Necktie Youth- A film about the Born Free South Africans

The film begins with a note informing us that the film is based on 1991. 1991 is the director’s year of birth as he is born on the 11 September 1991. He plays September in the film, presumably linking his birth month and the character, even though he admits that his reality in the film could be searched and found by understanding the character of Jabz (Bhonko Khoza), who is September’s best friend from childhood days. 

Briefly, the film depicts Displacement, solitude and a failed dream through its cast. The plot is set like a filmmaker wanting to make a film (to b called Dying for Freedom) about what happed in the previous year with the story of Emily committing suicide in what has been seen as a bizarre or attention seeking manner. She records her death. We are told that more than 10 million people managed to access this livestream. So the unknown documentary filmmaker interviews the five teenagers who are said to have been Emily’s friends. Jabz and September are part of the subjects to be interviewed. We learn soon enough about the close attachment Jabz had with Emily. In fact, the film becomes a rewind of who we think Emily must have felt in the presence of her family and friends. Through Jabs, Emily is reflected. And through the character of Jabz, we see how much of the director is reflected as well, since the film is based on one aspect of his life which has barely been talked about as yet.

There seem to be a different narrative in the newly released films in South Africa that are taking a different pattern from those like Tsotsi, Four Corners, iNamba Namba, Hijack Stories, Jerusalem which are plotdriven by crime. This shift has been made from films like Forgiveness and Zulu Love Letter which are tackling the country’s past by interrogating the role of the TRC. Additionally this new shift in the narrative has done away with the theme of HIV and AIDS and poverty which features a lt in films like Yesterday, Life above all, Izulu lami, to mention a few among many of the post apartheird films the country has been producing. The National Film and Video Founadtion regards Jenna Bass’s Love the one you’re with and Sibs Shongwe- La Mers Necktie Youth as films which have set a platform for what should be regarded as South African New wave in film. This trend is characterised by young South African directors who are interrogating identity in the ‘new’ South Africa post the Mandela dream.

South Africa holds the 8th country in the world with the number of suicides per year. Most prevalent deaths of this nature occur from young people, regardless of color or class. This film also makes a comment about this phenomenon as it is based on an actual event which affected the director’s life.  Through following up on the making of this film, one discovers that the director has based the plot over a true event which occurred in his personal relationship with a woman by the name of Emma who died in the same manner as depicted by the character of Emily who livestreams her suicide.  La Mer has said that this happened when he was 14 years of age. However, the nature of the real life suicide differs slightly from that in which is portrayed in the film as it is argue that Emma suffered an accident that left her paralyzed and In hospital for quite some time before she decided to took her life in a manner that she did by recording for everyone’s viewing. In the film, we are introduced briefly to a voice of a young woman who is seemingly reaching out to her confidant who is not available on the phone. Her voice reveals major themes which the film will be dealing with. For instance, depression, loneliness and substance abuse play out throughout the film, entwining with the politics of the post apartheid South Africa.  He confirms that the story is based on his life and how he thought he would end up after his girlfriend committed suicide and recorded it. In an interview with Ell magazine, Sibs mentions that his film  is,  “an autobiographical story of the first generation of affluent post-apartheid youth living in Johannesburg” (elle, 2015). He goes on to explain that he had intended on starting a dialogue about the troubles of post-apartheid youth.  

Richard Harrington argues that it is hard defining what looks like a suicidal person what not in young people as they go several stages of growth which alter their moods. He adds also that it is not easy to monitor a depressed person at home as sometimes these signs are not visible (Harrington, 2001: 47). This is evident in the film with the character of Jabz who barely shows signs of wanting to end his life even though one can come to this conclusion after examining events where he hints this. This we see with Jabs who hints but is not at all vocal about thoughts that haunt him. In one of the scenes with two Jewish girls who invite him to a party, he is heard saying, tomorrow would be lat for him as he would not be there. None of them take account of what he is referring to but we will later learn that he has hung himself in his room the following day. In several ways this is the same indication with Emily on the voiceover when she complains about the loneliness that follows her even after her mother has purchased anti-depressants pills. There is no single diagnosis for depression. One can be depressed because of anger or sadness from an occurred event. One can also inherit depression at home or around the area or peer influenced. 

