Dirty Pretty Things: Exposition of the Underground Economy: “Dirty Pretty Things” and the visual realism of invisibility as tool of exploitation in Neo-Liberal Globalization
Dirty Pretty Things: Exposition of the Underground Economy: “Dirty Pretty Things” and the visual realism of invisibility as tool of exploitation in Neo-Liberal Globalization
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1. INTRODUCTION
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 an immigrant on asylum, 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.
Visual media, also, questions the notion that immigrants/visitors are welcome and seen as necessary, given western societies’ tendency to ‘alienate’ the outsider. Moreover, migrants’ invisibility has been exacerbated by concerns over the security of Western nation-states in light of 9/11 and 7/7 and the weakening US economy. This has subsequently led to further exploitation and marginalization of the immigrant to the extent that the world has created a “We vs. Them” mentality as if immigrants are parasites, terrorists and threaten job security, safety and national identity. In fact, Cuaron’s “Children of Men” shows a dystopic Britain that is gripped with the fear of ‘alien invasion’ given the fragility of their society. Yet in this film, as in “Dirty Pretty Things”, immigrants are portrayed as the savior of the world, the ones who will ensure its survival. The immigrant is pursued as villain, yet they are impregnated with life which they are all but willing to share with the world and provide hope for humanity.
Essentially,Dirty Pretty Things and “Children of Men” humanize immigrants and suggest that they are indispensable to the development and riches of Western societies given their willingness to “donate their invisible blood and sweat to prop up western societies”.
Dirty Pretty Things is a work of art and genius, an epic if you may. It is grotesque, offensive, outright raw and ugly. But this is what gives the film its body and texture. This is what makes the film beautiful; how it captures the ‘other’ side of life – the ugliness of life. It deliberately hides what is fake or usually seen and understood, such as the westerner as hero, hospitable and honest vis-a-viz the migrant of the south who is criminal, dishonest, terrorizing and alien. The immigrant is dirt to the Westerner; yet, dirt is valuable to the extent that it can be used as cheap labor to advance societies. Dirt is things out of place, things we don’t usually see or hear or consider beautiful or pretty. And so we clean dirt, hide or push it aside under a rug with restrictive immigration laws. We use immigrants’ bodies for our pleasure and profit. We steal their organs; they suck our cocks and clean our dirt, as we pursue them. This is the horror of the film, the nature of this neo-liberal world that depends on such categorizations to survive.
Therefore, the Film is unpleasant, dirty and darn disturbing, which is aimed at its audience’s sensibilities. We never see Buckingham Palace or Nottingham hill, but backrooms, bathrooms and back alleys, garages, morgues and a hotel where strange people go in and out to negotiate their fate as way of escaping their plight for a better future. They seek hope in the West but find despair until in the end they are able to fight back for a change. It makes you crinch, but this is life and this is what great artistic work depicts – the other side of life/the backside of life. The scene is the hotel where everything is supposed to be pleasant, pristine and polite, hospitable but it is not and this is the irony of the situation depicted in the film.
Dirty Pretty Things is superbly constructed and highlights a well-defined texture. The film, like Life and debt, takes a circular structure; it starts at the airport and ends there which suggests one prevailing theme in Globalization, travel/mobility, the fact that we are always on the move for better and more opportunities. However, the film suggests that not all of us have this privilege and benefit, as migrants’ movements from the south are curtailed in the cities they find themselves. Hence, immigration and the tightening of borders beg the question, who are we keeping out? Borders especially in the 21st century neo-liberal capitalist global world exist to distinguish and isolate the riches from the poor and "invisible people" of the global south. It is the exploitation of opportunities and the lack thereof that highlights the divide and disparity in, among and between societies and people.
