"Just doin' my job": Monsters Inc.

In many cases, we think of ideology from the perspective of the oppressed; the person who suffers from “false conscience” and conforms to his oppression because of ideology.  Monsters, Inc., probably Helena Iara's favorite film at the moment, starts from the other side, with a more ambiguous question.   Sully and Mike, the monster-protagonists, are good guys.  The movie makes us identify with them.  They are hilarious, fun, and nice.  But…they make a living doing brutal work: scaring boys and girls.   They are good guys who do terrible things, so the movie poses a basic  question:   How is it that good people continue to do bad things?  The answer to this question helps us understand the attitude of the gangleader or boss, but also offers a path to change it.  

The first answer that Sully and Mike offer to this question is one that we have heard several times: “It’s my job.”   When police go to a poor neighbhorhood and begin to round up or beat people,  people complain, “You’re also poor and you come here to abuse us? How shameless!”   In many cases, the ones who defend the police will say, “Shut up, they’re just doing their job.”  In reality, the content of this excuse is “it’s somebody else’s fault, the boss who tells them what to do.  If he doesn’t do it, he’s going to get fired.”  Almost everyone can identify with this problem-“do I lose my job or my ethics?”-therefore, the police are forgiven.  And more importantly, the police pardon themselves and continue brutalizing the community.  

In Home on the Range,  the  sheriff finds himself in a similar situation.   He seems like a good guy, albeit weak and lazy, and is friends with the owner of the “Piece of Heaven” farm.   Nonetheless, he has to do the bank’s dirty work, evicting the woman from her house so that the bank and the villain Alameda Slim, make more money.  The sheriff knows that what he is doing is bad and even ask the owner to forgive him, but she knows the truth:  “Sorry isn’t going to save my farm!” With the sentence “I’m just doing my job,” the sheriff  justifies himself and continues to do bad things without feeling guilty.

The head of the company, Monsters, Inc., justifies himself similarly.   For him, the most important thing is the survival of his business during times of crisis; he inherited it from his family, employs many people, and provides electricity to the city.  But now, Monsters, Inc., is running out of energy, resources, and profits and is at its breaking point.

"I would do anything to save this company,” says the boss. “I don’t have a choice because the world isn’t the same.  Frightening [kids] isn’t enough anymore.”
"But kidnapping boys and girls?” asks Sully.
"I’m going to kidnap a thousand kids before I let this company die and will silence everyone who gets in the way!”

The boss is in control of Sully, the bank is in control over the sheriff,  the survival of the company controls the boss…Everyone wants to say that they don’t have a choice, that they only do bad things when they are ordered to do so.  In reality, they have the power to choose.  They can say that they won’t do it and they will look for other work.  But they don’t assume responsibility for their actions, and instead, blame others.

Helena and her cousin, Fernando.

The workers in the Nazi concentration camps made the greatest test of the excuse, “it’s my job.”  Their job was to kill Jews, gypsies, communists, and homosexuals.  After WWII, the whole world recognized that “it’s my job” doesn’t justify anything; the people that killed in the concentration camps are just as guilty as the ones who ordered them to do it.  To shift the question to a less serious context, imagine that a child does something bad and his mom asks why.  The excuse, “my brother made me do it”  doesn’t justify what he did.  Mothers know that each person has to be responsible for their actions and they will punish the child for what he did.   Nonetheless, when the police come to the neighborhood to kill poor people, we pardon the officials because they’re only doing their job.  This is the paradox that Monsters, Inc., and Home on the Range  highlight.

The other excuse of “good people” that do bad things is: “In reality, what I’m doing is good;” everyone knows the story of the father who abuses his children, saying, “I’m doing this for your own good!” Various movies clearly expose the hypocrisy of this discourse.  The slogan for Monsters, Inc., is  “We scare because we care”, as if scaring is a favor that the monsters do for kids.   This idea helps justify what the monsters do, but kids know very well that this is a thin and empty justification.   Similar is what the queen says in  A Bug’s Life, when she discovers that the “saviors” who came with Flick were nothing more than mere circus artists: “I never thought that that an ant would think of himself as more important than the colony."  In reality, what hurts the ants is the queen, in her conformity with exploitation, but she justifies her collaboration by saying that its for “the good of the colony.”

