MacGruber

Jorma Taccone’s MacGruber (2010) is a comedy (more like a parody of an action movie) about a legendary hero of the US military who moves to Latin America to take a break from his work, after his wife is assassinated by his worst enemy. MacGruber (Will Forte) fakes his own death and hides in Rio Bamba, Ecuador (a fictional city named after Ecuador's real Riobamba). The MIA (a security agency based on the CIA) tracks him down and convinces him to participate in an operation led by his wife’s murderer. He travels to Washington DC and forms a team with agent Piper and an old friend called Vicki.

The plot is built around the character of MacGruber. Considered a legend because of past successes helping the US government in uncountable special operations, MacGruber is depicted as the only hope to stop Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer). However, the ten years he has spent hidden in Ecuador seems to have taken his abilities away. He has become the opposite of a hero: a man whose egocentrism and evident mental issues are reflected in constant failure. Thus, as the plot develops, we realize that the legend of MacGruber is more and more fictitious. He still does his job, albeit rather takes the credit for other’s job, from beginning to end.

Basically, only the second scene of the movie portrays something about Latin America (which adds up to about five minutes of the whole production). In Rio Bamba, we see MacGruber meditating in a small monastery with religious portraits over the walls. The village had been MacGruber’s peaceful refuge for ten years. While the MIA general is trying to convince the hero to join the operation, people from what seems to be an indigenous peasant village walk in the background. However, the clothes the people wear, and the landscapes shown, do not belong to an accurate representation of an Ecuadorean village (still less of the real Riobamba, which is not a village but one of Ecuador's largest cities). The place looks more like something inspired on a Mexican village. But these details do not change what is depicted of Latin America, from its name we know that it is a fictional representation of some poor and hidden village that no one cares about.

Arranging the set in which the scene of Rio Bamba is recorded with Mexican molds gives us an understanding that, on the one hand, the imagination of Americans about Latin America is that everything south of the border looks the same. Or on the other hand, that Americans do not know much about Latin American society or its people (or that learning about them is irrelevant), and that their depictions of Latin America are mostly based on general imaginations of it (often stereotyped assumptions).

What is being depicted in the movie about Ecuador does not tell us anything about the country or Latin America, it is not realistic, but it is not important neither. Indeed, the entire movie was filmed in New Mexico, US. The only reason that this scene is included for MacGruber’s plot is to emphasize that a hero decided to go to a place where he was going to be difficult to find. Why would someone go to that village with houses made of dry mud, dirt streets and no electricity? An American hero was there and that made that place interesting enough to travel to.

Strange Wilderness

Strange Wilderness (2008) is a comedy directed by Fred Wolf about an animal TV show. A son takes over his dead father’s TV show which has become a failure at risk of cancellation as it lacks inspiration, budget and audience. The program is widely criticized because of the inaccuracy between its themes and what is presented on the screen; the show has passed from being an educational natural wilderness-themed program to a sensationalist and ridiculous representation of human wilderness (sex, blood, and drugs). To honour his father’s memory, the son, Peter (Steve Zahn), forms a group of four men and a woman to look for the legendary “Bigfoot” creature in the Ecuadorian forest. A trip to Latin America could help the group increase the show’s ratings, and it is also an opportunity to go on a real and wild adventure. It is a parody of animal-life shows like National Geographic or Animal Planet and questions the concept of “wilderness.”

By the time they get to the jungle, we know that any representation of animal wilderness will have a sexual undertone, a tragic death, or some footage of animal life accompanied by a nonsensical description. When they arrive at the Ecuadorean jungle, for example, the first wild animal to be portrayed in the TV show is a monkey, shown with the comment that “monkeys make up over 80% of the monkey population.” Immediately thereafter, Peter randomly talks about lions, zebras, giraffes, and gazelles, all iconic animals from Africa, not South America. The movie is full of generally mistaken and mismatching information like this one that let us assume that the group has no idea of what they are doing or talking about, which contributes to the simplistic humour of the plot.

Clearly each member of the group has a problem with drugs, alcohol, or/and a perverted mind which relates everything to sex. Men are presented like some kind of prehistoric troglodytes trying to show off their masculinity to the rest of the group Their uncontrollable and desperate need for women, and their failing efforts to prove themselves superior to animals, make their silliness extremely obvious. The only woman in the group (also basically the only woman in the movie) adds the brain to the group. She seems very aware of the ridiculousness of the trip and of the teenage-perversion of the group, but she is doing her job, so her opinion does not really count.

The trip to Ecuador is not only an adventure to find Bigfoot; it also represents hope to find their better selves. For Pete, keeping the show on screen is saving a legacy and part of his pursuit to become more like his dad. For Whitaker (Kevin Heffernan), going to a recondite place in the middle of the jungle is a chance to force himself out of alcoholism and to experience real life (sober). For the group as a whole, this journey forms not only a group of colleagues but a group of new friends.

