A teenage leader of a criminal gang steals a car that has a baby in the back seat. In caring for the baby, he develops compassion and comes to terms with his traumatic childhood. That is the basic plotline for Tsotsi, the South African film, based on an Athol Fugard novel, that won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2005. It sounds like a simple story of learned empathy, but it is much more complex.
Tsotsi, the boy and the film, is much more like a patient who initially presents a tough, violent surface through which he attempts to cope with a traumatic past. Like that well defended patient, the film tries to misdirect us so that we will not understand its motives. The difference is that with the film, this is done by conscious design, to create a meaningful impact. Nevertheless, as we look more closely, we will see a complex set of identifications constructed around a central screen memory.
Tsotsi is the self adopted name of the film’s central character. We are told that the word, “tsotsi” means “thug” in his native language. He is a nameless thug, hiding his true identity. Early in the film, one of his gang members, Boston, tries to break through the mystery of his identity, confronting him in a bar with having no decency after the gang has killed a man in a robbery.
“What’s your name, Tsotsi? Your real name? Tsotsi? Thug? That’s not a real name. … I’ve been with you for six months, I want to know his name. Every man has a name. A real name from his mother.” Boston goes on to express his pain over the murder they have committed that day, cutting himself to show how he is bleeding inside over it. He tries to tear verbally at the mask that is Tsotsi’s face, his identity and his past. “Maybe you had a woman and when she left you, it hurt. And you bled. Your father—your father, Tsotsi. Your father, where is he? Your father and mother. Where are they? Jesus, Tsotsi! A dog? What about a dog?”
At this, Tsotsi leaps over the table and attacks Boston, knocking him down and kicking him, then beating him in his face and running out of the bar. We do not yet know why Tsotsi reacts so violently, but the surface impression is that he is reacting to the attack and to Boston’s accusation that he has no decency. This is the first of those defensive misdirections. When we learn more about Tsotsi, we shall see that Boston has made a very ill timed interpretation, scratching at the surface of a repressed memory.
Ill timed as it is, Boston’s interpretative probe has had an effect. It has unleashed a violent reaction, an attack and an escape. It has also begun to break through the vale of repression. As Tsotsi runs out into the rainy night, we see a momentary flashback of a younger boy wearing a sweater, running on another night. Tsotsi runs into a more affluent neighborhood. As he sits in the rain, seemingly in an altered state, we see that boy again, presumably a younger version of himself, sitting in a cylindrical pipe he shares with another boy, protected from the rain.
With no history, we can make little of Tsotsi’s reaction or the scattered memories that have been awakened; but, we have learned enough of his defensive style so that we are not surprised to see him move again into violent action and escape. A car pulls up at the gated home across from him. When the woman driver gets out to buzz her husband to open the gate, Tsotsi advances with his gun drawn to take the car. As he gets set to drive off, the woman frantically grabs open the passenger door to stop him and he shoots her. As he drives off down the road, he discovers why the woman charged at him. Her baby boy is in the back seat. It is this culminating event of a very eventful day that will determine Tsotsi’s transformation.
We are not told why Tstotsi elects to keep the baby. He puts it with its blanket and some other items from the car into a paper shopping bag and carries it home with him. We can speculate that it was an act of compassion, an act of mindless acquisitiveness or because he was drawn to it in some yet undefined way. Only after further analysis, will we see that the film has Tsotsi find and keep the infant because it provides a vehicle for him to pursue desires that he has been forced to keep dormant. For now, we see only that having to diaper and feed the baby forces him into a nurturing role.
Tsotsi’s memory is jogged again by an encounter with a crippled beggar, but once again we are misdirected to think we are seeing something else. He trips over the man’s wheelchair walking out of the train station. The beggar curses him, calls him a dog and spits at him. Tsotsi begins to stalk this man. On the surface, it appears that he is seeking revenge for the insult as well as another robbery victim, but when he finally confronts the beggar, we discover that the encounter has awakened another piece of his past.
