Workingman's Death

Films like Workingman's Death exist for the same reasons charity shows are televised every other month and students flood the island hawking for donations in tin cans on Flag Day - to remind, and shame us, in our blissful satisfied corner of the world, that less fortunate people still exist. These less fortunate people are so crucial in a 'first-world' society, that governments harp on them, using them as marketing campaigns for their kindness; schools ceaselessly drill into students the suffering of these people, driving (or coercing?) them to do charity work to have a 'social-conscious' mind; and, of course, as we all know, private organizations make use of them to keep their money rolling in.

So what's our deal with them? It seems every society needs a guilt bag to puncture once in awhile, to shake us out of our comfortable life, because as much as we don't like discomfort, we also don't like to be too comfortable. These bags come in the form of these 'easy' charities, easy because we don't have to see them face to face - so long as we continue 'helping' them by donating, we allay our guilt yet keep them at bay. It is our middle-class society way of acknowledging the presence of the poor and occasionally helping them through middle-parties so that we could still remain comfortably guilty in our existence.


Workingman's Death comes to us as yet another harbinger of revelatory bad news, another guilt bag to puncture. Yet the biggest hypocrisy is that it is made only so middle-class people wallowing in their stupid lives can give up some of their hard-earned money in exchange for a ticket to make them feel guilty, a special commodity that is fast becoming necessary in our lives. The crime here is even more unbearable - unless someone tells me that for every ticket purchased, some portion would directly benefit one poor soul that was depicted in this movie, these paying middle-class folks would only go home, perhaps feel ashamed of themselves a bit, maybe make a resolution not to complain so much when they go to work the next day, and by the end of the next work day (or week, or month) they'd be complaining again. Or, they would type on their personal computers how much this movie has opened their eyes or changed their lives or whatever the New Age excuse for self-reflection is, or, as in my case, how repulsed they are by this movie. Either way, the only reason it could exist is to provide that thorn.

We have a tendency of exalting these harbingers without first thinking of their very own contribution to the cause - probably the latent hypocrisy in these documentaries, also known as postcards from the edge (of the third world). Why else would Christian Frei scramble to stress on James Nachtwey's hands-on aid to people of war-torn countries, in his documentary War Photographer, if not to immediately dispel any cry for hypocrisy? Of course, in journalism, we have to acknowledge the two-way pull between keeping a distanced objective eye (and doing actual reporting) and helping hands-on. But Workingman's Death, a slickly produced documentary with superb professional-looking camera work (one scene even had up to four cameras operating at the same time!), remains so adamant in showing how the characters suffer (yet remain impossibly optimistic about their suffering) that it paints them into mere caricatures, or, even worse - its effect is not unlike paying money to see the sideshow freaks in a circus, shuddering and feeling lucky that we were not born like them.

As the show drones on with piles of ironic wit - we see how sulfur workers in Indonesia rush to carry heavy bags of sulfur down the fields while indifferent tourists watch on; Indonesian workers chatter about their favorite Western bands (drawing chuckles of recognition from our middle-class audience); and, when the film turns its eye to Nigeria and decides to up the ante in impact, we see how various goats and cows are clumsily slaughtered (causing a few audience members to head for the exit; people who, in my mind, go back home to a full slab of steak later) just to invoke even more tsk-tsk's than just simple human suffering. It fulfills its promised five portraits of working people in the 21st century (technically only four are portraits of the workingman's death; the fifth, in China, seems more to serve the film's ironic edge), eventually heading to an epilogue in Germany showing a disused steel factory-turned-leisure park that is now littered with smooching teenagers, oblivious to the solemnity and harshness of their surroundings. This epilogue can probably be interpreted in two ways, 1. To show, after all the previous images of hellish working conditions in third-world countries, how much the first-world countries have put behind them to become a superior, cleaner state of affairs, or 2. To prove the point about how we, languishing in our self-built comfort zones, don't see the irony of living comfortably while horror is taking place somewhere else in the world, and, most importantly, to make us feel guilty about this. I prefer to choose the latter, the lesser of two evils, which is still bloody obnoxious.