The Gods Must Be Crazy
It is not the goal of this journal to heap scorn, so I will keep this brief.
In the early 1980s, the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy was a surprise worldwide smash hit.
Why? Well, it has a delicious premise — a Coke bottle falls out of the sky (tossed from a passing airplane) and is found by a tribe of Bushmen in the Kalahari desert. The bottle, being unique and beautiful, leads to jealousy and conflicts in the tribe. So the leader of the tribe, Xi, decides to travel to “the end of the Earth” to return this gift to the Gods who, Xi believes, dropped it. As he travels to the end of the Earth, he encounters civilization, and civilization is shown to be ugly, cruel and insane compared to the simple, edenic life of Xi’s blessed, carefree people.
In addition to the premise, it showed, or claimed to show, the world something it had never seen or heard before — “real” Bushmen (that is, non-actors) and their click-consonant language.
People were amazed that, in the go-go 1980s, there were still “savages” living in total innocence, peaceful, child-like people whose world could be turned topsy-turvy by an object as innocuous as a Coke bottle. The movie’s fake National Geographic-documentary format helps reinforce this notion.
Wikipedia informs us:
“While a large Western white audience found the films funny, there was some considerable debate about its racial politics. The portrayal of Xi (particularly in the first film) as the naive innocent incapable of understanding the ways of the “gods” was viewed by some as patronising and insulting.”
Count me in!
Now, I’m a storyteller by trade, so I understand the comedic potential in viewing civilization through the eyes of a naif. It worked in Splash, it worked in Being There, it worked in Forrest Gump, it worked in Crocodile Dundee. But those movies weren’t pretending to show us “real” naifs; they employed professional actors to pretend to be innocent. The Gods Must Be Crazy got its international frisson by telling us that its protagonist was a real innocent, the comedic equivalent of a snuff film. “Watch as a genuine innocent gets humiliated and corrupted by the evil, evil West!”
What is “patronising and insulting” about the filmmaker’s treatment of the Bushmen in general and Xi in specific? The narrator tells us, many times, that conflict is unheard of in the Bushman world, that they don’t have words for “fight” or “punishment” or “war.” This may or may not be true; the writer (who is also the director, producer, cameraman and editor) presents it not for its factual basis but for its potential for comedic juxtaposition. The Bushmen were living in Eden and then this wicked, wicked Coke bottle fell out of the sky and brought conflict to them.
Now, I’m trying to think of something more insulting, more patronising one could say about a people than that they have no conflict, and no notion of conflict in their lives, and it’s not coming to me. To call such people “childlike” is an insult to children, whose lives positively boil over with conflict. To call such people more “natural” is an insult to Nature, which is defined as remorseless, brutal and ceaselessly ridden with conflict.
The DVD of this movie comes with a 2003 documentary, wherin a vidographer travels to Africa to find the tribe of N!xau (the actor, or non-actor, playing Xi) to find out for himself how much of The Gods Must Be Crazy‘s presentation of the Bushmen’s world is accurate. I could have saved him the time, because the falsehood of the movie’s premise is right there on the screen; the Bushmen of the movie are flabbergasted by the sight of a Coke bottle, but not of a film crew, recording their fictional actions. This is the height of insult in this loathsome movie — the filmmaker goes to the Kalahari, explains to the tribespeople who he is and what he’s trying to accomplish, puts the “genuine” tribespeople in costumes (or lack of them), constructs a fictional world they live in, asks them to perform comedic pantomimes illustrating a dramatic situation (“now, pretend you’ve never seen a Coke bottle before — it’ll be comedy gold!”), gets convincing, “authentic” performances from them, records it all on film, then assembles the finished movie to convince people that they are watching genuine innocents cavorting in an unspoiled Eden. And the white people of the Western world eat it up.
The insult to Xi and his people is compounded as Xi gains his education in civilization. He is put through hell in the form of the local justice system, with arrest, convicition and imprisonment for a crime he does not understand, and yet he remains, of course, thoroughly innocent, bewildered by what is happening to him. So apparently he is not only innocent, he is stupid and unconcerned for his own welfare. Not only that, he goes through his entire ordeal and apparently never sees another Coke bottle, or anything resembling such, never puts together that the magical, evil item that has beset his existence is, in fact, a common item of little consequence. That would make him a very stupid innocent indeed, but that is how the filmmaker presents him.
None of this would matter if the movie happened to also be a comedic gem, but it is not. It has a terrible script, wherin Xi’s quest to venture to the end of the earth is quickly shunted aside for unrelated storylines concerning a bumbling terrorist group and a bumbling researcher’s attempts to woo a pretty young schoolteacher. Sooner or later, all the storylines meet up, and wouldn’t you know it, Xi’s naivety and savage ways come in useful for the white people in the attainment their goals. In true western film tradition, and just so you know where the filmmaker’s heart truly lies, the white couple end up with most of the screen time and are given top billing.
