Ganging up on movie violence

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.