The Animal Farm in Kenyan Politics

Bungoma Governor Ken Lusaka explaining the runaway insecurity in Bungoma on Citizen TV. His county government's recent purchase of 10 wheelbarrows at a cost of 1M is just but an exposed sore thumb of a badly rotten hand that is the Kenyan government. Image courtesy Citizen TV.

Besides the Animal Farm being an allegory for the Soviet Union and the failure of communism, it definitely is an intricate work of literature that has a relevance to the dirty Kenyan politics. Furthermore, through this enduring masterpiece, George Orwell showed how human nature inherently and consistently fails to be equal, all thanks to bad politics.

Old Major, is an old boar on the Manor farm. He instigates a rebellion against the human rule because according to him, humans are parasites. In preparation for a revolution, he teaches the other gathered animals of the farm a song titled Beasts of England. Unfortunately, Old Major dies before his dream of overthrowing the human rule in the farm comes to fruition. However, Snowball and Napoleon are two young pigs at the farm that took Old Major’s message to the heart and are willing to pursue his ideology to a satisfactory conclusion. The revolution is successful as the staged coup sees Mr. Jones—the alleged ever-sloshed and highly irresponsible farmer—flushed out of his farm which is immediately christened ‘Animal Farm.’ The new animal government then adopts the ‘seven commandments of animalism’ and explicitly state the commandment ‘All animals are equal’ as the most sacrosanct.

The jubilation and optimism that greets the Kenyan post-election period is well captured in the Animal Farm, where the new government seems quite in charge and everybody is happy but only for a while. Soon, evil political machinations that have brought us a hundred thousand worth of a wheelbarrow hatch schemes of absolute power consolidation and even manage to stage yet another coup in which Napoleon, the pig, orders his dogs which we can take to mean the military in human equivalent, to chase away snowball who till then was the de facto ruler of the Animal Farm. It is interesting to note the bone of contention between these two pigs who certainly wield a considerable amount of power in the Animal Farm. Apparently, Snowball ticked off Napoleon by trying to build a windmill! Perhaps he was scared that Snowball might gain considerable political mileage in the Animal Farm from the windmill project. Napoleon is thus a true reflection of most Kenyan political leaders who feel threatened by the goodwill of their opponents, real or imagined, and will stop at nothing to shatter their rival’s career. This scenario actually rings true for a majority of human conflicts; there will always be a good and a bad guy.

The subject matter dealt with in the Animal Farm mirrors closely the human nature and does justice to it. Kenyan politicians are particularly notorious for ghost projects that are just a conduit for siphoning public funds into personal pockets. The windmill project in the Animal Farm is one such project that has been erected high enough for everyone to see and have their spirits lifted in a false belief of a better life for all. Unbeknownst to the animals, they tirelessly work their fingers to the bones in what is actually akin to the chasing the wind because it will amount to nothing other than a waste of time and other resources employed at such a service. So, there will always be people fooling others for personal gain.

There is always a thrill in something new and what we see in the Animal Farm is no exception. The carnival mood in the farm and all the merry making after the deposing of Mr. Jones is an event most Kenyans can identify with. But soon, like it always happens, the personal interests of the coup leaders dredge up to the surface when they can’t agree to pretend anymore. The misery that then visits the farm is legendary.  Inasmuch as the pig administration in place claims to advocate for equality, what we see is further from the truth. Ideally, the pig government is just but a disguised extension of the deposed human government. This is so because, soon, pigs adopt an upright gait besides wearing clothes like man and carry agents of slavery in the form of whips. The disillusionment towards the end of the book cannot be overlooked. Dejected animals can barely tell apart the pigs from humans since they both look alike and act the same. The new government has eaten its own subjects just like did the old regime it claimed to replace.

The central theme of equality partly forms the subject matter of the thesis statement of this essay. It literally begs the question: can human beings be equal? Certainly not, as some people must play second fiddle to others. Perhaps equality was just but a misconstrued notion meant to play around with people’s minds and raise the hopes of those battered by life that they too, just like those they consider way ahead of them, can rise from the ashes like the proverbial phoenix and ‘make it’ someday. But the bitter truth has it that people can never be equal—there must be rulers and subjects for instance for a government to exist, failure to which there will never be a government.