In the movie, travelling to the South American wilderness (and finding Bigfoot) is the craziest idea one could have. And to everyone's surprise, since the plot is full of failures, in the end they do indeed find the creature. However, their hopes vanish after they “accidentally” kill Bigfoot and go back to the United States.

How is Latin America being portrayed? One of the reasons the group travels South the Border is to fulfill their expectations of presenting “real wilderness” in the TV show so it stays on the screen. Through the journey across the jungle to find Bigfoot, we are introduced to a dangerous place (funny, exotic, but dangerous): a lot of monkeys, snakes, carnivorous piranhas, tribes that cut scrotums and kill with arrows, explorers who will take advantage of you and steal your belongings, and of course the enormous Bigfoot.

Yet the portrayal of Latin American nature is not really important to the plot (we know that all the information given is intentionally mistaken or exaggerated because of the genre). The main reason for going on the trip is to seek out new material that will increase the TV show’s ratings. Animal life, whether it is a Latin American beast or an insect from the tree outside a building, is taken and exploited as a commodity. In the movie, those kinds of TV shows will not portray wilderness as it is, but as the audience wants it. Nature has been fetishized with sensationalist images; sex, blood, or comedy itself are more important than the facts. This is very clear at the end of the movie after the Bigfoot report is not accepted since Pete decides to film an episode about shark attacks, which saves the TV show. "People love shark attacks, you are back again," says the TV director. And what is wilderness? Who or what is "the wild"? Even though the TV show is called Strange Wilderness (referring to wild animals) and the Latin America jungle is the wildest place they could go to, ridiculing aspects of American pop culture like views on the use of drugs and guns, the sexual portrayal of women on TV (even worse of women of tropical places like Latin America and Africa), and sensationalism to create profit, suggest that animal-life or Latin America is not the only wild ideas portrayed in this film (they are scarcely important at all in the movie, to be honest).

Certainly, what is being portrayed about the Latin American jungle might appear quite wild, but these imaginaries of wilderness (like violent indigenous tribes and creatures living in caves) are only the space to which Western Society compares itself to argue it is superior, and a more civilized society. Wilderness is a word used to emphasize the most uncivilized, least human, least Western aspects of life. It is a word used to create a division and to reject certain truths that make "civilized" society uncomfortable. What could be wilder than killing animals for no reason, seeing women as a sexual object, becoming desperate for food or sex, doing crazy things under the influence of alcohol and drugs, feeling entertained when there is a shark attack or someone dies, and then using all these things to have more ratings on screen?

Snatched

The New Yorker Jonathan Levine directs the comedy Snatched (2017). In this movie, Levine satirizes the typical motivations an American decides to travel to the Latin American “paradise”. Emily (Amy Schumer) convinces her boring mother Linda (Goldie Hawn) to be her partner in a journey to Ecuador. Ecuador for Emily is not the typical resort vacations in some Mexican beach, but rather it is a real exotic adventure that can make her forget about her pathetic life (and it is also a non-refundable ticket that must be used). Ironically, they stay in a fancy resort at the beach, but Emily wants to experience the real Ecuador with a handsome guy she just meets at the pub.

Without listening to the advice of two retiree US intelligence agents, Emily goes to a party in the middle of a jungle landscape with a stranger in which Emily parties as Latinos do, learning capoeira? The day after she brings her mother to an adventure with the same guy who is supposed to take them to see waterfalls, but he was taking them far enough so they can get kidnapped. On the next morning, they wake up in Colombia and try to escape. Trying to get help, they find another American called Roger Simmons in a small village who appears to be their hope for salvation. Roger wears an explorer outfit and is very confident taking the two women through the jungle, though he has been in Latin America only for three weeks.

This movie portrays the ingenuity and imprudence of Americans when they travel to Latin America. Tourist look for adventure in an exotic place. But they also put themselves in dangerous situations, consciously like the American that pretended to be an explorer and the retiree agents that are looking for some action, or unconsciously like Emily and her mother who were too foolish that it becomes part of a predictable and laughable comedy.

Another interesting portrayal of the previous one (not about Latin America alone, but about American in Latin America) concerns foreign intervention for security reasons. Emily’s brother Jeffry calls and goes repeated times to the policy after he is informed of the kidnapping. Though of all the resources the police department has for tracking people, they do nothing until it is almost too late. American intelligence agents appear at the end of like the saviours, but when all the work was already done. The US embassy in Bogota neither could help. Basically, the message is that once you cross the border, the United States will not protect any of its citizens (but it could).

