The Harder They Come; A Jamaican Classic
This week we switch things up a bit with a retro feature. Sometimes it’s important to revisit the past so we can understand the present, and this week’s subject is the cult classic film, “The Harder They Come”, starring icon Jimmy Cliff. Directed by Perry Henzell, the film exposes the ptsd like behavior often exhibited by performers in general. It’s a kind of dementia that I feel many Jamaican artistes experience, where the lines of reality and stage or screen performance are blurred. Almost as if they fail to flip the switch and turn off the character they are playing.
The film follows the life of Ivan Martin, a poor man from the country who comes into Kingston to visit his mother after the death of his grandmother. He decides to stay in Kingston and soon meets a man called Jose who takes him to the “Realto”, where he watches the film Django for the first time. This scene takes place within the first twenty minutes of the film, which sets the pace for Ivan’s behavior going forward. His admiration for the character of the outlaw and his seeming invincibility soon warps Ivan’s self image, which is reinforced by the unkind treatment he receives when being his honest self.
We can observe two different natures here; The docile, easy going behavior native to the more rural people, and the more aggressive, proactive behavior associated with city folks. Ivan is plunged into a world where his genuine self struggles to survive and so he has to make adjustments to his character in order to weather the harsh reality of Kingston’s concrete jungle. He takes a liking to music and eventually finds a hit song for which he is barely paid.
Ivan eventually becomes a wanted man, and when the intoxicating allure of the outlaw character reaches it’s climax, we see him sinking fully into the character and casting aside his true self. He begins to believe that his life is a movie, like Django and that therefore his reach as the protagonist is limitless. He sees himself as invincible and greater than the laws that govern physics and life. This is where it ultimately goes bad for our protagonist who becomes the subject of an island wide manhunt. If you haven’t seen the movie, I recommend you go give it a chance and find out what happens to Ivan.
Still, this delusion is also the bedrock of the more aggressive spheres of dancehall music. Early dancehall culture saw artistes like Ninja Man, Super Cat, Merciless and many more who gave themselves fully, to their performance. They knew their job was to convince the audience that this lyrical warfare taking place is authentic. The responsibility of the academic is accuracy, but the responsibility of the creative is authenticity. The performer strives to be authentic, because there is no accuracy in fiction. That’s how it’s always been with dancehall music from that time until now. Although I feel a very large part of the post performance dementia is due to those same western movies like Django, that romanticized the outlaw in the 70s. Those men wanted to be like the John Waynes and the Doc Holidays, and nowadays that myth has evolved with contemporaries like Scarface in Godfather and Pablo Escobar in Narcos.
It gives the character a kind of power that’s supernatural, one that intoxicates many artistes who chose not to step down, but instead to become them. In the long run Ivan pays the price for his delusion and proves that you cannot outrun reality. Ivan’s character is loosely based on a notorious Jamaica criminal from the 40s called “RHYGING”, who claimed to not only be invincible but to posses the power of flight. He was also confronted by reality in the long run when he was gunned down and killed by the police.