The clearest case of “for your own good” is Buck, the horse from Home on the Range.  Throughout the whole movie, he affiliates himself with the wrong side-first with the bank who wants to take Mrs. Pearl’s land and later, with the hypocritical vigilante, Rico- but in his fantasies, Buck is always the hero and that nothing  he does is bad.  His dreams are films, where the horse uses martial arts to fight the bad guys dressed in black, but Buck never goes beyond the black and white symbols to see what is really good and bad.   Here we encounter the ideology of the police: they might always hurt the people they are supposed to protect, but in their fantasies, what is really important is that they wear a blue uniform and define themselves as the “good guys.”

In all of these cases, ideology functions so that the rich, powerful, and oppressors can pretend that they are good.  And in each case, the movies show that these arguments are ridiculous, trying to remove the psychological support of the oppressor.  The movies also observe the question of the ideology from below, with different conclusions.

The crickets from A Bug’s Life manipulate the ideology so that ants don’t question the exploitation.  “The world is as it is,” they say.  “It’s imposible to change it, so it’s better to conform to it.”  According to this logic, the world has always been unfair and will always be unfair, but this is how it functions and it can’t function any other way.  It’s normal and natural.  This discourse was used to justify slavery during a large part of human history.   It was simply a natural thing, like the sun or rain, and it made as much sense to complain about slavery as it did to complain about heat in the tropics.   The world was like this.

The sentence that the crickets always use is: “you ants, you have forgotten your place!”  Be it the caste system in India, segregation in the United States, or apartheid in South Africa, the exclusion of  the marginal neighborhoods in Latin America, violence against women…it is always justified with “this is how the  world works.  The ants work, and the crickets take what they harvest.”  For a great majority of people, this kind of oppression becomes natural and normal, and is imposible to question or challenge.

Helena likes these movies... I hope she's getting this message out of them!

A Bug's Life in a Gang-Controlled Favela

One of Helena Iara's favorite films is A Bug’s Life, where the crickets make a living by stealing half of the ants’ harvest; they say that the seeds and leaves pay for the protection that the crickets provide for the colony, but in reality, its nothing more than a bribe. For the crickets, it’s fundamental that the ants remain ignorant about the power dynamics, because ignorance is their most powerful weapon, as we see when the crickets go to a fancy cantina to spend their dirty money.   They have so much fun that the gang members go to the boss and ask if they really have to return to the ant colony.  Life is already good, they say.  Why do we have to have to go through the trouble of blackmailing the ants just to get a handful of seeds?  The boss responds with a naked expression of power:

"If you let one ant question us, then you let all of them question us.  There are 10 little ants for each one of us, and if they figure this out, then our game is up!  This isn’t about food.  Its about control.  And that’s why we go back to the colony."

The crickets, like mafias all over the world, charge a “vaccine” or protection money, saying that they will protect the community from outside threats, when in reality, the gang is the greatest threat that the neighbhorhood faces.  The gang is only legimate as long as people perceive them as the only solution to their problems, but when people perceive their own power, they no longer need the gang.  The crickets manipulate fear and ideology so that the ants don’t become aware of their own pwer, of their capacity to be actors on the world’s stage.  As long as they are seen as weak and incapable, they will never become a threat to the powerful.

Helena with her cousin, Gabriela.

Almost the exact same story has happened in Medellín, Colombia.   In the context of chaotic violence, where anyone can die at any moment, the local gangs organized with two motives: to defend the public and to make money.  The problem was that when street crime stopped, the gang still wanted to make money, so they kept charging “the vaccine” – protection  money-from the people in their neighborhoods.   People complained but they still paid because they didn’t see any alternative and because they feared  the power of the gangs.

The strategy of resistance in Medellín, like in A Bug’s Life, begins with conscience.    First, as it well known in popular education, the oppressed has to become aware of the oppression, but later on has to be aware of his/her  own power and ability to do what the gang does.  In Medellín, the violence had fragmented the marginalized communities to the point where neighbors were afraid to talk to one another.   When there was conflict between them – land ownership, water that  left one family’s house and entered another’s-they would look to the gangs to resolve the conflicts.  And each time they would seek out the gangsters, they would recognize them as a legitimate power in the neighborhood, thereby justifying the exploitation.

The gang took advantage of its legitmacy, but didn’t really want to resolve conflicts since it was far from their fundamental mission: making money.   Therefore, when a group of youth from the neighborhood proposed that they be in charge of mediating conflicts, the gang passed on this responsibility with a sense of relief.   Nonetheless, when people realized that they could resolve conflicts on their own, the gang lost its legitimacy and disappeared within six months.       In A Bug’s Life, when the ants become aware of the fact that they can not only defend themselves from the dangers of the world,  but also frm the crickets that protect them—the gang also has to go.

But that's a story for tomorrow.