Apparently, they’re making a movie out of The Last King of Scotland. I love Giles Foden, and hope he writes another book soon. I’m not sure what the adaptation will look like–cinematic treatments of atrocity are frequently underwhelming, and directors aren’t always willing to really let an evil man shine. Forest Whitaker is…not the actor I would have expected, but then, I first encountered him as the team psychic in Species, the one who spends the entire movie alternately whimpering and shouting, “Run and hide! Run and hide! She’s ovulating!” He does have an air of affronted dignity that could be very useful in evoking Amin’s petulance. I also was not expecting James McAvoy; I always pictured the doctor as being at least as old as Adrien Brody, and a good deal more careworn. It wasn’t difficult for me to see him as John Hurt circa 1984. Not callow but exhausted. Maybe callow is a better choice, though.
I liked The Last King of Scotland because I have a preference for unreliable narrators who become entangled in reprehensible things. High on my list of favorite books are The Good Soldier, The Remains of the Day, Artist of the Floating World, A Gesture Life, The Eye in the Door, The God of Small Things, Barbarians at the Gate. Protagonists attempting to ethically negotiate an evil system always fascinate me. Most of these stories involve war, obviously. I also have a special love of stories in which someone goes from feeling wholly protected to realizing that they’ve either wandered out of sight of shelter or been thrown in with the enemy. A skillful author can make the reader believe in that security until it suddenly vanishes. Many of those stories involve Westerners travelling, or fighting, abroad.
Scott at Lawyers, Guns, and Money links to a review that discusses some of the symbolism in these stories, and some of the problems with reducing those people to the symbol of some white guy’s fear of death:
Africa as metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?
In other words, there was more to the Belgian Congo than two Adventurous White Guys going crazy on a river. Indeed, the problems of Marlowe and Kurtz don’t seem to amount to a hill of beans compared to the grand opera of destruction that was the European colonial project in Africa. Stevens suggests that Last King uses Amin as a prop to examine the moral degeneration of Adventurous White Guy, played in this case by James McAvoy. I’m also reminded a little bit of Cry Freedom, which, for whatever merit it has, could have been titled “White Guy Comes to Grips with Apartheid while his Black Friends Die.”
Or Dances with Wolves, aka “White Guy Comes to Grips with Genocide while His Indian Friends Commence Starving to Death.” So what do I remember from the book, which I read several months ago? Here’s the synopsis from the review:
The Last King of Scotland (co-scripted by Jeremy Brock) filters the corruption and violence of Amin’s regime through the eyes of Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), a young Scottish doctor who arrives in Uganda in the early ’70s with a thirst for adventure and a vague desire to do good. Garrigan takes a job at a rural health clinic, where he lamely attempts a fling with a married co-worker (Gillian Anderson, looking strangely like Virginia Madsen). A visit from Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker), the president who has just overthrown the corrupt Obote regime, has a galvanizing effect on Garrigan; he’s charmed by Amin’s boisterous personality and common touch. At Amin’s invitation, Garrigan moves to the capital to become the general’s private doctor, lured by promises that he’ll be put in charge of national health-care reform. That promise never materializes, but soon the young Scotsman is driving his own Mercedes convertible and drinking imported liquor—lots and lots of it, as he tries to blot out his growing awareness of the methods his boss uses to prop up his power.
Pretty much, although I don’t remember him having a “vague” desire to do good so much as a vaguely altruistic excuse to go wandering. He seems to see Amin more as a cool guy and drinking buddy, someone to tell colorful stories about, than as a political messiah.
And here’s the similarity to Achebe’s complaint about Heart of Darkness:
The Last King of Scotland never rises to the standard set by Forest Whitaker’s fearless (and fearsome) performance as Idi Amin. Whitaker clearly has it in him to plumb the psychological recesses of this curiously playful madman [that’s all right, then], but the director, Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September), doesn’t ask him to. Instead, Amin serves as a backdrop for the story of Garrigan’s moral degeneration.
