Hollywood's golden pick...noticed the xenophobia yet?

By Suntosh Pillay

James Cameron was named 2009’s best director for his movie Avatar at the recent Golden Globe Awards. The other nominations that had already opened on local screens were Inglourious Basterds and Invictus. Though each of these movies had a distinct cinematic style and belonged to different genres, a common, important thread ran through them: the way people handle being discriminated against.

Avatar was a visually stunning science-fiction feat that took the viewer to a complex and marvellous planet whose underground resources were the target of invasive and greedy human beings. It was about power and destruction, human insensitivity, and disrespect for the spiritual.

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, about Nazi-killing Americans who went to Germany to kill Adolf Hitler and his cronies, was a masterpiece from a masterful director. The dialogue, build-up of tension, and violently orgasmic climaxes made the viewer’s patience pay off.

Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, an instant blockbuster, looked at the role of rugby in South Africa’s post-apartheid racial reconciliation. While overstated for the purpose of a Hollywood script, it provided an interesting angle and debating point. If schools start having “set-movies” as they do “set-books”, Invictus would top my must-see list.

But was Hollywood inadvertently giving out a message to the world through last year’s best productions? The common themes I see running through each of these films is the handling of “the other” and the effects of xenophobia and discrimination.

Overcoming racism was most explicit in Invictus. As a dramatised historical interpretation, the movie portrayed the 1995 Rugby World Cup as Nelson Mandela’s rallying point to reach out to whites who formed the majority of rugby-watching people in South Africa at the time. That this movie was made only about 15 years after the event, with both leading figures still alive — Madiba and Francois Pienaar — perhaps indicates that the film-making climate was ripe for a movie about unity and reconciliation. Does the Barack Obama election campaign have anything to do with it? Maybe. Certainly Obama has caused a psychological shift in the American and global emotional outlook. Are we yearning for the feel-good?

Tarantino, too, plays on the feel-good, but it’s a very different sort of feel-good, a very morbid kind, where watching heartless Jewish haters have their scalps ripped off leaves you feeling satisfied. Merciless genocide is the backdrop. The Basterds fight fire with fire, a resolution was impossible, and the boundaries between “good guys” and “bad guys” were blurred. Would you accept a role in a plot to kill a savage dictator? How would you justify it to yourself?

Avatar, the most mainstream of the three, falls in the middle of the two in the obviousness of its xenophobic storyline. It’s superficially about Man versus Alien, then turns this on its head when we come to realise that the humans are, in fact, the alien creatures on a planet they cannot (or will not) fully understand. It’s a sad movie. It makes humanity feel ashamed of itself. This movie will resonate across the world. Most countries were at some point in its history guilty of crimes against another, simply because the “others” were different, were not understood fully, or were in the way of some megalomaniac aspiration of power-hungry “leaders”.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which awards the Golden Globes, has obviously found merit in such themes. But have audiences noticed them? How do we make sense of these movies in an age where the social construction of “the dangerous foreign other” is seen clearly when South Africans burn immigrants, America regularly declares war on perceived enemies, Uganda wants to sentence homosexual people to death and racist rhetoric laces the language of immature public figures.

And now District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp, is being nominated for best picture at the upcoming Oscars. Wait, what’s that? Another movie about xenophobia? Let’s hope it wins, only because local is lekker. But are these themes coincidental or are they being raised consciously and earnestly so that movie-goers around the world leave the theatres with more than just the aftertaste of popcorn?

Suntosh Pillay is a clinical psychologist who writes independently on social issues.