Monsters

Gareth Edwards’s 2010 road-movie Monsters recounts the story of an American journalist and an American tourist on their way to cross the border from Mexico to the United States. While the movie’s main theme focuses on the fictional alien invasion and its consequences in Mexico’s and the U.S. security, this is also a border movie in which it is questioned the ways in which “threats” are taken care of before they can cross the border; in other border movies those threats are drugs or violence (usually carried into American territory by immigrants), in this case, monsters (creatures that act independently from human mobility).

The movie starts with an introduction to the current situation: a NASA probe crashed in Mexican land bringing alien forms of life to at least 50% of the country. The United States government has named those areas the “infected zone” and to protect people from the alien infection everyone is requested to wear masks. To avoid the “infection” spread, the Mexican government has paired up with the United States to allow the guarding and bombing of the most dangerous areas. Under these circumstances, Andrew (US photojournalist) is in charge to take back Sam (tourist) to “safe land”, the United States. Throughout their trip to the coast where they will find ferries to take them back home, Sam, again and again, tells Andrew that what is been said about Mexico in the United States is not the reality, that things are much better. In support of Sam’s comments, Andrew recognizes that the media is indeed sensationalist since photos of violence, the alien creatures or dead people are more valuable than photos that show happiness. This leaves him with no other option than look for images that confirm the misconceptions of the sensationalist media. However, as the couple gets closer to their destination, the contrast between what is being portrayed in the media versus Mexico’s reality becomes even stronger.

Once in the coast, crossing the border represents a real problem. Even though Sam and Andrew are American citizens, they are treated in the same way as the Mexican migrants. Before departing, Sam And Andrew go to a night festival in which all people celebrate without any fear of the monsters, however, they do fear and protest against another kind of monsters. The consequences of military intervention in the small coastal village are death and instability. Walls with messages endorsing the military campaign to bombard infected areas have been crossed over and on top Mexican people has written “Que son los Mountros? NO BOMBING” (What are the monsters? No bombing). The indiscriminate bombing to destroy the creatures has also killed hundreds of people, many of them without identification, the unknown dead.

Sam and Andrew lose their passports and have no other option than crossing the border by feet, through the infected zone. After 6 years since the extra-terrestrials arrived in Mexico, the evacuated infected zone became a jungle. Vegetation is growing covering the abandoned buildings and there only sounds that can be heard are those of animals, the creatures, and American aircraft dropping chemical bombs. Thus, the masks are not to protect people from the aliens, but from the chemicals dropped in the zone. “When American planes come, the creatures like animals get mad and become very dangerous… if you don’t bother them they don’t bother you” says one of the people smugglers about the nature of the conflict arising the question of who the real monsters in the story are. These conversations along the road problematize the dichotomy of what is real and what is fantasy within the plot, or in other words, what is being shown in the news (all American news in English, there is no national news reporting the problems) and what Sam, Andrew and the rest of Mexico experience.

The plot recurrently questions the idea and feelings of separation created by the US-Mexico border wall. Though there is a physical wall dividing both countries, several aspects of their societies make them more similar than diverging. One of them, as I have described, is the media present in Mexico. Getting closer to the border all the news on television are American made. Another contradiction to the division of the two North American countries is language, at the beginning of the movie when the main characters are more distant to the border, the language divisions are more tangible. However, as the plot moves up to the border, most of the people in Mexico speak or at least understand English. The last critique is made to the idea of danger/security on each side of the border. Though the general point of view presented by the media is a Mexico full of mystery and danger, especially in the infected zone, people feel quite safe even within that zone (but when the American military is not present). Also, once Sam and Andrew cross the big wall, they think that they are no longer in danger, but at night again they can see two giant creatures, but since this is happening in a US area the media does not report it.

The sci-fi component of this production might turn out attention away from the other aspects of the plot to focus only on the mystery of a typical monster movie. Nevertheless, what this movie tells us about Mexico goes beyond the fictional story. The monsters are introduced to the plot of this movie to question the efforts of building a wall that keeps danger away from the United States. From the movie, we can see that neither the wall not the bombing could stop the entrance of "danger" to American territory, and parallelly, the infected zone and the wall could not stop people from crossing. Additionally, it is very clear the disagreement with the news that is reported in traditional media. Latin America then is more than mystery and violence, is more than the ratings sensationalist media look for.

