Casting Out the Serpent: Eroticized Violence
and the Mexicana Body in Hollywood Cinema
Alesia García
On a recent visit to DePaul University in Chicago, Academy Award nominated
Chicana filmmaker Lourdes Portillo screened her latest documentary film
entitled Señorita Extraviada-an investigative
look into the horrific and as-yet-unsolved crimes of kidnapping, murder,
and mutilation of over 400 young Mexican women in the Texas-Mexican borderlands
that have taken place since 1993. What moves the viewer and captures her
imagination most in this film are the eyes of the missing women that gaze
directly into the camera from grainy snapshots. Photograph after photograph
of women from throughout Mexico. As so many before them throughout history,
they ventured to el norte in search of work and often found it in the
countless maquilas that now litter the landscape
between the "Third World" and the "First World."
As I watched the stories of the missing women unfold, I couldn't help
feeling outraged at the failure of the United States media to report such
disturbing human rights atrocities. I later recalled a summer issue of
Time magazine that promoted the borderlands as a location that is "creating
a new world for all of us." Of course, this is mostly a reference
to the cultural exchanges NAFTA is believed to have created rather than
to the rich mestizaje that we have known about for centuries. The only
mention in this national news magazine of the countless missing women
who have been raped, strangled, set afire, decapitated, dismembered and
thrown away like trash within miles of the maquiladoras is a couple of
buried sentences. A new world indeed. Sadly, it has long been much easier
for the "average American" to comprehend the cartoonish images
of Mexican women that have been manufactured by Hollywood since the early
1900s. As a professor of Chicana literature, it is my job to teach my
students how to read these images and analyze the contexts from which
they emerge, which is why a film like Señorita Extraviada is so
important and why its realism must be recognized in direct contrast to
exploitative images of Mexicanas and Chicanas that continue to emerge
from the assembly-lines of Hollywood movie factories. One such film is
From Dusk Till Dawn, co-written with Quentin Tarantino
and directed by Tejano boy wonder, Robert Rodriguez. This film premiered
in January 1996-three years after the mass murders began, which was, coincidentally,
also a presidential election year in the United States.
Rodriguez's "action-adventure" film From
Dusk Till Dawn symbolized what would become a barrage of on-screen
"alien invasions" of American culture throughout the 1990s (including
a rash of Chupacabra attacks). In scenes eerily reminiscent of videotapes
of the infamous 1991 Rodney King beating and the 1996 beatings of Mexicans
nationals on Southern California freeways, the crucifix-toting, white
male protagonist in Rodriguez's film, beats, stabs, shoots, impales, decapitates,
and dismembers a mob of alien female vampires. What is most disturbing
about this cinematic violence against Mexicanas is that it takes place
near the U.S. Texas-Mexico border-one of the most politically-charged
and exploited landscapes in American history.
The film follows two Americans on the run from the FBI and the Texas
Rangers. Seth (George Clooney), a professional thief and murderer, and
his brother Ritchie (Quentin Tarantino), a serial rapist and murderer,
flee toward the Mexican borderlands, where they plan to buy their sanctuary
deep inside Mexico from the local drug-runners. On the way there, the
kidnappers carjack a white preacher (Harvey Keitel) and his two children,
and, in a mock reversal of "illegally crossing over," force
the family to hide them in their RV and drive them across the border to
the appointed meeting place: a topless bar, brothel, and truckstop, branded
the "Tittie Twister." What awaits the killers is neither the
invisibility from American justice that they seek, nor a night of anonymous
sex with a border whore. Rather, they find themselves in a physical and
spiritual confrontation with what film critic David Maciel refers to as
the conventional frontier "lawlessness" of the U.S.-Mexico border-a
culturally constructed wasteland where white American film heroes have
traversed since the late 19th century (2). Lawlessness in this film would
not meet conventional cinematic standards of frontier violence without
the requisite onslaught of racist and sexist language, bloody gunfights,
knife-play, and half-naked, dancing Mexican women, which the director
provides in abundance. This time, however, the "twist" that
the hero is up against is none other than an ancient cult of Aztec female
vampires who prey upon helpless border travelers. Long-standing stereotypes
of coldblooded, Mexican "savagery," together with the wave of
anti-Mexican rhetoric that abounded in the U.S. in the 1990s, combined
to undeniably shadow the cinematic representations of Mexicana bodies
in From Dusk Till Dawn. The blurring of film
genres, particularly the action-adventure, horror, and Western, creates
a prime narrative space for Rodriguez's disposable Mexicana bodies: shape-shifting,
monster-aliens who must be exterminated to protect the American values
of capitalism on the border and the purity of white American womanhood.
In the late 1990s, Hollywood released a number of alien-attack movies,
namely The Arrival, Independence Day, Men in Black, and Falling Down,
but From Dusk Till Dawn, is perhaps the most
unsettling and violent interpretation of an "alien invasion"
because the film justifies the devaluation and disposal of Mexicana bodies
in the popular imagination.
Moreover, the violence committed against Mexicanas in this film is highly
eroticized-comic stereotypes of the Mexican border prostitute bleed into
one-dimensional images of devil worshipping primitives, hearkening back
the days of Hernan Cortes's bloody
massacres at Cholula and Tenochtitlán.