Undoubtedly, Stephen Frears, "Dirty Pretty Things" is a well-designed film with an oblique edge of social and sexual commentary, an uninviting tale of realism and anxiety which strokes a gushy mood. It fruitfully explores a diverse London, the imperial capital invaded and transformed by its former subjects who are usually portrayed as aliens with three heads and big sharp teeth seeking to destroy human society. But Frears challenge this narrative with an imagery that suggests that it is Westerners who are the real monsters who prey on the bodies of the immigrants who are trying to navigate the treacherous underground terrains of London. According to Phillip French, the film’s context is a sub-stratum of London occupied by outsiders, in flight for a variety of reasons (personal, political, commercial) from their homelands. Living invisible lives, they are anonymous faces in the crowd to their mostly reluctant and ungrateful hosts. Strangers to each other, they help and sometimes exploit their fellow immigrant. Frears combines the social commitment of the realistic school of British moviemakers from which he emerged in the Sixties with the happy readiness to shift from one genre to another that characterized a work of Hollywood genius.
Hence, it is quite easy to deduce that in this 21stcentury, media makes it an arduous task to ignore or conceal the truth about life. One of man’s basic instincts is the pursuit and discovery of truth. But in a world of isms and schisms, perceptions and deceptions, truth seems more elusive and reality becomes contradictions of our apperceptions controlled by our ideologies, products of human limitations. Neo-liberal globalization uses this limitation, thereby creating and exploiting invisible people so as to realize its resolve to generate more profit. Nevertheless, throughout history, man has searched for truth and according to Candis Callison, “film, art and media have reflected this eternal search for truth (November 14, 2000 p.1).
It is no wonder, that Professor Bob Nowlan, of the University of Wisconsin would assert, as he did, that documentary is one of the major achievements of cinema and film. Implicit in this assertion, is the argument posited by film scholars such as Vertov, John Rouch, Richard Leacock and Fred Wiseman, that films seek for truth or a realism that is never before achieved or represented in films, hence the term “cinema verite” or “direct cinema” which translates truth in cinema. This style of film-making, cinema verite, uses revolutionary styles of film-making, such as using hand-held cameras, non-actors and real places. But Dirty Pretty Things is no documentary, but blends fiction with fantasy in its thriller genre. Yet, truth is not devoid from fictional films such as Dirty Pretty Things. Frears uses visual media in allegorical form to picture the horror of society. Not only does he seeks truth but express artistry and provides social critique for social change.
Hence, visual media takes up this theme, of invisibility, “to visualize one of the most invisible elements of globalization: its penetration of and movement through bodies” (Davis, 2006).
In Dirty PrettyThings as in the film “Children of men” the immigrant is indispensable, yet underpaid and exploited due to his/her inconspicuousness in the neo-liberal global world, but visible in the world of media which truly represents reality. In fact, Slavoj argues that art is a better representation of reality than reality itself (Cuaron, 2007); as such media which is visual art epitomizes this decadence.
Surely,Dirty Pretty Things changes the order of things. It portrays the true decadence of life as a way to confront and challenge a world that has concealed the exploited invisible migrant people who are behind the scenes working arduously, although unwillingly, to comfort westerners even as they (the invisible people) are pursued as threats to society. It is these themes that we shall explore in this paper as we uncover how visual media portrays reality in this post-modern neo-liberal world.
2. Dirty Pretty Things answers the question: What is Neo-Liberal Globalization?
Dirty Pretty Things illuminates the dangerous underground economy of organ trading and its association with globalization’s exploitation of migrants who are unseen while they adorn the bodies of their ‘hosts’ who are largely unbeknown of their existence in any real and direct way. Andrew O’heir postulates that it treats the “traffic in human frailty and vulnerability in the shadowy underworld of immigrant London”. In one striking (and final) scene, Okwe, an illegal Nigerian migrant struggling to survive, hiding-out as a hotel receptionist, meets a white dodgy body-parts dealer. Okwe exchanges a freshly pilfered human kidney in a Styrofoam cooler to the broker in the underground parking lot of the hotel.