If this plot was not a comedy, a kidnapping and no support from the US will be terrifying. However, Levine makes those events seem better than they look, and mother and daughter even go again on a trip after this awful experience. Latin America is in this movie a place for adventure (though it might be a dangerous one). Even after experiencing violence and almost being killed, the trip was probably better than whatever they could be doing back home, and even inspires them to travel again. The plot might not be clearly promoting or opposing Ecuador, Colombia or any other Latin American country as a travel destination, but it shows that it is the American tourist who put themselves in danger by idealizing Latin America as that exotic place full of adventure, but by overestimating their own capacities and of their country. Latin America becomes attractive because it makes visitors leave their comfort zone.

One Night in the Tropics

One Night in the Tropics (1940) is a musical comedy about a topsy-turvy love triangle and is best known as the film debut of radio duo Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, who, although they steal the show with witty dialogues, play only minor roles in the main plot. The movie begins with the klutzy Steve Harper (Robert Cummings), who is unlucky with love in the way that he always has too many women at once. He’s falling head-over-heels (almost literally) for the beautiful Cynthia Merrick (Nancy Kelly) and the two plan to marry within the week; until Steve has several unfortunate run-ins with an elderly lady who ends up being Cynthia’s Aunt Kitty (Mary Boland). She forbids Cynthia to marry such a screw-up and Cynthia finally agrees when Steve inadvertently rips her wedding dress. While Steve tries to win Cynthia back over the phone, Mickey Fitzgerald (Peggy Moran) shows up and declares that no one will marry Steve except for herself. Steve is at odds until his best friend Jim “Lucky” Moore (Allan Jones) arrives with the proposition of offering Steve a million dollar ‘love insurance’ policy against his marrying Cynthia by Saturday. Seeing as Jim is about as lucky as they come for an insurance salesman, Steve accepts with the wisdom that he’ll obviously lose in his love insurance policy and thus marry Cynthia. All appears to be going to plan, as Cynthia has agreed to forgive Steve, until one evening when, while out at a restaurant, Cynthia, Steve, and Jim run into Mickey who sings a swooning love song to Steve. Cynthia becomes suspicious and her fears are soon confirmed after she discovers Mickey cornering a reluctant Steve into a kiss. Jim, who had met Cynthia only that night and immediately was bewitched, becomes fearful that he may owe Steve one million dollars if there’s no marriage that Saturday, not to mention a hefty bet that he laid with the intimidating restaurant manager, Roscoe. Cynthia storms off and is followed by Steve, who is followed by Mickey, who is followed by Jim, who is followed by Abbott and Costello, Roscoe’s unlikely henchmen, who are ordered to make sure Jim seals the deal between Cynthia and Steve.

Cynthia plans to board the S.S. Pan America with her aunt and head for the South American town of San Marcos. She is secretly pursued by Jim, Abbott, and Costello. When Steve fails to arrive at the boarding dock for the scheduled time of departure in order to win back Cynthia, Jim sends Abbott and Costello to investigate. Instead, the two nit wits become absorbed in their famous ‘baseball dialogue’ and when they finally arrive at Steve’s apartment they realize that he was being stalled by the conniving Mickey, who conveniently stole the ‘love insurance’ policy when Steve wasn’t looking. Steve takes the next boat to San Marcos while Mickey, flanked by a watchful Abbott and Costello, also manages her way to the South American city.

Meanwhile, on the steamer, Jim and Cynthia discover that they are interested in one another, but Jim keeps his distance, more to honour the insurance policy than his best friend. Aunt Kitty also takes a liking to Jim and upon arriving in San Marcos she insists that the young pair spend more time together. When night falls, the two lean in for their first moonlit kiss, accompanied by the hotel orchestra, but are interrupted by Steve who bounds up and tries to discreetly tell Jim that Mickey is also at the resort. This is all for naught when Mickey appears in Cynthia’s room that night and divulges the entire story to her. Cynthia joins forces with Mickey in order to beat the boys at their own game, thus making more of a love-square than a love-triangle. Mickey is all for it, as long as she is able to have Steve in the end.

The girls plan comes into action the next day when they attend a bull fight with the men and immediately send them into a state of jealousy with Mickey fawning over Jim to distract Steve, and Cynthia swooning over the bull fighter, Rudolfo, in order to distract Jim. They return to the hotel that night and spend the evening serenading their pretend partners while yearning to be with the ones they love, which leaves everyone pacing their verandas in anticipation of the wedding. The following day, Cynthia arrives at the ceremony to announce that the wedding is off, but is stopped when Roscoe appears and forces the minister to marry Steve and Cynthia so that he can win his bet. Jim spoils Roscoe’s plan by throwing grapes at him and then runs away with Cynthia; leaving Mickey behind who threatens the minister with the dropped gun to marry her and Steve, much to Steve’s delight. In the meantime, Cynthia and Jim race away from Roscoe through a maze of dancers in the square who are performing the country’s national dance, the Farandola, in honour of the wedding ceremony. The pair try to blend in, but to no avail. When Roscoe has them cornered, Cynthia pleads to Roscoe not to hurt Jim. Roscoe begins to laugh and says that the insurance policy has been fulfilled on account of Steve marrying Mickey and no one is going to get hurt. Jim doesn’t even hear this as he’s only focusing on how Cynthia tried to save him. He pulls her in close for a kiss as the final curtain falls.

