Showerhead + Hillbilly Elegy — at the movies with … Rick Deckard!

Don’t faucet 

At this point in his career, few people would dispute the fact that Jonathan Shapiro is one of the most highly regarded political cartoonists of his generation.

(Full disclosure: he’s paid to scribble for this publication, and he knows where I live.) 

Love him or hate him, his nom de plume — Zapiro — has shunted South Africa from the latter stages of apartheid into the new dispensation. He has shredded and venerated accordingly, but he has remained diligent about marking our milestones. His scratches on paper are a record of our time. 

But, it turns out that the cartoonist — the clown who conceals a sabre — cannot survive an unqualified encomium. The task of art, said Jorge Luis Borges, “is to transform whatever happens to us into symbols”. The task of the political cartoonist is to craft symbols that hurt. And so Showerhead, the new documentary that serves as a retrospective of Shapiro’s career thus far — and by extension, a précis of South African history since the 1980s — is a disconcerting experience. First, it literalises Shapiro’s symbols, which renders them benign. Second, it’s all veneration and zero shredding. It’s a reminder that satire and hagiography can’t mix. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxkDwKqsIM4

The film takes as its central conceit the showerhead that Shapiro installed atop Jacob Zuma’s butternut, a reference to the former president’s infamous HIV avoidance strategy. That particular symbol — a representation of unrestrained patriarchal power — was born of deep rage and frustration, as Shapiro makes clear over the course of the film. 

Indeed, the documentary wastes no time getting to the point. As far as the storyline is concerned, director (and human rights lawyer) Craig Tanner has settled on a straight chronology of Shapiro’s career. Stylistically, the film has few frills, despite a soundtrack that oversells certain moments. It kicks off at boyhood, when Shapiro’s family was pulled by gravity into the Struggle. His sister was detained, his mother was detained, and Shapiro himself was detained. “We found ourselves fighting against the state,” he says. 

When conscripted into the South African Defence Force, he refused to carry a rifle and carried a pole instead. The pole served both as a joke and a statement of intent: it turned the soldier into a cartoon, and the cartoonist into an activist. Shapiro started drawing the monsters who ran the regime and became plugged into South Africa’s rich compendium of struggle art. 

Unhappily for a satirist, after apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela’s rainbow utopia took its place. Happily for the satirist, it hasn’t turned out so well. And Shapiro has killed it: he defined the new dispensation’s ups and its downs (mostly the downs), and in the splendid new nonracial court, he became the chief jester. Mandela was at first annoyed, but eventually endorsed the work as an expression of free speech, the terms of which were guaranteed under the vaunted Constitution that the new President had himself signed into being. 

Other ANC leaders felt differently. Following Thabo Mbeki’s genocidal HIV/Aids denialism and the gorge-fest of the Arms Deal, Shapiro found himself on the frontlines once again. By the early zeroes, a true villain had emerged: the craven and corrupt figure of Jacob Zuma. Shapiro depicted him with his pants unzipped, preparing to rape Lady Justice. Given that Msholozi had narrowly dodged rape charges in real life, it wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t intended to be 

Famously, Zuma was less enamoured with the Constitution than was Mandela, and during a time of weaponised political correctness, Shapiro butted up against rising anti-free speech sentiments. Zuma and his cabal ground down as hard as they could on the press, and while there was little violence, it was hardly pleasant. 

Given his priapic intent and his bottomless appetites, it’s hardly a surprise that Zuma’s crotch became a satirical fixation. In the third act, Showerhead takes a diversion into the case of the brilliant agit-artiste Brett Murray, whose painting The Spear depicted Zuma with his pants unbuttoned, and his, er, machine gun exposed. Decried as a racist, and threatened with death (and worse), Murray articulately describes his collision with manufactured rage. 

And yet it is here that the film most glaringly shows its shortcomings. Why don’t we hear more about what it means to be a white cartoonist in a majority-black country, where most of the politicians and power players are black, and where the depiction of black people has had, shall we say, problematic connotations? While Murray thinks hard about these issues, at no point is Shapiro pushed outside his comfort zone. Never do we hear anyone saying “Fuck this guy!” Nor do any of the wildly supportive talking heads produce even a mild criticism of Shapiro’s work. Has the man made no missteps in his decadeslong career? 

Is Shapiro racist — or, rather, racially insensitive? I don’t think he is. But I would have loved to have heard from people who believe otherwise. And there are other aspects of his work that have met with serious criticism. As the journalist Lili Radloff wrote, “[For] many, no most, South African women ... rape can never be a metaphor. And if you have been sexually assaulted yourself or spent time with a woman with torn vaginal walls or hugged a gang-raped 4-year-old with decimated reproductive organs ... I think you’d agree with me.”