In the novel, the seven commandments are for inexplicable reason(s), other than the need for personal gratification through dubious schemes of corruption, summed up into one draconian rule which explicitly states that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” We have all seen this kind of thing in the Kenyan society. Some people are just deemed ‘untouchable’ and seem to operate from a level different than ours where neither our rules nor petitions can apply and/or affect them. This is certainly the height of inequality considering that such individuals live in the same towns and cities like we do, but seem to operate from a totally different lane than ours.

The renaming of the farm back to its original name of ‘The Manor Farm’ is a sure sign of the greatest disillusionment that sometimes characterizes the human condition. The animals finally reach a conclusion of hopelessness after a comedy of errors staged by the pig government. It is utterly obvious that the pig administration is phony and tottering the entire animals’ existence on the brink of disaster. Fed up with risking a horrendous crash by trying to commandeer a vehicle he barely understands, Napoleon finally throws in the towel and agrees to an alliance with the local farmers. By ceding ground, Napoleon thus kills two birds with a single stone. First, he successfully thwarts a simmering revolution by the animals against him and his corrupt administration. Furthermore, he cleverly eases off himself what was clearly to him, a debilitating yoke of governance. But he betrays Old Major’s vision beyond forgiveness.

The promises of grandiose dreams and lives that follow up immediately after the coup are something we can all identify with. But of notable concern, is the fact that these promises only seem to come true for a chosen few. Pigs particularly benefit a great deal perhaps because ‘one of their own’ now sits where it matters. They isolate themselves and eat a rich diet that is different from the rest of the animals. Moreover, they elevate themselves to positions of leadership and take maximum advantage of their good fortunes to mercilessly oppress the other animals in the farm. This is typical of a Kenyan politician’s job description and has only served to worsen the socio-economic chasm between classes.

Somewhere along the way, it becomes too obvious that a revolution is in the offing. All the promises of the pig government have metamorphosed into slavery and there is a lot of grumbling among the masses. These grumblings certainly denote lack of satisfaction from quarters feeling less equal than others. The human version of such has always been industrial actions, like our perennial teachers’ strikes that often end up in running battles with the police as the government fights back in a frantic bid to maintain law and order. If there had been equality, then nobody would have a reason to complain.

Animal Farm is a literary classic that combines outstanding writing with Orwell’s political leanings. Orwell used the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union as an allegory for why revolutions almost always fail and why humanity can never be equal. Orwell was staunchly anti-totalitarian and he used his ability to write as a platform for his political beliefs. Orwell believed that humans were inherently unequal and nothing could be done to change this fact. I beg to differ.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Film Review

Theatrical Movie Poster for the Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

It is every film director’s dream to make a good film which appeals to the audience’s aural and visual senses. In Hollywood, a lot of money often goes into making a film. And the moneymen don’t mince their words on wanting a good return on their investment. This makes creating a blockbuster that will rake in hundreds of millions of dollars for their employer a paramount goal for every film director. But this is not the sole reason why films are made. 

Like they say, art imitates life and so does most films. Based on this immutable fact alone, it’s therefore imperative for the audience to strive to understand a film besides being entertained. By critically analyzing the elements that make up a film, it becomes possible to conclude whether a film has successfully achieved any of the objectives slightly highlighted above. Released in December 2008, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button which stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and directed by David Fincher is indeed a curious film by all standards.

Every medium has its own technology and a given set of codes and conventions to convey its message. In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, director David Fincher sincerely did a commendable job that resulted in thirteen academy award nominations, of which it won in three categories—best art direction, best make-up and best visual effects. Besides anything else, this film is notable for its acclaimed use of make-up and visual effects. 

