On viewing the film "Disgrace": J M Coetzee

August 2009
In the brief “film guide” summations, Theresa Smith, film critic for the Star Tonite newspaper in Jozi writes about the film version of J M Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, that it is “Bleak and austere, but gripping because of nuanced performances and … it’s just as depressing.”

Having recently seen the film I cannot improve much on that summation. Nonetheless I cannot remember the last time an entire audience sat in stunned silence right through to the end of the credits and then left the cinema without a sound. This was our collective experience a few nights ago after witnessing this disturbing and haunting piece of work.

Notwithstanding this the screenwriter and director have tweaked Coetzee’s original prophetic vision of the white dilemma in a black controlled South Africa. When the book was first published in 1999 South Africa was still the “rainbow Nation” in which it was believed by the relatively unconscious white community that the future belonged to all its inhabitants.

A decade later that illusion has been shattered and to be a so-called “Lily-White is to be the subject of increasing discrimination and resentment as the great expectations that accompanied the transition to a democratic society have been shattered on the backwash of reality and in the aftermath of Polokwane that great ‘shattering’ which is still resonating through our post revolutionary society heralding the next phase of the “struggle”: that between the latent dark force of African feudalism: Coetzee’s theme and the driving forces of African liberation.

And this new phase of the struggle excludes the beleaguered white community much to the confusion of those sleepyheads who did not understand Coetzee’s “impertinent” message in the first place. Such “whitey’s” who appear in the film version of the book [excluding Professor Lurie and his daughter Lucy: the central characters] are either rapidly degenerating bit part players: Bill n Bev oscillating toward their trailer trash destination or as spectral spectators at a cape town farce… the window dressage extras, playing out their role in the shadows. There is no sense of the second revolution under way to the north.

But the violence is real. Thousands of unspeakably brutal farm murders since the book’s debut, underlined by the gratuitous murder of a young ‘Lucy clone’ woman on an isolated smallholding north of Jozi last week: slaughtered for her cellphone and her television set, underlined the reality of white powerlessness in the face of black rage and retribution and the empty awful Horror, that so completely destroyed Conrad’s character nearly a century earlier .

Since the publication of Disgrace, as many as one and a half million whites have fled South Africa for uneasy and discomforted security in other lands, and a million more will reluctantly vanish over the next fifteen years leaving only the rich established extras with too much to lose and the emerging trailer trash with nothing to hope for. [This is not something ever mentioned in polite media circles of course]

No wonder the audience sat rooted in horror at the awful truth our own dilemma. Movies are supposed to suspend reality not drive it home and so one cannot see this movie ever making to the general circuit. White sleepyheads will resist seeing it and the black majority will find it incomprehensible at best and racist at worst.

Theresa Smith’s summation was too kind: the movie is not just depressing it is a formula for suicide; which for many white aging South African’s will ultimately represent their only escape from Conrad’s “horror”, as it is unfortunately for increasing numbers of isolated beached white Zimbabweans, a country where the remaining white citizenry is now considerably outnumbered by the formerly non-existent, now rapidly growing Chinese community..

When I first read Disgrace I reeled in my own horror at the awful bleakness of Coetzee’s vision and I wrote a short review of my own in a poetic form and published it on my website at that time.It was a year [2000] when I was on a “write a poem a day” mission. I published it again later, in 2005, as part of my collection “Rehearsing Nietzsche” [ now also published on Blogroid.wordpress and eventually on this blogger site]

Watching the film I had the sense I had been Googled by the screen-writer, for reasons that are only evident to poets. Because the reason for this would not be evident to you my dear reader, i have re-published the blog i first published at the beginning of the decade on my original website Williamsonreport, and it now follows on this blog under the heading "On first reading J M Coetzee's Disgrace". I discontinued that website after some five years partly because of irreconcilable differences with the service provider and mainly because of legislation changes in my country of origin that would have subjected me to possible censorship and other State controls.

Happy blogging