The Gods Must Be Crazy · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A small plane passes over the Kalahari. The pilot finishes his Coke and flicks the empty bottle out the window, and it falls end over end into a desert the film tells us has never held a hard, singular, manufactured thing. A man named Xi picks it up. Watch that bottle and you have watched the whole film — and Deleuze has a surprisingly exact name for what it does.

In his account of the movement-image, the smallest unit of meaning is often not the shot but the relation an object carries. A mark is a thing that means by habit: you see it and expect its usual partner, because it sits in a customary chain. To us, a glass Coke bottle is thick with marks — thirst, the vending machine, the ad, the deposit, the gesture of drinking. A demark is what happens when that object is torn out of its chain and dropped where the chain does not exist. Then the thing stops meaning and starts demanding interpretation. That is literally the plot. For the San the bottle has no mark, no series to belong to, so they read it the way you read anything inexplicable that drops from the sky: as a gift from the gods, then as a sign, then as a problem.

Then it acquires a worse mark. Deleuze's impulse-image is a world of drives erupting beneath a calm social surface, often gathered into a fetish — a part-object charged with compulsion. The bottle becomes useful (pounding, curing snakeskin, making music) and then becomes singular: there is only one, and everyone wants it. Envy arrives. A child is struck. The Eden the film so lovingly paints — and I'll come back to that painting — tips down what Deleuze calls a line of slope, the impulse-image's downward drift, into the first want this world has known. Xi's quest to throw the "evil thing" off the edge of the earth is, in these terms, an attempt to un-make the fetish: to give the object back its proper status of having no mark at all.

Then the slapstick, which is something else entirely. This is, almost aggressively, a movement-image film — situation, action, resolution, repeat — and its engine is the action-image at full sensory-motor power. Uys builds it by undercranking: shoot slow, play fast, so the wretched Land Rover and the colliding bodies take on the frictionless jerk of Keystone. Bergson, whom Deleuze builds on, said the comic is the mechanical encrusted on the living. Undercranking literalizes that. It samples motion into any-instants-whatever — ordinary, mechanical, in-between instants rather than posed climaxes — and the human body becomes a machine misfiring. The lineage is precise here. Tillie's Punctured Romance hands Uys the accelerated chase grammar; Sherlock Jr. the gag engineered frame by frame around one stubborn object; Modern Times the innocent defeated by manufactured things — which Uys flips, sending a single manufactured thing into a world that has none.

And then the voice, where the reading has to turn serious. The film floats wall-to-wall on a wry nature-documentary narration, the Disney True-Life register lifted straight from The Living Desert and laid over human beings. Deleuze's late cinema cares about the speech act: a legending voice that tells a people into existence. The narrator never subtitles the San into equal standing; he speaks for them, classifies them, makes them charming. Modern political cinema, for Deleuze, turns on the hard fact that the people are missing — film cannot assume a people, it can only invent one. Uys invents one: an idealized, ahistorical "Bushman," staged for the camera inside apartheid South Africa, while N!xau, who was not an actor, was paid a pittance against a fortune the film earned. The warmth is genuine. So is the asymmetry. The voiceover is the apparatus of the invention — fabulation running backward, a state's cinema authoring a people rather than a people authoring themselves.

That is the honest double vision the film demands: a brilliant comic machine, and a demark performed on living people.

So name what Uys actually invented. He transplanted the whole wildlife-documentary apparatus — anthropomorphizing voice, long lenses, Edenic emptiness — onto a fiction about humans, and welded it to silent slapstick. He turned the ethnographic gaze into a comic engine. The film seeded its own small cycle: a sequel, and a run of unofficial Asian knock-offs trading on N!xau's face — which is the demark completing itself, the man who played the man without possessions becoming, off-screen, the most commodified object in the picture.

Watch the bottle next time. Watch the exact moment it stops being litter and becomes a god, then a tool, then a curse. Deleuze gives you the words for that single trajectory — mark, demark, fetish — and once you have them you can't unsee that the film's sweetest joke and its deepest problem are one gesture: an object, and then a people, lifted out of their own chain of meaning and handed to us to laugh at.