, really, but can you show me an alternative?
Robert Bly writes about this in a lovely little poem called Where we must look for help. ?When Noah was drifting on the flood, looking for land, ?neither the eagle nor the dove or the ‘split-tailed swallow’ were of much help: it was the crow ?that came back with mud on its feet. ?’The crow, the crow, the spider-coloured crow / the crow shall find new mud to walk upon.’ ? I love that line, because I love the icon of the crow, the harsh-voiced bird that, in myth, speaks unlovely truths; and that ?in real life survives on roadkill, wily and alert. ? And I think what hope there is for South Africa lies in our ability not to find ?a highway to the future, but to ground ourselves in that black unlovely muck. ?We need to find ways to enter this dark, humbling and unheroic time: a time when we can give up the magical, romantic projection onto the ‘Beloved country’ and forgive it — ?forgive ourselves for being what we are.
The problem with the depressive position is that it’s so damn depressing. ?You have to stop dreaming of the country beyond the rainbow, and start thinking about the difficult, humbling, limited interventions: the triage required of us in the ?here and how. ?But then, there is nothing that forces you to do this. ?Why?bother? You could also ?keep on investing more and yet more energy in the attempt to keep the dream ?of Dreamland going.
This is the frightening bit. ? For as the smoke of the Mbeki-versus-Zuma battle clears, and as the outlines of ?a new terrain of struggle are slowly revealed, it is evident that there is a powerful dynamic in our country centering on the desire to stay with blindness.
This is the way of the split-tailed swallow in Bly’s poem, and at the moment, it takes the shape of two unconsciousnesses: ?two parallel, competing and yet deeply complementary discourses of reality-denial. ? ?The one belongs to the camp that is forming itself around the likes of Julius Malema, Judge John Hlophe, Andile Mngxitama and their entourage: a camp that projects themselves as the voice of pro-African transformation, as the enemy of white domination; but which in reality can only speak from the place of powerlessness ?and victimhood. The problem with this group is not only their narrow ethnocentrism, their essentialist, racist, homophobic take on what African identity must be. ?It is not only that this discourse seems to function mainly as a way of providing ideological cover fire for the self-aggrandisement and enrichment of a particularly narrow-minded, bigoted section of our middle class. ?It is that as far as I can see (and I am on the white side of the fence, mind you!) the black subjectivity being articulated here is utterly disempowered, because it seems to pivot on a refusal of the possibility of a black person being held accountable (by anyone). ? Thus even the awful Leonard Chuene has been told by the ANCYL that he should not apologise for his lies about Caster Semenya. ?Now it is plainly true that there are many white racists who see corruption or incompetence everywhere, even where ?it isn’t. But the tragedy for our national process is that it is now seems increasingly possible for those who really are corrupt, or delusional, or ?who have acted foolishly, to accuse any and all critics of racism, or of resistance to transformation. ? ?Where is the honour, where is the power, where is the leadership in that? ??Frank Talk – the real one, not his pale imitator – ?must be spinning in his desolate, almost forgotten, little-honoured grave.
The second discourse is the mirror inverse of the first, its ‘racial’ and ideological twin. ?It is the voice of white denial, of a narrow, ideological, illiberal liberalism that refuses to acknowledge the persistence of racialised power relations and the ideological legacy of white supremacy in post 1994 South Africa. ? ? It uses the semblance of non-racialism (an insistence on ‘colour blindness’, ?lip-service to meritocracy) to sabotage the equitable transformation of unequal ?’race’ relations. ? ?While never overtly racist, ?it pursues the agenda of protecting the vested interests of the privileged white elite created by Apartheid, ?by wrapping the interests of this elite in a discourse about ‘world class cities’, ?global ‘standards’, ?governance and crime.
These days, this second voice has become less strident: instead of speaking flamboyantly and accusingly from the centre ?it tends to mutter bitterly from the shadows. ?I’ve remarked on some of its manifestations before, when I’ve written on Huntley and Disgrace. ?But it’s not only the voice of elite alienation or white underclass complaint. ?You can find its views confidently articulated in the mainstream as well, most obviously in the bumptious arrogance of the Democratic Alliance which, despite its own chequered history, ?acts as if it has the franchise on clean government; and which, though protesting always that it is not racist, has made its political mark by playing forcefully and effectively to white and ‘coloured’ fears.
The interesting thing about these two discourses is that though they appear formally opposed, they’re ?really deeply co-dependent. ? They’re enemies, but the emnity is of that special kind: ?it is that comforting emnity that exists where each adversary finds in the existence of the other proof of their own ?deepest, fondest fears and the vindication of their stance. ?The comforting enemy is the person without whom you would not be yourself, to whom you only have to glance to find the validation of your fear and rage. ? ?This is perhaps most richly illustrated in the cringe-making performances of Messrs Malema and Shivambu. ?Shivambu, you will recall, ?attained national notoriety for his blustering response to those who challenged him about his allegations that DA premier Helen Zille slept with her white colleagues. ? ?Malema’s most recent escapade even more tawdry: ?he stands accused of beating up a neighbour who came to complain about a noisy housewarming and now denies those allegations, saying that ?it is all ?all a plot by the spies of Helen Zille. ? This is so silly that I do not know whether to laugh or cry; ?our dear GodZille is famous for not knowing how to pick her fights, but the idea of she and her cabinet of aged pale males plotting deep into the night to trip up Julius is worthy of a second-rate Hayibo story, not of serious political discourse.
Helen Zille at the announcement of her all-male, white dominated provincial cabinet
But of course the compliment’s returned. ?Where would the DA and its ilk be without the Africanist axis? ? Chris Roper has publicly declared his love-hate affair with Malema , but he’s not the only one. ?Just as Hlophe casts himself as the agent of African transformation without actually lifting a finger to change anything material in the judiciary, ?white DA denialism is content to look at Hlophe and their crowd and merely find in their existence confirmation that at root, this is a continent of Idi Amins. ?Or more properly, this is a continent in which any African politican has got to be either a ?Nelson Mandela (magically statesmanlike, laundered of all white fears, ‘transcending’ their local roots) or one of a set of interchangeable,?indistinguishable?goons. ?They are not able to engage with the very real difficulties and political threats posed by the rise of xenophobic, conservative and authoritarian African essentialism, because firstly they cannot acknowledge the need for social transformation which that essentialism attempts to appropriate for its own ends, ?and secondly they cannot see African politics ?other than through their colonial-racial lenses. ? Through this lens, African demands for change are not responses to real problems, but the expression of an essential corruption and a primal irrationality. ??This evident, for example, ?in the media-pillorying of Malema’s school achievement. ?(Personally I must say that I have no problem with his 20% for woodwork, if that was ever his grade: ? I must confess that I did not do much better in that messy, unforgiving discipline ). ?More subtly, it is also evident in the way white attitudes to Zuma have flip-flopped in the past year. ?Present-day white relief ?at the fact that he seems to be a pretty competent president is a direct correlate of the way he was turned into a black bogeyman in the days running up to Polokwane.
It seems to me this kind of thing can run and run. ?On the one side, ?the smug and dull refusal to recognise the reality of entrenched racial inequalities and colonial mentality; on the other an increasingly shrill Afrocentrism that calls for a ‘debate on race’ while trying to simplify and flatten all discourse on racial problems. ? ?Everything done by the one side will justify the excesses of the other. ? No doubt at a certain?level this will be gratifying to those involved. ?But what is lost is the opportunity for a real and sensible debate on what can be done to address Apartheid’s legacy.
