Dirty Pretty Things

Dirty Pretty Things. Dir. Stephen Frears. Perf. Audrey Tautou, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sergi López, Sophie Okonedo. Atliance Atlantis, 2004. DVD.

“We are the ones you do not see. We are the ones who drive your cabs, clean your rooms and suck your cocks” - Okwe

Dirty Pretty Things brought home for me, perhaps even more strongly than Rushdie’s work, the idea of England as a nation of immigrants. I think, being Canadian, I have this idea of my nation being the nation of immigrants, the cultural mosaic, while I have this image of Britain as a much more homogenous and wealthy place (maybe this comes from the existence of the monarchy). This image of Britain was challenged when I finally visited London, but even then, it was mostly a tourist’s London I saw. In Dirty Pretty Things, we see the invisible London. We see London as a space of surveillance and biopolitical control, where immigrants in particular are disposable.

One thing particularly notable to me was that in Dirty Pretty Things there were virtually no white people. All of the central characters were black or brown or yellow, and most of them are also socially marginalized: working class or below working class (without the basic rights of citizenship). Senay, a hotel cleaning lady, is from Turkey, in the process of immigrating officially but working illegally in the meantime; Okwe is from Nigeria, an illegal immigrant working as a hotel desk operator by night, and a cab driver by day; Juliette is presumably British-born, but she is marginalized by being black and a prostitute; we don’t know the status of Ivan-the-door-man’s legality, but he is Russian, and thus he bears with him the still-lingering spectre of communism; Guo Yi is Asian, and though he, being legal, has a somewhat better job as a crematorium porter, we get the sense that his knowledge goes beyond that position (maybe, like Okwe, he was a doctor in the past?). Even the film’s two villains, Sneaky and the sweatshop boss, are immigrants, doing the illegal things they do––organ-dealing and sweatshop-running respectively––as a way to eke out an existence in a society where they are invisible. I of course don’t man to excuse their behaviour––especially the rape––but these characters, I think, show the way in which those who are disposable sometimes survive by participating in the economy of bare-life/disposability.

I think that Agamben’s idea of the state of exception works well here. To summarize it briefly and incompletely: Agamben argues that the rendering of life into bare-life––life that can be scarified, but not killed, because it is not really considered human––has stayed with us since the time of Nazism and fascism, and in fact, it has become the thing that upholds the legitimacy of the state (Homo Sacer 10-11; 127). Immigrants––especially illegal or marginally legal ones like Okwe and Senay––as well as anyone else outside the ranks of society––prostitutes like Juliette, for example––are not considered people. They don’t count. They are rendered bare life, bodies to be used and used-up through physical and sexual labour, through the harvesting of organs, and through the unspoken and unrecorded deaths of those who die as “illegals,” whether through botched organ donation, an STI (such as those Okwe treats in his fellow cabbies), substance use or sheer exhaustion.

The film presents two ways to survive when you have been rendered bare-life/disposable. One way is through giving in and reproducing that system of disposability, like Sneaky and the sweatshop boss do. Okwe himself is encouraged to be complicit with this at the beginning. His friend Guo Yi tells him, “I don’t ask questions here after 11 years, and I’m a certified refugee.” Part of survival can looking the other way, ignoring the violence inherent in the state of exception. Okwe, although he is tempted to comply (he even tells Senay that they, as immigrants, can’t love, they can only survive) is ultimately unwilling to give into this heartless way of being (literally - think of the image of the human heart in the toilet, an image he can’t shake). Instead of giving in and becoming an organ-harvester, he manages to form a community of invisible non-citizens. Together, this community manages to work within the confines of their forced criminality* not to reproduce the workings of London’s economy of bare life, but rather, to intervene in it, however contingently.

*by forced criminality I mean the state has deemed their very existence criminal, it is not their criminal acts which make them criminals