The year is 2040 and the global recession has flipped the world economy. Asia is enjoying the global power status it last had in the Middle Ages, and the 350-year rise of the West has been almost completely reversed. ‘White ghosts’ – gweillo in Cantonese slang – live hand to mouth, forced to do the menial jobs once reserved for cheap Asian labour, or starve.
Among them are a suburban ‘baby maker’ couple with PhDs in robotics, who make dolls for rich Asian kids while dreaming of creating the ultimate killing machine (“I hear of people who make it to Beijing – and their degrees aren’t worth anything. They end up fixing ovens and toasters.”). A ‘human spammer’ oozes through offices and bars, making cash every time she drops brand names into the conversation; a ‘digital janitor’ risks his health entering the virtual past to pixelate logos in adverts. To earn a single canteen of fresh water, homeless brothers scour the countryside for silk deposits left by giant mutant spiders.
These characters from an all-too-probable future star in new mockumentary, Ghosts With Shit Jobs. The film portrays a New World Order in which ‘the economic collapse of the West is complete and the East is in full ascendance’. The premise is far from unprecedented: in December, the National Intelligence Council in the US published the report Global Trends 2030. In it, NIC Chairman Christopher Kojm writes: “We are at a critical juncture in human history, which could lead to widely contrasting futures. The world of 2030 will be radically transformed from our world today.”
Comparing the scale of global chance to the French Revolution and the dawning of the industrial age in the late 18th century, the authors note that Britain took more than 150 years to double per capita income. India and China could do it in a tenth of the time, with 100 times more people. “By 2030, Asia will be well on its way to returning to being the world’s powerhouse, just as it was before 1500.”
The film, screening at The Flicks with a Q&A session with Torontonian co-director Jim Munroe, taps into latent fears about the rise of the Tiger Nation and won the Best Feature award at Sci-Fi London 2012. Its ghosts star in patronising Chinese documentary Window On The World, which harks back to the kind of anthology films of yore that make distinctly cringe-worthy viewing today (“They have such resilience and spirit. We could learn a lot from these people.”). As Carole Jahme writes in The Guardian, “With no budget and only in-kind support, Munroe decided that rather than struggling to create all the 2040 gadgetry necessary some of it would be mimed. This works well – it is as though gadgets have become so sophisticated many of them are invisible. Some light touches with graphics and momentary sound effects are enough; the viewer’s imagination does the rest.”
The Advisor met Munroe, who has been compared to Philip K Dick and is more often to be found writing graphic novels and comics, to talk the rise of the East, the fall of the West, and sharpening the cutting edge of science fiction.
What made you choose this premise?
You see it in the news: scary graphs, how the West is going and where China’s going, and this undercurrent of anxiety and fear cycles endlessly. There’s nothing really explicit, it’s all in the undertones of the reporting. I wanted to put it into a story context because that’s how we deal with a lot of stuff culturally. I was interested in checking that out in a post-apocalypse that wasn’t a zombie post-apocalypse.
You’ve said in previous interviews that it wasn’t the economic angle but the human angle you wanted to bring to the fore.
I’m not really a futurist in the sense that some science fiction will do endless amounts of research into economic forecasts. I’m not hugely interested in being right about my predictions. It’s a ‘What if’ scenario. I’m more interested in putting characters into power dynamics than I am in economic theories.
The film taps into the latent fear of a global shift in the balance of power. I was braced for something far more horrific. What made you stop short of outright terror?
[Laughs] I’m not a horror guy! I think another creator would totally go in that direction. I’m more interested in the politics of showing how in the future they would be more patronising to us than we were to them.
The hosts of the Chinese documentary made pretty painful viewing.
There are people who, having seen the trailer, have accused me of being all ‘Yellow Peril’ and ‘Asia-baiting’. The idea goes back to at least the 1920s: the idea that the Chinese are overrunning our country. But to me it’s much more about the reversal of fortune. People’s memories are short: when they’re on top they forget what it was like to be on the bottom, at least within a generation or two.
We had a screening in Seoul recently and one of the programmers said afterwards ‘What you’re saying is going to happen, it’s just a matter of when and how Korea will fare given their relation to China.’ They’re thinking ‘OK, China’s going to take over. Where are we going to fall? Are we going to be seen as American sympathisers and thus be kept away from the table?’ It’s not going to be like the Third World, but more like the Second World; like Britain was in the 1940s and ’50s, where the quality of life is pretty low. I thought that was pretty insightful and more realistic than my notion of it being a Third World. We probably won’t fall that far, but we will fall. It’s just a question of how far. I found out yesterday that we got accepted into the Beijing Film Festival, which is a big shocker.
Will the film be censored?
I have no idea, honestly. I won’t be able to check their subtitles, so they might entirely turn it into government propaganda…
Maybe it’ll be a triumph of will and they’ll all start cheering.
