Global Trafficking Networks on Film and Television: Hollywood’s Cartel Wars 2020043044, 2020043045, 9780367904050, 9781003024217

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Global Trafficking Networks on Film and Television

This book draws on a multi-method study of film and television narratives of global criminal networks to explore the links between audiovisual media, criminal networks and global audiences in the age of digital content distribution. Mapping out media representations of the ongoing war on drugs in Mexico and the United States, the author delves into the social, cultural and geopolitical impacts of distribution and consumption of these media. With a particular emphasis on the globalized Mexican cartels, this book investigates three areas – gender and racial representation in film and television, the digital distribution of content through the internet and streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix, and depictions of extreme violence in film, television and online spaces – to identify whether there are fundamental similarities and differences in how Hollywood productions reproduce stereotypes about race, gender and extreme violence. Some of the movies and television series analysed are Breaking Bad, Ozark, Weeds, Rambo: Last Blood, No Country for Old Men, Sicario and the Netflix series Narcos, Narcos: Mexico and El Chapo. Taking a unique interdisciplinary approach to the study of cartels in the media, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of media studies, film, television, security studies, Latin American and cultural studies. César Albarrán-Torres is a Mexican-Australian scholar and film critic. He is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, where he teaches Global Screen Studies. He has been widely published in academic and non-academic titles as a film and literary critic, author and translator. His current research focuses on film and television, as well as the negotiations between social media and politics in Mexico, particularly concerning the drug cartels. His book Digital Gambling: Theorizing Gamble-Play Media was published in April 2018. He is editor at the online journal Senses of Cinema.

Routledge Advances in Television Studies

8 Television and Serial Adaptation Shannon Wells-Lassagne 9 Girlhood on Disney Channel: Branding, Celebrity, and Femininity Morgan Genevieve Blue 10 Horror Television in the Age of Consumption: Binging on Fear Edited by Linda Belau and Kim Jackson 11 Reading Contemporary Serial Television Universes: A Narrative Ecosystem Framework Edited by Paola Brembilla and Ilaria A. De Pascalis 12 Children, Youth, and American Television Edited by Adrian Schober and Debbie Olson 13 American Television and the Sensate Body: Affect and Meaning Marsha F. Cassidy 14 Creating Reality in Factual Television: The Frankenbite and Other Fakes Manfred W. Becker 15 A European Television Fiction Renaissance: Premium Production Models and Transnational Circulation Edited by Luca Barra and Massimo Scaglioni 16 Difficult Women on Television Drama: The Gender Politics of Complex Women in Serial Narratives Isabel C. Pinedo 17 Global Trafficking Networks on Film and Television: Hollywood’s Cartel Wars César Albarrán-Torres

Global Trafficking Networks on Film and Television Hollywood’s Cartel Wars César Albarrán-Torres

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 César Albarrán-Torres The right of César Albarrán-Torres to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Albarrán-Torres, César, author. Title: Global trafficking networks on film and television : Hollywood’s cartel wars / César Albarrán-Torres. Description: Abingdon, Oxon New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge advances in television studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020043044 (print) | LCCN 2020043045 (ebook) | Subjects: LCSH: Drug traffic in motion pictures. | Organized crime in motion pictures. | Organized crime on television. | Mexico--In motion pictures. | Drug traffic on television. | Motion pictures--United States--History. | Mexico--On television. | Television programs--United States--History. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D777 A53 2021 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.D777 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/6556--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043044 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043045 ISBN: 978-0-367-90405-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02421-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun

Dedicated to the past and future victims of cartel violence in Mexico, Colombia, the United States and elsewhere To my children, David and Isabel, hoping that their generation does a better job of building a more compassionate world

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: cartel media 1

viii xi 1

How Touch of Evil set the rules for Hollywood cartel cinema

17

2

Cartel westerns: the new frontier (South of the border)

34

3

From Weeds to Ozark: the suburbs, threatened

54

4

Queen of the South: doing linguistic mish-mash and “Mexican face”

71

Walter White and the use of Brown bodies in Breaking Bad

90

5

6

The Sicario saga and chromatic othering

107

7

Netflix’s Narcos: cartel media in the age of digital distribution

124

“El Chapo” gets the Netflix treatment: theorising cartel mythologies

143

Postscript: cartel media beyond Hollywood Index

162 174

8

Figures

1.1 Charlton Heston (left) as Mike Vargas, a good Mexican cop

1.2

1.3

2.1 2.2 2.3

2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 3.1

3.2

amongst a horde of “bad hombres” in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) The Mike Vargas archetype is followed by Benicio del Toro’s character in Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 film Traffic. He plays Javier Rodriguez, an honest Tijuana cop caught in the crossfire of the cartel wars The good Mexican cop archetype embodied by Tiago Vega (Daniel Zovatto) in the television series Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (2020) The U.S.–Mexico border as a wasteland in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) Mexican hitmen as Brown disposable bodies in No Country for Old Men The 2013 cartel western The Last Stand follows the cinematic conventions of classic westerns. Notice the empty main street in a small desert town A cartel hitman holds a pristine handgun in Kim Jee-woon’s The Last Stand (2013) A classic standoff between a sheriff and an outlaw in The Last Stand John Rambo bids a final farewell riding into the Arizona wilderness in Rambo: Last Blood (2019) Clint Eastwood re-discovers the open spaces of the West in The Mule (2018) Mary Louise Parker plays suburban drug baron Nancy Botwin in the Showtime series Weeds (2005–2012). Nancy leaves behind a burning suburb in the season three finale, “Go” Guillermo Diaz and Demián Bichir play the token “bad hombres” in the Showtime series Weeds

25

27 27 40 41 44 45 45 48 49

60 61

Figures ix 3.3 In season four, episode five of Weeds, “No Man is Pudding”,

3.4

3.5

3.6

3.7 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3

6.4

Nancy finds a tunnel running under the border, which is being used for heroin and human trafficking In Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015), the main character, Kate Mercer, is horrified when she encounters images of spectacular death from the Mexican cartel wars In contrast, Ozark’s Wendy Byrde finds a business opening when she realises that the cartel wars in Mexico are getting increasingly violent At the end of season three, episode one, “Wartime”, Wendy enters her former suburban home and hangs the family portrait of the new owners upside down. This symbolises the destruction of the suburban ideal at the hands of drug violence Alejandro Speitzer as a rich, Mexico City kid turned ecstasy dealer in Netflix’s El Club (2019) Puerto Rican actress Jennifer Lopez as the late Tex-Mex icon Selena Quintanilla in Gregory Nava’s 1997 film Selena Mexican actress Kate Del Castillo as Teresa Mendoza, the iconic drug baroness in the telenovela La Reina del Sur Brazilian actress Alice Braga as Teresa Mendoza in USA Network’s Queen of the South Marlon Brando as Mexican revolutionary Indigenous hero Emiliano Zapata in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952) Emma (Mishel Prada) and Lyn (Melissa Barrera) in Tanya Saracho’s television drama Vida Black people being auctioned in Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out (2017) Walter White (Bryan Craston) strangles fellow meth distributor Domingo Gus Fring dies a humorous death in Breaking Bad In contrast, strongman Mike is given a placid, poetic death Denzel Washington in Tony Scott’s Man on Fire (2004), in which Mexico City is shown as a run-down, decaying city Benicio Del Toro plays Colombian hitman Alejandro in Sicario (2015) and its sequel, 2018’s Sicario: Day of the Soldado In Sicario: Day of the Soldado, DEA and Border Patrol agents find three prayer rugs lying on the arid U.S.–Mexico border: a sign that Islamic terrorists are infiltrating the United States, aided by the cartels In his 2003 film Dogville, Danish director Lars von Trier used schematic space to represent relationships of power, spaces of inclusion and exclusion

61 65 65

66 67 75 76 81 82 84 98 100 102 103 109 114

118 120

x

Figures

6.5 Similarly, in Sicario: Day of the Soldado director Stefano

7.1

7.2

7.3

7.4

7.5 7.6 8.1

8.2 8.3

p.1 p.2 p.3 p.4 p.5

Sollima opens with a shot of the U.S.–Mexico border, traced by the Rio Grande Diego Luna as Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo in Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico, season one, episode five, “The Colombian Connection” Wagner Moura as Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico, season one, episode five, “The Colombian Connection” When drug kingpins meet: In Narcos: Mexico, Netflix sets a passing of the torch in the Latin American criminal underworld and rounds up its successful international franchise. Al Pacino as Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s 1983 film Scarface. This moment has been parodied in internet memes Michael Peña plays the slain agent, Kiki Camarena, in the first season of Narcos: Mexico The video game Narcos: Rise of the Cartels, based on the popular Netflix franchise Mauricio Ochmann as the title character in El Chema, a character loosely based on El Chapo in the Telemundo narcotelenovela Marco De la O plays El Chapo in the Univisión/Netflix co-production Alejandro Edda (left) plays El Chapo in Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico. In season two, El Chapo starts digging tunnels to traffic cocaine under the U.S.–Mexico border Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013) explores the scars left by cartel violence in rural Mexican families In El infierno (2010), director Luis Estrada evidences the collusion between the state, the Catholic Church and traffickers Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallegos’ 2018 film Pájaros de verano (Birds of Passage), which explores Indigenous struggles in Colombia during the early rise of the drug cartels The documentary La libertad del Diablo (2017) places victims and victimisers on the spotlight, unearthing the reasons behind Mexico’s brutal spike of cartel violence The urban drama Ya no estoy aquí (2019) delves into the cumbia culture in the city of Monterrey, Mexico, which is deeply affected by cartel violence

120 126 126 127 132 136 139 149 151 155 165 166 168 169 171

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mel Campbell for her editorial assistance and critical insights during the preparation of the manuscript. Thanks to Ramon Lobato and Abel Muñoz Henonin for their invaluable feedback during the development of this book. Thanks to Erin Riley for offering great feedback for earlier drafts of Chapter 5. Thanks to my colleagues at Cinema and Screen Studies, Swinburne University of Technology, for their camaraderie and support: Liam Burke, Jessica Balanzategui, Dan Golding and Andy Lynch. I am grateful to Professors Angela Ndalianis and Kim Vincs from the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies for their support, and to Carolyn Beasley from the Department of Media and Communications. Thanks also to Roberto Castillo (Lingnan University, Hong Kong) who always played the devil’s advocate and kept me on my toes when it came to social and cultural issues relating to our native Mexico. Thanks to Professor Kath Albury, the organiser of the virtual ‘Shut Up and Write’ sessions that made this book possible amid the challenging COVID-19 lockdown period in 2020, and to the fellow shut-up-and-writers who kept me sane and productive. Thanks to my friend, Stuart Parry, who kept encouraging me from a distance when the 2020 Melbourne lockdown made it more challenging to write this monograph. Thanks to Suzanne Richardson, my editor at Routledge, for her continuing support for this project. But above all, thanks to my partner, Gabriella Munoz, for her support. This book was written on the land of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, which was never ceded. I acknowledge and respect the land, rivers, lakes, oceans, and the Elders past, present and emerging.

Introduction Cartel media

I wish this book did not exist. This book was written because human cruelty and lack of compassion towards those who are different know no limits. It exists because the media dynamics involved in the production, consumption and dissemination of contemporary Hollywood film and television featuring the global drug cartel wars often include problematic representations involving race, gender, migration and Global South diasporic identities in the United States and elsewhere. This book exists because the spectacular violence that cartels and governments cause has become a commodified form of entertainment that deserves to be critiqued. This book has been made possible because one person’s pain is another’s entertainment. “Cartel wars” is an umbrella term used to describe the multiple battlefronts that opened worldwide, but particularly in the Latin American countries of Colombia and Mexico, since the late 1970s around the production and distribution of illegal narcotics. The term does not describe a single conflict, but rather a collection of conflicts that have involved local and foreign governments – in particular, the United States – multiple criminal organisations and their cells, paramilitary groups and even guerrilla movements (Sanford, 2003). As Howard Campbell and Tobin Hansen remind us, the war on drugs that took shape in Mexico in the 1980s and intensified during the 2006–2012 Felipe Calderón presidency now comprises multiple fronts and has become a many-headed beast: “‘Narco-violence’ emerged in this context of intra-cartel, inter-cartel, cartel vs. government (the military and various police forces), and government vs. civil society violence” (Campbell & Hansen, 2014, p. 159). The cartel wars are symptomatic of the wrongdoings of local governments, U.S. interventionism in the Global South and the extensive failure of neoliberal policies. It is important to note here that recent political theory scholarship claims the term “cartel” is a discursive rather than practical categorisation. Mexican scholar Oswaldo Zavala, for instance, argues that cartels do not exist in practical terms, but rather are a symbolic construct that validates state power and helps justify the indiscriminate use of security forces (2018). For Zavala, the government and the media conceptually corral criminality and thus justify

2

Introduction

security policies, as well as establishing a common enemy of the people. In this book, “cartel” is understood as a cultural construct that might or might not have an actual counterpart in the real-life organisational structure of criminality. In cartel media theory, “cartel” has to do more with the media depiction of criminality rather than with the often-contested morphology of criminal networks. Narcotics are a highly profitable commodity that is produced mostly in Global South sites such as Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia and Afghanistan, among many others, but that reaches its peak street value in industrialised nations such as the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and Western European countries. Drug trafficking has been a common feature of global criminal activities for more than a century. Chinese opium trade to Europe and the United States, through the British East India Company, reached its peak in the nineteenth century, opening up a market of consumers eager for psychotropic experiences (Downs, 1968). For decades, the legality of the opium trade was contested in the United States, a nation founded on puritanical ideals (Brown, 1973). Doctors there used to overprescribe opium to addicted patients (Trickey, 2018). The origins of the U.S. addiction have been recently the subject of film and television. The television series The Knick, directed by Steven Soderbergh (who directed one of the key cartel films, Traffic from 2000), shows how opium addiction was present in early-twentieth-century New York. The show follows Dr John W. Thackery (Clive Owen), a genius surgeon who suffers from an unshakable opium addiction. The series shows how the worlds of medicine and narcotics have often experienced parallel histories, and how the recreational use of drugs became taboo once its illegality was established. Lobbying against opium finally won and the narcotic became illicit in the United States in the late 1910s, after the near prohibition brought forward by the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. But the U.S. addiction was far from over, as J. B. Brown narrates: “by the 1910s, opium was being supplanted by an illegal traffic in its terrible stepchild, heroin (isolated in 1898)” (1973, p. 111). From then on, the Global North’s gluttony for narcotics has created a multibillion-dollar market that leaves behind a trail of money, blood, sweat and tears. Since the 1970s, the violence produced by the narcotics trade has centred on the Latin American countries of Colombia and Mexico. The Colombian cartels – mainly the Medellín Cartel led by the slain Pablo Escobar, and the Cali Cartel led by the “godfathers” Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, José Santacruz Londoño and Hélmer Herrera Buitrago – represented a common enemy for Western countries: someone to point a finger at in matters of violence and addiction – particularly during the Ronald Reagan presidency (Bagley, 1988). Since the early 1980s, when the Guadalajara Cartel was allegedly formed, Mexican criminal networks dealing with narcotics have become increasingly complex and expansive in their operations. Initially distributors for Colombian cocaine in its way to the coveted U.S. market (Fuentes & Kelly, 1999),

Introduction 3

Mexican cartels have branched out after bloody turf wars and now deal other narcotics, as well as being involved in satellite criminal activities including oil theft, kidnapping, human trafficking and extortion. Data from the U.S. government agency Drug Enforcement Administration or DEA show that cartel cells have been identified in most U.S. states (Grillo, 2013), particularly in areas where Mexican-American enclaves are most prevalent and where addiction hotspots emerge and are sustained by a constant flow of product. The operation of drug traffickers is strongly attached to geographical and jurisdictional boundaries, as Shawn Teresa Flanigan identifies: Mexican drug cartels are, by necessity, territorially specific organizations tied to relatively defined geographic locations. While this is not characteristic of most types of organized crime groups, Mexican drug cartels have an interest in controlling specific territory in order to preserve drug trade routes and maintain access to rural, mountainous terrain that provides advantage in evading authorities. (2012, p. 280) The history and political economy of the global narcotics trade are complex and multilayered, involving local and global issues, and summarising them escapes the objectives of this monograph. However, throughout the book I provide details on particular passages of cartel history and how film and television have retold them. As with any major sociocultural shift, the drugtrafficking revolution involves not only the buying and selling of illicit substances, but also flows of people, languages, media and material culture. In Northern Mexico, for instance, narcocultura has infiltrated all aspects of life (Córdova, 2011; Ovalle, 2005; Santos, Mejías, & Urgelles, 2016) and has been represented in multiple narcotelenovelas (García Díaz, 2011), a television format also popular in Colombia (Ordóñez, 2012). Tales of money and betrayal are a constant fix in popular music genres such as narcocorridos, a derivative of norteña music that chronicles the rise and fall of cartel members (Arce, 2015). Narcocorridos feature hyperviolent lyrics in which killings, kidnappings and beheadings are glorified, particularly in the subgenre movimiento alterado (Ramírez-Pimienta, 2007, 2013). Female cartel members are increasingly common and their stories are also immortalised in song. Recent cartel violence has reached unprecedented levels of brutality, which film and television have used as source material to produce spectacular forms of gruesome entertainment. For instance, beheadings became common practice among the cartels in 2006. Among the cartels infamous for this execution method, often broadcasted via the internet, are Los Zetas and the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, or CJNG. This brutal practice has not only targeted members of organised crime: “Beheading victims first included rival cartel members, police officers, and lawyers but quickly expanded to include journalists and eventually Mexican military troops” (Bunker, Campbell, & Bunker, 2010, p. 149). Images of heads and headless bodies have become part of the visual grammar of the narco wars, and are often referenced in popular culture,

4

Introduction

from films such as El infierno (Estrada, 2010) and Sicario (Villeneuve, 2015; see Chapter 6) to the much vilified videohome industry: pulpy films that tell the violent tales of cartel members.

Cartel mediascapes I introduce the concept of “cartel media” to describe film and television narratives about global drug trafficking networks. These networks are not bound by traditional jurisdictions. Rather, these networks that media focus on escape the limits of the nation-state by establishing global trade routes and distribution cells. Cartel media mimics the morphology of the cartels themselves: they are decentralised, overlapping and often diasporic. Cartel media are part of what cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai terms “mediascapes”, a key element of global culture. He writes: Mediascapes, whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots, and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places. (Appadurai, 1990, p. 299) This book concerns the nature of those “interests” and the political in the “strips of reality” they convey through audiovisual narratives. Appadurai’s theorisation of cultural globalisation – as a process that should be understood as a form of contestation rather than perpetuation of the status quo – is valuable for fleshing out the particularities of cartel media. Cartel media puts the spotlight on local social preoccupations and global power dynamics in which Global North productions often reshape how the history of the Global South and previously colonised nations is perceived. There are deep-rooted vices in how cartel violence is shown in films and television (Boyd, 2009), iniquities that lay bare the vast gaps in global media markets between the voiceless and those who own and operate the means of media production. The cartel wars have affected the lives of millions of everyday citizens in the Global South, who have seen their ways of life shattered, their loved ones killed or disappeared, and their sense of safety all but gone. Criminal groups constantly fight for turf, spreading fear and causing thousands of civilian casualties. Audiovisual media is a fundamental element of today’s cartel wars. On one hand, it is through film and television that most people are told these stories of crime and pain (Candil, Dávila, & Batiz, 2016). On the other hand, criminal groups use digital photos and videos as propaganda, showing gruesome scenes of torture and murder or issuing threats to rival gangs or the government (Albarrán-Torres, 2017; Campbell, 2014). Recently, members of the CGNJ have used online videos depicting their military-grade

Introduction 5

arsenal and uniformed troops to pledge allegiance to their leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes alias El Mencho, intimidate rivals and threaten the federal government (Duncan, 2020). This book is written with a seemingly logical but often slippery belief: representation matters, but above all self-representation matters. Even though vulnerable individuals, particularly women (Jiménez Valdez, 2014), and communities are the most deeply affected by the illegal narcotics trade, they are seldom represented in U.S.-centric film and television in all their cultural and experiential complexity. Rather, the cartel wars are shown as the product of Global South’s alleged “barbaric” nature, its corrupt governments and overall greed. Little or no accountability is placed on colonial and neo-colonial forces, Global North consumption and geopolitical interventionism, or the corruption derived from hegemonic nations that also fuels the global narcotics trade. Added to this, arms trafficking from the United States to countries such as Mexico fuels the violence and equips criminal organisations with high calibre weapons and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment (Martinez, 2019). Representation involves how the history and stories deriving from armed conflict are told. Why is it particularly important that the cartel wars be told from a variety of perspectives including hegemonic and non-hegemonic voices? Why do we need to question how the story of the cartel wars is told? Humans remember what we have perceived first-hand, but also what we watch at movie theatres and on television screens. Our worldview in a globally mediatised reality is chiselled by personal experience, but also by the screen cultures we have come in contact with throughout our lifetime. Since the early twentieth century, film and television have helped shape our collective memory of historical events and of ways of being in the world. WWII and its many horrors, for example, have been retold by dozens of filmmakers all around the world and from dissimilar cultural industries. From Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust film Schindler’s List (1993) to the great Soviet war film Idi i smotri (Come and See, 1985) or the many propaganda films made during the war by the likes of Frank Capra and John Huston, the film camera has worked as a means to articulate the often-opposing narratives of this traumatic period. The corpus of WWII- and Holocaust-themed movies is vast and has helped shape the echoes of conflict and calibrate the ethical compass of postwar generations. Hollywood in particular has exorcised the demons of war through films that sometimes question hegemonic state narratives of heroism and rightfulness. This handful of films counters hyper-nationalistic stories that other films have used to portray U.S. overseas military campaigns. The Vietnam War (or American War, as it is known in Vietnam) has received some particularly pointed critiques in films such as Oliver Stone’s masterful and cruel Platoon (1986), the equally poignant Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989). Platoon in particular is a case of self-representation, as director Oliver Stone is a veteran of the American campaign in what was once known as Indochina. A recent film, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (2020), demonstrates how retelling history from a

6

Introduction

non-white perspective – in this case a Black standpoint – renders at least partial progress in inclusivity. Da 5 Bloods is also somewhat respectful in how it portrays the Vietnamese, who are often objectified and discriminated against in Vietnam films. In these and other films, the reckless U.S. war machine is put into question, both in terms of abuses against civilian populations and the precarious care that war veterans get once they are back at home. These are tales of young adults being flown into a foreign territory to perpetrate and witness blatant human rights violations; the image of a defenceless Vietnamese woman begging to be killed in Full Metal Jacket is an everlasting imprint, as is the burning down of a farmer village in Platoon. Film has thus become a powerful media form for vicariously experiencing geopolitical conflict and local social issues. In spite of this, U.S. soldiers are always the protagonists, even in the most progressive views of the war. As Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote in The New York Times when Da 5 Bloods was released: For Hollywood, and for Americans, it is better to be the villain or antihero rather than virtuous extra, so long as one occupies center stage. For Vietnamese people, as well as Laotians, Cambodians and Hmong, their role is almost always that of the extra, their function: to be helpful, rescued, blamed, analyzed, mocked, abused, raped, killed, spoken for, spoken over, misunderstood or all of the above. (2020) In the same article, Nguyen wittily points out: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory” (2020). Indeed, through film, and more recently through what is popularly known as quality television, Hollywood has become a somewhat involuntary historian. The problem lies in how U.S. individuals almost always take centre stage, which has vast implications in society, politics and culture. Even at its most inquisitive, Hollywood feeds audiences a hegemonic view of political and cultural life. Historically, deeply ingrained production and distribution mechanisms have been an obstacle to diversity in practice (a lack of non-white and female directors) and representation (few non-stereotypical roles for non-whites). Hollywood has always been quick to find villains – enemies of the United States and the West at large. As Scott Forsyth argues: Movie-goers have been traumatized enjoyably for years by the destruction of the mighty towers of Western capital, the war coming home from the always vanquished subaltern world, the triumphs of Progress and Empire answered by invasion, barbarism, apocalypse: America destroyed, or almost, again and again, by marauding Arab terrorists, Communists, bloodthirsty drug lords, rogue KGB officers with nuclear bombs, invading aliens. (2005, p. 111) The most recent geopolitical conflict that has got Hollywood’s creative and money engines running is the spread of drug cartel violence, particularly in the

Introduction 7

United States and its southern neighbour, Mexico. The films and television shows discussed in this book, including Breaking Bad, Sicario and Narcos, have perpetuated ethnic and racial stereotypes that connect all Mexican-American and Latino populations to illegal activities. The world order as seen through the eyes of the Trump zeitgeist does not have room for differentiation. Some translates into all: people of colour and Latinos in particular are perceived as interchangeable extras in most cartel narratives, as second-class citizens who probably have connections to the narco underworld. Alongside the distribution of drugs, negative stereotypes about Global South populations run rampant. In particular, Latin American citizens from countries including Colombia and Mexico are stigmatised due to the negative image their home countries have in relation to the drug wars. These processes of stigmatisation affect not only everyday interactions, but also wider policymaking, as the recent discussions around the wall along the U.S.–Mexico border have highlighted. This book is a cultural analysis of key recent Hollywood-centric film and television texts that represent the protagonists, local politics and geopolitics involved in the cartel wars. Rather than a place, Hollywood is a state of mind: a reinforcer of U.S. hegemony; a style of filmmaking; and a production and distribution system (Scott, 2005). Hollywood is also used to describe all that is not “world cinema”, a term that reduces global film production into a binary. As Lucía Nagib explains: However common it has become, the term “world cinema” still lacks a proper, positive definition. Despite its all-encompassing, democratic vocation, it is not usually employed to mean cinema worldwide. On the contrary, the usual way of defining it is restrictive and negative, as “the non-Hollywood cinema”. Needless to say, negation here translates a positive intention to turn difference from the dominant model into a virtue to be rescued from an unequal competition. However, it unwittingly sanctions the American way of looking at the world, according to which Hollywood is the centre and all other cinemas are the periphery. (2006, p. 26) This monograph acknowledges and contests “the American way of looking at the world”. Hollywood cannot be located, and rather than a place or even a network of production powerhouses (movie studios and television networks), Hollywood has come to signify a style and a set of industrialised production practices. Netflix itself, which has produced and distributed a wide variety of cartel-related titles, is a disrupting force in Hollywood. Where Netflix sits as a production and distribution disruptor in the Hollywood ecosystem is still up for debate. This monograph is written at a key juncture in the history of film and television production and distribution, as streaming services gain ground (see Lobato, 2019), new forms of spectatorship emerge and the magnitude of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in local and transnational productions worldwide is still unclear.

8

Introduction

Orientalism in cartel media I often refer to the term “Orientalism”, coined by Palestinian scholar Edward W. Said (1979, 1985) to describe how hegemonic European cultures have represented and conceived of “the Orient” as an exotic, mysterious and strange place. Orientalism is evident in art, public discourse, literature and everyday life. Orientalism is the positioning of Eastern societies and peoples as exotic “Others” to the superior West. The dynamics of Orientalism produce a hierarchy of weakness and strength which “helped to define Europe (or the West) as [the ‘Orient’s’] contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (Said, 1979, pp. 1–2). Media and cultural studies have long used Orientalism to expose imbalances of power in how societies are represented. Within the Orientalism logic, the “Orient” is imagined rather than having a direct correspondence with the real, just like ideas of the Global South and the previously colonised world in Hollywood-centric media are filtered rather than factual. The concept has proven durable, even if it has not been devoid of critics who label it as essentialising – critiques to which Said has responded (1985). Of course, Mexico and other Global South and previously colonised nations discussed in this book do not always fall under the umbrella term of “the Orient”. However, the hierarchies of strength and weakness described by Said are present in how Hollywood-centric media industries represent Latin American countries involved in the global narcotics trade. Within Latin American film and television, the white and mestizo cultural elites often produce Orientalist depictions of Indigenous populations. Mainstream Orientalism has found renewed vigour since 2015, when a Donald J. Trump presidency in the United States became a real possibility. Perhaps no recent political moment has crystallised how people of colour, particularly Mexicans and Central Americans, are discriminated against as Donald Trump’s infamous campaign launch speech on 16 June 2015. He said: When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically. The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems […] When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. (Reilly, 2016) Later, in the third presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016 he said: We’re going to secure the border, and once the border is secured at a later date, we’ll make a determination as to the rest. But we have some bad

Introduction 9

hombres here and we’re going to get them out. Right now, we’re getting the drugs, they’re getting the cash. (Gurdus, 2016) The term “bad hombres” has subsequently been used to refer to the racist position that many in the United States assume when discussing issues such as immigration and refugee rights (Silber Mohamed & Farris, 2020; Smirnova, 2018; Theye & Melling, 2018). With this broad rhetorical stroke Trump became the Orientalist in Chief. In this book, I use the term “bad hombres” to describe the stereotype of the amoral or criminal Brown man. Some of the cartel media texts that I refer to when discussing the term “bad hombres” predates Trump’s speech, but the term encapsulates a discriminatory attitude that permeated U.S.–Mexico relationships for the decades that led to Trump’s election. Indeed, Orientalism was particularly evident in 2020, as the Donald J. Trump presidency wrapped up its first and only term. As journalist Ed Vulliamy, who has long covered the border and the cartel wars, explains: What were lonely desert byways 10 years ago now host traffic jams of reporters and TV crews, as the border becomes a place of humanitarian disaster, main mast of Trump’s re-election campaign. Back then, you had to explain who and what Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and his Sinaloa cartel were. Since that time, we’ve had TV series Narcos ad nauseam, the films Sicario 1 and 2, some wonderful journalism and El Chapo’s trial-as-theatre in New York. (Vulliamy, 2019) Even though Donald J. Trump failed to secure a second term as President of the United States, the shadow of his divisive rhetoric and the strength of Trumpism among far-right groups will likely loom large for years to come. This will be felt in political discourse, media representations and everyday social interactions in the United States and overseas. The Trump presidency might be over, the majority of United States voters might have told the one-term president “You’re fired!”, but the divisiveness and vitriol of the Trump era will take longer to perish. If anything, in a deeply troubled world political extremism is likely to flourish. Misrepresentations and oversimplifications of cultural and historical events in media are far from inconsequential (Brooks & Hébert, 2006; Downing & Husband, 2005; Larson, 2006; Saha, 2018). Instead, they help in the shaping of cultural imaginaries that translate into social relationships, power dynamics and even government policies. For example, Muslims were represented negatively after 9/11, the effects of which are still felt in the everyday life of diasporic communities worldwide (Alsultany, 2012; Shaheen, 2003). Scholars in security studies also compared the threats that cartels and terrorist organisations pose to the United States (Flanigan, 2012). Similarly, the decades-long fear of the Other that has been inscribed in popular discourse surrounding the U.S.–Mexico border has contributed to the electoral approval that Donald Trump’s controversial border wall garnered before and after the 2016 presidential election (Galindo, 2019).

10 Introduction

Even though transnational drug cartels have been present since at least the late 1970s, they now reveal more starkly than ever how the Global South and the Global North interact, and how people of colour, particularly of Latin American origin, are perceived and treated the world over. Historically, the insidious transnational drug trade has crept into every sphere of life in countries including Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines. Cartel culture has even infiltrated religious practices, which transform apocryphal saints into the patrons of cartel members (Maihold & Sauter, 2012). Mexico in particular is currently the site of multiple human rights abuses ranging from torture to forced disappearance, sexual and organ trafficking and murder. The collusion of local and state governments with criminal organisations in places like the Mexican states of Sinaloa (Sánchez Godoy, 2009), Guerrero and Michoacán has often left civilians with nowhere to turn in the face of violence. Their stories deserve to be told.

Book structure: understanding Hollywood’s cartel wars Chapter 1, “How Touch of Evil set the rules for Hollywood cartel cinema”, analyses one of Hollywood’s first forays into cartel territory. Orson Welles’ film Touch of Evil (1958) set the tone for how United States–Mexico border would be represented in future drug trafficking films and television shows. Touch of Evil was instrumental in creating the common tropes of cartel media, in particular the depiction of the border as a dangerous space and the use of brownface to depict characters of Mexican origin. The film established a template that would be reused and adapted, again and again, to tell stories in a way that centred the experience of white protagonists, and reduced Brown characters to hollow caricatures. This chapter also draws a comparison with Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 film Traffic, which echoes many of the stereotypes in Welles’ film. Following this historical precedent, the Chapter 2, “Cartel westerns: The new frontier (South of the border)”, explores the tropes that are transmitted from the classic Hollywood genre of the western to cartel-themed movies and television shows. Among these tropes, the chapter highlights the racialised representation of “the Other” – Indigenous Americans in classic westerns and Mexicans in cartel cinema. The chapter deals with films such as No Country for Old Men (2007), the franchise bloodfest Rambo:Last Blood (2019) and the Arnold Schwarzenegger–starred The Last Stand (2013), among an ever-expanding body of cartel western films. The chapter ends by performing a close analysis of the genre elements in Clint Eastwood’s 2018 film The Mule. Chapter 3, “From Weeds to Ozark: The suburbs, threatened”, explores how two television shows, Showtime’s Weeds (2005–2012) and Netflix’s Ozark (2017–), portray the ways in which Mexican cartels infiltrate American suburban households and criminalise their dwellers. I argue that these reductionist narratives strip white Americans of accountability and instead place blame on people of colour, who “corrupt” otherwise upright citizens. The protagonists

Introduction

11

of both series are framed as victims whose only way to get their piece of the American Dream is becoming part of trafficking networks. Weeds’ Nancy Botwin is a suburban widow who trades marijuana to sustain her family’s lavish lifestyle. Ozark’s Marty Byrde is a hard-working accountant who uses his smarts to launder money for a Mexican cartel. Just as communism is framed as a foreign threat to white American values in shows such as TheAmericans (2013–2018), in Weeds and Ozark the menace comes from “South of the border”, a problematic geopolitical construct particularly in the Trump and post-Trump eras. As stated, the spike in drug-related violence that Mexico has experienced over the past 12 years has been chronicled by a variety of films and TV shows North and South of the border. Since early depictions of the conflict such as Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000) it has been common practice to feature dialogue in Spanish. Even though this could be appreciated as an inclusive industrial practice, such an assumption is deceptive. As Chapter 4, “Queen of the South: Doing linguistic mish-mash and ‘Mexican face’”, argues, Hollywood producers cast actors of diverse nationalities and who have different accents, including Mexican-Americans, to portray Mexicans (such as Puerto Rican Benicio del Toro in Traffic). In titles such as the television show Breaking Bad or the Coens’ No Country for Old Men it seems that any Latino-looking person of colour can do a “Mexican face”. Thus, diversity is not celebrated, but rather is essentialised and manacled by stereotypes. This chapter explores the genealogy of this practice using the example of Queen of the South, a Hollywood remake of the successful Mexican narcotelenovela La Reina del Sur. In this show, the leads are the Brazilian Alice Braga and Portuguese Joaquim de Almeida. “Mexican face” erects a symbolic border wall and does a disservice to Spanish-speaking audiences. Continuing the analysis of contemporary television narratives, Chapter 5, “Walter White and the use of Brown bodies in Breaking Bad”, looks at how white masculinity is embodied by Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad. The show uses Brown bodies as a tool for white characters to define themselves. The chapter looks at how Walter White undergoes his epic transformation into the evil Heisenberg in part through mediatising and using Brown characters as receptacles for his often-violent impulses. Chapter 6, “The Sicario saga and chromatic othering”, argues that Denis Villeneuve’s 2015 film Sicario represented a watershed moment in cartel media. It was an ambitious cinematic feat that lay in the liminal zone between blockbuster and arthouse cinema. However, both Sicario and its sequel Sicario: Day of theSoldado (2018, directed by Stefano Sollima) present a problematic geopolitical reality in which U.S. security forces have practical jurisdiction over foreign territories. These two films are reminiscent of 1980s action cinema in which foreign threats (communism and Islamic fundamentalism in the 1980s) are dealt with by employing paramilitary forces. This chapter looks at how particular stylistic choices including what I call “chromatic othering” mobilise misconceptions about the historical Other. Chapter 7, “Netflix’s Narcos: Cartel media in the age of digital distribution”, makes a case for thinking critically about how streaming platforms historicise

12 Introduction

conflict through texts distributed globally. In 2015, streaming giant Netflix released Narcos, a series that focused on the formation of the Colombian drug cartels. Through three seasons, global audiences witnessed the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar and the Cali Godfathers. In 2018, the series shifted its focus to the Mexican drug cartels, featuring known faces of cartel lore such as the Arellano Félix brothers. This chapter discusses the implications of a global, and perhaps final, retelling of cartel narratives in political and media terms. Victims of the drug wars have criticised both Narcos and Narcos: Mexico for offering limited accounts of cartel violence and being uncritical of the role that Global North countries have played in drug trafficking. Lastly, Chapter 8, “‘El Chapo’ gets the Netflix treatment: Theorising cartel mythologies”, analyses the various televisual and cinematic iterations of the improbable saga of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, considered the most important drug lord in the post-Escobar era. One of the main ethical questions faced by creators, distributors and audiences is whether cartel-themed media glorify drug lords and portray them as Robin Hood–like heroes – figures who fulfil some of the roles in which the state has failed. This chapter explores the mechanisms through which cartel mythologies are created and sustained by presenting famous criminals as a counterweight to a corrupt state apparatus. In this book’s closing pages, the postscript “Cartel media beyond Hollywood” looks at how the research agenda set by this book can be expanded to other geographies and cultural industries. It addresses the continuation of cartel media tropes in, for example, Filipino action cinema, which questions the harsh antidrug policies of the Duterte presidency. The critique offered in this book begs the question: Is self-representation in the context of the cartel wars possible at all, or even commendable? The answer is a resounding yes, as demonstrated by a handful of filmmakers and television producers who have created worlds in which characters go well beyond the stereotype of the “bad hombres”. We can think, for instance, of Amat Escalante’s Heli, a brutal yet contemplative portrait of how drug violence is inescapable for many in rural Mexico and seeps into all spheres of life like dark, pungent water. Cartel media is by no means limited to Hollywood-centric film and television, but also includes rich emerging voices from the Global South, as well as established cultural industries in places like Colombia and Mexico. This book, however, is but a first step in tracing the genealogy of cartel media and identifying common themes, narrative devices, stereotypes and trends in a hegemonic entertainment complex – Hollywood – and its derivatives. With this book, I hope to open a research agenda that can trigger cultural studies and film studies research into cartel media stemming from different parts of the world. The land of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation (Melbourne, Australia), September 2020

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Suggested viewing Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000) No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007) Savages (Oliver Stone, 2012) Heli (Amat Escalante, 2013) The Knick (created by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, 2014–2015) Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, 2015) Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee, 2020)

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14 Introduction https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mexico-drug-cartel-videojalisco-new-generation-weapons-military-cjng-a9626246.html. Flanigan, S. T. (2012). Terrorists next door? A comparison of Mexican drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. Terrorism and Political Violence, 24(2), 279–294. Forsyth, S. (2005). Hollywood reloaded: The film as imperial commodity. Socialist Register, 41(41), 108–123. Fuentes, J. R. & Kelly, R. J. (1999). Drug supply and demand: The dynamics of the American drug market and some aspects of Colombian and Mexican drug trafficking. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 15(4), 328–351. Galindo, S. (2019). Words matter: Representation of Mexican immigrants in newspapers from Mexico and the United States. Migraciones Internacionales, 10. doi:10.33679/rmi.v1i1.2024. García Díaz, T. (2011). El narco como telón de fondo: Fiesta en la madriguera. Amerika, 4. doi:10.4000/amerika.2171. Grillo, I. (2013). Mexican cartels: A century of defying US drug policy. The Brown Journal of World Affairs, 20(1), 253–265. Gurdus, L. (2016, October 19). Trump: ‘We have some bad hombres and we’re going to get them out’. CNBC. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/19/trumpwe-have-some-bad-hombres-and-were-going-to-get-them-out.html. Jiménez Valdez, E. I. (2014). Mujeres, narco y violencia: Resultados de una guerra fallida. Región y sociedad, 26(especial4), 101–128. Larson, S. G. (2006). Media & minorities: The politics of race in news and entertainment. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lobato, R. (2019). Netflix nations: The geography of digital distribution. New York: NYU Press. Maihold, G. & Sauter, R. M. (2012). Capos, reinas y santos-la narcocultura en México. México Interdisciplinario, 2(3), 64–96. Martinez, G. (2019, July 2). The flow of guns from the U.S. to Mexico is getting lost in the border debate. PBS. Retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-flowof-guns-from-the-u-s-to-mexico-is-getting-lost-in-the-border-debate. Nagib, L. (2006). Towards a positive definition of world cinema. In S. Dennison & S. H. Lim (Eds.), Remapping world cinema: Identity, culture and politics in film (pp. 30–37). New York: Wallflower Press; Columbia University Press. Nguyen, V. T. (2020, June 24). Vietnamese lives, American imperialist views, even in ‘Da 5 Bloods’. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/ 06/24/movies/da-5-bloods-vietnam.html. Ordóñez, M. D. (2012). Las “narco telenovelas” colombianas y su papel en la construcción discursiva sobre el narcotráfico en América Latina (Master’s thesis). Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador. Ovalle, L. P. (2005). Las fronteras de la “narcocultura”. In E. Garduño, H. M. Lucero, M. A. Magaña Mancillas, L. P. Ovalle, A. Tapia Landeros, & F. Vizcarra (Eds.), La frontera interpretada: Procesos culturales en la frontera noroeste de México (pp. 117–150). Mexicali, Baja California: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Centro de Investigaciones Culturales-Museo. Ramírez-Pimienta, J. C. (2007). Narcocultura a ritmo norteño: El narcocorrido ante el nuevo milenio. Latin American Research Review, 42(2), 253–261. Ramírez-Pimienta, J. C. (2013). De torturaciones, balas y explosiones: Narcocultura, movimiento alterado e hiperrealismo en el sexenio de Felipe Calderón. A Contracorriente: Una Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos, 10(3), 302–334.

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Reilly, K. (2016, August 31). Here are all the times Donald Trump insulted Mexico. Time. Retrieved from https://time.com/4473972/donald-trump-&/. Saha, A. (2018). Race and the cultural industries. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Said, E. W. (1985). Orientalism reconsidered. Race & Class, 27(2), 1–15. Sánchez Godoy, J. A. (2009). Procesos de institucionalización de la narcocultura en Sinaloa. Frontera norte, 21(41), 77–103. Sanford, V. (2003). Learning to kill by proxy: Colombian paramilitaries and the legacy of Central American death squads, contras, and civil patrols. Social Justice, 30(3), 63–81. Santos, D., Mejías, A. M. V. & Urgelles, I. (2016). Introducción: Lo narco como modelo cultural. Una apropiación transcontinental. Mitologías hoy, 14, 9–23. Scott, A. J. (2005). On Hollywood: The place, the industry. Princeton, MA: Princeton University Press. Shaheen, J. G. (2003). Reel bad Arabs: How Hollywood vilifies a people. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social science, 588(1), 171–193. Silber Mohamed, H. & Farris, E. M. (2020). ‘Bad hombres’? An examination of identities in US media coverage of immigration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(1), 158–176. Smirnova, M. (2018). Small hands, nasty women, and bad hombres: Hegemonic masculinity and humor in the 2016 presidential election. Socius, 4. doi:10.1177/2378023117749380. Theye, K. & Melling, S. (2018). Total losers and bad hombres: The political incorrectness and perceived authenticity of Donald J. Trump. Southern Communication Journal, 83(5), 322–337. Trickey, E. (2018, January 4). Inside the story of America’s 19th-century opiate addiction. The Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ inside-story-americas-19th-century-opiate-addiction-180967673/. Vulliamy, E. (2019, December 8). Back to the border of misery: Amexica revisited 10 years on. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/08/ amexica-revisited-ed-vulliamy-returns-to-us-mexico-borderline.

Films cited Coen, E., & Coen, J. (Directors). (2007). No country for old men [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Vantage, Warner Bros. De Palma, B. (Director). (1989). Casualties of war [Motion picture]. United States: Linson Productions, Columbia Pictures, Linson Entertainment. Eastwood, C. (Director). (2018). The mule [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Escalante, A. (Director). (2013). Heli [Motion picture]. Mexico, Netherlands, Germany, France: Mantarraya Producciones, Tres Tunas, No Dream Cinema. Estrada, L. (Director). (2010). El infierno [Motion picture]. Mexico: Bandidos Films, Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE), Foprocine. Grunberg, A. (Director). (2019). Rambo: Last blood [Motion picture]. United States, Spain, Bulgaria: Lionsgate. Kim, J. (Director). (2013). The last stand [Motion picture]. United States: Lionsgate. Klimov, E. (Director). (1985). Idi i smotri [Motion picture]. Soviet Union: Belarusfilm, Mosfilm. Kubrick, S. (Director). (1987). Full metal jacket [Motion picture]. United Kingdom, United States: Natant, Stanley Kubrick Productions, Warner Bros.

16 Introduction Lee, S. (Director). (2020). Da 5 bloods [Motion picture]. United States: 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, Rahway Road Productions, Netflix. Soderbergh, S. (Director). (2000). Traffic [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico, Germany: Compulsion Inc. Sollima, S. (Director). (2018). Sicario: Day of the soldado [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico: Columbia Pictures, Black Label Media. Spielberg, S. (Director). (1993). Schindler’s list [Motion picture]. United States: Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment. Stone, O. (Director). (1986). Platoon [Motion picture]. United States, United Kingdom: Hemdale, Cinema '84, Cinema 86. Stone, O. (Director). (1989). Born on the fourth of July [Motion picture]. United States, United Kingdom: Ixlan, Universal Pictures. Stone, O. (Director). (2012). Savages [Motion picture]. United States: Ixtlan, Onda Entertainment, Relativity Media. Villeneuve, D. (Director). (2015). Sicario [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico, Hong Kong: Lionsgate, Black Label Media. Welles, O. (Director). (1958). Touch of evil [Motion picture]. United States: Universal International Pictures.

Television shows cited Aguirre, S., & Contreras, C. (Creators). (2017–). El Chapo [Television series]. United States: Netflix, Univisión. Amiel, J., & Begler, M. (Creators). (2014–2015). The knick [Television series]. United States: Anonymous Content. Bernard, C., Brancato, C. ,& Miro, D. (Creators). (2015–2017). Narcos [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Bernard, C., Brancato, C., & Miro, D. (Creators). (2018–). Narcos: Mexico [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Dubuque, B., & Williams, M. (Creators). (2017–) Ozark [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Fortin, M.A., & Miller, J. J. (Creators). (2016–). Queen of the south [Television series]. United States, Mexico, Spain, Malta: Frequency Films, Friendly Films. Gilligan, V. (Creator). (2008–2013). Breaking bad [Television series]. United States: High Bridge Productions, Gran Via Productions, Sony Pictures Television. Kohan, J. (Creator). (2005–2012). Weeds [Television series]. United States: Lions Gate Television. Stopello, R. (Creator). (2011–2019). La reina del sur [Television series]. United States, Mexico, Spain, Colombia: AG Studios, Antena 3. Weisberg, J. (Creator). (2013–2018). The Americans [Television series]. United States: DreamWorks Television.

