Chapter Two
Manipulations of Borders and Human Rights:
The Representations of the Violation of Rights in Everyday Life in In This World and Dirty Pretty Things
In Chapter One, I summarize some theories about human rights in global era.
No matter how different theorists approach the issues of human rights, the national/social borders and boundaries are playing a central role in the enforcement and violation of rights. For further investigating the real impacts of borders on rights and how people realize and respond to these impacts in their daily lives, Chapter Two dealing with two films about illegal immigrants and refugees in London as case studies. In other words, in Chapter Two I would like to study the issue of human rights and immigration from the micro point of view of the refugees and illegal immigrants, instead of from the macro perspective. Examining filmic representations, I hope to re-approach the issue of the borders and human rights with outcast people’s everyday life experiences during their migration.
For analyzing the representations of the negotiation of the borders and human rights in immigrants’ everyday life, I employ Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2003) and Stephen Frears’s’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002) as my case studies.1 Both films represent the immigrants’ personal experiences of global migration. In This World is a dramatic documentary film shot from February 2002 after the U.S.
bombing campaign in Afghanistan in October 2001. It is about two teenage Afghan refugees, Enayatulah and Jamal, who are smuggled from the asylum in Pakistan to
1 Michael Winterbottom, born in 1961 in Lancashire, England, made many movies about human intense relationships and emotional commitment. He received many positive critical notices but no rewards. His works include Ingmar Bergman (1994), Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), Wonderland (1999), In This world (2003), and so on. Stephen Frears was born in 1941 in Leicester, England. He produced a lot of TV series and movies since 1968.
London through Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey for freedom and better life. Undergoing great sufferings, only Jamal successfully arrives at London while Enayatulah dies in the cargo container shipped from Turkey to London. Dirty Pretty Things, categorized as a thriller film for entertainment, deals with how a small group of immigrants builds their friendship and struggles to survive in London. Oppressed fiercely by immigrant officers and their employers who are also immigrants, Okwe, a Nigerian doctor in exile, and Senay, a Turkish refugee, find out they have no choice but involve in the illegal human organ trade of hotel-owner Senor Juan for forged passports. Helped by his friends Guo-Yi, a Chinese immigrant working in hospital mortuary, and Juliette the prostitute, Okwe saves Senay from the kidney surgery and both leave London with new forged identities. In both films, there are different groups of people who try to gain profits from managing the borders and from negotiating immigrants’ rights.
To some extent, In This World and Dirty Pretty Things are two films that complement each other thematically. Juxtaposing these two films, we see the diverse experiences of illegal immigrants in London. First, In This World focuses on the migrating process of two teenage Afghans and Dirty Pretty Things depicts the sufferings of illegal immigrants who try to stay in or get out of London. The main characters of In This World are from the low class of society but those of Dirty Pretty Things come from different social classes, even from the upper middle class. For example, the leading character Okwe was a doctor back in Nigeria. Second, In This World while portrays male immigrants’ experience, Dirty Pretty Things deals with the experiences of both male and female immigrants from various areas of the world, including Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Asia. It addresses issues of
class, gender, and ethnicity. Third, In This World represents how illegal immigrants confront the states’ law and Dirty Pretty Things stresses the tensions between the immigrants who get citizenship and those who do not.
Giving a fuller picture of illegal immigrants from representing their everyday life, these two films reveal some interesting observations about new relationships between the non-citizens and the citizens, between the illegal and the borders. Many critics easily note the humanitarian compassion that these two films endeavor to express. For example, Jamie Russell thinks that In This World is “a staggeringly persuasive reminder that the West's duty to the people of Afghanistan is far from over.”2 Allison Benedikt admires that In This World draws our attention to the harrowing reality of refugee story.3 Michael Wilmington says that Dirty Pretty Things is “an intelligent, sensitive piece about real people in harsh, dangerous situations… [and] a genre thriller while also offering gems of social portraiture and a lacerating expose of current conditions among illegal London aliens.”4 Also Margaret A. McGurk merely shows that the moral battling among the immigrants could be a biting social commentary as well as an entertaining mystery.5 These critics emphasize how two movies reflect difficult reality or how they faithfully represent real experiences of illegal immigrants. To them, the films are simply asking the audience and the West to sympathize these low-class marginalized people. However,
2 Please check the website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2003/02/21/in_this_world_2003_review.shtml
3 See
http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/movies/mmx-030918-movies-review-ab-inthisworld,0,3003507.st ory?coll=mmx-movies_top_heds
4 Please see
http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/movies/mmx-030731movies-review-mw-dirtyprettythings,0,5425 071.story?coll=mmx-movies_top_heds
5 For more details, please go to:
http://www.cincinnati.com/freetime/movies/reviews/08152003_dirtypretty.html
as far as I know, very few critics notice the issues of political negotiation over the borders in these two representations. These two representations in fact expose a much more profound political observation about how the borders are continuously dispersed and manipulated so that the refugees and illegal immigrants may never find themselves secured and fairly-treated.
