Hospitality for Sale, or Dirty Pretty Things

"A Business Based on Happiness"

A counterfeit passport and a commodified human kidney. A pirated version of an object that ties us to political life, and a commercialized, alienated version of a body part that ties us to biological life. These are the two illicit articles that circulate in Dirty Pretty Things (2002), directed by Stephen Frears and scripted by Stephen Knight. The relationship that the film posits between the passport and the kidney is one of equivalence: one object is exchanged for another, thus placing them in an economic relationship. As with most forms of commodity exchange, the deal requires a contract between two interested parties: one, an ailing renal transplant patient who wants to purchase a kidney because she can no longer wait for one to become legally available, and the other, an undocumented immigrant who willingly agrees to give up her kidney in exchange for a (fake) passport. From this unsavory transaction, Frears and Knight develop a compelling narrative that is best placed in the generic category of the thriller, for the story of Dirty Pretty Things is primarily about how its two protagonists, an asylum seeker and an undocumented immigrant, respectively, escape the fate of having to surrender their own kidneys. My argument in this essay is twofold. First, I suggest that Dirty Pretty Things seeks to critique this economic transaction by exposing that it is based on the commodification of that which should typically remain aneconomic: hospitality. However, the plot satisfaction provided by ensuring that the protagonists escape kidney extraction comes at a high ethical price. Hence the second point I seek to make: because the audience cannot but side with its protagonists and their refusal to capitulate to the organ trade, Dirty Pretty Things and its viewers risk becoming complicit in the immoralities of the very capitalism that the film seeks to critique.

Dirty Pretty Things is the result of an unusual collaboration. London's immigrant population is familiar territory for Frears, whose back catalog includes films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), both of which deal with the issue of hospitality, examining how Britain receives and treats its immigrants, and how these immigrants, in turn, survive in Thatcherite Britain. Both of these films, moreover, are scripted by Hanif Kureishi. Dirty Pretty Things, however, sees Frears teaming up not with Kureishi, who is known for his acerbic treatment of Britain's supposed multiculturalism, but with Stephen Knight, who debuted with this film, and was previously best known as the co-creator and scriptwriter of the popular game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The film is shot in a contemporary London stripped of all its glamour and tourist attractions, and deals primarily, as the presence of the counterfeit passport makes clear, with the plight of undocumented immigrants who try to survive in a turn-of-the-millennium capital that is portrayed as being infected with a rampant, predatory, and ubiquitous capitalism. Most of the film is set in the Baltic Hotel, an upmarket London establishment serviced almost entirely by immigrant employees. The lives of the three main characters intersect here. They are all members of the Baltic's immigrant staff, but hold different statuses under British law. Senay is a Turkish asylum seeker, and is not permitted to seek employment in the country until her case has been processed. She works illegally as a maid, cleaning up after the guests who stay at the Baltic. There, she meets Okwe, the nighttime receptionist at the Baltic, and falls in love with him. A Nigerian doctor who is fleeing persecution in his own country, Okwe has entered Britain illicitly and possesses no legal standing whatsoever. It is Okwe who stumbles on the plot device that connects human organs and fake passports: he learns that some of the hotel rooms are used as makeshift operation theaters where London's undocumented immigrants have their kidneys extracted in exchange for fake European passports. The procurer of both the willing kidney sellers and the counterfeit passports is his boss, a Spaniard named Señor Juan, appropriately nicknamed Sneaky by...