Straight to Hell

Straight to Hell (1987) is the brainchild of Alex Cox, a British director who was shunned by Hollywood after the production of his unconventional and politically-loaded film, Walker (1987). Straight to Hell, a homage to Spaghetti Westerns with offbeat humour and a punk rock cast, scandalized and bewildered critics, but attained minor cult status and can at least coax a smile from Sergio Leone fans.

Straight to Hell has a tagline promising “A story of blood, money, guns, coffee and sexual tension,” and though not having a plot to speak of, delivers generously on all accounts. The film opens with hitmen Willy (played by Dick Rude), Norwood (Sy Richardson) and Simms (Joe Strummer) botching a job and taking off with Norwood’s pregnant girlfriend Velma (Courtney Love) to avoid the wrath of their boss. As they are refueling their getaway car, they casually rob a bank then speed off into the desert. After night falls they spot a small town; they bury their suitcase of cash on the outskirts and decide to lie low. In the morning do they discover the strange nature of their hideout; Velma is accosted by a boy with apish expressions and a London accent who warns her that “bad men” are coming. Suddenly two pick-up trucks carrying a whooping band of marauders clad in mariachi suits descend upon the town. They have been out pillaging and plundering, but their loot unexpectedly consists of coffee beans and espresso-making paraphernalia. It turns out that the town is by-and-large populated by the gunslinging, incestuous, coffee-addicted McMahon clan, lead by the white-suited Frank McMahon.

The xenophobic McMahons quickly have Willy, Norwood and Simms in a gun-toting standoff. However, in a fluke the trio kills an American gangster who was threatening Bruno McMahon and Angel Eyes McMahon, earning Frank’s gratitude. Cox introduces the “sexual tension” promised in the tagline when Simms bursts into the hardware store, owned by a bizarrely French-accented couple named George and Fabienne, and sparks instantly fly between Simms and Fabienne. Simms uses a pretext to get George out of the room then the couple pounces on each other, neck-biting furiously enough to draw blood. The four newcomers are invited to the McMahon’s nightly ritual of coffee binging and singing around a banquet table. In the following days, the sexual tension mounts as the three men watch a scantily-clad Fabienne seductively soap-up her husband’s motorbike, Simms fools around with Frank’s wife, and Willy has a futile crush on Louise, one of Frank’s female miscreants. We are reminded that the trio are criminals at large when two Mexican police officers arrive to look for them. Another man shows up claiming to represent their boss, is scapegoated for the recent murder of Grandpa McMahon and hung in the town square. The audience can anticipate the final shootout scene when an American real-estate entrepreneur appears out of nowhere and bestows a suitcase of machine guns upon the three men.

On the final day, George shoots Angel Eyes who was trying to coax Fabienne into having sex. Thinking that one of the outsiders shot Angel Eyes, the McMahon clan mobilizes for a wild shootout against Willy, Norwood and Simms. The chaotic shootout, throughout which the McMahons keep slurping coffee from their little white mugs, continues until almost no one is left standing. The trio turns unexpectedly treacherous as a badly-wounded Willy and Simms hobble off to where the money is buried, leaving Norwood trapped in the cross-fire, and then Simms shoots Willy. Simms is then shot by Velma who has eloped with Frank, but their life as millionaires is cut short when they discover that their getaway car has no breaks and they careen off a cliff. The final scene shows the remaining characters departing from the town, Norwood and Fabienne in a truck of female McMahons and the boy with the London accent with a truck full of corpses, as the town is claimed the property of Farben Oil with a large new billboard.

In copying the Spaghetti Western convention of filming movies in Spain that are set in Mexico, Cox parodies how directors often use foreign places interchangeably with no regard for their geographic and cultural differences. For example, Cox makes it clear that Straight to Hell is set in Spain; the robbed bank is called Banco Central de Almeria and standing outside the town is the iconic Spanish statue of the bull silhouette. At the same time, the hardware store is full of Mexican knickknacks and the police officers look and sound stereotypically Mexican. Cox methodically manipulates and spoofs a number of the expectations cinemagoers may have about Latin America or Latin Americans. For example, the McMahons are clothed in Mexican mariachi suits, which is something American villains in old Westerns have been known to do, prompting the question of why this cultural garb should be associated with criminality. Whereas in many Westerns set in Latin America, the sought after resource is gold, in Straight to Hell it is coffee. This seemingly absurd twist prompts the audience to envision the modern coffee trade in the form of Old Western gold thieves.