In this film, it is unusual that we hear or see the white native-born character; symbolizing their ignorance and indifference towards “dirty pretty people”. The cagey, white English trader asks Okwe as he cautiously receives the peculiarly animate and "precious package "How come I've never seen you before?". With concealed raged Okwe replies: "Because we are the people you do not see. We are the invisible people, the ones who clean your rooms, who drive your cabs and suck your cocks." This is the crucial theme and the moral fabric of the film, its punch-line. This scene is particularly aimed at the viewing audience who are mostly white. Davies proposes that “We are the ones who drive your cabs; we clean your rooms and suck your cocks” is a pedagogical message for the film’s white, middle-class audience (Davis 2006)
Stephen Knight’s fictive portrayal of the global transplant underworld seems to have struck a chord that closely resonates with reality. But the film is a social thriller, not a documentary, and it plays with the theme of organ theft, blending elements of fantasy with realist scenes of human trafficking for kidneys. This portrayal of Globalization’s effect on immigrants is quite moving and horrific, and seems exaggerated, yet warranted given the severity of globalization’s injuries on migrants.
Globalization is said to be the “movement of commodities across borders”. This seems simplistic, but it is quite ‘exoteric’. Globalization is just that, the movement of commodities, whichDirty Pretty Things
suggests could be anything, even bodies which the underground and open markets enjoys. Globalization is so pervasive that it penetrates the bodies of people who are unseen, because it can easily manipulate the terms. Davis maintains that dirty pretty things uses” bodily intimacy as a metaphorical and ideological borders, as well as a means of literally demonstrating the impact of globalization on the bodies of the men and women whose invisible labor is the lifeblood of the global economy” (ibid, 34).
In addition, Zaniello describes Globalization as an “economic and political phenomenon involving the transnational creation of goods and services by multinational corporations at the lowest cost and for maximum profit” (1, 2007). He explains that this is achieved through the 1st world multinational institutions – IMF, WB, WTO and the IDB – which create the bureaucracy that enables the exploitation of raw materials from the global south, labor and the “unimpeded flow of capital, in disregard of national borders” (ibid). Emily Davis agrees that “globalization through their transnational corporation in the south has exerted enormous power and caused damaged in the global south and adversely affected the experiences of the immigrants and the refugees in the global city….” (34). Similarly, Baran argues, like Marxist theories of Imperialism, that the expansion of capitalism in the west was predicated upon colonization, destruction of indigenous economies and appropriation of their surplus (Randall and Theobald 1998, p.29). In effect, globalization has replaced neocolonialism as the “new dominant paradigm of the relationship between labor and capital in the world” (Zaniello 1997, 1).
Consequently, many citizens of the global south have fled their cities only to experience what the Theologian Shillibech described as the “Eschatological Concept of negative experiences of contrasts”. They flee from hopelessness in pursuit of a better life, only to find despair as they become targets of exploitation. Certainly, globalization has adversely affected the lives of people in the south so much that many have to leave. However, their movements are limited without capital and collateral, and many can only escape to the US and UK illegally. And when they migrate, they are relegated to a life of secrecy and anonymity so as to survive. According to
Dirty Pretty Things, their domains are backrooms and alleys and underground economies that benefit from their anonymity. As a result, they lack agency and have no real power or institution to make any claim or bargain on their behalf. In the film, Senay’s only stipulation to Senor Juan’s sexual penetration is that “You don’t see me…” which suggests that migrants have no real agency in the situation.
“We are the people you do not see…who clean…suck…wash…” is the driving force and main motif of the movie even as its conventional plot kicks in: People like Okwe and Senay and Sneaky, whether they do good or evil, are the invisible midnight agents of capitalism. They change the sheets, scrub the floors, retrieve awful things from the toilets, buy and sell whatever needs to be bought and sold in secrecy. You don't see them, but they're always there. (Dressed in a custodian's smock, Okwe is able to walk right through the security checkpoints in a hospital and steal the medical supplies he needs; as a black man with a mop, he becomes virtually part of the furniture.)