Tsotsi follows the beggar to an isolated area. The frightened beggar offers him his can of money, but Tsotsi says he wants the man to stand up, accusing him of lying about being unable to walk. He even kicks at the man’s foot as if to see if it has life. He either cannot or does not want to believe the man’s paralysis.
Finally convinced that the beggar is unable to walk, Tsotsi approaches him, kneels and reveals another fragment of his memory: “I saw a dog once. Two kicks and its back was broken. It crawled just like you.”
We can see now that the crippled beggar who spit and called him a dog had triggered this violent memory. Boston had also prodded him with “Jesus, Tsotsi! A dog? What about a dog?” just before Tsotsi knocked him down and re-enacted the violence he’d seen, kicking Boston twice. In both cases, Tsotsi was stimulated not by the verbal attack, but by the provocation of a memory. The film makers have deliberately misdirected us so that we can experience a pleasure known to those who have treated victims of trauma, a sense of finding someone more humane beneath the defended surface.
Whatever the meaning of Tsotsi’s memory, unknown to us at this point, the beggar offers hope. He responds, “What kind of man kicks a dog?” and, when Tsotsi questions his will to “go on when you live like a dog, he answers, “I like to feel the sun on the street. Even with these hands I can still feel the heat.” That hope is another counterweight that will help shift the balance of Tsotsi’s conflicts.
To this point, we have seen Tsotsi’s memory triggered by irritants, reminders of trauma. But the full memory is released through its gratifications and the reawakening of his desire.
Early in the film, the morning after Tsotsi has taken the baby, he is standing outside his shack with his two remaining gang members, Aap and Butcher. Butcher sees a young woman with her baby passing by and calls to her, “Feed it! Come here and feed him!” After coming back from his encounter with the beggar, Tsotsi realizes that he cannot take care of the infant without help. He follows the young mother to her home, then, pulling his gun out, forces his way in. It is reminiscent of his encounter with the mother that he has shot. This time he is not after her possessions, or her baby, but her mother’s milk.
He forces her to breast feed “his” baby. As he watches the baby feeding at her breast, Tsotsi gets a dreamy look in his eyes. When the mother stares back at him, he looks away with apparent embarrassment. But his look is not lustful. He is identifying with the pleasure of the infant boy. When she is finished feeding the boy, the mother asks if she can clean him. As she washes the baby she speaks lovingly to him, in cooing tones.
“There you are, little one. You want me to wash you? You do, don’t you?”
She is smiling at the baby. Tsotsi, seated across from her, is once again in a dreamy state, this time with a hint of a smile on his lips. We see another fragment of a memory, a woman, lying in bed, her hand reaching out towards the dreamer. It is only when the young mother looks at him that he is once again awakened from his reverie.
When he returns to his room with the baby, the full traumatic memory emerges as he sits in the dark room across from the baby. He is initially pulled in by the pleasurable part of the memory, hearing his name called gently by a woman’s voice.
“David, David.”
We see the woman in the bed reaching out. Now, we see the boy in the sweater, the one we’d seen running, standing with a dog.
The woman says, “Come and hold my hand. Don’t be afraid.”
David, Tsotsi, approaches her and takes her hand.
A male voice intervenes. “What are you doing?”
David looks back at the man, his father, standing at the door.
“I want him near me, Mandla,” the woman says.
“My son, go outside,” the man orders the boy. “Now!”
The dog begins to bark at the man.
“Please, Mandla.”
“Quiet, woman. You know you are sick. What if he gets sick like you?”
The woman relents. “It’s all right, my baby. It’s all right.”
The father orders the boy, the dog still barking at him. “You. Stay away from your mother. I said out! Get out, damn it!”
The boy runs out, crouching behind a chicken coop. The father is drinking beer from a bottle. The dog continues to bark at him and the father directs his anger and frustration at the dog. “Fucking dog! Out! Fucking dog!” He kicks the dog twice. As the boy watches, tearfully, the dog whines and drags itself along the ground.
David starts to approach the dog. His father says, “Leave it!” Once again he has forbidden him a loving approach. As father and son eye each other, the father says, “My son. Don’t look at me like that.”
David backs away and begins to run off into the night, his father calling after him, “David!”
