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The new film "Guava Island", written and performed by Donald Glover (AKA Childish Gambino) was screened for the first time at Coachella last weekend. Fortunately for those of us who were not willing to shell out $ 350 + During a weekend of "I've been to Coachella" publications on Instagram, the film was also released on Amazon Prime in the wee hours of Saturday.
The island of guava is a lot of things. It's a well-played film, absolutely beautiful in terms of cinematography, in short – and an insipid and unthinking criticism of capitalism, so unharmonious in its messages that even the Hotels.com mascot back to certain scenes.
The film takes place on the fictional island of Guava and follows the hero and musician Deni Maroon (Donald Glover), while he is planning a music festival for the island so that they can take a day out. leave and enjoy the paradise that surrounds them. Red Cargo (Nonso Anozie), the sleazy businessman who controls the island and never leaves his poor workers (who make up the majority of the island's population) to the opposition opposes the party from Deni.
Coley, one of his coworkers at Deni, shares his dream of moving to the United States (which Red owns). "It's different there," he says, "I've heard people are their own leaders." Coley explains that he saves money to leave the island and go to America and start his own business.
Deni laughs and says that America is no different from guava. "America is a concept," says Deni. "Wherever, to become rich, someone must be richer, it is America." To better convey his point, he tells Coley: "It's America," then bursts into the Childish Gambino song of the same name.
The message of the scene, and of the film in general, is clear: there is no way to escape the shadow of capitalism.
If Glover wanted to create a more accurate representation of capitalism, life on the island of Guava would have been radically different and for the better. Jonah Goldberg's Suicide from the west provides an overwhelming number of statistics and facts on how capitalism has, more than any other economic system, lifted the man from historical mass poverty (all of the following information comes from the past). appendix of the book).
For example, since the emergence of capitalism in the 1800s, the share of the world's population living in extreme poverty has fallen. In 1820, 94.4% of the world's population lived on less than $ 2 a day. About 84% lived on less than $ 1 a day. By 1970, the proportion of those living in absolute poverty around the world had fallen to 27 per cent. Never before in human history has life improved so quickly. In 2015, only 9.6 per cent of the world's population lived on less than $ 1.90 a day, the first time the percentage of people considered to be extremely poor was less than 10 per cent.
Despite Deni's concerns about the lack of workers' leave under capitalism, the number of hours worked per worker fell from 43 to 36 hours a week in the world, from 1950 to 2016. Crop yields are in rising, food supplies per person to electricity is rising, life expectancy at birth is rising, infant mortality is falling, I could go on and on. In total, according to the United Nations, poverty has been reduced more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500.
It is no coincidence that it was during this period that capitalism spread the most throughout the world.
Capitalism is certainly not without flaws – Irving Kristol summed it up with his "two cheers for capitalism"; the idiom calls three, but he would not go that far.
Capitalism, especially as it is practiced in the United States, does not resemble the monopolistic, almost feudal economy of the island of Guava. In terms of quality of life, the island of Guava looks much more like Cuba, where the film was shot. I guess "This is Cuba" just would not have worked so well with the rhymes program of the song.
Alec Dent is a journalism student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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