BRUTALITY AT THE FRONTIER
‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ on screen
I am in Washington, D.C., staying at a cheap hotel across from the National Headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, reporting on the USA v. Bertelsmann antitrust trial for a magazine. Yesterday freelance writer Stephen King testified that authors are experiencing a goldrush as a result of a demand for ‘content, content, content’ from Hollywood and the streaming services. I won’t dwell on those remarks (or their implications for the government’s case that writers face a doomsday of financial ‘harm’ with the coming PRH/S&S monopsony), but it does seem we are due for a flood of adaptations of major and minor works of literature from the last half century, or maybe the last three millennia, from White Noise to the Oresteia. No doubt for many of these projects, not to be born would be best. But history shows that a few will be OK.
It has been a few years since I last reread J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians. It is not a book whose minor plot points stay with you, but certain images and the dynamics between various characters do not go away. There is first of all the estranging description of sunglasses on the opening page, a new invention in the imaginary world of the novel. They are worn by Colonel Joll, an imperial enforcer who has come to the frontier outpost where the novel is set because of an outbreak of xenophobic hysteria and martial aggression in the imperial capital. Joll disrupts not only the placid state of things on the frontier but the life of the outpost’s Magistrate, the narrator of the novel, a reasonable and humane man and an amateur archaeologist and anthropologist who takes a sympathetic interest in the local nomads, whom Joll tortures, attacks, and incites to overrun the outpost.
The 2019 film adaptation of Waiting for the Barbarians is directed by Ciro Guerra of Colombia, whose 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent was nominated for the best foreign picture Oscar. The screenplay is by Coetzee. Mark Rylance stars as the Magistrate, with Johnny Depp as Joll and Robert Pattinson as his even more brutal deputy and stooge. The Mongolian actress and model Gaya Bayarsaikhan plays ‘the Girl’, a victim of Joll’s torture whom the Magistrate nurses back to health and with whom he falls in love (if not quite requitedly). After a premiere in the fall of 2019 at the Venice film festival, the movie was released in the summer of 2020, and hardly anybody saw it because of the pandemic. Box office receipts were below $1 million. Reviews were mixed. (It is now streaming on Amazon Prime.)