Now, we have the entire screen memory that makes the story intelligible. I call it a screen memory, not because it is untrue or screening another memory, but because it is a single memory that has become representative of an entire set of dynamics. It is a story of a mother and son, separated by an imposing, violent father.
With this tool, we can unlock the mystery of what we have seen. The provocations that brought back Tsotsi’s memory and drove him to violence and escape are clearer now. We go back to Boston’s words that led to Tsotsi kicking him, the way his father had kicked the dog. “Your father—your father, Tsotsi. Your father, where is he? Your father and mother. Where are they? Jesus, Tsotsi! A dog? What about a dog?” He had accidentally hit too close the traumatic memory. Similarly, the beggar in his crippled state, who also spit out, “Dog” had awakened his memory of his crippled dog and his invalided mother. We may presume that the beggar reminds him not only of his sorrow, but also of his fear that he, too could be crippled by his angry father. We can now better understand his wish to deny the reality of the man’s crippled state.
His father’s warnings, to stay away from his mother and the injured dog, carry a double threat. In addition to the threat of the father’s violence, there is also the implied warning, “Quiet, woman! You know you are sick. What if he gets sick like you?”
Not only is there the injunction against compassion and love, but also the warning that maternal contact itself may be deadly. There is poison in mother’s milk. In contrast to the young woman who Tsotsi uses to feed the infant, there is also a mother with poisoned milk in this story. She is the woman who runs the bar. She has attempted to nurse the injured Boston back to health, but she is not a good mother. Boston says to her, “You never had a child, did you?” Tsotsi confronts her with the hypocrisy of her attempt at mothering and the poison in her milk, setting himself up as a rival mother for Boston. He reminds her that when Boston first came to “the shacks” he spent all his money on her beer. “And when he fell down in the street, sick from the beer you sold him, I found him. Not you.”
Warned by a threatening father, fearful of contact with a sick mother, Tsotsi has had to put on a cold and fierce exterior not only to protect him from enemies, but also from his own desire for his mother’s love. It is only through the infant boy that he can vicariously gratify his repressed wish. His identification with the infant and it’s gratification is verified the next time he brings the baby to the young mother. “What is your name, little one?” she asks.
“David. Yes. His name is David,” Tsotsi tells her.
Much like Anna Freud’s (1936) patient who could not express her own desires, but could advocate for the wishes of others, Tsotsi, who cannot openly express his own desire to return to his home and his mother can try to gratify the imagined wishes of the infant “David”. He says to the baby, “You miss your nice home, I’ll show you a home,” taking him to the rows of piping that had been his home after he ran from his father, as if to offer him this metallic womb. It does not meet the infant’s needs, and Tsotsi leads his little gang back to the baby’s home to commit a robbery in order to collect the baby’s toys and belongings in an attempt to restore his secure and happy home.
As Tsotsi desires mothering, he becomes more mothering, not only towards the baby, but also to the injured Boston. But in nursing Boston, Tsotsi is not only enacting the role of a nurturing mother. The sick Boston, lying in bed, is also a reflection of David’s bed-ridden mother. He takes on the caring role not only to gratify his own need for maternal love, but also to nurse back to health his own mother.
Nearly every element of this tightly constructed film reflects back to some element of the central screen memory. The infant’s family is a better version of Tsotsi/David’s childhood family. The mother, like his, is an invalid, paralyzed from the waist down by Tsotsi’s bullet. But this injured mother fights to get her baby back to her, unlike Tsotsi’s more passive mother. The baby’s father, furthermore, is loving towards his wife and equally wishes to reunite her with her child.
He also becomes a means for repairing Tsotsi’s relationship with paternal figures. At the beginning of the film, Tsotsi’s gang targets a large, portly older man on a train. They surround him and demand his money, Butcher displaying a large knife while Tsotsi motions for the man to remain silent. As Aap reaches inside the man’s jacket for his money, the man starts to cry out. Butcher stabs him, killing him. The boys prop him up until the train empties, then allow him to drop.
