The new film “Guava Island,” written by and starring Donald Glover (AKA Childish Gambino) was screened for the first time at Coachella last weekend. Fortunately for those of us who weren’t willing to shell out $350+ for a weekend of “I went to Coachella” Instagram posts, the movie was also released on Amazon Prime in the wee hours of Saturday.
Guava Island is many things. It’s well-acted, absolutely gorgeous in terms of cinematography, short — and a vapid, hit-you-over-the-head critique of capitalism so unnuanced in its messaging that even the Hotels.com mascot would cringe at certain scenes.
The film takes place on the fictional Guava Island, and follows local hero and musician Deni Maroon (Donald Glover), as he plans a music festival for the island so they can take a day off from work and enjoy the paradise around them. Deni’s festival is opposed by Red Cargo (Nonso Anozie), the shady businessman who controls the island and never allows his dirt-poor workers (who comprise most of the island’s population) a vacation.
While working at the docks (which Red owns), one of Deni’s coworkers, Coley, shares his dream of moving to the United States. “It’s different there,” he says, “I heard people are their own bosses.” Coley explains that he’s saving up money to get off the island to go to America and start his own business.
Deni laughs and says America is no different from Guava. “America is a concept,” Deni says. “Anywhere where in order to get rich you have to make someone else richer is America.” To make his point even clearer he tells Coley, “this is America,” then breaks into the Childish Gambino song of the same name.
The message of the scene, and the film in general, is clear: There is no escaping the shadow of capitalism.
If Glover wanted to create a more accurate depiction of capitalism, life on Guava Island would have been radically different, and for the better. Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West provides an overwhelming number of statistics and factoids about how capitalism has, more than any other system of economics, raised man out of historic mass poverty (all following information comes from the appendix of the book).
For example, since capitalism first emerged in the 1800s, the share of the world population living in extreme poverty has plummeted. In 1820, 94.4% of the global population lived on less than $2 a day. About 84% lived on less than $1 a day. By 1970, the share of those living in absolute poverty worldwide had dropped to 27%. Never before in human history has life improved for so many people so quickly. As of 2015, only 9.6% of the global population lived on less than $1.90 a day, the first time ever that the percent of those considered extremely poor was lower than 10 percent.
Despite Deni’s concern that workers under capitalism don’t have sufficient time off, the hours worked per worker has dropped from 43 hours to 36 hours a week globally from 1950 to 2016. Crop yields are up, the food supply per person is up, access to electricity is up, life expectancy at birth is up, infant mortality is down, I could go on and on. All in all, according to the United Nations, poverty has been reduced more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500.
Not coincidentally, it’s during this time that capitalism has spread the most throughout the world.
Capitalism is certainly not without its flaws — Irving Kristol summed it up best with his “two cheers for capitalism;” the idiom calls for three, but he wouldn’t go quite that far.
Capitalism, especially as practiced in the United States, looks nothing like the monopolistic, almost feudal economy of Guava Island. In terms of quality of life, Guava Island much more closely resembles Cuba, where the film was shot. I guess “This is Cuba” just wouldn’t have worked as well with the song’s rhyme scheme.
Alec Dent is a senior journalism major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
