Made by a white director with funding from the apartheid government yet starring an unusually diverse cast, reverent of Indigenous traditions while deeply patronizing of its Indigenous main character, The Gods Must Be Crazy delivered an idealized, false picture of South Africa into the international marketplace. It highlighted the centuries-old Khoisan culture while misrepresenting and seeming to exploit the Khoisan actor at its center. Once one of the most popular movies in South Africa’s history, it’s now seldom discussed in the country and unavailable on either of the nation’s two primary streaming networks. And in America, where theaters once played it so long they wore out the film, it might as well be invisible—if you’d like to watch it, you’ll need to buy a DVD, if you can imagine.
That’s what I did recently, to reacquaint myself with one of the movies of my childhood. Watching it for the first time in decades, I laughed, I winced, I groaned, and I wondered how this gentle, faux-naïve, fundamentally racist, sui generis comedy was even made—much less how it came to rule the global box office. The story is even weirder, and more disturbing, than I imagined.
The world’s leading cause of avoidable premature mortality, tobacco smoking is a scientifically proven, virtueless vice. Broadly speaking, a vice is a “bad habit” or a “weakness of character.” But, in the spirit of honesty, it would be a disservice to claim to be a poster girl for wellness in other ways, as I find joy in a plethora of so-called “guilty pleasures.” To steal a Natasha Lyonne (who also quit cigarettes recently) school of thought: “I fucking love a vice.” Is that always an inherently bad thing? Could some “vices” even yield a positive outcome? Context is everything.
If your engaged friend isn’t the kind of awful, selfish person who will tell you to lose weight for the sake of their “perfect” vision or leave your husband at home because he’s too short to be in her wedding photos, being a bridesmaid is great. Because really, how pleasant could these people possibly have been before their weddings if they think these requests (let’s be honest, demands) are reasonable? If your friend doesn’t suck, being her bridesmaid won’t suck either.
The true object of Butler’s sophisticated, ambivalent satire may be millennial fiction’s tendency to celebrate the liberatory potential of sincere self-narration and downplay economic advantage. The final twist is that ridiculous, chippy Kimberly, with her insufferable sincerity, may actually have a point.