It is only later, after we have seen the screen memory, that we can begin to connect this murder to Tsotsi’s anger towards his father and his attempt to identify with his father’s violence. In a later scene, when he returns to the baby’s house with his gang, he appears to come to terms with this violent rage.
He leads Butcher and Aap to the house. As the father drives in the gate, the three boys run in behind him and put a gun to his head. They tie him to a chair downstairs, while the boys start ransacking the house. The man pleads for his life, saying his wife needs him. Butcher looks for valuables while Tsotsi seeks out baby toys. He sits down on a bed in the baby’s room, looking around him with the same dreamy stare.
Butcher wants to kill the baby’s father, but Tsotsi tells him to wait. Suddenly, the man presses a button in a key chain, setting off an alarm. Butcher runs downs and is about to shoot him in the head. We see the man waiting to die, hear a gunshot and see blood. But it is not the father who has been shot. Tsotsi has shot and killed Butcher, sparing the father.
As they drive off, the bewildered Aap asks why Tsotsi has killed Butcher.
Aap: He’s dead. He’s dead.
Tsotsi: Yes, he’s dead. With him it was always kill, kill, kill!
Aap: You never stopped him before!
In this snippet of dialogue, we see another identification. Tsotsi has allowed Butcher to kill to this point. (It was Butcher who killed the man in the train.) Now, he has turned against Butcher, disowning him and his violence. Obviously, Tsotsi has been violent in his own right, but here, in an act of violence, he has decided to not to identify with his violent side or with his violent father, seemingly removing it by killing his violent alter ego, Butcher.
In effect, in the context of the film, Tsotsi has been transformed, “cured” if you will, although that is probably an exaggeration. He has come to terms with his traumatic screen memory, begun to accept, and vicariously gratify, his need for maternal love, discarding his rigid defenses against it along with the violence that both expressed his rage and protected him from dangerous and ungratified dependence.
He goes back to the young mother who is caring for the infant. She feeds him a meal. He offers her money. She refuses it, implicitly showing her disapproval of his criminal life. It is clear that they are now relating on a more mature level, without the threat of violence. She tells him that he must take the baby back to its mother. By this time, the police have spread a drawing which is a likeness of Tstotsi. She offers to take the baby back for him, but he says, “If I take him back, can I still come here?” She responds with a little smile. Tsotsi is now ready for a compassionate relationship with a woman. The dangers of the traumatic memory have been resolved.
Before taking the baby to its home, he first stops to tell Boston that he is sorry for what he has done. At the train station, he meets the beggar and gives him a wad of money.
In effect, he has been transformed, not through simple empathy with a helpless infant, but through a complex set of identifications and confrontation with and reworking of a traumatic screen memory and the fantasies associated with it. He has moved beyond his rigid defensive structure and is now capable of empathy and compassion. All the elements of the film have contributed to this; his contact with the crippled beggar, with the young mother and with the baby’s father. Above all, he is changed through his ability to identify with the infant boy.
The film’s ending, while enigmatic in some respects, undoes the original trauma as the baby, “David”, is reunited with loving and caring parents. In the final scene, there is no more Tsotsi, only David. His plan is to leave the baby by the gate, but after he buzzes to say that he is returning the baby, he is stopped by the baby’s crying. Once again, he cannot leave it, preparing a confrontation in which he stands, holding the baby in the middle of the road, surrounded by armed police and facing the anxious parents through the gate.
It is the baby’s parents who take control of the scene, restoring the power and integrity of the family. The baby’s mother resists the attempts of the police to remove her from the scene of confrontations. She demands of David. “Boy, bring me my child!” as they stare at one another. The father takes control, ordering the police to put down their guns. “That’s my child he’s holding.” He slowly approaches David, who with obvious pain and reluctance, hands him the child.
The hardness is gone from David’s face. He looks frightened and uncertain, accepting the guidance of John, the baby’s father. He watches, tearfully, as mother and child are reunited. David has regained the capacity to be vulnerable, and, ironically, in maturing beyond his rigid defenses, he has once again become a child.
Freud, A. (1936) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense: The Writings of Anna Freud volume 2 International Universities Press (1966)