"They wouldn't understand"

In the New Zealand film The Tatooist (2007), a horror/thriller about “American tattoo artist Jake Sawyer wanders the world, exploring and exploiting ethnic themes in his tattoo designs. At a tattoo expo in Singapore, he gets his first glimpse at the exotic world of traditional Samoan tattoo (tatau), and, in a thoughtless act, unwittingly unleashes a powerful angry spirit. In his devastating journey into Pacific mysticism, Jake must find a way to save his new love, Sina and recover his own soul” (story line taken from IMDb)

The uncle murders a young boy whom he started doing the tatu on. After discovering that the tatu got infected he decided to kill him and cover up the murder. When Jake questioned why he didn’t take the boy (the angry spirit) to the hospital, the uncle replied that “they wouldn’t understand”. Who wouldn’t understand? The whites? The Samoan? In the end, the uncle is spared his life, but he must live with the shame of what he has done and is no longer worthy to wear the peau (tattoos around the thigh area) and he is forced to peel it off (extreme).

Also, while watching the film, I was wondering whether white people would understand what this film is getting at. This film is designed to educate non-Pacific islanders about our exotic traditions and teach them how important they are. However, there are issues of colonialism also raised by the film that resonates a Maori and White European conflict. In that I mean that sometimes I feel the racial issues in New Zealand are predominantly between Maori and White Europeans (maybe??)? Interesting to see that this film, in my opinion, associates Pacific Island stories of colonialism with that of Maori. For example, throughout the film, Jake is often referred to as ‘palangi’ and everyone just wishes he would go away, ‘back to where he came from’. One of the issues the film raised was the inability of White culture to understand the Pacific culture of shame, cultural beliefs and general differences. The characters often times share their experiences of colonialism where the ‘palangi thinks he can take whatever he wants without asking’. Although, Jake ultimately becomes the ‘white saviour’ in a sense that he figures out the problem and how to solve it, he is also the cause of these problems. He took one of the tools used to do tatau without asking (this particular tool was the one that possessed the angry spirit). The Uncle tells of how the missionaries came over to Samoa to try and convert people, to enlighten them about God. This almost destroyed their tatu traditions. The Uncle says, “The church became Samoan, not the other way round.” Christianity was assimilated into Samoan culture, where they made it their own.