Both in two representations, although being violated and abused a lot, illegal immigrants have more opportunities to cross borders and claim spaces in the receiving society. I argue that it is because besides nation-states, many interest parties are also able to be the players of borders of various kinds in globalization. Nation-states are no longer the only authority that has full power to regulate national, territorial, and social borders. In globalization, many local forces of different social resources have chances to intervene to manipulate various kinds of borders and social boundaries to negotiate the rights of illegal immigrants. Multiple players indeed increase the chances of exploiting illegal immigrants during the process of negotiating the borders. On the other hand, it is also the multi-players phenomenon that creates different possibilities for illegal immigrants to claim their spaces and rights that the nation-states would never grant. Also, I would like to analyze how the narrative and filming techniques of two movies play with different scales of border concepts that highlight their motive of violation.
This chapter is divided into three major parts. In the first section, I analyze how two films represent different interest parties participate in manipulating various kinds of borders, and also, how the negotiating process of these borders would cause violation of human rights. In the following part, I study how different represented
subjects of two films affect them to represent the hope and justice that illegal immigrants can expect. The last part focuses on examining the filmic techniques which also play the concept of border to correspond with the genres and motives of two movies.
I. Multiple Players and Multiple Borders in the Game
Dealing with global people and capital flow, both films represent the inconsistency of border conditions in globalization. In This World clearly shows that it is very much easier to cross the national borders by human trafficking than to cross as people of rights. Dirty Pretty Things indicates that the only way for illegal immigrants to claim rights in London is by exchanging their organs for fake citizenship in black market. Both illustrate that through loosely controlled economic borders and global markets, the illegal may penetrate into foreign countries. This suggests that the globe is being integrated economically. However, when it comes to the undocumented immigrants’ flow, the nation-states in both films reinforce the strong control of the national and social borders. For instance, the national borders are always guarded by police or army for preventing illegal immigration in In This World. In Dirty Pretty Things, the British government only permits Senay’s right of residence in London as a refugee. Without British citizenship, she is not allowed to work in the first six months.
The national and social borders are governed so firmly that they inhumanly keep her from entering the society. National economic borders are loose for stimulating its economic growth while social borders are strict for preventing foreigners from reducing its resources. The global geography and national borders are proceeding with
a series of geographical (re)building to achieve the goal of accumulating as much capital as possible (Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 54). In other words, borders would be open or close, removed or re-constructed anytime in accordance with the profits the capital flow can bring. Since the illegal immigrants and refugees are not considered as profit-makers, they are stopped by national and social borders which may open for foreign goods.
Two films show the incongruous economic and social border conditions through representing illegal immigrants in/to London. Étienne Balibar provides new understanding of borders to explain this transformation in globalization,
The borders of new sociopolitical entities, in which an attempt is being made to preserve all the functions of the sovereignty of the state, are no longer entirely situated as the outer limit of territories; they are dispersed a little everywhere, wherever the movement of information, people, and things is happening and is controlled—for example, in cosmopolitan cities. (1)
Borders no longer only refer to the political frontiers of each nation-state’s territory.
They fragmentally appear as invisible boundaries that occur in every movement of global flow. These boundaries are not spatially fixed, nor permanently close or open.
Whenever there is a movement, the boundaries can be regionally re-manipulated again. They are always in the process of being organized and reorganized. They are prevailing in every aspect of life, including social, economic, political, and cultural aspects. London, as the setting of two films, exemplifies what Balibar calls cosmopolitan city. The most intensive flows of every kind occur and confront in
London. Illegal immigrants in both films disclose that national and territorial borders are much easier to be penetrated. They really encounter obstruction of borders not when they pass the frontiers but when they try to integrate into London society to claim a social space for their survival.
To draw on Balibar’s definition, in both films borders are socially dispersed and (re)negotiated when the illegal immigrants and refugees practice their right of mobility to/in London society. That is, these borders are not fully controlled by nation-states. Because of the fragmental borders in global age, governments are no longer the only player that has access to regulating borders. Borders can be dispersed and appropriated in people’s everyday life. There would be spaces for more interest parties and people of more social power to manipulate the borders as a social means to increase personal property and secure personal social status.