1

How Touch of Evil set the rules for Hollywood cartel cinema

Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) is perhaps one of the most discussed film noirs in the history of Hollywood, in both film criticism and academic circles. At first panned by most critics and lukewarmly received by audiences, Touch of Evil has garnered a cult status, in part ignited by the film’s relaunch in 1998 with a cut that followed the instructions Welles had left on a memo after the studio, Universal Pictures, screened its cut (Rosenbaum, 2007). The film was subsequently remastered and restored in 2015: a version more in tune with Welles’ vision rather than the studio’s. The setting is the fictional Mexican border town of Los Robles. Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw remarked: “Welles gave one of his most Shakespearean performances as the ageing, corrupt police chief Captain Quinlan in a small U.S. town right on the Mexico border. Charlton Heston plays Vargas, an idealistic Mexican cop who has just married Susan (Janet Leigh), a beautiful American blonde, to the titillated, censorious fascination of everyone around” (2015). The film ranks as one of Welles’ best – a big claim, considering his stature as one of the indispensable auteurs of U.S. cinema and the following he received worldwide by critics, including the Frenchmen André Bazin and François Truffaut. Touch of Evil, however, presents problematic views of the U.S.–Mexico border, narcotics trafficking and race. In this chapter, I argue that the film can be read as a precursor of what I have termed “cartel media”. Touch of Evil was born and bred in Hollywood, and as such it transpires with the stereotypes and cultural misconceptions inherent in the film and television industry’s predominantly white, masculine gaze (Bernardi, 2007; Cripps, 2003; Quinn, 2011). Touch of Evil was instrumental in creating the common tropes of cartel media, in particular the depiction of the border as a dangerous space and the use of brownface. The film established a template that would be reused and adapted, again and again, to tell stories in a way that centred the experience of white protagonists, and reduced Brown characters to hollow caricatures (Boyd, 2007). The opening sequence is perhaps the most talked-about single take in the history of cinema, due to its technical dexterity and the meticulous choreo­ graphy brought to life by director of photography Russell Metty and camera operator John Russell. We begin with a close-up of a pair of hands holding

18 How Touch of Evil set the rules

what looks like a homemade explosive device. The camera shows us a mys­ terious figure planting the bomb in the trunk of a convertible. A middle-aged man and a young woman board the car and drive off. The bomb becomes the “tell-tale heart” of the scene, which is set in the boisterous nightlife of the border town. Welles, a director famous for his perfectionism, shot this scene with clockwork precision. The images are evidently inscribed in the ex­ pressionist and film noir tradition, with the mysterious terrorist reminding us of Fritz Lang’s murderer in M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931). There are street signs in English, showing Los Robles (the literal translation of the imagined location name is “The Oaks”) as a city that has been linguistically and culturally colonised by the United States via sexual and ethylic tourism. Welles played it safe by setting his story in a fictional location, although Los Robles very clearly references Tijuana, long the clichéd site for U.S. debauchery, titillation and eroticism in film and television (Brégent-Heald, 2006; Girven, 1994). We see U.S. servicemen and their female companions, mostly local young women, crossing the street. A man pushes a cart full of flags, trinkets and sombreros. The crane shot then focuses on a young couple on a night out. We later find out that they are the protagonists: the married Mike (Charlton Heston) and Susan (Janet Leigh) Vargas. An old Indigenous woman shepherds some goats. Other than Vargas, who is played by Charlton Heston in brownface, people of colour are nothing more than a touch of exoticism, a decoration, to the scene. We see the car containing the bomb driving past. Henry Mancini’s score signals tension; the misplaced Afro-Cuban percussions (Utterson, 2015) give marching orders to street vendors, city dwellers and more cars. Keep in mind that all of this is revealed in a continuous shot – evidence of Orson Welles’ innovative film­ making. As Andrew Utterson argues, Mancini’s score in the opening sequence exacerbates the exaggerated Latino quality of the setting: “With its distinctive pulse derived from traditional Latin musics – from mambo to mariachi – this opening theme immediately locates the narrative in an ‘alien’ (read non-U.S.) setting” (2015, p. 427). Mancini’s score commits one of the Hollywood sins related to the representation of Latin America: it obviates, or simply ignores, the cultural and aesthetic differences between countries, and between regions within those countries. This is neo-colonial film at its worst. The camera now follows the young couple. He is a tall Brown man, a darkskinned dandy. She is a blonde, a gringa. A small building reads “UNITED STATES CUSTOMS AND IMMIGRATION”. The couple then casually crosses the border on foot after getting their papers checked – an unimaginable scene today, when U.S.–Mexico border crossings are some of the busiest and most tightly secured in the world. We hear an explosion. Boom! The car has been blown to pieces on the U.S. side of the border. The fact that the bomb detonated in the United States strengthens the separation between the civilised United States and the exotic and barbaric Mexico. The deadly lawlessness south of the border has entered the United States.

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This scene features one of the key narrative devices of future cartel cinema: the border is used as a symbolic division – as well as a cultural, legal and political one – that mediates space in significant ways. Rather than an inherent feature of the space on which they are drawn, borders are technologies that turn space into places of inclusion and exclusion. By crossing a border, in­ dividuals suffer a non-material transformation. Through an act as simple as crossing a checkpoint, as the Vargas couple does, the individual is now governed by different legal, moral and ethical laws. The opening sequence is a superbly shot cinematic moment, but also an ex­ ercise in cinematic othering. What follows is a murder mystery that is as pulpy as it is Shakespearean – proof of Welles’ ability to mix genres and sources. As James Naremore puts it, the film is “a brilliant fusion of pulp art with continental so­ phistication; it has all the energetic cruddiness of a Samuel Fuller B picture and all the self-consciousness of the French New Wave” (Naremore, 2015, p. 159). Like many of the film and television shows discussed in this book, Touch of Evil’s artistic and storytelling qualities are notable in spite of its problematic representation and politics. This was Orson Welles’ last Hollywood film and the battle over the final cut is legendary (Rosenbaum, 2007, p. 249). One can appreciate the stylistic and narrative innovations of a text, but decry its mechanisms of representation and its politics. The question, however, is to what extent. The film has long been the subject of critical, academic and cinephile fascination. The script is Paul Monash’s adaptation of Whit Masterson’s novel Badge of Evil. The plot is exemplary of the trashy suspense genre. The bomb that ex­ plodes in the opening sequence kills a U.S. building contractor, Rudy Linnaker. The case forces Mike Vargas to interrupt his honeymoon with Susan and his return to Mexico City, where he is mounting a case against a criminal family, the Grandis. Because the bomb was planted in Mexico but detonated in the United States, Vargas has to lock horns with Captain Hank Quinlan (played by Welles), who is quick to frame a Mexican man for the murder. Even though the plot is simple and, in other hands, would likely have gone unnoticed amongst the myriad film noirs of the time, the director created an atmosphere of sleaziness, suffocation and overall sin. As Vargas goes deeper into the underbelly of Los Robles, he gets in touch – even if momentarily – with his own brutal instincts, his carnality and latent immorality. Welles’ film is sometimes absurdly imprecise in its plot, perhaps as a way of demanding more of its audience. We assume that Vargas and Susan are spending their honeymoon in Los Robles – shot and described as hell on Earth – because Vargas is aware of the influence that the Grandi family has on the narcotics business across the border. Even though the concept of a drug cartel didn’t exist as such at the time, Touch of Evil hints at the transborder and transnational nature of trafficking.

Seedy border tales Welles’ characters go down a deep rabbit hole whenever they cross the border. Los Robles became a stand-in for the cantina-infested Mexican towns in the

20 How Touch of Evil set the rules

popular imaginary, a stereotype that dates back to the days of the violent Mexican Revolution – a world that was later reimagined by Sam Peckinpah’s neo-western The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969). Production designers created a visual world in which Los Robles stands in for what is “uncivilised” from a Western perspective, and what is “underdeveloped” under the culturally hegemonic U.S. gaze. As a critical spectator watching the film in 2020 (and in my case more spe­ cifically, as a Latin American scholar of mestizo heritage, which is the product of colonisation), one can’t help but feel uneasiness at the effort to curate fictional Mexico as a hellhole. Cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha reflects on the themes that circulate in Touch of Evil and the critical readings of the film: the discourses of American cultural colonialism and Mexican dependency, the fear/desire of miscegenation, the American border as cultural signifier of a pioneering, male ‘American’ spirit always under threat from races and cultures beyond the border. (Bhabha, 1983, pp. 21–22) If the contemporary condition is one of fluidity rather than stability, of change rather than stasis, of migration rather than immobility, then Touch of Evil is premonitory. James Naremore echoes Bhabha when stating that: one must observe the degree to which the film has been made to represent an unstable borderland – an actual border between the United States and Mexico, a social border between whites and Latins, and an even more volatile psychological border between civilization and the libido. (Naremore, 2015, p. 170) The ambiguous border setting, however, is also testament to the director’s overall lack of clarity when it came to his political positioning as a filmmaker. This ambiguity is not exclusive to Touch of Evil. Welles’ first film, Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941), which he famously shot in his early twenties, has had multiple readings over the decades: some have argued that Welles’ portrayal of the magnate turned politician (a particularly prescient character in the era of Trumpian politics) is an indictment of capitalist politics; others have used the figure of Charles Foster Kane to exemplify the grandiosity of U.S. capitalist ideals (Bessette, 2017). Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil is also one of the first Hollywood allusions to narcotics trafficking along the U.S.–Mexico border, and certainly the first mainstream one in a time in which studios tended to be cautious (and gen­ erally conservative) when financing films that could be deemed too political. The film is as much a product of Hollywood as it is of Welles’ particular vision as an auteur, as this was initially more of a “job for hire” than a personal artistic exploration. Welles then made the film his and entered a tug-of-war with the studio over the final cut, perhaps once he believed in the project and tried to

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exercise the masculine form of authorship that first made him famous through Citizen Kane (Rollins, 2006). Touch of Evil offers a unidimensional view of the border that has influenced subsequent films and television shows in how it is shown as a strict line that separates spaces of inclusion and exclusion. The crisp black-and-white cinematography in­ deed draws from the film noir tradition, but also separates the brighter U.S. settings from the dark, menacing territory south of the border; as Chapter 6 will elaborate, future cartel cinema shot in colour would show the Global South through a yellow filter, in a concept I call “chromatic othering”. Welles revelled in the visual tra­ shiness of his imagined border town, as Eric M. Krueger wrote in 1972: Touch of Evil is a seedy experience. Orson Welles drags us through the dirt, dust, and garbage of his characters’ existence; and therein lies his mise en scene: a world where filth, garbage, and disarray become metaphors for evil-swirling in the funhouse, the dream, and the delirium. (p. 57) Touch of Evil is the seminal example of cartel cinema. The film established the politics of inclusion and exclusion that transpire in most Hollywood cartel media, as well as some archetypical characters. Six decades after its original release, Touch of Evil’s themes and mechanisms of representation find echoes in more recent Hollywood cartel media. Since the early years of Hollywood, people of colour were relegated to films about crime or social conflict, as Mary C. Beltrán recalls: “Multiethnic cityscapes are not new to Hollywood; their roots stretch back to the gangster films of the 1920s and 1930s and to the social problem films of the 1940s” (2005, p. 51). I don’t use the word “seminal” lightly: I am aware of its masculine con­ notations and use it knowingly. Touch of Evil is hypermasculine in its testosterone-fuelled cinematic impetus and its film-noir machismo, where female characters have minimal development and are functional rather than emotionally complex. Touch of Evil is also indicative of a gender imbalance both in terms of the stories being told and in who gets to tell them. These, of course, are issues present in the U.S. entertainment conglomerate at large (Willis, 1997). Only a handful of the Hollywood cartel media analysed in this book tell stories of women or are told by women. Even though the film is by all means an artistic and industrial accomplishment, it is problematic in its depiction of Mexicans, the border, accountability and crime. Touch of Evil set the tone for many of the stereotypes and approaches to the Other that I discuss in this book. Welles did not attempt to offer a truthful re­ presentation of the U.S.–Mexico contrast, but a version of Mexico that was grimier and darker than life itself. As Claudio Sánchez explains: Welles, in other words, didn’t set out to make a documentary about the border. Besides, Universal Studios didn’t want him to shoot anywhere near Mexico. So he settled on Venice, Calif., because, as he later explained, “it looked convincingly rundown and decayed”. (2011)

22 How Touch of Evil set the rules

The fact that many consider Touch of Evil a cinematic masterpiece gives a sort of blank cheque to future directors to represent the border, and Mexico, as a seedy, exotic, sexualised and/or dangerous place. The cinematic legacy of Touch of Evil, and its depiction of the border, is broad and enduring. Examples of more recent cartel media tell stories of characters whose fates change for the worse when entering Mexico. The 2019 U.S. remake of Gerardo Naranjo’s powerful 2011 film Miss Bala is an example of how a visit to Mexico puts characters in a state of vulnerability from which they can never recover. The 2019 Hollywood version tells the story of a Mexican-American young woman who, while on a night out at a Tijuana nightclub, finds herself caught in the crossfire of a narco turf war. As fate would have it, she is forced to become a mule for the cartels. The U.S. version of Miss Bala is symptomatic of the state of anxiety around border relations prevalent in the Trump era. As Chris Vognar wrote in The New York Times when Miss Bala (2019) was released: Based on these movies and shows, which coincide with the current political debate over a wall between Mexico and the United States, Americans might think nothing but death unfolds on the border. Violence, after all, sells, much as sex does. It’s hard to find the vitality and color of life on the border amid all the onscreen gunfire and despair. It takes some digging to find alternatives to Hollywood’s view. (2019) The tone set by Touch of Evil has cast a shadow not only over melodrama, but also over other Hollywood formulaic genres that have entered cartel terri­ tory, so to speak. The slacker comedy We’re the Millers (Thurber, 2013) follows four misfits (played by the unlikely cast of Jennifer Aniston, Emma Roberts, Jason Sudeikis and Will Poulter) in need of either money or ex­ citement. They pretend to be a family on holiday to Mexico, where they will retrieve a large marijuana cargo to sell back in the United States. Once they cross the border in a camper van, into the town of Nogales, Sonora, they encounter a feast of cinematic tropes: heavily moustached Brown men, cacti fields, abandoned cars and rundown haciendas. At one point they are stopped by a corrupt policeman, played by Puerto Rican actor Luis Guzmán in yet another case of “Mexican face” (a concept I develop in Chapter 4). This cop wants a bribe: either money or sex with one of the men in the group. The scene is racist and homophobic at once, an indication of how white, straight and shameless slacker films can be. Guzmán is often hired to play Latino characters, regardless of their precise ethnicity. For example, he played Colombian drug lord José Rodríguez Gacha in the Neflix series Narcos (Bernard, Brancato, & Miro, 2015–2017); coincidentally, Rodríguez Gacha was nicknamed “El mexicano” (The Mexican). The aesthetics of cartel landscapes are well established (Rojas-Sotelo, 2014) and move across genres. The logic that Mexico equals danger is not exclusive to the border, or to cartel-related films. Hollywood has depicted the tourist city of Los Cabos,

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which features some of the most expensive beach resorts in the world, as a sexy getaway where everything goes, and where U.S. tourists are the hegemonic culture, being serviced by the locals. These films stink of colonialism. The Farrelly brothers’ comedy, The Heartbreak Kid (Farrelly & Farrelly, 2007), takes the protagonist (Ben Stiller) and his bride to a honeymoon in Mexico. From then on, every single racist cliché is displayed, including “funny” mariachis and an end credits scene in which a female character has sex with a donkey. The first Sex and the City movie (2008) takes the female protagonists to a beach resort after one of them, Carrie Bradshaw, was jilted at the altar. Her friend, Charlotte, drinks some water from the shower and gets sick. The film jokes about how unsanitary Mexico is. The Matador is a 2005 film featuring Pierce Brosnan as a decadent hitman, in which the ultramodern Mexico City is nevertheless depicted as a shady hellhole. The list goes on. On the other hand, Hollywood representations of the border are both replicated or contested by local productions and narcocultura texts (Cabañas, 2014) such as the videohome industry: B-movies that tell stories of death, riches and redemption in the cartel world (Rashotte, 2015).

Charlton Heston doing brownface in dark, exotic, dangerous Mexico Touch of Evil is the precursor of brownface in cartel cinema. Like blackface, brownface has a long and infamous history in U.S. cultural industries and practices ranging from comedy (Pérez, 2016) to dance (McMains, 2001) and of course film. Brownface refers to the use of white actors to represent people of colour, particularly Latin Americans. In Chapter 4, I will discuss how cartel media often uses non-Mexican actors who pass as Mexicans in a media and cultural process that I call “doing Mexican face”. There is a sense of un­ canniness when Hollywood producers ignore cultural and linguistic nuance, and characters are almost authentic – but not quite. A recent example comes to mind: Brazilian actor Wagner Moura’s portrayal of the Colombian drug lord, Pablo Escobar, in the Netflix show Narcos, which demands a huge suspension of disbelief from Spanish speakers. During the production of Touch of Evil, Charlton Heston used makeup to darken his skin. He also sported a thin moustache, just like the stars of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema: actors such as Mauricio Garcés, Jorge Negrete, Pedro Infante and the comic genius Tin Tan. Welles’ team provided Heston with all the signifiers of heterosexual Mexican masculinity at the time, but rather than a characterisation, his portrayal comes across as a failed attempt at cultural camouflage. The casting of Heston as Mike Vargas could be read as what Bhabha calls “mimicry”. Bhabha argues that mimicry characterises a mode of colonial discourse which is “constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” (1984, p. 126). He observes a continual oscillation between

24 How Touch of Evil set the rules

“mimicry – a difference that is almost nothing but not quite – to menace – a difference that is almost total but not quite” (1984, p. 132). And he cites Jacques Lacan in this connection: “It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled – exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare” (1984, p. 125). Heston’s characterisation of Vargas is almost but not quite Mexican, and as such is menacing in its cultural uncanniness. Just like Heston’s Vargas in Touch of Evil, Benicio del Toro’s character in Traffic is almost like a Mexican but not quite. His accent and mannerisms are off. Here, histrionic mimicry transpires as colonial discourse. Offscreen, it is noteworthy that the protagonist Mike Vargas was played by a Caucasian actor with politics as conservative as Charlton Heston’s. Donald E. Pease remarks that by asking Charlton Heston to do brownface in playing the heroic Mike Vargas, the director overlaid the symbolic significance of the actor’s roles in westerns and other narratives in which white pioneers displace Indigenous and Mexican populations, “as Buffalo Bill in the 1953 film Pony Express; as William Clark in The Far Horizons, Universal Studio’s 1955 ren­ dition of the Lewis and Clark expedition; as a cattleman who led a fight with Indians and Mexicans over water rights in The Big Country released the same year as Touch of Evil” (2001, p. 85). The contemporary equivalent to this blatant cultural appropriation would be alleged anti-Semite Mel Gibson (Foxman & Gerstenfeld, 2006; Lawler, 2016) playing a Holocaust survivor. Pease concludes that even though Orson Welles’ personal politics might have been progressive when it came to U.S.–Mexico relations and the injustices committed at the border, his choice of Heston as Vargas over­ shadowed his own political position. He concludes: “In projecting an image of Mexicanness that bore no resemblance to any of the actual Mexican actors in the film, Charlton Heston had substituted for Mexican identity a look to which no actual Mexican could conform” (Pease, 2001, p. 86). Heston, who later in life was an outspoken conservative and National Rifle Association supporter (Melzer, 2012; Raymond, 2006), became the epitome of the ci­ nematic archetype of the Mexican good cop: someone whose moral ideals are so high that he can resist the temptation of corruption and sacrifice his personal safety for the greater good. But Heston’s Mexicanness was a simulation, an attempt at mimicry rather than authenticity. Touch of Evil is far from providing Mexicans with a voice. Instead, it strips the chance of self-representation from their hands.

Mike Vargas and the “lawful cop” trope Did Welles subvert the roles of the United States and Mexico in his film? Jack Beckham argues that Touch of Evil is revolutionary in how it flips the roles of the Mexican and U.S. cops. The Whit Masterson novel on which the film is based does not set the action at the border. That decision belongs to the

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scriptwriter, Paul Monash, and to Welles. Beckham contends that the film is progressive in its politics, arguing: Vargas explodes the American-held myths that put the United States in the dominant position of the U.S.–Mexico binary: Vargas is a legal border crosser that repudiates the stereotype of Mexican as illegal, assists with the self-destruction of the rhetoric of Anglo superiority, and unravels the notion of superior American nationalism by adhering to higher standards of law enforcement than do his American counterparts. (2005, p. 134) This statement is partially accurate. In the morally decadent Mexico of Welles’ vision, Charlton Heston’s Mike Vargas is indeed the exception to the rule: he is the only uncorrupted, upright Mexican (Figure 1.1). The rest are “bad hombres” and tricksters trying to take advantage of the United States, its ideals and way of life. The fact that Mike Vargas is married to a U.S. woman should not go unnoticed. It is either as if the film judges him civilised enough to marry into the country, or as if marrying a Caucasian woman will civilise him. However, the fact that he is “good” derives from his following of the law and from playing things by the book. Rather than “good” in the moral or even ethical sense, Vargas is “lawful” – a fact that suggests the film’s conservative politics, as well as the conservative and hypermasculine view of U.S. film noir at large, where the qualifications of “good” and “bad” are dictated by the extent to which characters act within legality (Abbott, 2002; Crooks, 1994; Krutnik, 1991). Across the decades, the archetypical “good” Mexican cop character has made appearances in other cartel media and texts depicting race relationships at the border, ranging from Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2001), which I discuss in detail later in this chapter (Figure 1.2), to the supernatural-themed television series Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (2020–), in which a Mexican-American LAPD

Figure 1.1 Charlton Heston (left) as Mike Vargas, a good Mexican cop amongst a horde of “bad hombres” in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958).

26 How Touch of Evil set the rules

officer, Tiago Vega (Figure 1.3), is torn between serving the law and defending his criminal brother. Tiago is also in love with a Caucasian woman who turns him into a more “civilised”, gentle man, much as Susan does to Mike Vargas. The “lawful cop” trope is a constant in Hollywood drug crime cinema. Black director Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day (2001), for instance, follows Jack, a rookie white cop played by Ethan Hawke in his first day with a new partner, Alonzo Harris, a rugged Black cop played by Denzel Washington. As the duo journeys the streets of multicultural Los Angeles, they bump into all sorts of coloured menaces to society: Mexican thugs covered in tattoos; Black dealers infecting the lives of fellow Angelenos. Antoine Fuqua, one of the most consistent Black voices in recent Hollywood cinema, offers a brutal assessment of race relations in con­ temporary Los Angeles, highlighting how whiteness allows the privilege of holding oneself to a higher moral standard. Hawke’s character soon realises that his idealistic view of the rule of law, the stuff he learnt at the police academy, does not play out on the streets. Jack realises that Alonzo bends the rules often, is in trouble with the Russian mafia and sometimes keeps money from drug busts. Jack is the white cop trying not to get corrupted by the seasoned Black officer. The film’s racial politics are often contradictory and highly allegorical, as Jared Sexton (2009) identifies: Washington, for his part as Detective Alonzo Harris, veritably embodies the dark side of contemporary urban law enforcement, cast as an unscrupulous rogue cop whose singular ferociousness and ultimately incompetent scheming seems to absorb the corruption of the entire Los Angeles Police Department, highlighting and absolving a racist city power structure in one breathtaking gesture: in other words, living the nightmare of unchecked (white) police power and purging the (racial) terror that such impunity necessarily produces through his spectacularly violent death. (p. 46) In the same vein, two films directed by David Ayer, scriptwriter for Training Day, come to mind. This pair of films reinforces the idea that intercultural and interracial interaction at border states often leads to mayhem. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña star in End of Watch (2012), which follows two police officers who are upright law enforcers and have to face the brutality of the Mexican cartel cells spread across Los Angeles’ multicultural landscape. Ayer’s next film, Sabotage (2014), brings together a group of Hollywood tough men including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Worthington and Joe Manganiello as DEA operatives who bust a cartel safe house and are later hunted one by one. Like Training Day and End of Watch, this film sees law enforcers being threatened by the menace from south of the border.

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From Welles’ Touch of Evil to Soderbergh’s Traffic: the genealogy of Hollywood cartel cinema Alongside Touch of Evil, Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 film Traffic certainly re­ mains one of the foundational texts for Hollywood cartel media two decades after it was released. If we were to trace the family tree of Hollywood cartel cinema, there would be a direct line from Touch of Evil to Traffic. The simi­ larities between how the two films depict the border and binational relations have not gone unnoticed by film scholars. They are both films that super­ ficially seem politically courageous – progressive, even – but that reveal

Figure 1.2 The Mike Vargas archetype is followed by Benicio del Toro’s character in Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 film Traffic. He plays Javier Rodriguez, an honest Tijuana cop caught in the crossfire of the cartel wars.

Figure 1.3 The good Mexican cop archetype embodied by Tiago Vega (Daniel Zovatto) in the television series Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (2020).

28 How Touch of Evil set the rules

problematic approaches to race and the representation of the Other if one scratches even a little under the surface. Traffic was directed by the industry’s wunderkind: he was just 26 when his debut feature, Sex, Lies and Videotape, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1989, and Traffic was his tenth feature at the age of 37. He would go on to receive dual Best Director nominations for Traffic and Erin Brockovich at the 2001 Oscars, which gave the film an air of sociopolitical validity. Because Soderbergh came from indie cinema and was already an inter­ national festival darling, Traffic audiences were perhaps predisposed to read the film as truthful. Two other factors aided this. One was the fact that Erin Brockovich was an activist film – or at least a pioneering Hollywood film about environmental politics – which hung a tag of “serious film­ maker” on Soderbergh. The other factor is Traffic’s documentary-style filmmaking. The plot is intricate, dealing with addiction in the United States and trafficking and corruption in Mexico. We get acquainted with Washington politicians, corrupt Mexican military, U.S. addicts and a good share of “bad hombres”. The camera is constantly moving. The grain, or visual texture, of the film explodes as the narrative gets grittier and grittier on the Mexican side of the border. As Aaron Baker explains, “Soderbergh used handheld camera, available light, and the appearance of improvisa­ tional performance in an attempt to present a realistic story about illegal drugs. He prepared by analyzing two political films made in such a realist style, Battle of Algiers (1966) and Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)” (2011, p. 19). In Traffic, Mexico is depicted as grimly and unfairly as it was in Touch of Evil. The film was part of the “important film” or “social issue” wave of the late 1990s and early 2000s: films made mostly by independent filmmakers and that dealt with pressing political issues. It is noteworthy that no Hollywood or television film did for Colombia what Traffic did for Mexico when the South American country was embroiled in a vast network of corruption and money connected to cocaine trafficking (Kenney, 2007). Colombia has historically been much more open than Mexico to receive U.S. military and financial aid to face the cartels. The closest interrogation of the cocaine trade from Colombia into the United States came via the Michael Mann television production Miami Vice (1984–1990), which Mann adapted to film in 2006. The television series has been read as a highly stylised and visually excessive text (Rutsky, 1988; Schwichtenberg, 1986) in which whiteness is protected from external threats at all costs (Stratton, 2009). Traffic showed the cartels as the main threat to the United States, just a year before 9/11 would shift the film industry’s focus to Islamic terrorism. Jack Beckham writes: “No one would argue that Soderbergh advances Mexico as lawless. In fact, it is as if he takes great pains just to do so. From the opening scene, the audience is faced with smugglers who are blatantly subverting the law” (2005, p. 139). The depiction of the Mexican network of corruption in Traffic touches on all levels of government, including an army general visiting a government office in Mexico City. This is eerily premonitory of the 2020

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arrest of Salvador Cienfuegos, who served as Mexico’s defence minister and was charged by United States authorities with “participating in a wideranging heroin and cocaine smuggling plot and accused of using his position to help a notorious Mexican drug cartel in exchange for bribes” (Hurtado, 2020). Cienfuegos’ sudden and for many unexpected arrest sent ripples through all levels of government in Mexico, and caused tension between Mexican and United States diplomats. Cienfuegos was eventually sent back to Mexico to be trialled in his home country, a surprising diplomatic and judicial move that was seen as a victory for the AMLO presidency in Mexico. Even though Steven Soderbergh could be considered an enthusiast of Latin American politics and the dissemination of the region’s history through film, having even shot an epic two-film project in 2008 on the life of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, in his earlier film Traffic “Latin America remains elusive, rarified, mediated” (Acevedo-Muñoz, 2018). As happens with genre and stylistic influences in media, the legacy of Touch of Evil and Traffic has transcended borders and languages. For example, two recent Netflix shows, produced with U.S. money and made possible with Mexican talent, also show how border crossing determines a person’s fate in the context of the cartel wars. One show, Yankee, is a Netflix production about a man who is fleeing the police in Arizona and crosses the border into Mexico. He ends up working for the cartels, using drones to move their merchandise. Meanwhile, El Recluso (The Inmate, 2018 –), co-produced by the Spanishlanguage U.S. media powerhouse Telemundo and by Netflix, is an adaptation of the Argentine television series El Marginal. The series tells the story of Lázaro Mendoza, a former U.S. Marine of Mexican descent. Mendoza works as a bodyguard for a prominent U.S. politician who is secretly embroiled with dan­ gerous Mexican criminal organisations. When his boss’s daughter is kidnapped, Mendoza enters a Mexican prison where she is being held by a powerful criminal boss (masterfully played by Mexican actor Luis Felipe Tovar). As the first season progresses, the spectator grows aware that Dante Pardo, or “Diente” (“Tooth”) as the other inmates know him, could easily escape if he revealed his true, hege­ monic U.S. identity. The series subtext divides the world into first- (U.S.) and second-class global citizens (Mexicans), pretty much as Touch of Evil did at Hollywood cartel cinema’s moment of inception.

Conclusion Touch of Evil has been widely discussed by critics and scholars; but in this chapter I have singled out elements of the film that filter through into what is now Hollywood cartel cinema and television. These elements include the representation of the U.S.–Mexico border as a symbolic space of inclusion and exclusion in which the proverbial line in the sand sepa­ rates “civilisation” and “barbarity”; the rule of law and lawlessness; the use of brownface as a deceptive industry practice that pretends to work to­ wards diversity; the trope of the “good cop” in drug trafficking narratives;

30 How Touch of Evil set the rules

and the mish-mash of Latin American cultural expressions that pass as authentically Mexican. I have also drawn a comparison between Touch of Evil and the 2000 Oscarwinner Traffic, singling out both texts as watershed examples of how Hollywood has dealt with the representation and history of narcotics traf­ ficking from Mexico. This discussion permeates the rest of this book as I examine texts such as the cartel westerns The Last Stand, No Country for Old Men, The Mule and Rambo: Last Blood; the television series Weeds, Ozark, Queen of the South, Breaking Bad, the Narcos franchise and El Chapo; and the Sicario film series. These examples reveal how cartel media is transnational and translatable, and how the ongoing many-headed conflict is, and will continue to be, source material for profitable and diverse media texts.

Suggested viewing Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000) Training Day (Antoine Fuqua, 2001) End of Watch (David Ayer, 2012) Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (created by Jack Logan, 2020–).

References Abbott, M. (2002). The street was mine: White masculinity in hardboiled fiction and film noir. New York: Springer. Acevedo-Muñoz, E. R. (2018). “Me mirabas”: Steven Soderbergh’s Latin America. Mise au Point: Cahiers de l’Association Française des Enseignants et Chercheurs en Cinéma et Audiovisuel, 11. Retrieved from https://journals.openedition.org/map/3043. Baker, A. (2011). Steven Soderbergh. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Beckham, J. M. (2005). Border policy/border cinema: Placing Touch of Evil, The Border, and Traffic in the American imagination. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 33(3), 130–141. Beltrán, M. C. (2005). The new Hollywood racelessness: Only the fast, furious (and multiracial) will survive. Cinema Journal, 44(2), 50–67. Bernardi, D. (Ed.). (2007). The persistence of whiteness: Race and contemporary Hollywood cinema. London: Routledge. Bessette, E. (2017). Mulvey and Trump on Citizen Kane. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 15(4), 410–414. Bhabha, H. K. (1983). The other question…. Screen, 24(6), 18–36. Bhabha, H. (1984). Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse. October, 28, 125–133. Boyd, S. C. (2007). Drug films, justice, and nationhood. Contemporary Justice Review, 10(3), 263–282. Bradshaw, P. (2015, July 10). Touch of Evil review – brilliant noir drama restored to Welles’s vision. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/film/ 2015/jul/09/touch-of-evil-review-orson-welles.

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Brégent-Heald, D. (2006). The tourism of titillation in Tijuana and Niagara Falls: Crossborder tourism and Hollywood films between 1896 and 1960. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association/Revue de la Société historique du Canada, 17(1), 179–203. Cabañas, M. A. (2014). Imagined narcoscapes: Narcoculture and the politics of representation. Latin American Perspectives, 41(2), 3–17. Cripps, T. (2003). Classic Hollywood, classic whiteness. The Journal of American History, 90(1), 310–311. Crooks, R. (1994). Retro noir. Future noir: Body Heat, Blade Runner, and neoconservative paranoia. Film and Philosophy, 1, 105–110. Foxman, A., & Gerstenfeld, M. (2006). Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: Legitimizing anti-semitism. Post-Holocaust and Antisemitism, 44. Retrieved from https://jcpa.org/article/ mel-gibsons-the-passion-of-the-christ-legitimizing-anti-semitism/. Girven, T. (1994). Hollywood’s heterotopia: U.S. cinema, the Mexican border and the making of Tijuana. Travesia, 3(1–2), 93–133. Hurtado, P. (2020). Mexico ex-military chief charged in U.S. with aiding cartel. Bloomberg. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-16/ mexico-s-ex-defense-minister-charged-by-u-s-in-narcotics-plot. Kenney, M. (2007). The architecture of drug trafficking: Network forms of organisation in the Colombian cocaine trade. Global Crime, 8(3), 233–259. Krueger, E. M. (1972). “Touch of Evil”: Style expressing content. Cinema Journal, 12(1), 57–63. Krutnik, F. (1991). In a lonely street: Film noir, genre, masculinity. New York, London: Routledge. Lawler, M. G. (2016). Sectarian catholicism and Mel Gibson. Journal of Religion & Film, 8(1), article 9. Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol8/iss1/9/. McMains, J. (2001). Brownface: Representations of Latin-ness in dancesport. Dance Research Journal, 33(2), 54–71. Melzer, S. (2012). Gun crusaders: The NRA’s culture war. New York: NYU Press. Naremore, J. (2015). The magic world of Orson Welles. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Pease, D. E. (2001). Borderline justice/states of emergency: Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. CR: The New Centennial Review, 1(1), 75–105. Pérez, R. (2016). Brownface minstrelsy: “José Jiménez,” the civil rights movement, and the legacy of racist comedy. Ethnicities, 16(1), 40–67. Quinn, E. (2011). Sincere fictions: The production cultures of whiteness in late 1960s Hollywood. The Velvet Light Trap, 67(1), 3–13. Rashotte, R. (2015). Narco cinema: Sex, drugs, and banda music in Mexico’s B-filmography. New York: Springer. Raymond, E. (2006). From my cold, dead hands: Charlton Heston and American politics. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. Rojas-Sotelo, M. L. (2014). Narcoaesthetics in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States: Death narco, narco nations, border states, narcochingadazo? Latin American Perspectives, 41(2), 215–231. Rollins, B. (2006). “Some kind of a man”: Orson Welles as Touch of Evil’s masculine auteur. The Velvet Light Trap, 57(1), 32–41. Rosenbaum, J. (2007). Discovering Orson Welles. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

32 How Touch of Evil set the rules Rutsky, R. L. (1988). Visible sins, vicarious pleasures: Style and vice in “Miami Vice”. SubStance, 17(1), 77–82. Sanchez, C. (2011, August 8). On location: ‘Touch of Evil’s’ border showdown. NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2011/08/09/139152265/on-location-touch-ofevils-border-showdown. Schwichtenberg, C. (1986). Sensual surfaces and stylistic excess: The pleasure and politics of Miami Vice. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10(3), 45–65. Sexton, J. (2009). The ruse of engagement: Black masculinity and the cinema of policing. American Quarterly, 61(1), 39–63. Stratton, J. (2009). Michael Mann’s Miami Vice: Protecting white America in the 1980s. Television & New Media, 10(2), 195–215. Stubbs, J. C. (1985). The evolution of Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil” from novel to film. Cinema Journal, 24(2), 19–39. Utterson, A. (2015). Crossing lines: The sound of the border in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 32(5), 426–436. Vognar, C. (2019, January 31). When American filmmakers try to cross the border. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/movies/ mexico-border-movies.html. Willis, S. (1997). High contrast: Race and gender in contemporary Hollywood film. Durham, London: Duke University Press.

Films cited Ayer, D. (Director). (2012). End of watch [Motion picture]. United States: Exclusive Media Group, Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films (EFO Films). Ayer, D. (Director). (2014). Sabotage [Motion picture]. United States: Open Road Films, QED International, Crave Films. Coen, E., & Coen, J. (Directors). (2007). No country for old men [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Vantage, Warner Bros. Costa-Gavras (Director). (1969). Z [Motion picture]. France, Argelia: Valoria Films, Reggane Films, Office National pour le Commerce et l’Industrie Cinématographique (ONCIC). Eastwood, C. (Director). (2018). The mule [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Farrelly, B., & Farrelly, P. (Directors). (2007). The heartbreak kid [Motion picture]. United States: DreamWorks, Radar Pictures, Davis Entertainment. Fuqua, A. (Director). (2001). Training day [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures. Grunberg, A. (Director). (2019) Rambo: Last blood [Motion picture]. United States, Spain, Bulgaria: Lionsgate. Hopper, J. (Director). (1953). Pony express [Motion picture]. United States: Nat Holt Productions. Kim, J. (Director). (2013) The last stand [Motion picture]. United States: Lionsgate. King, M. P. (Director). (2008). Sex and the city [Motion picture]. United States: New Line Cinema, Home Box Office (HBO), Darren Star Productions. Lang, F. (Director). (1931). M – Eine stadt sucht einen mörder [Motion picture]. Germany: Nero-Film AG. Maté, R. (Director). (1955). The far horizons [Motion picture]. United States: Pine-Thomas Productions.

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Peckinpah, S. (Director). (1969). The wild bunch [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros./Seven Arts. Pontecorvo, G. (Director). (1966). The battle of Algiers [Motion picture]. Argelia, Italy: Casbah Film, Casbah Film, Igor Film. Shepard, R. (Director). (2005). The Matador [Motion picture]. Ireland, Mexico, Germany, United States: Stratus Film Co., DEJ Productions, Equity Pictures Medienfonds GmbH & Co. Soderbergh, S. (Director). (2000). Erin Brockovich [Motion picture]. United States: Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Jersey Films. Soderbergh, S. (Director). (2000). Traffic [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico, Germany: Compulsion Inc. Sollima, S. (Director). (2018). Sicario: Day of the Soldado [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico: Columbia Pictures, Black Label Media. Thurber, R. M. (Director). (2013). We’re the Millers [Motion picture]. United States, United Kingdom: New Line Cinema, Newman/Tooley Films. Villeneuve, D. (Director). (2015). Sicario [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico, Hong Kong: Lionsgate, Black Label Media. Welles, O. (Director). (1958). Touch of evil [Motion picture]. United States: Universal International Pictures. Welles, O. (Director). (1941). Citizen Kane [Motionpicture]. United States: RKO Radio Pictures. Wyler, W. (Director). (1958). The big country [Motion picture]. United States: Anthony Productions, Worldwide Productions.

Television shows cited Aguirre, S., & Contreras, C. (Creators). (2017–). El Chapo [Television series]. United States: Netflix, Univisión. Bernard, C., Brancato, C., & Miro, D. (Creators). (2015–2017). Narcos [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Dubuque, B., & Williams, M. (Creators). (2017–). Ozark [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Fortin, M. A., & Miller, J. J. (Creators). (2016–). Queen of the south [Television series]. United States, Mexico, Spain, Malta: Frequency Films, Friendly Films. Gilligan, V. (Creator). (2008–2013). Breaking bad [Television series]. United States: High Bridge Productions, Gran Via Productions, Sony Pictures Television. Kohan, J. (Creator). (2005–2012). Weeds [Television series]. United States: Lionsgate Television. Logan, J. (Creator). (2020–). Penny dreadful: City of angels [Television series]. United States: Desert Wolf Productions, Showtime. Ortega, S. (Creator). (2016–). El marginal [Television series]. Argentina: TV Pública, Underground Contenidos. Ortega, S. (Creator). (2018–). El recluso [Television series]. Mexico: Telemundo, Netflix. Osorno, D. E. (Creator). (2019–). Yankee [Television series]. Mexico: Argos, Netflix. Yerkovich, A. (Creator). (1984–1990). Miami vice [Television series]. United States: Michael Mann Productions, Universal Television.

2

Cartel Westerns The new frontier (South of the border)

The Western is one of the foundational genres of Hollywood-style film­ making. Since the early twentieth century, the mythologies associated with the American West have captivated filmmakers and audiences alike and projected an idealised vision of the United States locally and in overseas markets. Even though the genre is not currently exclusive to Hollywood filmmakers and the English-speaking world, it is, like the gangster film, deeply embedded in what is commonly described as “American”. As a genre, the Western has worked as a prism through which the preoccupations, ethical crisis and ideas of the historical past in the American consciousness are reflected on the big screen. The Western is a genre that refuses to die, mutating instead and finding ways to speak to contemporary audiences through film and television. The themes of “outlaw culture” and “gunslinger violence” are updated, for in­ stance, in the biker television drama Sons of Anarchy, which Castleberry reads as indicative of post-9/11 sentiment (2014, p. 269). The show Yellowstone (Linson & Sheridan, 2018–), starring Kevin Costner, tells the story of a white ranching family and its conflict with both developers and Native Americans over the land. The show was created by Taylor Sheridan, who penned the script for Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015), a key cartel cinema film that also deals with symbolical and political borders. Another notable example of the reimagined Western is the television show Breaking Bad (Bernhardt, 2019), which is further discussed in Chapter 5. The Western continues to permeate popular culture through direct and indirect references, in Hollywood and other cultural industries (Hanley, 2020). In the current geopolitical juncture, when the message out of the echelons of power in Washington is that the U.S.–Mexico border needs to be protected from the horde of migrants arriving from the Global South – and from Mexico and Central America in particular – the Western has re-located the frontier. In classic Westerns cowboys parted the proverbial waters so civilisation could tame the natural and savage world. In contemporary Westerns set in the world of drug trafficking, it is this already settled civilisation – white, Protestant and entitled – that needs to be protected at all costs. This chapter discusses what I call cartel Westerns, a subgenre which borrows heavily from classic Westerns but sets the action in another sort of frontier which is geopolitical rather than

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35

ideological: the U.S.–Mexico border. In cartel Westerns, uncivilised humanity is represented by people of colour who are judged and represented as a threat to the idealised American way of life. In cartel Westerns, small idyllic com­ munities are often faced with a menace coming from “South of the border”. I will argue that the cartel Western mirrors the rise of Trump and of far-right politics in Western democracies. As stated, cartel Westerns can trace their thematic genealogy back to the early days of cinema. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery inaugurated a genre that would permeate ideas of heroism, nationhood and the rule of law in the decades to come. With the popularisation of the Western also came a catalogue of cinematic tropes that included not only particular aesthetics such as wide lenses to encapsulate untameable landscapes, but also reductionist portrayals of race and gender. The Western became an ample canvas in which male European settlers used violence to colonise the en­ vironment and its people. Both Native Americans and people of Mexican origin – some of whom lived in the modern-day United States at a time when states including Texas and California were, in fact, Mexican territory (Klein, 1996) – are often seen as the barbaric Other. Rather than pious, bucolic characters, non-white background characters are often portrayed as an angry mob; and very few texts actually give such characters any markers of in­ dividuality or a character arc. They are the savage enemy, or the brute that needs to be tamed and civilised, or the mystic who reveals some ancient wisdom to the white settler. As Jane Hanley writes, Westerns help define how we historicise the encounter of European settlers and the original owners of the land that is now America: Westerns are closely linked to the way we visualise the past, and how imaginaries of spatial and ethnic frontiers are recast at different moments through the specific narrative and aesthetic effects produced out of the convergences of individual cinematic projects. It has always been a genre which relies on location and environment. It often privileges visual and spatial communication and has the capacity to foreground the modes of relation between histories, human encounters, and the more-than-human worlds in which they take place and are remembered and revised. (Hanley, 2020, p. 155) The history of these “human encounters” is a brutal one. The trope of the Native American, or “Indian”, savage is prevalent even in the most recent traditional Westerns. The “bad hombre” trope does not totally replace the Indian trope; they coexist as a bouncing board for white complexes. In Ron Howard’s 2003 film The Missing, for example, an outlaw sets out to find a girl kidnapped by a group of Native Americans in a plot that clearly references the classic The Searchers ( John Ford, 1956), where a journey takes place to rescue a girl from the Comanche. Tag Gallagher claims that in The Searchers Ford shows Native Americans as “mythic apparitions, appearing repeatedly and always

36 Cartel Westerns

suddenly out of nowhere, icons of savage violent beauty dread, and so entirely projections of white fantasy” (1993, p. 68). In The Missing, Howard captures Native American rituals as a horror director would, with low-angle shots making animistic religious practices look strange, uncivilised. Yet again, the original owners of what is now the United States of America are defined by the hypermasculine white gaze, emblazoned here by Howard. More recent forays into the genre have taken on an equally colonial and uncritical gaze. For instance, the 2015 Western-horror hybrid Bone Tomahawk sees a white hero played by Kurt Russell fight a group of cannibalistic savages who are a clear, even vulgar reference to the already mangled image of Native Americans on film. In cartel Westerns, as we will see, problematic tropes related to the depiction of Native Americans are echoed in how people of colour are portrayed as a faceless mob of “bad hombres”, that Trumpian phrase turned cultural reference which has been discussed in this volume’s Introduction. The torch is passed from Native Americans to Mexicans as the Other that is to be feared, the savage that is seldom perceived as le bon sauvage. Rather, the colonial white gaze looks down on Indigenous lore as it opposes that oxymoron that is Christian rationality. The idea of the frontier as a liminal zone is fundamental to the Western’s mythologies. In the Western there is a “here” and a “there”, an “us” and a strange, foreboding “them”. Vast landscapes, the proverbial terra nullius, are there for the taking and the white settler has the God-given right to claim the land. Much as Spanish conquistadors claimed to save Mesoamerican civilisa­ tions from themselves so they could find solace in Christianity, cowboys embark on a crusade to bring light to wastelands allegedly devoid of culture and common sense. This ideological and physical frontier separates the realms of the civilised and the barbaric. As J. Hoberman argues in his 1991 essay “How the Western Was Lost” (originally published in The Village Voice), Hollywood Westerns were key to defining the idea of America in popular culture: “The cowboy movie was typically the vehicle America used to ex­ plain itself to itself” (1995, p. 85). Further, Hoberman argues that [e]ach Hollywood Western, no matter how trite, was a national ritual, a passion play dramatizing and redramatizing the triumph of civilization over “savage” Indians or outlaws. (Hoberman, 1995, p. 85) In this chapter I argue that cartel Westerns stemming from Hollywood re­ hearse this “passion play” (Hoberman, 1995, p. 85) by locating the savage world in Mexico. Cartel Westerns have conservative racial politics in which Brown bodies are coded as dangerous and disposable. In cartel Westerns such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s late-career The Last Stand, savagery infiltrates the border. The cartel Western is both a premonition and a representative of the Trump era of U.S.–Mexico relationships. I exemplify the concept of the cartel Western with The Last Stand, the Oscar-winner No Country for Old Men,

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Sylvester Stallone’s violent revenge fantasy Rambo: Last Blood and Clint Eastwood’s swan song in the genre, The Mule. In these four films, elderly, tough American men bid farewell to a world that is no longer feasible. The morality established by white settlers in the West and chronicled in classic examples of the genre, gives way to the savagery of the cartel wars. In particular, The Last Stand, Rambo: Last Blood and The Mule were chosen as they feature three representatives of what Susan Jeffords calls the “hard body”, a rhetorical and stylistic device prevalent in action cinema during the Reagan years. These bodies were muscular, edgy, overpowering, militaristic. Onscreen “hard bodies” symbolised “the normative body that enveloped strength, labor, determination, loyalty and courage” ( Jeffords, 1994, p. 24). It is no coincidence, I argue, that Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Eastwood are, even in their old age, the flag bearers of what Hollywood masculinity is in a politically conservative environment. In the Trump era and the years that preceded it there was a sense of nostalgia for the Reagan Cold War years among conservatives, a longing for a time when screens showed these “true American men” as the defenders of Western ideals. Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Eastwood return in the form of cartel Western heroes in a last stand against the enemies of the nation: communists and Islamic terrorist in the Reagan years, “bad hombres” today.

