Manic Myths, Fucked Up Fairy Tales and Pop Apocalypses: Text, textuality and intertextuality in Aryan Kaganof’s SMS Sugar man
“a fairy tale assumption in which an all but non-existent condition is assumed to be rampant” —Samuel R. Delany
South African film maker Aryan Kaganof shot his new film SMS Sugar Man entirely with a cell phone. That the media is the message is old news, so it’s hardly surprising that most readings of the film have focused on its presentation of the superficiality of our hyper-real late capitalist society. And indeed in Kaganof’s film is a relentless presentation of error, bad taste, artifice and a lack of truth or reasonableness, chronicling with zeal the hyper-violent banality of South Africa as a cell phone society where media image replaces reality and texting replaces language as a means of communication. What these readings fail to consider however is the films textuality and inter-textuality, and how Kaganof employs these strategies as a radical alternative to the banality of “sms society”. This paper investigates how Kaganof’s gleeful weave of fucked up fairy tales, nightmarish slapstick violence, literary references, mythology, personal narrative, b-grade trash and a wistful quest for spiritual unity encapsulates a cinema of multiple artistic personalities and irreconcilable differences. It is as if the film passes from the reality of our suppressed lives into the history we dream of making, and back again — left in ruins, our dreams haunt us like memories of an imaginary homeland that has disappeared from the map. In this context, Kaganof offers a reading of contemporary South Africa far more hopeful, far more complex than could ever be encapsulated in the 128×160 screen resolution of the cell phone.
In keeping with Kaganof’s refusal of the traditional dichotomies between art and popular culture, academic and b-grade strategies, this investigation presents itself as much as a fiction, an sms and a tabloid review, as a traditional academic analysis or paper.
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