Jonah: Film Analysis

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Historically, the introduction of foreigners, especially those acting as a colonizing force, have not only forced unfamiliar societies to assimilate into the colonizer’s idea of civilization, but also destroyed and suppressed the existing history of that region. In the short film Jonah, a small town becomes a tourist hub after the outside world gets wind of a large fish that attracts the attention of people around the globe, resulting in a polluted ecosystem and a city whose culture is destroyed by tourism. Jonah is a more blatant political work as it directly shows the cause of the pollution: the tourism. While on the outside this is simply a criticism of tourism and the capitalistic tendencies that drive it, I argue that this film can also …show more content…

In this case, the environment represents the existing culture of the area and the alien “pollen” represents the colonizer. The yellow pollen is said to be “Changing people, changing the animals, the plants” (Turpin). This “changing” acts as an excellent example of how colonizers force people to abandon their cultures and force them to assimilate. The speaker says that people “stopped going outside altogether” (Turpin). This parallels the way that colonized peoples are forced to abandon their old ways. The speaker explains that the “pollen” injures people, burning their skin and hurting their lungs, this is similar to the way that colonizers target those who refuse to conform and often physically injure them in order to coerce their cooperation. Like in Jonah, the environment (that represents culture) was healthy before the arrival of the foreign bodies, but the pollution caused by the invasion of space injures the community that is being affected, much like the way the introduction of colonizer suppresses the culture of the community they colonize. Another similarity that can be drawn between the alien pollutant in the story and the act of colonization is the potentially unsuspecting or initially unthreatening nature of the threat. In the story it is stated that it was “assumed to be tree pollen. It rolled in like a fog, settling on every surface outside like a bright, thick carpet of snow” (Turpin). While “pollen” is an irritant, it is not nearly as hazardous as the pollutant turns out to be, this is very similar to the fact that often times, colonizing forces may approach societies saying they simply want to educate and civilize them or trade and instead they end up committing mass genocides and terminating