The comedy is exceptionally broad and grating, and most of it operates at the level of an episode of Benny Hill, complete with copius undercranking and music-hall piano.
The technical aspects are abysmal; the image is washed-out, grainy and flat, and most of the sound seems to have been dubbed, badly, by amateurs.
Thank god, someone else was as grossed out by this movie as I was.
>>>the Bushmen of the movie are flabbergasted by the sight of a Coke bottle, but not of a film crew, recording their fictional actions.
The implication being, one assumes, that lions, zebras, wildebeast and other animals, the !kung didn’t know what a camera was and would continue on in their natural behavior. *ugh*
>>>Sooner or later, all the storylines meet up, and wouldn’t you know it, Xi’s naivety and savage ways come in useful for the white people in the attainment their goals.
That’s a major gripe I have with movies like “Rain Man” where the abnormal character is just there to teach the normal characters a lesson – we call it the magical retard syndrome. The fact that a professional (and one assumes, mentally normal) actor plays the magical retard makes it grate even further.
In the very rare cases when an actor actually is mentally retarded, the movie or tv show bends over backwards to be sacchrine and uplifting (Life Goes On). Maybe show a couple of good ol’boys beating the retard up, so the audience can feel superior to both parties involved.
That’s one reason I liked “What Is It?” so much – and the reason a lot of people who saw it hated it with the flaming intensity of a thousand suns. The mentally reatarded people in it weren’t cute! They picked on each other! They were painfully incompetant! They had OH MY GOD! sex (played by a real-life boyfriend and girlfriend)! In other words, not special angels sent directly from heaven. It was excellent. I could rant on.
You know, I never had a problem with this film because I never thought its “documentary” trappings were meant to be taken seriously. As for the scene where Xi refuses to eat while he’s imprisoned, something similar happens in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave, although I forget the exact circumstances. That film also sought to show the collision between ancient tribal customs and the modern world, but it couched it in an entirely fictional story.
Incidentally, to this day I’m known to follow up a particularly egregious fumble (either physical or verbal) was a sharp “Ish!”
I think it’s pretty clear that the documentary trappings are meant as satire. And yet the impact of the narrative still hinges on us caring deeply about this noble savage and the indignities heaped on him by the wicked civilized world. So the filmmaker wants it both ways: he wants to poke fun at our assumptions regarding the Bushmen and he also wants us to buy into the fiction he’s concocted about their blithe, innocent ways. He believes he’s not being racist because he’s holding the tribespeople up as a blessed, enlightened people. But to go so far as to exclude his innocents from all rational, reasonable, intelligent human thought strikes me as more racist than anything else he could have done.
It’s also worth noting that, among the movie’s other major characters, we have: a brutal black dictator, an equally brutal black terrorist, a cursing, bumbling black mechanic (who, later in the narrative becomes the wise, Uncle-Remus-like Wise Negro) and a bunch of silly white people who are vacant, accident-prone and vain but never brutal, base or cruel. The filmmaker’s position, politically, seems to be that Africa would be a paradise if the population consisted solely of child-like tribesmen and bumbling white do-gooders.
Your last remark is most amusing in light of the fact that this film was made by South African director James Uys, who was previously best known for the comic documentary Animals Are Beautiful People. If it takes any kind of political position, it’s doubtful that it does so deliberately. The man just liked to film animals (and people) acting very silly.
Oh, yes. And the last line of my previous comment should read “with a sharp ‘Ish!'” Ish…
Many harmful political positions have been taken inadvertently and without malice. It’s just like the representation of minorities in many old movies (or, arguably, in a lot of relatively “sophisticated” sitcoms. There wasn’t some smoke-filled room with men scheming how best to defame minorities. They just worked (or work) on what they think is funny without questioning the assumptions behind them.
It’s the same way with some early Warner Bros. cartoons. I love and respect just about everybody who worked in Termite Terrace, but they turned out some shorts that are horribly, horribly racist in retrospect.
I’m not so sure about that. I have many friends from the Huge-Lipped Bug-Eyed Grass-Skirt-Wearing Spear-Wielding African Cannibal Tribe That Somehow Has Giant Cast Iron Cauldrons In Which To Boil Outsiders, and they think their people were fairly and accurately represented.
Alas, we don’t need to reach sixty years into the past to find offensive stereotypes. My son Sam was watching Peter Jackson’s King Kong the other night, and during the “savage natives” part my wife and I had to keep saying “You know, Sam, there aren’t really people like this in the world” until Sam finally said “I know, Dad!”
Well, to be fair, Jackson got that straight out of the original King Kong. The difference, of course, is that Merion Cooper and co. didn’t know better. Jackson’s take on the savage as “other” was much better handled — and infinitely funnier — in Dead-Alive
*Classic spit-take, followed by rolling on the floor with laughter.*
Wow. Having read that, I’m glad I was like 14 when I enjoyed that movie.
