Ga, Ga – Chwala bohaterom / Ga, Ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986, Poland)
As much as this sounds like a prison movie – it involves prisoners being sent on ‘penitentiary space cruisers’ to claim unknown, uninhabited planets with little or no assurance of their safe return – it’s far from it.
Rather, it’s a dark (in more ways than one), absurdist political satire in which the prisoner hero is manoeuvred and bullied by the bureaucracy to reach a point where it seeks his agreement to being impaled through the anus on a giant pole. That symbolism is hard to ignore, particularly in a movie genre where rape is so commonly shorthand for the brutal exercise and abuse of power.
We’re in the 21st Century. The hero, a prisoner, Scope (Daniel Olbrychski), is packed off to space with fanfare, brass bands and a rousing speech about prisoners not being rejected but mercifully being given another chance. “Each and every one of you,” the prison warden tells a large number of assembled prisoners, will put your crappy foot on the new unknown planets on behalf of the whole society.” While many can expect to die of heat, cold, or as-yet-unknown planet animals, he tells them, “yours will be the glorious death of conquistadors.”
When he lands, Scope, who is desperately ill-equipped for space travel, finds his planet (Australia 458) already inhabited. In fact, it looks alarmingly like the place he has just left – mid-’80s Poland in which the Solidarity-aligned workers are wrestling with the prevailing communist leadership. It’s never daytime; it’s rundown, grimy, dreary, decaying, corrupt. He is met by an upbeat bureaucrat, Skinny (Jerzy Stuhr), introduced to his role as a Hero, and given cash, lodgings, a variety of weapons and access to prostitutes (the first of whom, Once, is a minor whom he treats decently and continues to pursue), and sent on his way.
As he lurches from one grotesque encounter to another, he gets to understand his task on the planet: it is to commit a crime so spectacular that it demands his very public execution; to facilitate the rare and uplifting benefit the community gets from witnessing the exemplary punishment of something hideous.
Scope is dubious. He offers to just be sacrificed without having done anything to warrant it. ‘Punishment without a crime? It’s immoral, don’t you think?’ he is told. But he refuses to sign an agreement to fulfil his obligation as a Hero – to commit a stomach-turning crime and in return be impaled. Instead, he writes ‘Ga ga’ on the form – ‘the sound children make.’
He robs a bank (using the gun with which he has been provided) in order to pay Once’s pimp to see her again, taking care not to hurt anyone, but another Hero bursts in and starts shooting indiscriminately, killing everyone. Once (Katarzyna Figura) is duly handed over, but before she and Scope get beyond a tender caress, the police burst in using the impaling pole as a battering ram, and charge him with the rape of a minor. In a struggle with the investigating officer (Marek Walczewski), the officer’s arm is ripped off, and he gets charged with that as well… and the bank heist. These are applauded as spectacular enough to properly warrant the full punishment.
Scope and Once manage to escape back to the space cruiser and manage to direct it to the nearest deserted planet where, it’s reported happily, they ‘gave beginning to a new civilisation.’ Hooray!
You could choose to see the film as commentary on law and order, or prison: Despite the rhetoric about second chances for offenders and pushing forward to new frontiers, it’s suggested that the system actually exists to encourage bigger and bigger failures so that it can achieve ‘social value’ by inflicting bigger and bigger punishments; those spectacular failures give licence to crush the wrongdoers in the name of restoring order.
It seems likely, though, that the target is the repressive, rundown, dreary, decaying, corrupt regime: Despite the grand rhetoric about pushing forward to new frontiers (‘Through Hardship to the Stars’, reads the banner that Scope is required to plant on the new planet to claim it for mankind), it’s suggested that innocent people are being impaled en masse and that the system actually exists to entice citizens into supposed malefactions so that it can achieve ‘social value’ by inflicting bigger and bigger punishments; those supposed failures give licence to crush the wrongdoers in the name of restoring order. The new settlement of the deserted planet foreshadows deliverance from the current regime. Hooray!
Of lesser importance, perhaps, the film also warns of the increasing influence of the partisan media in shaping the community’s responses to events – decades ahead, of course, of the growth in social media, algorithms and video-driven news. Prescient, it seems, as well as dark.
And richly dark, it must be said.
Posted on September 26th, 2026 at 10:16 pm. Updated on September 26th, 2026 at 10:26 pm.
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