“Amexica”, the mythic site of the cartel Western Cartel Westerns are deeply rooted in land, culture and politics. As an heir to the tradition of the Hollywood Western, the cartel Western has a deep symbolic and aesthetic connection to a particular geography. Classic Western narratives take place in a very specific place and time in U.S. history, a period that perhaps seems too short for the multitude of stories it has inspired. Even though westward expansion was a centuries-long process, most storylines in traditional Westerns are situated within a short timeframe, as Jim Kitses ori­ ginally explained in his 1969 book Horizons West: Hollywood’s West has typically been, from about 1865 to 1890 or so, a brief final instant in the process. This twilight era was a momentous one: within just its span we can count a number of frontiers in the sudden rash of mining camps, the building of the railways, the Indian Wars, the cattle drives, the coming of the farmer. Together with the last days of the Civil War and the exploits of the badmen, here is the raw material of the western. (Kitses, 1998, p. 57) Cartel Westerns take place in a now-mythical land that lies at the U.S.–Mexico border, a region that is idiosyncratic in its language, culture and way of life. This land has acquired mythical proportions in the popular ima­ gination after being immortalised in film, music, television, art and literature. In Mexico there exists, for example, a literary genre known as literatura de la

38 Cartel Westerns

frontera or “borderland literature”, which mainly deals with the comings and goings of cartel members, the rags-to-riches stories, the pain and desolation that violent death brings. Exemplars of literatura de la frontera include not only Mexican authors but also work from writers such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Spain) and Roberto Bolaño (Chile), who constructed narratives around the Dantesque world of the cartels. Pérez-Reverte wrote the story on which the narco telenovela La reina del sur and the subsequent English-language adap­ tation Queen of the South are based (I discuss this television series in Chapter 5). For his part, Bolaño wrote 2666, a posthumous novel that deals with the infamous femicides in the city of Juárez, where the remains of murdered and often sexually abused women have been found in the desert for decades now, where they are left to rot. How much these femicides have permeated gender dynamics and the social fabric at large in this city is almost impossible to quantify and will affect generations to come. Journalism and popular culture are populated with essentialising views of the border and concepts have been coined to try to corral the multiplicity of voices that exist in this liminal area. Journalist Ed Vulliamy, for example, described the U.S.–Mexico border as “Amexica”. In his view, this is a land that belongs to both cultures and is home to a unique set of identities that, as critics have argued, derive from the narco-feuds that have long plagued the region (Kramsch, 2011). Vulliamy wrote for The Guardian describing this land: the terrain astride the border, land that has a single identity – that belongs to both countries and yet to neither. A frontier at once porous and harsh: across which communities live and a million people traverse every day, legally, as do hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of goods annually. (Vulliamy, 2019) I use the concept of Amexica here and throughout the book because it reflects a limited view of the border, which permeates most cartel media stemming from Hollywood and Hollywood-influenced cultural industries. U.S. filmmakers have long created a cinematic grammar of “Amexica”, right from Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (discussed in Chapter 1). The cinema of Texan filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, one of the main voices of 1990s indie cinema alongside people like Quentin Tarantino and Richard Linklater, is one of the founda­ tions of the representation of Amexica on the screen. Drawing heavily from Westerns – particularly from the late 1960s wave of hyperviolent Westerns such as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) – and from narco B-movies or “video home” (Rashotte, 2015), Rodriguez helped establish the visual grammar of the U.S.–Mexico border. Cantinas that stand in for the Western’s saloon; chatty bartenders who tell the exploits of killer mariachis; seductive women of colour who charm vicious snakes, literally and figuratively, with their “exotic” accents; all of these new and recycled tropes still endure in the cartel Westerns discussed in this chapter. The cinematography used by Rodriguez in his Mexican trilogy has also left an enduring mark. Mexico, it

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seems, has a rusty hue to it. Grainy, brown images are now a visual constant in how the border is represented in film, television and advertising. Rodriguez built his early career around offering a U.S. Latino perspective on the cartel wars. In his debut film El Mariachi (1992) , he went South of the border to shoot the story of a mysterious folk singer who breaks havoc and spells disaster for low-ranked drug traffickers. He followed this low-budget adventure with two more films that together comprised his Mexico Trilogy: Desperado (1995) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003). Primarily in these three films, as well as in his Mexploitation fever dream Machete (2010), Rodriguez has fabricated a cartoonish world in which cultural nuance is lost and, perhaps unwillingly, racial stereotypes are perpetuated (Brayton, 2011). Robert Rodriguez’s Mexico Trilogy is the cinematic equivalent to Taco Bell.

No Country for Old Men: brown corpses as background Quality Hollywood cinema has also chronicled Amexican tragedies. Perhaps the most critically discussed film set in Amexica is the Oscar-winner No Country for Old Men, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. This film is a tale of murder and guilt in which the U.S. side of the border is threatened by the stench of crime coming from Mexico. The film could be read as a cautionary tale of how the American Empire could fall if it gives in to the “barbarian invasion” coming from down South. In the film, as in the Cormac McCarthy novel on which it is based, the last bastion of old-fashioned honour and law crumbles under the weight of violence and greed. The Coens’ take on the Mexican-American border does not necessarily follow the cinematic conventions of the Western when it comes to shots and editing techniques. Instead of offering mostly wide shots that showcase the landscape (Figure 2.1), the directors benefit intimate moments. The film has a minimalist sound design, which also counters preconceptions of both the Western and film noir. As Denis Lim wrote in The New York Times, “There is virtually no music on the soundtrack of this tense, methodical thriller. Long passages are entirely wordless. In some of the most gripping sequences what you hear mostly is a suffocating silence” (2008). The Coens offer a cinematic replication of the claustrophobic environments of Cormac McCarthy’s novel in a style more akin to the film noir tradition than to the audiovisual grammar of the Western (Mitchell, 2014). No Country for Old Men, in both its novel and film iterations, is an ode to change, a premonition of the violence that would sweep through the borderlands like a biblical plague. Critics and cultural commentators have highlighted the violence inherent in McCarthy’s view of the border. As writer Annie Proulx, who has also ex­ perimented with the Western in her fiction, particularly in the short story “Brokeback Mountain”, wrote in her review of McCarthy’s book: “Sheriff Bell knows he is standing against terrible and alien killers who increasingly seem to him to presage the dissolution of decent American life: the symptoms of a ghastly disease ravaging an increasingly godless and heartless nation”

40 Cartel Westerns

Figure 2.1 The U.S.–Mexico border as a wasteland in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007).

(2005). Proulx identified, perhaps more poignantly than the Coen brothers themselves, that social and political change in McCarthy’s world is related to a dissolution of the WASP hegemony in the Southern United States. Indeed, in McCarthy’s and the Coens’ world the Other is a disease that ravages anything that is decent about America. It is a barbarian invasion. As the border becomes increasingly porous, violent resistance against the cultural assimilation of nonwhite folk redefines politics. Proulx’s final reading of McCarthy’s violent world is damning: “McCarthy’s oeuvre can be seen as the ongoing study of a burning American rage, and how common that rage has become” (2005). Further, Susan Kollin has analysed how McCarthy transforms the Western into a “geography of violence” (2001). She writes: “Bringing elements of the southern grotesque to bear on Western themes and conventions, McCarthy added a grimmer, bleaker vision to the genre, providing what appeared to be the definitive statement on Manifest Destiny” (2001, p. 558). Cormac McCarthy’s literature incorporates drug trafficking into the Western literary tradition. If in classic Western narratives the geography provided hope, the promise of a future period of prosperity after the bloody rite of passage, in cartel Westerns there is no future beyond the violent present. Rage empties the future of hope, and turns the present into a futile race for survival. McCarthy also wrote the script for The Counselor, a 2013 film directed by Ridley Scott that further emphasises the novelist’s fatalistic view of the border. In this screenplay, McCarthy is playful with the conventions of the genre, as Jacob Agner argues: “The Counselor is a B-movie by A-listers, self-reflexive genre filmmaking bent on investigating the limits of popular entertainment. The Counselor, in this sense, functions a bit like McCarthy’s anti-Western, Blood Meridian – which is to say, it’s an affront to its genre’s and its medium’s very genetic makeup” (2005, p. 205). For his part, director Ridley Scott films Mexican border towns

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in the same rusty hues that Steven Soderbergh used in Traffic (2000) a kalei­ doscopic look into the political and moral corruption that sustains networks of production and use of narcotics. Soderbergh, like a handful of directors who have approached the cartel wars, positions the United States as a loser in the geopolitical equation of drug trafficking. In No Country for Old Men Brown Mexican bodies are disposed of un­ ceremoniously (Figure 2.2), just like Native Americans in classic Westerns. This is not surprising, though, and the Coen brothers have echoed these stereotypes, also in an uncritical manner, in their vignette film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). In No Country for Old Men, Mexican cartel members are killed unceremoniously, their bodies resting lifeless and nameless on the sand or against a wall in the toilet. No Country for Old Men tells the story of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a white man (or gringo, in Mexican border lingo) who stumbles upon the bloody aftermath of a drug deal. He finds a bag filled with cash and does not resist the temptation to take it. What follows is a violent game of cat and mouse involving Moss and a vicious killer called Chigurh (played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem in a role that gave him an Oscar) and the old Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). Sheriff Bell works as a pivot, the one unmovable piece that, through voiceover, provides some sort of reasoning amidst the whirlwind of destruction. It is through Bell that the old cowboy world judges the chaotic present. As Joan Mellen writes, Sheriff Bell is representative of an old world order, and his is the last image in both the novel and the film: “Sheriff Bell, a broken, idle man, sits at his kitchen table, empty of occupation and usefulness to the community he had served since he was a twenty-five-year-old lawman” (2008, p. 31). It is no coincidence that the protagonists or key characters in most cartel Westerns are elderly. Even though No Country for Old Men pre-dated Trump’s ascent to power, it holds the same nostalgic view of the past that the Trump political machinery mobilised through the slogan-turned-political movement “Make

Figure 2.2 Mexican hitmen as Brown disposable bodies in No Country for Old Men.

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America Great Again”. The Western is dead, Sheriff Bell seems to say. Long live the cartel Western.

The Last Stand and Rambo: Last Blood: 1980s strongmen fighting the cartels It is only fitting that two of Hollywood’s last action heroes not donning spandex superhero suits would enter the cartel Western. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were longtime symbols of masculinity and American exceptionalism in popular film. Both actors are the epitome of “the intersection of whiteness with muscular masculinity that became a re­ curring image in the 1980s” (Boyle, 2010, p. 47). Schwarzenegger appeared in militaristic films such as Commando (1985) and Predator (1987), both of which depicted Latin America as a dangerous, threatening place. In the Rocky saga, Stallone defined the boxing movie genre while playing Cold War politics and embodying American masculinity (Albarrán-Torres & Golding, 2019). It is important to note here that muscular male physiques are a marker of what is “American” in the popular imagination. As Ellexis Boyle contends, “Muscles have long been a leitmotif of national and racial supremacy in the cultural imagination of the United States” (2010, p. 45). Further, Boyle claims that Schwarzenegger’s media image – white, strong, heterosexual – is what eventually led to his political success when elected governor of California in the early 2000s. For his part, Stallone became the go-to action figure hero in the 1980s and 1990s. By then, Italian migration had been assimilated into white culture. As Chris Holmlund claimed then in regard to Stallone, “for audiences the world over he incarnates unquestioned virility, unassailable heterosexuality, and a US might and right which is, most decidedly, white” (1993, p. 214). Schwarzenegger’s incursion into the cartel Western is an amalgamation of the themes that the Austrian migrant has dealt with during his film and po­ litical careers: physical force, honour, violent means in the pursuit of noble ends and a fierce defence of the American Dream. In the 2013 action movie The Last Stand, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Ray Owens, an Arizona sheriff and former narcotics officer who tries to control a group of misfit police of­ ficers as all hell breaks loose in their small Arizona town. Meanwhile in Las Vegas, a secret FBI operation led by Agent Bannister (Forest Whitaker) sets out to transfer Gabriel Cortez, “the most vicious cartel boss since Pablo Escobar”, to death row. However, things don’t go as planned and Cortez (played by Spanish actor Eduardo Noriega) escapes in a feat of technical and strategical savviness not unlike the one displayed by cartels in real life, in­ cluding El Chapo’s 2015 escape from a maximum-security prison in Almoloya, Mexico. Cortez, the authorities let us know, hails from Sinaloa and has a need for speed: he loves car racing and has competed on the semi-professional circuit under a pseudonym. We are led to believe that his father was a trafficker too,

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and that Cortez led a privileged life before taking the wheel of the criminal organisation. Rather than an old-guard capo, Cortez is a player who re­ presents the cultural figure of the narco-junior: the sons and grandchildren of high-profile cartel leaders such as Ismael “Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Narco-juniors are “insiders” whose “practices of media­ tion promote lifestyles of drug dealers and disseminate specific insignia to show off and celebrate their privileged social position of power” (Martinez Orozco & Zapata Galindo, 2017, p. 135). Cortez is an exemplar of this new kind of drug lord: a sportscar-driving dandy rather than the stereotypical rancher turned smuggler. Schwarzenegger’s sheriff is the last barrier before the Sinaloan villain crosses the border into Mexico, where he will be free to continue his reign of crime and terror. Here, Amexica is visually stripped down to its basics and the law enforcers of the small Arizona town engage in modern shoot-outs with Cortez and his bodyguards. Perhaps more than any other mainstream action movie in recent memory, The Last Stand steadily looks and feels like a Western. When Cortez’s bodyguards arrive at the Arizona border town to make sure the capo can freely speed his way towards freedom in Mexico, the group of misfit officers is there to greet them, guns blazing. They face off in the town’s de­ serted main street. Racial politics are clear in the film: the problem is not migration, as the sheriff himself is a European now established in America. The problem, it seems, is Brown, Mexican migration. A few years before the Trump 2016 presidential campaign succeeded in its fear-mongering, cartel Westerns had already made their mark on how Latinos are framed by Hollywood story­ tellers. As Cristoph Schubert points out, Schwarzenegger’s character highlights his own migrant nature, but demarcates himself from “bad migrants”: “You make us migrants look bad!” With these words, Arizona Sheriff Ray Owens, played by former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, accuses and arrests the fiendish Mexican cartel boss Gabriel Cortez in the 2013 action film The Last Stand (1:26:02). This critical statement can be decoded at the meta-fictional level as well, since it may aptly be applied to the often one-sided representation of Mexicans in American film and television at large. Although Sheriff Owens, who is marked as a foreigner by his distinct Austrian German accent, puts himself in the same category of “immigrants” as the Mexican citizen, Schwarzenegger’s character is the brave and well integrated law-enforcer, while the Latino is the ruthless and criminal Other. (Schubert, 2018, p. 2) The film is directed by South Korean Kim Jee-woon, who in 2008 released The Good, the Bad, the Weird, a Western set in Manchuria that reimagined the world of violent misfits in Sergio Leone’s classic 1966 film. Any avid Western fan would be able to identify the now clichéd elements are present in The Last

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Figure 2.3 The 2013 cartel Western The Last Stand follows the cinematic conventions of classic Westerns. Notice the empty main street in a small desert town.

Stand: a dusty street; shut businesses; the elderly locals peering through the windows as they wait hell to be unleashed, perhaps a sort of morbid en­ tertainment in their otherwise uneventful lives. What follows is a shoot-out in which the fetishism for handguns and heavy artillery so prevalent in American popular culture reaches almost pornographic proportions (Figure 2.3). The actor Johnny Knoxville, of Jackass fame, plays a secondary character that serves as comedic relief and box-office bait. He owns a warehouse full of vintage weaponry, including WWII heavy artillery that he uses against the narcos. Here, the director draws a parallel between the Nazis and cartel members as enemies of the United States. As cops and outlaws open fire against each other, the leading hitman – an elegantly dressed American who leads a pack of mercenaries – takes out his silver gun and takes aim. Time stands still as the camera focuses on the gun, its sinuous contours and shiny finish. The director is renowned for his stylised violence and gore in films such as the horror film ATale of Two Sisters (2003) and I Saw the Devil (2010), in which he turns a cat-and-mouse chase involving a detective and a serial killer into a choreography of bloody mayhem. Here, Kim plays with the gun fetishism representative of most uniquely American genres (the Western, gangster films, action movies). Guns are filmed in a quasi-erotic fashion as the camera lingers on their curves, smooth surfaces and glistening tips (Figure 2.4, Figure 2.5). The other strongman of 1980s and 1990s cinema, Sylvester Stallone, takes the cartel Western to its most outlandish extreme. Rambo: Last Blood (2019) is Stallone’s alleged last incursion into the life of John Rambo, a Vietnam war veteran who has embodied the American zeitgeist for almost four decades. Scholars have argued that there are parallels in Rambo’s origin story to the Western (Schechter & Semeiks, 1991; Sweeney, 1999), particularly in how he portrays the antiestablishment loner masculinity that was resonant in

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Figure 2.4 A cartel hitman holds a pristine handgun in Kim Jee-woon’s The Last Stand (2013).

Figure 2.5 A classic standoff between a sheriff and an outlaw in The Last Stand.

post–Vietnam American cinema. But the last installment in the franchise is the most referential, and deferential, to the genre. Rambo: Last Blood was violently disparaged by critics, but nevertheless remains an exemplar of what I term “cartel Westerns”. Some of the aspects of the film that made critics reject it are the same ones that make it a clear exemplar of the cartel Western. In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw scathingly wrote: This massively enlarged prostate of a film can only make you wince with its badly acted geronto-ultraviolence, its Trumpian fantasies of Mexican rapists and hilariously insecure US border, and its crass enthusiasm for rape-revenge attacks undertaken by a still-got-it senior dude, 73 years young, on behalf of a sweet teenager. (2019)

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The film is indeed a clumsily told revenge fantasy also akin to the exploitation films of the 1970s. The first time we see John Rambo in Last Blood he is but a hazy figure amidst a rough storm. He is riding a horse in the middle of the night, wearing a hat. There is lightning and we can see his contour: mythical, imposing. Rambo has volunteered to help the local authorities when disaster strikes, and he is tracking possible survivors. The following morning, we learn that he lives an idyllic life on his family’s horse ranch in Arizona. He lives with a Mexican friend (played by telenovela actress Adriana Barraza) and her granddaughter, Gabrielle, with whom Rambo shares a fatherly bond. But trouble strikes when Gabrielle wants to visit Mexico to search for her es­ tranged father. Rambo says no, it is dangerous. She, of course, does not listen and crosses the border, a decision that will prove to be almost fatal. She is kidnapped. Rambo: Last Blood follows a proven formula in the Western. As in The Missing and The Searchers, a girl is taken by the savages (Native Americans in the classic formulation, Mexicans in cartel Westerns; Brown bodies in all) and the hero goes to her rescue. Mexico is once again portrayed as a chaotic and unruly place where the first people Gabrielle encounters are the epitome of the “bad hombre”. John Rambo embarks on a journey of revenge. This time the perpetual white saviour is not fighting the establishment or injustices in the Global South. The last 45 minutes of the movie are a symphony of gore. Rambo booby-traps his ranch, luring the “bad hombres” deeper into mayhem. The climax is a boisterous melange of severed heads and limbs, intestines and various pointy objects cutting through human flesh. In its imperialistic ethos, the Rambo franchise has had its share of racism in how the Other is represented. As Frank Sweeney has argued in relation to how Vietnamese soldiers are depicted in the POW rescue mission Rambo II: “Their depic­ tion is racist, drawing on latent and not so latent sentiments Americans may feel towards the Vietnamese. They are like the Indians of the Western, savage and always defeated” (Sweeney, 1999, p. 68). In Last Blood, the Other torch is passed on to Mexicans. The film borrows from the spectacles of death prominent in the cartel wars (Albarrán-Torres, 2017). The violence is almost unreal, as if from a fever dream. Aesthetically, the director Adrian Grünberg borrows from the many images of torture and murder that have sprouted from the media coverage of the narco wars and the propaganda through which cartels often make death spectacular, media bait for the networked era (Campbell, 2014). When John Rambo murders one of the cartel leaders who trafficked Gabrielle, he leaves his corpse on a bed, beheaded, with a photo of Gabrielle pinned to his chest with a military knife. The scene is not unlike the infamous crimes committed by ruthless cartels such as Los Zetas and Los Caballeros Templarios. The goriest scenes take place in a tunnel maze built by John Rambo. He lives down there amongst a collection of heavy ar­ tillery and tools. The tunnels remind us of the underground networks built by the Viet Cong during the American War in Vietnam, a conflict that sits

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heavy on John Rambo’s heart, mind and soul. But tunnels are also part of the symbolic grammar of the cartel wars. El Chapo famously built a net­ work of tunnels to smuggle narcotics through the border and then, in 2016, to escape from a maximum-security prison. The tunnels in Rambo: Last Blood are eerily similar to the ones broadcast all over the world in news stories and fictional accounts of El Chapo’s exploits, as well as the nu­ merous screen depictions of the famed Mexican drug lord (see Chapter 8). Rambo crosses the border by smashing a fence with his pickup truck, as if escaping a circle of hell – which is exactly how Mexico is exclusively por­ trayed in the film. Mexico is a place where no hope exists, no empathy, just evil people doing evil things. John Rambo’s Arizona estate, on the contrary, is an oasis that seems to be stuck in time: a big house, pristine barns, a rocking chair on which to think about life and watch the sunset. Visually, this setting seems to be cut off from a classic Western and pasted onto this gory tale of revenge. This is the American way of life that Rambo is defending.

Conclusion: Clint Eastwood’s last stand It is only fitting that the new era of the Western connects with one of its most iconic personalities. The 2018 film The Mule, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, is an exemplar of the Western’s transition in both geographical and ideological terms from the American West to what Vulliamy terms “Amexica”, and from a colonial to a neocolonial impulse. Eastwood is perhaps the most iconic actor/director of the spaghetti Western era – that is, Westerns generally directed by Italian filmmakers and shot either in Italy or Southern Spain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The silent, hypermasculine type that he embodied in such classics as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone, 1966) defined the Western and its racial and gender relationships for decades. Native Americans and Mexicans were to be feared; free Black men were to be dis­ trusted. Like John Wayne before him, Eastwood became the epitome of the white settler who establishes order and dictates a moral compass through violence. Or, rather, Eastwood became the archetypical strongman who clears the path for white settler colonisation. Although Eastwood’s swan song in the genre seemed to be 1992s Unforgiven, he has since returned to Western-like narratives in at least two of his films: Gran Torino (2008) and, a decade later, The Mule, in which he moves the setting from the unruly early days of the American West to what he sees as the unruly contemporary wastelands of the American post-industrial city. In The Mule, Eastwood plays what is, on the surface, the exact opposite to his silent cowboy type. Eastwood’s character, Earl Stone, is an octogenarian who dedicated his life to a blooming flower business while being an absent father and husband. He is a charming gentleman while networking for his business, but a distant figure at home. Divorced and alone, he sees his business crumble to the ground as competition from online stores renders it unsustainable. Earl Stone has

48 Cartel Westerns

followed the instructions on how to be a good neoliberal subject verbatim. He opened a business, paid taxes, did the part of travelling salesman. Yet, tech­ nology spat on his face and online shopping demolished his livelihood. The old man has grown bitter and desperate. His business and home go into foreclosure. While visiting his granddaughter before her wedding he talks to the only Latino in the crowd. He is given a card and learns of a very well-paid job. This sparks his curiosity. He calls the number and becomes a mule for a Mexican drug cartel. This setup is quite simplistic and basically equates meeting a person of Latino origin with becoming involved with the cartels. There is no interest from either Eastwood or his character in getting to know any of the “bad hombres” Stone subsequently encounters. The cartel members start calling him viejito, an endearing term meaning “little old man”. Stone gets sucked into cartel business as the cashflow provides him with the social status and financial stability that have eluded him in his old age. However, his final redemption comes in the form of admitted guilt and a prison sentence. When all is said and done, the white neoliberal subject whose path got momentarily crooked stands on a higher moral ground compared to the Brown barbarians. In the dusk of their careers, three of Hollywood’s iconic action men, owners of “hard bodies” (Jeffords, 1994) – Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Clint Eastwood – have turned to cartel Westerns in a sort of farewell to a world ruled by a colonial impetus to tame wilderness and civilise Indigenous peoples. In today’s political and social environment, the Western has re-located the frontier. The setting of most cartel Westerns is the U.S.–Mexico border, a site of lively cultural and financial exchange, but also one of the most conflictive places in the world due to the intensity of illicit trafficking networks and their violence. This chapter has theorised the narrative and aesthetic turn taken by

Figure 2.6 John Rambo bids a final farewell, riding into the Arizona wilderness in Rambo: Last Blood (2019).

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Figure 2.7 Clint Eastwood re-discovers the open spaces of the West in The Mule (2018).

one of the quintessential Hollywood genres, the Western, now a key element of Hollywood cartel media. But the cartel Western subgenre does not need to be static, and it can certainly be used as a tool for postcolonial critique. In U.S. independent ci­ nema, films such as John Sayles’ Lone Star (1996) and Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) have offered scathing views of racial tension and violence at the border. Australian cinema has also used the genre’s conventions to unearth deep scars. John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005) is concerned with settler guilt and the fact that Europeans were completely out of place in the millenary outback. The script was written by singer songwriter and novelist Nick Cave, who has long used cowboy ar­ chetypes in his artistic corpus. More recently, Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton used the genre to tell the story of colonial violence in Sweet Country (2017), a period piece set in 1929. The plot follows an Indigenous fugitive who killed a white settler in self-defence. Colonial experiences, multi­ culturalism and trauma bind Mexican and Indigenous Australian histories together. The cartel Western could also be a conduit for self-representation, as processes of colonialism and neo-colonialism are, sadly, far from over in Latin America, and are fed by the insatiable thirst for money and narcotics. Another kind of cartel Western is possible.

Suggested viewing The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) El Mariachi (Robert Rodriguez, 1992) Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996) The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007) El infierno (Luis Estrada, 2010)

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Salvando al Soldado Pérez (Private Pérez, Beto Gómez, 2011) The Counselor (Ridley Scott, 2013) The Last Stand (Kim Jee-Woon, 2013) Cartel Land (Matthew Heineman, 2015) Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton, 2017) The Mule (Clint Eastwood, 2018) Rambo: Last Blood (Adrian Grünberg, 2019)

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Kollin, S. (2001). Genre and the geographies of violence: Cormac McCarthy and the contemporary Western. Contemporary Literature, 42(3), 557–588. Kramsch, O. T. (2011). Beyond the paradigmatic mirage of transfrontier urbanism? Cities, space, and “post-political” war along the US/Mexico border. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 26(2), 243–247. Lim, D. (2008, January 6). Exploiting sound, exploring silence. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/movies/awardsseason/ 06lim.html. McCarthy, C. (2005). No country for old men. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Mellen, J. (2008). Spiraling downward: America in Days of Heaven, In the Valley of Elah, and No Country for Old Men. Film Quarterly, 61(3), 24–31. Mitchell, L. C. (2014). Dismantling the western: Film noir’s defiance of genre in No Country for Old Men. Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, 47(3), 335–356. Martínez Orozco, T., & Zapata Galindo, M. (2017). “Narco culture” and media practices: Negotiating gender identities in contexts of violence. In S. Foellmer, M. Lünenborg, & C. Raetzsch (Eds.), Media practices, social movements, and performativity (pp. 128–149). New York: Routledge. Pérez-Reverte, A. (2002). La reina del sur. Madrid: Alfaguara. Proulx, A. (2005, October 29). Gunning for trouble. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/oct/29/featuresreviews.guardianreview16. Rashotte, R. (2015). Narco cinema: Sex, drugs, and banda music in Mexico’s B-filmography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schechter, H., & Semeiks, J. G. (1991). Leatherstocking in ’Nam: Rambo, Platoon, and the American frontier myth. Journal of Popular Culture, 24(4), 17–25. Schubert, C. (2018). Mexicans on the American screen: The discursive construction of ethnic stereotypes in contemporary film and television. In C. Rosenthal, L. Volkmann, & U. Zagratzki (Eds.), Disrespected neighbo(u)rs: Cultural stereotypes in literature and film (pp. 2–22). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Sweeney, F. (1999). “What mean expendable?”: Myth, ideology, and meaning in First Blood and Rambo. The Journal of American Culture, 22(3), 63–69. van Erp, J. (2018). Anti-cartel thrillers as a new film genre: How regulator-produced films portray and problematize cartels and communicate deterrence. Crime, Media, Culture, 14(2), 229–246. Vulliamy, E. (2019, December 8). Back to the border of misery: Amexica revisited 10 years on. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/08/ amexica-revisited-ed-vulliamy-returns-to-us-mexico-borderline.

Films cited Coen, E.,, & Coen, J. (Directors). (2007). No country for old men [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Vantage, Warner Bros. Coen, E.,, & Coen, J. (Directors). (2018). The ballad of Buster Scruggs [Motion picture]. United States: Netflix. Eastwood, C. (Director). (1992). Unforgiven [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Eastwood, C. (Director). (2008). Gran Torino [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Eastwood, C. (Director). (2018). The mule [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Estrada, L. (Director). (2010). El infierno [Motion picture]. Mexico: Bandidos Films, Instituto Mexicano deCinematografía (IMCINE), Foprocine.

52 Cartel Westerns Ford, J. (Director). (1956). The searchers [Motion picture]. United States: C.V. Whitney Pictures. Gómez, B. (Director). (2011). Salvando al soldado Pérez [Motion picture]. Mexico: Salamandra Films, Lemon Studios, Terregal Films. Grünberg, A. (Director). (2019). Rambo: Last blood [Motion picture]. United States, Spain, Bulgaria: Lionsgate. Heineman, M. (Director). (2015). Cartel land [Motion picture]. United States: A&E IndieFilms, Our Time Projects, The Documentary Group. Hillcoat, J. (Director). (2005). The proposition [Motion picture]. Australia, United Kingdom: UK Film Council, Surefire Film Productions, Autonomous. Howard, R. (Director). (2003). The missing [Motion picture]. United States: Columbia Pictures. Jones, T. L. (Director). (2005). The three burials of Melquiades Estrada [Motion picture]. France, Mexico, United States: EuropaCorp, The Javelina Film Company. Kim, J. (Director). (2003). Tale of two sisters [Motion picture]. South Korea: B.O.M. Film Productions Co., Masulpiri Films. Kim, J. (Director). (2013). The last stand [Motion picture]. United States: Lionsgate. Kim, J. (Director). (2010). I saw the devil [Motion picture]. South Korea: Softbank Ventures, Showbox/Mediaplex. Leone, S. (Director). (1966). The good, the bad and the ugly [Motion picture]. Italy, Spain, West Germany: Produzioni Europee Associate (PEA), Arturo González Producciones Cinematográficas, Constantin Film. Lester, M. S. (Director). (1985). Commando [Motion picture]. United States: SLM Production Group. McTiernan, J. (Director). (1987). Predator [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico: Twentieth Century Fox. Peckinpah, S. (Director). (1969). The wild bunch [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Porter, E. S. (Director). (1903). The great train robbery [Motion picture]. United States: Edison Manufacturing Company, Warner Bros. Rodriguez, R. (Director). (1992). El mariachi [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico: Columbia Pictures. Rodriguez, R. (Director). (1995). Desperado [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico: Columbia Pictures. Rodriguez, R. (Director). (2003). Once upon a time in Mexico [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico: Columbia Pictures. Rodriguez, R. (Director). (2010). Machete [Motion picture]. United States: Overnight Films. Sayles, J. (Director). (1996). Lone star [Motion picture]. United States: Columbia Pictures, Castle Rock Entertainment, Rio Dulce. Soderbergh, S. (Director). (2000). Traffic [Motion picture].United States, Mexico, Germany: Compulsion Inc. Scott, R. (Director). (2013). The counselor [Motion picture]. United Kingdom, United States: Fox 2000 Pictures. Thornton, W. (Director). (2017). Sweet country [Motion picture]. Australia: Bunya Productions, Sweet Country Films. Villeneuve, D. (Director). (2015). Sicario [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico, Hong Kong: Lionsgate, Black Label Media.

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Welles, O. (Director). (1958). Touch of evil [Motion picture]. United States: Universal International Pictures. Zahler, S. C. (Director). (2015). Bone tomahawk [Motion picture]. United States, United Kingdom: Caliber Media Company.

Television shows cited Jonze, S., Knoxville, J., & Tremaine, J. (Creators). (2000–2007). Jackass [Television series]. United States: MTV, Dickhouse Productions. Linson, J., & Sheridan, T. (Creators). (2018–). Yellowstone [Television series]. United States: Paramount Network, 101 Studios, Linson Entertainment. Sutter, K. (Creator). (2008–2014). Sons of anarchy [Television series]. United States: FX.

3

From Weeds to Ozark The suburbs, threatened

Cartels are the new threat to suburban ideals as portrayed in film and televi­ sion. On one hand, suburbia is a common setting for stories set in the United States in which notions of family, race and morals are enacted. On the other, suburban stories generally involve a “threat” to the purity – racial, moral and otherwise – of the suburbs, seen as an expanse of the middle-class white ideal. Suburbs are by definition exclusive, and in the United States this exclusivity has had to do with racial and economic demographics. As Ann Forsyth argues, the idea of suburban exclusivity has deep repercussions in social and political life. She argues that “if suburbs in the United States are seen as essentially white and middle class or elite, policy makers may pay less attention to the real achievements and problems of African American suburban residents or low-income suburbs” (Forsyth, 2012, p. 271). In cartel media set in the American suburbs, white characters are motivated by the desire to maintain or better their socioeconomic status as they face the threat of the Other, often epitomised by Brown and Black characters who tempt otherwise upstanding citizens into a life of crime. The suburban setting is familiar to the majority of television and film spectators, almost always a cliché. Perfectly manicured lawns; clockwork sprinklers making rainbows with the midday sunshine; young blonde women pushing posh prams with sleeping cherubs inside. Suit-armoured fathers waving goodbye. A handful of American flags proudly waving from porches. The iconic American suburb has become the receptacle of the hopes of the post-war generation in the United States, as well as the promise of bonanza for prospective migrants. In the early 2020s, the idea of the suburb and com­ modified suburban life is an enduring legacy of the post-war era. The suburbs are an ideological fortress, particularly in the era of Trumpian politics and the resurgence of conservative worldviews. The baby boomer generation, now in power, had a key role in the de­ velopment of contemporary suburbia in the United States, as McManus and Ethington explain: “As this generation entered their own family-building stage of life, they warped the housing market with a spike in demand, and either reoccupied the suburbs, remodelling them to suit new tastes, or initiated ‘gentrification’ patterns in other parts of cities” (2007, p. 335). Today, when

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major political players in the United States are self-identified white hetero­ sexual men, some of them fiercely conservative, rhetoric has taken a turn to vilify those “Others” that threaten American suburbia. This fear of the Other is reflected in suburban narratives involving Mexican and other drug cartels, where non-white characters are singled out as outsiders in white suburbia, as disruptors of the assumed natural order of things. Fortress suburbia is at risk of being sieged by barbarians. In times of social or political instability, film and television has produced stories in which suburban life is somehow threatened. The Netflix sci-fi drama Stranger Things, for example, plays with the dynamics of “stranger danger” culture and explores the dynamics of 1980s paranoia, so deeply embedded in the suburban psyche (Shea, 2018). Indeed, the suburbs have been exclusive rather than inclusive when it comes to racial diversity. The U.S. suburb has traditionally been a bastion of whiteness that constantly reaffirms itself through the fear of Others (Low, 2009). Setha Low argues that as a symbolic construct whiteness goes far be­ yond ethnicity, as “Whiteness and the privileges accrued are viewed as middleclass privileges and are not restricted to access by color, but also by class, gender, sexual orientation, and place of origin” (2009, p. 81). At the current juncture, Brown and Black bodies are seen as the “Others” that ought to be feared. Low continues: Blacks and Hispanics, as well as other members of minority or immigrant populations within the USA, are racially and ethnically identified by socially constructed notions of phenotypic traits; these “traits” are used to mark groups as different from being White. Whiteness, on the other hand, is the assumed norm socially, physically, and even politically, and dominates national ideas of beauty, social class, and goodness. (Low, 2009, p. 81) The suburbs have long been a site of cultural interest for film and television in the United States and elsewhere. For example, suburban coming-of-age stories have idealised the camaraderie of the formative years. From The Wonder Years to That 70s’ Show, suburbia and upper-middle-class small towns have been sites of romantic encounters and tribulations, high-school drama and parent–children conflicts around issues such as vocation, sexuality and in­ dependence. Even in a show as seemingly banal as That 70s’ Show, which follows a group of teenagers in the fictional and archetypical suburban town of Point Place, Wisconsin, non-white characters are portrayed as eccentric and exotic. Case in point: the character of Fez, played by Latino actor Wilmer Valderrama, is portrayed as an eccentric, his accent heavily mocked and his dreams and aspirations ridiculed. He is the buffoon to the teenage antiheroes played by white actors. As Keith Wilhite points out, suburban narratives place characters at the intersection of two cultural forces, and he encourages us to “read suburban narratives as a form of regional writing that locates the political subject within

56 From Weeds to Ozark

the competing ideologies of privatism and globalization” (2012, p. 618). Indeed, suburban narratives involving drug cartels are highly regionalised: Weeds is as Californian as it gets; the Byrde family in Ozark possesses the gloomy solemnity of the Midwest. However, these narratives are inserted into the globalised context of trafficking, financial and political networks: the scapes of cultural globalisation theorised by Arjun Appadurai (1990) and discussed in the Introduction to this book. Both Weeds and Ozark are examples of how the intersection of cultural, financial and media networks results in televisual narratives in which the local and the global intersect: not only in the stories being told on-screen, but also in how these are distributed and consumed. Cinematic and televisual suburbs and affluent small towns, however, have also been known for being insidious: the site of sinister secrets and under-thesurface debauchery, crime and corruption (Coon, 2013). Auteurs such as David Lynch (Blue Velvet from 1986), David Cronenberg (A History of Violence from 2005) and Sam Mendes (American Beauty from 1999 and Revolutionary Road from 2008, based on the novel by Richard Yates) have fleshed out the unnerving quality of the alleged perfection of the suburbs, creating uncanny atmospheres in which appearances are kept by sweeping moral and ethical failings under the rug. However, as Lynch’s now iconic opening shot in Blue Velvet shows us, narratively there is always something burrowing underneath manicured lawns: in Lynch’s world, it is a squad of roaring, vicious insects. In cartel media, the threat is reduced to the involvement of virtuous WASP folk in cartel activities. In mainstream popular culture, people in the suburbs present a façade of being perfect citizens: virtuous mothers and fathers; successful businessmen (the traditional suburbs are fiercely conservative when it comes to gender roles as depicted in most mainstream film and television); and youngsters who are bound to become mirror images of their parents. But television shows such as Desperate Housewives and the HBO murder-mystery Big Little Lies, and films such as The Stepford Wives and its remake, complicate the appearance of suburban perfection (Miller, 2017). These narratives exemplify the racial dy­ namics of the cookie-cutter American suburb or affluent small town. White characters live at the centre of the neoliberal feud, while an army of labourers, mostly Brown and Black, tends to their needs. Desperate Housewives famously had a Latino family as one of its four leading suburban clans. However, Gabrielle and Carlos Solis fall into the stereotypes that have plagued Latino characters in Hollywood for decades. She is a superfluous housewife, a nou­ veau rich who lives the high life and cuts any ties with her underprivileged upbringing. Carlos ends up in jail for a white-collar crime. While shows like Desperate Housewives and Big Little Lies focus on what goes on behind closed doors, sci-fi dramedies like The Stepford Wives highlight the artificiality of suburban life, where all is done for the sake of appearances. In cartel-related dramas set in the suburbs, such as Weeds, the appearance of socioeconomic status is kept through drug dealing. The rapid yet dangerous accumulation of wealth – a product of narcotics trafficking – is ethically

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justified by how this activity fulfils the entrepreneurial ideal of the self-made individual and works as the financial glue that keeps suburban families in a position of privilege. Given this brief background of suburban narratives, this chapter looks at two recent television dramas, Showtime’s Weeds, created by Jenji Kohan, and Netflix’s Ozark, created by Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams. In these two shows, the stillness and predictability of suburban family life is first disrupted and then turned on its head by drug cartel activities. In a highly racialised view of the connections between illicit trafficking in Mexico and petty and cor­ porate crime in the U.S. suburbs, these two shows present cartels as a threat to the foundations of suburbia and the heterosexual white marriage, the ultimate symbol of the American Dream. In Weeds, a recently widowed woman turns to marijuana trafficking among her suburban neighbors as a way to sustain her family’s lifestyle. In Ozark, a Chicago financial advisor agrees to launder money for a major Mexican cartel, and then makes his family leave the suburbs for a rural touristic hotspot in Missouri.

Weeds and the pot entrepreneur The first time we see Nancy Botwin (played by Mary Louise Parker) she is a stereotypical suburban mother, constantly hyper on iced coffee and wine, and caring for her two sons, aged 10 and 15, a few months after her husband dies. Nancy lives in a suburban development, the fictional Agrestic, outside of Los Angeles. Agrestic is a stereotypical South California suburb: picket fences, upper-middle-class families and plenty of affairs, addictions and veiled secrets to keep the plot meaty. In order to keep up the family’s lifestyle Nancy starts her own pot-distribution network among the rich and bored of Agrestic. As Nancy’s world expands beyond her white privilege and she deals with Black and Brown characters, problems start to surface. The fragile balance that she has maintained between her suburban and criminal personas is hard to keep. Weeds presents us with a naïve ethical dilemma: What should a fictional suburban mother do in the face of an almost certain descent of the socio­ economic ladder? The answer seems simple: usurp the forms of labour, some of them illegal, that non-white characters have performed in popular culture since the 1980s (Lavoie, 2011). As Deborah Jaramillo points out in terms of the reversal of roles in Weeds, As Walter White from Breaking Bad and Nancy Botwin from Weeds voluntarily enter the drug world in their respective towns, they inevitably encounter the characters who have already been toiling there: the Mexicans. These Mexican narcos (drug dealers), who have led turbulent lives on television for years, find that they must make room for the new entrepreneurs on cable television. Here we see the televisual reversal of decades of xenophobic rhetoric: white characters are stealing Mexican characters’ jobs. ( Jaramillo, 2014, p. 1588)

58 From Weeds to Ozark

Walter White’s and Nancy Botwin’s entry into criminal activity wasn’t “vo­ luntary” in the strict sense. Rather, it was a desperate measure to preserve their family’s suburban lifestyle in the face of tragedy: a partner’s death in the case of Nancy; cancer for Walt. Walter’s and Nancy’s vulnerabilities in the neoliberal U.S. system, even given their relative privilege, surfaced in the face of ad­ versity. Nancy faced economic vulnerability as a single mother, while Walter found himself crushed by the prospect of paying for his treatment out of pocket as the United States does not have universal healthcare cover. At first sight, they become victims of the system and use drug dealing as a way to “stick it to The Man”. However, in fact, they suddenly face the reality lived by millions of underprivileged citizens in the United States and other developed economies, where individualism has led to a lack of basic protection for the majority. Nancy and Walt: privileged, yet with no safety net. The main dif­ ference between Walter and Nancy lies, logically, on gender. According to Céline Morin, Nancy is part of “a succession of heroines [that] has been confronted with the untenable gender inequalities of the ideal of the Fordist family” (2020, p. 7). Weeds is clear in its racial politics from the get-go. In fact, the two main Mexican characters with which Nancy has meaningful, lasting interactions fit two of the “bad hombre” stereotypes in cartel media: the small-time crook; and the corrupt politician turned cartel boss. Even though series creator Jenji Kohan has built a reputation of representing sexual, gender and ethnic di­ versity in the United States, both in Weeds and the prison drama Orange Is the New Black, the representation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Weeds echoes the harmful stereotypes discussed earlier in this book. In a 2009 in­ terview, Kohan expressed how portraying the real-life impact of the cartel wars is inconsequential in the writing team’s process: “We could go on and on about political intrigue and murder and violence in Mexico, but it’s got to relate to how our characters are doing and what they’re doing. Ultimately, we’ve got to take care of our people first” (Kohan in “TV dramas colored”, 2009). Indifference is often as hurtful as discrimination. Even though Weeds is part of the trend that saw middle-aged white women lead television shows of the early 2000s such as Showtime’s Nurse Jackie (Beck, 2012; Bednarek, 2015; Havas & Sulimma, 2020) – efforts that expanded tel­ evision narratives in terms of gender – the show is far from a beacon of di­ versity. Kohan’s Netflix show, Orange Is the New Black, for which she is more widely known, has a wider and deeper canvas linguistically, ethnically and in terms of gender and sexual identity (Caputi, 2015) – however, it has been judged as a white-saviour fantasy (Belcher, 2016). Indeed, scholarship around TV shows starring white heroines who face adversity by dealing narcotics often obviates the privilege engrained in their ethnicity. An example of this type of reading, which exacerbates white motherly heroism in the face of adversity while failing to question the harm derived from their actions, comes from Bernard Beck’s fleshing out of the similarities between the protagonists of Weeds and Nurse Jackie:

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The secrets we share with them about their sense of helplessness in facing challenges contrast with their evident instincts for survival. They handle the burdens of family, of economic insufficiency, and of the dangers and annoyances of the irksome drug trafficking operations that have become central to their daily existences, but in secret and without dignity. They are surrounded by crowds of people making contradictory demands, but they are essentially alone and isolated. Their lives are filled with crises and passionate encounters, but there is none of the dramatic and flamboyant energy of soap opera characters. They feel pity and annoyance, and their victories bring relief rather than triumph. (Beck, 2012, p. 29) While the inner struggles of the main character remained pivotal to her newfound role as a provider, Weeds makes a narrative and geographical shift at the end of season three. Nancy’s hitman and accomplice, Guillermo, sets fire to a marijuana plantation belonging to one of Nancy’s competitors. The fire expands into Agrestic and the suburb crumbles as Nancy leaves it behind (Figure 3.1). This is a powerful metaphor for how the ultimate blame for the crumbling of the suburbs does not fall on the white baroness, but the migrant gun for hire. The last image of season three is indicative of Hollywood cartel media’s racial politics: Nancy rides into the future aboard a Segway, leaving a literal trail of destruction behind her. In leaving Agrestic behind, Nancy ex­ ercises her right to a second chance, a right deeply embedded in the American ethos. With the help of her business partner and former rival Guillermo, she starts a new enterprise: smuggling marijuana across the Mexican border. We see Amexica from the opposite side: not from the dusty streets of Tijuana, as seen through the Hollywood prism, but from the lazy geography of San Diego, sprinkled with shopping malls, drive-throughs and the joyous yet in­ sidious hypercapitalism of the United States. But it is season five that draws most from the cinematic and televisual grammar of the cartel wars. Mexican actor Demián Bichir plays the fictional Esteban Reyes, who nevertheless resembles a real-life politician and alleged crime boss – Jorge Hank Rhon. Hank Rhon is the son of one of the most prominent Mexican politicians in the twentieth century, Carlos Hank. Formerly a schoolteacher, Hank founded the influential political cell El Grupo de Atlacomulco, which saw one of its members, Enrique Peña Nieto, become the Mexican president in 2012. The Esteban Reyes saga is perhaps the fictional narrative that most clearly references real-life events in the cartel wars. Demián Bichir, who plays Esteban and in real life is highly involved in political acti­ vism, said of his character: “that’s what I find fascinating about him and the characters on that show: they’re very real. It’s all about the gray, because none of us are black and white. We can all be angels or demons, or both” (Simon, 2017). Reyes, as stated, is the epitome of the corrupt politician (Atuesta & Ponce, 2017), a key figure in the bestiary of narco politics, a term used to describe the processes though which criminal networks have infiltrated,

60 From Weeds to Ozark

Figure 3.1 Mary Louise Parker plays suburban drug baron Nancy Botwin in the Showtime series Weeds (2005–2012). Nancy leaves behind a burning suburb in the season three finale, “Go”.

penetrated and controlled the political sphere in countries such as Mexico and Colombia since the uptake of the trade in the 1980s (Andreas, 1998; Lupsha, 1981; Morris, 2012; Paternostro, 1995). Nancy Botwin and Walter White are well-rounded characters whose motives, however devious, are well under­ stood. The ends of providing for their families – and saving their life, in the case of Walter – justify the means of wealth acquisition. However, Hollywood cartel media rarely provides “bad hombres” like Esteban with any sort of depth. Like cartoon villains, they are evil and greedy just for the sake of it. Criminality is in their blood, it seems. Through Guillermo, Nancy meets Esteban, who, besides being a criminal mastermind, also serves as the mayor of the border city of Tijuana, a key plaza since the early days of the Guadalajara Cartel in the 1980s. Nancy is blown away by the glitz surrounding Esteban’s political and social life, and finds in him a lover and a trafficking accomplice. Theirs is a romantic and sexual re­ lationship full of power struggles (Figure 3.2). Esteban operates a network of underground tunnels (Figure 3.3) that connect the supply point of Tijuana with the distribution key plaza of San Diego. There, in an outdoor mall in which the flows of American capitalism converge, Nancy operates a maternity shop that works as a front for this operation. Nancy is unaware of this, as she thinks the shop was merely set up as a money laundering operation; we get a glimpse of how enmeshed money laundering and business are across the globe, both in fiction and real life (see Walker & Unger, 2009). The tunnel is, of course, a direct reference to the operations conducted by El Chapo Guzmán,

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Figure 3.2 Guillermo Diaz and Demián Bichir play the token “bad hombres” in the Showtime series Weeds.

