Darwin's Nightmare

Hubert Sauper's disturbing 2004 documentary scrupulously raises questions that it, with equal scruple, refuses to answer. And the film's curiously apolitical and uninformative stance begs an ultimate question about this form of film: is sheer documentation without analysis a morally reasonable response to horrific human suffering? Fifty years ago, someone introduced the Nile perch, a voracious cannibalistic fish, into Lake Victoria in Africa. The invasive species proliferated and the predatory perch grow to enormous proportions -- some of them seem to be six feet long. The perch can be readily taken by fisherman and their fillets are apparently very tasty, thus, spawning an enormous industry on the shores of the huge lake. Rural villagers swarmed to shantytowns built by the lake. Prostitutes infected with HIV gathered in the shantytowns, spread their diseases, and, then, hired Vespas or motor-bikes to take them back into the hinterland where they could die at home, after spreading the disease in the country as well. Millions perished of AIDS. Huge potbellied jets piloted by Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan arrive daily at Mwanza, a desolate city with an airstrip that endsin the lead-blue shallows of the lake.. Everyone claims that the jets arrive empty to ferry fish fillets to Western Europe, as many as 55 tons per plane. But, of course, this is a lie: the jets arrive in Tanzania full of tanks and Kalashnikov rifles to arm soldiers in the various wars raging in central Africa -- conflicts that Sauper says have killed five million people in the years preceding 2004. The cannibal fish are a convenient metaphor for the dysfunctional and horrific human ecology that has arisen around the lake -- only the strongest and most violent can survive and the local biosphere is shattered beyond recognition. The perch have destroyed the balance of nature in the lake and the waters threaten to become s stinking "sinkhole." Sauper shows ragtag mobs of little boys roaming the streets, homeless children who, somehow, boil fish scales and guts into glue that they sniff, passing out in pestilential alleyways. The huge jets roar over the rotting landscape where women emaciated into skeletons by AIDS drag themselves from shack to shack. Preachers show movies about Jesus and depict the Savior on the Sea of Galilee while preaching against the use of condoms. In one nauseating sequence, hundreds of people pick through rotting fish carcasses, suspending the gobs of bone and entrails on wooden rails hundreds of feet long, vast pyramidal mounds of fish guts heaped near shacks where children are playing with perch carcasses. The ammonia rising from the rotting fish attacks people's faces and eyes, rotting away their corneas. A prostitute sings a patriotic song about "beautiful Tanzania;" later we learn that she has been stabbed to death by an Australian "client." Burly Ukrainian pilots drink vodka and listen nostagically to songs from home. The shadows of the big planes swoop over the ruinous city tattooing the streets with the insignia of doom. A group of well-fed Indian merchants runs a huge fish processing plant, seemingly oblivious to the squalor and misery on the other side of their windows. A night watchman lurks outside a mysterious scientific-industrial compound with poisoned arrows -- he is licensed to kill anyone inside the fence protecting the facility. The night watchman's eyes glisten with joy as he thinks of slaughtering trespassers with his quiver of deadly steel-pointed arrows. The entire spectacle is like something imagined by Jonathon Swift, a huge canvas of misery and folly and exploitation. Sauper doesn't use any voice-over narrative and many of the images are intentionally obscure -- I have no clear idea what the people are doing with the mountains of fish carcasses, although this business seems to have driven half of the villagers in that place mad. (I presume that they are processing the fish entrails and bones to make some kind of fish-meal fertilizer although we are not given any clue as to the purpose of their enterprise and the imagery is Sisyphean, absurd, horrific.) Sauper provides a long interview that is an extra on the DVD of "Darwin's Nightmare" -- also the unwatchably grim "Kinsagani Diary," about the massacres in Rwanda, a bloodbath that Sauper inadvertently witnessed in 1997 appears on the disc as a "bonus" (although I hesitate to use that word for this collage of dying children and rotting bodies). Sauper wants the pictures to speak for themselves. But, of course, they don't and his faith that we will come away from "Darwin's Nightmare" with some reasonable understanding of the plight of these Tanzanians seems to me to be naive. Certainly, it seems morally indefensible that planes come from the capitals of Europe loaded with weapons and, then, depart from this desperately poor and starving place so heavily laden with nutritious fish for tables in Paris and Berlin that the jets sometimes crash into the lake or fail to take off at all, littering the sides of the runway with colossal junk. The images fill the viewer with rage and dismay, but it is impotent rage and voyeuristic dismay. And, furthermore, Sauper's premise is a bit too facile. Isn't it a remnant of European paternalist colonialism to assert that the Africans are too vicious and politically inept to be sold weapons? Don't African countries have the right to arm themselves against insurgencies and foreign threats just as much as nations in Europe? And, on a continent rich in natural resources but overpopulated with starving people, isn't food also a weapon, indeed, perhaps, the most valuable and deadly weapon? In Africa, you can kill a child just as effectively with food as with a Kalashnikov rifle. What do I mean by this? Those with food can use that resource to provision their soldiers freeing valuable cash to buy more arms. So, in fact, Sauper's overly obvious metaphor for the nightmarish and damnable dysfunction in the area of Lake Victoria evaporates upon closer analysis. The jets arriving with guns and leaving with prime fish fillets are just one more symptom of human evil and cruelty that is pervasive, destructive, and ineradicable. And to revert to the question at the start of this note: is it right to leave viewers of a film filled with helpless despair?