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, and then extended in
an
entire series on Caribbean Connections, 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
another entire
week’s
worth
of posts
trying to illustrate, the relationship between the United States and Mexico is
in many ways 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.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS.
So one more time: what do you think? Summertime movies you’d highlight?
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