Figure 3.3 In season four, episode five of Weeds, “No Man is Pudding”, Nancy finds a tunnel running under the border, which is being used for heroin and human trafficking.

the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who has become a larger-than-life figure and who famously started trafficking cocaine by going under the border. Here, what Nancy envisioned as a possible way to conduct a legitimate business,

62 From Weeds to Ozark

even if it served as a money laundering operation, becomes her ultimate downfall. The pestilent waters of cartel money have dampened not only the foundation of U.S. society, the heterosexual suburban marriage, but also the financial support of the neoliberal society: the private enterprise; the small business. The moral panic in California over narcotics trafficking is an old ghost, and as far back as the 1950s there were already attempts to close the border (Smith & Pansters, 2020). The threat to Nancy and her suburban persona is ever-present, even if she has long left Agrestic and its “little boxes on a hillside”. From being a smalltime pot dealer, Nancy has now, in season five, been introduced into the big leagues by Mexican hardcore criminals. Long gone are the days when Nancy sold marijuana to bored teenagers, housewives and businessmen. In Weeds, the commingling of two previously unrelated and even opposing worlds – namely, American white suburbia and cartel violence “South of the border” – eventually leads to the disintegration of a suburban family, the foundation of society according to conservative American values. As Laura J. Miller explains, the suburban ideal has, from its beginnings, been associated with a particular vision of family life. This vision regards the family not only as a domestic alliance that creates a household to take care of its members’ basic needs for food and shelter, but also as a group of people who enjoy one another’s company and share leisure pursuits. This is a vision of family togetherness, meaning that husband, wife, and children choose to spend the time not claimed by wage labor or school with one another, preferring each other’s company to the competing attractions of the outside world. (Miller, 1995, p. 394) The family is disrupted. Nancy is now knee-deep in the muddy waters of the cartel wars and involved with a mayor and drug baron. The plot follows a trope in Hollywood storytelling where previously uncorruptible women get lured into crime by men of colour. Her relationship with Esteban, who fathers her third son, is what ultimately leads to her doom and incarceration.

Ozark and the problem with greed The first time we see Marty Byrde (played by Jason Bateman) he is hiding money. Dirty money. Cartel money. He needs to launder it for one of his clients, a second-tier boss in one of the most powerful Mexican cartels. Everything in Marty, beginning with his wholesome name, spells normalcy: he is the stereotypical all-American dad. Crisp shirt all tucked in, SUV to fit in all of the family; it is all there. His actions do not seem to correspond with his overall persona. Clearly this must be a mistake, as he does not fit the de­ scription of a criminal or a money launderer. Surely, he was tricked into committing these crimes. Either that, or he had no other option.

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Like Walter White from Breaking Bad – which will be discussed in Chapter 5 – Marty Byrde is an exceptionally intelligent straight white man who wants to provide the essentials for his family, and then more. He is a hardworking whitecollar professional who gives in to temptation and agrees to launder money for the cartel, silently and somewhat carefully. Here, the clear and present danger posed to American suburbia does not only involve drug addiction and gang violence stemming from ethnic minorities, but also the corruption of previously venerable occupations – in the case of Marty Byrde, financial consultancy. Marty has his own business and thus has taken on the role of the heroic entrepreneur so pre­ valent in twenty-first-century U.S. mythology. Yet, this is not enough to guar­ antee a prosperous future. Long gone are the days in which white men in grey suits ascended from the subway to enter a building in which they would work for the rest of their lives, employed by a government or corporation that acted as a providing father and nurturing mother all at once. In twenty-first-century America, cartel media tells us, hardworking white men have to fend for them­ selves and find creative ways to game the system and grab their share of the neoliberal promise, even if it ceases to exist. When we see the Byrde children for the first time, we encounter a typical suburban American family. They are having dinner with the father at the head of the table, peering into a screen displaying financial news. The scene reminds us of countless screen representations of family dinners, from the abovementioned American Beauty to the Pixar animation The Incredibles. The Byrde mother, Wendy (played by Laura Linney), talks about her day: shopping at Costco, dropping off the recyclables and taking their kid to the dentist. Plantation shutters, carefully decorated walls, a balanced dinner: all the in­ gredients for a perfect life. Then Marty is called in the middle of the night and he leaves the safety of the suburbs aboard his SUV. He arrives to a warehouse where Mr Del Rio (played by Esai Morales), an elegant cartel boss, is demanding $5 million that he claims have been stolen from him. Del Rio is far from the bandido type generally assigned to cartel members in U.S. film and television. He is methodical, soft spoken, an alpha male who would be at home in any corporate boardroom. Yet he displays unnerving brutality when killing Marty’s associate and his girlfriend, as well as a father and son who operated a warehouse where piles of cartel money were stored for Marty to pick up and launder. And the idealised suburbia kicks in as an oneiric sequence. As he is about to be shot in the head by Del Rio, Marty’s thoughts go to his kids, years earlier, playing on a wet trampoline. Himself, laughing on the wet grass. His wife, Wendy, showering the kids with a hose. He gets back his bearings to find out he was spared. But now he has to launder money for the cartels. For life. His seemingly noble and riskless job as an independent financial advisor was not as pristine as imagined. He ends up laundering money for “the second largest cartel in Mexico”. We see other two “muchachos”, as Del calls them, dispose of bodies in acid barrels – a clear reference to one of the most gut-wrenching practices of the cartel wars.

64 From Weeds to Ozark

Byrde’s first encounter with the drug baron encapsulates the most savage imagery from the cartel wars: the “spectacles of death” that I have described elsewhere (Albarrán-Torres, 2017). The tropes of the cartel wars are there: the bold, tattooed “bad hombres”, the savagery, and the harmless but greedy American men getting caught up in an unfortunate situation, but heroic nevertheless for attempting to provide for their family and fulfil the suburban triumvirate of private schools, SUVs and designer furniture. Later in the premiere episode, FBI agent Petty, following the money trail left behind by the cartels, solemnly says: “Mexicans, Mafia, Muslims. We all want to believe that these people are more than they are.” This display of Trumpian rhetoric sets the tone for how authorities are represented in the show: as necessarily tough, racist law enforcers who are fighting to keep drugs off the streets and do the impossible against an invisible yet powerful enemy. Social class also plays a defining role in the show. The Byrdes move to the Ozarks, the mountainous area in Missouri that has long been a byword for classist views about “redneck culture”. As such, Ozark also presents us with the dichotomy of suburban and rural communities in the United States (Eisenberg, 2018), which is rarely portrayed in cinematic or televisual culture – though a notable exception is Debra Granik’s 2010 film Winter’s Bone, in which meth trafficking brings mayhem to a struggling mountain family. The rural com­ munity to which the Byrdes self-exile is as un-suburban as it gets. The show looks down upon this “redneck” bastion, casting a patronising gaze over the lives of the rural dispossessed and their means of survival. In terms of on-screen urbanism, Ozark presents us with a community of labourers that caters for the urban rich who own summer homes or attend the lakeside town to party. As Michael Mitgang points out, the Byrdes act as parasites by sucking up the lifeblood of the disadvantaged: the socio-economic statuses of the people living in the Ozarks play a huge role in the success of the illicit trade depicted in the show. In actuality, the most common types of jobs in the Ozarks are lower paying jobs. (Mitgang, 2018) In Ozark’s narrative universe the cartels have threatened the very foundation of suburbia: the heterosexual marriage. The Byrdes’ downfall as a romantic couple and strengthening as a criminal partnership is triggered first by survival instinct – they need to flee to the Ozarks and launder cartel money so their lives, and the lives of their two teenage children, can be spared – and then by their greed and hunger for power. Particularly in season three, we see a shift in the power dynamics of the Byrde family, whereby Wendy finds ambition within herself and realises that she too can become a powerful player in the business, while taking the reins of the household from Marty. In season three, Ozark becomes a marital war in which gender dynamics are turned on their head. In addition to the Byrdes’ struggle with each other to demonstrate their decision-making power, we see Helen (played by Janet McTeer), a lawyer and

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fixer for the cartel boss Navarro, battle for the custody of her teenage children. We also meet an elderly couple who own a boat casino that the Byrdes and the Navarro cartel want to buy. Ozark is a hall of mirrors populated by conflicts: women versus men; Mexican savagery versus American calm; suburban so­ phistication versus bucolic simplicity. It is in season three that Ozark brings the horrid world of the cartels and the tense calm of American corporate and entertainment spheres together. In the season’s first episode, Wendy sees images of the cartel wars on her computer, much like the lead character in the Denis Villeneuve film Sicario (see AlbarránTorres, 2017). Wendy gets a glimpse of just how blood-soaked the money she and her family are laundering is. She sees decapitated bodies, corpses lying on the streets – the effects of the cartel war fought by their boss Omar Navarro and his most bitter rival. The carnage is seen from afar, from a computer screen in a dimly lit corporate office. Yet the carnage is real; and the Byrdes get ever so much closer to it when Navarro (played by Felix Solis) starts commu­ nicating directly with Wendy, and later in the season holds Marty hostage in his castle-like estate. Like Breaking Bad before it, Ozark juxtaposes the serenity of American prosperity and the stark violence of the cartel wars.

Figure 3.4 In Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015), the main character, Kate Mercer, is horrified when she encounters images of spectacular death from the Mexican cartel wars.

Figure 3.5 In contrast, Ozark’s Wendy Byrde finds a business opening when she realises that the cartel wars in Mexico are getting increasingly violent.

66 From Weeds to Ozark

Figure 3.6 At the end of season three, episode one, “Wartime”, Wendy enters her former suburban home and hangs the family portrait of the new owners upside down. This symbolises the destruction of the suburban ideal at the hands of drug violence.

The opening episode of season three clearly establishes a break with the Byrde family’s past. On a trip to Chicago, Wendy visits the family’s former suburban home, where a young family now lives. Wendy stalks the young family and sees them exit the home at night, their kids walking happily as they enter a SUV. Wendy walks the halls of her former home, where she raised her children while Marty, an ever-loyal husband and provider, worked to increase the family’s wealth. Wendy takes a melancholic stroll through the hall and kitchen, climbs the stairs, enters one of the children’s rooms and makes the bed. For a brief moment she is a suburban mother again. Then it hits her: she is not that version of Wendy Byrde anymore. She then proceeds to leave eerie souvenirs of her visit: she unmakes the bed, pours food colourant into the milk, grabs a beer from the fridge and leaves it half-consumed on a table. Finally, she hangs the family’s portrait upside down. In an interview with Variety, actress Laura Linney said that the Byrdes could provide a source of identification for audiences: “I think people like identifying with the Byrdes and thinking, if they were in their situation, what would they do? It’s easy to be someone of questionable character. It’s not easy to be of solid character, I think. So I think people are realizing how easy it is to take the dark road” (Linney in Countryman, 2020). The Byrdes have become the American ideal in the inverse.

Conclusion: when trafficking preserves privilege The ideal of suburbia is not exclusive to the United States, and for the past few decades has become the drive of middle-class aspiration worldwide. In parallel, narratives in which drug dealing corrupts the upper classes and alters the

From Weeds to Ozark

67

ethical and legal status quo in the suburbs are not exclusive to television shows and films set in the United States. The Netflix production El Club, launched in 2019 and set in Mexico City, tells the story of a group of upper-class young professionals who try to escape their entitlement, but not their privilege, by selling drugs to other uber-rich youth. The show, produced by telenovela production powerhouse Argos, deals with how drug trafficking corrupts the members of El Club – as their criminal micro-organisation, which they de­ scribe as a small business, is known. Their business starts off as a dating app, which quickly evolves into a contact point between these amateur traffickers and their growing list of consumers. The show, which takes place in the ul­ tramodern settings inhabited by the Mexican elite, feels like the fictional companion to the reality show Made in Mexico, also produced by Netflix. Made in Mexico relishes the banality and grossly limited worldview of Mexico City socialites, who are blinded to the poverty, violence and social injustice that most Mexicans face. There is a clear social class divide in the world created by El Club, but this is merely described and lacks any sort of critical nuance. Like the protagonists of Weeds and Ozark, the spoiled rich kids in El Club get corrupted by the narco underworld and are led into a hell of their own making. However, the show depicts a lack of accountability on their part: they had no other choice, it seems, once they were pulled into trafficking. Rather than offering a muchneeded scathing critique of the deep class divides in Mexico and the racism and

Figure 3.7 Alejandro Speitzer as a rich, Mexico City kid turned ecstasy dealer in Netflix’s El Club (2019).

68 From Weeds to Ozark

classism that this brings into everyday social dynamics, the show presents these kids as heroic figures who try to escape the status quo and renounce the privilege they were born into by preserving that same privilege through their own entrepreneurial skills. Similarly, the Spanish teen drama Élite (2018) in­ cludes a plot in which the drug trade tarnishes the pristine and privileged lives of students at an upscale private high school. In this Netflix production, students that are offered scholarships at the institution bring in the criminal activities prevalent in their disadvantaged background. They sell drugs at the school. Blame is centered on the underprivileged students who traffic narcotics rather than the posh ones who consume them. This is yet another narrative that uses social class in a problematic way to deal with drug trafficking. Shows like Weeds and El Club end up giving a free pass to their ethically shady protagonists: they managed to turn crime into a clean, sterile business akin to any other enterprise. Like Nancy Botwin and Mary Byrde, the members of El Club enjoy the benefits that their whiteness and/or class gifts them. They can conduct their business without raising much suspicion from the authorities, as they do not fit the Brown and Black descriptors often as­ sociated with cartel activities.

Suggested viewing Weeds, season 5 (created by Jenji Kohan, 2010) Ozark (created by Bill Dubuque, Mark Williams, 2017–) El Club (created by Camila Ibarra, 2019)

References Albarrán-Torres, C. (2017). Spectacles of death: body horror, affect and visual culture in the Mexican narco wars. Senses of Cinema, 84. Retrieved from http://sensesofcinema.com/ 2017/feature-articles/mexican-narco-wars/. Andreas, P. (1998). The political economy of narco-corruption in Mexico. Current History, 97(618), 160. Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Theory, Culture & Society, 7(2–3), 295–310. Atuesta, L. H., & Ponce, A. F. (2017). Meet the Narco: Increased competition among criminal organisations and the explosion of violence in Mexico. Global Crime, 18(4), 375–402. Beck, B. (2012). Mother courage and her soaps: Incendies, Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and daytime drama. Multicultural Perspectives, 14(1), 28–31. Bednarek, M. (2015). “Wicked” women in contemporary pop culture: “Bad” language and gender in Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Saving Grace. Text & Talk, 35(4), 431–451. Belcher, C. (2016). There is no such thing as a post-racial prison: neo-liberal multi­ culturalism and the white savior complex on Orange Is the New Black. Television & New Media, 17(6), 491–503. Coon, D. (2013). Look closer: Suburban narratives and American values in film and television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Caputi, J. (2015). The color orange? Social justice issues in the first season of Orange Is the New Black. Journal of Popular Culture (Boston), 48(6), 1130–1150. Countryman, E. (2020, August 14). ‘Ozark’ cast and crew discuss season 3, expansion and evolution in Variety Streaming Room. Variety. Retrieved from https://variety.com/ 2020/tv/news/ozark-cast-crew-streaming-room-1234734209/. Eisenberg, A. M. (2018). Rural blight. Harvard Law & Policy Review, 13, 187–239. Forsyth, A. (2012). Defining suburbs. Journal of Planning Literature, 27(3), 270–281. Havas, J., & Sulimma, M. (2020). Through the gaps of my fingers: Genre, femininity, and cringe aesthetics in dramedy television. Television & New Media, 21(1), 75–94. Jaramillo, D. L. (2014). Narcocorridos and newbie drug dealers: The changing image of the Mexican Narco on US television. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(9), 1587–1604. Lavoie, D. (2011). Smoking the other: Marijuana and counterhegemony in Weeds. Substance Use & Misuse, 46(7), 910–921. Low, S. (2009). Maintaining whiteness: The fear of others and niceness. Transforming Anthropology, 17(2), 79–92. Lupsha, P. A. (1981). Drug trafficking: Mexico and Colombia in comparative perspective. Journal of International Affairs, 35(1), 95–115. McManus, R., & Ethington, P. J. (2007). Suburbs in transition: New approaches to sub­ urban history. Urban History, 34(2), 317–337. Miller, B. J. (2017). From I Love Lucy in Connecticut to Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane: Suburban TV shows, 1950-2007. Sociological Focus, 50(3), 277–290. Miller, L. J. (1995, September). Family togetherness and the suburban ideal. Sociological Forum, 10(3), 393–418. Mitgang, M. (2018). The secret agenda of a quiet town. In C. Anders, A. Ayala, B. Baughman, N. Buehler, C. Cahya, A. Campbell, & H. Haines (Eds.), Perspectives on black markets v. 2. Retrieved from: https://iu.pressbooks.pub/perspectives2/chapter/quiettowns-are-suspicious/. Morin, C. (2020). Television makes room for Trumpism: The persistent “family crisis” in ABC’s rebooted Roseanne. Feminist Media Studies, 1–18. Retrieved from https://www. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2020.1804977. Morris, S. D. (2012). Corruption, drug trafficking, and violence in Mexico. The Brown Journal of World Affairs, 18(2), 29–43. Paternostro, S. (1995). Mexico as a narco-democracy. World Policy Journal, 12(1), 41–47. Shea, G. (2018). Stranger danger: The inversion of suburban stranger-danger symbolism in Stranger Things. The Graduate Review, 3(1), 48–60. Simon, A. (2017, July 13). Great conversations: Demian Bichir. Huffpost. Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/great-conversations-demia_b_7782556. Smith, B. T., & Pansters, W. G. (2020). US moral panics, Mexican politics, and the borderlands origins of the war on drugs, 1950–62. Journal of Contemporary History, 55(2), 364–387. TV dramas colored by Mexico’s drug violence (2009, April 8). New York Daily News. Retrieved from https://www.nydailynews.com/latino/tv-dramas-colored-mexicodrug-violence-article-1.362579. Walker, J., & Unger, B. (2009). Measuring global money laundering: “The Walker Gravity Model”. Review of Law & Economics, 5(2), 821–853. Wilhite, K. (2012). Contested terrain: The suburbs as region. American Literature, 84(3), 617–644.

70 From Weeds to Ozark Films cited Bird, B. (Director). (2004). The incredibles [Motion picture]. United States: Pixar Animation Studios. Cronenberg, D. (Director). (2005). A history of violence [Motion picture]. United States, Germany, Canada: New Line Cinema. Forbes, B. (Director). (1975). The Stepford wives [Motion picture]. United States: Palomar Pictures. Granik, D. (Director). (2010). Winter’s bone [Motion picture]. United States: Anonymous Content, Winter’s Bone Productions. Lynch, D. (Director). (1986). Blue velvet [Motion picture]. United States: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. Mendes, S. (Director). (1999). American beauty [Motion picture]. United States: DreamWorks. Mendes, S. (Director). (2008). Revolutionary Road [Motion picture]. United States, United Kingdom: DreamWorks, BBC Films. Oz, F. (Director). (2004). The Stepford wives [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures.

Television shows cited Black, C., & Marlens, N. (Creators). (1988–1993). The wonder years [Television series]. United States: American Broadcasting Company. Brazil, M., Turner, B., & Turner, T. (Creators). (1998–2006). That 70s’ show [Television series]. United States: Twentieth Century Fox Television. Brixius, L., Dunsky, E., & Wallem, L. (Creators). (2009–2015). Nurse Jackie [Television series]. United States: Showtime Cherry, M. (Creator). (2004–2012). Desperate housewives [Television series]. United States: Touchstone Television. Dubuque, B., & Williams, M. (Creators). (2017–). Ozark [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Duffer, M., & Duffer, R. (Creators). (2016–). Stranger things [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Ibarra, C. (Creator). (2019). El club [Television series]. Mexico: Netflix, Headroom, Argos. Kelley, D. E. (Creator). (2017–2019). Big little lies [Television series]. United States: HBO. Kohan, J. (Creator). (2005–2012). Weeds [Television series]. United States: Lions Gate Television. Kohan, J. (Creator). (2013–2019). Orange is the new black [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Madrona, D., & Montero, C. (Creators). (2018–). Élite [Television series]. Spain: Zeta Ficción, Netflix. Weisberg, J. (Creator). (2013–2018). The Americans [Television series]. United States: DreamWorks Television.

4

Queen of the South Doing linguistic mish-mash and “Mexican face”

Spanish language is one of the key cultural identity markers of communities of Latin American heritage in the United States. Even though Spanish has been deeply rooted in some areas of the current-day United States even before English became the dominant language, Spanish speaking is still a point of contention for the most conservative factions of the political es­ tablishment. Rather than a source of cultural diversity and a provider of identity for large segments of the population, Spanish is seen by con­ servatives as an invading force. The disdain for non-English speakers in border states is seen not only in everyday acts of racism (Schmidt, 2002) but also in official policies that impose English as the de facto mother tongue. For instance, state policies discourage the use of Spanish among school-age children. This cultural policing echoes colonial experiences in the Americas and elsewhere, where Indigenous languages have been wiped out since colonial times (Mar-Molinero, 1995). The representation of Mexican and other Latino characters in Hollywood in film and television dates back to the early days of cinema, when the Western proved to be a profitable genre. The mythical West, as we have seen in the Introduction and Chapter 2, is populated with stereotypes surrounding non-white characters. Native Americans have been portrayed as the savages who needed to be tamed by European settlers, while Mexicans filled in the role of the bandido: the mischievous outlaw who seeks to take advantage of righteous white lawmen by taking what those lawmen suppose is rightfully theirs to colonise. In the current rise of cartel media, as we have seen, tropes emanating from the Western are rehashed and set in the proverbial Amexica (Vulliamy, 2011). Characters of Mexican origin generally fall into stereotypes aligned with the cartel Western, such as the trope of “bad hombres” discussed in Chapter 2. There is vast underrepresentation of sexual, gender and ethnic minorities in U.S. media, which makes it all the more important to “get it right” when these non-hegemonic groups are given a voice. Underrepresentation and misrepresentation of Latino characters has been a constant in U.S. film and television (Olivarez, 1998; Mastro & Behm-Morawitz, 2005; Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2017; Figueroa-Caballero, Mastro, & Stamps, 2019).

72 Queen of the South

Up until the boom of streaming services and local co-productions, stories about women and sexual and ethnic minorities have been mostly told through the gaze of white male privilege. As Maryann Erigha states, “The orchestrators of this historical and wide-reaching trail of American popular cultural artifacts have been almost exclusively White men, while the narratives from women and racial/ethnic minorities have occupied far less space in the cultural canon” (2015, p. 78). Erigha goes further and claims that: “With the under­ representation of women and racial/ethnic minorities in Hollywood, White men exercise a cultural imperialism and hegemony with unilateral control over media images” (2015, p. 85). This “cultural imperialism” permeates decisionmaking processes such as studio budgets, casting and linguistic choices in dialogue and editing. At times, cultural imperialism translates into blatant erasure of minorities. Two recent high-profile Hollywood productions come to mind. First, the award-winning film La La Land (2016), a musical ode to Los Angeles that is dumbfoundedly devoid of Latinx characters. The other is the Ryan Murphy mini-series Hollywood (2020), produced and distributed by Netflix. The narrative celebrates ethnic, sexual and gender diversity, but is equally missing Latino characters. Both stories take place in Los Angeles, a city in which multiculturalism has deep historical roots. In contemporary film and television, linguistic inaccuracy has been pro­ blematic, as has the casting of characters of Latin American heritage, parti­ cularly in the context of the cartel wars. Casting practices in mainstream shows such as our case study in this chapter, USA Network’s Queen of the South, speak of wider misconceptions about ethnic, racial and linguistic identities sur­ rounding the concept of “Latinx”. In television shows and films set in the context of the transborder cartel wars, characters who are explicitly Mexican are often played by actors from diverse nationalities and who often have different accents. Authenticity suffers as actors deliver their lines in broken Spanish or in an unrealistic melange of Spanish and English, used aleatorily and bearing no resemblance to Spanglish, an emerging hybrid that mixes Spanish and English and which is quickly evolving among Latino communities in the United States (Ardila, 2005; Otheguy & Stern, 2011; Rodríguez-González & Parafita-Couto, 2012). Here, it is important to note that the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” are not monolithic, but rather fluid and even contentious. In the United States, there is no clear categorisation for “Hispanics” and “Latinos” written into the census, for example. Rather, people who self-recognise as “Hispanic” have historically been categorised as broadly “white”. In the U.S. Census, people of Latin American origin self-identify in multiple ways, including “criollo”, “mestizo”, “LatinBlack” and, of course, “Hispanic” and “Latino” (Amaro & Zambrana, 2000). The term “Hispanic” refers to a Spanish-speaking heritage, which leaves monolingual Indigenous Latin Americans out, as well as Portuguese speakers from Brazil (Marrow, 2003). The confusion around the terms “Latino” and “Hispanic” speaks of the practical impossibility of grouping diverse cohorts under a single umbrella

Queen of the South 73

term. The confusion or lack of interest in fleshing out and appreciating the cultural differences among Latino individuals and communities has led to what I call “Mexican face”, a term that defines the use of any white actor or actors of colour to portray Mexican individuals, such as Brazilian actress Alice Braga and Portuguese thespian Joaquim de Almeida in Queen of the South. The term “Mexican face” is of course heavily loaded, as it relates to the racist practice of blackface whereby non-Black individuals portrayed people of African descent. Blackface has long been a controversial but recurrent practice in the United States (Lhamon, 1998; Mahar, 1999), and a precedent for how minorities are misrepresented and mocked in everyday life and media texts.

Se habla español, but you must speak English Mexican-American culture has specific traits and histories that escape broad generalisations about what it means to be Latino. The cultural assimilation of Mexican-American communities through the imposition of English as a first language has revealed official and unofficial uses of power. The use of Spanish was particularly important in pioneering cultural production among Mexican Americans in California during the early twentieth century. Spanish was seen as a provider of a solid identity and as a way to prevent the whitewashing of Mexican-American culture in particular, and Latino culture more widely. However, early efforts to produce Spanish-language content for local con­ sumption were short-lived as English took over music, film and later television. As Colin Gunckel chronicles: “With the Spanish language situated as a crucial point of cohesion among individuals of Latin American descent, its maintenance by Mexicans in the United States was often regarded as a barometer of cultural integrity and as a central element of the struggle against assimilation” (2008, p. 330). As silent movies gave way to “talkies” in the late 1920s (Allmendinger, 1988), local media in Los Angeles, California, saw Spanish-language products at first as a sort of contestation to the prevalence of English as a de facto official language that did not ne­ cessarily reflect the kaleidoscopic diversity of Southern Californian com­ munity life. As Gunckel expands: Accordingly, talking pictures (initially called “toquis” in the Spanish language press), were greeted by La opinión with a combination of enthusiasm and anxiety: the potential ubiquity of English language features appeared to threaten the very survival of the Spanish language, while the possibility of a culturally specific Spanish language cinema generated optimism about a medium that would achieve the cultural value of live theater. Within the paper’s entertainment coverage, the issue of spoken language (pronunciation, regional slang, and diction) assumed a central position, whereby issues of class, generational conflict, nationality, and cultural integrity were collapsed into a discussion of cinematic dialogue and the “proper” use of Spanish. (2008, p. 330)

74 Queen of the South

As Gunckel’s passage foreshadows, the discontinuation of Spanish in theatre and film was key in the cultural assimilation of Mexican-American commu­ nities. Spanish-speaking production was all but halted in the United States for decades, and without a steady stream of uniquely Mexican-American content, consumption depended on whatever was produced in Latin America and Spain. Diasporic Latino communities consumed and continue to consume media produced by cultural powerhouses such as Televisa (Mexico) and Caracol (Colombia). These practices amplify the sense of cultural nostalgia that diasporic communities often experience and that is expressed through the consumption of entertainment media (music, television, film) from the homeland – we can think, for instance, of the Southeast Asian diaspora in the United Kingdom (Gillespie & Cheesman, 2002; Punathambekar, 2005). The following decades saw Mexican-American and Latino stories, some of them iconic for current Chicano identity-building, being told mostly in English with sporadic passages in Spanish. Even if the production team and talent were of Latino heritage, films were shot in English for commercial purposes, as the distribution of foreign-language subtitled content in the U.S. market is all but doomed. We can think, for instance, of director Gregory Nava’s body of work. In My Family (1995), for example, he chronicles the experience of Mexican migrants in Los Angeles across generations. Even though the story begins in Mexico, it is told and spoken in English, with exaggerated Mexican accents that attempt to provide a dose of authenticity. The director spoke about how his own bilingual and bicultural heritage served as inspiration for the film: my family has been in southern California since the 1880s, so it’s an old southern California family. I came from a border family, so although I was born and raised in San Diego, I have lots of aunts and uncles and cousins who were born and raised in Tijuana. Even though I’m a third generation native Californian, some of my immediate relatives, who live just a few miles from the house I was raised in, are Mexican. So I’ve always been raised in that border world, with that tremendous clash between the cultures. (West, 1995, p. 26) The film, produced by Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope, cast some of the biggest names of the Latino acting community at the time, including Mexican-American Edward James Olmos and Nuyorican rising icon Jennifer Lopez. The soundtrack was written and performed by Dominican star Juan Luis Guerra. Latino talent en masse, but not necessarily a nuanced re­ presentation of Mexican-Americans, but rather of the wider denominator of “Hispanic” used in the United States to socially and politically group com­ munities and individuals of Spanish-speaking backgrounds. This is also true of Gregory Nava’s most successful film, Selena (1997), which chronicles the rise and sudden tragic end of Tex-Mex singer Selena

Queen of the South 75

Quintanilla. In the film, Jennifer Lopez, who is from the Bronx, fills Selena’s shiny boots (Figure 4.1). In an interview for The New York Times upon the release of the film, J.Lo, as Lopez is also known, commented upon the ethnic differences between her and Selena: “But Selena was dark, like me, and had a Latin body, like mine, and didn’t try to hide that. She went up there on stage and said: ‘This is who I am, and I like it. Why should I aspire to be blond and thin?’” (Rohter, 1997). Before Latino culture started to infiltrate the cultural mainstream in the mid-2000s, some of the most recognisable talents among Latinos in the United States collaborated in films such as these. It would be a mistake, however, to consider cultural products such as My Family and Selena an exercise in selfrepresentation. The casting is mostly Latino, but it disregards the diversity of backgrounds and ethnicities within communities of Latin American descent.

Queen of the South, or when any Mexican-sounding dialogue will do It would be unreasonable, of course, to expect all characters of Mexican origin to be played by actors of Mexican descent or all Latino-themed texts to be produced by Latinos, particularly as Latino culture is so diverse, and yet there are so few opportunities for creatives and actors of colour in Hollywood (Sakaguchi & San Martin, 2020; Sinha-Roy, 2017). As Sakaguchi and San Martin (2020) remark, “Since the dawn of Hollywood, non-white actors have been asked to play stereotypes – from maids to immigrants to thugs – while struggling to get cast in layered, authentic roles”. However, something

Figure 4.1 Puerto Rican actress Jennifer Lopez as the late Tex-Mex icon Selena Quintanilla in Gregory Nava’s 1997 film Selena.

76 Queen of the South

remains to be said of the lack of care and the dumbfounding stylistic and linguistic choices taken by the producers of some mainstream screen media. In this chapter I look at Queen of the South, the U.S. adaptation of La Reina del Sur – both the original novel by Spanish author Arturo Pérez Reverte and the narcotelenovela that garnered a cult status for Mexican actress Kate Del Castillo (Figure 4.2). La Reina del Sur is perhaps the most culturally relevant cartel narrative in­ volving a female lead, as women are often overlooked in the televisual and cinematic rendering of the drug wars. La Reina del Sur has become a highly successful, and profitable, media and literary property that has delivered a bestselling book, a highly successful telenovela that was picked up by Netflix after a successful first season, and a “quality television” series produced by USA Network and now available via streaming worldwide. It is exactly this U.S. iteration, Queen of the South, that lays bare the mechanisms of stereotyping, Orientalism and oversimplification used by Hollywood productions that at­ tempt to depict Global South realities. This is not to say that producers do not attempt to portray and even honour diversity; but the predominant white male gaze is limited in its scope and its understanding of other subjectivities. The story follows Teresa Mendoza, a young woman who works in the currency exchange black market, where she meets and falls in love with a cartel member. Inner struggles within the cartel lead to Teresa’s partner’s disappearance and she has to resort to her street smarts to survive. As she navigates the criminal underworld, she discovers her inner strength: a knack for efficient narcotics trafficking. Like other cartel narratives, La Reina del Sur is a rags-to-riches journey in which a member of the lower socioeconomic

Figure 4.2 Mexican actress Kate Del Castillo as Teresa Mendoza, the iconic drug baroness in the telenovela La Reina del Sur.

Queen of the South 77

sector achieves upward mobility by bypassing the legal frameworks imposed by the state. Increasingly, Global South narratives of entrepreneurial success have central characters whose endeavours run counter to the official law, but play along with the twisted ethical logic of corrupt government officials, lawmakers and law enforcing agencies. Teresa Mendoza breaks the glass ceiling of the mythical mediatised cartels (which, as discussed in the Introduction, might bear little resemblance to the actual cartels; see Zavala 2018) by becoming a leader and challenging the allpowerful governor of Sinaloa – a cartel boss himself – and his scheming wife. Mendoza is now an iconic character in Latin American popular culture (Routon, 2007; Dunn & Ibarra, 2015), and an icon of counter-patriarchy in the media. Teresa Mendoza is unlike other telenovela heroines, who follow simple romantic arcs and seek a Cinderella ending in being rescued by a man often belonging to a higher socioeconomic class. Narratives in most Mexican telenovelas exercise what Lewkowicz has called “policing of femininity” (2014, p. 268) by placing women in roles and si­ tuations that ultimately confine them to the roles of housewives, domestic workers or women in search of love. Even though a romantic entanglement triggered Teresa’s involvement in the violent world of the cartels, her quest is to become a powerful player in the masculine underworld. She is a revolu­ tionary in the sense that she subverts the victimisation of women in cartel narratives.

Linguistic mish-mash and “Mexican face” in Queen of the South Queen of the South’s iterative development through several literary and tele­ visual versions has created multiple layers of linguistic wash-down in the story. First, the author of the original novel, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, is of Spanish nationality and learnt the Sinaloan lingo to bring his characters to life. Of course, an author’s background shouldn’t generally matter when it comes to describing a reality that is not their own. In the case of La Reina del Sur, however, a Spanish novelist’s decision to tackle a uniquely Mexican problem raises clear questions of postcolonial entitlement, as the linguistic, political and racist legacy of Spanish rule in what is now Mexico cannot be understated or ignored. Similarly, the novel American Dirt (2020), written by United States author Jeanine Cummins and featured in the highly-influential Oprah’s Book Club, has been criticised for its tone-deaf approach to cartel and border vio­ lence, and for what some call signs of clear cultural appropriation (Wheeler, 2020). The author has also been accused of “exploiting the migrant experience for the benefit of white readers”, and Latinx writers have spoken out against what they see as “trauma porn” (Sullivan, 2020). Pérez-Reverte wrote what has been the highest-grossing novel about the Mexican cartels; however, this literary terrain had already been explored, and owned, by Mexican authors of literature fronteriza or literatura del narco such as

78 Queen of the South

fiction writers Élmer Mendoza (Balas de Plata, 2008) and Yuri Herrera (Trabajos del reino, 2004), and essayist Sergio González Rodriguez (El hombre sin cabeza, 2009). There is a sense of ownership, anchored in the right for selfrepresentation, around cartel stories. As Benavides points out: Pérez-Reverte’s impressive novel about a female Mexican drug lord who, after having to flee her country, makes it big in southern Spain sets the stage for a provocative reassessment of the narco-genre in all its gender, racial, and national glory. The fact that Pérez-Reverte is a best-selling Spanish writer only makes more explicit the underlying and enormous tensions of Spain’s colonial legacy. These same tensions are further intensified by the provocatively accurate depiction in the novel of the violent narco-culture that characterizes Mexico’s northern region. (Benavides, 2009, p. 152) The USA Network adaptation draws from both the novel and the Spanishlanguage television version, yet its dialogue is situated in a zone of in­ determinacy: in most conversations, Spanish and English are interchangeable in a sort of linguistic mish-mash, with subtitles filling in the gaps. Characters who would naturally speak Spanish, such as members of the Mexican Army or the villainous governor of Sinaloa, Don Epifanio (played by Portuguese ve­ teran actor Joaquim de Almeida), suddenly shift to English in the middle of a conversation. Critic Brian Moylan said in The Guardian: The biggest problem is the use of Spanish. The characters almost always speak English, which is unrealistic, but, let’s face it, American audiences are far too lazy to watch something with subtitles. However, occasionally the characters lapse into Spanish for words, phrases or full sentences. There is no rhyme or reason as to why they use their mother tongue and having the mishmash of the two languages doesn’t make it seem more authentic – it just alerts the viewer to the fact that they should be speaking in Spanish the whole time. (2016) Contrary to Netflix’s Narcos, where Americans speak English while Colombians and Mexicans converse almost exclusively in Spanish (see Chapter 7), in Queen of the South conversations shift mid-sentence, which leaves Spanish speakers with a feeling of uncanniness. As Laura Bradley wrote in Vanity Fair upon the release of the first season, producers made narrative choices as an effort to lean towards diversity in the show and to recognise “Hispanic” audience members: Getting her story right, and making it resonate with both Hispanic and non-Hispanic viewers, required some precise considerations – and a couple tweaks to the original story line. For instance, in the books, Teresa makes her home in Spain; in USA’s series, Teresa ends up in Dallas. It’s a nod to U.S. viewers – one that also introduces the potential for some

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fascinating angles on ever-contentious border issues, should the show decide to go in that direction. (Bradley, 2016) Producers of Queen of the South, none of whom are of Latino heritage, are entering the territory of cultural Orientalism: even if in a possibly wellintentioned manner, they are viewing the Other as an exotic, strange and ambiguously interesting curiosity. Feagin and Hernan have termed these ulti­ mately racist practices “sincere fictions” (2000). The term “sincere fictions” implies that after the civil-rights era there was real progress in racial relations and representation in the United States. As Eithne Quinn argues when mobilising this term to discuss white attitudes towards Black cinema: “Such discourses are “sincere” because they are heartfelt, but they are also “fictions” because they deny that there is discrimination in the face of persisting inequality” (2011, p. 4). In the era of “woke culture” (Rose, 2020), half-baked efforts to truly mobilise diversity in media representations end up leaving a stench of flakiness and ir­ relevance; however, there are noteworthy examples of non-Latino directors telling Latino stories in a respectful, attentive way, such as Christopher Zalla’s 2007 film Padre Nuestro, in which broken family ties are the product of un­ documented migration. The concept of “sincere fictions” is useful in describing the approach taken by the producers of Queen of the South, because the use of Spanish in spurts also seems to come with an intention to service Latino audiences – an inept attempt to claim diversity. Journalist Laura Bradley (2016) reports on a conversation with showrunner David Friendly: “As a nod to Hispanic audiences, Friendly also wanted to ensure that Spanish made its way into the show – in the right way. ‘It’s set in the U.S., so obviously the main language is English,’ he explained. ‘But there is a fair amount of Spanish in the show with subtitles’”. Having a little dialogue in Spanish sprinkled here and there throughout each episode does not amount to a faithful representation of the specific cultures clumsily represented in Queen of the South. Rather, this narrative choice reveals a misunderstanding of what servicing diversity means. In reality, it is an example of whitewashing not only Mexican-American culture, but also a turbulent and painful period in Mexico’s history. It is “sincere fiction” at its worst. The Orientalist gaze deployed in Queen of the South surfaces through careless production and script choices, as well as casting. Northern Mexican and Mexican-American cultures are portrayed in a stereotypical manner, fulfilling the Anglo image of what Latinidad (the quality of being Latino) must be like (Molina-Guzmán, 2013; Ruiz, 2015). When reviewing the Orientalist ap­ proach to Japanese culture that author Arthur Golden evidenced in his 1997 novel Memoirs of a Geisha (later adapted by Hollywood and typecasting Chinese actors to pass as Japanese), Allison argues: Power – either real or imagined – is always at work in Orientalism in that forays into foreign lands are taken with the mind of keeping one’s own

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borders and sense of superiority intact. Even in encountering cultural difference, then, the encounter is done in a manner that confirms, rather than alters, one’s own world and position in it. What is seen and known of different places is selective, driven by the need and desire to reassert one’s own cultural identity as both superior and secure. (Allison, 2012, p. 298) These same manifestations of power come into play in Queen of the South, where the us/them dichotomy reaffirms the real and imagined position of white U.S. citizens as “both superior and secure” (Allison, 2012, p. 298). The TV show is told from a male white subjectivity devoid of any accountability. The gross geographical distortions written into Queen of the South challenge credibility, beginning with the decision to stage most of the action in the Dallas area and to alternate between the Texan city and Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa. Characters move back and forth between the two cities, often within the same day. This is a big factual error as Culiacán and Dallas are quite distant from each other – just under 2,000 kms. Culiacán, it is important to note, is not a border city, yet characters constantly travel between Mexico and the United States, sometimes in a span of a few fictional hours. Although this detail might seem inconsequential at first, it does speak of an us/them and here/there mentality. Everything “South of the border”, it seems, is a vast and lawless land where corrupt members of the military eat human flesh and narcos act like savage feudal lords. The misrepresentation of geographic distance in Queen of the South, where characters complete a 20-hour drive in a few fic­ tional hours, lets us peek into Hollywood malpractices when it comes to the careless representation of foreign peoples, languages and territories. Here is where “Mexican face” comes in: it is triggered by this careless mis­ representation. Casting in Queen of the South also essentialises the many and often conflicting definitions of what it is to be Latino in the United States. Brazilian actress Alice Braga plays Teresa: a choice that reminds us of the casting of another Brazilian actor, Wagner Moura, as the late Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar, another mythical figure within cartel narratives. Braga provides depth to the role, as she plays both present and future Teresa (Figure 4.3). We see her struggling to stay alive, agreeing to traffic drugs to escape sex slavery. When she is faced with terrible violence, she sees herself in the future, dressed in haute couture, the stereotypical Latin American, Miami-chic empress. Braga is extremely competent as an actress, but her casting is a symptom of the es­ sentialisation of Latinidad in U.S. popular culture. It is a case of “Mexican face”. “Mexican face” is not exclusive to Queen of the South, of course, and there are multiple examples throughout Hollywood film and television history in which white and Brown non-Mexican actors are chosen to play these roles. Consummate products of the Hollywood star system often partook in “Mexican face”. I have already discussed how the self-confessed conservative

Queen of the South 81

Figure 4.3 Brazilian actress Alice Braga as Teresa Mendoza in USA Network’s Queen of the South.

Charlton Heston played a Mexican cop in Orson Welles’ classic noir Touch of Evil (1958). Makeup darkened his skin and roughened up his facial features. Likewise, Marlon Brando famously portrayed the legendary Mexican re­ volutionary hero Emiliano Zapata (Figure 4.4), a symbol of Indigenous struggle (Gilbert, 2003; Schell, 2009), in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata (1952). Hollywood has historically whitewashed other ethnicities as well. The ex­ amples are too many to list here, but some infamous instances of “facing” include Laurence Olivier’s blackface in Othello (1965) or John Wayne doing “Asian face” as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956), and recent examples such as white actress Emma Stone passing as Chinese-Hawaiian in Cameron Crowe’s Aloha (2015). This sort of whitewashing and cultural appropriation has been a constant in U.S. filmmaking and television that includes Brown characters, where nonLatino producers and creatives make significant choices in terms of re­ presentation. The list is vast; producers have historically “played it safe” when casting big productions that depict Latin American realities; and the tentacles of misrepresentation have grabbed popular imaginaries of what being Latino or Latin American means. In 1993 director Bille August adapted Isabel Allende’s novel The House of the Spirits, which takes place in Chile. Even though there are no Anglo characters, the roles landed on Hollywood A-listers Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Glenn

82 Queen of the South

Figure 4.4 Marlon Brando as Mexican revolutionary Indigenous hero Emiliano Zapata in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952).