It can never be a clear cut explanation as to why someone feels the way they do. It is interesting to note that most people speak about people who are medicated, as some rely on anti depressants while some find relief in substance abuse to a point where some are put in psychiatry wards or even rehab. This seems to be the culture about the Johannesburg that is displayed in the film. In the voice over when the film begins, Emily explains how her mother has put on anti depressants hoping for her sadness to go away and she informs us that none of that seems to be working. The scene even shows us her lack of interest in food as well as loss of interaction with others. All these can be linked to depression. 

However Jabz depression is slightly different from Emily’s as we see him in company of others. Because the film follows La haine’s style, Necktie Youth shows a life of these teenagers just in for one day, from the morning up until the next morning. This has limited us in examining how Jabs spends his other days, but for the whole of that day we see how very much reliant he is on company. If he is not with his best friend September, he is with other friends. Despite their presence he is still haunted by his thoughts and cries of being suffocated by this city. A brief moment of him is shown in the beginning of the film when he is taking a bath, drowning purposefully inside the water while he replays Emily’s voicemails. This moment is disrupted by a phone call asking him where he will be for that day. Another brief moment alone is when he asks to be excused when he and September arrive at the location where they buy drugs. He leaves to the bathroom and has a moment alone, crying and bashing everything around him. Even at that, that moment is short-lived, as he wipes his face then after and walks out like nothing happened.

The depressed group is hiding their pain through the substances and gatherings they engage in. It is not only Jabz who suffers from grief and depression since September too, in denial as he is about racism, he is a victim of alienation since he has a desire to belong whilst he faces rejection from the people he wishes to be one with. For example, he tells Jabs of the Afrikaans woman she met and thought would be the mother of his children only to realise that the woman was just sexually fascinated about black men as she refused for her to drop her home for fears that her neighbourhood, that is Pretoria, will not approve of her dating a black man. We see another incident where the tow Jewish girls are having a predicament where they are not sure whether to invite a Jewish lesbian to their party or a black man. For them, these two are tokens for their excitement, outcasts who could never be approved in the world they exist in. They finally decide to invite the black guy. September is that black guy. He invites Jabz to accompany him. Evidently this another way in which September struggles to fit in. Additionally he tries to brag to the group they went to buy drugs at about how he was going to fuck a white girl but messed up by coming too early. In this story, he mentions how fascinated the girl was by seeing a black penis. So wherever he goes, he becomes a fascination to whiteness that never accepts him as a human being. This is further justified by the scene in the pharmacy shop where he is racially profiled as a black man. The security guard thinks they have gone in there to steal meanwhile Jabz has gone for medication. However, he does leave without paying for the item, but because of his name, he is off the hook.  It is interesting though to see how much September thinks has changed as he says, there is no need for people to kafferise them anymore as that time has long passed.

Nikki is another one in the group who silently suffers from depression. She mentions her mother’s loneliness but makes no mention of hers. Nikki’s mother has been depressed ever since her father died and her mother has become alone and sad, Nikki tells us via her boyfriend where this is discussed. She explains how she could have done everyone a favour by dying along with him because her life is wasting away. She also mentions how her mother has become so disinterested in the world that she no longer puts effort in the manner she dresses in. Nikki seems to be inheriting this sadness as well. This is also proved by her constant thinking of death. How aware she is of it. She tells her boyfriend though that she does not want to die. Unlike Nikki, Jabs thinks he will reunite with Emily somewhere if he is dead.

September on the other hand has troubling views about suicide as he claims it is a white people’s thing. In the film, September answers that white people do crazy things. This is after he is asked on why he thought Emily killed herself. It is ironic then when his best friend kills himself under his watch. We learn too that Emily was depressed. In the call, she even tells Jabs in the voicemail she lives for her that she feels alone and that he has a longing for him to make her pain go away. Jabz is open about his sadness as he confesses to September that he feels lost and frustrated.  He adds that he feels like Joburg is trying to kill him. In the end, it does kill him.