The protagonist, Benjamin Button, played by the much decorated Brad Pitt, is born on November 11, 1918, and suffers from a rare condition that leaves the medical fraternity at a loss for words. Even his father is too traumatized and abandons him in the nursing home where he is born. In a curious case of medical mystery, inexplicably, Benjamin Button goes against the grain by aging in reverse. That is to say, he is born with the physical characteristics of an old man and dies of Alzheimer disease as an infant! This distortion of reality serves to give the film a memorable uniqueness of sorts and a cut above the rest of Hollywood’s releases. Furthermore, the same distortion of reality firmly grips the imagination and attention span of the audience. Besides evoking emotions of shock, fear and sympathy for the openly ostracized Benjamin Button, the fact that he ages in reverse heightens the audience’s sense of curiosity as they want to fully comprehend his abnormal condition. Moreover, some audience might find this film a breakthrough in highlighting the challenges faced by people living with special conditions in the society.

Visual sociology and visual anthropology are grounded in the idea that valid scientific insight in society can be acquired by observing, analyzing, and theorizing its visual manifestations. It’s indisputable that like any other form of art, film mirrors the society. What we see in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a society fragmented by discrimination of objective conditions. Benjamin Button is clearly ostracized in the film on account of his curious condition. His father, Thomas Button, perhaps too afraid of the ridicule that having such a child could bring from family and friends, abandons him in the porch of a nursing home immediately after birth and the demise of his mother. 

In one of what is arguably the most moving scene in the film, Benjamin and Daisy are playing at night, hiding under a table. An old lady soon discovers them and orders Daisy to go to bed with finality. To Benjamin, she says: “And you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Clearly, her words cut through Benjamin’s heart like a sharp knife, bringing him to the reality that he is a different child who shouldn’t freely mingle with other children. The strain that such a rude awakening can have on a child is incomprehensible. For Benjamin, he reacts to this sudden reality by collapsing under the table, an act that can only symbolize a desperation emanating from an identity crisis he is facing. A tearful and confused Benjamin later asks his black foster mother who comes to console him: “What’s wrong with me, Mama?” While giving him an affectionate hug, all that his foster mother can tell him is that “people aren’t gonna understand just how different you are.”

The innocence that defines childhood is clearly demonstrated in the friendship between 5 year old Daisy and Benjamin. Considering that he is growing in reverse, Benjamin is aged about 60 years when the two first meet in the nursing home. Though Benjamin is old by physical appearance, he exhibits child-like characteristics that endear him to Daisy as the two regularly play together, much to the chagrin of individuals like the old lady who insensitively tells Benjamin that he ought to be ashamed of himself for playing with a child under a table, considering his physical characteristics that define him as a senior citizen. What clearly comes out is the fact that Daisy sees in Benjamin a friend and a play mate and is not bothered by his ‘curious case.’ However, we cannot say that she is oblivious to it; she is just an innocent child who doesn’t know how to discriminate.

A central theme that clearly plays out in the movie is that of love. Queenie played by Taraji P. Henson, is a black woman working in the nursing home where Benjamin Button is abandoned by his biological father soon after his mother died. Off her own volition, she assumes the responsibility to care for Benjamin—a white child—at a time when racial discrimination in America was at its worst levels and interracial interaction could attract hate crimes of unimaginable magnitude, some even resulting in cold blood murders. David Fincher, the director of this film, clearly had a predetermined objective in casting Queenie as a black woman instead of a white woman. To say the least, a black woman mothering a white child in the film was an intentional attempt at bridging the racial gap that still exists courtesy of some American supremacists who just won’t wake up to the reality that times have changed. David Fincher clearly wanted to communicate the important point that love is a universal language that defies all parameters set by man and that skin color is just that—color. It totally has no influence on how an individual behaves. For Benjamin Button, after all the tribulations of coping with an alien condition, love ultimately conquers all and proves an impregnable fortress for him to shelter.