Close and Winona Ryder. They deliver their dialogues in English, with clichéd South American accents and the occasional word in Spanish. The creative team was mostly international; Danish director Bille August (who had got the industry’s attention with his Oscar winner Pelle the Conqueror, 1987) scripted the film with the novel’s author, Isabel Allende. Critics at the time blasted the film, highlighting the miscasting of the main characters. Peter Travers at Rolling Stone wrote: “Irons is hardly ideal casting as the macho, rapacious patriarch Esteban Trueba. Even in thick pancake makeup (and a thicker accent), he looks better suited for high tea than for pillaging gov­ ernments and peasant girls. Streep also fights a losing battle. As Trueba’s ethereal wife, Clara, possessed of the power to see her family’s future, she seems gripped less by spirits than by a galloping dementia” (1994). The House of the Spirits’ critical and commercial failure is often cited as an example of how miscasting can be damaging from an industry perspective. Although Braga’s casting as Teresa Mendoza in Queen of the South might seem inoffensive in light of these more blatant examples of Latino-passing and “Mexican facing”, it is indicative of endemic industry and market practices. The casting of Braga in the lead role responds, perhaps, to the fact that she is one of the few Latin American actresses who has succeeded in both global arthouse cinema and Hollywood blockbusters. She first became known to international audiences in the festival darling Cidade de Deus (distributed in­ ternationally as City of God), about drug dealing in the Brazilian favelas. She has then gone on to appear in genre blockbusters such as the zombie night­ mare I Am Legend (2007), opposite Will Smith, and the sci-fi dystopia Elysium

Queen of the South 83

(2013), opposite Matt Damon. By the time Queen of the South was released in 2016 Braga was a somewhat recognisable face in U.S. mainstream media. The pool of Latina actresses with name recognition in English-speaking U.S. media is limited, which brings to light ingrained and long-lasting in­ equalities in the U.S. film industry (Erigha, 2015; Quinn, 2011; Smith, 2013) which persisted even in the enthusiastic early years of the supposedly postracial Obama era (Baum, 2010). Braga, however, is not a native Spanish speaker and, as happened with Wagner Moura in Narcos, Latin American and U.S. Latino audiences may be able to identify her forced accent. This reading of Braga’s casting is not an indictment on her as a Latina woman taking one of the few leading roles on offer in the cannibalistic television production landscape, but rather an indictment on industry practices that manacle diversity and seem to “fill in a quota” of non-white talent on air. Teresa Mendoza’s arch-nemesis Don Epifanio, a drug dealer and governor of the state of Sinaloa, the historical epicentre of trafficking, is played by Portuguese actor Joaquim De Almeida, who has played similar characters in films such as Desperado (1995) and television projects such as Kingpin (2003) and the third season of 24, where he played fictional cartel leader Ramon Salazar. De Almeida has been typecast in cartel-related roles for more than 25 years. He is a master of “Mexican face”: a mature actor with an air of Old World sophistication that bridges classic noir and cartel narratives.

Conclusion Is there a way to escape linguistic mish-mash and “Mexican face” in main­ stream film and television? Is self-representation of ethnic, gender and other minorities possible in the current state of the film and television industries? There are valuable efforts to convey the linguistic and cultural complexities of Mexican-American identities on the screen within cartel media productions. The international co-production Zero Zero Zero (2020), for example, captures the complexity of global trafficking assemblages by offering a narrative trip­ tych. We see three storylines that converge: the buyers of a big shipment of cocaine in Calabria, Italy; the brokers in New Orleans, Louisiana, a family in the cargo business; and the sellers in Mexico. In Mexico, we follow both the cartel and members of the Mexican military. In all instances, the dialogue is carefully constructed. Even regional accents are reproduced, among them Monterrey lingo from northern Mexico and the nuances of the cumbia regia subculture: in the second episode of season one we follow an off-duty soldier into a club; the production design is impressively detailed and gives the sequence a deep sense of realism. Zero Zero Zero is a multinational co-production that includes major industry players such as Sky and Canal+. One of the showrunners is Mauricio Katz, who scripted one of the most outstanding Mexican films about the cartel wars, Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala (2011). The fact that the showrunners include Katz, who is well

84 Queen of the South

Figure 4.5 Emma (Mishel Prada) and Lyn (Melissa Barrera) in Tanya Saracho’s television drama Vida.

versed in the cultural nuances and moral grey areas of the cartel wars, is a step towards a stronger sense of self-representation in cartel media. There are notable examples of linguistic and ethnic veracity in U.S. tele­ vision more generally, outside of cartel media. The Starz show Vida (Figure 4.5), for instance, includes truly bilingual dialogues and goes into anthropological minutiae to depict the cultural life of a Los Angeles neigh­ bourhood in transition towards full-blown gentrification. Showrunner Tanya Saracho (who hails from Los Mochis in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and was recognised as a strong Latinx voice in the Chicago theatre scene before her move to television) has created a world in which Mexican identities are problematised and characters struggle to find a balance between their sometimes-conflicting cultural affiliations. On one hand, they struggle to fit in with U.S. aspirational standards, and on the other they try to hold on to their Mexican roots in an evolving social and political environment (Malaver, 2019). Spanish is used as a form of political resistance and a source of cultural identity. The characters in Vida mix Spanish and English seamlessly. Some exacerbate their Mexican traits and heritage, while others are discriminated against for not being “Mexican enough”, for giving in to the gentrification of traditional Mexican-American enclaves such as Boyle Heights. Linguistic confusion is celebrated rather than swept under the rug. A more realistic linguistic mish-mash is a constant in character interactions.

Queen of the South 85

Vida isn’t related to the drug wars and the creators have steered away from any cartel-related plots. However, it remains an exemplar of how mainstream television can be linguistically accurate while being commercially viable. Vida feels authentic, almost anthropological in its portrayal of everyday practices, lingo and morals among Latinx communities in the United States. The characters feel and sound real, even for those audience members not familiar with Mexican-American idiosyncrasies. The show is also a heartfelt explora­ tion of Latinx queerness (Gilchrist, 2020). Another prominent example of Mexican-American self-representation in mainstream culture is the Netflix show Gentefied (2020). The plot follows a family who struggle to keep their restaurant business afloat amidst economic uncertainty and the gentrification of the diasporic enclave of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles. The dialogue alternates between Spanish and English, and these shifts mark different cultural allegiances among the first- and secondgeneration characters. America Ferrara, who broke the mainstream glass ceiling for Latina actors as the protagonist of Ugly Betty, is one of the executive producers and directed two episodes of the first season. In the 2020 remake of the 1990s classic TV drama Party of Five, the story of five white orphans is reimagined as the tribulations of a Mexican-American family after the parents are deported (the father is played by veteran Mexican actor Bruno Bichir, an inspired choice). Even though the show is not run by Latinos, linguistic expression is a credible representation of the generational divide between parents struggling with English and children who have been raised in the United States. The show deals with pressing issues for Latino communities during the Trump era, including ICE raids and threats to the legal status of DACA recipients (Framke, 2020). There are other reasons for optimism when it comes to linguistic and cultural accuracy in cable, broadcast and streaming U.S. television, but the battle is still uphill.

Recommended viewing Desperado (Robert Rodriguez, 1995) My Family (Gregory Nava, 1995) La reina del sur (created by Roberto Stopello, 2011–2019) Queen of the South (created by M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller, 2016–) Vida (created by Tanya Saracho, 2018–2020) Gentefied (created by Linda Yvette Chávez & Marvin Lemus, 2020–)

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88 Queen of the South Sullivan, J. (2020, February 11), The problems with Jeanine Cummins and American Dirt. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/ the-problems-with-jeanine-cummins-and-american-dirt-20200206-p53ybq.html. Toro, J. J. R. (2007). La recreación literaria del español de México en “La Reina del Sur”. Anuario de Letras. Lingüística y Filología, 45, 197–226. Travers, P. (1994, April 2). The House of the Spirits. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from https:// www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/the-house-of-the-spirits-116316/. Tukachinsky, R., Mastro, D., & Yarchi, M. (2017). The effect of prime time television ethnic/racial stereotypes on Latino and Black Americans: A longitudinal national level study. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 61(3), 538–556. Vulliamy, E. (2011). Amexica: War along the borderline. New York: Random House. West, D. (1995). Filming the Chicano family saga: Interview with director Gregory Nava. Cineaste, 21(4), 26–28. Wheeler, A. (2020, January 22). American Dirt: why critics are calling Oprah’s book club pick exploitative and divisive. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2020/jan/21/american-dirt-controversy-trauma-jeanine-cummins. Zavala, O. (2018). Los cárteles no existen:Narcotráfico y cultura en México. Mexico City: Malpas.

Films cited August, B. (Director). (1987). Pelle de conqueror [Motion picture]. Denmark, Sweden: Per Holst Filmproduktion. August, B. (Director). (1993). The house of the spirits [Motion picture]. Portugal, Germany, Denmark, United States, France: Constantin Film. Blomkamp, N. (Director). (2013). Elysium [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico, Canada: TriStar Pictures. Burge, S. (Director). (1965). Othello [Motion picture]. United Kingdon: National Theatre of Great Britain Production. Chazelle, D. (Director). (2016). La la land [Motion picture]. United States, Hong Kong: Summit Entertainment, Black Label Media, TIK Films. Crowe, C. (Director). (2015). Aloha [Motion picture]. United States: Columbia Pictures. Kazan, E. (Director). (1952). Viva Zapata! [Motion picture]. United States: Twentieth Century Fox. Lawrence, F. (Director). (2007). I am legend [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures. Marshall, R. (Director). (2005). Memoirs of a geisha [Motion picture]. United States: Columbia Pictures. Meirelles, F., & Lund, K. (Directors). (2002). Cidade de deus [Motion picture]. Brazil, France, Germany: Globo Filmes. Menendez, R. (Director). (1988). Stand and deliver [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico: American Playhouse, Olmos Productions. Naranjo, G. (Director). (2011). Miss bala [Motion picture]. Mexico: Canana Films. Nava, G. (Director). (1995). My family [Motion picture]. United States: American Playhouse, American Zoetrope. Nava, G. (Director). (1997). Selena [Motion picture]. United States: Q Productions, Warner Bros.

Queen of the South 89 Powell, D. (Director). (1956). The conqueror [Motion picture]. United States: RKO Radio Pictures. Rodriguez, R. (Director). (1995). Desperado [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico: Columbia Pictures. Soderbergh, S. (Director). (2000). Traffic [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico, Germany: Compulsion Inc. Welles, O. (Director). (1958). Touch of evil [Motion picture]. United States: Universal International Pictures. Zalla, C. (Director). (2007). Padre nuestro [Motion picture]. United States, Argentina: Cinergy Pictures, Panamax Films.

Television shows cited Brennan, I., & Murphy, R. (Creators). (2020). Hollywood [Television mini-series]. United States: Ryan Murphy Productions, Netflix. Chávez, L. Y., & Lemus, M. (Creators). (2020–). Gentefied [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Cochran, R., & Surnow, J. (Creators). (2001–2010). 24 [Television series]. United States: Imagine Entertainment. Fortin, M. A., & Miller, J. J. (Creators). (2016–). Queen of the south [Television series]. United States, Mexico, Spain, Malta: Frequency Films, Friendly Films. Horta, S., & Gaitán, F. (Creators). (2006–2010). Ugly Betty [Television series]. United States: Silent H Productions, Ventanarosa Productions, Reveille Productions. Keyser C., & Lippman, A. (Creators). (2020–). Party of five [Television series]. United States: Sony Pictures Television. Mills, D. (Creator). (2003). Kingpin [Television series]. United States: Paramount Network Television. Saracho, T. (Creator). (2018–). Vida [Television series]. United States: Big Beach TV, Starz. Stopello, R. (Creator). (2011–2019). La reina del sur [Television series]. United States, Mexico, Spain, Colombia: AG Studios, Antena 3.

5

Walter White and the use of Brown bodies in Breaking Bad

In 2008, Vince Gilligan, one of the producers of the highly successful sci-fi TV show The X-Files (1993–2018), released Breaking Bad, a television series that jumped on the wagon of “quality television” and had a quirky, compelling plot related to the U.S. neoliberal tribulations and the transnational drug cartels. The series tells the story of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a middle-aged high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He wears chinos and plaid shirts, and has a haircut and spectacles reminiscent of the The Simpsons’ wholesome character Ned Flanders. He has a pregnant wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), a baby girl on the way and a teenage son, Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte), who has cerebral palsy. But Walter has a secret: he has cancer and no money for a treatment that could potentially save his life. He is a public servant, but the state that he works for has failed to provide him with adequate healthcare. He is running out of options until an unexpected revelation unleashes what he comes to see as his full potential as a talented scientist and innate businessman. His brother-in-law, Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), is the Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) of the Albuquerque office of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). One day, Hank busts a meth lab. Upon hearing about what is being produced in the clandestine lab, Walter suddenly realises that he can put his chemistry knowledge, his underused genius and his natural business savvy to good use in the synthetic narcotics business. He can produce me­ thamphetamines, save his life and assure that he will be there to provide for his infant daughter and disabled son. Mortgage and bills need to be paid and his teacher salary can barely cover the cost of a simple existence in early twentyfirst-century United States. He recruits one of his former students, rebellious and smart Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), to produce his special blue meth, which becomes a sought-after and profitable narcotic. Walter and Jesse un­ knowingly cross into Juárez Cartel territory and “bad hombres” will come and go throughout the show’s five seasons. The cartel is a foreboding shadow coming from South of the border. Breaking Bad makes use of many classic U.S. cinema genres including the Western in its treatment of violence and race relations. As a cartel Western (see Chapter 2), Breaking Bad presents people of colour as menacing, an apocalyptic force threatening the U.S. way of life. Throughout the show, characters

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including Hank’s wife, Marie (Betsy Brandt), are scandalised that cartel vio­ lence from groups including the Juárez Cartel and Los Zetas seems to be contaminating the arid New Mexico suburbia. In analysing Breaking Bad’s Western genre tropes and the series’ relationship to the history of colonisation and racialised violence in New Mexico, Mark Bernhardt writes: Another way in which this mythologized history is addressed is through the portrayal and discussion of violence in which people of color are described as dangerous and white violence is downplayed. In the course of white conquest and occupation, whites portrayed Native Americans and Mexicans as violent savages and threats to white safety, although whites killed more people of color than people of color killed whites, and this is also the case in Breaking Bad. A total of 89 characters are killed throughout the series. Whites kill 58, 24 of whom are people of color and seven of unidentified ethnicity. Comparatively, people of color kill 41, only six of whom are white. Yet discussions of violence by the characters focus on violence committed by people of color, especially Mexicans. (2019, p. 73) Race is key in understanding Breaking Bad, although scholarly discussion on the show has often focused solely on whiteness and not on how people of colour are represented or the role they play in the narrative. Due to its am­ biguity, whiteness is a contested term as it is a descriptor that encompasses cultural, social and political issues, and is hard to pin down in terms of eth­ nicity. Whiteness has to have an opposition in order to be an operational descriptor. As Steve Garner suggests: “Whiteness as an identity exists only in so far as other racialized identities, such as blackness, Asianness, etc., exist” (2007, p. 2). Building on Richard Dyer’s (1997) work on whiteness in photography, Garner further explains that “white is the point from which judgements are made, about normality and abnormality, beauty and ugliness, civilisation and barbarity” (2007, p. 34). Whiteness is a departure point for defining what falls outside the hegemonic norm. Armond R. Towns argues that predominantly white philosophers and media theorists have historically seen Black bodies as “extensions of man into his raced self-conceptions of the world” (2020, p. 1). Towns claims that even in seemingly progressive academic fields, such as classical media theory, Black bodies (a conceptual construct rather than actual Black people and identities) are used as a foil to Western ideas of what it means to be human, therefore becoming a sort of medium. In analysing Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, which was influential in both academic and non-academic circles, Towns points out that: “Because McLuhan input tribal, detribal, and retribal ideas in media theory throughout his work, race was a foundational aspect of his media environments” (2020, p. 6). Towns inspiringly contends that “the Black body exists to serve a function by and for others, rather than for itself” (2020, p. 3). Being inscribed in the tradition of Western

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storytelling, and anchored in a hegemonic United States subjectivity, Breaking Bad is a form of media that uses non-white bodies functionally rather than for themselves. Characters become concepts rather than living, breathing fictional human beings. I am not arguing that Vince Gilligan and the team behind Breaking Bad are openly racist ( just as Towns clarifies that he is not labelling McLuhan a racist), or that the show pushes a white supremacist or eugenicist agenda, but rather than the story perpetuates tropes of Hollywood cartel media and a more general Western gaze. Cartel media echoes racialised worldviews that are based on beliefs rather than facts, stereotypes rather than actual lived experience. Instead, this chapter argues that the main character in the Breaking Bad television universe, Walter White, undergoes his epic transformation in part through mediatising and using Brown characters as receptacles of his oftenviolent impulses. Walter is White in name and white in his privilege and sense of entitlement. The series showcases a series of adversaries that Walter disposes of using both violence and intelligence, almost in a ritualistic manner. Their deaths are treated as procedural: necessary steps for Walter to regain his footing in the world and to cement his criminal enterprise. As I have argued elsewhere (Albarrán-Torres, 2017), Breaking Bad uses the affects of body horror, which are a constant of propaganda videos released by the cartels, to make Brown deaths gruesome and spectacular. This is particularly true in the slain of cartel informant Tortuga, who is decapitated. His head is placed on a giant turtle and then blown off as a threat to the DEA. The use of Tortuga’s body as a tool of awe and entertainment is an example of Breaking Bad’s problematic racial politics. As I argued: “This shocking image has a quasi-religious, ritualistic air about it. Like the photo­ graph of the Abu Ghraib hooded prisoner, it echoes Judaeo-Christian imagery. It reminds us of the many depictions of the head of John the Baptist, served upon a platter to Salome, or Goliath’s head, severed by David” (AlbarránTorres, 2017). Body horror objectifies victims, turning their bodies into ri­ tualistic tools or receptacles for the lowest of murderous impulses. In Breaking Bad, minimal care or thought is given to the backstories of these Brown characters. They are criminals like Walter himself, but are bound together by family ties (as with the Salamanca men, who are pro­ minent in the series) or new beginnings after a traumatic past (in the case of Gus Fring, Walter White’s mirror image, shadow and adversary, who might have fled or participated in the brutal Pinochet dictatorship in Chile). Whereas Walter’s criminal career is given enough depth for audiences to question whether his wrongdoings are at least partially justified, the plethora of cartel members who cross his path are cartoonish, cookie-cutter “bad hombres” who are either openly hypermasculine and violent (Tuco Salamanca) or criminal masterminds disguised as upright citizens (Gus Fring). In Breaking Bad, Brown characters exist for the sake of whiteness, for Anglo characters to reaffirm what they are not. Brown characters help whiteness define itself by offering an opposite.

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White bodies as worthy Even though the show was first aired more than a decade ago, Walter White remains an archetypical character representing white male victimhood, the glorification of the use of intelligence for violent means and the oftencondescending gaze that hegemonic cultural industries cast over non-white characters, cultures and experiences. As an archetype, Walter White is perhaps more salient today than he was in 2008. Whereas in 2008 he represented the broken pride of the white heterosexual man after the election of Barack Obama, sometimes ridiculed to a certain extent by the show, in the Trump era he dangerously stands for those who have felt empowered by far-right dis­ course that calls for historical and cultural retribution for the ground that whiteness, and masculinity, have lost (Donnor, 2020). In five seasons, Walter White experiences a character transformation seldom seen in screen media. He goes from being a victim of the perils of United States neoliberalism to becoming a feared drug lord and taking on the moniker of Heisenberg, after the German physicist Werner Heisenberg. His cancer goes into remission; he keeps his bald head and starts wearing darker, more elegant clothes. His initial goal of financing his cancer treatment is overshadowed by his monetary gluttony. He ends up accumulating more wealth than he ever imagined. He has killed and ordered killings. When his transformation is complete, in “Cornered”, the sixth episode of season four, he famously tells his wife, “I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!”. He is remorseless about the fellow criminals and innocents he has disposed of but, always the grossly imperfect family man, is somewhat remorseful for the hurt he has caused his immediate family. In Vince Gilligan’s New Mexico, white characters involved in the drug business strive to become the entrepreneurial best version of themselves through a series of rituals that often involve enacting violence against Brown bodies. In the more than 12 years since the Breaking Bad universe was first shown on television, dozens of Brown characters have been tortured, de­ capitated and murdered in the benefit of Walter White’s story. In the spin-off series and prequel, Better Call Saul, these same characters are used as tools for Jimmy McGill’s (Bob Odenkirk) transformation into Saul Goodman, a bombastic minicelebrity in Albuquerque: a charismatic lawyer with billboards and television ads featuring his sleazy smile. Breaking Bad’s plot follows the 2000s trend of placing seemingly mundane white men in situations in which their most violent inner instincts surface as a form of revelation, a purifying act that makes them whole. We can think, for instance, of Michael C. Hall’s character in Dexter (2006–2013). Hall plays a blood-spatter analyst working for the Miami Metro Police Department. He is quiet, dresses tidily and nothing in his life seems scandalous. His sister is a police detective and his adoptive father was a policeman who rescued him from the shipping container where he was found as an infant sitting on a pool

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of blood, beside his mother’s slain body. But Dexter Morgan is a serial killer. His innate thirst for blood turns him into a vigilante who disposes of murderers who slipped through the cracks of the justice system and walk the streets guilty but unpunished. Dexter positions the audience in an ambivalent position by highlighting how reprimandable Dexter’s actions are in a legal and moral sense, but justifying their ethical coherence. As Isabel Santaularia indicates: “In spite of his criminal activities and villainous nature, Dexter’s character is in­ tended to canvass the audience’s approval” (2010, p. 60). Dexter and Walter White are vulnerable white men who commit horrible crimes, but whose wickedness is nevertheless justified by what a cruel world has taken from them. Similarly, in Breaking Bad, the audience is compelled to root for Walter and accept the illegal and harmful nature of meth production as a necessary evil. The illegality in which he operates is evidence of Walt’s uncontainable genius, de­ fined in terms of the figure of the white and masculine outlaw maverick. The narrative celebrates Walter’s unacknowledged intellect, his business acumen and the way in which he regains self-confidence and asserts his place in the world. Walter is monstrous, but that might not cut against the sense of admiration the narrative asks us to have for him: monsters are compelling. Walter White be­ comes the entrepreneur par excellence and his rags-to-riches story has more in common with the contemporary myth of the self-made-genius (white) man (such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg) than with narratives coming from cartel culture. Breaking Bad is a celebration of the white genius criminal, even if the Walter White saga has a less than happy ending. But what made Breaking Bad such a watershed moment in recent television history? Paul Elliot Johnson points out that Breaking Bad’s success among commonly separate audiences in the United States, conservatives and liberals, has to do with how the series channelled the United States zeitgeist product of the 2008 financial crisis. He argues that Breaking Bad “distinguished itself from its competitors by offering a pathway for the repetitive, allegorical enactment of trauma by metonymizing the financial crisis and the election of Obama as crimes against a white, male American body politic displacing the challenge those events posed for white masculinity” (2017, p. 15). White conservatives saw the Obama presidency as an affront to the status quo and a challenge to historically hegemonic groups. Walter White became the embodiment of white masculinity and its entitlement. By placing Walter smack in the middle of the hero-villain spectrum, Gilligan validated Walter’s actions, at least par­ tially. We can condemn Walter White and his murderous tactics, but admire his masterful chess moves and ingenious solutions. He is the MacGyver of the drug world; the Gregory House of New Mexico; the Sherlock of metham­ phetamines; a rebellious Nikola Tesla. Therein lies his popular culture appeal, as Matt Zoller Seitz has described: “Walter is a sad, misguided, good man. Walter is a hateful, vindictive monster. Neither statement excludes the other” (2013a, September 18). Walter’s white masculinity has been hurt too many times, he believes; his current troubles aside, he was denied his good fortune when his business

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partners bought his share of a nascent company years ago. That is perhaps the appeal that the character has had among white, male conservatives, as Johnson (2017), argues: his sense of victimhood is what propels him to be meaner, richer, better. In many ways, Walter White is one of the popular media forefathers of hypermasculine white hate groups such as the “involuntary celibate” or incel movement (see Hoffman, Ware, & Shapiro, 2020) and the invigorated white supremacist far-right during the Trump era (Matias & Newlove, 2017; Pulido, Bruno, Faiver-Serna, & Galentine, 2019), both of which have used extreme violence as a way to establish their alleged super­ iority or to right what they consider to be social, sexual and historical wrongs. Even though the Walter White storyline ends on a bittersweet note for him (we are led to believe he has been killed, but he dies with a smirk on his face), as an audience we can’t help but think that he was spared true justice. Significantly, Hank Schrader is perhaps the only true hero in the show. He literally takes a bullet for the team, is a devoted husband and offers fatherly advice to his nephew Walt Jr. He displays a John Wayne or Clint Eastwood type of white masculinity: he is calculating but becomes violent when the end justifies the means. From season one until the end of the show he has just one aim in mind: to untangle the network of trafficking that operates in New Mexico and along the border. He is symptomatic of the type of borderline vigilante law enforcement that has become salient in the Trump era, parti­ cularly around immigration issues (Poirot, 2017). Showrunner Vince Gilligan said in relation to the function that Hank plays in the Walter White character arc: I wanted Hank to be everything Walt wasn’t. I wanted Hank to be a winner, and in that first episode Walt is kind of a loser. Hank was going to be a bigger than life, bold, and confident DEA agent. And I wanted the gist of it to be that Walt was thinking of cooking meth in some small fashion to get back at Hank for being everything he was not. (Saeed, 2013) Hank is an upright law enforcer who nevertheless is blatantly racist. He has a Latino partner in the force, Steven Gomez, whom he constantly berates with racist remarks; when wrapping up a meeting at the station, for example, he tells Gomez to go break a piñata, clearly alluding to his heritage. This is racist and condescending “locker room banter”. The fact that race relations within the Breaking Bad world are problematic does not mean that the series does not deserve the critical and scholarly at­ tention, and praise, that it has received. Breaking Bad is a testament of its time, and unveils the unrest that led to the culture wars of the Trump era. As a drama, Breaking Bad is entertaining and sometimes artistically innovative. Its camerawork is exhilarating, as is the use of a tense soundtrack that burns like the New Mexico desert sun. Some characters are meticulously developed and plotlines converge in logical but surprising ways. Gilligan and his team created

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a drama that is prescient, intimate and epic at the same time. The show also used B-movie tropes to captivate audiences, as Paul Schrodt (2013) argued in Esquire magazine: There is no question that what Walt does is heinous. But it’s so compelling you can’t help but watch it, and the writers and directors of Breaking Bad revel in every detail. The show is engineered with perfect cliffhangers and twists and ticking time bombs, and seeing how they – and Walt – pull it all off is how we derive our basic satisfaction. It’s how we get off. This is a fantasy, and that’s ultimately what the ‘Team Walt’ critics miss. Movies and TV shows like Breaking Bad have always been about identifying with desires you’re not supposed to admit in polite company. Like the desire to own and operate a multimillion-dollar meth operation. (C’mon, the thought has at least crossed your mind.) But as in many forms of U.S. popular entertainment, the “satisfaction” that Schrodt describes is derived from “fantasies” that are problematic at their core. What critics and commentators leave out is the fact that these “desires” are often satisfied, even if vicariously, at the expense of minorities and vulnerable groups. What critics seem to conveniently ignore is that representation does matter. It matters considerably. The show is symptomatic of the huge ground that hegemonic cultural industries are yet to cover in issues of representation and racial relations on (and off ) screen.

Black and Brown bodies as conduits for white salvation Breaking Bad’s problematic approach to race is not new in U.S. cultural in­ dustries. There is a long history in the use of non-white characters for the development of white consciousness in film and television. For example, nar­ ratives in which white families adopt Black children have been constant since the late 1970s. Rather than advocating for a normalisation of mixed-race fa­ milies, these television and film texts exalt the goodness of the white families and establish that adoption into and adaptation to whiteness is an individual’s only path towards personal and financial progress. These narratives, which are per­ haps well-intentioned but end up feeding white saviour fantasies, include the television comedies Diff'’rent Strokes (1978–1986), about a wealthy New York family who adopts the two sons of their housekeeper from Harlem, and Webster (1983–1989), about an NFL player and his wife who adopt a dead teammate’s Black son. The film The Blind Side (2009), about a Southern woman who adopts a talented Black football player, also comes to mind. Other films that disseminate the white saviour narrative include TheHelp (2011), about a young Southern white woman who aids domestic helpers in their personal and work emanci­ pation (Albarrán-Torres, 2012). The examples are numerous. Black bodies are a constant conduit for white redemption in U.S. cinema, and most such stories are situated in the context of the 1960s civil rights

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movement (for example, Alan Parker’s 1988 film Mississippi Burning). Most recently, the Academy Award winner Green Book (2018) perpetuated the white saviour cinematic myth by casting Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip, a driver for Black musician Dr. Donald Shirley, played by Mahershala Ali. The film follows the pair in a tour of the South in the turbulent 1960s. The titular Green Book refers to a guide for Black travellers which listed establishments and places that were safe for Black men and women in a day and age in which lynching was a not-so-distant memory (Gonzales-Day, 2006; Pfeifer, 2004) and segregation was allowed by local laws (Massey, Rothwell, & Domina, 2009). Rather than exploring the cultural effects of racism and their impact on Black experience, director Peter Farrelly pulled the narrative strings in the direction of the white man’s ultimate redemption. Joseph Harker wrote in The Guardian after the film was awarded the Oscar for Best Picture in 2019: Above all, what makes Green Book such a bad choice is that it’s a full 30 years since its road trip predecessor, Driving Miss Daisy, scooped the best picture Oscar. That similarly saccharine take on racism – this time using a white passenger and black driver – at least had the excuse that the world was far more ignorant then. Does Hollywood really consider a crude rerun the best it can do? It sends a message that, three decades on, it has learned nothing. Green Book demonstrated that the Hollywood establishment still deals with race in an archaic way, and that white salvation often takes centre stage when white characters share the screen with people of colour. What is even more alarming about Green Book is that even though the historical backdrop con­ cerns the issue of racism, which has had a lifelong impact for millions of African Americans, the ultimate narrative climax concerns Tony Lip’s rea­ lisation that racism is wrong. In Green Book’s moral and ethical universe, race relations are an affront to white wholeness. Mahershala Ali’s character exists simply as an instrument for Tony Lip’s salvation. When the film was awarded the Oscar over another film that explores colonisation and racial tensions, the Spanish-language Roma (Alfonso Cuarón), the white producers received the statuette. Green Book and the critical commentary that surrounded it are but one example of how Hollywood narratives have used Black bodies and ex­ perience as a conduit for white self-congratulatory impulses and needs. Green Book was released just a few months after Jordan Peele’s debut film, Get Out (2017), used the horror genre to lay bare how the white hegemonic class has historically used Black bodies for labour and entertainment (and in the case of Peele’s film, literally as replacement bodies partly inhabited by white elders). As The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis described it, Peele uses horror tropes carefully, “turning white racism into disquieting genre shivers” (2017). Peele’s film is a poignant critique of Trump-era racial politics, and is prescient about the social tension that erupted in 2020 around the amplifi­ cation of the Black Lives Matter movement. What makes Get Out noteworthy

98 Walter White and the use of Brown bodies

Figure 5.1 Black people being auctioned in Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out (2017).

in recent U.S. cinema is how it spoke about racism and the latent legacy of slavery from a Black perspective (Figure 5.1), while becoming part of main­ stream popular culture via its Oscar nominations and afterlife in manifestations of digital culture such as memes and GIFs that are widely circulated. On the opposite side, what texts like Green Book and Breaking Bad have in common is that in both narratives white characters exist in universes filled with Black and Brown tribulation, but it is their own stories that seem to matter (and sell). This is white narrative entitlement. Green Book’s Tony Lip becomes a better person by realising that racial discrimination is reprehensible, while Dr. Donald Shirley takes the archetypal role of the “Magical Negro” who holds some eternal truth (the “Magical Negro” is an enduring and harmful trope in U.S. film, see Glenn & Cunningham, 2009). A few Black men need to be discriminated against or beaten up for the sake of Lip’s per­ sonal development. Breaking Bad’s Walter White lives in New Mexico, a state that is the site of migratory issues, discrimination and border conflict. Yet he needs a Brown body count to become his best entrepreneurial self, to realise his full financial potential as a cisgendered white man. He needs to ritualis­ tically regain his status at the top of the food chain, a status handed to him by having been born a white man in the United States. Brown bodies stand between Walter and financial wealth – Brown bodies that need to be dis­ posed of.

Walter’s baptism of blood The use of Brown characters for the protagonist’s development in Gilligan’s narrative universe (comprised of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and the 2019 movie El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie) is quite insidious. Being murdered, either by Walter or one of his adversaries, is the only way through which Mexican people and those of other ethnicities seem to serve any purpose.

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Brown deaths either put an accent on a white character’s wickedness or re­ present a loss that moves them to a more mindful, whole state. One could argue that Jesse Pinkman is as much a protagonist of the series as Walter White. At first a young, white slacker with an Eminem vibe, Jesse develops into a modern-day vigilante in the last seasons of Breaking Bad and the sequel film El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (Gilligan, 2019). Even though he has his share of romantic and carnal relationships throughout the series, Jesse only becomes a mature adult after he falls in love with a Mexican-American young, single mother, Andrea Carrillo. Her death while he is being held captive by a mob of white supremacists is a transformative moment for Jesse, who gathers his last ounce of will to break free. Even though Andrea and her son, Brock, could have been afforded deeper narrative arcs, they serve a mostly instru­ mental role in the plot. They are there for Jesse to experience the loss of yet another family (his own parents cut ties with him in the earlier seasons, and his rollercoaster father–son relationship with Walter is also emotionally taxing for him). The use of Brown characters for the sake of Walter’s character development is evident early on. Breaking Bad forecasts the downward spiral that Walter will follow right from episode three of season one, which is part two of the subplot titled “Cat’s in the Bag … and the Bag’s in the River”. The transformation of Walter from a lacklustre teacher to a criminal needs a human sacrifice. Two Brown men die so Walter can start his new, violent life. Walter tells two meth distributors that he will show them his formula as a way to earn their trust. But he has something else in mind. He produces a small chemical explosion that kills one of the men, Emilio, and leaves the other, Domingo Gallardo “Krazy8” Molina, unconscious. Walter and Jesse, then newbies in the world of crime, hold Domingo hostage in Jesse’s basement. They keep him tied to a column with a bicycle lock around his neck. Over several days, Walter and Domingo hold long conversations over beer and sandwiches. They realise they might have crossed paths when Domingo was a young boy and Walter bought a crib for his son at Domingo’s family furniture shop. They grow fond of each other – or at least Walter does. Then he realises that the young Mexican-American mobster is planning to kill him with a piece of broken crockery. Tearful and visibly in anguish, Walter strangles Domingo, apologising over and over again (Figure 5.2). Mr. White, as his high-school students call him, has blood on his hands. He emerges like an ominous moth from his middle-class cocoon to become a full-on meth producer and dealer – someone who can strangle an adversary with his bare hands. Someone who can use his STEM capacities for homicide. There is a ritualistic element to Walter’s killing of Domingo. Even though he is not the one who has been killed and he only sustains minor injuries when Domingo punctures his leg, the affective dimension of the episode frames him initially as a victim. Strangling Domingo is not something that Walter does, but something that is done to him. He was cornered into killing the young man when he realised that the paternal relationship they had created over a few days

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Figure 5.2 Walter White (Bryan Craston) strangles fellow meth distributor, Domingo.

was merely an illusion. Walter pays betrayal with death. Among its many stylistic and narrative innovations, Breaking Bad was successful in showing how life is but a labyrinth of unexpected twists and turns. The Minotaur of cancer and death was chasing Walter until he became the Minotaur himself. Domingo’s death is a pivotal moment in the series, as Matt Zoller Seitz de­ scribes: Everything after that is a long, steep, increasingly slippery slope. The significance of that act is confirmed by Walter’s sudden acquisition of a new eating habit: He cuts the crusts off his sandwiches, as if in unconscious tribute to the prisoner he fed and then murdered. (2013b, September 25) From then on, Walter White becomes a cold-hearted murdering machine who seems to have little remorse for the lives he takes or changes forever. He is, by all means, a B-movie villain. But White/Heisenberg is also a B-movie hero. In all its artful bravado but problematic racial and gender politics, the series plays with the audience’s own perception of Walter as someone who might have some good left in him; but it is hypnotic viewing when he pushes moral, ethical and legal boundaries to unimaginable extremes.

Brown bodies as expendable, subhuman There is a clear disconnect between the way the series films and contextualises white deaths and the way it handles Brown deaths. Walter murders important

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Brown characters in surprising ways in which the writers and directors spare no creativity. Their deaths are enjoyable moments for the thrill-seeking spectator; no thought is spared for the life being lost. Throughout Breaking Bad, Gilligan infuses many of Walter’s crimes with dark humour, which makes the entertainment value of Brown deaths even more blatantly evident. In contrast, there is a sense of loss and emotional tribulation whenever a white antagonist dies. Throughout the series, Marie, Hank and other characters describe Mexicans with terminology such as “litter”, “vermin”, “freakin’ animals”, and a “Bunch of animals clawing their eyes out over turf”. The producers seem to take the same approach to the white killing of Brown characters. Some of the Brown deaths in Breaking Bad seem whimsical, carnivalesque – like moments from a Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner cartoon sketch. The way in which the show disposes of Walter’s most formidable antagonist comes particularly to mind. Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) is an enigmatic character who first makes an appearance in season two of Breaking Bad, when lawyer Saul Goodman ar­ ranges for Walter and Jesse to meet a potential buyer. He is supposedly an Afro-Chilean, but his accent and demeanour are not typical of the South American country. There are scattered references to Gus’s probable links to the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, which may account for his martial demeanour. Soon Walter’s gargantuan ego clashes with that of Gus, who has built a state-of-the-art underground meth lab, and who hires Walter and Jesse to cook meth. The surgical cleanliness of the place, the expensive equipment and the prospect of running a successful business operation is enticing for Walter. It is notable that Gus is the only character of Latin American heritage who takes part in the American Dream as a business owner. He is a meth baron, but as a smokescreen he also runs a highly successful fast-food business – Los Pollos Hermanos – and is a respected member of the Albuquerque community, a poster boy for successful immigration. He makes donations to the DEA and is even given private tours of its Albuquerque facilities, where he discovers that Walter’s brother-in-law is an agent. Walter looks to take the control of meth trade in the Southwest away from the cartels and Gus Fring, in a move that “can be viewed in the context of historical conquest as a white man sup­ pressing the racial other” (Bernhardt, 2019, p. 75). After a failed attempt on Gus’s life, Walter devises a Machiavellian plan, even by his standards. Walter convinces old cartel member Hector Salamanca, who now lives in an aged-care facility, to set a trap for Gus, who has hated Salamanca since their cartel days. The Los Pollos Hermanos owner had found out that Salamanca could spill the beans with the DEA, and so pays him a visit to kill him. He dresses for the occasion. A shiny, dark silk suit brings us back to more gla­ morous times – perhaps the zoot-suit era. When Gus and his bodyguard are about to give the elder Salamanca a lethal injection, Salamanca activates a bomb with the bell he uses to communicate.

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Next, we see Gus Fring’s slender figure emerging from the room, appar­ ently unhurt. But the screaming nurses alert us that something is off. We then see Gus’s face half blown off. His skin is charred and one eye is gone. We can see his skull and almost smell burnt hair. Gus, always the dandy, fixes his tie and then falls, dead, on the floor, like a puppet abandoned by his master. The image contains elements of dark, cartoonish humour. It also reminds us of classic comic-book villains such as Harvey Dent, the Two-Face of the DC Comics universe. Like Harvey Dent’s, Gus Fring’s half-burnt face symbolises his double nature: the impresario and the drug lord; the upright citizen and the savage killer (Figure 5.3). Gus is a cockroach refusing to die; a headless chicken. Thus, the series uses a mutilated and burnt Black body for the sake of spectacular entertainment and a few laughs. Vince Gilligan revealed the Orientalist view he had of the character and his ultimate death in an interview with Vice: It’s almost like the Central American warriors who kill their enemy and then pull his heart out still beating and bite into it and assume their power. It’s old school in that sense. I’ve got a feeling that he thinks by killing Gus Fring he becomes Gus Fring. If not Gus Fring literally, then figuratively. He’s assumed his power, he’s assumed his mantle of respect. (Gilligan in Saeed, 2013) In contrast, there is a sense of loss and emotional tribulation whenever a white antagonist dies, as is the case of Mike Ehrmantraut’s death. Mike was Gus Fring’s right-hand man. He is a surveillance expert and former Philly cop who might have been Special Forces during the American War in Vietnam. He wants to bequeath the money he has made through crime to his widowed daughter-in-law and his granddaughter. Walt shoots him near a river. Instead of Gus’s gruesome death, he is granted a last wish: dying while looking at the

Figure 5.3 Gus Fring dies a humorous death in Breaking Bad.

Walter White and the use of Brown bodies 103

Figure 5.4 In contrast, strongman Mike is given a placid, poetic death.

sunshine. Walter and Mike share a moment of serenity, like two old friends enjoying their old age in zenitude. A shot shows us their balding heads from behind while a tranquil river reflects the sunshine and grass shakes slowly, dancing with the wind (Figure 5.4). If Gus Fring’s death displays the B-movie trashiness that made Breaking Bad a profitable pop-culture phenomenon, Mike’s killing is closer to the arthouse cinema vibe that earned the series its critical acclaim. Mike, one of the few important white criminals in the series, is afforded a placid death, the exact opposite of Gus’s bombastic murder. Rather than an antagonist, he becomes a sort of mirror for Walter. He was a cop who was dealt a bad hand in the game of U.S. fortune, just like Walter. Whereas Walter felt guilt and pain when he choked Domingo to death with a bicycle lock, killing Mike was more like a peaceful, ritualistic euthanasia: the death of a fellow white man who cared for family but took a wrong turn in life.

Conclusion Breaking Bad is a complex television text that deserves the critical and scholarly attention it has received. However, unlike the Dickensian television master­ piece The Wire, which equates its storytelling complexity with a cultural critique of the networks of trafficking and corruption in the racially diverse city of Baltimore, Breaking Bad only scratches the surface of the racial tensions that prevail in its borderland setting. In this chapter, I have focused on Breaking Bad, the seminal (in the sense of self-indulgent, macho posturing) story of Gilligan’s New Mexico universe. However, the prequel Better Call Saul and the sequel film El Camino deserve further scholarly attention, as they deal with race in a slightly more open and multilayered way. In all its pyrotechnic grandiosity, Breaking Bad is overly ambiguous not only on race, but on gender, too, which also deserves further academic exploration.

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Walter’s violence is not only racialised, but also heavily based on gender. The main character’s violent impulses and thirst for domination in the drug world quickly seep into his domestic life. Walter abuses his wife, Skyler, verbally, financially and emotionally while internalising a male victimhood that, as Stuart Joy argues, incited “a culture of misogyny and victim-blaming fostered by fans towards Skyler evident in numerous online blog posts, fan forums, social media platforms, and Anna Gunn’s own treatise on the portrayal of her character in the New York Times” (2019, p. 119). Joy further contends the forms of coercive control Walter exercises over Skyler are dismissed as a subplot and left unattended by the producers, and that even a marital rape scene in the first episode of season two indicates “the series’ broader proble­ matic negotiation of coercive control that marginalizes her experience at the expense of Walter’s character arc” (p. 123). Breaking Bad might work as a narrative clockwork, but its gears crush whatever isn’t white or hy­ permasculine. As a popular example of cartel media, Breaking Bad is symptomatic of how the U.S.–Mexico border and its people are misrepresented. Its point of view is discriminatory: it treats whiteness and masculinity as a pair of tools for dif­ ferentiating what and who belongs or does not belong in contemporary Western cultural and political imaginaries.

Suggested viewing Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker, 1988) Better Call Saul (created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, 2015–) Breaking Bad (created by Vince Gilligan, 2008–2013) Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) El Camino: A Breaking Bad movie (Vince Gilligan, 2019)

References Albarrán-Torres, C. (2012, February 21). The Help, las “chachas” y el racismo en México. Nexos. Retrieved from https://cultura.nexos.com.mx/?p=634. Albarrán-Torres, C. (2017). Spectacles of death: Body horror, affect and visual culture in the Mexican narco wars. Senses of Cinema, 84. Retrieved from http://sensesofcinema. com/2017/feature-articles/mexican-narco-wars/. Bernhardt, M. (2019). History’s ghost haunting Vince Gilligan’s New Mexico: Genre, myth, and the new western history in Breaking Bad. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 47(2), 66–80. Dargis, M. (2017, February 23). Review: in ‘Get Out,’ guess who’s coming to dinner? (Bad idea!). The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/ movies/get-out-review-jordan-peele.html. Donnor, J. K. (2020). Understanding white racial sovereignty: Doing research on race and inequality in the Trump era (and beyond). International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 33(2), 285–292. Dyer, R. (1997). White: Essays on race and culture. New York: Routledge.

Walter White and the use of Brown bodies 105 Garner, S. (2007). Whiteness: An introduction. New York: Routledge. Glenn, C. L., & Cunningham, L. J. (2009). The power of black magic: The magical negro and white salvation in film. Journal of Black Studies, 40(2), 135–152. Gonzales-Day, K. (2006). Lynching in the west, 1850–1935. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harker, J. (2019, February 26). Green Book’s Oscar shows Hollywood still doesn’t get race. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/ feb/25/green-book-oscar-hollywood-race-best-picture-academy-racism. Hoffman, B., Ware, J., & Shapiro, E. (2020). Assessing the threat of incel violence. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 43(7), 565–587. Johnson, P. E. (2017). Walter White (ness) lashes out: Breaking Bad and male victimage. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34(1), 14–28. Joy, S. (2019). Sexual violence in serial form: Breaking Bad habits on TV. Feminist Media Studies, 19(1), 118–129. Massey, D. S., Rothwell, J., & Domina, T. (2009). The changing bases of segregation in the United States. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 626(1), 74–90. Matias, C. E., & Newlove, P. M. (2017). Better the devil you see, than the one you don’t: Bearing witness to emboldened en-whitening epistemology in the Trump era. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(10), 920–928. Pfeifer, M. J. (2004). Rough justice: Lynching and American society, 1874–1947. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Poirot, K. (2017). Violence and white heteronormative citizenship. Women’s Studies in Communication, 40(4), 321–324. Pulido, L., Bruno, T., Faiver-Serna, C., & Galentine, C. (2019). Environmental dereg­ ulation, spectacular racism, and white nationalism in the Trump era. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2), 520–532. Saeed, A. (2013, Dec. 8). I tried to talk drugs with the creator of Breaking Bad. Vice. Retrieved from https://www.vice.com/en/article/yv5qam/i-asked-thecreator-of-breaking-badabout-meth. Santaularia, I. (2010). Dexter: Villain, hero or simply a man? The perpetuation of traditional masculinity in Dexter [Dexter: ¿Villano, héroe o simplemente un hombre? Perpetuando la masculinidad tradicional en Dexter]. Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of AngloAmerican Studies, 32(2), 57–71. Schrodt, P. (2013, September 27). The trashiness of Breaking Bad. Esquire. Retrieved from https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a25010/breaking-bad-trash/. Towns, A. R. (2020). Toward a Black media philosophy. Cultural Studies, 1–23. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/09502386.2020.1792524. Zoller Seitz, M. (2013a, September 23). Seitz on Breaking Bad, and why viewers need to whitewash Walter White. Vulture. Retrieved from https://www.vulture.com/2013/09/ seitz-breaking-bad-walter-white-apologists-phone-call.html. Zoller Seitz, M. (2013b, September 25). Matt Zoller Seitz on the 11 Breaking Bad episodes he can’t shake. Vulture. Retrieved from https://www.vulture.com/2013/09/seitz-11favorite-breaking-bad-episodes.html.