This I’m not too sure about. I don’t get the sense that the story was about Garrigan being offered a choice in that sense. In other words, it wasn’t, So you’ve been cooperating with this regime that you’re invested in as a successful and moral enterprise, and now you realize that it’s evil–what do you do? It was more like, So you didn’t care and now you still don’t particularly care, but you’ve suddenly realized that all the apathy in the world won’t release you from involvement–what does that make you?
There was no real question of doing anything at any point in the book. Garrigan’s only impulse is towards escape. He is horrified, but not for moral reasons–he’s horrified because he’s just realized that he’s the subject employee and mascot of a vicious man. The story ends with Garrigan returning home and attempting to wash his hands of the whole affair. His denouement, which does not actually occur until well after he is out of Amin’s clutches, is the realization that the rest of the world won’t allow him to detach himself from everything he witnessed and condoned. And he resents the hell out of that.
That doesn’t rebut the charge that Amin and the other Africans in the book–few of whom were characters in their own right–were not reduced to scrims onto which the author projected chaos. However, I don’t think the story is so much about how the white guy uses a foreign culture as fodder for his own personal fables. I think the book is an exploration, and an indictment, of the tendency to see oneself as the tourist, the Westerner. Garrigan lives through most of the book–and in terms of acknowledging his moral responsibility, all of the book–in a state of dissociation that borders on dreamlike. It’s clear that he believes that he is special, that his presence there was somehow less real than everyone else’s. His willingness to ignore the clear signs of Amin’s brutality is part of that–he seems to believe that assiduous blindness will confer durable invisibility.
Scott also talks briefly about Hotel Rwanda:
Thinking on this question makes me revisit my mild disappointment in Hotel Rwanda, which, in retrospect, largely avoided the problems discussed above. Hotel Rwanda’s avoidance of the crazy white guy narrative has to be seen as particularly impressive in the context of what was an obvious “white guy gone crazy” opportunity in the figure of General Romeo Dallaire, played in the film by Nolte as “Colonel Oliver”. Dallaire was genuinely driven crazy by the events in Rwanda, but the film shows us very little of this, instead concentrating on the experiences of the African victims and perpetrators of the genocide. I think that my mild disappointment had a lot to do with how the film lacked operatic sweep, especially towards the end. Rusesabagina’s recovery of his children during the RPF advance feels like a tacked on Hollywood ending but is, in fact, the way that the story played out. There was no way, without doing violence to the narrative, to tell the story with a different ending.
Nevertheless, I found it unsatisfying, and I’m now wondering whether that has more to do with me than with the film. Am I prepared to accept a story about Africa when Africa is a Grand Backdrop for Something Important Happening, and less prepared to accept a story about Africa and Africans? Perhaps the inevitable consequence of being a white Westerner, but probably not…
And in comments, from TS:
I hated Hotel Rwanda. I hated it to such a degree that when I worked at a video store I’d tell customers who asked that, with the exception of the intrusive musical numbers, it wasn’t too bad.
HR was PG-13, which I think was the intitial mistake. It was a completely callous judgement on the part of the director/studio to downplay the viciousness of the Tutsi slaughter in exchange for a broader audience.
The end result was that there seemed to be very little context for Rusesabagina’s heroism. Sure, the audience knows something Bad Is Happening Out There, but since we don’t appreciate the scope of the atrocity — i.e. see a machete slice open a head — the saved Rwandans may as well have been seeking shelter from a hurricane.
The genocide should have pervaded every scene, like a virus. But it didn’t, so the ill-informed audience is left, perversely, feeling pretty good, having forgotten — if they ever knew at all — that, despite Rusesabegina’s act — 800,000 Rwandans died anyway.
Disgraceful.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. Although the point about conveying all the deaths Rusesabegina did not prevent is well-made, I don’t remember Hotel Rwanda with such a sunny ambience. For one thing, many accounts of being just this close to violence describe the same relative distance: down the hall, down the block, across the street, across the city. The offstage presence of mass murder, as it were, was threatening; it added to the sense of helplessness. A Passion of the Christ approach might have desensitized the audience, and made it more difficult to convey Rusesabegina’s sense of his own tenuous safety.