Dirty Pretty Things” and the Visual Realism of Invisibility as Tool of Exploitation in Neo-Liberal Globalization Part 1

Globalization has created tremendous opportunities for many; but it has adversely affected the lives of people who it has fragmented, marginalized and abused. The impact of globalization on the human bodies which are integral to the global economy is grossly understated and overstated because of their ‘invisibility’ which is necessary for profit. This invisibility seems like a fairy-tale story, thus blending fact with fantasy. However, this is strangely true. The global human eyes are blind to some of the most intricate and inhumane realities of this post-modern world. We are oblivious to the mechanical economic order that has created ‘invisible people’ usually of color and from the global south and as a consequence they are susceptible to economic and sexual exploitation.

 

Hence, as a Black immigrant from Jamaica, I am all to happy that visual media such as the film “Dirty Pretty Things” captures and exposes this invisibility and consequent vulnerability of the unseen migrant people of the south to sexual and economic exploitation. The film cleverly uses the thriller genre to assert that immigrant networks may be successfully mobilized to overcome this invisibility and exploitation (Grewal, 234). Certainly, invisibility and ignorance is at the heart of neo-liberal globalization’s exploitation of migrant labor which involves the penetration of the human body for profit. Wenzel continues this argument postulating that ordinary Americans are perceived in the documentary film “Life and Debt” to be ignorant of the US economic ties with the rest of the world given its (Life and Debt’s) aim to situate Jamaican tourism within a broader critique of US trade policy and neo-liberal international finance regimes (2007, 14).Life and Debt, therefore, demonstrates how neo-liberal globalization has destroyed the societies of the global south through the implementation of structural adjustment policies. This involves the administering of unfair trade, financial policies and regulations that have marginalized its peoples, destroyed their industries and created abject poverty so that they must find some way to escape their realities.