Suicide according to Harrington occurs when it is least expected, and sometimes no one sees it coming. However the case of Emily is different as she records hers for all to see. Harringthon has argued that sometimes the victim does not really want to die but the act is to send an alert to people that is somehow asking for help. Just recently a twelve year old girl livestreamed her death on Facebook. The cause of the acts remains unknown but there is an element of truth in the argument that perhaps the victim is sending out messages for people to pay more attention to people who are falling apart. When one examines Emily’s stance it is unclear whether the message she was sending really got into the people she wanted them to hear because the Jabs kills himself right in front of them, while everyone is too preoccupied with leading their own lives and having fun and partying and nursing their own challenges.

The youth in the film seem to be suffering from post traumatic stress. The director has argued that this is a failed new South African where the colours of the rainbow nation are failing apart mainly because of racism and a failed dream of togetherness. The youth do nothing all day but get high and drunk and party. No one in the film is ambitious to pick up and create things that promise a better tomorrow. It is tricky though because the director is showing the richer side of South Africa where these teenagers have the financial means unlike others who are stuck in poverty and lacking financial resources to get education and jobs. Here it is Sandton, where they live in big houses, drive nice cars and have a good education that seems to be meaningless. This also the case because the children of most these parents are not there physically to bring up their kids, to talk to them, to care as the business of the day seems to be chasing wealth, making client and getting deals. The boy even claims that he knows someone who is given R8 000 of pocket money a week yet he dips it all in drugs.

This portrayal of the Born frees shows a youth that is decaying, waiting for their death as these youth have seen the deception from the leaders of the country as well as the lie their parents have been feeding them about a better country that is free. None of them are free as some face racial prejudice no matter how privileged they are. Some are not free from personal burdens such as being alienated or misunderstood from a group of friends and family that is too preoccupied to oversee this lonliness, so drugs become a relief to this pain. Nonetheless, this film depicts a Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s rainbow nation falling apart. The decay evident when the youth is immense in drug abuse and depression, whose dreams are rotting away while they sit, drowning themselves in alcohol, awaiting their death.

It is worth noticing that the film distances itself from this blaming Mandela administration for the problems the country has inherited over time. Most importantly, the film is adamant to confront racism that was brought about by the Apartheid administration, as the problem is shifted to a more recent set back, the Zuma administration. The film opens with a man sweeping a yard of a suburban Johannesburg. The next shot cuts to an empty television room. On it plays footage of the old police force chasing civilians. The man sweeping is presumably sweeping away this past. Jabz’s  (     )voice over later on confirms this view point when he mentions that, “things are better now since they have done away with that apartheid shit”. Furthermore, we hear September saying, “ It is not a black an a white thing anymore, we are all black, so I don’t get why people are trying to kafferise us”. Whether or not his words are true is unfolded as the film progresses.

Furthermore, a political commentary stance shown in the film is the lack of faith of both rich and poor South Africans on the current president, Jacob Zuma. This is demonstrated clearer in one of the beginning scenes of the film as well as the one third from the last one. When the film introduces us to Jabs, it pans to his parents who become the window of how the black elite feel about the current president. The couple is seated, eating breakfast and complaining about a headline they are reading about one of the many iNkandla scandals the president has been reported on. On this particular one, Jabz mothers complains how wasteful the statement is for stealing so much money to build private headquarters for himself. Both she and her husband reminiscing about how they will never be any other man who can fit President Nelson Mandela’s shoes. As proof of their admiration for this man, they even have a portrait of him decorating their seating room. 

The weakness of this scene is to glamorise the Mandela Myth. Nelson Mandela prior to 1990 lenses is seen by many as the father of the nation who ‘freed’ black people from their jailers. However, in this post 1994 narrative, for many, especially for the so called born free youth, he has become to be seen as the person who let the white-man get away with his crimes at the expense of the oppressed black people. This is mainly due to the the enriched BEE black elite which benefited alone from the newly acquired freedom while other poor blans continue to sunk even deeper in poverty and inequality. The third last scene makes a commentary about how Zuma continues to fail poor people. The cab driver lists all the problems faced with people who live farway, in skwatta kamps, earning peanuts but paying tax for expenses of a president who does not care about people.