That is why I think it is necessary to say, with as much gentleness as possible: a pox on both your houses. ? That is why I agree with Zackie Achmat’s refusal to give politicsweb the right to publish his criticisms of John Hlophe. ?Charting a genuinely anti-racist politics depends, I think, on the ability to wrest the debate away from these mutually constituted, co-dependent, ideologically narrow, blinded camps. ? Creating a democratic South Africa, where we can encounter one another in new ways, ?less shaped by predetermined paths mapped out for us by Apartheid society, ?requires that we map out a third terrain, ?beyond these two mirroring unconsciousnesses.
To live on this terrain is, as I’ve said, to some extent a saddening business. ? It requires an honest tally of the losses and the recognition ?of irreversible damage. ?It means foregoing the illusory safety brought by high walls and gated suburbs, and entering into a real relation with our fellow citizens. ? It means letting go of many heroic dreams. ?Instead of trying to make an entirely new South Africa, unstained by its past, I fear that we may be reduced to trying to make the present one more?livable, more merciful, more various, more kind.
But that’s not a bad thing to do. ?It does not require the abandonment of a radical politics; in fact I think it requires its enlargement. I think it requires the addition, alongside the awareness of large scale social injustice, a more fine-grained, interpersonal and existentialist concern. ?A door, one of Le Guin’s characters says in one of her short stories, is opened by a very small thing — ?a key. Liberation is not liberation ?if it has not rooted itself in our fragile ?bodies, if we cannot live it in the freedom and authenticity of our everyday encounters.
I would like to try to abjure the rough power of ?the simplistic splitting that turns our multifarious country into ‘two nations.’ ?I would like to learn to live without the comfort of enemies. ? Not in the promised land, but in the gefokte land. ?I think we will find that there is much to love there.
lost in africa: disgrace, whiteness and the fear of desire
OK, let me start by saying straight up: I did not like this film. ?Disgrace left a bad taste in my mouth which I’m still trying to spit out. ?Which gives me pause.? I have my doubts about reviews that are all about tearing something down. ?Disparagement’s so easy.? Just the other day I had occasion to remember Toni Morrison, at the beginning of her brilliant essay on whiteness in American literature, Playing in the Dark: my project, she says, arises from delight, not disappointment.? That, I think, is the proper attitude of the critic: to take seriously the artifact as it is given into her hands, and ask, really ask: beautiful thing: how are you made?
So let me also say, right at the start, this one is exquisitely made. It is a work of art.? John Malkovich’s performance is as finely poised and savage as anything he has ever done. The score is ravishing. The intertwining themes that animate the book are brilliantly rendered. ??It is beautifully shot; everything about it is meticulously made.? And therein lies the rub. For all this artistry works to deliver an unpleasant, I think ?poisonous payload; ?the melody is all the more false for the very care and deliberateness with which every note is played.
Well. As you can see, my words don’t arise from delight. ?Nor do they arise from disappointment. ?Rather, I ?want try to put my finger on what is that causes the queasiness and distaste this film aroused in me. ? ?Part of the reason, quite obviously, is its ?barely concealed racism, the way it presents — ?and ?renders culturally respectable — ?a ?particularly hateful vision of South Africa after liberation, ?of its people, and of the place of whiteness within it. ?But the racial message is only?part of a deeper, darker malaise. Something really nasty’s wrong here. ?A life-denying, fastidious, disconnected, self-pitying narcissism permeates this film. ? Permeates it, I say, because I do not think it is being named or shown. ?Rather, I think we’re in the presence of unconsciousness: ?the film asks us to be complicit or identify with a tawdriness that it participates in and honours, but which it does not understand.
Let me start with the aspect of the film that is most compelling, and that stays longest in my memory: ?its artful, ?deliberate, but ultimately failed engagement with the surface ?texture of present day South African life. ?It’s interesting to compare this film with District 9. D9 is profanely non-realist (a spaceship, looming above Johannesburg? ?A squatter camp, crawling with eight-foot, ?insect-legged aliens?) – and yet achieves a gritty, ?giddy verisimilitude. ?Disgrace is elaborately, self-consciously exact, littering the screen with hundreds of tiny details carefully got just right: the dinnertime conversation at Harbour House restaurant ( I see David Lurie got a table by the scenic window, which I never achieve); the white enamel bread tin on Lucy’s kitchen countertop; the dowdy straw-hatted white women in the farmers’ market in Grahamstown; ?the careful, casual elegance of David and Lucy’s clothes, sourced from just the right shops in Kalk Bay and Constantia Village; ? the mediocre beige cloth hangings in Mr Isaacs’s George home. ?All these things are precisely, obsessively, tastefully ?just right. ?But all they achieve is to make the missteps that much more glaring.
The most obvious example of this is of course the film’s bizarre transposition of Grahamstown into what seems to be the Cedarberg. ? There seems to be ?no coherent reason for this disorienting move. ?(Steve Jacobs’s stated reason is that the Eastern Cape is not picturesque enough, which frankly makes me doubt his sanity). ? No doubt an American or British audiences will be none the wiser. But the Eastern Cape is South Africa’s Sert?o, its Red River Valley, its remote and distant moral centre. ?All ?the stories of what happens there are indissolubly entangled with the outlines of its densely populated, desperately beautiful bare eroded hills. ? Seeing Disgrace played out in the prettily scenic, pastel-toned ?hillsides of the Western Cape is a bit like seeing West Side story transposed into the Alps, ?or John Wayne galloping around on a Shetland pony.
A subtler example of this same strange dislocation is the curious absence from the film of today’s post-industrial technological culture. ?As best as I can recall, there is with one exception, not a single mobile phone in the entire movie. ?For anyone who has hung around in the rural Eastern Cape, ?where chinese traders hawk consumer electronics on the pavement of every rural dorpie, and where every livelihood depends on something that is happening a thousand kilometres away, this is just baffling. ? (And it can’t be ?a matter of historical faithfulness to the mid-nineties, for the film quite clearly happens after 2005, if the cars are any indication.) ?It’s rather as if everyone has been transported bodily into another era, a South Africa untouched by the profane, demotic commercialism of present day consumer culture. ?The same time-warp is evident in the depiction of the party where Lucy’s tenant/landlord Petrus ?celebrates his land transfer. ? Who are these strange black people, dressed in such awkward, dated ways? ?And what is this music they are playing? ? Where are the gritty, nasty township beats? Where’s Chiskop, Bongo Maffin, or ?(if you really want to be cliched), Mandoza? ?Or, if the point is that Petrus is old-fashioned, at least Simphiwe Dana? ?Instead, we have this strange accordion-playing trio, straight out of some imaginary rendition of the fifties. ?One is left peering at the screen in irritated consternation, trying to figure out just where all this is supposed to be happening. What country is being imagined here?
The answer, I think is clear. It is, guess what, “the beloved country.” ?It is South Africa as scenery. ?It is ?that well known, often rendered, but entirely imaginary landscape of the high-culture, ?patrician, ?white English South African literary imagination. ?It is Smutsworld. ?It was ?originally rendered freshly by Bosman, ?Marais and Paton (and, yes, consciously and ironically by Coetzee), but by now it has become a literary trope, a cliche. ?It is the very opposite of District 9: it is Stephen Watson country; the landscape we need to imagine ourselves in when we white South Africans need to experience ourselves as poetical, literary, ?tragic and refined: a landscape that is always imagined as empty, even when it is populated.
Where this falseness finally becomes ugly is in the depiction of the relationship between Lurie and his daughter on the one hand, and the baleful, enigmatic figure of Lucy’s black tenant Petrus. ?At first glance the casting of Eric Ebouaney in this role is perplexing: the film clearly spent a fortune on accent coaches, but try as he might, Eric just sounds like a foreigner. ?Could they not have cast, even, say, John Kani? ?But Kani, you see, would have imbued that role with humanity and warmth. ?You would have liked Petrus, had Kani played the man. ?And what Ebouaney gets exactly right is the cold, robotic indifference required of him in this role. ?It is an astonishing performance, because what it portrays is so horrible and so false. ?Anyone who knows anything about patron-client ?relations among white and black in the rural Eastern Cape countryside would be able to tell you: ?Petrus’s matter-of-fact callousness at the rape of his landlady and neighbour would be, in terms of the codes of rural conduct, simply unthinkable. ?And I am not denying that murder and rape do happen. But a person of his age and status and situation who behaves in this way would be thought a psychopath, by white and black alike.