In This World and Dirty Pretty Things together represent at least three different kinds of everyday negotiations of borders. These three borders are political/national, socio-economic, and corporeal border. They are manipulated by the border and immigration police, the border residents and some documented immigrants. The political border refers to the territorial border that marks the nation-states’ sovereignty to exclude/include. The socio-economic boundaries control the distribution of social resources and determine social hierarchy. The corporeal border distinguishes human and non-human and decides the site to practice human rights. The global movements of the illegal immigrants and refugees simultaneously lead to the (re)negotiation of these three kinds of borders. In each manipulating process, their human rights are traded or violated for more capital accumulation of various kinds. They often need to
sacrifice some of their rights in order to survive and to pursue a better political and economic life. The three kinds of borders are not independently manipulated; they are inter-related.
(a) The Political/National Border
In both films, the political border is guarded by the border and immigration police who represent nation-states’ sovereignty. The national border is the space that a nation-state displays its power of sovereignty and protection. On the other hand, “the functions a government applies to the border depend on the image it wants its border to project” (Witt 167). In both films, the image of the border is represented by the image of the border police. The border police embody the functions the government wants the national border to fulfill. As the nation-state’s representatives, the police are equipped and represented martially. All of them are fierce-looking and very masculine males. The border police in In This World are armed all the time. Despite the penetrated economic border, Pakistan and Iran declare that they still have power over their border by exhibiting their physical strength through the armed police. The powerful image of the police is formed by a contrast with the weakness and frightened expression of two illegal teenage immigrants. In one scene of In This World, two teenagers are repatriated in an armored vehicle by the border police of Iran.
Contrasting with Jamal who cringes in fear under the machine gun on the car, the standing border policeman who controls the gun looks so powerful and omnipotent. In Dirty Pretty Things, the immigration police seem to be able to locate and inspect Senay no matter where she hides. By excluding or supervising the strangers, the border and immigration police maintain the nation-state’s sovereignty to control the
national border which is by contrast penetrated easily by global capital flow.
In In This World, the border police protect the border with militant power but they can also use the power they have to manage the border for their personal profit.
As Jacque Derrida observes, “the police become omnipresent and spectral in the so-called civilized states once they undertake to make the law, instead of simply contenting themselves with applying it and seeing that it is observed” (14). In the process of executing the law, the police are able to make their own law because the nation-state depends on them to practice the power of sovereignty. As in the film, when two refugees exercise their right of mobility, they are forced to stop by the border police twice and give up some of their belongings. They unwillingly give away the Walkman as a “gift” to the Pakistan border police to leave safely and the Iran border police take away their money by force before denying them the right to enter the country. The Pakistan border police, to some extent, privatize the border and make it their own space of exchanging profit. Only when Jamal gives him what he desires, the border can be opened for them to pass. The Pakistan border police rewrite the laws that are practiced in everyday life to make the illegal immigrants trade their right of mobility. The Iran border police also take advantage of their power to make their own laws over the space of the national border.
In Dirty Pretty Things, while enforcing the law, the immigration police compress the illegal immigrants and refugees’ living spaces to reinforce their sovereign power. The immigration police forcibly enter the house of Senay, to make a thorough search and take things away without a warrant. They spy on her to prevent her from working. In a scene, the police make her apartment not a private space but a
public space used by the state to detain her. As a refugee, not a citizen, she has no legal rights to claim spaces in London and she has to accept whatever the police do to her. Compressing Okwe and Senay’s social spaces of survival, the immigration police can display their power of consolidating the social border in global city. At the end, both Senay and Okwe are hunted so fiercely that they have no other way but consider hiding in the mortuary and living on in Chinatown where the police “do not dare to come in.”6 In both films, having the tyrannical power to decide who to include and exclude, the border and immigration police profit from controlling and managing the political and social borders.
