The Foreigner Was Afraid

In response to Juan Downey's "The Laughing Alligator"


Juan Downey speaks to us slowly and cautiously as we walk with him, towed along in his camera’s lens, through the dense, thick, and overgrown jungle of the Amazon, following two Yanomami guides. We are able to make sense of the forms of their naked bodies, but only with the help of the night vision lights on Downey’s camera. The natives were armed, but so were we, for “the Indians took the camera as a dangerous weapon, as though bullets would come through the lens.”

Both naked Indians spin around with their respective weapons aimed directly at us – a long shotgun cocked and resting on shoulder aligned to eye level, a carved bow and arrow with its string pulled taut. In this long and tense moment, reality slows down, and we question why we are here in the first place. We question whether or not we are intruding, whether or not it was a good idea to follow these men into their wilds after all.

And when the trigger is finally pulled, the bowstring released, the silence broken, what is actually discharged at us is merely a mimetic gesture of bullets being fired, along with the smile on their faces.

We are mocked for being scared, we feel bashful and shy – like a child with our heads looking down at our toes turned in. As of now, the camera’s violent authority decomposes and is lost. The assuming anthropologist’s stone pedestal crumbles, leaving us standing barefooted, with the earth underneath the soles of our feet, on the same ground as the Yanomami.

Before we can get too comfortable on our new keel, the scene cuts to a Yanomami woman laughing at our predictable distress, while another one of our powerful Western weapons – text – is used against us, bold, brightly colored letters flash in front of us spell out, “the foreigner was afraid.”

The problem is, we are afraid. We are afraid to stand too close, to “be swallowed up” by a culture other than our own. We are afraid to stay unsure, to stay unsure of a reality that is different from our own. This issue becomes blatantly transparent in Napoleon Chagnon’s the “Ax Fight.” The fear he attempts to induce in the viewer, by manufacturing a calculated macabre spectacle clearly exists within his own self before he even staged the fight. He doesn’t engage with these people, he doesn’t move closer. The 200 or so bodies that inhabit the stage of this tragic drama become a blurred and out of focus mass in which the individual is lost. When the soul and body of the individual is obscured behind the overarching stereotype of the documenting anthropologist, that is when the tragedy begins to solidify. Chagnon’s narrative voice speaks like a terrified adult feeling the need to speak in order to allay and soothe the aches that come along with the malaise of uncertainty – the problems of categorizing foreign lives within the context of our Western ways. To do so, we will always fall short, and we will always be full of it. Chagnon must maintain his cool, his balance, and his authority, so the camera stays level – it stays constant in its unyieldingly detached perspective. We watch as spectators. We watch, separate.

The problem of perspective endures and is constantly being addressed in Downey’s work, as one shot is quickly exchanged for another, as the colors change, as the sights are inverted. For how do you know where you stand when your perspective viewed from the camera lens spins in circles and gazes up, looks down, looks ahead, and most importantly looks inside? In fact, you don't, and it is through this profound certainty of uncertainty with which we can move forward as honestly as a human being can. As the camera’s vacillating, temperamental perspective changes our own fickle views, it is still letting the native take the lead, slowly rowing, dipping his oar into the silky water, leading us on what Downey calls “a search for a vanished reality.”