The graphic portrayal of gang violence in the new movie Zulu
might just influence young children to become gang-members themselves. Petrus
Malherbe digs deeper.
During a recent viewing of the yet to be widely released
film Zulu, one theme stood out between all this movie tries to address:
Cape Town is one hell of a violent place.
This French/South African co-production, directed by a
Frenchman Jarome Salle and starring American actors Forrest Whitaker and
Orlando Bloom, leaves the viewer with the idea that impulsive beheadings and
drive-by shootings of shebeens leaving even the dogs dead, are normal for the
Cape Flats.
The initial problem with foreigners coming to South Africa
to tell a South African story is that it immediately makes you apprehensive of
their intentions. Whitaker plays Ali Sokhela of the Cape Town Serious and
Violent Crimes Unit. Bloom is his disgruntled partner, Brian Epkeen. Replete
with mock Zulu-accents and a few words of Afrikaans, these two Yanks fully
emerged themselves into the roles of hard boiled South African cops.
But there is a two-fold snag with this approach. Zulu
is pumped full of gratuitous violence ranging from the exemplary shooting in
the head to the odd case of one poor cop getting his hand chopped of by machete
on Muizenberg beach. Only to have his head hacked with the same machete soon
afterwards.
The plot of the movie is embroiled in the dark world of drug
dealings on the Cape Flats. Although this world really exists much as depicted,
Zulu openly exploits it to see how many violent scenes it can squeeze
from it.
This sheer unpleasantness overwhelms whatever idea the
makers of this movie tried to get across about living in a post-apartheid South
Africa. Themes of redemption, acceptance and friendship get muddled in a sea of
violence that’s forced into almost every scene.
But how big an influence does this film have on children –
some perhaps even living in these gang-stricken areas of the Cape?
Film is truly the only art form that can attack our mood and
senses on a real, stomach-turning level. The visceral impact of seeing
someone being beheaded versus reading about it in a newspaper or book
cannot be understated.
Therefore when a child watches Zulu, in his or her
mind the violence being portrayed can be seen as real. It will affect their
memories about what they know of how gangs operate in these areas of the Cape.
According to Muriel Johnstone, a social worker who works
with children at a maternity hospital in Cape Town, the most important
thing to remember with regards to violence on screen is that children are far
more prone than adults to be influenced by it.
“Children emulate the
characters on screen,” she says. “They are likely to look at the action on
screen, notice what they are doing and imbed that action into their minds as
acceptable behaviour.”
When looking at media effects on its users, the authors of a
study called Longitudinal Relations Between Children’s Exposure to TV
Violence and Their Aggressive and Violent Behaviour in Young Adulthood argue
that these effects are mostly, if not completely, felt by children rather than
teenagers and adults. “Short-term effects can be felt by adults, but it is the
more severe long-term effects that can only affect children. This includes
children of all types and backgrounds.”
This is especially important to remember when one tries to
understand the possible impact the violence in a movie like Zulu might
have on a child growing up in a gang-stricken area or even elsewhere.
“What a child sees, it remembers,” explains Johnstone. “The
most important thing to remember here is that it should be the responsibility
of the parents to control what their children watches. Adult supervision is one
of the best barriers guarding children from the unnecessary exposure to worlds
they do not need to know about at that age.”
This is where, in South Africa, a governing body like the
Film and Publications Board (FPB) comes into play. With a specific focus on
protecting children from exposure to potentially disturbing, harmful and
inappropriate materials, the FPB decides on advisory age guidelines for parents
by giving each and every film released in South Africa an age restriction.
This phenomenon is nothing new. The practise of giving a
film an age-restriction of, for example, sixteen does not stop the intended
effect of that movie on the child, regardless if they are still younger than
sixteen.
According to Anziske Kayster, a mother of two boys aged 4 and
12, it is almost impossible to keep your children away from violence even if
you follow the FPB’s guidelines. “Take for example the movie Spider-Man,”
she says, “it’s got a rating of PG-13, but in the movie Spider-Man still
violently kills, maims and burns the bad guys. If I had not made my children
understand that Spidey was the good guy, what type of message does this
supposedly family friendly-film give?”
Like Johnstone, Kayster also feels that the main influence
of movie violence on her children is that they want to emulate the actions of
the ‘heroes’ on the screen. She talks about how her sons, after seeing Spider-Man,
got into a mock fight with each other, both wanting to be the hero and not the
bad guy in their make-belief re-enactment of the movie.
Although this is a rather trivial anecdote, the principle of
the matter remains that the fine line between the portrayal of violence and
being violent in real-life starts to blur.
A more heavy-handed example of this is the story of former
child-soldier in war stricken Sierra Leone, Ishmael Beah. In his memoir A
Long Way Gone, Beah writes how violent media was part of his training
regimen.
Noah Berlatsky, in writing for The Atlantic, points
out: “Rambo: First Blood, Rambo II and Commando were
screened in constant rotation to encourage them in battle... [They] all wanted
to be like Rambo and couldn’t wait to implement his techniques.” Beah recalls
the incident wherein one of his friends snuck into an enemy camp and started to
slit the throats of the guards. Just like Rambo would do.
Here violent films directly lead to real-life violence. Who’s
not to say that Zulu might be used to the same effect to induce violence
in children living in the gangster paradise of South Africa?
“I would definitely advise parents to fervently prevent
their children from viewing such a film as Zulu,” says Johnstone. “There’s
a high amount of danger in portraying such real life realities on a medium that
can be widely accessible to easily impressionable children.”
If through further studies violent media are conclusively
found to cause real-life violence, a better form of implementing fair
restrictions might be needed. It will not be fair to live in a society where the portrayal of violence in that society effectively leads to more real and
consequential violence.
According to Ster Kinekor, Zulu will be widely
released after a preview at the Durban Film Festival in July.
