Repudiating Bruce Willis’ Tears of the Sun

I should have gone fishing or skinny-dipping or window-shopping, for that matter. I should have broken my resolution to abstain from clubbing, or done anything else on the face of the earth but sit through Bruce Willis’ yarn of an action movie. The experience was exasperating in its milder parts, and revolting at its crudest. Quite frankly, I should have spent my time watching SNL reruns.

Setting aside more sinister conspiracy theories for a moment, we must understand that capitalism is at work here: Hollywood churns out features that sell, and features that align themselves with romanticized notions happen to sell very well. It’s a matter of giving people what they want; indeed, give them whatever reaffirms their smug convictions, and makes them declare in self-adulation, there goes us but for the grace of God.

Tears of the Sun is one of such Hollywood attempts to nurture the general Western notion of Africa as a massive jungle inhabited by birds, beasts, and a banally primitive people doomed to a perpetual cycle of famine, sickness, war, and poverty... A people as utterly incapable of civilization, as they are of the business of government... A people whose whose idea of conflict resolution is exactly wanton massacre...

In the approximately ninety-minute feature, an African nation represented as Nigeria is portrayed as a massive forest (which, coincidentally, fits snugly into the West’s notion of Africa). “Nigerian” politics is reduced to a primordial tribal bloodbath perpetuated by the “Fulanis” against the “Ibos.”

Supposedly, the “Ibo” President (who, it appears, holds a part time job as a “tribal king” of sorts) is murdered by “Fulani rebels.” His son, who is “heir” to “the throne,” suddenly becomes the burden of the U.S. Navy SEALS dispatched to extract an American doctor from the “hostile” region. The juxtaposition of “presidency” and “tribal kingship” in one single man is an anachronism at best, and an aberration at worst. The variant of tribal politics depicted would have been more appropriately ascribed to another time and place.

At the very least, the plot could have been based on a fictitious nation, like Coming to America’s “Zamuda”—although this approach does not altogether address the fundamental issue at hand. Because it arbitrarily uses “Nigeria” as a label for its pitiful contrivance, Tears of the Sun is abrasive, offensive, and insolent. Additionally, it betrays the ignorance of the writers. (There are no “kings” among the Ibos, for a start.)

The people in the movie were most assuredly not Nigerians, the “native” language spoken was decidedly not a Nigerian language (and I might contend was not even a real language at all), none of the sound tracks had the faintest connection to a Nigerian ethnic group, and the quixotic jungle location was, I’ll bet, not anywhere near the Nigerian geographical space. So the epistemological question, then, is: why ascribe such an obnoxious plot to Nigeria?

To have people represented as Nigerians clad in tattered rags, referred to as refugees, and benevolently offered bits of soldier food made me feel like running to the front of the theatre to repudiate, on the spot, the movie’s premise. If not for the release of the exasperation caused by the attack on Nigeria’s name, I would have at least disabused the mind of viewers of the assault on their collective intelligence and sensibilities.

In the end, we are left with the impression that, once again, the caucasoid demigod has succeeded in saving the confounded African negroid from himself, as the helicopters rise in messianic ascension into the clouds. Indeed, the scene was reminiscent of the very Christ himself ascending into heaven after saving wretched man from his sins.

Tears of the Sun does nothing but unleash a demeaning onslaught on an African nation, and an unflattering abuse on the minds of a generation of Americans, with misrepresentations of the social and political realities in today’s Nigeria.

And, oh, the movie, if I am to be allowed to be a movie critic for a moment, has no real morals, hinges on warped principles, and would be receiving a rather charitable assessment if it were compared to, say, Schwarzeneggar's Commando. Tears of the Sun is, to put it as it is, a lie.

My only regret is that my $9 goes towards enriching a band of lying connivers.

Postscript:

I envisage three possible reactions to this write-up:

1. It's a movie, get over it. (Well, I'm over it now that I've had my say.)
2. Other countries have been vilified before, what's the big deal with your Nigeria? (Well, I leave it to the citizens of those countries to rant on their own Web sites.)
3. I, like, totally agree with you. (Thanks, Comrade!)