Furthermore, Cox embeds a critical message about the violent underbelly of American corporations abroad. We notice that the American real-estate tycoon, after appraising that the town could be “just like America” once they build a 7-11, out-sources his dirty work to the protagonists by giving them suitcase of machine guns. We see no more of this character, but once the two factions have annihilated each other, his clean-up crews arrive and his company billboard is erected. Cox is famous for his condemnation of the American-funded Contra War in Nicaragua, another out-sourcing of violence by American foreign policy. For a film that some critics accused as one big “in-joke” for its cast and crew, Straight to Hell has a great deal of under-the-surface complexity.

Vera Cruz

Vera Cruz (1954) takes place at the end of the American Civil War as a motley assortment of ex-soldiers, adventurers and criminals went profit-seeking in Mexico, which was caught in the turmoil of the Franco-Mexican War. The leading men meet when Joe Erin sells Benjamin Trane a horse which is not only extortionately priced, but property of the Mexican military Lancers, and within minutes a brigade is bearing down on them to retrieve it. While fleeing the military, each man tests the wits of the other and a bond based on mutual respect, but at the same time distrust, is established. Trane and Erin are the hero and anti-hero. Trane is a former Confederate officer, a southern gentleman with a true moral compass who aims to make the money in Mexico to rebuild his devastated plantation. Erin, on the other hand, is an outlaw who robs and kills with a devilish grin, and scorns all norms of civilized behaviour. His roguish charm and razor-sharp wits make him a likeable character, but when push comes to shove, we realize that he really is a cold-hearted scoundrel.

The question of morality is raised as Erin and Trane, along with their posse of fortune-seeking Americans, are presented with employment on both sides of the war. On one hand, an ostentatiously uniformed Marquis Henri de Labordere, aide to Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, guarantees them generous pay. On the other hand, a humble General Ramirez of the Juaristas offers them little money, but the honor of fighting in a war he claims is analogous to the American War of Independence. The men are uninterested in Ramirez’s offer and align themselves with the Marquis. Their mission will be to escort the carriage of Countess Marie Duvarre, the Marquis’s love interest, through Juarista territory to the port of Veracruz. However, the Marquis and the Emperor have no intention of rewarding the Americans for their service; death awaits them in Veracruz. En route, unusually deep tracks left by the carriage tip Erin off that something about their mission is amiss. Snooping around that night, he and Trane discover that the carriage has a false floor, beneath which are nestled six chests of gold coins. The Countess appears and informs them that the three million dollars in gold is intended to bring European troops to support Maximilian, but slyly tells them her plan to abscond with it at Las Palmas and that she will split it three ways if they help each other out.

From this moment on, the journey to Veracruz is rife with double-crossing schemes and shifting alliances. The characters are deeply distrustful of each other but also dependent; the viewer is left uncertain who will stick to the stated plan or who will betray the others. To complicate matters, the Juaristas are also vying for the gold, and a beautiful Juarista spy has captured Trane’s heart. When they reach Las Palmas, the Marquis, who had always been aware of the scheming behind his back, retreats with the gold and his Lancers to a fortified building. Erin and Trane team up with the Juristas to retrieve it, and Trane states that the Juaristas have earned the gold for their bravery, eliciting disbelief and scorn from Erin. In the chaos of battle, Erin seizes the carriage with the gold and abandons the Countess after she mistakenly reveals the location of their getaway boat. However, Erin still has Trane to contend with, who insists that the gold belongs to Mexico. Erin is hell-bent on getting the gold and demands that one man kill the other in a quick-draw, which Trane deftly wins. Rather than joining his lady-love, Trane walks silently away, over the mingled corpses of both sides of the war.

The American presence in Vera Cruz, embodied by Joe Erin and Benjamin Trane, is an ambivalent one. Taken as an allegory for the twin sides of American foreign policy, one could say that Trane represents interventionism based on goodwill and Erin represents interventionism based on self-interest. It is unclear at what moment Trane decides that the gold must stay in Mexico with the Juaristas, but he becomes so steadfast in his belief that he shoots Erin, who cared for no one but himself. American morality, which takes side with the revolutionary common-folk in contrast to the French who support an imposed emperor and associated elites, seems to come out squarely on top. However, Trane may not be the straightforward hero he appears, straying from the moral high ground on more than one occasion. For instance, Trane does not find Erin and his ragged crew of thugs so morally objectionable that he is compelled to leave them, and it is questionable how much of Erin’s violence he would permit if the end justified the means.