Globalization and it creation of an invisible people whom it exploits has not only penetrated the body but it has also catalyzed the human trafficking of organs. Implicit in Dirty Pretty Things is the claim that, illegal immigrants’ invisibility and lack of agency have made them the likely and best candidates to exploit in this inhumane business. And, ironically, the idea of buying and selling human tissues and organs once evoked shock and revulsion, but they are now among the global economy's newest commodities as well as a large, unregulated, multi-million dollar business thanks to globalization (Scheper-Hughes 2006, 14 - 21). But this is quite possible in this neo-liberal global world that is fueled by desire. Do we not live in a society that is driven by demand and desire, and this desire is met by cheap and willing labor created by neo-liberal globalization. Bauman maintains that we live in an age that lives to consume or consume to live. This dialectic has supplanted the previous age which was aimed at unraveling the dialectic of whether we live to work or work to live. This consumer society demands labor, cheap labor whereby capitalists can maximize outputs while minimizing costs. Illegal immigrants who are struggling to survive because of the lack of opportunities in their locals, as a result of globalization, illegally migrate. This is met by the harsh realities in which they are either absorbed in the underground economy of criminality or seek cheap labor in exchange for their anonymity.
Certainly, we live in a global mechanical structure that is fueled by a disparity between the visible producers of the global south and the visible consumers of the global north. Neo-Liberal globalization success is largely dependent on its creation of “invisible people” of the global-south whose labor is exploited so as to generate super-normal profits for the benefit of the rich capitalists. Indeed, capitalist crusades in the global south have been marginally successful in the sense that globalization has created one big mall where the right can buy children, immigrants or even a whole country such as Jamaica, cheaply thereby exploiting their labor, steal their profits and diminish their way of life. The fact is that neoliberalism creates poverty and inequality. Industrialization has not really benefitted the world, but those of the north and few in the south who experience great wealth on the backs of the subordinate people in the world.
Moreover, the conclusion that neo-Liberalism creates inequality and poverty is not just an argument devoid of objective and logical reasoning, but has long been the observation of many economic and social scientists such as Slavoj Zizek, saskia Sassin, Fabrizio Eva et al. Human beings are nomads who have been travelling from place to place all their lives, because of what Eva called in Cuaron’s documentary film “an inequality of opportunities” (2007). This mobility has increased significantly because of neo-liberal globalization which has created greater opportunities for the few by exploiting the masses. Neo-liberal globalization which is based on mobility has largely ostracized the masses in the global south exploiting their labor and limiting their freedom of movement, while the wealthy capitalist are free to go wherever they desire, (this is the ‘bureaucratic phenomenon’ developed by Michael Cozier) (Bauman 1998,). Therefore it is hard to imagine that neo-liberals and their lackeys would believe that neo-liberalism was the answer to underdevelopment unless it suits them as it did. Fabrizio Eva argues that in capitalist economies, economic inequality is acceptable because it’s the engine of growth and that inequality brings richness (Cuaron 2007).
3. Dirty Pretty Things visualizes Immigration, border protection the Western Politics of Migrants’ exploitation
We live in world of detachment and displacement, segregation and separation, where the wealth of the few is protected from the poor masses. It is said to be the “greatest age of mass displacement in the world’s history”. According to Bauman, mobility is central to the process of globalization, yet “Dirty Pretty Things” begs the question, “who is really mobile?” or “are we all really mobile?” in this neo-liberal global world. Immigrants largely from the global south do so in order to seek a better way of life and for opportunities. On December 21, 2010, the world celebrated International Migrant Day. The UN reports that there are over 200 million people living outside their countries of birth (http://esa.un.org/migration/p2k0data.asp). In addition to this exponential increase in scale, international population movements are also increasing in diversity with new patterns such as temporary, circular migrations challenging established norms of place and identity (Rouse 1991). In the US, anti-immigrations sentiments have been inflated given the weakening of the American economy and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Furthermore, neo-liberals in the Developed world are becoming exclusive societies that delimit wealth and poverty in certain territorial zones, so that the global south is estranged from their toil to the benefit of the North. According to Balibur, “we live in a world that is now broadly unified from the point of view of economic exchange and communication needs borders more than ever to segregate, at least in tendency, wealth and poverty in distinct territorial zones ... Borders have thus become essential institutions in the constitution of social conditions on a global scale where the passport or identity card functions as a systematic criterion. It was for this reason that I found it appropriate to speak of a
global apartheid being put in place after the disappearance of the old colonial and postcolonial apartheids." (119, 2006).
