The Last King of Scotland: The Real and Imagined

Idi Amin: Look at you… did you think this was all a game? “I will go to Africa and will play the ‘white man’ with the natives…” Is that what you thought? We are not a game… We are real. This room here… it is real. I think your death will be the first real thing that has happened to you.

James Ferguson mentions Mbembe (2001:241-242) in Introduction to Global Shadows. He quotes that there is “the oscillation between the real and imaginary, the imaginary realized and the real imagined” (p7 Ferguson)
The Last King of Scotland captures this oscillation in Garrigan’s character and in the role he plays. There is a constant juxtaposition of the real, imagined, imaginary realized and real imagined in several scenes with Garrigan.
The imaginary begins at 3:30, where Garrigan is on a bus, meets a young woman from Uganda, and has sex with her. This is contrasted with the scene in 7:26, where the difficult working with Dr.  Merrit conditions give Garrigan a little reality check . The movie then shifts to the imaginary realized in 23:29, where Nicholas is driven in the president’s car and is greeted by Ugandans, and in 32:17, where he attends a cocktail party. Garrigan was a king surrounded by splendor, and was pampered and entertained.

It becomes increasingly evident as the movie progresses that Garrigan thinks the imaginary is real. The reporter at 1:01:33 attempts to show Garrigan the ‘truth’ but this is not well received by Garrigan. In this scene, the real that the reporter describes seems imagined to Garrigan. However, Nicholas comes to full terms with the truth in 1:08:19. He pleas to Amin to leave Uganda and Amin refuses his offer. “Your home… is here”
The real and imaginary are again  juxtaposed in 1:11:11. Nicholas knows that what he sees and the lifestyle he lived is an illusion. In other words, the imaginary Nicholas realized was false, despite how appealing and participatory it seemed.
These contrasts reach a climax in 1:44: 42. Amin makes it very clear that Nicholas was living an illusion, and by overstepping his boundaries in these illusions, Nicholas was to suffer death as the consequence.