Nevertheless, this is among the first feature films of South Africa to make a comment about the Marikana Massacre. This is shown briefly by the visuals showing Johannesburg in its entirety. The montage is of several buildings accompanied with a voice over of how Hilbrow and Sophiatown would be remembered as the heritage of the ‘dead’ Johannesburg. Suddenly when the montage reaches to the wall with the ‘Remember Marikana’ culture jammed poster, the pace of the sequence becomes even slower and drags the shot even more than those that had appeared before it.

Some of the problems with the film are that it uses same actors to play different characters. For example, the security guard at the pharmacy is the same guy who drives Jabs and September home before sunrise. He still has the same accent and there is no link between him and the guy we saw earlier at the pharmacy. Moreover, the film repeats shots it has previously used on other scenes. The shots displaying Johannesburg in the 21st century, the traffic, and the tabloids are employed again in later scenes, presumably because the film ran out of footage to use as cutaways. The director has explained that there was no script for most of the characters; I think this is the case then that some of the scenes felt out of place or unnecessary, adding nothing to the narrative of the film. One of these is found in a scene where three boys from the township are speaking about how at one point a white woman came to his township whining that he is unemployed. The theme could have been developed a bit further as it is out of context and confusing as it plays. Others have accused Sibs of stealing shots from other auteur directors such as Goddard by delaying his scenes when there is nothing that is particularly happening on screen. Offering remedy to this the director has admitted of being a fan of Goddard’s  work as he says he grew up watching films like breathless.

Necktie youth has borrowed a lot from the French and Italian cinema traits. The film takes influences from the French old and new films such as La haine and Breathless with its choice to stick to black and white visuals. His motivation for this choice according to him was to follow pattern from French directors like Fellini and Godard. Moreover he argues that his move away from contemporary style of filmmaking is to pay tribute to films like Breathless that he grew up watching. Moreover, he added that, “That language of black and white was before Africa had a voice in cinema. It’s almost like I’m showing a new world but in archive of the start of African film.  The film follows the Italian neorealism pattern where some of the scenes were shot on actual locations that were neither built up for it or rented. For example, some scenes in the film were shot in his home. Such as the his bedroom with a portrait of Mahatma Ghandhi in which the film depicts as his parents’ bedroom. Moreover, the location where Emily hangs herself was also filmed at his backyard.

Moreover, major roles in the film are played by first time actors who had not formal training for the craft. Jabs is Sibs real life friend and he mentions the challenges they had to go through in shooting the film because of lack of discipline from him as he would sometimes disappear four days away from the shoot or when he was too high to act the part he had to play. Shongwe explains though that most of the characters in the film did not have a script and that this aided the type of realism they were going for with the film.

Similarly to most Italian neo realism films that are made on a small budget scale, Sims financed the film himself. Moreover, he himself has not training of the craft as he argues that, “I dropped out of high school before my last two exams to go work in a production company. And my friends said ‘Dude you are so f*cked. You are the most unemployable human being.’ And I’d just go to production companies asking for an internship and they’d say no because the people who make coffee here have finished film school. So people were not interested in my art or me being part of their structure. So that’s why I had to make art on my own. It was out of necessity. I had to finance my own stuff in the beginning and live in the inner city in a small box and shoot bands and stuff”.