Films cited Beresford, B. (Director). (1989). Driving Miss Daisy [Motion picture]. United States: The Zanuck Company, Allied Filmmakers, Majestic Films International.

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Cuarón, A. (Director). (2018). Roma [Motion picture]. Mexico: Esperanto Filmoj, Participant, Pimienta Films (distributed by Netflix). Farrelly, P. (Director). (2018). Green book [Motion picture]. United States, China: Participant, DreamWorks, Innisfree Pictures. Gilligan, V. (Director). (2019). El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie [Motion picture]. United States: Netflix, Sony Pictures Television, High Bridge Productions. Hancock, J. L. (Director). The blind side [Motion picture]. United States: Alcon Entertainment, 3 Arts Entertainment, Left Tackle Pictures. Parker, A. (Director). (1988). Mississippi burning [Motion picture]. United States: Orion Pictures. Peele, J. (Director). (2017). Get out [Motion picture]. United States, Japan: Universal Pictures, Blumhouse Productions, QC Entertainment. Tate, T. (Director). (2011). The help [Motion picture]. United States: DreamWorks, Reliance Film & Entertainment.

Television shows cited Brooks, J. L., Groening, M., & Simon, S. (Creators). (1989–). The Simpsons [Television series]. United States: Gracie Films, 20th Century Fox Television, Twentieth Century Fox. Carter, C. (Creator). (1993–2018). The X-files [Television series]. United States, Canada: Ten Thirteen Productions, 20th Century Fox Television, 20th Century Fox. Gilligan, V. (Creator). (2008–2013). Breaking bad [Television series]. United States: High Bridge Productions, Gran Via Productions, Sony Pictures Television. Gilligan, V., & Gould, P. (Creators). (2015–). Better call Saul [Television series]. United States: High Bridge Productions, Crystal Diner Productions, Gran Via Productions. Harris, J., & Kukoff, B. (Creators). (1978–1986). Diff’rent strokes [Television series]. United States: Tandem Productions. Manos, J. (Creator). (2006–2013). Dexter [Television series]. United States: Showtime Networks, John Goldwyn Productions, The Colleton Company. Silver, S. (Creator). (1983–1989). Webster [Television series]. United States: Emmanuel Lewis Entertainment Enterprises, Georgian Bay Productions, Paramount Television. Simon, D. (Creator). (2002–2008). The wire [Television series]. United States: Blown Deadline Productions, Home Box Office (HBO).

6

The Sicario saga and chromatic othering

Cartel media stemming from Hollywood is political by nature. Because cartel media portray the legal- and security-related repercussions of the trafficking of an illicit product (narcotics) through international borders, issues such as jur­ isdiction often come into play, as well as historical accountability and blame. As cartel media representing the Colombian and Mexican cartels are produced in the United States with mostly non–Latin American teams at the helm, they almost always assume a prescribed position that tends to exoticise the Other, justify U.S. interventionism in fictional narratives and represent geopolitical space and foreign cultures in a way that creates and perpetuates stereotypes about Latin America, its governments and people. This chapter fleshes out how directorial and stylistic choices in the Sicario saga establish the geopolitical stance of the films. Sicario (2015) and its sequel Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018) present a problematic geopolitical reality in which U.S. security forces have practical jurisdiction over foreign territories. These two films are reminiscent of 1980s’ action cinema in which foreign threats (communism and Islamic fundamentalism in the 1980s) are dealt with by employing paramilitary forces. An example is The Delta Force (Menahem Golan, 1986), in which Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin come to the rescue after a commercial airplane is hijacked by Islamic terrorists. This type of menacing geopolitical landscape replicates official and jour­ nalistic discourses stemming from the United States, in which Mexico in particular and Latin America in general are depicted as dangerous foreign places, while the United States and other hegemonic powers are filmed as ordered, even sterile places. These stylistic choices include – but are not limited to – the representation of geographical space from above; and the depiction of Global South locations with rusty hues and grainy film, in what I term chromatic othering. Chromatic othering is not found exclusively in cultural products that depict the war on drugs, but was also widely used in film and television texts about the War on Terror launched by the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks. Places and peoples that are judged as threats to the United States are depicted as uncivilised and brutal: as urban geographies that are underdeveloped and unfinished, stuck in the limbo of unfulfilled promises.

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The border and “chromatic othering” Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, sits right across from El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.–Mexico border, and it is the epitome of the border city, as seen through the Hollywood gaze. This is the Mexican site in which the action South of the border is mostly set in Sicario, the Denis Villeneuve film which became per­ haps one of the two most iconic Hollywood texts about the cartel wars, the other being Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000). This city, which enjoyed a brief and deceptive moment of prosperity in the 1990s as U.S. factories were established there, is often named one of the most dangerous places in the world (Young, 2018). Ciudad Juárez is a cruel metaphor for the many failings of neoliberal politics in Latin America. Jobs were created in maquilas (sweatshops) and then shipped off to Cambodia, Pakistan, China and other Asian countries. The thousands of women who migrated from other parts of Mexico were suddenly left jobless, abandoned. As a border city, it is a coveted plaza by the cartels and is often caught in the crossfire of the cartels and Mexican security forces. Juárez is also infamous for the multiple killings of young women, which have plagued the city for more than three decades. These insidious femicides have been chronicled in films such as the Jennifer Lopez–starred Bordertown (2006, by Chicano director Gregory Nava), The Virgin of Juárez (2006), Borderland (2007) – which explains this type of murders through the existence of satanic cults – and El Traspatio (Backyard, 2009, by Mexican director Carlos Carrera). The particular stylistic choices in representing the Mexican side of the border exacerbate the stereotypes and preconceptions associated with the re­ gion. Through the term ‘chromatic othering’ I describe the Hollywood-style practice of using rusty hues and grainy textures to film locations outside of the United States or what is generally considered to be “the West”. Among film practitioners, the colour palette generally used in chromatic othering is simply known as “yellow filter” (Sherman, 2020). Chromatic othering sets people and territories as something separate from and different to the Self, as seen from the gaze of primarily white American, Canadian or European di­ rectors and producers. The locations commonly subject to chromatic othering include, among other geographies, Latin America (think of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, discussed further in this chapter), the Middle East (Paul Greengrass’ Green Zone, 2010), Southeast Asia (Extraction, 2020) and Africa (as in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, 2001). Chromatic othering is used to stylistically and discursively draw a line in the sand that separates the “us” and “them”, “civilization” and the “inhospitable”. Chromatic othering has been recognised and discussed in popular media (Sherman, 2020), but has so far received little or no scholarly attention. One of the first uses of chromatic othering that caught the attention of Mexican audiences, commentators and critics was Tony Scott’s Man on Fire (2004). The plot follows the kidnapping of Lupita Ramos (Dakota Fanning),

The Sicario saga and chromatic othering 109

who comes from a wealthy family. The film’s hero is John W. Creasy (Denzel Washington), a former CIA operative who works for the Ramos family and swears vengeance over Lupita’s kidnappers. The narrative takes place in Mexico City (Figure 6.1), which is filmed in sepia hues and is shown as a dangerous, lawless place. Scott and his production team filmed on location in the slums that border the capital city, focusing on the most disadvantaged sections of the urban sprawl. Scott effectively engaged in poverty porn, a tele­ visual and cinematic genre which, Peter Beresford argues, profits from “hardship and difficulties” for commercial reason profit and voyeuristic pleasure (2016, p. 422). The Ramos parents, played by American actor Marc Anthony and Australian actress Radha Mitchell, pray for Lupita in a kitschy room full of candles and Catholic imagery, which follows multiple stereotypes surrounding Mexican identity and religiosity. The most “Mexican” moments are captured in yellow hues, which turns space and culture into an exotic curiosity. Even though the film translated into global exposure for Mexican talent such as Roberto Sosa, Carmen Salinas and Jesús Ochoa (long-standing per­ sonalities in the Mexican film, television and theatre industries), it offered a demeaning, and unfair, image of Mexico City that has permeated other film and television productions. It is, as Robert Arnett has pointed out, “more of a B-movie than an A-movie prestige picture” as “it’s neither historical, nor epic, nor based on a major/popular literary work” (2015, p. 60). What was a wa­ tershed moment for Mexican talent and crew was a low-brow Hollywood production. As such, Man on Fire lacked nuance when it came to cultural representation. As often happens when non-white actors cross over to Hollywood, Sosa, Salinas and Ochoa were cast as amoral, threatening figures in the world inhabited by the wealthy, and half-American, Ramos family.

Figure 6.1 Denzel Washington in Tony Scott’s Man on Fire (2004), in which Mexico City is shown as a run-down, decaying city.

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Man on Fire is but one example of the many film and television shows that have used chromatic othering in recent times. In generalist media, Elizabeth Sherman has described the visual look of “yellow filter” as follows: Oversaturated yellow tones are supposed to depict warm, tropical, dry climates. But it makes the landscape in question look jaundiced and unhealthy, adding an almost dirty or grimy sheen to the scene. Yellow filter seems to intentionally make places the West has deemed dangerous or even primitive uglier than is necessary or even appropriate, especially when all these countries are filled with natural wonders that don’t make it to our screens quite as often as depictions of violence and poverty. (2020) Indeed, chromatic othering or yellow filter is a quick way for filmmakers to move across geographies, but also across affects: from the calming blue hues of Western safety to the eerie bile tones of the Global South – menacing, im­ poverished, vulgar. And Sherman concludes in her opinion piece: “The white savior trope needs to go – and it can take yellow filter with it” (2020). Rather than being a purely aesthetic device, chromatic othering or yellow filter has geopolitical dimensions when used in cartel media. Chromatic othering often uses sepia or amber hues, as if the lands and peoples showcased on the screen were trapped in time and space. In rusty, amber-hued places, there is no hope for progress or a brighter, happier future. Rather than living in the present, these jurisdictions live in a past from which there is no escape. In the case of depictions of the Mexican border and northern regions, this past is linked with the brutality of the Wild West (as discussed in Chapter 2) and the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution – a conflict that has permeated how Mexico is visually represented overseas, mainly in the United States (Britton, 1995). By showing Mexico as a rusty noman’s land, Hollywood film and television series justify political and military intervention through chromatic othering. If Mexico is disorderly, if its in­ habitants know no better than either lowering their heads in the face of cartel brutality or joining criminal networks, then U.S. security forces are in a po­ sition to save them from themselves – an ideological position mirrored in the far right in both countries (Antony & Thomas, 2017; Davidson & Saull, 2017). Anything that is caught in amber is unchanged and, by extension, underdeveloped. The question of how “developed” or “underdeveloped” a country is has helped shape policy and scholarly discussions in the fields of economics, in­ ternational relations and geopolitics for decades (Myint, 1965). By positioning Mexico and other previously colonised countries within the range of under­ development, chromatic othering perpetuates and even feeds colonial dis­ courses concerning the superiority of some countries over others based on economic advancement. In both aesthetic and narrative terms, film has historically created an image of the U.S.–Mexico border that could very well be Dante’s hell. In discussing

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Sicario, Carlos Gallego argues that Villeneuve uses Ciudad Juárez as the an­ tagonist, the villain: “This feat of villainous characterization is achieved through the figure of ‘Juárez, the Beast’, a transnational fantasy cityscape which functions as an ideologically overdetermined geopolitical signifier for Ciudad Juárez, the actual border city (sister city to El Paso) located in the Mexican state of Chihuahua” (2018, p. 46). Gallego also recognises that American exceptionalism in Sicario is anchored in the establishment of all that is not American as the Other. He claims that Ciudad Juárez “functions as a suturing point that anchors abstract fantasies of national identity in the con­ crete otherness of the US-Mexico border in general” (2018, p. 46). Building on Gallego’s reading, I argue that the colours chosen to represent this Otherness in Sicario echo popular militaristic imaginaries of the War on Terror. In Sicario and other cartel media, Mexico replaces Iraq and Afghanistan as a place where U.S. hegemony is challenged and American exceptionalism questioned. Hollywood-centric film and television has long deployed Orientalist tropes to depict the Middle East. Discussing Palestinian scholar Edward Said, Matthew Bernstein explains how Orientalism “describes a strand of colonialist discourse in the ideological arsenal of Western nations – most notably Great Britain, France, and the United States – for representing the colonies and cultures of North Africa and the ‘Middle East’” and a “way of perceiving these areas that has been supported, justified, and reinforced by the West’s colonialist and imperialist ventures” (Bernstein & Studlar, 1997, p. 2). He concludes that Orientalism “is a distinctive means of representing race, nationality and Otherness” (Bernstein & Studlar, 1997, p. 2). The cultural mechanisms of Orientalism are mobilised in the multitude of films and tele­ vision shows that narrate U.S. military intervention in the Middle East after 9/11. Many, if not most, use chromatic othering to visually differentiate pristine American suburbs and government offices from the dust-covered wastelands of the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia. Films such as Sam Mendes’ Jarhead (2005), Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005) and the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker (2008), directed by Kathryn Bigelow, have clear uses of chromatic othering. These films indeed explore the psychological effects of war on U.S. citizens – soldiers, negotiators and businessmen – but seldom see the Other as complex or multidimensional human beings. Added to this, the films’ mostly desert landscapes lend them­ selves to the use of yellow filter. Because Hollywood-influenced audiences perceive Mexico to be a hot, desert-like country – even though its geography, flora and fauna are actually among the most diverse on the planet – the visual grammar of the Middle East in post-9/11 cultural production permeates most cartel media. The connection is not only visual, but also political: those menacing places that need U.S. intervention are rusty, suffocating, soiled. Kathleen Staudt has reflected on how “quality” films set in the border bring out “the worst of countries in the US–Mexico borderlands”, adding that “I mean lawlessness, sexual violence, deaths, and drugs. Filmmakers – both US and Mexican – do not represent the border well in historic and

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contemporary times” (2014, p. 465). Staudt argues that since Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, films emanating from both Mexico and the United States have painted a deceptive image of the borderlands. After analysing films produced on both sides of the border since the 1930s, Staudt concludes that everyday lives not associated with criminality are seldom represented, and that the borderlands are misjudged. She writes about the depiction of torture, sexual abuse, drug trafficking and overall violence in both Mexican- and U.S.-produced films: While themes like these reflect partial reality, to be sure, the absence of multiple stories about the diversity of lives at the border conveys to mainstreamers that borders are places of depravity rather than the mixed picture of lived realities for the 14 million people that reside in, rather than pass through the borderlands. As such, many border films perpetuate the idea that border people are somehow less than mainstream “others,” unfit to make decisions about their destinies. (2014, p. 475) The notion that borderlands are “places of depravity” is taken to the extreme in the Sicario universe, where cities like Juárez and Nogales are portrayed as de facto war zones. Even though many of the cities depicted in cartel media indeed experience high levels of violence and murder, there is much more to them, culturally and socioeconomically, than war-torn barrios. Tijuana is a vibrant hub for creative arts and literature. Juárez has a rich cultural life and plenty of wealthy neighbourhoods. The list goes on and on. Rather than the gigantic slums shown in Hollywood cartel media, these cities are sites of deep inequalities where the hypermodern and the rural, extreme wealth and pre­ carity, Spanish and English, tradition and global culture coexist. Borderlands are sites of globalised and local encounters where multiple cultural forces converge and produce a multitude of meanings, life experiences and sub­ jectivities. Films such as Sicario grossly oversimplify a multifaceted reality, which derives from cultural misrepresentation and, perhaps even graver, from deceptive geopolitical constructs such as the idea that Global North powers have the moral obligation to “save” the Global South from itself.

Sicario and the border as infestation of “bad hombres” Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario tells a transborder story that involves a brutal CIA operative called Matt (Josh Brolin); an FBI agent, Kate Macer (Emily Blunt); and a Colombian hitman, Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), who used to work for the cartels but now does the dirty jobs for U.S. law enforcement agencies. Alejandro lost his family to the cartel wars, and now acts as a free agent. Del Toro’s character reminds us of Charles Bronson’s desperado in Death Wish (1974) and every vigilante thereafter in English-language cinema who attempts to exorcise trauma through ultraviolent means (such as Jodie Foster in Neil Jordan’s The Brave One or Michael Caine in Harry Brown).

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These three characters offer different and at first conflicting subjectivities in relation to the cartel wars and the role that the U.S. forces should have in a foreign territory. Kate is at first reluctant to accept the fact that in the moral universe of Sicario the ends justify the means. If they have to engage in an illegal shooting on foreign soil, then so be it. Matt authoritatively tells Kate when she expresses her doubts: “What you’re doing here is you’re giving us the opportunity to shake the tree and create chaos. That’s what this is!”. Matt, who used to be an operative in the war-ravaged Middle East, holds the moral ground in the narrative and embodies the figure of the seasoned military type who has seen too much to second-guess his decisions. The Spanish word sicario means “hitman” or “gun for hire”, and has been widely used in the context of the cartel wars in Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere. Latin American literature has used this cultural figure to dig into the depths of violence in the region and question what leads disenfranchised youth to murder for money. Most notably, Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo explores themes of urban warfare and nostalgia in his novel La virgen de los sicarios, which Barbet Schroeder adapted to the big screen in Our Lady of the Assassins (2000). Vallejo’s semi-autobiographical novel and Schroeder’s film narrate the story of a man who goes back to his hometown of Medellín after years of self-imposed exile, only to find it overtaken by cartel violence. He falls in love with a 16-year-old sicario. The story is one of the few that features gay identities in the hypermasculine and heteronormative cartel world. The story also offers depth when discussing the motivations behind what passes as un­ motivated violence, but which is in fact a symptom of historical inequalities that were perpetuated and made more visible by corrupt neoliberal Latin American governments in the 1980s and 1990s, and from which the cartels seemed to offer a way out for millions of people living in extreme poverty. A sicario in the popular imagination has no loyalty other than to money or hate. As Matt tells Kate when explaining Alejandro’s role in the operation: “He works for the competition. Alejandro works for anyone who will point him toward the people who made him. Us. Them. Anyone who will turn him loose. So, he can get the person that cut off his wife’s head, and threw his daughter into a vat of acid. Yeah. That’s what we’re dealing with.” It is worth noting that while the many faceless and nameless cartel members who die in Sicario are spared a backstory, Alejandro is given complexity and psychological depth, as if the reward for collaborating with U.S. intervention were to be allowed humanity. Alejandro is always the silent type; however, his story is told through Matt’s gaze, which strips him of narrative agency. Alejandro is also given the potential of redemption through murder. In one of the climactic scenes, Alejandro is about to assassinate cartel boss Fausto Alarcon ( Julio César Cedillo) in front of his wife and kids. Here, chro­ matic othering is used in a revelatory way that undresses the film’s politics. The setting is an elegant mansion. The family is having dinner al fresco at a perfectly manicured table, red-wine glasses glowing. Their economic wealth is obvious, but the styling is understated, not nouveau riche in any way. The scene is the

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Figure 6.2 Benicio Del Toro plays Colombian hitman Alejandro in Sicario (2015) and its sequel, 2018’s Sicario: Day of the Soldado (pictured here).

opposite of the boisterous, kitschy aesthetics generally associated with narcocultura. Yet Villeneuve uses the yellow filter, as if indicating that no matter how rich or sophisticated, cartel leaders will always be “bad hombres”. Alejandro disposes of Alarcon and his family unceremoniously; Villeneuve’s detached gaze offers no sympathy to the woman and minors being shot. Alejandro is a smooth operator: the silencer in his gun makes a noise similar to a stunbolt gun in a slaughterhouse. Death is sometimes necessary, the director seems to imply. This is efficient murder that seems almost painless, in contrast with the scenes of cartelperpetuated torture and spectacular killings that we have witnessed. The cine­ matographer is Roger Deakins, who in this film and the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men has become the master painter of the border. In Sicario, chromatic othering coexists with other ways of differentiating the face of violence in each country. This is seen, for example, in the contrasting manners in which the dogs of war are unleashed on each side of the border. As Hilaria Loyo argues when discussing the politics of space in Villeneuve’s film, through a scene in which Kate, from the safety of an armoured vehicle, sees a group of corpses hanging from a bridge in Juárez: “The display of an extreme cruelty of killing, seeking to inflict unbearable pain and to degrade the bodies of the dead, contrasts with the US agents’ more sterilized and humane forms of killing shown in the film, much more in line with the cinematic depictions of battle spaces in recent films on the war on terror in Afghanistan or Iraq, such as

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Body of Lies (Ridley Scott, 2008) and Lions for Lambs (Robert Redford, 2007), to name a few” (2019, p. 63). But the road to representation hell is often paved with good intentions. For Villeneuve, Mexico stands in for any country or region suffering from U.S. interventionism, a worryingly essentializing, naïve view. He said in an interview: The movie is about America… how America fantasises that it can solve problems beyond its borders, and about the collateral damage that results… and the legality and moral issues around that… It’s a movie that deals with idealism and realism and the tension between both… It takes place on the Mexican border, but it could have just as easily have been set in Afghanistan or the Middle East or various countries in Africa. In North America, we allow ourselves to do things that other countries can’t afford to. (Heinrich, 2015) Mexican film critic Fernanda Solórzano has pointed out that Villeneuve’s quasi-surgical directorial style can be mistaken for a lack of involvement – and perhaps it rightfully is uninvolved. In discussing Sicario’s opening scene, in which U.S. law enforcement agents find human bodies decomposing inside a house’s walls, Solórzano writes: The cadavers stuffed into the walls could belong to rival gang members or to illegal immigrants – either way, they are evidence that those “bad hombres” operate beyond the scope of normal morality. Such a depiction can appear to have given in to sensationalism, but really the difference between this film and The Bridge or Traffic is that Villeneuve offers a less empathetic view of his characters and the situations they face. (2017, p. 126) This scene objectifies Brown bodies. The decomposing cadavers stuck in those walls, in the medieval fashion, are props to trigger the action. War dehuma­ nises, but cinema can dehumanise even further. Still, if Sicario offers some sort of political critique when Kate realises that the war against the cartels involves unethical U.S. involvement and torture, Villeneuve plays by the stereotypes and clichés that have plagued borderland cinema since the 1930s. The good guys have to do bad things in order to reach a noble end. The bad guys, the Other, remain evil, amoral, barbaric. The character of a Mexican cop is introduced, along with his family, but this seems to be more of an inclusivity quota rather than a true attempt at representation. As Loyo points out, this is “an underdeveloped subplot that will serve to counteract the simplified negative view of Mexicans involved in drug trafficking as cruel monsters” (2019, p. 65). Representation matters: for years, accountability and blame concerning narcotics have been placed on

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Global South criminal organisations – the producers and distributors – while little “heat” has been given to Global North consumers, distributors and corrupt authorities. Alienating or exoticising the Other is an effective way to oversimplify an incredibly complex cultural, financial, legal and political as­ semblage that shapeshifts constantly. Loyo’s key word here is “underdeveloped” (2019, p. 65): the real prota­ gonists and victims of the cartel wars are given little screen time; their stories are a mere passage among the chaos that affects them more than anyone else. Rather than ignorance, Sicario displays a blatant disinterest in the Other. Brown bodies are disposable and only gain relevance when they corrupt U.S. order with their stench. This is quite literal: Kate, Alejandro and Matt Graver only decide to enter Mexico when the gruesome discovery in the safehouse becomes too much to deal with on U.S. soil. The cartel wars that have long plagued the Global South have shown their ugly face in U.S. everyday life, and that must be stopped. Not the arms being trafficked in a North-South flow. Not the lives that the cartel wars claim on both sides of the border via bullets and overdoses. What needs to be defended is the tranquillity, the apparent civility with which crime is committed in the United States of America. The reality of the cartel wars is too foreign, too exotic, too distant for Kate to comprehend when Matt first approaches her to join the DEA forces. It is only when she Googles what the cartel wars really look like that she en­ counters the disgust and fascination that images of body horror can trigger (Albarrán-Torres, 2017). It is not entirely clear whether Kate decides to ac­ tively engage in the conflict, to enter the real battlefield, because she wants to stop cruel assassinations to happen in Mexico or to prevent them from seeping into the social foundations of the United States. Kate represents the moral and ethical ambiguity that U.S. policymakers feel towards the cartel wars, which has led to unilateral and short-sighted policies in the country, mostly based on military and security aid (Carpenter, 2013). Even if its packaging screams “quality cinema”, Sicario is a product of a U.S.-centric worldview that positions the North American country as the global police, just like the Reagan era action cinema epitomised by The Delta Force. Even though the CIA does not have the jurisdictional or legal power to intervene in foreign territories, the “goodies” in Sicario chase the “baddies” in Mexican territory, breaking with international laws but doing it for a “good cause”. Villeneuve plays along with the white-saviour ethos of most U.S. films about the cartel wars by positioning U.S. security forces on a pedestal of moral, if not ethical, superiority. While trying to contain the violence and stop it from spreading, like an infection, across to the United States, Villeneuve’s film implies that Mexican blood has to be shed in order to re-establish some sort of order (Koram, 2017). Retribution is needed, it seems, in order to make things even. An eye for an eye. Sicario is neo-imperialist propaganda wrapped in the fluff of arthouse cinema. I am not arguing that Villeneuve holds these views personally, but in playing along with the political dynamics of the Hollywood

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entertainment complex, as he did with his sci-fi film Arrival (2016), he replicates ideas, and ideals, of American exceptionalism.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado: a cautionary tale for the Trump era Sicario: Day of the Soldado, released in 2018 and directed by Stefano Sollima, captures the zeitgeist of the Trump presidency and its early focus on the border and the proposed wall between Mexico and the United States. The film brings together the menaces of cartel violence and terrorism, two contemporary nation-building narratives in the United States. In the Sicario universe, besides trafficking drugs, the cartels are now profiting from crossing migrants and smuggling terrorists across the border. This is perhaps the most insidious recent cartel media product in its justification of U.S. interventionism in a foreign territory and the oversimplification of border politics. Key in Sicario: Day of the Soldado is the conflation of the drug cartels and networks of human trafficking operated by coyotes: people who have formed a shadow economy of smuggling and abuse in the border, and who target mainly women and vulnerable groups (Martínez, 2016; Spener, 2004). The collusion of human and drug trafficking is well documented. In fact, Showtime’s The Trade (2018–) is a meticulous and incisive documentary series directed by Israeli filmmaker Matthew Heineman, who leaves no stone un­ turned as he goes on the ground to follow the material, financial and affective threads that determine the lived experience of the cartel wars. Such nuance is lacking in the Sicario universe. The second part of the Sicario saga opens with an aerial shot. A Border Patrol helicopter casts a shadow over the U.S.–Mexico border. It is nighttime and the officers spot a group of undocumented migrants and chase them as they run from the helicopter’s blinding spotlight. Soon Border Patrol jeeps and ATVs round up the migrants. It is all seen from above, as if the camera has taken on the panoptic gaze of the helicopter. Through encapsulating the physical ter­ ritory within the frame, the camera colonises space – makes it its own. The shot establishes the subjective position that the film will take in the portrayal of the border, its people and its contested politics. The camera, it is now clear, holds the authoritative gaze of the Border Patrol. The shot from above dehumanises the migrants who are trying to cross the border. The film focuses on Matt and Alejandro, the righteous heroes from the first film, but their stories seem to be just an excuse to showcase a need to intervene in the proverbial Wild West of the border. The opening shot is almost like an anonymous officer’s point of view. The director Stefano Sollima, who worked as a second unit director in Villeneuve’s Sicario, doesn’t shy away from establishing the moral stance of the film: it represents undocumented migrants as a faceless mob, a menace – much in line

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Figure 6.3 In Sicario: Day of the Soldado, DEA and Border Patrol agents find three prayer rugs lying on the arid U.S.–Mexico border: a sign that Islamic terrorists are infiltrating the United States, aided by the cartels.

with far-right groups in some Western democracies including, but by no means limited to, the United States. This, of course, might not have been Sollima’s intention, but it is certainly the modus operandi of screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, who penned both Sicario films plus the neo-Westerns Hell or High Water (2016) and Yellowstone (2018–), a television show led by Kevin Costner. Sheridan has become an important Hollywood voice in the Trump era, creating hypermasculine and hyperwhite narrative spaces. The action then moves to the ground as the ATVs aggressively corral the Global South citizens trying to reach the promised American Dream. We see people from different ethnic backgrounds: Latin Americans, Chinese, Middle Eastern. The menace from across the border is not solely Mexico, but the whole of the “underdeveloped world”. But then the illegal networks of narcotics, human trafficking and fundamentalist terrorism converge: a bearded man breaks from the pack and runs aimlessly into the desert. Agents chase him. He kneels down and prays in Arabic. As the armed officers approach, the suspect reveals an explosive device attached to his body. He is a jihadist. At this moment, the director cuts back to the helicopter’s gaze. We witness the action through an infrared camera – the machine gaze, a common aesthetic device in films and television shows depicting the War on Terror. The un­ documented migrant, now revealed as a terrorist, activates the explosive de­ vice. In the world of Sicario, human trafficking across the border is not only an affront to legality, but also an issue of national security. This worldview lines up with Trumpian politics and the beliefs held by anti-immigration vigilante groups in U.S. states such as Arizona. The next morning, investigators survey the scene and find three prayer rugs lying in the desert (Figure 6.3), abandoned. Sombre music plays as the director lets the audience gather the facts: coyotes are smuggling terrorists across the

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border. Undocumented migration must be stopped. In an interview, Sollima explained his approach to dealing with issues of undocumented migration in his film: On Soldado, it was to study how it works, the illegal immigration, by the point-of-view of the Coyotes. So the people who are actually doing it for real, and then what you learn is that they’re a different kind of gangster. Sometimes it’s just logistics, or they just drive people from point A to point B. This is what I studied. Now really, by going to the border by doing interviews, almost everybody could be potentially involved in the product. (Giroux, 2018) Key in this quote is the implied suspicion that in the borderlands, everyone could hypothetically be complicit in criminal activities until proven otherwise. The film shows this suspicion as the moving image and foreboding music work together to create a menacing atmosphere. Sicario’s sequel had a bigger mainstream impact than the original, perhaps due to its overtly conservative politics in a day and age of worldwide political division over issues such as immigration, attitudes towards the Middle East and the global distribution of wealth. Popular media reports argued that while president Donald Trump even tweeted about prayer rugs that were supposedly found in the arid border, which was a possible reference to the film rather than an actual fact. Yohanna Desta wrote in Vanity Fair: However… what Trump describes is, once again, a plot point in the Sicario franchise. Could it be, then, that real governmental talking points are being lifted from movies, so that Trump can find new reasons to justify his proposed, costly border wall? Vanity Fair has reached out to the White House for comment. (2019) Sicario: Day of the Soldado validates often unsustained ideas of the border and migratory processes. The film, like its predecessor, represents geographical and political boundaries in a schematic, quasi-cartographical way. Straight lines separate the Texan city of McAllen from the Mexican city of Reynosa in the state of Tamaulipas, one of the hotspots for human trafficking in the area and where migrant camps have been set up in recent years (Orozco, 2020). One of the subplots of the film follows a young Mexican-American man who be­ comes a coyote as he has an American passport and is therefore a valuable asset for the cartel. He lives right on the border, and with overhead shots we can see his house, under the shadow of the border wall. The representation of space is reminiscent of film and theatre in which clearly demarcated spaces help establish relationships of power (Figure 6.5). Inclusion and exclusion in these spaces determine characters’ fates. We can think, for instance, of Lars Von Trier’s Dogville (2003), shot on a minimalist

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Figure 6.4 In his 2003 film Dogville, Danish director Lars von Trier used schematic space to represent relationships of power, spaces of inclusion and exclusion.

Figure 6.5 Similarly, in Sicario: Day of the Soldado, director Stefano Sollima opens with a shot of the U.S.–Mexico border, traced by the Rio Grande.

stage (Figure 6.4), which deals with how conservative societies are wary of strangeness – a theme that certainly resonates when discussing the politics of migration. Sicario: Day of the Soldado is a film that deals in relationships of inclusion and exclusion – albeit in an uncritical manner. Just like the divisive politics of the Trump era, when the political spectrum clearly expanded to the farthest right, not only in the United States, but also worldwide, Sollima’s film paints a bleak picture in blacks and whites, in which violence is the only answer.

Conclusion In this chapter I have analysed how the Sicario saga has constructed a simplistic geopolitical reality that implicitly supports the conservative politics of the Trump era. Through chromatic othering, directors Denis Villeneuve and Stefano Sollima echo both previous cartel media such as Soderbergh’s Traffic and films about the War on Terror in which the Middle East was portrayed as a rusty wasteland. Chromatic othering separates civilisation from the “barbaric” – in this case, the United States from Mexico. In both films, the camera acts as a colonising force that corrals space and divides reality into zones of inclusion and exclusion. It is no surprise that a franchise like this would emerge out of the late 2010s’ cartel media. The plotlines written by Taylor Sheridan often seem to have come out of Breitbart News Network, the far-right media organisation that became an early advocate of Donald Trump’s political project and agenda. These films play with fear of the Other in every frame by favouring alarmism over nuance.

Suggested viewing La virgen de los sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins, Barbet Schroeder, 2000) Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000)

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El Traspatio (Backyard, Carlos Carrera, 2009) Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, 2015) Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Stefano Sollima, 2018)

References Albarrán-Torres, C. (2017). Spectacles of death: Body horror, affect and visual culture in the Mexican narco wars. Senses of Cinema, 84. Retrieved from http://sensesofcinema. com/2017/feature-articles/mexican-narco-wars/. Antony, M. G., & Thomas, R. J. (2017). “Stop sending your kids across our border”: Discursively constructing the unaccompanied youth migrant. Journal of international and Intercultural Communication, 10(1), 4–24. Arnett, R. (2015). Understanding Tony Scott: Authorship and post-classical Hollywood. Film Criticism, 39(3), 48–67. Beresford, P. (2016). Presenting welfare reform: Poverty porn, telling sad stories or achieving change? Disability & Society, 31(3), 421–425. Bernstein, M., & Studlar, G. (Eds.). (1997). Visions of the east: Orientalism in film. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Britton, J. A. (1995). Revolution and ideology: Images of the Mexican Revolution in the United States. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. Carpenter, A. C. (2013). Changing lenses: Conflict analysis and Mexico’s “drug war”. Latin American Politics and Society, 55(3), 139–160. Davidson, N., & Saull, R. (2017). Neoliberalism and the far-right: A contradictory em­ brace. Critical Sociology, 43(4–5), 707–724. Desta, J. (2019, January 18). Did Donald Trump Actually Confuse Sicario 2 with Reality? Variety. Retrieved from https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/01/donald-trumpsicario. Gallego, C. (2018). “Juárez, the beast”: States of fantasy and the transnational city in Sicario. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 74(1), 45–72. Giroux, J. (2018, October 20). ‘Sicario: Day of The Soldado’ director Stefano Sollima on the importance of authenticity and real locations [Interview]. Slash Film. Retrieved from https:// www.slashfilm.com/sicario-day-of-the-soldado-director-stefano-sollima-on-the-importanceof-authenticity-and-real-locations-interview/. Heinrich, J. (2015, April 24). Denis Villeneuve: ‘Sicario is a very dark film, a dark poem, quite violent’. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/ 24/denis-villeneuve-sicario-cannes-2015. Koram, K. (2017). “Order is the best we can hope for”: Sicario and the sacrificial violence of the law. Discourse, 39(2), 230–252. Loyo, H. (2019). The politics of space within the Mexico-US border region: The war on drugs and geographies of violence in Sicario (2015). The Velvet Light Trap, 83, 60–72. Martínez, D. E. (2016). Coyote use in an era of heightened border enforcement: New evidence from the Arizona-Sonora border. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(1), 103–119. Myint, H. (1965). Economic theory and the underdeveloped countries. Journal of Political Economy, 73(5), 477–491. Orozco, C. M. V. (2020). Sleeping on the streets: A perspective of migration in the border of Reynosa Tamaulipas, Mexico. International Journal of Social Sciences, 9(1), 113–131. Robin, P. (2015). Sicario: la force tranquille. Séquences: La Revue de Cinéma, 298, 4–5.

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Sherman, E. (2020, April 27). Why does ‘yellow filter’ keep popping up in American movies? Matador Network. Retrieved from https://matadornetwork.com/read/yellowfilter-american-movies/. Solórzano, F. (2017). Trump’s border, as seen on TV. Americas Quarterly, 11(2), 122–127. Spener, D. (2004). Mexican migrant-smuggling: A cross-border cottage industry. Journal of International Migration and Integration/Revue de l'integration et de la migration internationale, 5(3), 295–320. Staudt, K. (2014). The border, performed in films: Produced in both Mexico and the US to “bring out the worst in a country”. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 29(4), 465–479. Young, A. (2018, July 17). Juárez among the 50 most dangerous cities in the world. El Paso Times. Retrieved from https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/world/2018/07/17/ Juárez-50-most-dangerous-cities-world/791543002/.

Films cited Barber, D. (Director). (2009). Harry Brown [Motion picture]. United Kingdom: Marv Films, UK Film Council, HanWay Films. Berman, Z. (Director). (2007). Borderland [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico: Tonic Films. Bigelow, K. (Director). (2008). The hurt locker [Motion picture]. United States: Voltage Pictures. Carrera, C. (Director). (2009). El traspatio [Motion picture]. Mexico: Tardan/Berman. Coen, E., & Coen, J. (Directors). (2007) No country for old men [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Vantage, Warner Bros. Dobson, K. J. (Director). (2006). The virgin of Juárez [Motion Picture]. United States: Las Mujeres LLC. Gaghan, S. (Director). (2005). Syriana [Motion picture]. United States, United Arab Emirates: Warner Bros. Golan, M. (Director). (1986). The Delta Force [Motion picture]. United States, Israel: GolanGlobus productions. Greengrass, P. (Director). (2010). Green zone [Motion picture]. United Kingdom, France, Spain, United States: Universal Pictures, StudioCanal, Relativity Media. Hargrave, S. (Director). (2020). Extraction [Motion picture]. United States: Netflix. Jordan, N. (Director). (2007). The brave one [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Mackenzie, D. (Director). (2016). Hell or high water [Motion picture]. United States: CBS Films, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. Mendes, S. (Director). (2005). Jarhead [Motion picture]. United States, United Kingdom, Germany: Universal Pictures. Nava, G. (Director). (2006). Bordertown [Motion Picture]. United States, Mexico: Möbius Entertainment, El Norte Productions, Nuyorican Productions. Redford, R. (Director). (2007). Lions for lambs [Motion picture]. United States: MetroGoldwyn-Mayer (MGM), United Artists. Scott, R. (Director). (2001). Black Hawk down [Motion picture]. United States, United Kingdom: Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Scott, R. (Director). (2008). Body of lies [Motion picture]. United States, United Kingdom: Warner Bros. Scott, T. (Director). (2004). Man on fire [Motion picture]. United States, United Kingdom, Mexico, Switzerland: Fox 2000 Pictures, Regency Enterprises.

The Sicario saga and chromatic othering 123 Schroeder, B. (Director). (2000). Our lady of the assassins [Motion picture]. Spain, France, Colombia: Canal+, Les Films du Losange, Proyecto Tucan. Soderbergh, S. (Director). (2000). Traffic [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico, Germany: Compulsion Inc. Sollima, S. (Director). (2018). Sicario: Day of the soldado [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico: Columbia Pictures, Black Label Media. Villeneuve, D. (Director). (2015). Sicario [Motion picture]. United States, Mexico, Hong Kong: Lionsgate, Black Label Media. Villeneuve, D. (Director). (2016). Arrival [Motion picture]. United States, Canada: FilmNation Entertainment. Von Trier, L. (Director). (2007). Dogville. [Motion picture]. Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, UK, France, Finland, Norway, Italy: Zentropa Entertainments, Isabella Films B.V. Winner, M. (Director). (1974). Death wish [Motion picture]. United States, Canada: Dino de Laurentiis.

Television shows cited Heineman, M. (Creator, Director). (2018–). The trade [Television series]. United States: Our Time Projects, Showtime. Linson, J., & Sheridan, T. (Creators). (2018–). Yellowstone [Television series]. United States: Paramount Network. Raid, E., Stein, B., & Stiehm, M. (Creators). (2013–2014). The bridge [Television series]. United States, Mexico: FX Productions, Shine America.

7

Netflix’s Narcos Cartel media in the age of digital distribution

Televisual cartel narratives are tragic and epic, and usually condense years of turbulence into a few key moments. Networks and streaming services package key historical events as a media commodity that can be transferable to multiple markets. Producers attempt to tell the story of the drug wars while sticking to the stereotypes, proven market strategies and conventions of action films and serial television. When it comes to understanding and theorising the cultural sig­ nificance of streaming television shows like Narcos, we must take into account the transnational nature of Netflix content distribution (Lobato, 2019). Netflix’s reach generates a sort of communal, cosmopolitan viewership through which audiences relive historical moments and identities are shaped around particular national contexts. These identities, as with most cartel media stemming from Hollywood, are deeply rooted in stereotypes and geopolitical misconceptions. During the fifth episode of the first season of Narcos: Mexico, titled “The Colombian Connection”, we are bystanders at the passing of the torch from Colombia to Mexico as the epicentre of cartel activity, at least in political and public perception terms – although as Gootenberg (2012) reveals, this tran­ sition was far more complicated. This is a key moment in the long and tor­ tuous history of illegal drug trafficking from Latin America to Global North markets, which has been simplified – perhaps grossly so – in the Netflix tel­ evision show Narcos. Through five seasons, Narcos has chronicled the parallel rise of the Colombian (seasons 1–3) and Mexican (seasons 4–5, titled Narcos: Mexico) drug cartels as the main driving forces of global narcotics trafficking. The show, spearheaded by Brazilian filmmaker and producer José Padilha among others, has been criticised by commentators, scholars (Britto, 2016; Rocha, 2018) and audiences for offering a simplistic view of the expansion of Latin American criminal organisations and a naïve perspective on the in­ volvement of the United States and its security agencies in the conflict and political life in the region. Television shows such as Narcos and films made following Hollywood’s commercial and aesthetic mandates have made a global commodity out of the events, protagonists and victims of the cartel wars, mainly from the battlefields of Mexico and Colombia. In “The Colombian Connection”, we witness a meeting between bosses Pablo Escobar (played by Wagner Moura) and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo

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(Diego Luna), one of the founders of the famed Guadalajara Cartel that planted the seeds for what is now a complex assemblage of extraofficial territories and trafficking routes in cartel populated contemporary Mexico. The episode, directed by Mexican auteur Amat Escalante (who directed 2013’s Heli, perhaps the most brutal cinematic account of cartel violence, which won Escalante the Best Director award at Cannes), sees Félix Gallardo travel to Colombia to meet with Escobar. This episode follows one of the formulas of contemporary film and television franchises: the crossover. Bart Beaty defines the crossover as “the use of characters from one franchise in the film or television program of other characters” (2016, p. 318) and emphasises how Hollywood powerhouses such as Marvel use this model to sustain profitable properties. As Beaty ex­ pands: “Not only do the appearances of characters across titles help establish the sense of a shared universe, but they also reinforce the necessity of buying all Marvel comic books, or seeing all of the Marvel films” (2016, pp. 322–323). In Narcos, Netflix is basing a semi-fictional universe on jour­ nalistic and historical accounts of the drug wars in Colombia and Mexico while following the industry mandate of the crossover and having characters from the two Latin American countries appear in both iterations of the franchise. For example, drug lord Amado Carillo Fuentes, better known as “el señor de los cielos”, appears in both series, played by Mexican actor José María Yazpik. Carrillo Fuentes himself has been the subject of a highly successful narcotelenovela (narco-themed soap opera), El Señor de los Cielos, which broke audience records in Latin America and within Spanish-speaking communities in the United States. Back to “The Colombian Connection”. Much to the anger of his partner, Rafael Caro Quintero (Tenoch Huerta), Félix Gallardo (Figure 7.1) wants to expand their business and start dealing cocaine in addition to their staple product, marijuana. Caro Quintero believes that cocaine will translate into trouble with the United States, while Félix Gallardo wants to build an empire regardless of the consequences. After Félix Gallardo arrives at Escobar’s le­ gendary estate Hacienda Nápoles in the middle of the night, Blacky – one of the cartel’s hitmen, with whom we became familiar in the first two seasons of Narcos – leads him to a riverside kiosk. Félix Gallardo is left alone, unsure whether he will be killed or if his wish of meeting Escobar will be granted. The kiosk is either his final destination or the birthplace of a multimilliondollar alliance that will reshape trafficking networks worldwide. The next sound Félix Gallardo hears, he must be thinking, will be either a gunshot aimed at his head or the voice of the mythical Don Pablo. But what Félix Gallardo hears surprises him: animals grunting and splashing in the water. He looks at the river and two tiny ears peer out of the water. He must be dreaming. These animals belong to sub-Saharan Africa, not the Colombian jungle. “Hipopótamos,” he hears a voice tell him. Hippos. Like Colonel Kurtz in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Escobar emerges from the shadows, always the patient predator (Figure 7.2). Escobar then

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Figure 7.1 Diego Luna as Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo in Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico, season one, episode five, “The Colombian Connection”.

Figure 7.2 Wagner Moura as Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico, season one, episode five, “The Colombian Connection”.

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proceeds to explain how a hippo will kill anything that gets in its way. “They can break you in half”, he adds, clearly threatening his visitor. Félix Gallardo is unfazed. Escalante builds the tension by allowing us to fully take in the features of each character. Félix Gallardo is a thin, immaculately dressed businessman. Escobar looks like a dad one might find in a shopping mall pushing a stroller: polo shirt tucked into chinos; hastily combed hair. He talks calmly, each word a bullet, una bala. He listens attentively as Félix Gallardo tells him that he has already struck a deal with the Cali Cartel, Escobar’s enemies. He offers to take Escobar’s product as well. A gamble that could be fatal. In “The Colombian Connection”, Netflix producers build a bridge be­ tween the two installments of the franchise and get a second chance at further aligning their version of Pablo Escobar with the one collectively built by the public and the media throughout the years (Figure 7.3). Netflix doesn’t leave any stone unturned – and even Escobar’s famed hippos make an appearance. Hippopotamuses are key figures in Colombian cartel lore ( Jaramillo, 2017; Naef, 2015). Pablo Escobar famously collected exotic species and had a per­ sonal zoo in his estate. After his death and the seizure of his assets by the Colombian government, Escobar’s hippos were left unattended in the tropical countryside. The animals thrived with no natural predators around (Kremer, 2014). Stories abound of the animals numbering in their dozens and terrorising the local population. These animals, however, were strangely absent in the two seasons of Narcos dedicated to Escobar; but in this scene, they finally appear on the screen. Escobar’s legend comes full circle more than two dec­ ades after his death in 1993, when he was shot by Colombian forces known as

Figure 7.3 When drug kingpins meet: In Narcos: Mexico, Netflix sets a passing of the torch in the Latin American criminal underworld and rounds up its successful inter­ national franchise.

