{"id":3854,"date":"2020-05-03T20:29:49","date_gmt":"2020-05-03T19:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=3854"},"modified":"2020-06-23T20:51:01","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T19:51:01","slug":"moffie-the-heart-of-our-darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=3854","title":{"rendered":"Moffie: The heart of our darkness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Soldiers<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\nMen who have fought in wars don\u2019t really talk about it. And when\nthey do, things might turn violent quickly. It is best to move away,\nas it is a sign that some of the violence they\u2019ve absorbed, had to\nparticipate in, and enact, is trying to escape. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is why it is critical for such men (and it is generally men) to have a slow and secure release valve. Such as a psychologist\u2019s office. Of course this rarely happens, so we live among traumatised people who struggle to contain their demons, and find a variety of generally destructive ways to do so. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For thirteen years all white boys were ground through a malicious, intentionally cruel and brutal system designed to break them down and strip them of their voice in order to enable them to kill as a matter of survival. This is true of all young men who have been drafted into wars, just this one is close to home. Very close. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\nMoffie is a particular rendering of a time and place. The South\nAfrican Infantry School, 1981, and the border, 1982. It gets it\nright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The silence that exists between characters is its genius. The army shuts you up. Shuts you in. To talk about how you feel is impossible. What matters can only be said in silence. There is a fair amount of monologue, spat in the form of abuse by Hilton Pelser\u2019s psychopathic Sergeant Brand, overflowing with \u2018fokken roofies\u2019 and \u2018etters\u2019 and \u2018puisiepoes\u2019 but actual dialogue is minimal. The familiarity of this inability to speak is where everything begins to teeter toward the edge of the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\u201cEk voel vokol\u201d is the password to acceptance. Feeling nothing,\nor pretending to, is a solace and a weapon. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nAnd so we see how these battered, brutalised boys, young men full of\nphysicality and half-formed realisations, express what they feel, if\nthey dare to do so at all, without words, or under cover of bravado.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nCommunication becomes implicit. It is the length of silences; the\nleaning of heads; the terse enquiry: \u201cyou allright?\u201d; the shy\njoining in half-singing the words of a song with your chommie as you\nclean rifle parts for inspection. Simply sitting next to someone\nholds meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nDirector Oliver Hermanus achieves this through portraits and close\nups and landscape and tableaux. It is grimy, dark, and beautiful.\nActor Kei-Luke Brummer, who is our protagonist van der Swart \u2013 a\nsoutpiel with an Afrikaans surname – is beautiful. And what happens\naround him, and to him and everyone else, is awful. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nTo a certain generation of South African white men who watch this\nfilm, it will reach into rooms in the mind that were firmly shut.\nEveryone who got conscripted into browns will be deeply affected, no\nmatter how much they deny it or pretend not to be. The madness. The\ninsanity. And for some – far too many \u2013 the horror. And yes, we are\ntalking about The Heart of Darkness. It is all there, with very few\nshots fired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIt is a great film. The cinematography is brooding, although the\naesthetic may be a little indulgent. It could have focused a bit less\non Brummer and given us a better look at Stassen, or Sachs, his\nfellow troep. Played by Matthew Vey who has a bit of a James Phillips\nlook about him, Sachs is an intriguing and complex character. There\nis dangerously close to too much focus on Brummer, as well as he\nstands up under scrutiny. But then it is based on an autobiography,\nby Andre Carl van der Merwe. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nThe strength of Moffie is that it is not about the SADF and the early\n\u201880s border war. That is merely the specific setting. And neither,\nin my reading, is it about being homosexual or coming to terms with\nit, but about the internal conflict of having to do things you don\u2019t\nwant to do, and not being able to do the things you do want to do. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is something with which we are all familiar, this is just extreme circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film is available for streaming. Tickets cost R150. Fine it at <\/em>https:\/\/www.moffiefilm.com\/stream<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Men who have fought in wars don\u2019t really talk about it. And when they do, things might turn violent quickly. It is best to move away, as it is a … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3855,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1001,981,10],"tags":[403,982,983,984,985],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3854"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3854"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3856,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3854\/revisions\/3856"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}