In New York, the characters are constantly at odds with one another, and while the situation doesn’t appear to improve much after shifting locations to San Marcos, the trip’s intention of ending confusion and liberating love lives eventually transpires. San Marcos, in all its wonderful geographic ambiguity, is a site of escape and a refuge for stressed city-folk. Along with the oddness of its street vendors selling hot dogs under the name of ‘tamales’, even the ‘national dance’ of San Marcos appears out of place as it is actually a dance native to several regions in France. The bullfight brings the characters closer to the culture of Spanish heritage, but the tell-tale ignorance of foreigners in Latin America is flaunted when Aunt Kitty exclaims, “Oh, what a pretty bull!” as the beast appears in the ring, which clearly demonstrates that she is unaware of the expected outcome of a bull fight. The resources of this Latin setting are constantly being utilized to set-up passion for the complicated Americans, from the ever-present orchestra and rich moonlight, to the bullfighter Rudolfo who is used as an object to create jealousy. From the plot’s point of view, one night in the tropics, where “the chief import is love and the chief export is happiness”, is all that is needed to untangle a muddled love-triangle.

Forever Darling

Forever Darling (1956), a typical Lucille Ball/Desi Arnaz comedy, begins with the blissful wedding of Lorenzo or "Larry" and Susan Vega (Arnaz and Ball, respectively). Susan happens to be from a wealthy family, while Larry (although it is never said outright) appears to be middle-class, as is first brought to our attention when Susan’s cousin Millie (Natalie Scafer) scoffs, "He’ll never fit into our set." Larry isn’t blind to these comments, but lets them slide, while lobbing back subtle remarks about why he wouldn’t want to be in their set anyways. The wedding guests discreetly wonder how long the couple will last. The film then fast forwards to five years later, with the predicted outcome of their marriage slowly going to ruin. Larry has become an esteemed chemist working on a new insecticide called "383," while Susan has followed in Millie’s footsteps to become a stuck-up socialite. The two barely speak, and one night Larry loses all restraint and tells Millie and her husband Henry what he really thinks of them. Susan is enraged that on top of all this, Larry wants to travel the world to do research on his insecticide. A domestic argument ensues in which they realize that their marriage is on its last legs, and separate sleeping quarters are arranged.

Suddenly the film takes a mystical turn as Susan is visited by a guardian angel, played by actor James Mason (as per Susan’s fantasies). At first she is frightened; but after discovering from her father that both visions and guardian angels run in the family, she promptly listens to the angel’s advice. He lectures her on love and stresses that she and Larry were destined to be together. On hearing this, Susan tries her best to see Larry in a different light and even volunteers to go on a camping trip to Washington with him to gather research on mosquitoes and his insecticide.

This turn of events induces the tried-and-true Lucille and Desi slapstick comedy. Susan’s lack of outdoors know-how tests the limits of Larry’s patience. Yet, despite some unfortunate incidents, Larry still manages to serenade his love to Susan while they sit by the campfire. But this all comes crashing down in the grand finale when Susan accidentally cuts a hole in their inflatable boat, which promptly puts them in the swampy river like drowned rats. This is the last straw for both of them until two officials from Washington arrive to see the insecticide in action. Here is where the guardian angel again intervenes so that "383" fails to work and Larry becomes devastated. Seeing Larry in this state, Susan rushes to his side and spouts everything she’s learned about love and that she will be with him no matter what, even to travel the world and look at insects. No sooner said than done, the officials interrupt to tell them that they tried "383" again and it worked, meaning a contract and some world-traveling for Larry. He looks dubiously at Susan who assures him that this is the life she wants and that she doesn’t "care if [they] never see Millie and Henry again." Larry replies incredulously in his Spanish lilt, "You dunt?" Susan smiles back before embracing him: "No, I dunt!"

It’s impossible to take in this film without realizing its relevance to the successful Ball and Arnaz TV show, I Love Lucy; it even replicates a silk sheet backdrop behind the opening credits. However, although Forever Darling and the couple's other feature film The Long Long Trailer, may have protagonists analogous to the couple on the show, it lacks the cultural nuances which made I Love Lucy such a hit. For instance, Larry is clearly of Hispanic descent in Forever Darling, but it is not clear where exactly he is from. In fact, the only Latin American country mentioned in the film is Puerto Rico, where Larry will have to go to research the effects of "383" on roaches . . . how charming! It appears that this typical "American couple" has truly been assimilated. As Gustavo Peréz Firmat observes, "Just as Vegas [Larry and Susan’s last name] is a Spanish name that has become an American city, Larry is a Hispanic man who has become a dyed-in-the-wool American" (Life on the Hyphen 68-69).