But you see, reality is not what matters here. ?For Petrus is not a real person; he is a figment of the imagination. ?He is a projection of a very particular kind. For what the movie does is to??present to us ― and lend ?support to ― a very specific, and enormously prevalent, ?racialized fantasy about what South Africa is today. That fantasy is, you might say, the world according to Brandon Huntley: ?liberated South Africa as a hell for white victims. In this aspect, the movie is unremarkable. The story it repeats is told again and again everywhere around us – ?from the embittered complaining you might hear on Radio Pretoria to the angry excesses of sites like zasucks.com.
Its key propositions are familiar: to be white in South Africa, it says, is to be simultaneously the sole custodian of civilisation and morality and to be stained, if only through association, with moral responsibility for the brutality of Apartheid repression and unearned privilege.? This also means that to be white is to be the object of black rage.? The form that this rage will take is rape, theft, violent crime; uncontained rapaciousness, savagery, uncouth bestial cruelty. Neither the state nor law-abiding black people can be counted on to offer meaningful solidarity or? reliable protection. ??White guilt and global hypocrisy mean that the world will look away; so this violation will be ?underpinned by isolation and marginality. To be white in South Africa is therefore to face a choice between, on the one hand, flight and embittered nostalgia for the sundrenched homeland and, on the other,? abject consent to violation. ?Such ?consent will ?not bring redemption. ?Instead it will bring an equally embittered isolation, far from the safety and security of the normal world where other whites — whites just like us — live lives cosseted in ignorance and moral certainty.
And so on.
All this is fairly evident, and should be obvious, I think, to anyone who has eyes to see. ?But in a way it’s incedental. It is ?epiphenomenal. For what what makes the whole film hang together, its moral core, is not simply this frightened, isolating view. ?It seems to me that the film’s endorsement of the racist fantasy is linked to a deeper, more elusive problem, which is its underlying moral and existential stance – its denial of the possibility of relationship as such; its fear of life; ?its murderous attitude towards desire.
Perhaps one way to frame this problem is to note, that brutal and inhuman as its portrayal of ?black South Africans is, that is as nothing to how the movie portrays the whites. ? Here, Malkovich and Haines are brilliant in their roles. ?They perfectly convey the maladies the characters embody. ?Two sorrier specimens of humanity cannot be easily imagined. ?Malkovich’s feral, distant, self-hating Lurie is precisely acted: a man who professes himself to be a servant of Eros, but whose predatory seduction of his student borders on rape; ?a man who claims to follow desire, but who is clearly unable to enter into the vulnerability and openness that desire brings. ?He quotes Blake on how it is better to murder an infant in its cradle than to nurse unacted desire, ?but in reality he cannot allow ?desire to live. ?Here, the dogs lay a central role in the film. What can a dog do but enter trustingly, vulnerably, innocently into life and connection? Lurie cannot suffer that to live, because for him, to live thus is to suffer. ?The only thing, the kindest thing you can do to desire, is to snuff it out, to kill it on the vet’s steel table. ? As for Lucy, she’s even more a caricature of of hysterical disconnection from the instinctual self. ?She’s nothing but a victim; she sets up her own attack with neurotic, self-destructive precision.
The movie’s world, then, is a world in which connection and relationship is impossible. ?The alternatives are simple. ?On the one side is the world of whiteness, which is a world of solitude, of neurotic disconnection from instinct and desire. On the other side, a bestial blackness — ?vigorous but incapable of kindness, ?insensible to suffering, coldly materialistic, harshly physical. ? They are, of course, two sides of the same coin; two aspects of the same fantasy.
Much can be written here, of course, about the movie’s relationship to the book. ? As several critics have pointed out, the novel gives you the added complexity of the character’s interior dialogue. Events and acts depicted on the screen can, in the novel, be rendered with additional layers of irony and self consciousness. ?This is particularly true of Coetzee, who always writes to distance the reader from the concerns of the protagonist. ?Coetzee’s writing at times is distinguished by an implacable, basilisk gaze; it is as if South Africa has given the world its only Cthuhlu novelist, regarding the writhings of its human subjects ?with an icy, million-year-old gaze, as if they are maggots under a microscope. ? One might with reason wonder why that kind of thing is as widely admired as it is – the guy’s being pipped for his third Booker, if I hear aright. ?But that’s not the point here. ?Let us simply note that it could ?be that Coetzee the novelist is dissecting all this disfunction, splaying it pitilessly on the operating table for us to see and understand.
It could be. I do not know. But that most certainly is not what is happening in the film. ?The movie treats this life-denying, fearful, disconnected stance as if it is the only way to be. ? No alternatives are offered, no different perspective is explored. ?This self-pitying vision, the film suggests, is how things are. ? ?You can stay in the white citadel, where you may still attempt to ravish, coldly and without pleasure, ?the reluctant daughters of the former servant class. They will coolly submit, but they will have their revenge. ?Or you can give up the trappings of privilege. ?You can suffer your daughter to be raped, and you can sit on your back stoep, picking out desultory phrases on your mandolin, while the savage children of the new nation leer at you over the barbed wire fence.
Why?
Because you would die rather than enter into relationship. You would die rather than take that risk.
Hmmm.
You know what???I don’t buy it.
the alienation effect: further thoughts on D9.
It has been an interesting week. District 9 has continued to excite much interesting debate, and so has the damned Huntley affair. I have lately been?laid low by a virus – relax, it is neither H1N1, nor something of alien provenance – just a middle-ear infection; but it gave me opportunity for many fevered dreams, in at least one of which I found myself living on a rainy pine-infested landscape, sharing a homestead with Wikus, Brandon Huntley and Caster Semenya, who for some reason appeared to be white. The pine forest referencing not so much Brandon’s (now, it seems, perhaps temporary home) but the book I am reading now, Annie Dillard’s gorgeous novel of North American colonial life, The Living. Which is another kettle of fish entirely.
For now, what want to do is to offer a few more thoughts on that fascinating movie. ?I have been to see it a second time; I have learned a lot from other reviews and ?from some thoughtful and perceptive comments on my previous post; ?I have been trawling the ?internets with delight and alarm. ?I’ve also had the occasion of an interesting email exchange with Barnor Hesse, one of the more penetrating observers of racism in these ‘post-racial’ times. I thought I would offer for more general discussion and tearing-apart some of what I wrote to him.
The 'Nigerians' prepare to 'harvest' Wikus.
Firstly, regarding the ‘Nigerians’. I think a few things can be borne in mind. Firstly, it is undeniably true that the movie serves up a very in-your-face, stereotyped image of the African racial other, with all the signs and signifiers familiar from hundreds of years of racial stereotyping. ?The ‘Nigerians’, indeed, are almost surrealistically caricatured: as Belle Prannyshake pointed out in her perceptive comments in this blog and elsewhere, they are ‘cannibalistic, lusty, hot:’ ?one of them walks around with a python around his neck; I swear that I saw one with a hyena on a leash; and consistently the camera emphasises their brutality, their blackness, their bestiality, etc. ?It is, indeed, strong meat.
