Baby Love and Murder

Saw Tsotsi last night, the South African movie that won Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards this year. I am too old now to just see a movie. I feel a need to see right through it. Partly this is because I dislike the feeling that some sly producer who stands to make millions has been calculating how to make me feel sympathetic toward things that are essentially repugnant.

Tsotsi – which means “Thug” - is about an angry, violent young black man living in tolerable poverty beside a distant, shining –yes, an uncaring capitalist - metropolis from which he is both excluded and, I would say, self-excluded. On a romp with his unemployed and clearly sub-normal gangster friends one night he coldly and unfeelingly helps to kill a lovely man on the subway for a few dollars. Then they move on to the next gig. This time Thug ends up stealing a car and shooting (with intent-to-kill) the innocent woman owner, who happily survives but will be a life-long paraplegic. As he drives crazily away he discovers her hungry baby is in the back seat.

This is where the clash of ideologies begins. Until this moment the movie (and again later in various flashbacks) makes it pretty clear that Thug is violent because he is hard done by. We are asked to accept that anyone in such circumstances might be driven to murder a nice man in a subway for his pocket money. We see Thug as someone made cold, cruel and calculating because society, his drunken sub-normal father, and his sweet mother unfairly dying of AIDS, have made him that way. This is where the romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) might have stepped onto the screen to present the idea that because he thinks people are naturally good, it has to be society that makes them bad. Thomas Hobbes, who wrote Leviathan in the prior century (1651) had promoted the opposing view: that all humans are more like walking cost-benefit calculators, and so it is individuals, and not society that must always be held responsible for whatever they do. Rousseau was the most famous progenitor of the European Romantic movement, and it was Hobbes’s then-prevalent view he was out to change. He has largely succeeded, for it is Rousseau’s view that almost every modern film-maker now idealizes. The underlying message is that if we can just touch a man’s true heart, all the goodness will flow out, they will then beg forgiveness, and society will right itself a little. The cry of the baby becomes the cry of Thug’s own smeared-over inner self, his baby-self. By the end, his baby-soul reduces him to a state of quivering surrender.

Forgive me, but this was a bit of “a stretcher,” as Huck Finn used to say. Unless it is their own brother or sister crying – and maybe not even then - most young men capable of stabbing an innocent man to death and then angrily shooting a complete stranger and stealing her car (in that order), would be more likely to run from that baby as fast as they could or throw it in the nearby river than carry it off and care for it, much less change its smelly diapers. But at this point, reality is already out the window and we are in the full grip of ideology. You could say that a lot of modern movies, as a friend said last night, “are trying to create sympathy for murderers.”

In short, this is a movie about warring concepts of the human mind and soul. A war between the belief in Man-made-by-society, and the belief in Man-made-by-himself; between the view that a bad society is responsible for what we are and so it must be made good and equal for all through progressive social engineering, and the view that regardless of our circumstances, personal “decency” (as one of the weaker characters in this film continues rightly to insist), must prevail if we are to remain human, and this means taking responsibility for our own actions. But the decency fellow remains bed-ridden the whole time because, although he later gets an apology, it was Thug who savagely beat him up. I won’t give any more of the film away. It is worth seeing just to watch these ideologies grappling with each other cinematically, so to speak.

For me, what exposes the society-made-me-do-it view is the fact that so many thousands of Thug's neighbours living in the very same lousy circumstances were nevertheless very good human beings. So for me, the view that society and poverty make people bad is an insult to the goodness and moral fortitude of the poor, the vast majority of whom are never bad. I am also persuaded by the story I heard years ago about the two identical-twin sons who had the same upbringing by a violent, drunken father.

Question to first twin: “Why are you a drunken criminal?”

Answer: “With a Father like mine, who wouldn’t be?”

Question to second twin: “Why are you not a drunken criminal”

Answer: “With a Father like mine, who would want to be”

Comments

[Alex Corbett]

I think you missed the point of the film.

i realized that you missed the point of the film starting in paragraph 4.

While you might be right that "most young men" who are capable of stabbing someone "would be more likely to run from that baby", the fact is that the character doesn't do this, because if he were like "most young men" it would be an uninteresting story.

Do we go to movies merely to enforce our existing prejudices and perceptions? or do we go to challenge them?

I don't know about you, but i prefer to be surprised when i see a film. I don't want to see what i expect to happen... (well.. unless i am going to see a Jerry Bruckheimer movie) I want to see something INTERESTING. I mean, I had better see something interesting for, what, is it up to like $12 now!?!?

I don't know that this movie, or the History of Violence, Godfather, Crash, or any other media that bothers to develop a character, who is also a murderer, is necessarily guilty of "trying to create sympathy for murderers". I think that these types of stories are trying to convey a simple idea, in most cases anyway, that we are all flawed and complex human beings who are capable of good AND evil.

If this film portrayed the murderer as the characature, of which you so eloqently described the antithesis to, (Namely the diaper-changing do-gooder) then nobody would watch this film. They would watch "COPS" instead.

"WOW, that was the best movie EVER!!! i loved how it totally re-enforced my value system!! I didn't think it was possible, but i came out even more closed minded than before." <---- Not something that a movie reviewer is likely to say about a film they endorse.

"Ideology" exists in "reality". One can't go out a window without affecting the other.

The set of understandings and beliefs that form our political/Economic/Spiritual and social preconceptions (Known as "Ideology") are only challenged in the best of films, and never in the worst of films.

I applaude the philosphical analysis.

I tend to think that people are more complex than any one philosopher can articulate. Hobbes and Rousseau base their thinking on a miriad of assumptions just like you do, and i do, and everyone else does. These ideological roots ought to be challenged in my view, to see if they still apply to us in our ever changing world.

Oh, how i do love the "society made me do it" view. I am a firm believer that under the right circumstances we could all be gas chamber attendants, or saints. After all, it would be absurd to think that EVERYONE in the German Nazi party would have been a facist even if they grew up in Canada during the same period. Or maybe that they all just happened to be really really evil all at the same time. If they all just happened to be evil...DON"T drink the water in Germany!! In reality, they got that way because all the books that would permit them to think otherwise had been burned, they'd been alienated by the post-WW1 order,Nationalist indoctrination etc etc...

BUT... people are also responsible for their actions. I love the "society-made-by-man" view equally as much as the other. I am able to love them the same for one simple reason.

They're both wrong.

Humans create society. Society, in turn shapes humans, who then shape society etc etc. In fact there is no "war between beliefs" because these beliefs aren't in opposition, unless we want them to be.

Whew!! I am happy to solve a "war" for you anytime...