This is not to say that Larry has lost all traces of hispanidad. For instance, whenever he is emotional he uses his native language. This can be when he is angry with Susan, when he is incredulous, or when he is laughing at someone; but the similarity among these instances is that Larry is always talking to himself, thus creating a link between his culture and the isolation of being the only Hispanic-American in the film. This characteristic is reiterated when Millie points out that Larry will never belong. This remark may be interpreted in terms of wealth, as is Millie's suggestion, but this is unconvincing, as Larry has provided Susan with a luxurious home complete with hired help. Larry invites Susan into his culture as he serenades her in Spanish; however, she then asks him to sing the song again, this time in English. The only scene where Larry’s culture is acknowledged in any way is in the last few lines of the film when his pronunciation of "don't" as "dunt" becomes a comical connection between husband and wife. It appears as though Hollywood has made an icon of Arnaz and plans to keep him this way: petrified in film as the token Hispanic character, he maintains his difference from his counterpart, Lucille Ball, who is the icon of the American house-wife.

The Long, Long Trailer

You know those days when nothing seems to go right? When everything falls apart and it’s all you can do not to break down? Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz feel the brunt of that kind of day stretched into weeks in the 1954 film The Long, Long Trailer, a slapstick comedy similar to recent films such as National Lampoon and Meet the Parents, whose audience can't help but cringe as bad luck rains down on the protagonists.

The film begins with Nicky Collini (Desi Arnaz) driving frantically through the rain to a trailer park in Colorado where he knocks on what is presumably his trailer and yells out for Tacy (Lucille Ball) to open up. The camera pans to a "For Sale" sign tacked to the side of the trailer, which is apparently news to Nicky. He decides to retreat from the rain into the clubhouse where he meets an older gentleman (Moroni Olsen) relaxing in a chair. After a few customary pleasantries and inquiries, the two realize that the older man is here to buy Nicky’s rig and both their wives have gone to measure furniture for it. Nicky exclaims, "I'm telling you, it's a fine thing to come home to your home and your home is gone!" and then proceeds down a different path and asks the man if he and his wife ever fight. When the man answers a bewildered "no," Nicky cries out in exasperation, "No fights? No battles? Then don’t buy a trailer!" And with such an exclamation Nicky begins his upside-down tale of his experiences with the long, long trailer.

The movie is filmed as a flashback from the point of view of Nicky, a successful engineer who travels a lot for his work. The flashbacks begin with the sound of laughter as Nicky ridicules his fiancé Tacy's idea of living in a mobile home, but Tacy soon wins him over with clever pouts and hypnotizing dreams of a mobile honeymoon. The next scene brings the pair to the mobile home show where Tacy falls in love at first sight with the Blue Moon rig, complete with charming doorbell, sunken living room (where Nicky always manages to trip on the stair), and a $5345 price tag; three times the price they had originally had in mind. Lucy convinces her fidgety fiancé that in the end they would actually save money because they would otherwise be living in hotels (words she may need to eat by the end of the film), and Nicky signs the cheque. The trailer is magic to Tacy and misfortune to Nicky as mishaps happen again and again, including the task of learning to drive with a 40 foot trailer creeping up behind him. However, these calamities are put on hold for the lovebirds to be wed and Nicky even puts the trailer in his new wife’s name as a wedding gift. And so the honeymoon, and the bad luck, begin.

After the first leg of their trip, filled with wrong turns, driving embarrassingly slow, and stopping in the middle of a busy traffic light, they arrive at their first trailer park, only to realize that being a neighbour in a trailer park means that they can’t have any privacy, not even to consummate their marriage (a curious consummation seeing as they sleep in separate beds, a rule and regulation of 1950s film and television). After a frustrating night, they pack up and attempt to camp in the wilderness only to get the trailer stuck in a rut on a back-country road. A downpour commences as they undertake the comedic task of cooking and eating dinner while on a slant, culminating in Tacy getting thrown out of the trailer door into an enormous mud puddle, in true Lucille Ball form. Tacy now begins to see the disadvantages to her big, beautiful trailer.

The adventure continues with a much-anticipated week-long stop at Tacy’s Aunt Anastasia’s house, only to have Nicky back the trailer over the the garden, the roses, and then into the garage, all in front of an on-looking crowd of extended relatives. Needless to say, the trip promptly continues the next day. Throughout the catastrophes, the couple is committed to staying together, with Nicky saying that he’d be happy with Tacy even if they had to live in a cave. This leads the movie into a few scenes of rest, relaxation, and beautiful scenery while cruising through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Tacy tries a turn at the wheel and discovers that she’s better at driving the rig than Nicky, which only leads to resentment and another fight. Tacy makes amends by suggesting she cook a pasta dinner while Nicky drives and then they can eat upon arrival at the next destination. Unfortunately, Tacy does not compensate for the turbulent ride and ends up covered in all her ingredients.