Indeed, Mexico is portrayed as an environment that facilitates misleading appearances. When Erin first becomes suspicious of their mission he comments, “Funny country, the carriage leaves steeper tracks than an overloaded wagon,” and later Trane muses how “They say a thief in Mexico can disappear like a puff of smoke.” In their imagination, Mexico itself plays a role in concealing deception, such as the beautiful Mexican woman who is a pickpocket and spy, and in revealing it, such as in the tell-tale tracks in the mud. This symbolism is most apparent when an American man lifts the mask of a pretty señorita with whom he has spent a fiesta, only to reveal a gap-toothed guffawing man. Despite misleading appearances, the Mexico of Vera Cruz is real (the theatrical trailer boasts that the entire film was shot in Mexico) and the Mexicans are portrayed as friendly, reasonable and valiant. Mexico may be a place of turmoil and trickery, but in comparison to the American profiteers and outlaws that populate the film, its moral fabric is for the most part intact.

See also Jon's account of the film.

The Emerald Forest

John Boorman's The Emerald Forest sets out to make the invisible visible, all the time aware of the dangers and perhaps the unethical inconsideration involved in precisely such an ambition. This contradiction is of a piece with the paradox of making a film, especially a film that purports to venture deep into the rainforest, that claims to protest the way in which technology denudes the natural world. It's one of the first eco-adventure movies with an environmentalist and subalternist heart, but it remains uneasy with the tensions that this very genre entails.

The "invisible people" are an Amazonian tribe that have so far evaded contact with Western civilization. But all around them they sense that their world, the world as they put it, is rapidly growing smaller. And this contraction is thanks in no small part to the efforts of people such as Bill Markham, a US engineer down in Brazil to clear the land and dam the river. But one day, as though in righteous vengeance, the invisible people snatch Markham's son Tommy as he and his family are sitting down for a picnic at the site of the future degradation. So Tommy too becomes invisible, and remains so for the subsequent decade that Markham and his wife anxiously comb the forest for any sign of him or his kidnappers.

Markham decides to take one more trip upriver, armed with the feathered arrow that was all the Indians left behind, an obnoxious German reporter by the name of Uwe, and rather foolishly as it turns out also with an M-16 carbine. He and the reporter fall into the hands of another tribe, the so-called "fierce people" who understandably live up to their name when provoked by Markham's semi-automatic. Uwe dies a grisly and unmourned death, while Markham sets of running, pursued by savages. Fortunately it's at this point that he finally runs into Tommy, who now goes by the sobriquet Tomme and is a fully-fledged member of the invisible peoples' tribe.

So where the father had thought to save the child, it turns out that it is Tomme who rescues the man he now calls Dad-dee to distinguish him from his adoptive indigenous father, the tribal chief Wanadi. And Wanadi in turn, sage and sensitive in line with his close empathy with nature, cures Markham of the wounds sustained in his escape from the fierce people. Unfortunately, however, the interloping Westerner has caused more damage than the few scrape he suffered. Along the way he dropped his gun, which the invisible people's enemies are keen and quick to learn to use against them.

Tomme has no interest in returning to his former life in the city, so Bill leaves the forest empty-handed. But when the invisible people come under attack from their M-16-weilding neighbors, who take their womenfolk and send them on into prostitution, not even the old man Wanadi's curative powers can save the day. So Tomme has to leave the forest in search of his biological father who alone can help the tribe rescue their women now dramatically on display for drunken Portuguese-speaking Brazilians in a decrepit brothel at the frontier between the two worlds.

The rescue accomplished, Markham once again tries to convince his (former) son that he should emerge from the jungle, pointing out that the nearly-finished dam that he himself has designed means that further encroachment on their territory is inevitable. And once again Tomme refuses. But both in their own way are now determined that the dam has to be destroyed, so that the Indians can fade back out of sight. The indigenous resolve to employ magic, conjuring up frogs to call down torrential rain; Markham takes a few sticks of dynamite for the same purpose.

And in the end it is not technology that saves the day. The frogs do their stuff while Bill's detonator fails to go off. Yet this is a somewhat limited view of technology, of course: the frogs, too, and the hallucinogenic drugs that the indigenous take to call them forth, not to mention the green stones they employ for their (rather fetching) face and body paint are all technologies in their own way. Presumably Boorman would argue that film can be such a liberating technology, in opposition to the destructive machines that are tearing down the Amazon's trees and threatening indigenous livelihood. But even guns have their uses, as the brothel shootout showed. So the movie displays more an anxiety about its own mechanisms, as well as a certain seduction for the emerald aesthetic of the forest and its peoples, rather than any real sense of how that anxiety could be soothed.