Secondly, it does bear remembering that the movie has its origins in a short film very deliberately and consciously seeking to problematize South African discourse about immigrants and specifically ‘Nigerians.’ Blomkamp’s clip ‘alive in Joburg’ ?is fascinating viewing; one of the best examples of the Brechtian ?‘alienation effect’ (ahem!) I have seen: for the movie, Blomkamp interviewed real South Africans talking about immigrants, and juxtaposed the vox pops with footage of space aliens. ? The decontextualization effected by the science fiction works powerfully and subversively to highlight ?the dehumanizing logic of xenophobic discourse. As Belle points out, it is dangerous to get into ‘intentions’ when analysing a text, but I do think that we can at least allow them to complicate our readings.
Thirdly ? and perhaps this is another place where foreigners will miss out on some subtleties ? the ‘Nigerians’ in the movie are not Nigerians at all.??The indigenous medical practices attributed to them are ?to my knowledge not at all ‘Nigerian’ in character, but much more local in nature. ?Quite a few times, some of them seem to be speaking what sounds like Swahili. ? I was powerfully reminded of my days of living in Muizenberg, where I would often hear complaints about the ‘drug-dealing Nigerians’ by local whites… none of whom could explain to me why most of said ‘Nigerians’ spoke French. ? ?Same in the movie. The ‘Nigerians’ are in fact named as such only by the whites in the movie. ?In other words, the movie is careful to give us clues that they ?are ‘Nigerian’ only in ?the way that Rwandans, Cameroonians, Senegalese, Somalis and Congolese in South Africa are ‘Nigerian’ ? viz. only within a very particularly racist gaze. So it is clear ?that Blomkamp and co are doing something rather complex – not so much offering ?a racist caricature, as caricaturing racist stereotypes themselves – which is a different thing entirely.
Fourthly, on seeing it a second time, I had the nagging but distinct sense that although the ‘Nigerians’ are portrayed as brutal, bestial, etc etc, there is also a distinct sense in which they are admirable. They are the only humans in the film who do not react to the aliens with squeamishness. They are uncannily like Wikus in one sense (they want to become the Alien); but they are also like the MNU (they want the weaponry). ? They are at home in the landscape that most humans regard with distaste, and which the MNU can only occupy and traverse with weapons and armoured vehicles. ?Most importantly, there is an honesty about ‘Obesandjo’s’ lust for power that contrasts very favourably with the MNU’s heartless machinations.
This is linked to a bigger set of underlying issues, which is that I think the Nigerians are deeply necessary to the ‘representative economy’ of the movie, in that they represent a very particular set of ideas and narrative possibilities. In a way, Wikus, the MNU and the ‘Nigerians’ all represent very distinctly different ways of relating to alienness.
This diagram may look familiar to some of you: it looks a bit like a Greimasian semeiotic square, which is a way of exploring conceptual opposition and contrast in a text or representation. ?In a Greimasian thinking, the opposition between the concepts ‘human’ and ‘alien’ ?is one that involves not two terms, but at least four: ?for example, not only ?human and alien but also ?not-human, not-alien.
This helps us understand the nuances of this opposition much more clearly. ? In the above diagram, the??horizontal axis, left to right, relates to the ‘alien’/ not ‘alien’ distinction. ? On the left are Wikus and the MNU – the side of the ‘us’ in racist discourse, defined in opposition to ‘alienness’, and whatever it is that exists in the expelled, cordoned off terrain of ‘District 9′. ? On the right is the ‘other’, that-which-needs-to-be-expelled (and expelled ever further; as we learn right at the start of the movie, District 9 is ?not far enough: the nightmare logic of racism is that District 9 turns out to be too close; it needs to be cleaned up and replaced by District 10). And as is very clear from the movie, this is a terrain that belongs as much to the ‘prawns’ as to the ‘Nigerians’.
But that is not the only axis of differentiation. ?The vertical axis, the axis of up-and-down, differentiates the protagonists according to the extent to which they are ‘human’ – capable of fellow-feeling, kinship loyalty, and vulnerability. ?This is what separates Wikus and ‘Christopher Johnson’ from the MNU and the ‘Nigerians’: while the MNU and the Nigerians are ‘inhuman’ and heartless, interested only in power and exploitation, ?the movie links ?Wikus and the ‘Prawns’ with themes of sentiment and affection (thus we have Wikus’s ?love for Tanya, ?and we also have the classic, almost corny ?Bill Cosby- style ?father-son bond between ‘Christopher Johnson’ and ‘his’ alien ‘son’). ?Most importantly, Wikus and the Aliens have this in common: they want to get ‘fixed’. ?They want to go home.
So the ‘Nigerians’ are not a simple afterthought or a plot mechanism. ?They embody the possibility of ?gutsy human survival and adaptation within the badlands of ‘district 9′. ?They are clearly preferable to MNU: much less calculating, and also much cooler in a kind of post-apocalyptic, Mad-Max way. ? There is much, one might think, that Wikus might be able to learn from them, and they from him. ?But ?the film maintains the separation between Wikus and them: his heart belongs with his ‘angel’ in the white suburbs; ?even though he has become an alien by the end of the movie, he cannot ‘go over’ to ‘that other side.’ ?While Wikus might go home, and while the Aliens might fly away to their distant planet, the Nigerians are the true aliens of the film, ?comfortabe denizens of the crime and war zone.
Which brings me to my fifth point: ?I do think that the representation of the ‘Nigerians’ is the one place in the film where the movie falters in its ability to unpick the workings of racist ideology. ?Because, for all of these interesting complexities, the reality is that the movie does not obviously withdraw or complicate its apparent endorsement of the African stereotypes. ?There are ironies and complexities ?– ?but they ?are evident only to a fairly sensitive and conscious viewer. ?In fact, the film actively pushes these complexities in side. ?The crucial flaw, in fact, lies ?lies precisely in this: ?it relies for its narrative drive, for its satisfaction of the ‘adventure’, on the antagonism against (and the extermination of) the ‘Nigerians’. ? So even though the real villains are all white, and even though the movie subtly mocks xenophobic discourse, many audiences will no doubt identify with this ‘othering’, and will cheer when Wikus’s alien exoskeleton kills them all so picturesquely.
So, as I said, a troubling film. ?But, I think, ?important and worth taking seriously for all that. In the end, despite these flaws, the movie works powerfully to raise disconcerting questions about identity and ‘othering’ both inside and outside South Africa. ?As a South African today, where ‘aliens’ are still routinely deported, I think the film is playing an enormously important role in asking questions ?and encouraging debate about the way in which xenophobic logic and modernity still interpenetrate in our government today. ? ? In those terms, it has been massively successful, at least here. ?And it has relevance beyond South Africa. ?As many commentators have pointed out, the alliance of brutal violence and bureaurcratic form that it so carefully depicts is found in Guantanamo Bay as much as it is in Gauteng. ?MNU’s DNA is that of Blackwater and Halliburton as much as it is that of Armscor and Denel.
And somehow – and this, I think is the genius of the film – it has done so in a way that almost perfectly marries form and content. ???Why does the film ‘need’ to be a science fiction film in order to make its points about South Africa… and why does it take a South African setting to make a science fiction film which feels so grittily real? The answer is, I think, twofold. ?Firstly, that the best science fiction has always been ‘news from the present’, focusing on what we are through pictures of what we are becoming. And secondly, ?I think one can say that postcoloniality is futurity. If the future is now, what country better encapsulates that future than South Africa, with its confluence of violence, race, inequality,technology, regulation, despair and hope?
becoming the alien: apartheid, racism and district 9
Warning: spoilers follow!