(b) The Political-Social-Economic Border in Everyday Life
Not only can the police handle the borders with their political force, the ordinary people in both films may multiply borders’ functions for personal benefit as well--the border residents and the documented immigrants who take advantage of state’s regulation of borders and global flow to gain as many profits as possible. The way they manipulate the political-social-economic borders is different from the police’s. The police use the sovereign power to privatize the national borders. Without any sovereignty power from governments, the border residents and some documented
6 Interestingly, Chinatown in Dirty Pretty Things is a liminal space or a border area. It corresponds with Étienne Balibar’s description about border area because it is exactly resulted from the movement of people. When Chinatown and other ethnic foreigners confront with the border of another country or community, there immediately forms a border area where allows conflicts and heterogeneousness to exist. Therefore, Chinatown is often represented as an exotic space of anxiety (Cho). It makes possible that foreigners could claim spaces, whether legally or illegally, in the receiving societies. In the film, Chinatown is regarded as “a hopeful space of refugees” to escape the violation of the immigration police. It indicates the very frontline where the immigration police start to lose their regulating power and hyper-mobility and to negotiate with another force brought by global people flow. On the other hand, here in the film Chinatown is also a particularly-chosen symbol of mystery, instead of a casually-selected place. “The experience of Chinatown as a ‘place’ of imagination seems best characterized as part alluring, part repulsive” (Lee, 19). In many literary representations, such as The Blade Runner (1982) and Chinatown (1974), Chinatown is often used as a symbol referring to chaos and marginalized spaces where disciplinary and governing power (i.e. the police) can not function well.
It is usually represented and related with strangeness and mysteriousness as a space that can never be contained.
immigrants in the films develop a new social network among themselves to reorganize the geography of borders and accumulate personal property. They co-work and form as another party besides nation-states and their sovereignty in border control.
For example, the smugglers in In This World earn their living by building a very different global geography of borders from the map of nation-states’ sovereignty.
Enayatulah and Jamal cross the national borders by paying for the service of smugglers who live near the borders. The smugglers succeed one another to transport them with the border shuttle bus and trucks of different exporting goods. They even map out a depopulated smuggling path through mountains on the borders. The smugglers form a global network of path that crosses several political borders in spite of the nation-states’ laws and policies. Establishing a global path, the smugglers provide the “illegal” global mobility, which they in fact have no legal power to grant, to illegal immigrants as a service and product. By paying for their service, Jamal and Enayatulah seem to be able to practice their right of global mobility, which all the nation-states they stay never promise them to practice as a civil right. The smugglers in the film collectively manipulate national and social borders of various nation-states to accumulate capital. They collect money by re-organizing the consolidated national borders that block the unwelcome illegal immigrants. The smugglers manipulate the borders not for displaying the power to exclude, as what nation-states want their police to execute, but for accumulating more personal interests for living.
In Dirty Pretty Things, the legal immigrant, Senor Juan, can also play with the political and social borders by providing fake citizenship to the illegal and refugees to
reinforce his social and economic status. Like the smugglers in In This World, Senor Juan collaborates with few skilled immigrants at forgery to find ways that allow the undocumented immigrants to politically and socially enter England and become a British citizen. He forges passports for those illegal immigrants as a price for their kidneys. It means that Senor Juan opens the national border as if he did have the power to control it. Lifting the political border to exchange for immigrants’ kidneys, Senor Juan gains a huge amount of profit. His dirty business earns him a lot of money and firm social status as a prosperous middle-class businessman. The material success of his life is based on his manipulation of the borders. National and social borders are used as a means to strengthen his superior status in social hierarchy.
(c) The Corporeal Border
While the smugglers and some documented immigrants manipulate the national-social-economic borders, they also play with the corporeal border that separates human from non-human and determines the basis of human rights. In two films, the bodies of illegal immigrants and refugees are mixed up or blurred with non-human images during their illegal border-crossing movements. Their bodies are compared and associated with lifeless products, animals, and superfluous redundancy that no community would claim as its people. As Brian Orend observes denigrating the humanity of the persons is the first step to human rights violation (16). The less-than-human condition would justify the injustice that is done to them (Kallen 35).
Manipulating corporeal border endangers and violates illegal immigrants and refugees more than other kinds of manipulations in the film.
Regardless of the basic human need of illegal immigrants, the smugglers in In
This World transport them as products and animals and that endangers their lives. In one scene, Jamal and Enayatulah hide themselves among a truck of lambs to cross borders. The camera as well shows the process that Jamal and Enayatulah are bit by bit concealed by many baskets of oranges. Later, they are even locked within a cargo container without food, drink, and enough air as if they were exported products.
Carelessly blurring the border between the bodies of the illegal immigrants and the traded products, the smugglers endanger and violate immigrants’ lives and rights while they are manipulating the political and economic borders.