Yet, Homi Bhaba et al post-colonialists suggest that migrants are celebrated symbols of globalization’s fluid mongrelized social forms. Immigration promises to transform the nation’s architectures of belonging and thereby to reconfigure nationalities in a novel cosmopolitan frame (Braucom 23). But given Balibur’s previous assertion and immigration and the tightening of borders we left with the question, who are we keeping out? Borders, especially in the 21st century first world neo-liberal capitalist society, exist to distinguish and isolate the riches from the poor and "invisible people" of the global south. It is the exploitation of opportunities and the lack thereof that highlights the divide and disparity in, among and between societies. Gibson argues that…
This economic logic, which constructs ‘the “outsiders” as costly’ in order to control and legitimise entry into the nation, has a long history going back to the 1905 Aliens Act. The figure of the asylum seeker is frequently imagined as a parasite upon the host nation and its welfare state, with
asylum seekers being associated with ‘unproductive hospitality’. For example, the British press typically represents the figures of asylum seekers
and refugees using negative ‘fear-inducing’ language…. (2006, 697)
Dirty Pretty Things traces the struggle for survival of immigrants Okwe, a Nigerian Doctor, and Senay, a young Turkish woman seeking Asylum, while working on the night shift at a London hotel. Senay shares her one-room apartment with Okwe, yet they rarely interact because they work anti-social hours, a fate shared by most immigrants in the global south. Further, Okwe is a well-educated Nigerian Doctor who has to work menial/ad-hoc jobs to survive in the global city. This meta-narrative explores the idea, in Okwe, the trend for well-educated professionals from the ‘global south’ to work in unskilled, low-wage service jobs in the global north. Globalization and “structural adjustment programs” imposed on many developing countries by the hegemonic forces of neo-liberals have created and perpetuated a situation in which increasing numbers of former middle class members in these countries are forced to migrate and flee over the last quarter century. Whereas Okwe is somewhat a straightforward political refugee, in following his marginal existence in Britain, Dirty Pretty Things illuminates the often-overlooked complexities of societal status (class, race and nationality) that characterize contemporary migration.
In the beginning Okwe solicits fares for his cab (not, of course, the iconic and “official” black cab of London but a simple passenger car) at Stansted Airport. He promises his potential customers that he can get them to Buckingham Palace for ten pounds, but instead of following him to this comfortingly familiar locale the film’s next scene takes us back to the cab office in an immigrant neighborhood of South London. As he enters the office, Okwe hands his identification card and license over to another driver, and then reminds him to remove the crucifix around his neck: “your name is now Mohammed.” This exchange, in which clearly foreign workers casually exchange documents that disguise their true identity and status, may certainly raise anxieties about safety and the ability of the state to account for and thus control the inhabitants of the global city, and these anxieties have been increased in the years since the film was released. Yet this unfamiliar world, of unstable and fluid identity, reveals the mutual support and camaraderie among immigrants of various kinds. Far from threatening, the film depicts these characters as hard-working individuals trying to forge a living as they provide a crucial service to all of the “official” and “legal” inhabitants of the city.
Nevertheless, their communal efforts are not enough to militate against the ‘Eagle eyes’ and the iron hand of the state that have infused the natives with the suspicions that immigrants are menacing terror of little value seeking to disrupt and drain society of its resources. Davis continues this argument, stating that “dirty pretty things”people of color [from the south] as “invisible within and yet central to the processes of global capitalism” (2006). She contends that “these bodies elude the ‘gaze of structures’ of authority [immigration officials] even as they are continually commodified and threatened with injury, producing significant anxiety on the part of the authorities that seek them” (ibid 37).