You have to admit: As a premise for a movie it is pretty unpromising. An alien spaceship comes to rest over Johannesburg.? Instead of conquering the planet, the aliens turn out to be in crisis: malnourished and in need of rescuing.? They end up living in a local slum, crammed together in a rusty shantytown.? When human Joburgers complain, a company is called in to move them ? but things get out of hand, and it all escalates into car chases and gun-fights. ? Stated like this, who would be blamed for deciding to give it a miss? It is hard to figure out what kind of movie it could be. ?Some kind of half-baked take on District 6, set in the wrong city?? An American skop skiet en donder movie, with Parktown Prawns as the baddies? ???When I first heard about the movie, I dismissed it without a thought; and indeed, even today, with the movie doing well at the box office, some reviewers and commentators seem reluctant to take it seriously.
Well, I’ve been to see it and I personally think it is the best movie I have yet seen about South Africa ? and specifically, one of the most pentetrating, disconcerting and subversive meditations ?on the nature of racism and repression in the post-colonial world.? District 9 is fresh and transgressive, hilariously funny and absolutely horrifying: ?brutal, ?sly, ?streetwise ?and in your face. It’s not a voice from the ghetto ?? it is, completely and incontrovertibly, a white voice ? but is a voice from the postcolonial periphery; a voice speaking harshly, grittily and urgently about the surrealism of racism and the confluence of violence and normality here at the edges of the West’s old empire.
But to whom does it speak? ?Throughout the ?film, one of my most recurrent thoughts was: how many people who are not from this country ?will get what is going on here?? So many of its references, points and jokes ?would make sense only to someone who lived here during the years of Apartheid.? To some extent the movie is successful because it works on two levels: an international audience can enjoy it simply as a sci-fi thriller, while at the same time there is another layer of meaning, accessible only to those who share the filmmaker’s cultural and political frame of reference. ?But the key to the film, its centre, lies in its local subtext – while its iconography and genre conventions would be familiar only to hardcore science fiction aficionados.
In some ways, of course, the film’s insistent local-ness is the first thing most critics have noticed about it.? The South African mise en scene is ?precisely and affectionately realised.?? It’s all there, and beautifully done:? the welter of South African accents, black and white (so thick that the producers give us subtitles much of the time), ?the incessant Afrikaans swearing and obscenity; the endless ?local cultural references. The movie has a lot of fun with this, parading its provincial roots with a kind of delighted embarassment. ?The hero Wikus’s tacky Benoni home; his awful relatives; his fading-beauty of a wife; ?the earnest academics from ‘Kempton Park University,’ spouting platitudes at the camera in their crap hairstyles and shabby academic clothes… we’ve seen it all a million times before, on Special Assignment and Carte Blanche. All the delights of our own ethnoscape ? all the more pleasing because it is done with such a light, subversive touch. No wonder South African audiences love it: ?at the screening where I saw it, the darkness was alive with ripples of laughter throughout the movie.
But more is at stake here.? This is not just a remake of Alien with people shouting fok a lot. The movie’s verisimilitude comes with an agenda, and the reality it seeks to describe is very specific. ?For what you seeing is not just South Africa, but that South Africa that we think we’ve left behind, that we think we’ve forgotten … ?until you come across a reminder that brings it home to you so forcefully that you realise you’ve never left: Apartheid South Africa; State of Emergency South Africa; forced removal South Africa.? This is at the centre of the extended set-piece that forms the heart of the first part of the movie ? the long, chaotic sequence where the hired mercenaries and functionaries of? MNU, the firm to which the government has outsourced the task of the ‘clean up’ of the ghetto, have their first encounter with the reluctant, soon-to-be-displaced Alien population. ?It is ?a cinematic tour de force; one of the most sustained and brilliant pieces of filmmaking I can recall seeing? –? but I wonder whether any of the movie’s international audience will even understand ?a fraction of what is going on here.
Forced removal, 21st-century style
As anyone who lived with any kind of political awareness through the eighteen years between 1976 and 1994 in South Africa will immediately see, what the film is doing here is to give you an almost obsessively focussed, insistently detailed account of the workings of ?the Apartheid state’s repressive apparatus as it existed during the regime’s most conflictual years.? Apartheid repression was never just about violence. Instead, it was a strange and carefully composed mix of brutal force, racist anthropology, Foucauldian surveillance, and a curious, bureaucratic obsession with the appearance of due process and the rule of law. ?Every single thing you see in this scene? – the harassed, edgy bureaucrats with their clipboards and their explanations; the ludicrous attempts to get the aliens to sign the consent forms prior to their removal to the tent town; the prowling military thugs; the constant threat of violence, spiralling out of control; the chaos and confusion ? all of it is precisely how it all worked. ?Watching it, I suddenly remembered, with vertiginous clarity: Crossroads. ?KTC. The Witdoeke.? Jeff Benzien. Dolf Odendaal.? Some of you reading this blog – you were there too. You know of whom and of what I speak.
Wikus
What makes it brilliant cinema, of course ? what makes it all come together as it does, is not just this accuracy; not even the disorienting, vertiginous, documentary-style way in which Blomkamp renders the almost-out-of-control chaos of the engagement. It is above all, the figure of Wikus van der Merwe, surely one of the most unlikely protagonists that cinema has produced in a long while. One of the high points of a pretty impressive performance on the part of the actor Sharlto Copley is his rendition of Wikus during the forced removal, half the time trying to control the whole mad show, and half the time acting as a kind of crazed, geeky curator, speed-talking at the camera and describing in awful English every aspect of what is going on.
The whole point of Wikus, of course, is that he is such a prat. He is thick as a plank. He is awful. He is as unlike a Bruce Willis or a Samuel Jackson as it is possible to be – ?and this is at least partly because he is Afrikaans. He is not just Afrikaans, he is a rockspider. He is a doos, a chop, a moegoe. He mangles English with hilarious ineptness. He is cringe-makingly uncool: cheesily in love with his ‘angel’ wife, dorkily clumsy in front of the camera, cravenly obedient to authority,? crudely bullying to the aliens that he deals with, and horrifyingly inept in his dealings with his Black underlings, whom he patronizes with cheery ignorance. ?At the same time, in his earnestness, in his desire to be liked, in his bright-eyed and bushy-tailed eagerness to make a success of this impossible, chaotic, disaster of a job, one cannot but like him.
At one level, the character of ? Wikus allows the movie to have a huge amount of satirical fun with the stupidity and ignorance of his outlook and what he represents, for of course Wikus’s exasperated encounters with angry, uncomprehending, resistant aliens precisely mimic and pillory the carryings-on Apartheid officialdom at its crude and idiotic worst. ?One of the funniest standing jokes in the movie is Wikus’s relationship with the alien whom he refers to throughout the film as Christopher Johnson. (‘I cannot do the clicks’). ?From time to time Wikus will stop, fix the camera with his glowing eyes, and start talking about what ‘the Prawn’ needs; what ‘the Prawn’ should do. ? That was precisely t way in which Apartheid officials used to pontificate about ?the nature of ‘the Black man’ or ‘the Bantu.’
'Christopher Johnson.'
But this not all that is going on. For all of its attention to historical echoes, District 9 is not simply an allegory about forced removals, and the aliens in the movie are not black South Africans in disguise.? Rather, what is happening here is something altogether more significant and ambitious: the metaphors and tropes of science fiction are being used to engage rather more deeply and disconcertingly with the nature of racism itself ? with the way that racist ideology and discourse deals with the feared, hated, despised ?(and desired!) ‘Other.’
This is the heart of the film. In many ways the most disturbing and unsettling aspect of the movie is the rendition of the aliens themselves, who appear like nothing so much as huge, quasi-human cockroaches.? They are ‘prawns’, they are ‘bottom feeders’, they appear to be addicted to giant tins of blue cat food; they live on rubbish dumps, they breed.? They are disgusting.? And that is the point. For ?- if I may be allowed to wax academic for a bit – the figures of ?the aliens are, in a sense, nothing other than the exaggerated, concrete rendering of the way in which racist discourse depicts its objects: the way Nazism talked about ‘the Jew’ and Apartheid ideology talked about ‘Coloureds’; ?the way present-day? white racists in Europe (and black and white xenophobes down here!) ?talk about immigrants; the way Radio Interahamwe talked about Tutsis.? By presenting the aliens to us, not as attractive, noble creatures, by making them half-human and half insect, the film constantly trips us up by making the racist gaze our gaze. It confronts us with our complicity with racism, by ?making us identify with the perspective of the racist, inviting us to feel the revulsion of the xenophobe ? and then pulling the carpet from under our feet.