This point is further expatiated when Benjamin, in 1941, while in Murmansk and working as a seaman in a tugboat captained by Mike Clark, begins a steamy affair with Elizabeth Abbott, the wife of the British Trade Minister. The affair is somehow influenced by a quirk of fate when Elizabeth and her husband are stranded in a sleazy hotel and cannot travel to Beijing. It’s at this point that she meets Benjamin. Some may argue that such a relationship is just temporary and subject to the duration canal lusts may endure. Whether Elizabeth Abbott could leave her government minister husband and give up her lifestyle for a seaman remains a subject of much conjecture. By all accounts, the wife of a government minister and a seaman ought to be worlds apart. But thanks to cupid’s arrow of love, deeply in illicit passion, these two lovebirds seem unperturbed by the differences in their background. They simply forget who they are for a moment and indulge in canal sin at a time when social class seriously defined all the aspects of one’s life. It’s unimaginable the hullaballoo that such a scandal could have caused in the media and society at large, in the event that these two lovers ever got caught. But overwhelmed by love, they decide to throw caution to the wind and do what was definitely ‘unthinkable’ in 1941.

The on-off relationship between Daisy and Benjamin is yet another strong portrayal of the central theme of love in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The two meet for the first time in the nursing home where Benjamin is abandoned and Daisy’s grandmother lives and keep in touch throughout their entire lives, albeit their relationship is punctuated by a few instances of break-up and make-up. Besides that, their rocky relationship appears to be greatly influenced by fear of rejection and self-doubt. For instance, when a taxi cab crushes Daisy’s leg and unceremoniously winds up her dancing career in Paris, Benjamin visits her and she is clearly mesmerized by his youthful looks. But fearing rejection due to her crushed leg, she asks him in frustration to stay out of her life. Another instance is when, they move in together after Queenie’s death. When Daisy tells Benjamin that she is pregnant, he clearly doubts if he could have fathered her baby due to his reverse aging. To what should have otherwise been wonderful news for a first time dad, Benjamin reacts by selling all his possessions and leaving the money realized out of the sale to Daisy and baby Caroline. He then embarks in the journey captured by a montage of eleven images in the 1970s. When he returns to Daisy in 1980, he finds her married to someone else and she introduces him as a family friend to her husband and daughter. She later comes clean about the reason why he left. The two later meet in Benjamin’s hotel room and relive the good old times. . . .

David Fincher offers the audience a much more realistic account of Benjamin and Daisy’s love life, characterized by the upheavals that are bound to commonly occur between lovers in real-life. This realism is meant to enable viewers identify with the happenings in the film and lend it a much more credible touch of reality as opposed to the surreal romantic situations mostly portrayed in films.  Even though Benjamin and Daisy never get to experience the Cinderella kind of romance owing to their regular break-ups and make-ups, ultimately, they end up together when a widowed Daisy moves into the nursing home to care for Benjamin who is down with dementia. She faithfully takes good care of him for 5 great years till he dies, notably, in her arms in the spring of 2003. Even though he now has the appearance of an infant, chronologically, Benjamin is aged 84 years and dies of an old man’s disease. By letting Benjamin find love and acceptance in Daisy, a woman other than Queenie—his foster mother, David Fincher successfully tones down our heightened emotions of pity for the protagonist. For once in the film, the audience forgets Benjamin’s rare condition and follows with a keen interest his love journey, regardless of its ups and downs.

The connotation to the style of the camera action in this motion picture is incredible. Take for instance when Benjamin is leaving Daisy, abandoning her and their child. She looks at him from a lower angle without saying a word. The lower angle connotes her position of power in her relationship with Benjamin. That is to say, it identifies Benjamin as the ‘all powerful’ partner in the relationship while she is just a subordinate and a vessel to satisfy his canal desires. The lower angle bears him out as a symbol of authority that should be looked up to, and that his decisions are final and binding. Unlike today where some women hold powerful positions, this scene evidently transpires at a period of time when the emancipation of womanhood was just a pipe dream. It pays homage to the submissive woman of the past.