One night at the hotel Juliette sends Okwe upstairs to investigate a clogged drain and he makes a horrific discovery in the hotel bathroom’s toilet. He suggests to Sneaky that they need to call the police, but he is merely handed the phone with a smirk. Okwe does not want to call the police for fear that conversations with the police might revoke his invisibility and forced to go back to his homeland. "The hotel business is about strangers," Sneaky tells him, "and strangers will always surprise you. They come to the hotel at night to do dirty things, and in the morning we make it all look pretty again." It rapidly becomes clear that Sneaky himself is involved in something even less pretty than the hotel business. Okwe must intervene when two men speaking an African language he's never heard before turn up in Sneaky's office; one of them is near death from a mysterious wound, but they refuse to go to a hospital.
Indeed, immigrants’ value in this global world is invisible. We are scuffed at and treated with disdain. We are seen as criminals, parasites, aliens, rebels who threaten national and cultural identity. ‘We’ are different, dirty things who don’t belong anywhere. It is this displacement and detachment from society, this nomadic uselessness that benefit neo-liberal society who exploit their labor and call it First World hospitality.
Dirty Pretty Things is a double-entandre, as “Maria Full of Grace”. It’s a double meaning; it suggests things out of place but things quite necessary. Immigrants are normal human beings who seek a better life, and are willing to do anything to better their lives. This has influenced stringent economic and political laws by the neo-liberal governments that goes against immigrant; laws that provide the greatest freedom of movement to the bureaucrats and their families, while limiting the freedom of movement and decision making of those of the global south. Michael Cozier calls this the bureaucratic phenomenon in which those at the top legalize phariseeism - “do as I say but not as I do - so that those at the bottom remain at the bottom and are limited by laws that have no bearing on the top.
The film takes up the theme of “body invasion as a mode through which to represent Western-driven economic globalization’s dependence on underpaid labor by people of color from the south – globalization’s other….
They are anxious about their bodies being consumed by westerners. The horror of the film comes from the cannibalistic forces of Western capitalism and not from the invisible migrant. It allegorizes the plight of the migrant worker in the global city as a struggle not to be consumed by the excessive demands of this [neo-liberal] global world…extending from the premise that immigrants donate the invisible blood, sweat, and tears that prop up Western economies, the underlying theme is the film is that immigrants quite literally keep wealthy westerners bodies going by selling their own” (Davis 2006, 48).
In addition to tracking the conditions that catalyze immigration, Okwe and Senay's struggling and besieged lives illuminate one of the constitutive contradictions of the contemporary economy. Despite the sterile imagery that has accompanied the rise of the information economy over the last quarter century, today's global cities are dependent on sweated labor in the service sectors. While traditional manufacturing has been exported to low-wage countries of the global south, the advanced service sector has - until quite recently - boomed, producing record profits and salaries in areas such as finance, real estate, and insurance. However, concurrent with this growth of the advanced service sector is a massive expansion in low-wage service jobs, some of which are an integral part of the advanced sector and some of which simply involve catering to the inflated needs of the new elite created by the economically polarized information economy (Sassen 1996, 22). The discourse of sparkling clean high tech that characterizes the information economy obscures the proliferation of sweated labor and renders invisible the immigrants who carry out the bulk of such labor. Dirty Pretty Things works against this rhetoric by focusing on the lives of the workers whose labor is at the heart of the information economy. Through its spectacular cinematic representation of resistance, Dirty Pretty Things is clearly determined to restore agency to immigrants, change popular sentiments and mitigate the exploitation of immigrants, thereby expelling their invisibility.
While its thriller format allows the film a rousing conclusion directed to that end, Frears's representations are not preoccupied with tracking the interior transformation that facilitates acts of resistance and agency among exploited workers in the informal sector. Hence the hotel becomes the scene of a marketplace in which exploitation is inevitable, as sellers are willing to bargain with their life in order to pursue a better life, a hope a future that deride them in the past. Exploitation is easy and becomes an exchange for anonymity so that they are able to continue living with a sense of hope. Normalcy means exchanging kidneys and organs for passport and other documentation. In an invisible world, without agency, exchange of body parts for better living becomes inevitable. This is based on a false hope, or false notion of happiness – as their faith meets a deadly fate whereby the removal of their body parts becomes part of the sacrifice they must pay to realize their utopia.