It is this tension that produces what must be the most toe-curlingly awful moment in the film ? the scene where Wikus and his men stumble across the breeding house where the alien grubs are feeding on the decomposing body of a cow, and proceed to torch the place. ??The shack is in flames; from its interior a gruesome series of popping noises is ?heard; Wikus ?speaks delightedly to the camera, stammering in his excitement as he explains that that sound is the noise of the ‘little fellows’ exploding like popcorn.? On the one hand, we in the audience share his delighted revulsion in the cleansing of that awful, insectile, maggoty interior ? and at the same time, we are disconcertingly aware that we are witnessing a scene of genocide. ?The film will spare us nothing.
Rather more subtly ? but perhaps more disturbingly ?- ?the same logic is at play in the film’s treatment of the reviled ‘Nigerians’, who are depicted in much the same fantastical ‘othering’ way as the aliens themselves.? ?Like the aliens, the ‘Nigerians’ are rendered as surrealistically horrendous; in fact part of their awfulness is that they live so close to the aliens, doing business with them, even (or so some of the whites in the film fantasize) having sex with them. ?And no wonder. For in the racist world view, the most terrible thing about the relation with the Other is that the boundary might break down – ?that ‘they’ might become like ‘us’, or we like ‘them’.
And that, of course, is Wikus’s fate.
It is here that the movie’s location in the genre of science fiction becomes so crucial. For the modern-day science fiction notion of the alien is arguably one of the ways in which the West can imagine and re-imagine its encounters with those it colonised and racialised. ?Part of the fascination of the science- fictional notion of the alien is that it allows us to imagine?an encounter with an ‘other’ that is both like and entirely unlike us ? and who therefore brings the thrilling possibility that ‘they’ might do to ‘us’ what ‘we,’ the whites, the Northerners, have done to blacks, to Indians, to ‘natives’ on so many places of own world.? ‘Take us to your leader’ says the tall ambiguous figure… ? And then? Do they come in peace? Are they wise? Do they bring technology or miraculous ?medicine? Do they invite us to join an interstellar commonwealth of worlds?? Or do they eviscerate us, turn us into slaves, eat our children, take our land?
This is what makes Wikus’s journey so wrenching and profound.? The compelling and mysterious thing about the aliens in District 9 is the deep ambiguity that they represent.? Are they a culture of superbeings, more advanced than us? Their spaceship, looming hugely over Johannesburg, seems to suggest that.? Or are they cockroaches; depraved, subhuman, corrupt; so decayed that even with all their weaponry they are nothing but victims? ???That question hangs over the whole movie ?– ?and nowhere more disquietingly than when Wikus realises that he is physically turning into an alien.? What does this transformation mean?? At one level, it is a fall into death, it is the body rotting: teeth falling out, nails dropping off, the white ?skin flaking, sliming, growing black scales. ???But it also brings with it a strange promise: the possibility of a different relationship with the aliens ? and of course, the ability to manipulate all that awesome weaponry.
All this comes together in one of the most inspired moments of the whole film.? Wikus and the alien ‘Christopher Johnson’ are in the bowels of the MNU building.? They have secured the vial of fluid that they need to effect their escape plan.? They are in a firefight: the scene is indescribably chaotic, with junk and destroyed equipment scattered all around, gunshots, ?bullets flying everywhere.? A moment ago, horrifyingly, they stumbled across the lab where the MNU has been torturing and conducting medical experiments uponthe aliens. Wikus protests his innocence ? I did not know this was happening, he says ? but his protests sound feeble and unconvincing even to us.? By now we are used to anthropomorphising ‘Christopher’, and we can see the horror and the pity ? and the rage ? that we imagine flowing through him as he looks at the ravaged body of his murdered kin. We can see that he would be entirely within his rights to smear Wikus then and there, and go his own way.? But he runs across the passage to join him, and together they crouch behind a bulkhead, the room filling with smoke and the thunder of gunshots, firing madly round corners, covering each other as they dash down the passage. ?And suddenly we are watching … a buddy movie. I thought it was the most thrilling moment in the whole film- not because of the excitement of the action, but because the panache and the knowingness with which the movie draws upon ? and re-invents ? the genres within which it operates.? There are many movies in which the aliens are good guys ? but never aliens that look like this.? Wikus has crossed over to the other side.? And so have we. For the rest of the film, we will look at the humans with fear and distrust, and when the mercenary Kobus Venter finally gets his gruesome come-uppance ? he is torn apart alive, eviscerated and eaten by a group of aliens ? the audience cheers.
So Wikus at last ?becomes a man: by ceasing to be one. ?In the final desparate battle of the film, ?clad in a giant alien exoskeleton that disintegrates around him, he has has nothing left but his courage. ?We don’t know whether he will ever find his way back to the human side of the fence again. The last scene shows him, completely transformed into an alien now, crouching among the rubble and debris of the ghetto, fashioning a flower out of scrap metal and tin cans.? It is a beautiful image ? and ever so slightly cheesy. But that’s Wikus for you.? You can take the alien out of Benoni, but you can’t take Benoni out of the alien. ?Strangely enough, we know that Wikus is now more at home on this blasted, fractured landscape than he has ever been in his life.
So, a strange and disturbing film; disorienting and discombobulating at more than one level. ?It is thoroughly and utterly South African, but it inhabits its post-human cyborg sci-fi imaginary with knowing Northern familiarity. ?It is clearly intended to comment and question on racism and xenophobia (it started life as a short movie questioning South African attitudes to, among others, those dreaded Nigerians) but it gets its effects through forcing you, the viewer, time and time again, to be the racist. ? It is affectionately patriotic, but it frames its local and regional content by consistently ridiculing it. ?It crackles with life and energy, but the landscape is the landscape of death: decayed, raddled, crumbing, strewn with garbage . ?The moments of beauty in the film are the lingering shots of shantytown filth, settling gently in the breeze. ?Above all, it is resolutely non-serious. ?This is where the film stands head and shoulders above most other attempts to say something about our past. ?At last we have a film that is not pompous, ?does not moralise, does not offer lessons. ?It does not attempt to be blameless. ?Instead, it parades its own crudeness. ?This is South Africa, it says. ?A great place, as I said earlier this week, for trauma. ?This is how awful we are. This is what we are like. Could you live here?
There’s one last inversion.? One of the most abiding images in the film is of the alien spaceship: huge, threatening, enigmatic, hanging over the Joburg skyline.? It is ominous, brooding (hanging there like the future, says one friend of mine; ?like the mines under the surface of the city, says another). ?And it looks so right that next time I am at OR Tambo international airport, I know that I will reflexively look up ?to see if it is still there. ? But the continual presence of the ship forces one more question.??? Who is it who arrived, uninvited, in South Africa?? Who is it who came one day in a ship, and stayed, and did not leave?? In Johannesburg: who are the aliens?
a great place for trauma
I have been stewing away of late, trying to get an angle on the tangled state our current debate – or is it a non-debate? – on race and change in South Africa. ?The issue has been pretty much in all of our faces of late: ?the ever-deepening ditch into which our Judicial Services Commission and Judge John Hlope have been digging themselves; ? the increasing shrillness of the slanging match between Julius Malema and those who seem unable to resist responding to him as his beloved enemies; the horrendous mess that’s been created around the gender status and testosterone levels of Caster Semenya (Zola Budd really feels a long time ago now, doesn’t she); and last but not least, the news that one Brandon Huntley, a white South African now resident in Ottawa, has managed to get himself awarded refugee status on the grounds that, as a white person, he was not safe in his country of origin.