I don’t understand why you have a problem with this movie. As slapstick comedies go, it really works. And if it stereotypes the characters, what of that? It’s satirizing documentaries.. No one would mistake it for a real documentary, or even for realistic representations of characters. Even if the main character hadn’t been a real bushmen, it still would have worked.
I disagree. I feel, as slapstick comedies go, it’s really painfully awful. But apparently the moviegoing audience at large (and the critical community; it has a 94 rating at Rotten Tomatoes — “irresitably silly!” crows the New York Times) feels the same way you do.
And if filmmakers continue to employ stereotypes, what of that? But then, we find today that brutal, racist caricatures are still wildly popular, so I guess it’s okay.
“The DVD of this movie comes with a 2003 documentary”
I assume that is another conceit? Because who would trust this package the second time around, or in the case of Gods Must Be Crazy II, the third time. That in fact, was what bothered me when the film came out, the packaging was very mixed up. Was it a “european” film, some cheapo dubbed Italian comedy set in Yugoslavia or points Australian. Was it some Hollywood C-movie cast off, and so on. For the stature it had in terms of distribution-clout, it seemed so … cheap and poorly made, a money-laundering film basically..er,.. for Coke?
FW
It doesn’t appear to be. Rather, it seems to have been included as a kind of corrective, for people like me, although if the person like me was just a teeny bit more like me, they wouldn’t be able to finish watching the movie, much less move on to the “special features.” The director/narrator of the piece couldn’t be more earnest, upset or disillusioned about how betrayed he feels about the the way The Gods Must Be Crazy lied to him and mis-served the people is was claiming to celebrate.
Thanks for posting this. This film in on my list of “Things I Hated Which Others Seem To Like”. I disliked this movie at first because the parts with the white people were painfully lame. Later, when I thought about what the movie seemed to be saying, I came to the same conclusions you did.
Comment with ‘Babel’ spoiler
Your critique of ‘Gods’ reminded me of a problem I had with ‘Babel,’ which struck me as having a similarly condescending attitude about the Third World.
If you haven’t seen ‘Babel,’ you might not want to read the rest of this.
When we learn that the fateful rifle that caused all the trouble had a First World source, I felt like the implication was that the Third Worlders (esp. the Berbers) were happy innocents, and a “Western-made” weapon was the corrupting influence. It implies, to me, that Third Worlders can’t be trusted with rifles, because they’ll cause trouble with them.
Re: Comment with ‘Babel’ spoiler
I had that problem with Babel, yes. I felt in general that the movie teemed with stereotypes. I also had other problems with the script unrelated to its use of stereotypes.
Most of the critics, too; but, what do they know?
More than okay. In comedy, such caricatures are an effective way to criticize and to demean real life persons that resemble the stereotypes. This is exactly why Warner Brothers made slapstick Bugs Bunny cartoons starring and ridiculing Hitler during World War II, and why South Park created the farcical Saddam Hussein character.
To complain that the brutal characters in this movie are black Africans defies reason: The overwhelming majority of people in SubSaharan Africa are black Africans. As recently as the early 90s, a documentary expedition sent to retrace Livingston’s route met children who ran in fear from “white devils,” having never seen such pale skin before.
Sorry about the post-rearranging. You were responding to my post while I was re-editing it to include the Rotten Tomatoes link.
The critical response to this movie baffles me. I kept thinking “Well, it was a different time, maybe people didn’t know any better,” but then I remembered it was 1984, the eyes of the entire world were on South Africa, how could anyone watch this movie in 1984 and think it was anything other than insulting and patronizing?
And yet, the top-billed cast members, and the only characters granted humanity, and the characters granted the majority of screen-time, are white. Why is that, I wonder?
I figured out what was going on with the posts from the email notifications.
It was really simple, funny, and mostly light-hearted (accept for the terrorists, perhaps). Even though this film came out of South Africa, it’s not obviously set in South African places or events. And since none of the characters comes out as obliquely superior to the others, it’s hard to recognize the underlying prejudice of the South African producer. Even the white protagonists come off as inept and foolish through most of the movie.
I never thought about the billing order. I figure that it’s the same reason child stars get lower billing after established stars –often with the dubious honor “and introducing…”– even if the child star gets more screen time than anyone else. Since N!xau was “discovered” for this part, it seems as reasonable for him to get the lower “and introducing” billing.
I’d say that even the terrorists are light-hearted. They obey the rule of comedy, which is that no one “really” gets hurt.
Tell me about it; Tatum O’Neal won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Paper Moon, and she’s the protagonist of the film! Meanwhile, Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar while only appearing in 25 minutes of the film.
And, of course, John Travolta was nominated for Best Actor and Samuel L. Jackson for Best Supporting Actor for Pulp Fiction — even though Jackson had more lines (and had arguably the more interesting character) than Travolta.