YouTube Link: frolics in the water (French subtitles).

The Border

It's no surprise to learn that Bruce Springsteen is a fan of Tony Richardson's The Border. This film's emotional tone is very much the understated disgust and despair characteristic of Springsteen songs such as "The Line" or "State Trooper"; indeed, "The Line" is said to have been inspired by the movie.

For Richardson as much as for Springsteen, the border between the US and Mexico points up a series of divisions that are in fact internal to the USA. And all of these borders provoke anxiety because they are so permeable and unfixed.

There is the US's institutional hypocrisy: the state throws resources at keeping Latin American immigrants out, and yet the economy of the South West would collapse were it not for this cheap labour willing to take on work that white Americans regard as beneath them. Caught in this contradiction, the corruption that this movie portrays as endemic to the border patrol is inevitable. The patrolmen know better than anyone that their task is both counter-productive and impossible, as they continually send the same people back again and again, only postponing their successful crossing, so drawing out their suffering in the meantime.

Then there is the fact that these migrants are simply taking the American Dream at its word. The Border hardly has a sanguine view of the pursuit of happiness through consumer goods or social distinction. But it shows that white Americans who want no more (and no less) than a new condo, with pool in the garden and waterbed in the bedroom, have little solid ground from which to criticize Latin Americans who come north similarly seeking material benefit. (Charles Taylor's "The Broken Promised Land" focusses on this aspect of the film.)

Finally, there is the line that border agent Charlie Smith (magnificently played by Jack Nicholson) literally draws in the sand: his is an attempt to stake out a limit, a personal code of ethics in the midst of the contradictions and corruption that surrounds him. His limit is a refusal to condone his patrol buddy's extrajudicial killings. "You see this line?" shouts Charlie. "That's as far as I go! No murders!" "Okay," replies Cat (Harvey Keitel), "I can respect that."

But on the border the law no longer makes sense, and the film shows both that Cat can provide some rationale for killing drug-runners but letting other immigrants through for a profit, and that Charlie too eventually takes life and death into his hands in an effort to enforce his own code of honour.

The border is a zone of exception in which the law is suspended, and what Giorgio Agamben terms force-of-law takes its place: in the absence of any coherent or consistent legal framework, the border patrol's actions have the force of law without its rationalizing justification.

Perhaps the greatest irony comes when the border police chief tries to explain to the boss of the coyote people-smuggling operation why a truck full of migrants has been stopped: it's been chased down by a couple of honest border guards and "Goddamit, I ain't got no control over that! That's just gonna happen sometimes."

Meanwhile, Charlie's doubts and moral uncertainty are played out over and around the figures of three Guatemalan refugees: a brother and sister, plus the sister's little baby, who leave their village after an earthquake in the movie's opening scene. Charlie sees the sister from across the Rio Grande while the brother is on the US side, stealing his car's hubcaps. From that point on he gradually becomes obsessed by the trio's fate, saving the brother from the wheels of a freight train, and trying to save the sister from prostitution in a seedy strip joint in the Mexican border town. When the child is stolen (to be sold for adoption to a rich white family), Charlie makes it his mission to recover and return him to his mother.

To all intents and purposes, this young woman is essentially mute: she speaks no English and is given only a few lines of (untranslated) dialogue in Spanish. She's a near perfect subaltern. (Interestingly, the same actress, Elpidia Carrillo, plays a very similar part in Oliver Stone's Salvador.)

And when Charlie tries to explain why he has become so obsessed with her salvation, the best he can come up with is that "I wanna feel good about something sometime."

But Charlie fails to get this group over to the US. He fails even to ensure that they all survive through to the film's final frame. The best he can manage is a kind of second-order compensatory restitution, effected in the middle of the Rio Grande, in the shadow of the transborder bridge and US flag in the background.


In the end, this physical frontier, no more than a dirty stream, is the least substantial of any of the borders featured in Richardson's film. The Border can only gesture towards larger, systemic issues, in the face of which it suggests revenge is feeble and reconciliation fleeting.

And perhaps this is the film's grandeur: that it is an "issue" movie without even pretending to offer resolution.