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the Bloque de Búsqueda (Search Bloc), a task force created to hunt him with the aid of the DEA. This chapter explores the Netflix Narcos franchise and how it commodifies and frames the foundational stories of the Colombian and Mexican cartels. Narcos’ producers argue that the show is a “history lesson”, certainly a dubious claim that begs the question of whether historical veracity is achievable in screen media. Following the distribution model for most Netflix productions, Narcos and Narcos: Mexico have been released globally and simultaneously, which allows for a sort of communal viewing that previous cartel media products did not afford. As Ramon Lobato explains in his book Netflix Nations, one of the first scholarly investigations of the streaming platform: Global simultaneity is certainly a striking feature of Netflix, when seen in the context of the longer history of sequential film and television distribution (windowing). There are also other attributes that make Netflix a distinctly transnational, even cosmopolitan, service. It hosts a very diverse, though Hollywood-centric, spread of multilingual content, and it now translates its original content into dozens of languages. By aggregating large amounts of content into the one platform, Netflix also enables a certain cosmopolitan consumption experience that is highly valued by some subscribers. (Lobato, 2019, pp. 69–70) Upon the release of Narcos, which has now garnered a cult following (Lobato, 2019), responses from audiences and critics were produced in parallel around the world, and the show became popular in markets such as India, where Netflix invested handsomely in promotional campaigns. Here, distribution is the message: televisual narrative becomes historical dogma for global audi­ ences, generally devoid of context about a region, Latin America, that has been the subject of multiple misconceptions. Mexico’s current Foreign Secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, in charge of the country’s diplomacy, is an outspoken critic of cartel-themed television shows. He claims that producers describe Mexico unfairly, scaring tourism away (Cueva, 2019). It is worth stressing that even if the Narcos franchise has hired Latin American actors, directors and writers, it is still a Global North assessment of a Global South reality and as such it often lacks empathy and cultural nuance. History has been commodified by Netflix, repackaged for commercial pur­ poses. As Lina Britto wittily pointed out after the first season was released, “Narcos’ creators have instead hijacked history, car bombed it, and then mixed and matched its thousands of pieces, events, and characters together in the name of artistic license and in pursuit of new markets” (2016, p. 117). Given that recent Colombian and Mexican history is deeply intertwined with the development and expansion of drug cartels, this “hijacking” of history merits questioning. Given the definitive version of the cartel wars that Netflix claims to provide, do Global South nations forgo the right of self-representation in

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the era of global, simultaneous streaming? Even though Netflix sells and revels in the notion that it is a global, truly transnational form of media, it is still nationally anchored in the United States (Lobato, 2019). Netflix’s Narcos franchise perpetuates historical interpretations that are simplistic and provide only the point of view of United States officials and informants, for the most part stripping the capacity of Latin Americans to perform and exercise in self-representation. Narratives of cartel turf wars and the rise and fall of drug kingpins have defined how Latin America is seen, and judged, geopolitically since the 1980s. It was then that the Colombian cartels gained prominence as global criminal networks. Cartels such as the Medellín and Cali organisations not only gained enormous financial power, but also became highly influential at all levels of government, and some commentators (Andreas, 1998; Bibes, 2001; Patenostro, 1995) have claimed that the South American nation, as well as Mexico, became a de facto “narco state”, whereby true political power and decision-making lay in the hands of cartel bosses. Cartel influence in politics has been well documented (Mattiace, Ley, & Trejo, 2019; Mercille, 2011) and encompasses anything from money being funnelled into electoral campaigns to high-ranking government officials receiving bribes and favouring some cartels over others. Hollywood retellings of these turbulent times often echo the idea that Colombia was beyond salvation and that U.S. intervention helped muzzle the dogs of war. Americans are either portrayed as victims of the drug trade (citizens caught in the middle of the violence, addicts, downed officers) or as heroic crusaders that liberate the locals from themselves and protect the se­ curity of the United States while in overseas missions. During the 1980s and up to the establishment of the Plan Colombia by the Clinton and Pastrana administrations in 1999, the tug-of-war with the cartels also defined bilateral relations between the United States and Colombia. Ronald and Nancy Reagan made the “war on drugs” a cornerstone of their administration, perhaps choosing a new international foe in preparation for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Bloc. The “war on drugs” also became the ethical compass of the Reagan years, which were defined by a return to political conservatism, ableism and stigmatisation of racial and ethnic minorities. The Reagan years were also shaped by a kind of American exceptionalism that recalled WWII propaganda. Colombia first and then Mexico became U.S. national security priorities alongside Islamic ex­ tremism in its many forms. The Plan Colombia was of course a turning point in U.S.–Colombia relationships. As Jaime Zuluaga Nieto points out, this plan “made Colombia the third-highest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, the leading recipient of direct U.S. military training, and the linchpin of Washington’s global counternarcotics policy” (2007, p. 117). This aid, of course, came at a price and Colombia has faced constant social unrest aimed at neoliberal policies that go in tandem with U.S. interests in the country and in South America at large. As left-wing governments swept South American politics in the 2000s and 2010s, with Bolivia and Venezuela leading the pack

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of socialist-minded governments, Colombian authorities remained by and large conservative. There is, of course, a long history of popular rejection against U.S. in­ terventionism in the region, and cultural critics, academics and artists often put Hollywood television shows about Latin America under the micro­ scope. Critics argue that the national-security focus on the Colombian and Mexican cartels is but a way for the United States to exert influence in the region (Stokes, 2003), as in the mid-1980s drug trafficking “dethroned the USSR and its ideology as the principal threat to national security” (Zuluaga Nieto, 2007, pp. 112–113). This influence is materialised through training of security forces, increased presence of U.S. agencies and local govern­ ment decisions that seem to align with Washington. Local inefficiency to fight the cartels due to corruption and lack of firepower is often used as a bargaining chip by the White House and U.S. diplomacy to call for further aid in terms of military and police training, or on the ground operations by the DEA and the CIA. Paul Gootenberg is blunt in his assessment of the role that these agencies have had in defining global geopolitics in the postWWII period: “Like the CIA with terrorism, the DEA and its precursors unleashed their own demons with a global strategy of drug militarization” (2012, p. 159). Are Hollywood-centric narratives such as Narcos another form of cultural, pervasive interventionism akin to the ideas of cultural imperialism prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s? Are these “demons” still being unleashed on screens worldwide?

Pablo Escobar: screen icon and cartel media commodity Real and fictional outlaws have become popular media commodities, a profitable product for film studios, television networks, streaming services, merchandise manufacturers and local tourism (Naef, 2018). Criminals of Latino heritage in film and television have echoed harmful stereotypes about criminality, toxic masculinity and anti-democratic ethos in the region while becoming profitable media properties. Figures such as Pablo Escobar and the fictional Tony Montana from Brian De Palma’s cult classic Scarface have in­ spired countless products and forms of creative expression such as hip-hop songs, internet memes and even clotheslines. By all accounts, they are now part of the everyday vernacular of numerous cultures and subcultures. In al­ ternative popular culture they are portrayed as role models and heroes of the underprivileged, champions of the dispossessed. In mainstream productions, they are vilified as ruthless men who used people to achieve their means and extend their tentacles into all spheres of financial, social and political life. Contrary to other fictional criminals who achieve a mythical status, such as Vito Corleone and his son, Michael, in the The Godfather film trilogy (released in 1972, 1974 and 1990), drug lords in film and television are not granted a legitimisation in society by redirecting their resources to more venerable and productive activities. Paradoxically, Italian migrants such as the Corleone

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family have long been subjects of great American stories that start on a boat ride from the Old World and end in their incorporation into the American way of life after making a living from illegal activities which are then aban­ doned for morally acceptable, clean enterprises. But drug-lord narratives rarely follow the same structure, perhaps due to the fact that they are generally depicted as Brown or Black and therefore less likely to be assimilated into WASP America. The Corleones famously reject any involvement with the drug business, which set the moral tone for a film released in the 1970s, during the first stages of the massification of narcotics consumption in the United States. If the Corleones had made a living from drug trafficking, perhaps their relatively wholesome image – which has made them such fascinating and enduring film characters – would be shattered. In a meeting of dons in The Godfather, Vito refuses to enter the drug business. One of the other dons, racist Zaluchi, tells him: I, too, don’t believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra to stay away from that sort of stuff, but someone comes along saying, “I’ve got powders where, if you put up a three- to four-thousand-dollar investment, you can make fifty thousand distributing,” then there is no way to resist it. I want to keep it respectable. I don’t want it near schools. I don’t want it sold to children! That’s an infamia. In my city, we’d keep the traffic to the Dark People, the Coloreds – they’re animals anyway, so let them lose their souls. Drug traffickers, capos as they are known in the Latin American context, have become, in the view of some, champions of the dispossessed in some Global South contexts such as Mexico and Colombia, and in disen­ franchised urban environments in the Global North. Tony Montana, the protagonist of Brian De Palma’s 1983 film Scarface, for example, is con­ stantly referenced by Black urban culture in the United States and else­ where (Prince, 2009), and has become the epitome of an anti-establishment crusader, an entrepreneur who “sticks it to The Man”. The fictional Montana (Figure 7.4) is a Cuban migrant who sneaks his way into the Florida underworld and becomes a powerful cocaine dealer. Scarface is si­ tuated in the particular context of the mass migration of Cuban exiles who left the port of Mariel in 1980. These migrants were collectively known as Marielitos and were seen as traitors in their native Cuba and as a threat in the United States. Their status as welcome political refugees escaping Castro was transformed by officials and the mass media, which triggered a “moral epidemic” that framed them as “undesirables” (Aguirre, Saenz, & James, 1997, p. 487). Perhaps not purposely, but nevertheless somewhat irre­ sponsibly, De Palma helped perpetuate this “moral epidemic” by directing what is perhaps the definitive mainstream film about post-Revolution Cuban migration (there are other less known examples, such as Julian

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Figure 7.4 Al Pacino as Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s 1983 film Scarface. This mo­ ment has been parodied in internet memes.

Schnabel’s Before Night Falls, about novelist and queer activist Reinaldo Arenas). As Ramiro Martinez, Matthew Lee and Amie Nielsen argue: Popular media accounts not only shaped the portrayal of the Mariel Cubans within the Miami metropolitan area but across the United States. The most prominent image appeared in the cinematic remake of the movie Scarface, previously about Al Capone but recast with a machine gun-toting drug lord Marielito wreaking havoc in the streets of Miami. Writers further fueled this image by proclaiming that Mariel-related crime was spreading across the United States without presenting any systematic evidence to support this notion (Tanton & Lutton, 1993). Nevertheless, the violent Mariel image flourished as politicians, pundits, and psuedoa­ cademicians [sic] (cf. Lamm & Imhoff, 1985; Tanton & Lutton, 1993) continued to promote the notion of the crime-prone immigrant, a claim linked directly to the 1980 Mariel boatlift. (2001, p. 39) Montana is the definition of 1980’s excess and De Palma imbues his film with an extravagant and even kitschy vibe. Tony wants it all and gets it all. He even awaits death snorting a mountain of cocaine in a cartoonish moment that has since been remixed into internet GIFs, memes and other forms of satire. Contrary to Tony Camonte, the Italian-American fallen hero in Howard Hawks’ 1932 Scarface, which is set in the underworld of bootlegging opera­ tions, De Palma’s Cuban degenerate is only there to take and then take some

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more. There is no final purpose in Montana’s incommensurable greed other than money itself, which perpetuates harmful stereotypes assigned to Brown migrants from Latin America, particularly in cartel media products. Perhaps a veiled critique of capitalism, De Palma’s film ends up being an entertaining but ultimately demeaning epic that situates Brown, Spanish-speaking migration in a frame of hyperviolence, insatiable gluttony and illegality. Tony Montana is one of the seeds of the cultural figure of the “bad hombre” discussed earlier in this book. Montana is a Brown menace, the embodiment of all men who have been deprived in their home countries and arrive in the United States willing to do anything for the sake of riches and speedy social advancement. The figure of the “bad hombre” is echoed in the early 2020s not only on the screen, but also in political discourse as far-right movements and conservative immigration politics have taken hold in most Western democracies. The cultural figure of the drug lord is part of the bestiary of neoliberalism and late capitalism, a period defined by the gluttonous accumulation of wealth. As beasts of capitalism, capos have become commodities for global en­ tertainment industries. A similar entrepreneurial and outlaw drive to those of Tony Montana can be seen in the story of notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, loved and hated in his native Colombia and known throughout the world as both one of the most vicious criminals and one of the most successful en­ trepreneurs in the world. Unlike Montana, Pablo Escobar is a real-life figure; but, similarly to the character played by Al Pacino, he has come to symbolise the savage nature of criminal activity in a neoliberal sociocultural framework. One has to tend for oneself, they both seem to say, regardless of the means. Following his death at the hands of security forces and the DEA in 1999, Pablo Escobar has been the subject of multiple films and television shows financed and produced across the globe. In his native Colombia, the 2012 soap opera Pablo Escobar: El Patrón del Mal ran for more than a hundred episodes, achieving high rankings and generally positive critical reception. As Pobutsky argues, “Escobar has entered the world of outlaw folklore, becoming a sought after – albeit highly controversial – commodity that speaks to popular tastes” (2013, p. 685). Like other mythical figures such as the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, Escobar’s life has worked as a canvas in which the hopes and preoccupations of the times are imprinted. For example, as the Trump administration further emphasised the threat presented by Latin American migrants and criminals (one and the same in Trumpian rhetoric), Escobar’s saga gained traction in the English-speaking world. The public’s preoccupations seemed clear. Just who are these narcos that we should all fear? Who would Trump’s border wall protect us against? In Hollywood-style films, Oscar winners Javier Bardem and Benicio Del Toro starred as Escobar in two separate productions. The 2017 film Loving Pablo stars Bardem as the infamous cartel leader and his real-life partner, Penélope Cruz, as journalist Virginia Vallejo, with whom he had an extra­ marital affair that helped the capo use the media in his favour. The film is based on Vallejo’s memoir and directed by Fernando León de Aranoa, with whom Bardem collaborated in the 2002 film Los Lunes al Sol (Mondays in the Sun,

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about unemployment in Spain). Loving Pablo chronicles Vallejo’s relationship with Escobar, providing a rare female perspective on the hypermasculine and violent cartel world. The film is far from perfect and falls into many of the generic traps of the biopic. It sits in the liminal zone between arthouse films and Hollywood award-season bait. Like Queen of the South (widely discussed in Chapter 4 of this book), Loving Pablo includes dialogue spoken in English with a few Spanish words, providing the expected dose of exoticism. Even though both the cast and the director are native Spanish speakers, the chosen language is English, perhaps as a way to guarantee a healthier global distribution. The film is a Spanish/Bulgarian coproduction that nevertheless follows Hollywood conventions. Here is where the Netflix model in particular, and streaming in general, become a disruptive force. Films like Loving Pablo leave some viewers – at least Spanish-speaking audiences – with an uncanny feeling. The char­ acters look and sound Colombian but speak in a somewhat broken English. For his part, Benicio Del Toro played Don Pablo in the 2014 film Escobar: Paradise Lost. The film follows a young Canadian man who travels to Colombia, expecting to find a surfing paradise. The naïve surfer meets a young Colombian woman who happens to be the niece of Pablo Escobar. The young man, initially a bystander to the cartel life, becomes increasingly intertwined with the family dynamics and becomes a main character in Escobar’s ultimate doom – an iteration of the Hollywood trope in which an innocent Anglo person becomes corrupted by Global South criminality (see the discussion around Clint Eastwood’s The Mule in Chapter 2). But then Netflix offered what was, according to promotional materials released by the streaming service, the definitive and truthful recollection of the events that shaped the bloody episodes that led to the creation and ultimate downfall of the Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia. By tackling the Pablo Escobar saga, Netlix tapped into what already was a cultural phenomenon in Colombia and elsewhere, as Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky explained in 2013: Nearly two decades after his death, Pablo Escobar refuses to go away. His life continues to stir controversy, while his face does not cease to reappear in places both predictable (Medellin, Cartagena) and obscure (Ukraine), thereby converting his semblance into a timeless icon of notoriety. Pablo Escobar continues to attract morbid curiosity, subsequently providing an opportunity for commercial exploitation. News items related in some way to the cocaine kingpin erupt with regularity in the national press, while more reflective journalistic pieces revisit his era and the places that bear the imprint of his infamous legacy. Next to traditional tourist souvenirs, popular markets in Colombia sell Escobar t-shirts, while the geographical spaces that bear the drug lord’s mark – his gravesite, the ruins of his properties around Medellin, his famous ranch Hacienda Nápoles, or the hide-out where he met his end – are magnets for a growing number of visitors. (p. 684)

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Global audiences fell in love with the exoticism of the cartel underworld as reconstructed, or manufactured, in Narcos, but some sectors of the Colombian population were resentful of Netflix’s pontificating approach. Escobar’s re­ newed fame lifted the veil that Colombians had tried to put over their trau­ matic past, which they now wished to leave behind in order to revitalise the country’s image worldwide. Various governments have created costly tourism advertising campaigns in an effort to strip away the image in the Global North that Colombia is synonymous with crime and corruption (Castillo-Palacio, Harrill, & Zuniga-Collazos, 2017); but now the country was once again linked to the excess, blood and uncertainty of the Escobar years. It is important to note that José Padilha, who works here as an executive producer and directs some episodes, is the creative force behind the controversial Brazilian action franchise Elite Squad, which showcases the lives of that country’s elite forces, who are infamous for the brutality with which they “cleansed” the favelas (slums) prior to a papal visit. Elite Squad is a counterpart to the much-lauded film City of God, through which filmmakers Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund offered an inside look at life in the slums and the hardship, ambition and twisted ethical compass that leads to a life of criminality among disenfranchised Brazilian youth. City of God, however, achieved the key development of presenting a vibrant community life in the favelas – something that reduc­ tionist films such as Elite Squad fail to do. The good-guys-versus-bad-guys rationale in Elite Squad is replicated in Netflix’s Narcos, which is not surprising given Padilha’s involvement. In Narcos, little moral or ethical nuance is given to law enforcement agents, particularly members of the DEA. There is no doubt, however, that globally Netflix’s rendition of Pablo Escobar is quite definitive, unless a new, more popular cartel media product comes around to depicting him. As Ed Vulliamy wrote in The Guardian upon the release of Narcos: Mexico in November 2018: “There is a way in which Netflix writes history. Its portrayals of the drug-trafficking barons who form the dramatis personae of Narcos in its Colombian seasons are now ingrained in the popular imagination”. There will never be a Pablo Escobar more iconic, more fiercely contradictory, as Wagner Moura’s. Like Tony Soprano before him, Moura epitomises a kind of vulnerable and violent masculinity re­ miniscent of the tough guys of classic noir – characters embodied by the likes of Humphrey Bogart (think Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon) and Marlon Brando (Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront). Moura provides Escobar with an emotional depth that makes him reachable, human. The strong, silent type of “quality television”.

Building El Jefe de Jefes as a cartel entrepreneur Netflix is creating a televisual universe of drug trafficking in which characters cross over and formulas are repeated, as expected by the market. Narcos: Mexico follows a similar structure to the Colombian saga: a typical rags-to-riches story that ends up overwhelming government and security forces. In this second

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iteration of the franchise, stereotypes and tropes abound presenting the United States as the region’s saviour. The show starts as the tale of two friends, ex-cop Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and marijuana grower Caro Quintero, who grow and distribute menial amounts of marijuana and evolve to become perhaps the most powerful men in Mexico. As with the first three seasons of Narcos, the story is narrated in voice over by a former DEA agent, which sets the tone for what ends up being a moralistic tale of good guys versus bad guys. The good guys overall are represented by the U.S. government and its law enforcement branches, including the DEA (Figure 7.5) and state police in the border. The bad guys are made up of basically anyone South of the border: from the first episode there is a clear distaste for anyone involved in the drug business, as well as the Mexican authorities. But things in Mexico are his­ torically way more complex than a reductionist spectrum of legality on which illegality equals moral and ethical failure – because the municipal, state and federal governments have failed to provide even basic services to the popu­ lation. In many regions of Mexico, including the state of Sinaloa from which many of the most notorious cartel leaders have emerged, there persists a co­ lonial mentality whereby Indigenous and rural populations are often sub­ jugated. Violence against rural populations does not only involve armed repression but also an economic system that has rendered agriculture an in­ sufficient mode of survival for many communities. In Mexico, due to failed state policies that basically abandoned farmers and non-corporate agricultural production after the Mexican Revolution in the early twentieth century, narcotics crops such as marijuana and poppy flowers have offered an alternative to farmers. They have also been a source of op­ pression, as cartels and allegedly corrupt members of the military abuse whole communities, killing, kidnapping and terrorising residents. The systematic

Figure 7.5 Michael Peña plays the slain agent, Kiki Camarena, in the first season of Narcos: Mexico.

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abuse of rural and Indigenous populations permeated most of the twentieth century and has increased exponentially in the twenty-first century. Violence in some regions of Mexico has reached Dantesque proportions. In 2019, the most violent year in Mexican modern history, children as young as 6 years old were trained by their communities in the state of Guerrero to act as soldiers and defend their towns against criminal groups (Gallón, 2019). Narcos: Mexico does try to depict the twisted power dynamics involved in the cartel wars: it places blame on the local government – a corrupt state governor, ruthless soldiers, shady policemen – and leaves U.S. agents practically unscathed. The first season revolves around the kidnapping and murder of Kiki Camarena, a Mexican-American DEA agent who got too close to unveiling the inner workings of the Guadalajara Cartel and its increased collaboration with the Mexican government and military. Camarena and his fellow agents are por­ trayed as do-gooders, family men with little moral or ethical ambivalence. They are similar to the heroes of classic Westerns who were discussed in Chapter 2 of this book, rather than being antiheroes – though the antihero is perhaps a more fitting figure in the chaotic world of narcotics trafficking. Like Escobar in the first two seasons, Félix Gallardo is constructed following industry formulas and standards. Félix Gallardo is more akin to Vito and Michael Corleone, the elegant, calculative entrepreneurs who happened to deal drugs, than to Tony Montana, the gunfighting capo who revels in vul­ garity. Diego Luna said about his character in an interview with The New York Times: What he built in Guadalajara was incredible: He had hotels. He had banks. He had schools. He had country clubs. And these things were functioning where the elite would interact. Which tells me he had the aspirations of a businessman. It was my feeling that his ambition was to be in power among men in suits, where the real decisions are made, with politicians and business executives. He understood the machinery behind the system. (Tobias, 2020) Diego Luna’s Félix Gallardo moves with the feline charm of Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (The Godson, 1967). Luna’s Félix Gallardo fits into the neo-noir renaissance in global television and streaming cultures rather than with a factual recollection. Like Escobar before him, Félix Gallardo is an historical figure turned into a neoliberal commodity: a smooth operator who fits within the model of the “strong leading man” in quality television that was previously solidified by characters such as Tony Soprano, Walter White from Breaking Bad, Nucky Thompson from Boardwalk Empire and Jack Bauer from FOX’s 24 (see Chapter 5 for a close analysis of the “strong leading man” trope in so-called quality television). These characters became the marker of what has been labelled as the golden age of quality television, which led to a blurring of aesthetic and narrative styles between film and television, epitomised in what Trisha Dunleavy has termed “complex serial drama”

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(2018). Dunleavy explains in regard to the New Jersey mafia boss Tony Soprano: “Important to the continuing allure of Tony as lead character, de­ spite such horrendous on-camera murders, is that his professional life is given almost the same narrative weight as his domestic life” (2018, p. 112). Like Tony Soprano, Moura’s Pablo Escobar and Walter White, Diego Luna’s character is a vulnerable human being who is a family man and a ruthless criminal in equal measures. They are the “strong, silent type”. Much of the criticism against Narcos in the media, and stemming from government officials, is based on the empathy that scriptwriters encourage towards for­ mulaic characters based on historical figures who have brought suffering to countless individuals and families. Narrative nuance is lost to cater for cookiecutter character stereotypes.

Conclusion: Netflix or franchising history By using archival footage showing the real-life protagonists of the period, the showrunners give Narcos a docudrama feel, which further exacerbates the series’ claim to veracity. This impression of veracity, however, is highly du­ bious and even misleading given the complexity of the issues at hand: gov­ ernment corruption, U.S. interventionism and the moral and ethical ambivalence of both cartel members and law enforcement authorities. Moreover, in their effort to write the definitive, if inconclusive, history of the cartel wars, Netflix creators and producers have mostly echoed a view of the narco world in particular, but of Latin America in general, that feeds mis­ conceptions and gross generalisations of the region and its people. Narcos also falls into the trap of having few female characters of significance. Like in classic noir, the Narcos world is inhabited by seductresses and housewives who are almost completely disempowered. Towards the end of Narcos: Mexico’s first season, Don Neto – one of the founders of the Guadalajara Cartel – is ap­ prehended by the Mexican authorities while he rests in a beachside home. He watches as two topless women kiss for his viewing pleasure – and for the audience’s male gaze. He wears headphones and Mexican pop music blasts at full volume. We see the women being shot and Don Neto’s face being splattered with blood. He seems content or resigned. Women are mere props, cannon fodder, vehicles for entertainment and exploitation. Making a commodity out of history, and media properties out of kingpins, is a disservice to those affected by armed conflict, within and outside the battleground countries. What’s more, Netflix has partnered with video-game developers to produce titles based on the series, making Narcos a transmedia franchise similar to the Marvel or Star Wars universes. In Narcos: Rise of the Cartels (Figure 7.6), players can take the role of either a cartel hitman working for Pablo Escobar or of the authorities trying to catch him – namely, the DEA and the Search Bloc established by the Colombian government (Blake, 2019). Here, the type of subjectivity afforded by the gameplay is problematic and banalises what Susan Sontag termed “the pain of others” (2004).

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Figure 7.6 The video game Narcos: Rise of the Cartels, based on the popular Netflix franchise.

Furthermore, the Netflix franchise Narcos takes for granted that cartels are in fact the way that the drug wars operate. As in the scene described at the beginning of this chapter, television narrative has turned the history of the cartel wars into a classic tale of kings and successors. The fact is that Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo might never have met Escobar; but the on-screen en­ counter was key for the sustenance of an audience, and effective in terms of a crossover strategy.

Suggested viewing Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983) Escobar: Paradise Lost (Andrea Di Estefano, 2014) Narcos (created by Carlo Bernard, Chris Brancato and Doug Miro, 2015–2017) Surviving Escobar: Alias J.J. (produced by Acier Aguilar, 2017–) Narcos: Mexico (created by Carlo Bernard, Chris Brancato & Doug Miro, 2018–)

References Aguirre, B. E., Saenz, R., & James, B. S. (1997). Marielitos ten years later: The Scarface legacy. Social Science Quarterly, 78(2), 487–507. Andreas, P. (1998). The political economy of narco-corruption in Mexico. Current History, 97(618), 160–165. Beaty, B. (2016). Superhero fan service: Audience strategies in the contemporary inter­ linked Hollywood blockbuster. The Information Society, 32(5), 318–325.

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Bibes, P. (2001). Transnational organized crime and terrorism: Colombia, a case study. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 17(3), 243–258. Blake, V. (2019, November 21). Narcos: Rise of the Cartels review – pleasantly surprising strategy. EuroGamer. Retrieved from https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-11-21narcos-rise-of-the-cartels-pleasantly-surprising-strategy. Britto, L. (2016). Car Bombing Drug War History: How the hit Netflix series Narcos echoes the DEA’s version of events, distorting—and commodifying—the rise of Colombia’s drug economy. NACLA Report on the Americas, 48(2), 177–180. Cano, M. A. (2015). The War on Drugs: An Audience Study of the Netflix Original Series Narcos. Undergraduate Student Research Awards, 24. Retrieved from https:// digitalcommons.trinity.edu/infolit_usra/24. Castillo-Palacio, M., Harrill, R., & Zuniga-Collazos, A. (2017). Back from the brink: Social transformation and developing tourism in post-conflict Medellin, Colombia. Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, 9(3), 300–315. Cueva, A. (2019, July 14). Marcelo Ebrard y las “narcoseries”. Milenio. Retrieved from https://www.milenio.com/opinion/alvaro-cueva/ojo-por-ojo/marcelo-ebrard-y-lasnarcoseries. Dunleavy, T. (2017). Complex serial drama and multiplatform television. New York: Routledge. Gallón, N. (2019, January 30). Children are joining a self-defense militia in Mexico. CNN. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/30/americas/children-self-defensemilitias-in-mexico-intl/index.html. Gootenberg, P. (2012). Cocaine’s long march north, 1900–2010. Latin American Politics and Society, 54(1), 159–180. Jaramillo, C. (2017). Pablo Escobar: Zoomania in the narco imperium. The glorification of the cocaine network. The Design Journal, 20(sup1), S4697–S4709. Jenner, M. (2018). Netflix marketing: The binge and diversity. In Netflix and the Reinvention of Television (pp. 161–182). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. Kremer, W. (2014, June 26). Pablo Escobar’s hippos: A growing problem. BBC. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27905743. Lamm, R. D., & Imhoff, G. (1985). The immigration time bomb: The fragmenting of America. New York: Truman Talley. Lobato, R. (2019). Netflix nations: The geography of digital distribution. New York: New York University Press. Martinez Jr., R., Lee, M. T., & Nielsen, A. L. (2001). Revisiting the Scarface legacy: The victim/offender relationship and Mariel homicides in Miami. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 23(1), 37–56. Mattiace, S., Ley, S., & Trejo, G. (2019). Indigenous resistance to criminal governance: Why regional ethnic autonomy institutions protect communities from narco rule in Mexico. Latin American Research Review, 54(1), 181–200. Mercille, J. (2011). Violent narco-cartels or US hegemony? The political economy of the ‘war on drugs’ in Mexico. Third World Quarterly, 32(9), 1637–1653. Naef, P. (2015). Pablo and the hippos: ‘Narcoheritage’ and tourism in Medellin, Colombia. Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado. Naef, P. (2018). “Narco-heritage” and the touristification of the drug lord Pablo Escobar in Medellin, Colombia. Journal of Anthropological Research, 74(4), 485–502. Patenostro, S. (1995). Mexico as a narco-democracy. World Policy Journal, 12(1), 41–47.

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Pobutsky, A. B. (2013). Peddling Pablo: Escobar’s cultural renaissance. Hispania, 96(4), 684–699. Prince, R. (2009). Say hello to my little friend: De Palma’s Scarface, cinema spectatorship, and the hip hop gangsta as urban superhero (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Rocha, S. M. (2018). Visualidad política latinoamericana en Narcos: un análisis a través del estilo televisivo. Comunicación y medios, 27(37), 106–118. Sontag, S. (2004). Regarding the pain of others. New York: Picador. Stokes, D. (2003). Why the end of the Cold War doesn’t matter: The US war of terror in Colombia. Review of International Studies, 29(4), 569–585. Tanton, J., & Lutton, W. (1993). Immigration and criminality in the U.S.A. Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies, 18, 217–234. Tobias, S. (2020, February 21). Why Diego Luna took convincing to play a kingpin in ‘Narcos: Mexico’. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/ 2020/02/21/arts/television/diego-luna-narcos-mexico-netflix.html. Vulliamy, E. (2018, November 4). Félix Gallardo: The ‘Bill Gates of cocaine’ who rules the new Narcos season. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/tvand-radio/2018/nov/15/felix-gallardo-the-bill-gates-of-cocaine-who-rules-the-newnarcos-season. Zuluaga Nieto, J. (2007). US security policies and United States–Colombia relations. Latin American Perspectives, 34(1), 112–119.

Films cited Coppola, F. F. (Director). (1972). The godfather [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures. Coppola, F. F. (Director). (1974). The godfather: Part II [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures. Coppola, F. F. (Director). (1979). Apocalypse now [Motion picture]. United States: Zoetrope Studios. Coppola, F. F. (Director). (1990). The godfather: Part III [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures. Curtiz, M. (Director). (1942). Casablanca [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. De Palma, B. (Director). (1983). Scarface [Motion picture]. United States: Universal Pictures. Di Estefano, A. (Director). (2014). Escobar: Paradise lost [Motion picture]. France, Spain, Belgium, Panama: Chapter 2. Escalante, A. (Director). (2013). Heli [Motion picture]. Mexico, Netherlands, Germany, France: Mantarraya Producciones. Hawks, H. (Director). (1932). Scarface [Motion picture]. United States: The Caddo Company. Huston, J. (Director). (1941). The Maltese falcon [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Kazan, E. (Director). (1954). On the waterfront [Motion picture]. United States: Horizon Pictures. León de Aranoa, F. (Director). (2002). Los lunes al sol [Motion picture]. Spain, France, Italy: Sogepaq, Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas S.L., Mediapro. León de Aranoa, F. (Director). (2017). Loving Pablo [Motion picture]. Spain, Bulgaria: Escobar Films. Meirelles, F., & Lund, K. (Directors). (2002) Cidade de deus [Motion picture]. Brazil, France, Germany: Globo Filmes.

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Melville, J. P. (Director). (1967). Le samouraï [Motion picture]. France, Italy: Compagnie Industrielle et Commerciale Cinématographique (CICC), Fida Cinematografica. Padilha, J. (Director). (2007). Tropa de elite [Motion picture]. Brazil, United States, Argentina: Zazen Produções. Schnabel, J. (Director). (2000). Before night falls [Motion picture]. United States: El Mar Pictures.

Television shows cited Aguilar, A. (Poducer). (2017–). Surviving Escobar: Alias J.J. [Television series]. Colombia: Caracol, Netflix. Bernard, C., Brancato, C., & Miro, D. (Creators). (2015–2017). Narcos [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Bernard, C., Brancato, C., & Miro, D. (Creators). (2018–). Narcos: Mexico [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Cano, C., Klement, G., & Uribe, J. (Creators). (2012). Pablo Escobar: El patrón del mal [Television series]. Colombia: Caracol TV. Calasso, M., & Zelkowicz, L. (Creators). (2013–). El señor de los cielos [Television series]. Mexico, Colombia: Telemundo Studios. Chase, D. (Creator). (1999–2007). The Sopranos [Television series]. United States: HBO. Cochran, R., & Surnow, J. (Creators). (2001–2010). 24 [Television series]. United States: FOX. Gillian, V. (Creator). (2008–2013). Breaking bad [Television series]. United States: AMC. Winter, T. (Creator). (2010–2014). Broadwalk empire [Television series]. United States: HBO.

Video game cited Kuju. (2019). Narcos: Rise of the cartels.

8

“El Chapo” gets the Netflix treatment Theorising cartel mythologies

One of the clearest mediatised memories that I hold from my early teenage years is a government “Wanted” ad featuring the face of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera and other drug dealers. The year was 1993 and Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, the Catholic Cardinal from the city of Guadalajara, the second largest in Mexico, had been assassinated just outside the airport. Official and unofficial versions about the killing abounded. Evidence pointed towards a case of mistaken identities, whereby Posadas Ocampo was wrongly identified as El Chapo, who had been waging a turf war against the powerful Arellano Félix brothers, heads of the Tijuana Cartel. After Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo went to jail and the drug trade experienced a balkanisation (Valdés Castellanos, 2014), El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel and the Tijuana Cartel engaged in a bloody and prolonged war (Hernández, 2012, 2020). While investigative journalism has long pointed towards collusion between the cartels and the Mexican govern­ ment (Aponte, 2012; Hernández, 2012; Ravelo, 2012), the magnicide of Posadas Ocampo impelled the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari – long seen as a bastion of neoliberal policies in Latin America – to face its first stern test of governmentality vis-à-vis the public face of the cartels. Few had heard of El Chapo back then, but the government launched a highly mediatised manhunt that included television ads offering a generous reward to anyone who could provide information of his whereabouts. The televised manhunt captured the country’s imagination as Salinas’ government tried to validate itself in terms of national security as it had in economic matters (O’Toole, 2003) and in a much-publicised social program labelled Solidaridad (“solidarity”). As a national symbol, El Chapo was born on television. His legendary alias means “Shorty” in Sinaloan slang; but it doesn’t describe his stature in recent Mexican cultural history, or the magnitude of the gory trail that his criminal activities have left behind. This was the beginning of El Chapo’s long and heavily mediatised public criminal trajectory, which has seen improbable escapes, savage violence, rumours of corruption (Andreas, 1998), countless narcocorridos (Simonett, 2004), Bmovies, alleged deals with numerous presidencies and even an improbable meeting with Hollywood actor Sean Penn. El Chapo was first captured in Guatemala in 1993 and escaped on 19 January, 2001. He allegedly fled hidden in a laundry

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cart with the help of prison authorities, although there are conflicting versions. For the next 13 years he strengthened his criminal organisation (Nájar, 2019; Reveles, 2011), to the extent of allegedly travelling overseas, until he was captured in 2014. He also got married to Emma Coronel Aispuro, now a social media microcelebrity, while he was a fugitive (Dávila, 2014). He escaped in 2015 from a tunnel built inside his maximum-security cell in Almoloya, an event that prompted public scorn and tarnished the Enrique Peña Nieto presidency. He was ultimately recaptured in 2016 and extradited to the United States a day before Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. In 2019, when Peña Nieto’s term was over, multiple unnamed witnesses alleged that his campaign had received financial help from El Chapo (Esquivel, 2019). For almost three decades Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera has been a key figure in the Mexican political and cultural imaginary, becoming an im­ probable national hero for many (Rodríguez Barrón, 2015). His mythic persona is still relevant in Mexican cultural and political life, even though he was most recently captured in February 2016, extradited to the United States the following year, and is now serving a life sentence at a maximum-security prison in Colorado. He is revered by rural folk and by Mexican migrants in the United States who find affinity in the capo’s humble origins (Délano, 2016). Film and television narratives have kept his story current, and his family continues to play an important role in how the Mexican state relates to the cartels. As recently as early 2020, El Chapo’s mother met with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in Sinaloa, which drew anger from the right-wing opposition (Phillips, 2020). The encounter, which broke COVID-19 protocols by including a handshake, was widely shared on social media and scorned by political pundits (“Mexico president defends”, 2020). His legend continues to shape discussions around Mexico’s political system as much as it did during 1993s manhunt. Fast forward to 2020: in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic a viral video showed Alejandrina Guzmán Loera, El Chapo’s daughter, delivering basic goods to disadvantaged communities in Culiacán, the capital city of Sinaloa, the state that has long been the epicentre of drug trafficking. Alejandrina and members of her foundation wore masks adorned by a stylised rendering of El Chapo’s face and handed out boxes also bearing El Chapo’s portrait and emblem (“Cárteles”, 2020). Online videos showed people thanking Alejandrina and sending their regards to El Chapo, who is, alongside slain Colombian cartel leader Pablo Escobar, the most publicly recognisable personality in the recent history of Latin American drug cartels. It is through these kinds of mediatised events that El Chapo remains an important figure, both in his home state of Sinaloa and internationally, as the footage makes its rounds on social media. Even behind bars in Colorado, where he will likely live for the rest of his life, El Chapo exerts enormous political influence due to his legacy. This cultural and political heritage not only involves the still viable and very much opera­ tional criminal organisation that he co-founded, the Sinaloa Cartel, but also the networks of vested interests and corruption that the cartel threaded with and

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within all levels of government throughout the decades (Winslow, 2016). In 2020, U.S. authorities arrested Genaro García Luna, the architect of President Felipe Calderón’s 2006–2012 full-frontal war against the cartels (Gibbs, 2019), for allegedly receiving bribes from Sinaloa and using federal security forces to decimate the cartel’s enemies. Opponents of the former president saw this as a validation of their point of view: that Calderón had benefited the Sinaloa Cartel by using the army against other organisations such as Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel. In this chapter, I argue that film and television cultures have been key in creating and sustaining popular narratives around El Chapo, often running counter to official versions about the capo’s drug empire, connections to the political elite and whereabouts, while at the same time making El Chapo and narcocultura look “exotic”. Due to the lack of verifiable information that often surrounds the lives and times of cartel leaders, their myth is built through a combination of folklore, popular culture and media representations that in­ clude factual news reports and fictional film and television narratives. Theirs is an amorphous and constantly contradictory mediatised legacy. In conceptualising mediatisation I follow Krotz (2017), who states that it “is a concept of the reconstructive analysis of today’s media-related transforma­ tions, together with respective social transformations of everyday life, culture and society” (p. 106). El Chapo’s mediatised persona conflates changes in Mexican politics (changes in regimes), culture (the rise of narcocultura and its assimilation into Mexican wider popular culture) and society. How El Chapo’s story is told reveals wider preoccupations regarding corruption, the state’s legitimacy and Mexico’s geopolitical position – most notably its relationship with the United States. Audiovisual texts that have chronicled El Chapo’s story for more than three decades include broadcast television news, television shows, B-movies com­ monly associated with the genre known as narcocinema, and the recent in­ carnations of El Chapo in the Netflix shows El Chapo and Narcos: Mexico, which I will discuss further in this chapter. His image has been reproduced perhaps millions of times, in all sorts of analog and digital media, as well as material cultures. Guzmán Loera has been the subject of countless news articles and broadcasts, a multitude of memes and other manifestations of remix culture, numerous television shows and films, books, narcocorridos (see Lara, 2004), political cartoons and even piñatas. He has also been mentioned in the lyrics of U.S. rappers Uncle Murda, Skrillex, YG, Gucci Mane and The Game (drug-trafficking stories are one of the tropes of urban music cultures in the United States). Future projects include El Chapo and the Curse of the Pirate Zombies, a project described as a horror comedy and to which actress Tara Reid (Sharknado) is currently attached. El Chapo can be read both as an historical figure of great real and perceived importance in the history of the drug trade and its relationship to the state, and as a symbol of the political concerns prevalent in the past three decades of Mexican history. I am not condoning the unspeakable acts of violence and the

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deep suffering attributed to Guzmán Loera and his criminal organisation and associates – a legacy that still permeates everyday violence in contemporary Mexico. Just in 2019, over 31,000 homicides were committed in the country, most of them related to cartel violence (Rapalo, 2020). Rather, my purpose in this chapter is to analyse how El Chapo’s persona has been collectively created and consumed. Just as Pablo Escobar became a commodity in Colombia – as I discussed in Chapter 7 – El Chapo has joined the ranks of narco quasi-saints that includes Malverde (Aguiar, 2019), a robber who became the patron of the cartels and an unofficial Catholic saint. El Chapo is still alive, but the ve­ neration he inspires in some sectors of the population leads us to believe that after his days are over his mythical figure will remain a relevant element of Mexican popular culture in general and narcocultura in particular.

El Chapo in the Sinaloan imaginary In order to understand El Chapo’s appeal as a media commodity, it is key to place him within the social imaginary of Mexico’s highly idiosyncratic northwest. El Chapo was born on 4, April 1957 in the municipality of Badiraguato, the birthplace of other high-profile narcos including Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Juan José Esparragoza, also known as “El Azul” (“Badiraguato”, 2015; Enciso, 2014). Badiraguato is a small rural municipality that has long been associated with the harvesting of marijuana and opium (Valenzuela Lugo, 1979). The fact that Badiraguato has been associated with organised crime and illegal plantations has led to local mistrust of the autho­ rities (Blázquez, 2016), as there is perceived discrimination against the mu­ nicipality when it comes to government grants and support for agriculture. As a son of the rural community in Badiraguato, El Chapo fulfilled the description of serrano, a key figure in local Culiacán lore. As described by Gabriela Polit Dueñas in her carefully documented book Narrating Narcos: Culiacán and Medellín, this cultural figure dates from the days of the Mexican Revolution and is a symbolic precedent to today’s narcos. She states: The serrano, or highlander, inhabitant of the Sierra Madre, is an emblematic northern character described as a party-lover, a hard worker, a rebel, and a machista. For the serrano, disobeying the law is a question of honor. That definition is quite similar to the one given in several corridos. (Dueñas, 2013, p. 16) Added to this definition, is the anti-state attitude that the serrano usually em­ bodies, a disdain for those who become rich by exploiting the campesinos or peasants. And El Chapo’s home state of Sinaloa has a tortuous history when it comes to state repression of peasants masquerading as a fight against illicit narcotics. In 1975, approximately 7,000 Mexican soldiers, aided by over 200 DEA agents, cracked down on opium and marijuana crops in what has come to be known as the Golden Triangle: the states of Durango, Chihuahua and

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Sinaloa, a region that is still a hotspot in the cartel wars (Shirk, 2010; Weinberg, 2002). Despite the crackdown’s alleged purpose of capturing drug producers, rural populations were abused, which set the tone for an antag­ onistic relationship with authority. As Julien Mercille narrates: Officially operations targeted narcotics, but the fact that not a single big drug trafficker was arrested, while hundreds of peasants were arrested, tortured and jailed, led some contemporary analysts to conclude that Mexico’s military and counternarcotics campaigns in the countryside should have been more accurately described as a war against peasants, marginalised groups and the (real or imagined) guerrillas of the sierras rather than against drug trafficking – setting a precedent for the current situation. (2011, p. 1641) These intelligence operations, which have been deemed brutally bellicose in retrospective, were collectively known as Operación Cóndor. They dug a deep trench between the authorities and local communities. The popularity that El Chapo enjoyed and continues to enjoy among some sectors of the Sinaloan community dates back to the historical trauma of Operación Cóndor, as cartels are seen by some as a counter-hegemonic force that fights back against a quasi-totalitarian state with its headquarters thousands of kilometres away in Mexico City. When rehashed in film and television, El Chapo’s improbable life story highlights his humble beginnings and the contradictory nature of his persona: the anti-government Robin Hood and the vicious criminal leader; the self-made man and the ruthless egomaniac. These contradictions are both meaty narrative material and the character-development backbone of the fictional criminals that have made their mark in “quality television” (McCabe & Akass, 2007). As Matt Zoller Seitz wrote about The Sopranos, which follows the life of mobster and family man Tony Soprano: “Chase’s The Sopranos balances subjective and ob­ jective storytelling, zooming into the consciousness of main character Tony Soprano but also pulling out to give us a view of his blood family, crime family, neighborhood, county, state, and nation” (2012). In a similar manner, the numerous iterations of El Chapo’s epic deal not only with Guzmán Loera but also, influenced by the conventions of U.S. network television and cinematic mobster genre, with family, community, state and federal matters. There are numerous early film and television depictions of El Chapo, but this chapter focuses on two Netflix productions: El Chapo and Narcos: Mexico. The Netflix shows were preceded by low-quality movies that depict particular episodes in the capo’s saga. Chapo: El Escape del Siglo (Axel Uriegas, 2015) is a tedious videohome that focuses on one of El Chapo’s improbable escapes. Perhaps due to the increased popularity of cartel-themed content on Netflix, the streaming giant offers it to its global subscribers. Videohome, we shall remember, is a low-quality genre popular in Mexico and among the MexicanAmerican diaspora in the United States (Rashotte, 2015). Here, El Chapo’s

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popularity has opened up streaming services to genres and low-quality cultural industries, such as the Mexican videohome subgenre, that would otherwise be considered too “lowbrow” even for a catalogue as deep and wide as Netflix’s. Also available on Netflix is The Unknown Hitman: The Story of El Cholo Adrian (originally titled El Desconocido: La Historia del Cholo Adrian, from 2017), a loose adaptation of the rise of El Chapo’s (here named El Chato) bodyguard and right-hand man. Spin-off stories of patrones’ right-hand men are now common in cartel television. The Colombian production Alias J.J., launched in 2017, is based on the life behind bars of John Jairo Velásquez, alias “Popeye”, a celebre sicario turned YouTube celebrity who died in 2020 while imprisoned. “Popeye” committed almost 300 killings and ordered thousands while working for Pablo Escobar. The show is titled Surviving Escobar: Alias J.J. on Netflix, where it was distributed globally, in a move to make it more appealing to international audiences aware of Escobar and his exploits. Other screen depictions of El Chapo include El Chema, a narcotelenovela that was produced by Telemundo and the Mexican telenovela powerhouse Argos, and is now available globally through Netflix. The story is a spinoff of the highly popular El Señor de los Cielos, a telenovela that chronicles the rise of Aurelio Casillas (Rafael Amaya), a character based on Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the cartel leader who built an empire out of Juárez by transporting narcotics by air. Carillo Fuentes is also featured in the Narcos franchise on Netflix, where he is played by the well-established actor José María Yazpik. El Chema follows the casting conventions of the telenovela industry, which has been criticised for casting almost exclusively white, European-looking actors for the main roles, in a gross misrepresentation of the ethnic compo­ sition of Mexican society. Telenovelas in the cultural powerhouses of Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico are for the large part conservative in issues of gender and sexual diversity, and selective when choosing white beauty standards (Benavides, 2009; Lewkowicz, 2015; Rios, 2015; Rivadeneyra, 2011). El Chema’s title role is played by former heartthrob Mauricio Ochmann, who is well known to telenovela audiences in Latin America and elsewhere (Figure 8.1). As a television format and cultural product, the telenovela has been a source of identity-making for the Latin-American diaspora in the United States (Barrera & Bielby, 2001; Mayer, 2003) and has travelled globally to places as geographically distant from Latin America as Israel, the former Soviet republics and China (Biltereyst & Meers, 2000; López-Pumarejo, 2007; McCabe & Akass, 2012; Slade, 2003). El Chema whitewashes narcocultura, as its characters retain some traits that have become clichés in depicting people associated with trafficking. These include boots and cowboy hats on men, and cleavage and tight clothes on women, in what has come to be known as buchona fashion (Zavala, 2018), alluding to the whisky brand Buchanan’s, which is constantly featured in social media accounts related to the cartels Just like the two Netflix shows discussed in this chapter, El Chema estab­ lishes an antagonistic relationship between the cartels and the office of the Mexican presidency. However, rather than keeping the conflict in the political

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Figure 8.1 Mauricio Ochmann as the title character in El Chema, a character loosely based on El Chapo, in the Telemundo narcotelenovela.

realm, it features a romantic triangle between El Chema, the Mexican pre­ sident (modelled after Enrique Peña Nieto), and Aurelio Casillas’ daughter, who is the president’s lover and mother to El Chema’s son. The telenovela demands of the viewer huge leaps of faith – a constant in the format – as the legal procedures depicted are laughable and the political setting seems to be a parody rather than a depiction of the real. However, El Chema is effective in encapsulating and distilling the most iconic elements of El Chapo’s story in digestible, bite-size chunks of melodrama. The tunnels; the extravagant es­ capes; the drug lord’s iconic white tank top and black baseball hat; El Chapo’s connection with actors Kate del Castillo and Sean Penn… it is all there in one way or another, with hyperbolic dialogues, tacky music and multiple instances in which the producers jump the shark. El Chema is far from an accurate or well-documented depiction of the cartel wars in Mexico, but rather an op­ portunistic melange that nevertheless highlights El Chapo’s position as a media commodity that is replicable, transnational and translational.