Huntley, Refugee from Darkest Mowbray
There is not much that is sublime here, and plenty that’s ridiculous. ? So much heat, so little light, so much obfuscation. ?The sky is dark, if I may mix a metaphor, with red herrings coming home to roost. ?Judge Hlope, a champion of transformation, a fighter for the Africanisation of our justice system? Don’t make me laugh. ?His actions have consistently been grasping and self serving and as a jurist he has been utterly conservative. ?All this talk about him being marginalised for questioning the lack of transformation in the judiciary is ?so much obfuscation. ?Caster Semenya, a latter day Saartjie Baartman? I am sorry, I don’t buy it. ?Why is the International Association of Athletics Federations racist for wanting her testosterone levels to be tested? ?Questions about her gender, it appears, were routinely raised by black athletes at home throughout her career, and her coach is an disgraced East German steroid peddler notorious for diddling his charges’ hormone levels; in fact, one of his charges subsequently had to have a sex change to become a man. ? As for Brandon – well, comment is superfluous, isnt’t it? Though some loons have cheered at this news, ? most ?white South Africans actually inside the country have responded with bafflement, irritation and??ridicule to ?his attempt to portray himself as the member of a latter day racially persecuted diaspora. ?If he absolutely has to go and live in a place where the temperature routinely is 20 below, can’t he apply for a work permit like an normal person? ? Does he not have any marketable skills? ?And why does he have to try to portray Mowbray — boring, middle class Mowbray, I ask you — as a latter day Warsaw Ghetto for lahnis?
And at the same time, what space is there for argument? ?Everything that can be said about this tedious contentiousness is already so perfectly obvious, it is depressing even to have to put pen to paper. ? If you buy into any of these ridiculous stories, it is doubtful that facts or reason will make any impact; if you see through them, nothing needs to be said, does it?
This morning, however, it all clicked nicely into place. ?A ?colleague and I were driving into work. ?Down Modderdam road, in sleety rain, on the first day of Spring, in his Mazda 3. My colleague ?was recounting the stories of an acquaintance of his, a ?medical doctor from the UK, ?who was down here on holiday. ?South Africa, ?it appears ?is a much sought after destination for UK and European medical students looking for internships. ?The gruesome reality is that our country, with its legacy of chronic poverty, inequality and violence, presents a young doctor with opportunities for work experience that are simply unavailable in the calmer North. ?Or as my colleague ?rather baldly put it, South Africa is a great place ?for trauma.
A great place for trauma. ? ?That should be our slogan. ?Way back in the mists of time, some bunch of advertising consultants decided that we should be marketed as ‘the world in one country’. ? Back then, I used to find it odd that you would want to brand and market a country as if it was a detergent. ?Clearly I was young and naive then. ?Since then, we have been through many re-brandings. ?Currently, South Africa’s brand as a country is that we are ‘alive with possibility’. I am sure you will agree that that, not to put too fine a point on it, just sucks. ?It ?weak and unconvincing even as far as branding taglines go. ?It just reeks of focus group. ?Instead, consider ‘South Africa – ?a great place for trauma’.
It says it like it is, doesn’t it? ?In the first place, it puts centre stage our national history of violence and violation. ?No need for Brandon to argue it to a Canadian court in detailed argumentation. ?It just says so, right on the label.
Secondly — and this is the point — ?it’s captures our national discourse to a T. As Colleen says, it’s how we think. ?Trauma is what we do. Give us a situation, and we will turn it into a story of victimisation. ? Black people feel like victims. ? ?White people feel like victims. ?Poor people are victims, clearly. ?Rich people talk like the biggest victims at all, and have the bandwidth with which to whine about it at length, as well. ?And if you are tired of the victim position, why, there are all these other predictable positions you can occupy. ?You can be the rescuer, ?pointing out the marginality and powerlessness of the victim without ever having to confront the possibility of change. ?Or even more deliciously, you can become a vengeful persecutor, taking out your rage and pain on someone who richly deserves it! ?We’ve had three hundred years of it – it’s one of our key skills, and it looks like we can go on for a good few years more.
What gets lost, in this cult of trauma, in this identification with the victim, in this rush to be blameless?
A lot, I think.Nuance is lost. ?Interest is lost??Above all, compassion gets lost, and realism, and the ability to make real differences, small as as they might be. ? The possibility of conversation is lost in ?the self-righteousness of anger. ?In this discourse, the enemy of your enemy is your friend, even if he or she is a psychopath or a narcissist, or just a fool. ?All that is left is the pressure to choose your corner, your predetermined position, and to fight in it.
And most importantly, no-one ever needs to look into the mirror. ?No-one ever needs to ask, what is my role in all this mess?
And that’s ?a pity. ?Because I don’t know how anything can get better, if that question is not asked. ?If that boring, that irritating, that depressing question is not asked.
lavinia’s voice (or: the critique of rome)
Le Guin’s new book is a subtle work, low-key in many ways; presenting itself as a footnote to history, a gloss on another story.? It is a slight departure from familiar genres for Le Guin: instead of taking us off to one of her beautifully realised alternative worlds she pays a visit to one created by another storyteller.? The storyteller is Vergil, the story the Aeneid, and Le Guin’s story fixes on one of the marginal characters,? the all-too-convenient princess, ‘now ripe for a man, now of full marriagable age’, whom the hero marries in the end, but who never gets to say a word herself.? Le Guin’s project is to let her speak, to tell the story from her perspective: Vergil’s story still, but from another point of view. A humble work then, in some ways, a tribute by one writer to another, and a little academic ? obscure even ? for readers accustomed to her marvellous fantasies. But like its central figure,? Le Guin’s book is much more formidable than it seems: through the elusive voice that speaks here,? shifting and uncoiling like a thread of smoke in still air, Le Guin addresses a wide range of issues ? the use of power, the differences (as always!) between men and women,?? the meaning of war, cruelty and violence; and the nature of the creative and artistic process of storytelling and mythmaking itself.? Most of all, as my friend Colleen perceptively points out, it is a reflection on the prehistory of Empire, on how we might imagine a good society: it is an attempt to recover and remember what it is to be virtuous, pious, heroic,? a good citizen ― not in Vergil’s world but in ours, our Rome, in the day of the current hyperpower.
Letting Lavinia speak is of course not a new thing to do.?? Le Guin’s book is powerfully reminiscent of Christa Wolf’s devastating Medea,? in which the anti-heroine of the original Greek drama tells the story from her side, and reveals who really killed the children. Wolf’s book is a revisionist feminist re-telling of a radical kind: not only does it seek to vindicate Medea, it also seeks to reframe the story of Greece and the start of Western antiquity in the context of the death of the old goddess religions and the birth of the new patriarchal orders.?? And Le Guin herself has done this before in the Earthsea stories:? the brilliance of Tehanu and The Other Wind, of course, lie precisely in their critique of the wizardry of Roke,? looking at that masculine world of power through female eyes.? Lavinia seems at first glance to be another project of this kind:? a rethinking of the ‘his’ in history, that kind of thing.
