Chappie's Soiled Innocence
As readers of this blog are well aware, I have no interests, only obsessions. To me, if something is worth being interested in at all, it’s worthy of deep, unhealthy, pathological obsession.
Take, for example, Neill Blomkamp’s 2015 flop Chappie. Blomkampf exploded onto the international film world with 2009’s District 9, an audacious science fiction allegory that used the concept of aliens living in South Africa as second-class citizens as an elaborate metaphor for Apartheid.
District 9 was a massive critical and commercial hit that grossed over two hundred million dollars internationally and earned its writer-director an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
It was the kind of massive worldwide success that often, if not inevitably, leads to failure on an equally massive, equally spectacular scale.
That glorious, historic failure did not occur with Blomkampf’s immediate follow-up to District 9, the 2013 science fiction allegory Elysium, which garnered mixed to positive reviews and grossed nearly three hundred million dollars internationally.
No, the movie that would send Blomkampf’s professional fortunes spiraling in the wrong direction was instead his third feature film, 2015’s Chappie.
It was a film of wild, wildly misplaced audacity, filled with choices that were as bold as they were completely insane.
Those strong, bewildering choices began with Blomkampf thinking that what audiences wanted from him, a promising auteur adept at fusing spectacle-rich science-fiction with potent ideas and social commentary, was a direct cross between Robocop and Short Circuit.
Like Robocop in the motion picture of the same name, Chappie is a robot cop, the future of law enforcement, as it were. Like Johnny 5, Chappie, is an adorable man-child with the pure heart of an innocent child and the circuitry of a powerful, expensive robot.
Blomkampf’s brazen, astonishingly stupid ideas for Chappie extended to casting in more or less lead roles the two non-actors in hip hop duo Die Antwood, Watkin “Ninja” Tudor Jones and Yolandi Visser as fictionalized versions of themselves.
It would be like a family-friendly Herbie the Love Bug reboot centering on Marilyn Manson playing himself as a shock rocker who comes into possession of a kooky anthropomorphic car with a mind of his own.
It didn’t really make sense for sneering provocateurs like Die Antwood to be a in a silly movie for children about a robot police officer who learns about the curious entities known as “feelings” and “love.” Then again, very little about Chappie makes a goddamn lick of sense and all of it is bizarre and perplexing in a way I found utterly fascinating.
Chappie is the kind of bad I absolutely adore: weird, personal, wildly non-commercial and just plain bonkers, a singularly unpalatable combination of sticky sentimentality and cyber-punk craziness.
In other words it’s the kind of movie I very much hope that someone chooses for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 so that I will have an excuse to re-visit it.
Alas, the ugliness of the real world has intruded on the bizarre fantasy world of Chappie. In a deeply unsurprising turn of events, it turns out that Die Antwood, like Manson, don’t just portray the role of debauched, amoral hedonists onstage, on record and in music videos: they’re disgusting, repellent human beings in real life as well.
Manson has recently been outed as a sex criminal and predator by ex Evan Rachel Wood while Die Antwood have been accused in the past few years of sexual assault and sex trafficking AND gay-bashing and physically assaulting a gay musician.
The controversial duo is getting dropped from festivals as a result but it’s a little late to digitally erase them from Chappie.
The tragic revelations of the #MeToo era cast a long shadow over a lot of entertainment for children, and not just because America’s dad, Bill Cosby, turned out to be a serial rapist who committed a series of horrible crimes over the course of a half-century as an aggressive and prolific sex criminal.
When Matt Lauer pops up in a framing segment for Sesame Street Beginnings, which depicted Elmo, Cookie Monster, Big Bird and Prairie Dawn as infants, or Jeffrey Tambor appears on Yo Gabba! Gabba! as a tiny king, I can’t help but think of the awful crimes they were credibly accused of.
Of course sadness and disappointment I feel watching these tainted, toxic figures in family fare is nothing compared to the harm they caused their victims.
The ugly accusations against Die Antwood cast a long shadow over Chappie, soiling its blinkered innocence. It’s one of the weirder casualties of #MeToo but it’s a casualty all the same.
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