The final drama involves the couple driving up the mountain to an elevation of 8,000 feet. Nicky had asked Tacy to get rid of all her heavy possessions, including the large rocks she collected throughout the trip. Tacy can’t bear to part with her memories and so she hides them around the trailer, only to regret her actions when the rocks tumble from their hiding places and nearly topple the trailer off the edge of a cliff. When Nicky opens the trailer door and discovers what Tacy has done, it is the last straw and the pair part unfavorably, with Nicky taking a long drive alone.
This brings us back to the film's opening scene, with Nicky coming back to find his wife gone and his home for sale. The old man who has listened to this tale of woe tells Nicky that he and his wife were unhappy at first as well, but all they had to do was learn to say "I'm sorry." Nicky balks at this idea and then sees Tacy arriving back at the trailer. He grudgingly grabs his things from her and makes his exit in the car, when all of a sudden Tacy races through the rain to the car and the two of them exclaim apologies to one another. They rush inside to make-up, and the audience catches glimpses, through the door banging in the wind, of this eccentric couple embracing in their long, long trailer.

Although this film enjoys kooky mishaps and romantic reconciliations, it denies the viewers any recognition of the Cuban culture of Desi Arnaz. That being said, in one scene Arnaz does rattle off angrily in Spanish as he’s trying to put the trailer on a jack, but these rants are directed only to himself and the prominent use of the English word “trailer” is the only clue to the non-hispanic audience that he is upset with having bought the mobile home. It is also interesting that a character with the Italian last name of "Collini" is spouting Spanish vocabulary. As a result, it can be inferred that the film is more focused on creating an opposition between wife and husband, male and female, rather than one between American and Cuban cultures. The Collinis are portrayed as a typical newly-wed, 1950s American couple trying to find a place to call their own, whether it be on the road or simply a long, long trailer.

The Wrong Guy

The Wrong Guy is a Canadian movie, filmed entirely in Canada but set fully in the USA. Its plot begins in Cleveland and heads southward but never actually gets to cross the Mexican border. It also constantly aims at humor, but likewise falls desperately short.

In brief, Dave Foley plays Nelson Hibbert, a nerdy executive who believes he is next in line to be company president. To get this far he has got himself engaged to his boss's daughter; but he discovers that he has chosen the wrong daughter and a rival who is to marry his boss's favorite daughter pips him to the post. Hibbert is dragged from the company meeting, screaming and threatening bloody vengeance. Returning to confront his future father-in-law one on one, he finds the old man dead with a blade embedded in his skull. Panicking, Hibbert grabs the knife and covers himself in blood before running from the building, convinced he is now the prime suspect. Little does he know that the murder was caught on tape, and that in fact he is never under suspicion.

So where can an innocent man find refuge from imaginary pursuers? Mexico, of course. And there's no better place for the guilty, too. So the rest of the film follows Hibbert and the real murderer in their intertwining journeys south. They take buses, steal cars, jump on trains, and hitch-hike, all the while more or less followed by a remarkably ineffective and lazy police chief and his men. Still, somehow the assassin is tracked down, surrounded by marksmen after he's taken Hibbert and a companion hostage. And justice is done when the murderer is captured, his attempts to negotiate transport across the border foiled, and the inadvertent fall guy realizes he is free.

But Hibbert has had some contact with Mexico, or some version thereof. He carries in his wallet a photo of himself in technicolor tourist poncho and oversized comedy hat. So it's as though, beneath his eminently bland, grey-suited exterior, or in some off-kilter part of his nerdy sensibility, there's some cartoon image of mexicanidad that this executive under threat is seeking to rediscover. The film's running gag is that Hibbert is not what he appears: the police continually mistake him for a woman; ordinary members of the public confuse him with the actual suspect; and the real killer believes he's some kind of elite super-cop. But it's as though he himself believes that he could become some kind of wacky Pancho Villa figure. If only he could get to Mexico.


But Hibbert never makes it. Just as the film itself never quite comes together. Perhaps Mexico is a border too far for a Canadian movie. Just as the film's various imitations of classic Hollywood film (from its Bond movie credits to an entire subplot based on It's a Wonderful Life) never quite attain either parody or homage. They simply remind us how much less impressive this film is than its models.

YouTube link: Hibbert fails to jump a train.

Nacho Libre

Nacho Libre is director Jared Hess's second film. His first was Napoleon Dynamite, and what the two have in common is a certain absurdist humor found in the quirks of settings that are just off the beaten path, and so slightly behind the times. In Napoleon Dynamite, that setting is Preston, Idaho; in Nacho Libre, it is Oaxaca, Mexico.