Mexican women in the bar appear naked except for loincloths and feathered
headbands. They are exoticized and eroticized for the viewing pleasure
of the mostly American male truck drivers who inhabit the bar. But the
central symbol of sexual evil is inscribed upon the body of featured dancer,
Santanico Pandemonium (Selma Hayek), a nearly naked, dark-skinned woman,
who wears a copilli, or Aztec sacred regalia, as she seduces a python
in a parody of a snake dance. The visual conflation of sexual and racial
stereotypes of Mexicanas reinforces the white American heroism of Seth,
for, in the minds of the audience, the Mexican-ness of these female alien-vampires
already inscribes them as more dangerous and evil than either Seth or
his brother, Ritchie.
Further complicating audience reception of these stereotypes is the way
film critics tend to validate the authenticity of these border representations,
as Anthony Nerricio points out in a recent essay where he refers to a
noted film critic's description of the border "essence" that
is "authentically" captured in films like Orson Welles' Touch
of Evil. This 1958 film, which is characterized by "'strip joints
and prostitution, a few ragged Mexican poor, and a couple of men trundling
fantastic pushcarts . . . the [border] town . . . exists by selling vice
to the Yankees, functioning as a kind of subconscious for northerners
just outside their own boundaries where they can enjoy themselves while
they imagine the Mexicans are less civilized'" (qtd. In Nerricio
49). The effectiveness of Rodriguez's film depends upon the audience's
acceptance of these distorted ideas about the Mexican borderlands. Perhaps
its success can, in part, be measured by the fact that to this date, two
sequels and an interactive videogame have been released.
The images of Mexicana bodies in From Dusk Till
Dawn are doubly inscribed as impure and expendable because Santanico
is played by Mexican actress Selma Hayek, a woman who, in true Hollywood
style, has had her sexuality exaggerated in the roles of Mexican spitfire
and hot-blooded Latin, much like other famous Latina actresses such as
Lupe Vélez, Rita Moreno, and more recently, Jennifer Lopez. Commenting
on classic Hollywood stereotypes of Mexicans, film critic Linda Williams
points to the obvious: "that women's bodies reduced to the status
of sex objects for the delight of male subjects are no less stereotyped
than the 'lazy Mexicans' who serve as foils in countless Westerns to flatter
the intelligence and energy of the Anglo cowboy" (59). The strewn
decapitated and disemboweled bodies of Mexicanas in this film visually
demonstrate what feminist film critic Laura Mulvey refers to as "the
fragmented body," a female body that is hacked into eroticized, objectified
pieces in order to transform her into manageable objects of desire (7).
Others find direct links between film genre and political ideology. Gina
Marchetti, for one, notes that action adventure films, in particular,
"embody and work through those social contradictions the culture
needs to come to grips with and may not be able to deal with except in
the realm of fantasy" (211). All feminist and cultural theory aside,
it is still quite unsettling that From Dusk Till
Dawn has received far more media attention than the real life murders
of young Mexican women on the border.
By the end of From Dusk Till Dawn, we see
how anti-Mexican immigration rhetoric merges with popular stereotypes
of Mexican "savagery." With the vampires successfully disposed
of, the final shot of the film reveals a justification for the bloody
massacre. As the camera zooms out to a long-shot, the focal point on the
screen is the image of the vampire lair resting upon the ruins of an Aztec
sacrificial temple-an architectural reminder of the fall of ancient Mexico
and a relic of the European conquest of a "primitive" culture.
Victorious, Seth emerges into the sunlight not as the thief and murderer
that he arrived as at the start of the film, but, as the "hero"
Cortés reborn, reconquering Mexico and securing the U.S.-Mexico
border against an invasion of man-eating Mexicanas. Unbelievable. Perhaps
one day Hollywood will get the message?
WORKS CITED
The Bronze Screen: One Hundred Years of Latino Cinema. Dir. Nancy Alicia
de los
Santos. Bronze Screen Productions. 2001.
Cortés, Carlos E. "Chicanas in Film: History of an Image."
Chicano Cinema: Research,
Reviews, and Resources. 1985. Ed. Gary D. Keller. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual
Review/Press, 1993. 94-108.
From Dusk Till Dawn. Dir. Robert Rodriguez.
Perf. George Clooney, Harvey Keitel, and
Quentin Tarantino. Dimension Films. 1996.
Nericcio, William Anthony. "Of Mestizos and Half-Breeds: Orson Welles'
Touch of Evil."
Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance. Ed. Noriega, Chon. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1992. 47-58.
Maciel, David. R. El Norte: The U.S.-Mexican Border in Contemporary Cinema.
San Diego: Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias SDSU, 1990.
2-16.
Marchetti, Gina. "Action-Adventure as Ideology." Cultural Politics
in Contemporary
America." New York: Routledge, 1989.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen.
16 (1975): 6-18.
Walker, Ronald. Infernal Paradise: Mexico and the Modern English Novel.
Berkeley: UC Press, 1978. 211.
Williams, Linda. "Type and Stereotype: Chicano Images in Film."
Chicano Cinema:
Research, Reviews, and Resources. 1985. Ed. Gary D. Keller. Tempe, AZ:
Bilingual Review/Press, 1993. 59-63.
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