Furthermore, using a montage of eleven images punctuated by a good score of French composer Alexandre Desplat, David Fincher summarizes the life that Benjamin Button led after abandoning his family. From the montage, the audience discovers that Benjamin sailed to Ganges, cleaned a temple in India and generally suffered living in shanty towns. By using a montage, the director of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button effectively cuts down on the time and resources which could have been required to shoot the footage for all the eleven scenes demonstrated in the montage but still maintain an enviable continuity in the film. At already 166 minutes, the film could have been very lengthy had all the footage of the eleven scenes summarized into a montage been incorporated into the final release. A lengthy film suffers the risk of losing its intended punch, something which David Fincher is better placed to comprehend and thus successfully avoided.

The dialogue in this film has been well developed and is easy to follow. It clearly compliments the characters’ actions. From the characters’ conversation with each other, one is able to clearly tell their hidden passions and emotions plus their underlying intentions. Through listening to the dialogue in this film, the audience is able to follow the story with limited difficulty. As the film moves with a progressive intensity towards the climax, so does the characters’ dialogue. 

Symbolism has been achieved with a considerable level of success in this film. In art, different colors have been known to convey different moods and by extension, messages. David Fincher uses different colors to symbolize different moods in various instances in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. For instance, Benjamin’s affair with Elizabeth Abbott ends at midnight. As he sits waiting for her in vain, the dominant color black suggests doom and bad luck. And true to the color black, Elizabeth dishonors their rendezvous, shattering Benjamin’s heart and hopes. Moreover, this once again proves true when his relationship with Daisy suffers a break-up at midnight. In the dark, Benjamin is seen leaving a tidy sum of money on the bed for Daisy and Caroline on his way out. The darkness of midnight suggests pessimism which is just what a break-up evokes in the parties concerned, and much more especially in the individual being left.

Family values are cast in the spotlight in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Thomas Button is portrayed as the height of irresponsible fatherhood. He abandons his son to fate in a nursing home instead of formally giving him away for adoption. Later on, while Benjamin was working on a tugboat, he encounters his father who fails to reveal himself. To the audience, it appears as though Thomas Button prefers the status quo or is too ashamed to own up to the injustice that he did Benjamin immediately after his birth. But much later on like they always do, when terminally ill, Thomas reunites with his son and dares to let the cat out of the bag. After telling Benjamin that he is his biological father, Thomas wills him his material possessions and dies. But apparently, Benjamin has lost a sense of belonging to Thomas Button. During his father’s funeral, Queenie tells him “he’ll be buried right next to your mother,” to which Benjamin emphatically replies “you’re my mother.” Later on Benjamin tells Queenie that even though he has inherited all the wealth of the Button Company, he still prefers and values more their relationship than the material possession his father left him. This clearly shows that material possession can never replace parental love; once missed, no amount of money can fill up that void.

In his 1995 book More Than Meets the Eye, film critic Burton argues that much of the content and treatment of the output in Hollywood is basically the same. David Fincher has not escaped this scathing criticism in this film. Staying true to the Hollywood tradition, the subject of erotology has been well exploited in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button just like in any other blockbuster film. 

Daisy dies as the Hurricane Katrina approaches. The audience gets to know this by Fincher’s placement of a television set broadcasting the hurricane news close to her bedside. There are two possible explanations for this: news being a stock character could have been used to suggest that the character’s life (Daisy) was quite dramatic. And indeed it was. Again, news of an approaching Hurricane Katrina could have been intended to bring about a strong climax to the ending of the story, unlike what a dying lonely and aged Daisy could have achieved on her own.

In conclusion, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a film that deserves all the accolades it gets. It’s a revolutionary film in the sense that it dwells on the life of a man who lived his life backwards. Not only does this film entertain, but it also boggles the mind and generally engages the audience in trying to imagine what it would be like to live an inverted life. David Fincher comes out strongly as a master of fiction and dramatic elements in this film. Moreover, the star-studded cast including Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett make the film worth checking out owing to their reputation of sterling performances. And truly, in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, they don’t disappoint either. With such an enduring excellence, this is a highly recommended film that is definitely bound to be a timeless classic just like Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story by the same title from which this film is adapted. I would recommend reading the short story first before watching the film.