Senay's immigration status forces her to work in hazardous and ill-paid conditions. Although Senay is not in the country illegally, she is seeking asylum, which means that she cannot officially hold a job. As anti-immigrant sentiment has risen in recent years, successive British governments have cut benefits for asylum seekers, ensuring that they must take illegal jobs in order to survive during the extended wait before their cases are resolved (Bacon 46). Senay initially works as a chambermaid at the Baltic; however, after the menacing immigration police raid her apartment and discover a matchbook from the hotel, Senay is forced to take work in a sweatshop. Here, her boss threatens to hand her over to the authorities unless she regularly gives him oral sex. Before she begins work in the sweatshop, Senay had ironically remarked to Okwe during one of the film's few moments of relative tranquility that she fled Turkey not because she aspired to be like her cousin, a successful waitress in a New York cafe, but because she did not want to end up like her mother, a woman with little sense of her own agency.
Dirty Pretty Things thus powerfully captures the vulnerability of female immigrants to sexual as well as economic exploitation. Like many of the women caught up in the global sex trade, Senay's rebellion against her destiny as a woman from an underdeveloped country places her in a position of extreme sexual exploitation and violation once she reaches London. Senay's rebellion against the sweatshop boss, whose cock she eventually bites, deepens her plight, for her only recourse after this aggressive act of insurrection is to throw herself on the un-tender mercies of Senor Juan. Again, sexual penetration as a result of migrants’ invisibility becomes a “visual rhetoric” in dirty pretty things and human bodies are the token of exchanges that are often masked as something else – love, altruism, pleasure, hospitality….(Davis 2006).
Therefore, if the increasing desperation and entrapment felt by both Senay and Okwe are rendered with great insight and an increasingly high narrative pace, the film's conclusion offers a magical resolution of their problems that explores credibility. As Senay's desperation escalates, she volunteers to place herself under the knife and thereby win a European passport and, with it, her freedom. Faced with the disfiguration and possible death of this woman he has come to love, Okwe mobilizes the film's other immigrant characters. After telling Senor Juan that he will operate on Senay, Okwe steals surgical implements with the help of the mortician Guo Yi and gets help in the operating room from Juliet, a sympathetic Black British prostitute who works the hotel's rooms each night. Okwe tricks Juan, who has forced Senay into surrendering her virginity to him in exchange for a passport, into drinking a drugged beer. When Juan collapses, Okwe operates on him rather than Senay, removing and selling his kidney to finance the group's escape.
This suspenseful conclusion seems fantastic, nonetheless, it hints at the potential of anti-racist, feminist coalitional politics to challenge the exploitative machinations of the underground economy. The immigrants, then, have to create their own agency and illegally navigate through the maze that so desperately demands their cheap exploitative labor. As Saskia Sassen remarks in discussing the service economy, despite the high degree of exploitation found in this area, immigrant workers have great potential power when they organize since they are working in the most quickly growing sector of the economy (1998, 188).
4. CONCLUSION
Neo-Liberal globalization has downplayed the value of immigrants from the global south. It 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 the ‘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.
However, Dirty Pretty Things exposes this once hidden conspiracy thereby granting agency to illegal immigrants who were largely unseen and unheard as they work behind the scenes in inhumane and unpleasant conditions servicing western societies. According to O’Hehir, in Dirty Pretty Things, Frears and screenwriter Steve Knight creates a city that resembles globalized Babel, “a fluorescent-lit service economy of sweatshops, hospitals and hotel bathrooms that could just as easily be in Paris or New York or even the Middle East”. This is included in the film’s mise-en-scene to reinforce this dialogical imperative that immigrants are pre-disposed to an underground economy and as such they are open to exploitation. The characters in the film are foreign - Nigerians and Turks and Spaniards and Russians and the only white English-speakers in the entire film are sinister immigration officials and a white body-part broker who is beyond the authorities’ gaze.