This film is bourgeoisie in the manner that the characters have some fascination with the American pop culture, even the black youth themselves talk down about Kwa Zulu Natal as it is perceived as a rural location where nothing really happens. This is heard in a conversation between Jabs and September where Jabs tells his friend that he is better off living in the posh side of Johannesburg as there is nothing that would happen for him should he go back to Natal since he will be looking over his uncle’s cattle or something worse than that. More so, the language that these two use is very much borrowed from the Africans in America who are influenced by the hip pop culture in dress code as well as the choice of words they address each other in. For example, the two abuse the word fuck and nigga which is included in every sentence that they utter. Also their interests are not so far removed from the experiences of young people in America. As a justification for this, Sibs has offered that, We didn’t try to not sound South African but I did tell them to sound a little American because there’s an Americanising of young people. But we’re not American. We’re Zulu kids from Sandton. But the internet has brought about a collective identity that’s spreading through pop culture.” (McDonald, 2015).

In an interview with Ell Magazine, the director of Necktie Youth, Sibs Shongwe La Mer shares the following words as his motive for making the film,  “I had many suicide attempts and was trying to escape and do as many drugs as I could. I was very lost and always in trouble, I was always getting arrested. So my parents really, really struggled…My friends ended up killing themselves because they had nothing… I started the first draft of this film when I was 14, five days after her death. And I’ve been working on this film for the past nine years, right until we shot it.” (Fluer McDonald, 2015).This paper aims to analyse Neckitie Youth as a film that seeks to spark a debate about depression and alienation among the so called born free youngsters of South Africa. I will be analysing the film by looking at South Africa that is shown in the film anfter Mandela and his failed dream of a united and free country. Moreover, I will be looking at the themes the film in tackles, which include suicide and South Africa politics.

La Mer’s real life is portrayed by Jabs in the film. He has contended that Khoza was the only person who could capture what he wanted in a manner that he wanted it to be shown. He adds also that he went to the similar experience in which we see Jabs going through in the film. Jabz voice over becomes our departure into navigating the space around the rich levity of Sandton Johannesburg, as we hear him say, “that’s how most people think in my city about most things: that they are not responsible for other people’s poverty” this statement comes after he has related a story of how his teacher asked them to donate for an ‘underprivileged school in some part of Africa”. He quotes how one of his white friend’s parents reacted to the idea negatively by listing how those children’s poverty was not in any way their fault and that therefore no one should feel responsible for aiding the situation. This sequence unpacks layers of texts worth breaking down about South Africa in its current form as presented by the film.

Nevertheless, Jabz represent the middle class kids who are removed from the experience of the rest of the black people who are cramped in an overcrowded township that rely on taxis as a primary source of transport. Firstly, Jabs is undoubtedly wealthy: he drives his mother’s BMW car and is said to be one of the kids who can afford a weekly pocket money of R8 000.  Secondly, his parents are well known by the townspeople who are major shareholders in corporate of Johannesburg. Thirdly, at home he speaks English as his first language, meaning that he is fortunately or unfortunate to have attended private schooling that is not offered in his vernacular as an Africa, unlike most of his peers who are afforded this in government schools. Thirdly, through this privilege, Sibz gets away with a small crime of stealing in a pharmacy shop because his father is a well known man in the city, says the white pharmacist who defends his release when the black security guard has accused him of having had stolen something. It is interesting though that his status as a black elite does not make any exceptions for him as he is prone to the racial prejudice that black people face in white dominate areas that have previously put oppressive measures to keep black people from staying or even walking nearby those areas.

It is of importance to not distance the reflections of the film with the director himself, as Shongwe also comes from a position of privilege. Young as he is, he managed to produce a feature length film mostly on personal funding. This becomes a point of interest taking in regard his age, race as well as country he is based. It is hard for anyone to make a film in South Africa, however, La Mer seemed to have managed just fine with budget for production as the NFVF only came through for post production and marketing costs. His filmography includes short films such as Death Of Tropics, , Territorial Pissings which he made as he turned 21. Neckitie Youth is his first feature at the of 24. This feature is a build up from Territorial Pissing and the same cast and theme is used.  La Mer does not have a tertiary qualification for film and is under 24 years of age, black but he still managed to make it work. This is privilege in many layers as most of youths, especially black youths are not even afforded a chance to become filmmakers because of historical facts and structural violence such as poverty that are trapping many of the black people in situations in which the film also makes commentary on.

                                                    Film analysis by Noluvuyo Mjoli