The Jarmusch Way by Rice Julian;

Author:Rice, Julian; [Rice, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

The Limits of Control

As described in chapter 1 Jarmusch repeatedly placed images or replicas of the Golden Tower in The Limits of Control to historically link the imperialism of sixteenth-century Spain to twentieth-century America. He also chose a single African resource to symbolize the contemporary “pillaging of the world” perpetrated by global corporations. In the opening airport scene where Creole (Alex Descas) gives the African hero Lone Man (played by Ivory Coast native Isaach De Bankolé) initial instructions for his mission, the accompanying French translator (Jean François Stevénin) muses, “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” as he glances at two beautiful girls narcissistically caressing each other’s necklaces. Later when Blonde (Tilda Swinton) gives Lone Man a matchbox filled with diamonds at a café in Madrid she theatrically intones, “diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” and in a subsequent scene Nude (Paz de La Huerta) exchanges a matchbox with Lone Man for the diamond-filled one, saying, “I have what you need. Do you have what I need?” Much later at another café in Almeria, Lone Man finds a single diamond in his espresso cup shortly before he discovers Nude’s dead body in the villa where he has been staying. Part of the implied message here is that nobody needs diamonds and that material obsessions are marketing illusions calculated to kill commonsense perception. But more to the contemporary topical point, legal and illegal trading in diamonds has caused enormous suffering in Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

During the time Limits was being prepared, the Academy Award–nominated film Blood Diamond, directed by Edward Zwick and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, focused worldwide attention on the multibillion dollar resource that rebel forces in Sierra Leone sought to seize in a horrific war that lasted from 1991 to 2002. Sierra Leone is a former British colony with a population of 6.1 million in western Africa. Life expectancy is forty, and despite its vast diamond wealth 50 percent of its citizens are subsistence farmers while only 35 percent are literate, though English is still its official language. To crush support for the government forces the RUF rebels cut off the hands of thousands of civilians in response to a government slogan, “we need your hands to vote,” echoing the same “pacification” strategy practiced by the conquistadors in sixteenth-century America (see subsequent discussion in this chapter). In his DVD commentary on the scene where this atrocity occurs, Zwick says that the “amputation of hands [was the] single most salient, signature image of what happened in that time [and is still happening] throughout Sierra Leone. There are literally tens of thousands of men, women, and children who are amputated in various ways.”1 In another scene events in modern Sierra Leone are put into historical perspective when an African teacher tells DiCaprio, “The Belgians were the first to chop off limbs in Africa. King Leopold took one hand for every hundredth slave in the Congo . . . to keep them in line.”2

During the civil wars in

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