Emotional Overload

I think it would be hard for anyone to accuse Americans of being unaware of all the terrible things that are going on around the world, because we spend so much time acknowledging them in a kinda of twisted, voyeuristic entertainment. Every night when you turn on the news there are countless stories about unrest in this country, uprising in that one, and disease in another. If you follow even moderately famous people on twitter or facebook, they are constantly updating to let you know that there is something bad happening. When you watch awards shows, the stars will coyly slip in something about their latest cause, and the movie theater always seems to have a story about problems in another country, or at least one coming soon. It has now gotten to the point that we are simply overloaded with pain. As Manohla Dargis put it in Ideas & Trends:Film – Film Fatigue; Africa, at the Cineplex”, “For the last few years or so, every week seems to bring another documentary, another song, another campaign, another press conference, another celebrity sighting”. To add to that he says “my problem, rather, is al those films filled with suffering, struggling black Africans who, for the most part, seem to be on camera to make me feel bad,” which points out yet another devastating truth about over exposure to traumatic stories: we are going numb. When people are bombarded with news of murder and famine, it becomes second nature to tune it out, because if you don’t you will never get out of bed.

Terry George’s 2004 Hotel Rwanda would seemingly be another film that gets lost in this pessimistic propaganda, but some reason it has risen along with films like Edward Zwick’s 2006 film Blood Diamond to be one of the more powerful films about conflicts in Africa. Hotel Rwanda tells the story of the genocide that occurred when the Hutus began their attempt to exterminate the Tutsis. The film touches briefly on the reason for the genocide, but focuses more on what actually happened than on the exposition of the situation, most likely because trying to get to the root of the problem would have taken up the entirety of the movie and prevents the demonstration of the monstrosities that occurred from entering the film.

Now you might be asking why this film was so much more powerful than a documentary about suffering such as Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare. In all honesty, I don’t have the answer. I can’t even say for sure that it is a fact that Hotel Rwanda was the more powerful film. I can simply give you my analysis, which is that George’s film made us connect more with the people of Rwanda, followed a narrative story line that made the people real, and gave us hope.

In “Hotel Rwanda” Anthere Nzabatsinda wrote. “The remarkable performance of Don Cheadle (Paul Rusesabagina) makes us believe that he really belongs to that space, to that population, to those events. His talent, as well as Terry George’s craft, make the fiction almost fade in front of the reality, but again the dialogue between the two levels of representation succeeds in achieving an interesting balance that stands out in regard to many other films shown on the same topic of 1994 Rwandan tragedy”. Don Cheadle is an American actor, someone that we know to be talented, so when we see him onscreen we see another American who cares enough about a story to be in a film about it. We do not see an unknown actor cast because they are Rwandan and experienced the tragedy, which tells the audience that the filmmaker was not trying to beat them over the head with realism. Cheadle also plays the part of a Rwandan who lives in a house that resembles many American houses, and goes to work in a nice hotel, one that you would see anywhere in the world. This makes the character seem much more like an American, someone that we can identify with. He is not a poor African in danger of starvation while he and his wife slowly die from AIDS, leaving their three children with nothing, which has become a typical story from Africa. Instead, Americans can identify with this very westernized character, we can feel his love for his family and his pain when they are in danger.

Hotel Rwanda also carries the audience through a narrative journey. Instead of bouncing back and fourth between interviews that have been pieced together to tell us what happened during the 1994 genocide, the film is easy to follow, allowing the focus to be on the atrocities. The being said, as Anthony Daniels acknowledges in “New Again, That Time”, “The director obviously decided that what is implied acts upon the mind more profoundly than what is shown”. George doesn’t show the audience dozens of images of people being murdered with machetes or piles and piles of bodies. He spends most of the film in the hotel with the people who are surviving, the people with hope, who are worried about their friends and family outside the hotel, a worry which the audience feels thanks to the powerful performance by the actors. While a documentary may rely too much on stock footage of what happened to relay the intensity of the situation because their interviews were not quiet powerful enough to get it across, Hotel Rwanda can rely on the actors and recreate only a few graphic images to drive the point home at key dramatic moments. One of the most powerful moments in the film, I think, was the point when Rusesabagina and his helper are driving home to get supplies, and in the fog they think they have driven off the road. When Rusesabagina gets out of the car to se where they are, he falls on several bodies and the fog clears showing a road littered with bodies. There is no violence hear, only the aftermath that allows the audience to imagine what happened. It is also one of the few times we see dead bodies, which makes it a much more powerful image than if we had been seeing them the entire time.

Ultimately, what made Hotel Rwanda such a powerful films was not the fact that Don Cheadle was in it, or the powerfully used images. It was the talent on behalf of all involved combined with their passion to tell the story in a way to make people feel, and their trust in the medium to do the job. In Ideas & Trends: Film – Film Fatigue; Africa, at the Cineplex”, Manohla Dargis wrote “one of the truths about the movies is that, no matter how high-minded a director or how earnest his intentions, what he puts in front of his camera usually talks louder and more honestly than anything he himself might say”. Had George or Cheadle simply stood in front of a microphone or camera and told us we needed to care about this issue, we would have tuned it out because it seems as though another celebrity has simply taken on another issue to feel better about themselves. Seeing the story of these people unfold before our eyes, however, got us involved in the issue. It made us forget that it came from someone with an agenda and allowed us to experience briefly the tragedy that occurred so that it has become part of our subconscious, part of our memory.

In the wake of the films release, something that I found very interesting was the response to Rusesabagina. While Americans and Western countries acknowledge him as a hero, his own people say that he has rewritten history. According to Christopher Rhoads in “Hotel Rwanda Hero Hasn’t Fared Well Back Home Lately; Paul Rusesabagina Now Has Detractors in High Places; A Young Critic in Arizona”, the situation for the real life hero has become one of death threats from his own country accompanied by denouncement by his own people. They accuse him of selling their tragedy for money as well as rewriting history, yet they are the same people who quoted a disguised the statement of a 12 year-old boy as being from a renowned journalist, simply because it made it seem as though the United States didn’t truly regard Rusesabagina as highly as it seemed. This alone shows the dishonesty that still rages in the country. It also demonstrates the effects that a film can have on the person who’s life it was based upon. Being a hero on the screen doesn’t necessarily make life easier.

In the end, there is no way of knowing rather or not a film will help a cause or hinder it. There is no way of knowing whether it will help the subject or put his life in danger. The only thing that matters is whether or not you want to tell the story. Everything else can be dealt with as it comes.

New Terminology

In Hotel Rwanda by Anthere Nazabatsinda, he accuses the film of being between fiction and quasi-journalistic”. “Quasi” is a word I hear and use often, but one in which the meaning has come second hand, so I decided to look it up.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary it means “resembling; seeming; virtual”. In this case, I don’t agree with Nazabatsinda’s statement. The film, in my opionion, does not pretend to be journalism. It does not seek to uncover the root of the problem, nor does it try and clutter the story with facts or testimonies. It tells a story, one based more on emotions than facts.