The Dichotomy of American Cinematic Egotism

The following was first published in the Villager newspaper.

The Villager is a weekly Namibian newspaper.

The dichotomy of American cinematic egotism

The United States of America sure loves itself doesn’t it? Hopefully this doesn’t piss of any American aid funding agencies in the country, but let’s be honest, the country is the international superpower equivalent of Narcissus, the Greek mythological hunter who fell in love with his own reflection.

You mostly see this in movies. It’s as if the cinema is America’s giant lotion bottle for the proverbial obvious. Red Dawn is a movie about North Korea hostilely occupying American soil; with no clear purpose apparently; simply because they can. The result? A large, trained North Korean army division gets their buttocks handed to them by a bunch of American teenagers. Seriously. They had zero training, just a chorus of American patriotic chanting, because that’s usually how winning a war works.

When you look much closer at this you realise just how frequent this occurs. Two of the new blockbusters are practically the same movie. White House Down is about terrorists attacking the White House and subsequently getting their rear ends kicked. Olympus has Fallen is about terrorists attacking the White House and subsequently getting their rear ends kicked. You would think they copied off each other for the script.

Almost all the big hit movies revolve around America. If it’s an alien invasion, whatever the extraterrestrial visitors are looking for is hidden in America. If the world is coming to an end, the most interesting moments will be occurring in the Land of Opportunity.

Now a lot Afro-centric voices are displeased with this and this is very understandable. They hate that America is so focused on itself in its artistic expressions but I think we have to realise a major contributing factor for this is that the movies are being made in America by Americans. I’m sure if Namibians had the budget (and talent?) to pull off an alien invasion blockbuster, Martian kwaitos would be pitching up in Independence Avenue.

The reproaching finger has to be wagged for the right reasons. In the new Die Hard movie, our American hero, played by Bruce Willis, erects an arrogant middle finger at his about-to-die Russian villain as he jumps to safety. In the high grossing film Armageddon, starring the same Bruce Willis, meteorites fell to the earth and caused much destruction. Paris, the French city gets totally destroyed by an asteroid fragment. But that wasn’t a big deal, everyone cheered when America was saved.

I think this is where the real issue lies. Despite tensions in North Korea reaching boiling point, American film makers still received epiphanies to make movies that depict Koreans as bulling, incompetent jerks with an air of sexual deprivation. With great parts of the world already hostile towards America due to this perceived attitude, which they totally have, you would think their PR work would be more PR and less mud smearing.

So I think there should be fairness in our disparagement. There’s nothing wrong with feeling patriotic about one’s own country and depicting it in film. If we made a good movie showing how awesome Namibia was, we’d want others to watch it and I’m sure America feels the same. It’s only when that patriotism becomes jingoism and pokes at other countries that it becomes a problem. What’s the solution? Does anybody have Michael Bay’s number?

Should all words be pliable?

The following was first published in the Villager newspaper.

The Villager is a weekly Namibian newspaper.

Should all words be pliable?

Andrew SevenSeven

So I’m sure you’ve seen the new Trevor Noah show, That’s Racist, right? Maybe you bought the DVD or copied it from a friend, whatever, the show was pretty funny. Besides the humour, he really got the crowd buying into the philosophy that words were quite pliable if you invest enough time to changing it. The focus word here was kaffir and he really believes that if we use it often enough, particularly in mundane contexts, the word would lose the power it so tightly holds over the southern African region. It’s not a word that gets used often-although get used it does, let’s not kid ourselves (and in very racist contexts as well), and most of the continent does seem to be slowly forgetting the bitter word, nevertheless when it does show its head it has a way of turning even the kindest heart into a pungent jumble of bile. But such was Trevor’s charismatic sway that he even got a few impressionable white girls to call themselves kaffirs.

If you look to history, it’s a given fact that words can change meanings over time. After all gay used to mean cheerful or merry. The American counterpart of the word kaffir has been embraced by the black community there, so much so that it is employed as many times as the word ‘the’ in the average rap video.

But has that actually made things better? Why does it feel like much of the community that has embraced this word amongst them also endorses some of the foulest lifestyles on the face of the earth? Not to mention that the actual meaning of the word hasn’t been changed, has it? Nigger is still used to refer to black people, even in the black communities, and it still carries some of the negativity previously associated with it.

Words very rarely fully disengage themselves from the association attached to them, even over time. Gay may now mean homosexual, but that that is still due to most of that community’s over eccentric gesticulations. But perhaps what’s worrying is that a lot of women are starting to use this kind of thinking with regards to the B word. For most, it’s no longer an insult now. It doesn’t matter that the word means a female dog. It can be changed to mean something else. But how many of these people would be fine with their young daughters calling themselves that?

Besides that, isn’t word association one of the many things that set us apart from animals? We’re people after all. Should we just disregard the fact that our parents and grandparents died so we’d be freed from the old systems? Isn’t pain a part of being human? A lot of us have a greater respect for history and our ancestors now because we still appreciate the weight behind the words they were lashed with.

When the comedy shows are over, what will we tell our children about our past, and what will their reaction be if their association with the word is nothing different to what they have with a cellphone charger or a glass of water?