What makes Shapiro interesting is not that he’s universally beloved. It’s that many South Africans loathe his work and everything he stands for, very much including his constitutional rights. And yet he keeps going, without blinking. That is the cross the satirist must bear, and rightly so. Having said that, it’s nearly impossible — if it’s possible at all — to quote an example of Shapiro punching down. His target has always been capital-P Power. But the power that remains unaddressed in this film is his own. 

Showerhead (2024) 

Directed by Craig Tanner 

110 mins

Feature documentary 

Couch-smurfing 

The most pressing question in politics is: Did Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance make love to a piece of furniture? The answer remains elusive, at least as far as the 2020 movie based on Vance’s star-making memoir Hillbilly Elegy is concerned. 

Hoo boy, but this is a wildly weird Hollywood interpretation of Vance’s ragweed-to-riches story. At once nostalgic for a past that no one involved in the film experienced, and also formulaic in a way that makes every scene a chore to watch, this is a cinematic curiosity perhaps without precedent — although not without vice-precedent, as the case may be. (Try the soup, I’ll be here all week.) 

Vance’s memoir, published around the same time as Donald Trump’s successful 2016 election campaign, was shared like samizdat by East Coast poobahs hoping to understand the deplorables that had sent Saint Hilary to the dustbin of history. These flyover Americans in their dungarees and ancient sedans smoked cigarettes unironically, ate non-grass-fed meat, chowed opiates like vitamin B12 supplements, and hadn’t heard of a polycule. 

How were they even allowed to vote? 

Turns out that they’re a sentient lot, invested with pluck, ambition and mysterious sores on their legs. And they are a common American type: Vance’s memoir elegantly updated America’s foundational Horatio Alger myth for a new generation — poor kid from Ohio, raised by his addict mother and straight-talking grandmother, pulls himself out of poverty, into the Marine Corps and into Yale Law School. It all ends tragically of course: he becomes a venture capitalist. But in between, he falls in love with the daughter of Indian immigrants, while coming to terms with his tough but loving childhood, and the aw-shucks folks among whom he was raised. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW_3aaoSOYg

Say what you will about Ron Howard’s adaptation, but it is not elegant. It is, however, elegiac — hilariously so. Lots of golden sunlight dappling through trees, set to bluegrass adjacent strings, over-explained by Southern-accented voiceover. Everyone involved, including living legends like composer Hans Zimmer and cinematographer Maryse Alberti, are on their worst behaviour. But no one submits to their baser creative instincts more wantonly than Howard himself. The reliable veteran director of such hits as Splash and Apollo 13 is completely lost in this world. Nothing looks or feels authentic, especially the authentic stuff, like the frequent use of non-professional performers. A child of Hollywood, Howard’s craft fails him in the Hillbilly Cinematic Universe. It’s like a schmaltzy Deliverance, except with less nuance, and more teeth.  

Left to flail where the crawdads sing are two great actresses, Amy Adams and Glenn Close. As Vance’s troubled mother, Adams does her best to avoid trope-iness, but playing an addict is never easy. Playing an addict in Ohio, it turns out, is impossible. Close, on the other hand, gives a performance so broad it transcends camp. Mamaw, Vance’s grandmother and matriarch of the family is foulmouthed but chockfull of homespun wisdom. She’d be perfect in a buddy film, paired with a strait-laced Manhattan lawyer played by Sandra Bullock. Here, in one of the more legendary Hail Mary bids for an Oscar, she blows the doors off the assignment. Given that poorface is the spiritual corollary of blackface, Close should probably be cancelled for 10 lifetimes — just four years old, her performance has aged like moonshine brewed in toilet water. 

Instead of showing moviegoing Americans a neglected part of their country, Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy inadvertently exposes Hollywood liberalism’s myopia — mostly its failure of close observation and nuanced portrayal. Hillbilly Elegy’s bad guys are its creators — the liberal overlords in their palaces trying to figure out how they got screwed over by people who work the night shift at a Burger King in Kentucky. 

As for the real JD Vance, he clearly learnt how to be a true American at Yale: he betrayed his values, became a VC, and now a potential VP to a man he once described as “America’s Hitler”. That said, we never learn if JD Vance fucked a couch. 

Perhaps the sequel will be made from the furniture’s point of view. The protagonists will be no less inanimate and unknowable.  

Hillbilly Elegy (2020) 

Directed by Ron Howard 

117 minutes 

Feature film DM