Hollywood is many things, but isolationist it is not. Long before Bob Geldof and Bono started prancing about in flyblown media enclosures like two lipless leprechauns with hard-ons for poverty, American film was showing us the world as it really is.
While musicians were beginning the Beguine and dreaming of whites Christmases, Kate Hepburn was letting Congolese leaches tuck into her legs and James Cagney was being slapped around by John Chinaman and his gang of snaggle-toothed mandarin goons. Novelists may have gained bourgeois acclaim as they yearned for underage girls sucking lollipops, but let us never forget that it was Audie Murphy and Frank Sinatra who threw themselves on to Japanese hand-grenades and expired with four-leaf clovers and Iowa-scented kerchiefs clutched in their bloody fingers.
Indeed, one might even argue that Errol Flynn butchered a junkload of Malayan tahrs with only a rusty boathook so that the poets could be free to write about their bell jars and wastelands and stopped clocks. All you need is love, sang the Beatles. Poppycock. All you need is John Wayne, packing heat, with a sturdy wagon wheel at his back. All you need is Steve McQueen doing donuts in the green grass of Alpine foothills. All you need is Sophia Loren, doing Steve McQueen in the green grass of Alpine foothills.
But such explanations are unnecessary. After this week’s Oscar awards, nobody can still believe that the American film industry is out of touch with global realities, for leading this internationalist charge is one very special award, an Oscar that recognises and rewards excellence in non- American films shot in a language other than English: the award for Best Furrin Pitcher.
All South Africans are delighted for Gavin Hood and his young cast. Those who remember Hood in the 1980s rugby drama The Game will be especially pleased for him. Triumphs are always sweeter when they follow crippling shame and wretched ignominy. Of course, in retrospect, the signs of future glory were present in his awful attempts to portray a Springbok superstar. It wasn’t his acting or his ghastly lines, or even his running style, which was faintly reminiscent of one of those lizards that dash across ponds without foundering. It was his intelligence. It was a severe liability and one that he tried to hide by staring at the ground a lot and looking cross for the rest of the time, but the empty middle-distance gaze of the sporting thoroughbred can’t be learned or copied. One is born with it, much as one is born with a tail or a sixth finger. Hood’s brain simply got in the way.
But Tsotsi and its Academy Award are about more than one man’s redemption from tight white Judrons and a mullet. Best Furrin Pitchers are not simply good films. They are pathfinders, waypoints in the ongoing journey of the Western consciousness as it tries to come to grips with The Other and to understand Furrin ways. If South Africa wasn’t on the map before last Sunday, it is now, and more importantly, it is understood much more deeply now.
Before Tsotsi, citizens of developed countries only suspected that Johannesburg looked like Baghdad-on-the-Niger and crawled with murderous blackamoors. They had no evidence for their white suburban nightmares. Today they do, and henceforth their appeals to their offspring not to go south (”Why the Peace Corps? Why, Greta? Why not an internship with Papa at Saab?”) will be bolstered with cinematic proof.
That’s the splendid thing about Best Furrin Pitchers. They show us the world, warts and all. They capture the soul of the countries in which they take place. They look unflinchingly at real life and teach us truths about our fellow humans.
For instance, before I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon I didn’t know that Chinese people could fly. The grace and verve with which they administered roundhouse kicks to each other’s heads, swooping about in the treetops like so many jasmine-scented Chuck Norrises, spoke straight to my humanity and made me glad to be alive. Rather like an Italian.
Italians, you see, are all glad to be alive. The Best Furrin Pitchers made in Italy have taught us this. Whether overacting in Life is Beautiful or overreacting in Cinema Paradiso, Italians will always laugh through their tears. Just why they’re crying is never quite clear, though. Perhaps they’ve just had to listen to an Il Divo castration of a Charlotte Church flagellation of a Sarah Brightman strangulation of an Andrew Lloyd Webber sonata written for clarinet, heartstrings and black molasses. Perhaps they’re crying because life is pain. Which is why the only way to grow old (according to Best Furrin Pitchers from Eastern Europe) is with a young child who will twinkle away the loneliness until death comes in the form of a snowstorm or Stalin.
What lessons can the world learn from Tsotsi? Certainly, they can appreciate that humanity flowers in the darkest holes. But, perhaps more importantly, they can embrace the eternal truth at heart of the film: Always keep your windows rolled up, and whatever you do, keep your car in gear at robots.