The Gods Ought Not Lose Their Wits Again

When I started this movie, I didn’t really know what to expect or what direction it was going. For the most part, this movie was very unorthodox even for the time in which it was filmed. The way it was edited, and how the scenes were sped up and cut drastically changed the way some elements of this movie were presented. The style the movie had, lead me to believe it was older than it actually was. The scenes that were intentionally sped up added a more comical effect and made them seem both more lighthearted and seemingly less significant. Obviously some of these scenes were sped up for time constraint, watching Mr. Steyn chase his “anti-christ” car around would have probably taken a much longer time and wouldn’t have had the same comical effect if the scene had been left at regular speed. In my opinion, the car chase scenes between the guerrillas and the various governments were sped up for similar reasons, but more for time constraint than comical reasons. The style of humor in this film was a little different than the other movies that I’ve seen in this class. It took a mix of physical, slap-stick humor, with a little deeper “intelligent” humor that took a longer time to set up. The movie took a longer time to set up most of its humor, in general.

In the beginning, I thought this film was going to strictly be about the bushmen, then it splintered off and talked about various people groups and governing bodies. The story sort of takes a hit with all of the diversity the filmmakers tried to throw in. What started as a commentary on modernization essentially destroying the beauty of life, became a bland love story that mingled with a senseless pride war between a rebel group and one of Africa’s governing bodies. After looking a little closer though, the theme still carries through. The evil that is represented as a glass coke bottle and the innocence of the bushman change forms throughout the film. The first shift that can be seen is the guerrillas attack on the government building, where the coke bottle is the government and the guerrillas are the bushman. This comparison can be made when they retreat back into the banana forest, the guerrillas are hiding out in the brush, while the governing officials recuperate, get dressed and retaliate from their office. Another contributing factor in this scene is the government's military giving chase to the guerrillas in a Mercedes (I think that’s what that car they commandeered was), while the guerrillas flee in open aired jeeps. The military even comments on the gas guzzling vehicle when it breaks down while in pursuit of the guerrillas. Another throwback to consumption and waste.

This change in form is made more official when the bushman is arrested for shooting a goat in another man’s pasture. When the bushman is arrested, he drops the bottle as he is carried off in the paddy wagon; I think that this is a symbolic shift. Throughout the entirety of this movie, both the innocent bushman and the corrupting coke bottle are symbols represented by different elements in the film at different times during the film. At the beginning the symbol of innocence represented by the bushman shifts to the rebels, but then shifts back to the bushman. Later, the innocent bushman symbol is then shifted to the Botswana people and the rebels become the representation of the corrupting coke bottle. The defeat of the rebels is the end of the symbolic corruption. These symbols then revert back to the bushman and the bottle, where the bushman prevails in finding the end of the world and disposing of the evil bottle once and for all.

Overall, this movie seemed very scattered and unorganized, but latching on to the bushman and coke bottle being merely symbols of innocence and corruption helped me to understand this movie on a level that might have been completely unintentional, but helpful nonetheless.