Dirty Pretty Things compares more directly the illegal immigrants and refugees to animals which express precisely their struggles against violation. As a man of medical knowledge, Okwe is aware that Senor Juan is taking advantage of the illegal immigrants’ desperation and ignorance of the consequence of kidney surgery to de-humanize and violate them. Considering swapping her kidney for new identity, Senay tells Okwe that Senor Juan says it is like taking out a tooth. Okwe angrily replies, “He’s lying…You will be gutted like an animal.” Later Okwe confronts Senor Juan, “I won’t allow you to butcher her [Senay]…I will operate on her myself.” The language Okwe uses points out that the living condition of illegal immigrants is like defenseless animals. Okwe realizes in the eyes of people like Senor Juan who uses illegal immigrants to benefit themselves, the undocumented immigrants are like animals, so he uses the word “butcher” to depict their behavior. Senor Juan plays with the national border to give them fake new identities but before he gets them citizenship, he already denies their “humanship” which is the basis of rights.
In Dirty Pretty Things, the right to migrate is harmed the most when the body of
the illegal immigrants is defined as superfluous redundancy that the society can not endure. Okwe explains to Senay the dirty business of Senor Juan, “…they will take what they want and leave the rest to rot.” Illegal immigrants are used for producing profits for people like Senor Juan. After that, they are abandoned as useless rotten trash. Like the heart that blocks the hotel toilet, their lives are so valueless that they would be flushed away to the underground sewer as something the society want to quickly get rid of and forget. Their life and death mean nothing to the society. Just as Guo Yi says to Okwe, “I’m a certified refugee. You are an illegal…you don’t have a position here. You have nothing; you are nothing.” The illegal belong to nowhere.
Even in the mortuary which is the space of the dead, Okwe, as an illegal, is still warned and reminded that he has no rights to claim a position here in the society. As Hannah Arendt writes,
The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. Only in the last stage of a rather lengthy process is their right threatened; only if they remain perfectly
“superfluous,” if nobody can be found to “claim” them, may their lives be in danger. (295-296, emphasis added)
Belonging to no community is the final and biggest danger the rightless people would encounter because they become superfluous redundancy. The illegal immigrants in the film are not recognized in any space of London society. Their body is something superfluous; their life is naturally in danger.
II. Hope/Hopelessness of Illegal Immigrants
Facing the compression of living spaces, the main characters in Dirty Pretty Things still reveal to certain extent the hope they can expect, that is, their friendship which grows in the social marginal spaces. Okwe, Senay, Guo Yi, and Juliette develop their friendship mainly in two spaces that are both related to death in the film.
Although Okwe does not have a legal position in this space, the mortuary is the only space he may temporarily be able to relax himself. He can honestly express his worry and anxiety and ask for help. Mortuary belongs neither to the living space nor to the death space. It is a liminal space where the society momentarily leaves the dead and dirty things they want to void and exclude. As an unwelcome “dirty foreigner” in the society, Okwe can produce a space of friendship here in the mortuary where is part of the society but meanwhile out of the society. The other space where they develop their friendship and mutual-trust is the hotel room 510, where Senor Juan has the operations done. This room represents simultaneously death and new life. This is a room where people transform from an outsider to an insider. It is the place where Senay loses her virginity but starts to identify with Juliette. The room 510, like the mortuary, is a middle-space for the illegal to find a temporal position and to be accepted in a community. Although being marginalized, Okwe and his friends find it possible to practice their right to claim a space and have social life in the peripheral border area of London society.7
The friendship of these four characters even gives them power to fight back and to confront the violation. Okwe and his friends find their connection strong enough to
7 Please refer to Chapter One for more explanation about Balibar’s concept of border area.
turn the space of room 510 their own. For instance, Guo-Yi gets Okwe a fake ID to smuggle together medical appliance for kidney surgery out of hospital. Juliette works with Okwe and Senay as a medical team during the operation. They transform the space where Senor Juan uses for his dirty business into Okwe’s operation room and claim the justice they deserve by making Senor Juan replace Senay for the operation.
They together trade the kidney while Guo Yi waits at the hotel front gate to drive Okwe and Senay to airport. Although in the end Okwe and Senay do not claim a permanent space in London, their friendship with other immigrants and its power still represent some hope and make their survival possible.
The representation of In This World rarely suggests positive hope like Dirty Pretty Things; instead, it emphasizes the sense of powerlessness and isolation. The representation of two teenagers’ migration starts with their separation from the loving family. During the journey for a better future, two teenagers rely on each other’s company and the short term of friendship offered by some nice people and children they encounter to get through the hardship and loneliness. Their hope for a better life, however, is cruelly destroyed in the cargo container. In the darkness, their shouting for help is excruciatingly shocking. The begging for life and fear of death fill the whole deep dark space of container as well as the pitch-dark camera screen. It is the most chaotic and intensive moment of their life. Suddenly, the camera jumps out of the dark container to take a very long-shot to look at the cargo peacefully moving on the sea.
