Holy
shit and unholy Al Borada
He
works with human excrement - what is rejected, what is accounted of no worth to
mankind - and in it I suppose he hopes to discover something that is of worth.
-
Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
Summary
This
review attempts to investigate the film Al Borada, directed by Asoka Handagama
2022, through the lens of psychoanalytic theories and interpretations of Freud,
Lacan and Deleuze. It demonstrates the symbolic uses of faecal elements in the
filmic text, which depicts a few of the discourses associated with social
bonds. It concludes the challenging and controversial use of faecal symbols in
artistic and political contexts.
Faeces
The
movie is positioned in a universe of faeces. This starts from the first
instance of the protagonist’s arrival at the new accommodation, which is given
by Lional Wendt. The "Bucket Toilet" is
located a little far from the residence outside the beach. This toilet is
inspected by the protagonist, Pablo Neruda, who finds its function is awful and
queries about the drainage system of the area. The answer was that this is the
way of dumping excretions, and the bucket underneath would be replaced by a
Sakkili woman daily. That was the whole sewer management system for the
residence. The caretaker, Rathne Ayya, had got a different toilet for his
use.
Besides
the fact that Pablo intervenes in his affairs, which made him leave Burma and
come to Sri Lanka, his obsession with the toilet cleaner, a young woman from an
untouchable caste, brings him a fantasy. This fantasy has its own obscene
dimension as it ties in with excretion in the Freudian context.
ad
nauseam of toiletry
The
movie develops with the smell signifier from the beginning minutes until the
end. In another perspective, it signals at the beginning that the movie does
not bring you any fantasy other than misery. This bad smell starts to echo in
the mind of the spectator, and it becomes an anti-catalyst to the entire
artistic core of the filmic text. This would be an extension of mechanical art to
the level of perversion in the observer. It should be noted that the background
music also acts as a body of signifiers which revolve around the theme and has
natural tones. At the beginning of the scene of Neruda’s travel from home to a
nearby party location, he experiences strange music, a folklore, but he loses
himself looking for it, and experiences a traumatic pain, a wound of his own
mind with the immediate past memories.
All
the other events are built around this faecal castle. Once, Pablo ordered the
servant, Rathne not to use his toilet as he offered his excretion in the purest
form to the young woman who comes daily to clean the toilet and discharge the
collection bucket.
This
mandate of offering his excretion to the woman is a direct follow-up to Freud’s
equation between faeces and gifts, Lacan states that the formula of
offering-‘everything for the other’—shows that it is a fantasy of the
obsessional neurotic.
From
this point forward, he begins his fantasy of being seduced by remotely
observing her working process in the toilet. He possessed himself by watching
the toilet in the early morning in a hidden gaze and became obsessed to the
point of raping this young woman of low caste who had been repulsed by the
caretaker of her same ethnicity but of a higher caste.
The
caretaker leaves the premises by excreting in the banned toilet, which was
assigned only to use by Pablo, showing him the disgust of being associated with
a low-caste woman, untouchable in the background of his Hindu faith. Pablo
watched his act of denying the rule over him and fell into the reality at the
end of his fantasy space. His fantasy was shattered.
The
woman kills herself as a true act in response to the Pablo at the sea by losing
her purity, though no one cared about low-caste females’ dignity at the time of
the events but portraying self-denial of the crime that happened over her.
Finally,
Pablo decides to replace her service by himself and carries the sewer bucket on
his head towards the Sakkili village to discharge, most sarcastically, the
excretion of his caretakers contained in the bucket. In his act, he firstly
dramatized his guilt for the crime of raping the woman, and secondly, he
demonstrates the carrying of his caretaker’s excretion-contained bucket on his
head to escape the reality of betraying his God’s resemblance, which he faked
to the caretaker. This point is merely a transfiguration of the master-slave
relationship inversion just to remake his destiny, which is full of guilt.
Trainspotting
(1996), which depicts the unrest among poor youth in Edenborough and their drug
addiction by symbolically portraying disgusting images of faecal matter,
literally reproducing "the worst toilet in Scotland," is another film
that has used faecal symbols in a more widespread adoption.
Reawakening
the social traumas through faecal elements
From
a panoramic view of the cinematic text, it could be concluded that the
unveiling of the obsessional neurotic and narcissistic nature of Pablo Neruda
is the subject of the movie. In Lacanian context, partial drives, especially
the anal drive which produces the faeces as partial object, and consequently
the olfactory, the sense of smell, unveils a truth about the suppressed memory
of Neruda.
The
fabric of the symbolic universe is the disgust of the excretion of the human
subject, in complete opposition to the Freudian anal discourse: faeces become a
traumatic gift. In the meantime, how do the erotic pulses get their life
through embodying the external objectivity of the same faecal universe? Oversimplified
version, can shit trigger sexual arrogance? A Lacanian perspective,
rather than the idea of Deleuze, of a body without organs, BWOs, a resembling
and analogical solution prevails in the core of the cinematic text. How can a
smell of faeces or scatological elements create a material image of sexual desire
in the psyche? In a sense, that challenge had been answered by Asoka. In this
filmic context, he had become the first director to manipulate such elements
into an artistic form in Sri Lankan cinema: A controversial adoption of a faecal
metaphor of sexual desire. In the smell, as an anti-voyeuristic image on the
screen, the whole potential to become a signifier is embedded, and he uses it
to explore a wide range of human core values (here the subjects of the Al
Borada, especially Neruda), exploding them into a plethora of organs, by
products, and faeces. The egg becomes a creature of its own traces; the
cancerous dimension of BWOs. I suppose that as time passes, the Deleuzian
interpretation will find its own locus.
Perhaps
in the movie, the social order is being deconstructed by two main themes:
first, the Tamil ethnocentrism and social hierarchy through caretakers’ point
of view, and second, the feminist world view about the time of the events in
question through all the characters integrated in the main story, especially
the position of the woman who acts as a sewer carrier.
On
the other hand, Asoka’s attempt to bring the faecal symbols to a form of
cinematic art is a political expression. It could be seen as a symbol of how
people might become aware of an opposing group or hegemony against the political
powers in the future. Already, faecal material as a foreign body to the
existing ideological atmosphere has become a trendy political expression. The
end scene of the movie, the re-emergence of the dead woman from the water,
could be a sign of that moment.
Notes:
I
took the title “Holy and unholy shit” to produce the title of this article from
the book, Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art Studies in Scatology:
Holy and Unholy Shit: The Pragmatic Context of Scatological Curses in Early
German Reformation Satire losef Schmidt,
with Mary Simon
Dawson Preethi
dawsonpree@gmail.com