Hess's comedy is sufficiently understated that it's not even completely clear whether or not Nacho Libre is meant to be a period piece. It is suffused with the aura of the 1970s, not least in lead character Nacho's choice of what he terms "recreation clothes": a thin pastel blue sweater plus cream slacks. Nacho is a rather unsuccessful monk with dreams of becoming a lucha libre fighter so he can afford better ingredients for the dinners her serves up to the monastery's orphans. On the side, he also has more than a passing fancy for the new nun in town, Encarnación. So he eagerly casts off old habits and enters the world of spectacle that is Mexican wrestling: a world of masked avengers and dreadful sartorial taste. But again, it's not certain whether his penchant for "stretchy pants" and frilly blouses (in a scene at the local wrestling promoter's elaborately decorated residence) is a function of period or location. Either way, the film seems to reverse L P Hartley's famous observation that "the past is another country; they do things differently there." Here there do things differently in Mexico because it has the aura of the past.


But this a past that is treated with delight and nostalgia. Nacho Libre is a strangely quaint and understated movie. And that's true even with Jack Black playing Nacho's role, and despite the fact that so much of the comedy is slapstick: fart jokes, turd jokes, midget wrestler jokes, and all. For the pacing is slow, at times even stately. Scenes often begin with what is almost a still image, foregrounding characters against countryside or architecture in a style almost reminiscent of Eisenstein's ¡Que Viva Mexico!, were it not for the notable use also of vibrant, saturated color. Then after a gag, Hess's editing almost always holds the shot for an extra beat, a pause in which nothing really happens except that we both register the joke and also the fact that it has no real consequence. In the Mexico that the film depicts, what seems comic to us is merely everyday reality.

So the paradoxical result of the movie is that despite, for instance, Jack Black's relentless deployment of a comic faux-Mexican accent, or co-star Héctor Jímenez's initial portrayal as a semi-feral beast scratching for nacho chips in a dirty back alley, or even the ambience of the wrestling world itself, with its high camp and low blows, the Oaxaca that the film presents is homely rather than ludicrous, sentimental rather than savage. It's as though Mexico incarnated all our yesterdays, or perhaps (like small-town Idaho) a place we might inhabit, and might even still want to inhabit, if it weren't that fate had led us elsewhere.

YouTube Link: the film trailer.

Bananas

Despite its title, this is a film with barely a banana in sight: indeed, Woody Allen's Bananas is concerned above all with way in which representations are so dislocated from referents that they are now effectively autonomous.

Opening and closing with scenes in which TV commentators incongruously narrate first death and then sex, Allen's film is a series of comments on commentary. Its absurd comedy derives mostly from a disconnect between what is said and what is done.

Little else unites the otherwise fragmented and episodic plot, which takes Allen's character Fielding Mellish from his job as bumbling consumer products tester to vigilante to political activist to (briefly) stand-in surgeon, analysand (and Christ figure), and then on to guerrilla, tin-pot president, treason defendant, and finally over-scrutinized groom.

Early on, for instance, we hear a salesman from the company for which Mellish works extolling the virtues of the "Execuzisor," a contraption designed to provide exercise for sedentary executives, while in the background we see Mellish demonstrating (despite himself) the worthlessness of the invention. Later, Mellish's best efforts to conceal his purchase of a pornographic magazine are undone by a shop assistant blithely calling out to a colleague "Orgasm, this man wants to buy a copy. How much is it?" Walking down the street, Mellish's apparent helpfulness in guiding a driver seeking to parallel park leads him, unconcerned, to engineer the car's collision into another parked car. And of course the sex-obsessed Fielding's rapid politicization is driven by no real concern for the downtrodden of the Third World, but by his desire to bed the young "women's libber" Nancy.

Latin America is the focus for the middle third of the film. Nancy has stopped by Mellish's apartment with a petition calling on the US government to break relations with the dictatorship of San Marcos, and upon breaking up with her Mellish goes down there to prove himself. But this Latin America is very far from being any index of the real. This Latin America is a mediatized creation of clichés exaggerated into absurdities.

So, for instance, the notion that "power corrupts" is presented in terms of the newly-installed guerrilla president declaring that San Marcos's official language will henceforth be Swedish, and that its citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour--and to sport their underwear over their other clothing so that obedience to this edict can be monitored.

And when Mellish is in turn drafted in as leader, he is provided, or provides himself, with an outlandishly fake Castro-ite beard and moustache. Greeted on his state visit to the US by an official on the airport tarmac, an attendant interpreter "translates" the ensuing conversation by simply repeating everything that is said word for word.

And indeed the point here is that such mediations are at best comical nonsense, at worst disturbingly callous trivializations. What's lost in all these (inevitably) failed representations is any sense of the affect proper to experience. That affect is either ignored or sanitized or packaged into conventionalized sentiment. That goes as much for the left-wing activist's thoughtless romanticization of what Nancy takes to be a guerrilla revolutionary as it does for the News at Six's turning foreign affairs into another sensationalized banality, interspersed with priests advertising "New Testament" cigarettes.

