On
the two very different yet not necessarily dissimilar visions of Americans in
Mexico in the same film.
As
I wrote in this
post on Edouard Glissant and the idea of creolization, the United States
has a lot more in common with the Caribbean and the rest of the Western
Hemisphere than we often acknowledge. Moreover, as I spent
an entire
week’s
worth
of posts
trying to illustrate, the relationship between the United States and Mexico is
even more interconnected. Yet despite those parallel and interconnected
histories and identities, and notwithstanding the basic fact of geographical proximity
between the two nations, there’s no question of course that Mexico is its own
place, a fundamentally different nation than the US—and thus that we can and
must analyze how Americans travel to and engage with Mexico (in reality and in
cultural representations) just as we would with any other place.
One
of the most complex and interesting such cultural representations, of the last
couple decades and of any moment, has to be John Sayles’ Men with Guns (1997). Sayles’ film
was shot entirely on location in Mexico, using an all-Mexican cast who speak Mexican
Spanish (with English subtitles) throughout the film, which makes the few scenes
when two overtly American, English-speaking turistas show up that much more
striking and significant. The two tourists, played to exaggerated perfection by
Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody, are as clichéd and stereotypical as (I would
argue) the rest of the film’s characters are multi-layered and complex; but
while that leads their scenes to have a certain heavy-handedness, it’s also
clearly Sayles’ point in these moments. These minor characters are not only
outsiders and intruders in the film’s setting and world—they have no ability to
understand this place and no interest in doing so, and their cultural tourism
is, in the context of the film’s dark and powerful main stories and themes,
both utterly ridiculous and deeply insulting. That might not describe all
Americans’ attitudes toward or relationships to our hemispheric neighbors, but
it’s certainly (both Sayles and I would argue) a far too prevalent perspective.
Sayles’
film would seem to be precisely the opposite: a thoughtful, nuanced, culturally
immersive engagement with Mexican culture and community and history and issues.
I love Sayles and am a fan of the film (although it’s not at the
top of my list of his works), so I would agree with that description. Yet
on the other hand, can’t we also see Sayles here as a kind of intellectual and
artistic version of the tourist couple? A cultural tourist who comes down to
Mexico for a while, engages with the place while he’s there, and then returns
to the United States, to tell his stories of what he found? The film is, after
all, not entirely unlike a tourist’s slideshow; “What John Did on His Mexican
Vacation.” At the very least, I think we have to acknowledge that both Sayles
and the tourists exist on the same spectrum, of American experiences in and
with Mexico—and while of course it would be far too reductive to argue that all
points on that spectrum are identical, it would be just as wrong-headed to
claim that they don’t have anything in common. Only by acknowledging that we’re
all cultural tourists, after all, can we perhaps start to analyze our own
perspective and figure out how we can at times get beyond it.
Next
Americans abroad tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?
8/9
Memory Day nominee: Pierre
Charles L’Enfant, the Franco American engineer and architect
who fought in the
Revolution and created
the plan for Washington, DC—just another compelling
reason to thank
the French!
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