On such a beautiful shiny day, the sea is so calm and blue as if the cargo were really heading for a bright future. The abrupt jump-cut shows a sense of isolation. The world can not hear their weak voice. Their bare hand struggling for life can not stop the
cargo which serves economic globalization and must arrive on time. Later, Enayatulah dies. Jamal is forced to strive alone “in this world” in London where he is
“exceptionally” permitted to legally stay only until his 18th birthday.8 Even though he survives from the horrible journey, Jamal still faces “this world” which can only tolerate him as a child and would start to exclude him as soon as he turns to be an adult. To Jamal, growing up means having no future, no hope, and no place in this world. The sense of isolation and powerlessness exclude the possibility of hope and justice.
Two movies choose to represent different groups of subjects among illegal immigrants and that varies how they deal with hope and justice in their endings. Jamal and Enayatulah can not find the hope like Okwe and his friends do because on the one hand, they are in the process of migrating and they are unable to identify with a certain community. On the other hand, they are minor. Children’s rights are fragile because they are often universally regarded as “the bearers of a group identity for a family, ethics, or nation,” instead of individuals (Brysk, 155). Their rights are derived first from the family units then from the states’ law. Family is the site where they inherit their identity and citizenship. To them, family plays a more crucial role than the state in protecting their rights and providing protection. Choosing teenagers to be the subjects of the global migration, the film tries to understand citizenship from family, a scale that is often overlooked in the grand narrative of globalization. In the movie, the only hospitality Jamal and Enayatulah enjoy in their migration is offered
8 According to British Immigration and Asylum Act, an asylum-seeker refers to a person who is at least 18. Under 18, a young refugee without parents may have an adult representative from British refugee organizations to support his/her stay in UK. For more information, please consult
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts1999/19990033.htm and http://abc.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full183/5/384
by a Kurdish family living on the border. They extend the border of the family to include these two strangers as their own children. The film shows us that Jamal and Enayatulah are well-cared only when they attach to a family. Leaving their family forces them to face a more hopeless condition of exploitation than adult individuals may encounter.
III. Filmic Techniques of Two Films
How two films differently represent human rights and hope for justice is also revealed through their filmic techniques. Representing different groups of illegal immigrants with different genres, two films display very distinct attitudes toward the issue of border in their styles. In This World, as a dramatic documentary, identifies the camera eye with Jamal and Enayatulah who are the children among the group of refugees and illegal immigrants, the weak among the weak. On the contrary, as an entertainment and thriller, Dirty Pretty Things must consider its audiences and market while it discusses this uncomfortable global issue.9 Comparing the filmic languages of two films is helpful for understanding the borders’ manipulations that are hidden behind both films’ representations of refugees and undocumented immigrants.
Although In This World is a documentary film which perspective would stay as neutral as possible, its style displays its intention to criticize the concept of border after the global terrorist campaigns. The consequences of terrorist campaigns are a refugee explosion and the military reconsolidation of the national and geographical
9 Paul Smith, the executive producer of the film, says in the interview, “It is a story that has
international appeal because the problem of the underlying story is not unique to London. It happens to take place in London, but this sort of thing takes place in every major city around the world…I would love to think it would make people look at London in different way…It’s a thriller; it’s a piece of entertainment. Its primary purpose is to entertain.”
borders that are wide open in economic globalization. The director chooses to represent this intense conflict after 911 with a lot of long shots and extreme long shots.
These kinds of distant shots not only minimize the objects and characters but show the wide openness of the land and the consistent landscape of Middle East. When Jamal and Enayatulah come to the check-point of Dalbandin where they give away the Walkman, the camera first takes an extreme long shot. In this shot, both the border police, Jamal and Enayatulah look very tiny on the screen. The small built check-point located on the huge stretching open desert looks ridiculous in distance.
The artificial borders that always powerfully limit and affect the refugees’ daily life become so ironic in the long shots. The (extreme) long shots of the natural scenes reveal the illusion of the border’s political power. Exposing how artificial the political and national borders are on the continuous geographical landscape, these shots try to give the audience a superior perspective to look beyond the ideological borders that incompatibly divide mankind and to think the globe and human beings as a natural whole.