But there's no outside in Allen's film. Bananas is, in this sense, properly postmodern according to Fredric Jameson's definition of postmodernity as the definitive colonization of nature by culture, such that the two are now absolutely indiscernible. There's also, then, little in the way of political critique: simply a shotgun assault on representation from within what is just another, self-consciously grotesque, instance of precisely the same representational strategies that are under fire.

San Marcos is, in Woody Allen's vision, the only Latin America we have left. The only alternative to (mis)representation is to take its distortions to their (un)natural limit. To show how the media now ventriloquize the corpse of what was once the Third World.

The In-Laws

Banana republics and tin-pot dictators: if there is a most stereotypical stereotype of Latin America, it is undoubtedly this. And though I'm interested in, by contrast, the diversity of the ways in which Latin America figures on screen, there's no point denying that this particular image does crop up with some regularity.

But the image of the banana republic is less a comment on Latin America, than it is a symptom of the fact that so many movies that are concerned with governance (in whatever form) find a Latin American detour to be a useful, perhaps necessary, device. Latin America serves as a frame within which to consider issues of corruption, bureaucracy, and power that are general, rather than specific to any one country--or that, if they are specific, are if anything more specifically identified with the United States.

Take the Peter Falk / Alan Arkin comedy vehicle The In-Laws. This is, in essence, a comedy that revolves around the difficulty of interpretation: Arkin's character Sheldon Kornpett (a straight-laced New York dentist) is never sure quite whether or not to believe the tall tales told by his future father-in-law, Falk's Vince Ricardo a shady... well, a shady what? Businessman, mobster, madman, CIA agent?

The first indication that Vince may be either unhinged or dishonest--and surely not what he appears to be--comes in his account of his time working in Guatemala.

Over dinner he describes, in all apparent seriousness, a tale of tse-tse flies the size of eagles carrying off native children: "The enormous flies flapping slowly away into the sunset, small brown babies clutched in their beaks." Kornpett's response is incredulity and amazement: "Beaks? Flies with beaks?" "The size of them," comes the deadpan reply. "I was stunned. Appalled."

Convinced by his wife and daughter to give Vince a little more slack, Sheldon soon finds himself en route to the Latin American republic of Tijada, which we are told is a tiny island just south of Honduras, there to meet a General García and hand him US Treasury plates with which to print high-denomination dollar bills and so destabilize the world economic system.

García proves to be the most caricatured extreme of a crazed dictator: he talks to (and waters) his make-up embellished hand, and proudly shows off his art collection of kitsch black-silk nature paintings, as well as the flag that he has had designed for the Republic, on which is emblazoned a portrait of himself with a local prostitute. But García is also distinguished by his scar: a "Z" scratched on his cheek. Inscribed with the mark of Zorro, then, he's also firmly placed within Hollywood's own versions of Latin misrule.


But if García incarnates a state form that has gone wild, then he does so spectacularly, hypervisibly. Vince tells Sheldon that he shouldn't comment on what he sees: "Don't say anything about his scar . . . You'll see it but don't say it, you follow my drift? The other thing, be sure to compliment his art collection." But when they are face to face, the sight is too overwhelming for the impressionable dentist, whose first words on seeing the general's cheek are: "A Zee? A Zee?"

On the other hand, this hypervisibility is merely the obverse of the invisible, almost indiscernible way in which the US state has also gone wild. For Vince is indeed, it turns out, in the pay of the CIA, going about his business for Uncle Sam. His craziness is all the more disturbing because it is so hard to interpret. It isn't "in your face" in the way that it (literally) is with García. Even the straight-laced US official based in Tijada is not what he seems: he spins Sheldon a line, which we don't know whether or not we can or should take at face value.

Moreover, those who serve the US state are no less corrupt than the functionaries of Tijada's Banana Republic: Ricardo and Kornpett walk away from their escapade with a cool $5 million each, some of which, true to stereotypical Latin form, they immediately pass on to their nearest and dearest. But this nepotism is hidden, underhand, a far cry from García's delight in having bridges named after him for no other reason than he can.

Of course, The In-Laws has few pretensions to seriousness: it's a light-hearted odd-couple comedy. But it's revealing that the means by which the evil despot is to take over the world should be though currency crisis and hyperinflation. In 1979, the various oil-price shocks (and their third-world origins) were hardly a distant memory.

Indeed, the late 1970s were a time when Western states were particularly fragile, object of considerable suspicion. Voters would soon turn to stronger, more visible and more forceful, leaders than Carter and Callaghan. The era of Reagan and Thatcher, and so also of monetarism and fiscal responsibility, was just around the corner. At least with Ronnie and Maggie (and very much unlike Vince), you knew what you were getting into from the start.

It's as though, ironically, a General García might seem more attractive than a Vince Ricardo, however much there is "something loveable" about such smooth-talkers on the surface.