They don’t even care enough to think about what they’re doing. But Denton and Rosie don’t know they’re awful. There’s a strength to this, however, as there is very little room for the plot to become confused or for the audience to have any conception of why exactly the central characters are so deplorable. All that Cowdry seems to want to communicate with these characters is that they are nowhere near as perverted as Rosie or Pants Dude or even Denton. The most significant among these characters are Detective Barrero and Prince Puju who have small roles that are pretty trope-centric and marginally considered. Truly the only people with much dignity or sanity to speak of are the characters native to the region, albeit they only speak sparingly and essentially only serve as instruments to move the plot along. Denton is incredibly horny and Rosie is a vapid materialist. They are all opportunists in one way or another. Which is all to say that Cowdry’s opinions of the characters of this book are quite explicitly stated. The book’s opening is, as well, a reiteration of thematic critique of Imperialism and Culture Tourism – an awkward sex scene between two Christians celebrating their wedding on a river-boat tour of the Amazon River where they met “ on a mission trip to provide aid relief to the savage tribes of this land.” It’s fair to say that they don’t even care. They’re not even in Vietnam – they honestly don’t even know where they are. In a facsimile of every Vietnam movie ever made, enjoyed, and critically acclaimed (racial slurs included), the reader gets a sense of Rosie and Denton’s imperialist unconscious. It’s a canned sequence, and I think there’s good grounds to say it’s intentionally laid out this way. He has a dream that he and Rosie are in Vietnam violently murdering members of the Viet Cong. After the crash, Denton passes out in the jungle. Explicitly: how white people interact with it. More significant is the conversation that it’s having with the subject of imperialism and how people interact with it. Plot critical events, however, represent the least interesting aspect of Crash Site. Over the course of Denton’s narration, he discloses that they were on a plane that crashed over the Amazon, that they were the only survivors, and that in their ensuing journey to be rescued there was a conflict between himself and Pants Dude for Rosie’s affection that culminated in Denton being disemboweled. The narrative, for the most part, takes place as a flashback delivered by Denton to a detective investigating narcotics trafficking in Bogotá. Denton is being used as a mule by Rosie, whom he is in love with. How effective can it be? What’s there to say and what ground is there to cover that hasn’t already been iterated by other people who have benefitted from this project in one way or another, directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly? To be slightly reductive, it’s mostly likely a matter of taste, that is, whether you enjoy colonial exploitation as a premise to be explored by a comedic graphic novel.Ĭrash Site by Nathan Cowdry follows the trio of Rosie, Denton (a dog), and Pants Dude (Rosie’s panties) as they go on an expedition to South America to smuggle drugs back to the United Kingdom. Basically, there’s a divide between the acknowledgment of the facts and the implementation of a premise. Many people legitimately enjoy Aguirre: The Wrath of God or Fitzcarroldo for their presentation of the project of colonialism as fetishistic and extremely violent, while some have critiques of this project coming from those descendants of empire. Common knowledge, I suppose however, there are thorny conversations to be had about whether or not the narrative representation of this fact is correctly positioned from the standpoint of a citizen of the Western imperial project. Without invoking too much sanctimony, it can also be said that much of the Western artistic tradition follows the same line of thinking. Without much exaggeration, it can be said that the inborn instinct of citizens of the great Western Empires is that the rest of the world is both their playground and their property.
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