Besides criticizing the artificiality of borders, the movie language of In This World intends to propose a family-scale psychological border to redefine the basic meaning of citizenship. It is an invisible border that mentally provides care and security that a citizen should be offered. As Alison Brysk declares, “…political membership has long been defined via a public-private distinction and collective subject: the family. States construct citizenship around and through private family legal codes…” (155). Family, which is the origin of citizenship, excludes harms and provides basic protection for its loving members. The family-scale border is
particularly highlighted in two juveniles’ experiences because it is their very first time to leave home and enter the world by themselves. To see the world from their eyes, the camera reveals a different landscape. In the end, Jamal, with the traumatized memory of Enayatulah’s death, finally arrives alone at cloudy London. He calls home to tell his uncle, Enayatulah’s father, Enayatulah’s death. After he finishes, the camera jumps right back to catch the sad face of Enayatulah’s father who loves and cares about them. Then the camera shows shot by shot the innocent smiling faces of children back in the refugee camp where Jamal comes from. Back in the camp, it is a sunny day and the children are laughing in the sunshine. These shots are taken with earthy yellow color which gives audiences the impression of warmth, fertility, and hope. In the following scene, the camera returns to Jamal walking alone in the crowded London market without any facial expression. All the scenes in London are gray, suggesting hopelessness and indifference. London, which should stand for hope for Jamal and many other refugees like him, becomes a place of isolation and death.
In reverse, the Pakistani refugee camp, which is supposed to be poor and suffering from wars, transfers to be a place of hope and connection. The director looks beyond the political border from the eyes of children to point out a psychological border that divides a life zone of family, love, and warmth from a death zone of depression and despair.
In This World combines the very local scale of family and juvenile individuals’
experience to condemn the ideology of seeing globalization as a better future for all, a narrative that helps to promote the global-scale flow. Juxtaposing the individual, family, and global scale, this film represents and reveals the ambivalence of the
manipulations of borders in globalization. In terms of individual experiences in globalization, the very opening of the film shows that the American campaign against terrorism has caused every individual in the camp much suffering. The following explanations from the local news and narrator tell that most people come to this camp, established in 1979, for escaping U.S. bombing campaign of anti-terrorism. The U.S.
military force opens the borders of nations in the South and Middle East and that causes the suffering in each individual’s daily life. As far as human rights are concerned, the national borders would be severely re-consolidated no matter how loose it becomes for the sake of economic benefits. In terms of family and global scales of borders, In This World in its ending indicates a psychological life-death-zone border to oppose the economic globalization that has been widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Putting family’s love and connection side by side with the rightless status of refugees, this film sharply underlines the problem of global injustice.
For the sake of entertainment and market niche, Dirty Pretty Things blurs to certain extent the border elements that would intensify the sense of division and social gap in its performance and filmic language. Unlike In This World which consists of plenty of long shots to help the audiences recognize the places, this film almost only uses close-up and some medium shots to tell the story from the beginning to the end.
The close-up shots require the audience to identify with the characters and to devote themselves emotionally (Phillips 81). The medium shots are to explain the plot, not to give the audience enough distance to criticize and reflect. The whole film is tightly framed. On the one hand, this kind of tight framing can produce “the sense of
confinement of the subjects” (Giannetti 80). It may imply that the life of illegal immigrants is repressed and restricted. On the other hand, the tight framing in the film can avoid shooting any landmarks or buildings that would help identify London. It attempts to remove the story background from real spaces. The film would attract the audience to focus only on the story itself, instead of on the social context and background that establish the stage of the story. The obscure London spaces detach the film from real social context and moderate the sharpness of the border issues. It helps the film to be accepted globally as an entertainment.
Using tight framing to underplay the social and spatial borders, Dirty Pretty Things attempts to limit the issue of global injustice toward the illegal and refugees to an internal problem among immigrants themselves. The film concentrates on a small group of immigrants instead of representing the bigger frame of the British society to show the social borders that cause the miserable social position of these illegal immigrants and refugees. In fact, the film represents neither particular spaces and buildings of London nor any native Londoners, except for one scene that Okwe gives Senor Juan’s kidney in the parking lot to a white man who might be a British. Okwe reveals the dirty reality of London life to this white man, “We [illegal immigrants] are the people you do not see. We are the ones who drive your cabs, clean your rooms and such your cocks.” As the only white man who encounters Okwe and his friends face to face, he is supposed to play the role of a messenger of Okwe’s accusation in the film to audience, all Londoners or the advantaged class. However, although this scene suggests British men may involve in the network exploitation of illegal immigrants’
body for capital accumulation, it is shot from the three-quarter turn of the white
man.10 Almost turning his whole back to the camera, this character refuses any possibility for the audience to analyze and understand. The audience even can not really make sure whether this man is a native Londoner or a white man emigrating from other countries. The message from Okwe he should spread is also blocked. The film avoids the geographical landmarks of London and the appearance of British natives, even two immigration officers who oppress Okwe and Senay are represented as non-White and possibly the descendants of immigrants. Confining the story to immigrants, whether legal or illegal, the film may deal with the social injustice and exploitation as an internal social problem of the immigrants.