A few chapters in, of course, you realise that this is not exactly what is happening. (‘I am not the feminine voice you may have expected’, she rather knowingly says early on. ?’Resentment is not what drives me to write my story.’) ?Lavinia is no Medea, nor does she speak with the radical female anger of an Antigone or a Cassandra. ? She is a dutiful daughter, a good mother, a loving wife, proud of her son. ?Her most radical act is not to choose freedom, not to leave the citadel of masculine power, but to enter it, to consent to being given away like a possession by her father to a man she does not know.? Most astonishing is the portrayal of Amata, Lavinia’s mother, as a manipulative witch; Amata’s subversive escapade, her attempt to use Dionysian tradition, the ‘women’s religion’, to thwart Latinus’s plans, is rendered as mad, hysterical, irrational, deranged. ?This is not what you expect from a feminist re-telling: no wonder so many reviews of the book sound a little perplexed.
The second disorienting thing is the mode in which the story is told and the nature of its claims to truth.?? Early on, Lavinia tells us she knows she is only a character in a story, and time and time again as the story progresses, she reminds us that all this is really happening in a poem.? Most interestingly of all, the crucial events in the story pivot on Lavinia’s meeting with Vergil, ‘her’ poet, the man who imagined her.? He appears to her in the forests of Albunea― or is it that she appears to him as he lies dying in his ship…??? It is all most disorienting, as if Genly Ai were to speak to Le Guin on the ansible, asking her for advice; or as if Frodo were to see Tolkien in Galadriel’s Mirror, writing away in his Oxford study.? What is going on?
The answer, of course, is that Lavinia is as much about the process of writing and imaginative creation as it is about Lavinia the woman.? In fact, as Le Guin points out, we are not sure whether Lavinia ever existed.? After all,? she is only a name handed down in myth: she exists only in a story.? Vergil invented her.? Or did he?? He sat down at a table, started to write, and she came to him of her own accord. This is one thing about which Le Guin has always been quite clear:? that imaginative storytelling when properly done is a process of exploration, of discovery; not of goal-directed making.??? To find out who Ged was,? who Shevek was, who Tenar was, Le Guin? had to let them speak.? And if the writer be true to her art, what will emerge will always be something more than she could ever have intended.? Now I in you without a body move: through her something more than her will speak, the voice of Story as it comes into emergence. In this way, the true storyteller is not unlike the wizards of Roke, with their powers of naming and their fateful ability to summon the spirits of the dead. ?Perhaps the most touching passages in the story are the long conversations between Vergil and Lavinia; where the poet at the end of his life is visited by his neglected creation, and says Speak to me!? Tell me who you are! But in truth it is Le Guin, not Vergil, who is the summoner here, and through her that Lavinia speaks.
So what does Lavinia have to tell us?? What stands out most of all is her voice, her tone.? Though the events she speaks about are often terrible, her tone is gentle, elegiac, discursive.? She dwells? sensually on the lived texture of everyday life;? recounts unflinchingly ?the most brutal events; ?reflects coolly on men’s ?and women’s weakensses and flaws; remembers warmly and generously the people she loved.? As you listen to her, Lavinia emerges as a formidable woman,? fully inhabiting the place allotted to her in her society ?– ? fully inhabiting it and more.? For as the story makes clear, Lavinia is the shaper of events in this story, the one who changes the course of events.? It is she that causes the war, it is through her choices that Aeneas comes to settle in Latium, that a new city is founded, that a new dynasty comes into being; a dynasty that leads to nothing less than the founding of Rome, the creation of a new empire, the unfolding of events that lead to this civilisation, to us, reading and writing here, in the twenty-first century. Through her choices she becomes the pivot around which history turns; and this is so even though her choice, her act, is nothing more (and nothing less) than to accept her fate, to sink her teeth, like Annie Dillard’s weasel, into the throat of necessity as it seizes her in its talons.
This gentle voice, then, if you pay attention, is in truth a formidable one. Like Antigone, like Medea, she does not give way as to her desire; but her radical act is not to leave the city of the patriarchy, but to act within it, to speak (and to speak sincerely!) in the voice of duty, the voice of piety, to speak as the king’s daughter, the hero’s wife, the servant of the gods, the prince’s mother.?? Following always the path she must go.? That is not lightly done, as Le Guin often reminds us: if you seek to follow the Way, you may not know where you will end up. There is a ?darkness in this story, the source both of its elegiac tone and its moral force; for Lavinia’s voice is the voice of a woman who has accepted death, who accepts pain, who accepts even war and violence; accepts them as part of what the world is, part of what is given; and seeks not to avoid them, but to know how to act rightly within them.?? Alongside Gifts, it is in some ways Le Guin’s darkest work, most concerned with violence, with unmaking, cruelty and death. Much of the sensual beauty of the story comes from this acceptance of fragility: we are always conscious, as we see the beautiful hillsides and the fertile groves of Lavinia’s Latium, that life exists in the presence of death; that lasting peace always comes after ? and ends in―war;? that Latinus and Aenas’s kingdoms, reigns of peace and plenty, are doomed to fade; that on Aeneas’s shield Lavinia sees the dark cloud that will rise into the sky in the last war, when the world ends and the very earth burns.? An harsh vision indeed, harsh and austere, but it is the ground of Lavinia’s being, and of Aeneas’s too, it is what constitutes their piety, and ultimately, it is, I think, piety that this book is concerned with.
Piety?? Even the word seems odd today. “By that word,” ?says Lavinia, “I meant responsible, faithful to duty, open to awe.’ ?But what can we moderns do with piety?? That is a good question, and it leads, I think, to a consideration of what Lavinia has to tell us who live today.?? As I have mentioned, my friend Colleen has put her finger on the nub (as she so often does): in Lavinia, le Guin gives us a vision of Rome before it was an empire, and it is indeed significant that? she chooses Rome; for when ‘America’, the present hyperpower, the present Empire, chooses to recognise its own imperial nature, it is precisely in Rome that it sees its image. 
And no wonder: in its grandiosity, its military might, its traditions of masculine heroism and civic virtue, Rome is indeed a flattering mirror in which America can regard itself.? And this means that today ? as the corrupt empire heaves and struggles in its troubled sleep, as it unleashes death and war across the world, as it erases freedoms in the name of liberty, and crushes livelihoods in the name of enterprise –? the critique of Rome might give us food for thought.
I think it is here that Lavinia’s subtle subversion really lies.? ?At a time when the religious right has hijacked the language of morality, of family, of piety and masculine virtue, Le Guin’s act is not to leave the city, not to walk away ? this time ? from Omelas, but to speak within it: to ask what piety, what virtue, and what heroism in war could mean.? She shows us Rome before it was a empire, and what those values were before they were corrupted. And what we see is? not the utopia of Anarres, or the wise and patient Taoism of the Ekumen, but a society much like our own: in which violence and cruelty and war exist;? one deeply shaped by class and gender hierarchies; a world of kings and slaves and masters.? But it is a world in which piety is possible: in which the young woman can speak to her father, and he will listen; in which slave and master are bound not just by coercion but also sentiment and common humanity; in which the armies, in the middle of the fighting, come together in ritual sacrifice; in which farmers are warriors, and warriors farmers; in which humans seek not to conquer the world, but to live within it, part of a larger order, a larger story, in which they are merely a thread.
So. The summoner calls forth the spirits of the dead.?? Through her, the Empire dreams; the Empire of which she herself, dutiful daughter, is also a part.?? Like any dream it is brief, evanescent, many-layered, dark, evocative.?? Like any dream remembered, it will go its own way now, speak in its own voice those who listen. ?What does it say? ?I think it says that we are lost. ?That in seeking to master our fate, in seeking to tell our story as if we ourselves are it sole author, we have lost the way. ?That we should do what is right to do, not because we will be rewarded, because what follows will be what should follow.??That your beloved will be taken from you, but that you must love him nonetheless. ?That peace is precious; that war always comes. That life is cruel; that life is sweet. That we should offer praise, and ask for blessing, and seek to know our fate. ?That empires die. ? A gentle voice, ?implacable: ?a voice for today.
