The motor-car is the epitome of “objects,” the Leading-Object, and this fact should be kept in mind. —Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World Anyone who thinks evil of you, may this car run them over in their sleep. This car will hunt out your enemies, pursue their bad spirits, grind them into the road. Your car will drive over fire and be safe. It will drive into the ocean and be safe. It has friends in the spirit world. Its friend there, a car just like this one, will hunt down your enemies. They will not be safe from you. A bomb will fall on this car and it will be safe. I have opened the road for this car. It will travel all roads. It will arrive safely at all destinations....

This article examines the ways that Nollywood films are involved in the moral policing of the postcolonial subject both by challenging the state's moral failings and by enacting its ideological violence. I argue that although it is necessary to acknowledge how Nigerian video-films reflect the struggles, anxieties and instability of ordinary Nigerians, it is also crucial to examine the ways that they deflect various concerns about everyday life on to certain bodies. Through a close reading of Kabat Esosa Egbon's film Beautiful Faces (2004), a film about female campus cults, I demonstrate that while the film grapples with issues of violence and corruption on university campuses, it does so by channeling fears about students' educational opportunities into anxiety about women's sexual transgressions. In this way, I suggest that Beautiful Faces is typical of many Nollywood films that simultaneously challenge corrupt and wizened government institutions while also reproducing their normative and violent hetero-patriarchal position.

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