Attempting to deal with the issue of violation as the social conflicts between the groups of immigrants, the film offers a moral scale of border to explain and contain the injustice and violation of rights. The representations of immigrants are basically divided into two kinds. One is Senor Juan and the boss of sweatshop; both sexually abuse Senay who is too socially weak to protect herself and run their business by exploiting illegal immigrants without morality. The other is Okwe and his friends who are represented with compassion, innocence, or strong sense of morality. Particularly, the representation of Okwe’s character combines a lot of features that are regarded as a model and symbol of high morality. For example, in the very beginning, he introduces himself, “…I’m here to rescue those that have been let down by the system.” He describes himself as a hero who brings hope. Later in the conversation with Juliette, she connects Okwe with the image of lion which represents power, leadership, and dignity. Also, cohabiting with Senay, Okwe shows the noble
10 Audience would hardly see the full profile and any facial expressions of a character in three-quarter turn. Like the shot taken from characters’ back to camera, three-quarter turn also refuses to let the audience to identify and analyze.
characteristics of an ideal gentleman who respects ladies and is self-disciplined, well-educated, and responsible. Also, he is a family man as he misses his wife and daughter and remains faithful to them no matter how lonely he is in London. Facing hateful Senor Juan lying powerlessly in front of him, Okwe still insists on treating him as a human being and sewing him up, instead of revenging him by leaving him there to die. He is the moral figure that any gentlemen would immediately identify.
Because of the clear moral division and scant representation of social context, the audiences would not easily associate the violation of rights occurred among immigrants with complex institutional and political conflicts. Rather, they are encouraged to understand it as a moral issue. As long as the immigrants of good morality defeat the bad immigrants who are somehow punished, the audience would feel easy to drop the issue of social injustice that actually roots in political and social context.
While In This World discloses a family-scale psychological border to challenge the contemporary understanding of borders and justice, Dirty Pretty Things seeks the moral border to ease the anxiety aroused by the penetrated geographical national borders. The global injustice caused by the unbalanced growing speed of economic globalization and that of enforcing globally human rights is diverted to the moral terrains. As to Okwe, working for Senor Juan to perform the operation is not a struggle for citizenship and rights but more likely a struggle of morality. The moral border enables the good characters to unite and develop friendship. It justifies their action of rebellion against Senor Juan even though what they do is nevertheless against either civil or human rights of Senor Juan as well. The seemingly universal
border of moral scale takes place of national and social borders to distinctly separate more “us” from “Other.” Due to their virtues, these characters are rewarded with what they want. At the end, Okwe and Senay get a “legal” right to leave England; they do not stay in England. Their leaving, as a moral compensation, makes the unstable political border that excludes non-citizens somehow restored in the end. The global justice can to some extent be fulfilled, not because of the improvement of the global political scale of border but because this film contains its narrative by the moral border which works for poetic justice that people wish to see.
The concept of border and geographical (re)organization in globalization are the most important central factors that indirectly lead to the predicament of illegal immigrants and refugees in two films. Because of global capital flow, the globe integrates economically while the national borders are strengthened for stopping
“unwanted” immigrants who seek for better material life promoted by economic globalization. In both films, when illegal immigrants try to find their way to London, a prosperous part of the world, to which they have no “legal” access at all, they are exposed to more dangers of exploitation and violation. Since borders are fragmented in globalization, the nation-states are no longer the only authorities that are powerful enough to fully control all the borders. Dispersed borders grant multiple interest parties besides nation-states to have more spaces and chances to intervene and manipulate various borders for their own profit accumulation. Whenever confronting borders during their illegal migration, whether political, social or economic border, illegal immigrants must negotiate with different players of borders waiting to extort profit from them. Two representations show that first being excluded from the
opportunities to pursue a better secure life, illegal immigrants undergo repeated exploitation and violation caused by multiple players of various borders in their everyday life. They become the most silent sacrifice of the grand narrative of globalization and barely survive in the sewer-like spaces in the most prosperous global city.