[Laughs] Even North Americans admit this is going to happen. This could actually turn the whole thing. In 30 years, I might find myself commemorated with a statue: ‘After he was lynched in Chinatown in Toronto during the famine of 2023…’
Wired magazine wrote of Ghosts With Shit Jobs: ‘Excellent sci-fi isn’t dead, it just moved to the internet.’
It was a $4,000 movie but we intended it to be a no-budget movie, so it was a total failure [Laughs]. We had made a movie before in 2007 for about $700 and it took us about six months but the production values were terrible – the audio and video were pretty crappy, which was really distracting. We wanted to make something where the production values weren’t distracting. Our goal was to do it again but with more polish. We did pre-production over about six to eight months, where we’d skill share with people who were interested in making movies and wanted to learn about editing or lighting or acting; we tried to build a community. We had a huge pool of actors to choose from, but post-production people were very hard to find for free. We looked for people at that sweet spot who had the skills but also had some spare time and were willing to get involved. Our special effects person’s day job is working on movies like Resident Evil and Scott Pilgrim – big-time studio stuff – but she was really fond of our script.
Is this the future of filmmaking?
I’m a graphic novelist; I only got involved in making movies when it could be done for free. I enjoy the collaborative process, but I don’t like the culture at all. I think it’s a terrible culture. It’s so calcified; there are such standard ways of doing things and there’s a very conservative element that’s only interested in keeping things the way they are. I find that all terribly boring. The fun thing for me is to try to prove people wrong when they say you can’t do anything on a budget less than $1 million. It is possible; I’m going to keep making movies like this and I think more and more people are going to as well. If I want to write something that’s totally out of my imagination, I can write a book, but if I want to write a film that can economically be done, this is how to do it.
One of the techniques that kept costs down was using mime rather than special effects, which gives the film a certain theatrical feel.
It was definitely a choice because at some point we could have added effects. We only have them when the characters are in-world – when there’s visual feedback from the overlays and you can see stuff, otherwise we figured they’d have better privacy settings than Minority Report. I mean, someone’s going to be looking over Tom Cruise’s shoulder when he’s on the subway, so it made sense that it would be fairly invisible. The doctor – I know him from high school and he’d been doing some concept acting – he’s an artist and there’s a certain spatial intelligence he has that artists often have in terms of being able to picture things and turn them around in their head and get them right. He really stood out. The only direction we gave the actors was ‘Imagine there’s a giant iPhone in front of you. How would you interact with it?’
Given that you weren’t politically or economically eulogising, what do you hope people will take away from this film?
There’s definitely a political point to the thing, but it’s not on a country basis. It’s analysing that well-meaning documentarian who ultimately is almost predatory, turning people’s misery into a kind of consumer product. That’s something I’ve always had a problem with in documentaries and it’s so easy to fall into that. ‘Aren’t these people sad?’
Speaking of which, another powerful motif repeated throughout the film is that of a hamster in a ball. I know how that hamster feels.
[Laughs] It’s about the notion that people can cope with adversity and tell stories to themselves as to why their job isn’t so shitty; how they rationalise things. You see documentaries on the garbage man who thinks he’s an archaeologist: ‘People throw this away, but it’s history!’ That, for me, is at once uplifting and pathetic. It’s such a complicated thing. I was interested in trying to capture that and getting people to think more critically when they watch documentaries. There’s also an undercurrent, with the baby maker who ends up in jail and eventually blows up the cameraman with a battlebot; that’s a cautionary thing. It’s about someone who has ambition and talent but is just boiling in their own juices. There are a lot of people today who are cut off from all sorts of opportunities because of bullshit bureaucracy and racist policies. You get enough of those people, you cut off enough of those people and there are going to be repercussions. It’s not just a bad idea economically.
How has the film been received by the Asian community so far?
Toronto has the second-largest Chinatown outside of San Francisco. There’s one scene at a Chinese restaurant; one of the owners called just before the shoot. I thought: ‘Oh, no!’ He said: “We’re a little bit worried about the name of your movie. Some of the owners were just wondering about the ghosts part.” They’re very superstitious about the dead. I said: ‘No, no, it’s Cantonese slang for white people.’ He just laughed. “OK, that’s fine.” In a Canadian context you’d get people much more upset about using slang for another race – that would be the red flag, not dead ancestors.
Final words: I did feel slightly cheated when we didn’t get to see any giant mutant spiders.
[Laughs] It couldn’t have been anything but terrible, that’s the problem!
WHO: Sci-fi film director Jim Munroe
WHAT: Ghosts With Shit Jobs screening plus director Q&A
WHERE: Flicks 1, #39B St. 95 & Flicks 2, #34 St. 130
WHEN: 7pm March 15 (Q&A) at Flicks 1; 6:30pm March 20 at Flicks 1 & 2
WHY: A much-needed collective reminder of what it feels like to be cannibalised