The film’s project to reveal the unseen begins with careful attention to props/concrete objects such as buildings, neighborhoods, homes, and of course people. Filmed on location in London and in the Shepperton Studios, Dirty Pretty Things takes us to unfamiliar areas and denies us helpful establishing shots that orient us to the city - never once do we see, for instance, Big Ben, Westminster Abby, or Piccadilly Circus. It uses actors of many different nationalities who, if they speak English at all, speak it with a wide variety of accents and inflections. Therefore, Dirty Pretty Things presents, a different London - if, indeed, it is even “London” at all. In doing so, London is transformed to illuminate a vibrant marketplace that spells danger. Something is bound to happen. O’Hehir notices this as well; he writes that in "Dirty Pretty Things" London is a vibrant 24-hour marketplace that breathes a deep dark danger lurking in the night. Indeed, there's something sinister about that vitality - everything seems to be on sale at a discount, including the bodies, minds and perhaps the souls of the newest arrivals. Knight’s plot plays out mechanically which captures a spectacular intensity, an alternate universe of people who go to work by dawn or by dusk, who sleep away the day on rented couches or in hospital basements, who avoid talking about their pasts and will do just about anything to stay awake through a 16-hour work day so as to survive their ‘useless lives.
But the small band of strangers can only survive if they have a hero who can truly inspire and help the weak to coalesce around a cause. It demands an ability to outfox and outwit. Similarly, the film
Children of Men continues the tragedy of migrants who try to escape the structures that stands in their way for a better life. Theo is the unlikely hero who helps to protect the Nigerian migrant who is carrying the only hope for humanity. Her value is invisible until the Nigerian migrant produces from her penetrated body, a child who is the savior of the world. Dirty Pretty Things is slightly different yet similar. It has a “neo-noir” setup that requires an existential hero given the lack of agency, and Frears has emboldened Okwe with such powers to rescue those “left behind by the system”.
Despite its serious subject matter, Dirty Pretty Things is a gothic thriller. While this abstract description may seem nothing more than a cheap gambit to interest audiences in the otherwise obscure lives of global migrants, the film's thriller plot is an integral part of its depiction of the marginalized lives of Okwe, Senay, and their confederates. Immigrants, especially illegal immigrants such as Okwe, do not exist as long as they remain illegal. To be illegal, in other words, is to be invisible and, of course, powerless. The thriller plot that drives Dirty Pretty Things is a powerful evocation not simply of the massive scale of exploitation to which immigrants are exposed, but also of the odds they face in challenging the terms of this exposure as a result of their illegal status. Working highly anti-social and long hours in order to remain in the relative security of a developed and stable nation such as Britain, immigrants cannot appeal to the state for help against abuse because of the law's role in rendering them invisible.
Finally, "Dirty Pretty Things" swerves from bleak urban naturalism to artificial wish-fulfillment. Frears' vision of London's invisible work force is never less than captivating and warmly sympathetic. Like Okwe himself, it rises above its limitations, and it's just a little bit bigger than the landscape around it. Hence we are confronted with the message in Dirty Pretty Things that if you treat people the way these people are treated in England, then you will create a criminal underclass that is vulnerable to exploitation. England is both a very tolerant country and a sort of neo-racist country. People like Okwe aren't made to feel welcome. It's a paradox and the reaction of the neo-liberal technocrats is to make peoples' flesh creep with fear, which is all but reversed in the visual media of Dirty Pretty Things. Thus it is quite reasonable to conclude that, Stephen Frears, "Dirty Pretty Things" is a well-designed film with an oblique edge of social and sexual commentary, an uninviting tale of realism and anxiety which toy with our emotions. It fruitfully explores a diverse London, the imperial capital invaded and transformed by its former subjects who are usually portrayed as aliens with three heads and big sharp teeth seeking to destroy human society. But Frears challenge this narrative with an imagery that suggests that it is Westerners who are the real monsters who prey on the bodies of the invisible immigrants who are visibly trying to navigate the treacherous underground terrains of London in “dirty pretty things”
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