El Chapo does Netflix: when cartel crime equals political corruption Once he was definitely behind bars, first in Mexico and then as an extradited felon in the United States, El Chapo’s serendipitous story seemed to reach a dramatic resolution in the popular imaginary. After escaping the authorities for years and orchestrating larger-than-life escapes from maximum-security

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prisons, El Chapo was in captivity at last. This is when his story – which seems to have been made for the screen, an already-mediatised tale of precipitous falls and improbable comebacks – came to a standstill that allowed for memorialisation. The television show El Chapo was released in 2017. It is a co-production between Univisión Studios and the French Gaumont International Studios, and is distributed worldwide through Netflix. It was created by writers Silvana Aguirre, who has experience in writing soap-opera scripts, and Carlos Contreras, who has scripted some independent Mexican films – most notably, his brother Ernesto’s Párpados Azules (2007). The show narrates El Chapo’s life from when he was a young boy working in the poppy fields of his native Sinaloa, his subsequent entry into the criminal underworld as a soldier of the Guadalajara Cartel and then his rise to power alongside his partner, Ismael Zambada. El Chapo is skilfully played by Marco De la O, who provides multidimensionality to a public figure who has inspired love and hatred in equal amounts. El Chapo’s main character is full of contradictions – just as Pablo Escobar was portrayed in Netflix’s Narcos – and the lead actor delivers. El Chapo is immortalised by De la O and added to the pantheon of “strong silent types” in quality television: men of dubious and often despicable ethical and moral builds, but attractive in their Brandoesque vulnerability. Like James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, Marco De la O’s El Chapo (Figure 8.2) orders others to murder on his behalf, is a womaniser and makes his living through illicit activities that trigger a ripple of pain and loss. At the same time, they share some qualities that could be judged as partially redeeming, and which position them in a moral and ethical grey area – a common trope of quality television. El Chapo and Soprano are protective fathers and minority leaders who defend their communities against threats that often come from the government and are put into motion through deeply rooted mechanisms of stereotyping and discrimination. In The Sopranos, characters often complain about the stereotypes plaguing Italian-Americans in the United States, and the show itself is an indictment on the many cracks in the American cultural melting pot (Beck, 2000; Cavallero & Plasketes, 2004). In El Chapo, cartel members complain about bureaucrats in “la capital” (the Mexican capital, Mexico City), which has historically been the epicentre of political, military and economic power while being geographically distant from areas such as Sinaloa (Mecham, 1938; Rodríguez, 2018; Véliz, 1968). But even if El Chapo employs some of the tropes of recent televisual texts, there is a narrative twist that adds to the political dimension of the show. Alongside El Chapo’s rise, we witness the political growth of a fictional character called Don Sol (Humberto Busto), who amalgamates the personal­ ities of numerous Mexican politicians who were bred in the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, which held on to power for more than seven decades at the end of the Mexican Revolution. As El Chapo was a lowranking soldier in the cartel, Don Sol was a low-ranking bureaucrat in the federal government trying to find his way into the higher echelons of power

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Figure 8.2 Marco De la O plays El Chapo in the Univisión/Netflix co-production.

by being a sort of influence broker. Both become master chess players, at times impulsive and brutal, at times eerily calculative. El Chapo and Don Sol are the same kind of beast: they are humble men who resent privilege and embark on a personal crusade for power. Here, power does not translate necessarily into economic wealth, but into influence and the consolidation of political and business alliances. Critic James Donaghy compared the series to The Wire after it was released in the United Kingdom: What you may not expect is how El Chapo subtly chimes with another show about the drug trade. Much of the critical acclaim The Wire received was due to its portrayal of how the three key tiers of the drug game – the street, the police and the politicians – interacted in a broken system, with deadly results. In El Chapo, it is clear that the state and politicians are as ruthless as the cartels. (Donaghy, 2017) The plot also echoes Hollywood narratives in which privileged and under­ privileged characters develop in parallel, leading to a climatic encounter. We can think of Robert Redford’s Quiz Show (1994): a televised contest which pits a working-class hero against a man who benefits from a legacy of privilege (Epstein, 1994). Like El Chapo and Don Sol, Herb Stemple ( John Turturro) and Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) have vastly different life experiences, but seek the recognition that has eluded them: Stemple, for being a workingclass Jew in a hostile post-war environment; Van Doren, for coming from American royalty and having little to achieve that hasn’t already been given to him.

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Similarly, El Chapo and Don Sol strive to prove themselves to others. El Chapo has to surmount his humble beginnings through crime. Don Sol is a modest bureaucrat caught in the cogs of Mexico’s vast and cruel political machinery. Don Sol is also a gay man, a fact he must conceal to advance in the gargantuan monopoly game that are Mexican federal politics. El Chapo is certainly structured following the narrative grammar of Hollywood film and television as it tells parallel stories of characters who are, at the end, one and the same. Other examples include Martin Scorsese’s cop/robber house of mirrors The Departed (based on the Hong Kong franchise Infernal Affairs) and John Woo’s exploitation extravaganza Face/Off, in which John Travolta and Nicolas Cage portray a good/bad guy pair who actually exchange faces. The producers of the subtly political El Chapo follow this formula to make a point: the power structures that allow drug trafficking do not only involve the cartels and their leaders, but also the political class (Amaya-Trujillo, 2018). Throughout the show we learn about the deals brokered by the Sinaloa Cartel with the presidencies of Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Ernesto Zedillo from the PRI, Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón Hinojosa from the PAN (the con­ servative Partido Acción Nacional, which took power from the PRI in 2000 after 71 years of a one-party regime) and Enrique Peña Nieto from the PRI. The depth and breadth of El Chapo’s saga functions as a pretext to comment on the intermittent waves of hope and pessimism that have plagued the Mexican state for years. We also witness El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel fighting to take control of other organisations and enter a vicious war with Los Zetas, a violent cartel splintered from the Mexican Army special forces and which inaugurated what Logan (2011) labelled a “new era of barbarism” in global criminality (see also Campbell, 2010; Correa-Cabrera, 2017; Osorno, 2012). Strangely absent in El Chapo’s most poignant critiques, however, is the role that the United States and its security agencies have played in violently and sometimes unilaterally at­ tempting to curb the sustenance and expansion of drug and arms trafficking (Mercille, 2011; Toro, 1999). The fact that the show was first broadcast in the United States on Spanish-language network Univisión and then released on Netflix might have influenced the producer’s decision to focus the action in Mexico and delve almost exclusively in Mexican politics. By making El Chapo the one piece that ties governments, criminal orga­ nisations and Sinaloan communities together, the show turns him into an omnipresent figure that, under its narrative terms, basically defined cultural and political life in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Mexico. The magnitude of the kingpin’s real power is of course arguable, and it has in fact been contested for years. During Guzmán Loera’s trial in a federal court in the United States, the defence argued that his real power within the Sinaloa Cartel had been exaggerated and that his partner, Ismael “Mayo” Zambada, was the true leader (Feuer, 2019; Hernández, 2020; Vulliamy, 2019). One of the crucial but ultimately failed weapons for the defence was underplaying Guzmán Loera’s role in daily cartel activities, particularly given his fugitive years, his captures and his escapes.

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In fact, Guzmán Loera’s lawyers first threatened to sue Netflix and Univisión for not paying him to use his name and story in El Chapo (“Lawyer for Mexican drug lord”, 2019). They later claimed that the show could be detrimental to their case during the trial as it portrays the accused as a “heartless criminal”. In 2017, as the much-publicised trial was being prepared, El Chapo’s lawyer, José Refugio Rodríguez, argued: “Things are happening (in the series) that do not correspond to reality, despite the fact that there is no conviction confirming those events. That represents a grave violation of [Guzmán Loera’s] right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty” (“Captured Mexican drug lord”, 2017; Espallargas, 2017). Throughout the past three decades in which El Chapo has been a public persona, media de­ pictions of him have been mentioned as an influence on public perceptions; and this quote by the criminal’s lawyer highlights the intricate relationship between media representations and public opinion. El Chapo is a media commodity: a profitable brand that provides fertile ground for writers’ and directors’ imaginations. As such, El Chapo’s film and television persona is constructed around stereotypes that highlight social in­ equalities and regional disputes in Mexico. This is perhaps why the mediatised, commodified El Chapo remains so profitable and current. Adepts of narco­ cultura and crime apologists see these representations as heroic tales that re­ present the people’s fight for riches and rebellion against a repressive government. Those who rightfully decry cartels, or align with the govern­ ment’s bellicose policies and welcome U.S. intervention in matters of national security, see film and television representations of Guzmán Loera’s life as examples of what they are not: parables of the Other who is rural, brutal, uneducated and cruel. There is an exercise in othering to which Oswaldo Zavala has pointed (2014, 2018). El Chapo’s persona as a media commodity is also a reflection of how the cultural and political elites in Mexico City tend to exercise a sort of Orientalism when approaching local identities in other parts of the country. Because the federation is highly centralised in the capital (Vázquez, 1993), most Mexican media practitioners look at regional cultures with an inquisitive and often patronising eye. Carlos Reygadas, who belongs to the white upperclass elite, is among the filmmakers who have exoticised peoples from northern Mexico: a Mennonite enclave in Luz Silenciosa (2007) and rural Indigenous communities in Japón (2002). Even though the artistic qualities of Reygadas’ modernist films and the director’s innovative bravado cannot be overstated (Hershfield, 2014; Penn, 2013), he approaches non-white and uneducated characters with an anthropological gaze. His camera lingers on their faces and their often old or obese naked bodies (as in Batalla en el cielo, 2005) with a curiosity that borders in a sense of superiority. Reygadas, even in his stature as an auteur, is an example of what could be described as a “Mexico City gaze” or “chilango gaze” – chilango being a term that describes the in­ habitants of Mexico City and is used both as a marker of cultural identity and as a pejorative (Sabates & Pettirino, 2007).

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“Chilango gaze” is present in how the itinerant directors of the three sea­ sons of El Chapo depict Sinaloan and other local cultures, particularly when El Chapo meets with the leaders of other cartels from regions such as Michoacán and Veracruz. In a geographically vast and culturally diverse country such as Mexico, the centralisation of the creative industries – including film and tel­ evision – has produced numerous cases of misrepresentation. The chilango cultural elite, whose members are of mostly European descent, approaches Indigenous and rural realities with a whiff of the colonial. El Chapo is such an Orientalising cultural product. When Guzmán Loera travels to Malaysia to negotiate the opening of meth labs in the Asian country (season three, episode one), he is treated to local delicacies. He and his wife bring their Mexican chillies to the table and bite on them as they eat the local dishes. This brief moment is telling in how the producers judge El Chapo’s cultural identity: no matter how sophisticated his surroundings, he will always be a serrano, a peasant. Rather than accentuating the impunity with which El Chapo allegedly travelled while being a fugitive, this scene mocks his rural ways.

Narcos: Mexico or the origins of the myth Perhaps more than any other television text, Netflix’s Narcos franchise has shaped contemporary global imaginaries of the Latin American drug trade cultures and characters. As I argued in Chapter 7, the producers’ selfproclaimed status of “historians” and “documentarians” of the cartel wars is misleading in that it presents a limited view of the networks of complicity, corruption and greed that have triggered de facto civil wars in much of the American continent. Narrated by DEA operatives in Mexico, the franchise errs on the side of overcaution when digging into the role that U.S. authorities have had in the rise of the cartels. Narcos: Mexico narrates the rise of the Guadalajara Cartel as the main player in the 1980s’ narcotics boom and the ensuing balkanisation of the cartel into smaller subgroups that waged a brutal and ongoing turf war for plazas (unofficially demarcated territories controlled by a particular criminal organisation). Among the many narcos portrayed in the first two seasons of the show, El Chapo slowly gains prominence, foretelling his future status as the new “jefe de jefes”. In Narcos: Mexico, El Chapo is played by Alejandro Edda (Figure 8.3), who has worked in cartel media such as the film American Made with Tom Cruise (2017) and the videogame Ghost Recon: Wildlands (2017), a Tom Clancy creation about a fictional drug cartel in Bolivia. In the first two seasons of Narcos: Mexico Edda has to be restrained in his acting choices as he has to play Guzmán Loera before he became the mythic figure El Chapo. During production, however, Edda saw El Chapo in the flesh, a rare opportunity for an actor and an improbable episode that further shows how El Chapo is as much a product of his life and times as he is a figure shaped by media. The real and fictional versions of El Chapo came face to face while the drug lord was being judged in New York. As Bruce Fretts chronicled in The New York Times:

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Figure 8.3 Alejandro Edda (left) plays El Chapo in Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico. In season two, El Chapo starts digging tunnels to traffic cocaine under the U.S.–Mexico border.

On Monday, Alejandro Edda, the actor who plays Mr. Guzmán Loera in the series, showed up at the courthouse to watch the day’s proceedings and instantly became part of the absurdity. After El Chapo’s lawyers told their client that the actor who played him on the show was in the gallery, the kingpin turned around from his spot on the defense table, smiled and waved at Mr. Edda. “I didn’t smile back. I was just paying respect to him,” Mr. Edda, who lives in Mexico, said. “I was shocked in a way. He has a very intense look. His eyes say a lot. He’s a bit intimidating.” (2019) In seasons one and two of Narcos: Mexico, El Chapo is shown as an en­ trepreneur and an innovator, a foot soldier who respects those who hold a higher rank in the criminal underworld. He gets a pet tiger for his boss and he is a good son who visits his mother in her rural Sinaloan home. El Chapo is depicted as a serrano whose modest beginnings do not foretell the wealth he will amass and the intricate paths that his life will take. Perhaps more than with any other character, Narcos: Mexico producers can revel in the interest that this origin story will have among transnational audiences who recognise El Chapo as the biggest cartel leader since the late Pablo Escobar. The Narcos franchise has created a narrative multiverse of the cartel wars that is similar to cinematic franchises such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Star Wars property (Golding, 2019), in which secondary characters lead spin-offs and storylines converge. In these universes each character, however seemingly unimportant, has the potential to become a narratively rich media commodity.

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The first two seasons of Narcos: Mexico only offer a glimpse of the man “Shorty” is about to become. El Chapo is portrayed as entrepreneur who rides the waves of neoliberalism with one of the most profitable products in the market: the perfect fit for a Mexican federal government that, since the Salinas de Gortari presidency (1988–1994), has made neoliberalism a modus operandi that has broadened the socioeconomic gap in the country (Kurtz, 2002; Morton, 2003; Schwegler, 2008). El Chapo’s self-made fortune, sprinkled with violence and despair, is a natural and brutal result of deep economic disparity, government corruption and centralism in contemporary Mexico, and the various iterations of his story shape a microcosm of the political and social preoccupations of the country.

Conclusion: Cartel leaders as media commodities Guzmán Loera himself seems to have been aware of the myth-making capa­ cities of media. During the trial, it was also revealed that he wanted to write and direct his own El Chapo biopic (Fretts, 2019). That is what initially led him to contact Kate del Castillo, the Mexican actress who has starred in the narcotelenovelas La Reina del Sur and Dueños del Paraíso. She also played a Tijuana drug baroness in the Showtime dramedy Weeds. Del Castillo famously visited El Chapo, alongside actor and director Sean Penn, who interviewed the capo and published the result in Rolling Stone magazine (2016). It is alleged that this encounter led to the ultimate arrest of El Chapo. The actors’ encounter with the drug lord is chronicled in the Netflix doc­ umentary The Day I Met El Chapo: The Kate del Castillo Story (2017), in which the Mexican actress narrates her side of the story and implies that Sean Penn used her to write his Rolling Stone piece. The documentary series had lifealtering implications for both Del Castillo and Penn. The actress was threatened with legal action by Mexican authorities and Penn at one point feared for his life and his lawyers demanded that Netflix edit the piece (Koblin, 2017). The encounter was also chronicled in the TV documentary El Chapo & Sean Penn: Bungle in the Jungle (Victor-Lifton, 2016). The del Castillo–Penn–El Chapo saga highlights how fiction and reality surrounding the cartel wars prompt un­ predictable events when brought together, and how relevant audiovisual storytelling has become for some cartel leaders, who realise they could be captured or killed at any given moment. In this chapter, I have discussed the cultural mechanisms that sustain El Chapo’s standing as a profitable media commodity and as a departure point to open up conversations about government corruption, U.S.–Mexico re­ lationships and how the impunity with which drug cartels operate transpires in film and television narratives. Fictional accounts of Guzmán Loera’s exploits have migrated from narcocultura B-movies to quality television, mainly through the global distribution network of streaming giant Netflix. In the most mainstream film and television texts, the cultural mechanisms of Orientalism,

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centralism and classicism are deployed in the depiction of Sinaloan rural culture as foreign, lawless and unsophisticated.

Suggested viewing El Chema (created by Luis Zelkowicz, 2016–2017) Narcos: Mexico (created by Carlo Bernard, Chris Brancato & Doug Miro, 2018–) El Chapo (created by Silvana Aguirre, Carlos Contreras, 2017–) The Day I Met El Chapo: The Kate del Castillo Story (created by David Broome, 2017)

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Rios, S. (2015). Representation and Disjunction: Made-Up Maids in Mexican Telenovelas. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 21(2), 223–233. Rivadeneyra, R. (2011). Gender and race portrayals on Spanish-language television. Sex Roles, 65(3–4), 208–222. Rodríguez Barrón, D. (2015, September 10). El Chapo y nuestra profunda crisis simbólica. Letras Libres. Retrieved from https://www.letraslibres.com/mexico-espana/el-chapo-ynuestra-profunda-crisis-simbolica. Rodríguez, V. (2018). Decentralization in Mexico: From reforma municipal to solidaridad to nuevo federalismo. New York: Routledge. Sabates, R., & Pettirino, F. (2007). La identidad de los emigrantes de la Ciudad de México. Papeles de Población, 13(52), 211–229. Schwegler, T. A. (2008). Take it from the top (down)? Rethinking neoliberalism and political hierarchy in Mexico. American Ethnologist, 35(4), 682–700. Shirk, D. A. (2010). Drug violence in Mexico: Data and analysis from 2001-2009. Trends in Organized Crime, 13(2–3), 167–174. Simonett, H. (2004). Subcultura musical: el narcocorrido comercial y el narcocorrido por encargo. Caravelle, 82(1), 179–193. Slade, C. (2003). Telenovelas and soap operas: Negotiating reality from the periphery. Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, 106(1), 6–17. Toro, M. C. (1999). The internationalization of police: The DEA in Mexico. The Journal of American History, 86(2), 623–640. Valdés Castellanos, G. (2014, February 25). El Chapo y el cambio de reglas. Nexos. Retrieved from https://www.nexos.com.mx/?p=19149. Valenzuela Lugo, R. (1979). El cultivo de opio en Badiraguato. Presagio: Revista de Sinaloa, Época I, 26, 15–17. Vázquez, J. Z. (1993). Un viejo tema: El federalismo y el centralismo. Historia Mexicana, 43(3), 621–631. Véliz, C. (1968). Centralism and nationalism in Latin America. Foreign Affairs, 47(1), 68–83. Vulliamy, E. (2019, January 5). El Chapo v El Vicentillo: Son of cartel’s co-founder testifies against drug lord. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2019/jan/04/el-chapo-el-vicentillo-trial-joaquin-guzman. Weinberg, B. (2002). Drugs, guerrillas and politicos in Mexico. NACLA Report on the Americas, 36(2), 18–26. Winslow, D. (2016, August 9). El Chapo and the secret history of the heroin crisis. Esquire. Retrieved from https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a46918/heroin-mexico-elchapo-cartels-don-winslow/. Zavala, O. (2014). Imagining the US-Mexico drug war: The critical limits of narco­ narratives. Comparative Literature, 66(3), 340–360. Zavala, O. (2018). Los cárteles no existen: Narcotráfico y cultura en México. Mexico City: Malpaso. Zoller Seitz, M. (2012, March 26). The greatest TV drama of the past 25 years, the finals: The Wire vs. The Sopranos. Vulture. Retrieved from https://www.vulture.com/2012/ 03/drama-derby-finals-the-wire-vs-the-sopranos.html.

Films cited Lau, A., & Mak, A. (Directors). (2002). Infernal affairs [Motion picture]. Hong Kong: Media Asia Films.

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Liman, D. (Director). (2017). American made [Motion picture]. United States, Japan, Colombia: Imagine Entertainment. Redford, R. (Director). (1994). Quiz show [Motion picture]. United States: Hollywood Pictures. Reygadas, C. (Director). (2002). Japón [Motion picture]. Mexico: Mantarraya Producciones. Reygadas, C. (Director). (2005). Batalla en el cielo [Motion picture]. Mexico, Belgium, France, Germany: Mantarraya Producciones. Reygadas, C. (Director). (2007). Luz silenciosa [Motion picture]. Mexico, France, Netherlands, Germany: Mantarraya Producciones. Scorsese, M. (Director). (2006). The departed [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Uriegas, A. (Director). (2016). Chapo: El escape del siglo [Motion picture]. Mexico: Dragon Films. Victor-Lifton, P. (2016). El Chapo & Sean Penn: Bungle in the jungle [Motion picture]. United States: P&L Media. Woo, J. (Director). (1997). Face/off [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures.

Television shows cited Aguilar, A. (Producer). (2017–). Surviving Escobar: Alias J.J. [Television series]. Colombia: Caracol, Netflix. Chase, D. (Creator). (1999–2007). The Sopranos [Television series]. United States: HBO. Aguirre, S., & Contreras, C. (Creators). (2017–). El Chapo [Television series]. United States: Netflix, Univisión. Bernard, C., Brancato, C., & Miro, D. (Creators). (2018–). Narcos: Mexico [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Broome, D. (Creator). (2017). The day I met El Chapo: The Kate del Castillo story [Television series]. United States: Netflix. Hernández, E. (Creator). (2017). The unknown hitman: The story of El Cholo Adrían [Television series]. Mexico: Plus Entertainment.

Video game cited Tom Clancy’s ghost recon: Wildlands [Video game]. (2017). Montreuil, France: Ubisoft.

Postscript Cartel media beyond Hollywood

In this book, I have focused on cartel media produced by the Hollywood entertainment complex and its derivatives, such as the burgeoning streaming services conglomerate which has partnered with local production houses. However, cartel media is not exclusive to companies based in the United States and there are worldwide examples of film and television industries that are exercising the right to self-representation, with varying results in terms of cinematic innovation and respectful, rightful portrayal and amplification of the voices that have so far been mostly marginalised in cartel media. Despite considerable challenges in terms of financing, as well as official government censorship and unofficial restrictions coming from criminal groups, auteurs worldwide have explored how narcotics trading and other satellite activities, such as human and sexual trafficking, have affected the lives of millions. Drug trafficking is a worldwide problem that has exacerbated already insidious issues in terms of socioeconomic inequality, state repression, extreme violence and the exploitation of vulnerable groups. Even though the stories stemming from the cartel wars are varied, Hollywood cartel media – such as the examples analysed in this book – tend to frame things in reduc­ tionist oppositions of good versus evil, civilised versus barbaric, white versus Brown or Black. The political and social agenda of conservative governments in countries such as the United States, Brazil and to some extent Mexico during the 2010s and early 2020s has led to an increasing stigmatisation of all Brown, Indigenous and Black individuals directly or indirectly linked to the cartels. They are shown as “bad hombres” who do not deserve a second shot at life or even to be mourned properly, or as deviant women who fall into the cultural ste­ reotypes of the seductress or the vengeful lost soul. However, reality is far more complex than that, and numerous places in the Global South have seen their ways of life turned upside down by corruption and criminality. There are millions of stories that escape the often-cruel boundaries of film and television representation. Global South cartel cinema is a cinema of the subaltern, of the previously voiceless. Cartel media stemming from the Global South is complex in its storytelling and audiovisual innovation. Film in particular has found avenues for self-

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representation and for exploring the human dimension of the cartel wars in a deep, historically and artistically meaningful way. In terms of distribution, Global South cartel cinema has altered the Global North–Global South course of media circulation, even if only for fleeting moments. New South–North flows of content involving quality cartel cinema are constantly opened via film festivals and curated streaming services such as Mubi; strengthened through viewership from diasporic communities; and recommended on- and offline by cinephiles, critics and commentators. In particular, the success of Mexican directors such as Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, Amat Escalante, Michel Franco and Carlos Reygadas in international events such as the Academy Awards and the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals have increased interest in Latin American cinema. Via film festivals and streaming services there is also a South–South flow of content that allows audiences to experience, for example, the struggles of a young Mexican man vis-à-vis violence and exile in Ya no estoy aquí (I Am No Longer Here, Fernando Frías, 2019), which was launched via Netflix worldwide in the midst of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside Hollywood films such as Sicario or The Last Stand, a cinephile can get a close look into life in the colourful barrios of the Global South. In what follows, I focus on Latin American films, but this is by no means the only region that has produced subaltern and subversive cartel media in recent years, as I will briefly point out. The best cartel cinema comes from post­ colonial nations where power imbalances persist and which are now subject to the crushing weight of political, criminal and financial cartels. The first Global South cartel media product that broke into the interna­ tional mainstream was Brazilian film Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002), di­ rected by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. The movie was distributed by Miramax, which was then the King Midas of the studio system, and the di­ rectors were nominated for an Academy Award – a rare feat for a non-Englishlanguage film. The movie is energetic and larger than life: a samba remix of the best of Scorsese’s intimate dramas (think Mean Streets, 1973) and his mob epics (Goodfellas, 1990). Meirelles and Lund give voice to the youth that inhabit the often-stigmatised favelas, poverty belts that surround most Brazilian megacities including Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo. Yes, there is crime in the favelas, but that is not the only thing that defines them. There is also creativity, lust for life, romance and dreams. Cidade de Deus was also groundbreaking in how it depicted police brutality as a trigger for crime and social unrest – two forces which the state and conservative commentators often mistakenly throw into the same basket. Sarah McDonald argues that: “The police are shown to be as brutal and im­ moral as the drug traffickers they chase but in contrast to the traffickers the police are a socially and politically legitimate force that represents and ‘defends’ the state while those on the periphery (the favela) are a threat to the nation” (2006, p. 21). The film merits revisiting in light of the Jair Bolsonaro pre­ sidency’s return to conservative politics that have translated into further

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alienation of vulnerable groups such as Indigenous Brazilians and favela dwellers (Dos Santos, 2018). Colombian cartel media has mostly taken the form of telenovelas about the Escobar era, but a handful of filmmakers have also dealt with historical trauma and accountability. In Sumas y Restas (2005), most notably, Colombian di­ rector Víctor Gaviria explores the beginnings of narcotrafficking in Medellín through the story of an engineer who gets involved in cartel business. The film dealt with an uncomfortable truth in Colombia’s recent history involving the cartels: that the professional middle class was, and is, also entrenched in traf­ ficking. The bourgeoisie also has blood on its hands. Mexican auteur cartel cinema has left a mark in recent years. Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala (2011) tells the story of a beauty queen who is forced to take part in cartel activities. The film untangles the networks of influence and bribery that allegedly involve the Mexican military, state governments and cartels. The film is a real tour de force in which Naranjo displays a maturity that is hard to find in emerging directors. The film was distributed locally and internationally by Fox Searchlight; it sits in the liminal zone that separates blockbuster and arthouse cinemas. Its action sequences are skilfully shot, but the narrative intensity with which Naranjo shoots the gunfights and heist scenes does not overwhelm or diminish the film’s social and political critique. Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, 2008) remade the film in 2019. The remake is a half-hearted attempt to re-create the angst and tension of a war scenario. It stars Gina Rodriguez, who became mainstream as the protagonist of the telenovela-inspired dramedy Jane the Virgin. Hardwicke’s film lacks depth when it comes to representing the vulnerable state in which millions in the Global South exist to sustain the flow of addictive substances to mostly Global North consumers. In comparing both versions of Miss Bala, Peter Debruge points out that in the original: “Instead of sensationalizing the action, director Gerardo Naranjo made it exponentially more impactful by plunging an innocent woman into this out-of-control situation, letting realistic scenes of violence play out at a distance, often in a single shot” (2019). In the remake, Debruge argues, the Hollywood machinery dilutes the core message: “Miss Bala no longer serves as a critique of a system that might allow innocent people to get caught in the crossfire of the drug war, but as the kick-ass origin story for a new kind of action hero” (2019). Indeed, Naranjo’s critique of gender, racial and political inequalities in contemporary Mexico is repackaged as an action film more in tone with the Fast and Furious franchise than with Global South quality cinema. The tropes of action cinema can indeed be used to tell the story of the militarised cartel wars, but this can be done in such a way that pays respect to the complexity of cartel geopolitics and the lives that they impact. There are notable examples, such as the television series Zero Zero Zero (2019), which constitutes a model for transnational cartel media. It is an entertaining show that features carefully choregraphed action, but also a narrative that pays

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Figure p.1 Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013) explores the scars left by cartel violence in rural Mexican families.

attention to both the intimacy of personal suffering and the network of cor­ ruption involved in shipping cocaine from Mexico to Italy, via a U.S. cargo company. Zero Zero Zero leaves no stone unturned and assigns blame to the powerful – businessmen, politicians, army generals, mafia dons – for the suffering of the most vulnerable. The series was created by a multinational team formed by Italians Leonardo Fasoli and Stefano Sollima (who directed Sicario: Day of the Soldado, discussed in Chapter 7), and Mexican Mauricio Katz. Perhaps the most brutal recent Mexican film about the cartel wars is Amat Escalante’s Heli (Figure p.1), which earned the director from Guanajuato a Best Director award at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. The jury, with Hollywood power player Steven Spielberg as president, singled out Escalante’s vision of violence and fraud. More in the tone of with Michael Haneke’s subdued violence (think of the suicide scene in Caché, 2005), Heli presents suffering and inflicted pain as part of everyday life. The film is laconic. Rather than presenting, for example, scenes of extreme torture as an interruption of life, Escalante narrates them as just another daily chore. When a man’s genitals are set on fire while he is hanging upside down, the camera stands as an uninvolved witness. Torture is just business as usual – a job. In his acceptance speech at Cannes, Escalante addressed his fellow Mexicans: “I hope we never get used to the “suffering”. Hopeful words, but since then tens of thousands of Mexicans have perished violently and the cartel wars have intensified, as has the cruelty through which sicarios operate. Escalante’s next film, 2016’s La Región Salvaje (The Untamed) is a sci-fi erotic fantasy that nevertheless can be read as a metaphor for how the human body, particularly the female body, is objectified, sexually and sadistically. It is a poignant reminder of the volatility of death in today’s Global South. For at least a decade, filmmakers outside of the videohome industry (lowbudget, straight-to-video narco cinema) have used comedy as a way to show

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Figure p.2 In El infierno (2010), director Luis Estrada evidences the collusion between the state, the Catholic Church and traffickers.

the quasi-farcical way in which local, state and federal authorities in Mexico collaborate, openly and often unashamedly, with the cartels. Luis Estrada, a Mexican director who has built a career through poignant commentaries on the ruling political class, released El infierno (El Narco, 2010) as part of the commemoration the bicentenary of the Mexican Independence and the centenary of the Mexican Revolution. El infierno (Figure p.2) tells the story of a migrant who returns from the United States to discover that his hometown has become a wasteland run by the cartels. He ends up becoming a narco as well, flaunting his recently earned riches and becoming the plague that has decimated the traditional way of life. Similarly, in 2019, actor José María Yázpik made his directorial debut with Polvo, which is about a man who goes back to his town to collect a shipment of cocaine. The film, which goes back and forth between dramatic and comedic tones, deals with how cocaine, the “dust” or polvo from the title, transforms the town’s inhabitants. Mexican cinema has also used the dystopian sci-fi genre to reflect on how everyday violence affects the youngest and most vulnerable. Cómprame un revólver (Buy Me a Gun, 2018) tells a story of loss and violence from a young girl’s perspective. Director Julio Hernández Cordón skilfully mixes a child’s point of view, which echoes magical realism, with a story that reveals the heartless efficacy of criminal organisations in a wasteland where women dis­ appear and the local capo treats righteous men as expendable. The young female protagonist hides her gender to escape being enslaved or killed. Guy Lodge wrote at Variety: “An indeterminately dystopian vision of Mexico in the full control of cartels – whether it’s post-apocalyptic, preapocalyptic or merely apocalypse-adjacent is among the many question marks

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here – the film ostensibly centers on a father and daughter struggling to stick together through a barrage of regimented violence” (2018). It is worth asking, however, how far removed from reality such a dystopian vision is. Multilingual films are a constant of quality cartel cinema. Linguistic diversity lays bare the transnational nature of the multifront armed conflict. Fernando Frías’ Ya no estoy aquí (I Am No Longer Here, released via Netflix worldwide) looks at the effect of petty drug trafficking in youth. It is a careful study of the cumbia regia subculture in the northern city of Monterrey. Cumbia regia is a local version of Colombian cumbia, a lively musical genre. In cumbia regia, the music’s frantic tempo is slowed down, creating a hypnotic effect. Monterrey has long been the epicentre of industrialist wealth in the country but for the past 10 years has experienced increasing levels of cartel violence. Frías is the director of the acclaimed HBO offbeat comedy Los Espookys, which was released in the United States but is spoken mostly in Spanish. As he wasn’t born and raised into Monterrey’s cumbia culture, the director had to undertake extensive ethnographic research to let those represented speak for themselves. In an interview with Variety, he said: It was a very intense and solitary process. I started by letting some film contacts try to help but soon it was clear that the world I needed to research was not of an easy access to these contacts. So I then befriended taxi drivers and asked them to take me to dance parties and to the neighborhoods where there were cumbia-loving gangs and where these drivers knew people. Then I also used something called fotolog and Facebook to contact some kids directly. I’d talk to them online while watching YouTube videos. The real problem was that as I was writing the script I witnessed how this style started to vanish. (Hopwell, 2018) The cartel wars are prominent in Ya no estoy aquí, but the narrative and stylistic drive lies in the vibrant cumbia regia subculture. The movie shows some violence, of course, but the dramatic core concerns what is lost: friendship, folklore, entire ways of life and livelihoods. Critic David Rooney wrote about the ethnographic gaze of the film: “this flamboyant teen subculture provides both an escape and a proud expression of identity, not unlike the ballroom voguing scene for at-risk LGBTQ youth in America” (2020). This “expression of identity” and its eventual dissolution, at least for the protagonist Ulises Sampiero, is what translates into ultimate death. Violence makes one lose oneself, ad infinitum. Ya no estoy aquí follows Ulises, a young man (Figure p.5) who befriends a gang of small-time crooks and suffers unfortunate coincidences that make him cross the border as an undocumented migrant to escape certain death. Like the homonymous Homeric hero, he then returns home to find a cityscape transformed by the cartels. His friends, with whom he was united by music and urban culture, are now either dead or involved in criminal activities. The film has a similar structure to the groundbreaking cartel film Maria Full of Grace

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Figure p.3 Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallegos’ 2018 film Pájaros de verano (Birds of Passage), which explores Indigenous struggles in Colombia during the early rise of the drug cartels.

( Joshua Marston, 2004), in that it splits the narrative between the homeland (Colombia, in the case of Marston’s film) and the Latin American diasporic enclave of Queens, in the United States. Both films explore how young lives are torn apart by criminality, and feature dialogue in English and Spanish, which highlights the role that language plays in processes of cultural belonging and adaptation. Likewise, recent cartel films have featured Indigenous languages in a re­ cognition of the hardship that the drug wars have inflicted on the original owners of the land now known as Latin America. Colombian directors Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s Pájaros de verano (Birds of Passage, 2018) is spoken in Spanish, English and the Indigenous language Wayuu. The film (Figure p.3) explores the beginnings of the drug trade in Colombia and the brutal effects that it had for Indigenous autonomy. Director Ciro Guerra acknowledges that there is an underrepresentation of Indigenous stories in cartel-themed Colombian cinema, but has also explained how telling Indigenous stories offers a peek into the world at large: “For us, Wayuu culture is a microcosm. You can see the effect that capitalism has, in its most pure and savage form, and the Wayuu experience it in a short period of time, in a very close community. But I think the film deals with the world at large” (Aftab, 2019). In Mexico, Joshua Gil’s Sanctorum (2019) contains dialogue in Mixtec, one of the Indigenous languages of the Mexican state of Oaxaca, historically a site of resistance against colonial and postcolonial forces. The film offers a fresh approach to criminal violence in Mexico, as critic Mukulika Batabyal explains: “To watch a film related to the narco-violence in Mexico that relies not on its vivid portrayal of human brutality but focuses rather on the mystical control of nature over the lives of these vulnerable people with primitive beliefs is a fresh take in the commercial world of visual media which otherwise glorifies the macabre cartel brutality” (2019).

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Documentary filmmakers have given a voice to the victims of cartel vio­ lence. In Temptestad (2016), Tatiana Huezo follows two women whose fa­ milies have suffered from the tsunami of cruelty and despair that has enveloped Mexico in the past three decades. One of them, Miriam, ends up in a prison run by the Gulf Cartel, which demands that inmates’ families pay to keep their loved ones alive. She is incarcerated for a crime she didn’t commit; she is a scapegoat in a case of human trafficking. The other woman, Adela, is a mother whose young daughter disappears, most likely after having been sold into sexual exploitation. Both women enter a Kafkaesque labyrinth of the Mexican bureaucratic apparatus that often colludes with criminal networks. They could be anyone, the Salvadoran-Mexican director seems to tells us. No one is safe in contemporary Mexico. Tempestad offers a much-needed female gaze into the lived pain of thousands of women who have fallen victim to a crumbling society in recent years. In 2017’s La libertad del Diablo (Figure p.4), another documentary film­ maker, Everardo González, interviews victims as well as former sicarios. He makes his subjects wear white masks, the type worn by severe burn patients, that give an unnerving feeling and draw the spectator to the nightmarish affects of war. This stylistic choice is much more than a gimmick: it puts an accent to the anonymity of most victims and their victimisers. Again, rather than pointing fingers or highlighting the vulnerability of a particular social group, the director emphasises the precarity with which life goes on in violenceravaged Mexico. By placing sicarios and victims on an even field, by giving a voice to both, González remarks how no one seems to be safe from either

Figure p.4 The documentary La libertad del Diablo (2017) places victims and victimisers on the spotlight, unearthing the reasons behind Mexico’s brutal spike of cartel violence.

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suffering or inflicting pain in cartel-dominated areas. The documentary is bleak, but luminous in its honesty. Latin America is not the only region affected by extreme cartel and state violence, nor is it the only producer of quality cartel media. The Philippines, with which Latin America shares historical similarities such as Spain’s long colonial legacy, U.S. cultural influence and the widespread Catholic faith, has also produced notable cartel cinema in recent years. Recent action cinema produced in the Philippines works as a form of discursive resistance to the antidrugs war waged by conservative and populist president Rodrigo Duterte. This resistance denounces police brutality and class warfare by using generic tropes of commercial action cinema, centring narratives on drug busts, police raids and the scars left by drug trade in the Manila slums. Rather than being overt, this resistance is coded as entertainment, perhaps to escape censorship. To name a few Filipino filmmakers, Erik Matti (BuyBust, 2018), Arlyn Dela Cruz (Buybust, 2017) and Treb Monteras (Respeto, 2017) have delved into what martial policies mean for everyday individuals and families affected by state and criminal violence. These and other directors have found a way to use genre as a gateway to explore what authoritarian rule means for everyday Filipino citizens. These types of films, which are widely watched by the culturally rich, global Filipino diaspora, are packaged in the box of genre ci­ nema – often underestimated and disregarded as a form of “low culture”. Elsewhere in Asia, filmmakers have also used the tropes of action cinema to delve into precarious social realities. For example, the Indonesian films Serbuan maut (The Raid, 2011) and its sequel Serbuan maut 2: Berandal (The Raid 2, 2014) follow a S.W.A.T. team who fights drug lords in the slums of Jakarta. Although the films are directed by British filmmaker Gareth Evans, they show a Global South reality seldom seen by audiences outside of Indonesia – a country which has a solid, massive media industry. Future research directions on cartel cinema scholarship should include Global South voices that have so far received little scholarly and critical at­ tention. Conflicts sprouting from cartel activities affect all spheres of life and all socioeconomic sectors, but the impact on vulnerable individuals and com­ munities is disproportionately higher. All forms of cultural expression are worth scholarly attention. There needs to be a move in media, cultural and film studies emerging from the Anglosphere to magnify creative voices from the Global South, and to question hegemonic cultural industries that deal with race, gender and history in a single-minded way. As Stuart Hall wrote in his luminous essay “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” (1993): That high/popular distinction is precisely what the global postmodern is displacing. Cultural hegemony is never about pure victory or pure domination (that’s not what the term means); it is never a zero-sum cultural game; it is always about shifting the balance of power in the relations of culture; it is always about changing the dispositions and the configurations of cultural power, not getting out of it. (pp. 106–107)

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Figure p.5 The urban drama Ya no Estoy Aquí (2019) delves into the cumbia culture in the city of Monterrey, Mexico, which is deeply affected by cartel violence.

Hollywood cultural hegemony, or the notion of it, has established how cartel media is produced, researched and consumed. A unidimensional version of justice, historical accountability and racial stereotypes has led to a further marginalisation of the dispossessed in the Global South. The undeniable wave of criminality that has swept through much of the Global South, and Latin America in particular – in large part due to failed neoliberal politics – has strengthened racialised notions about Brown and Black folk. Trump-era dy­ namics have led to screen representations that do a disservice to diversity and impede a truthful representation of Global South realities. These screen re­ presentations have repercussions for how multicultural societies, migration and history are perceived. There needs to be a shift in the “balance of power” of cultural hegemony. Scholarly work can bring attention to misrepresentation and celebrate creative voices that offer alternative viewpoints about a painful global reality.

Suggested viewing Sumas y restas (Additions and Subtractions, Víctor Gaviria, 2005) El infierno (Luis Estrada, 2010) Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo, 2011) Serbuan maut (The Raid, Gareth Evans, 2011) Heli (Amat Escalante, 2013) Tempestad (Tatiana Huezo, 2016) La libertad del Diablo (Everardo González, 2017)

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Pájaros de verano (Birds of Passage, Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego, 2018) Ya no estoy aquí (I Am No Longer Here, Fernando Frías, 2019) Sanctorum (Joshua Gil, 2019) Zero Zero Zero (television series created by Leonardo Fasoli, Mauricio Katz and Stefano Sollima, 2019–).

References Aftab, K. (2019, May 22). Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego: “Birds of Passage flips the genre on its head”. Sight & Sound. Retrieved from https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/ sight-sound-magazine/interviews/ciro-guerra-cristina-gallego-birds-of-passage-interview. Batabyal, M. (2019, September 10). Sanctorum (2019): Venice review – Joshua Gil’s mystical take on the narco-violence in Mexico. High on Films. Retrieved from highonfilms.com/sanctorum-2019-venice-review/. Debruge, P. (2019, January 31). Film review: Gina Rodriguez in ‘Miss Bala’. Variety. Retrieved from https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/miss-bala-review-remake1203123556/. Dos Santos, F. (2018). Do lulismo a Bolsonaro: agonia da Nova República no Brasil. Boletín Onteaiken, 26, 1–16. Hall, S. (1993). What is this “black” in black popular culture? Social Justice, 20(1/2 (51–52), 104–114. Hopwell, J. (2018, November 7). Mexico’s Fernando Frias on ‘I’m No Longer Here,’ globalization, hybrids. Variety. Retrieved from https://variety.com/2018/film/festivals/ mexico-fernando-frias-im-no-longer-here-globalization-hybrids-1203021841/. Lodge, G. (2018, May 31). Film review: ‘Buy Me a Gun’. Variety. Retrieved from https:// variety.com/2018/film/reviews/buy-me-a-gun-review-1202826446/. McDonald, S. (2006). Performing masculinity: From City of God to city of men. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 12(2), 19–32. Rooney, D. (2020, May 27). ‘I’m No Longer Here’ (‘Ya no estoy aqui’): Film review. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved from https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/imno-longer-here-ya-no-estoy-aqui-review-1295225.

Films cited Dela Cruz, A. (Director). (2017). Bubog [Motion picture]. Philippines: Blank Pages Productions. Escalante, A. (Director). (2013). Heli [Motion picture]. Mexico, Netherlands, Germany, France: Mantarraya Producciones, Tres Tunas, No Dream Cinema. Escalante, A. (Director). (2016). La región salvaje [Motion picture]. Mexico, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Switzerland: Mantarraya Producciones, Tres Tunas, IMCINE. Estrada, L. (Director). (2010). El infierno [Motion picture]. Mexico: Bandidos Films, Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE), Foprocine. Evans, G. (Director). (2011). Serbuan maut. [Motion picture]. Indonesia, France, United States: Pt. Merantau Films, Celluloid Dreams, XYZ Films. Evans, G. (Director). (2014). Serbuan maut 2: Berandal. [Motion picture]. Indonesia, United States: Sony Pictures Classics, Stage 6 Films, Pt. Merantau Films.

Postscript 173 Frías, F. (Director). (2019). Ya no estoy aquí [Motion picture]. Mexico, United States: Margate House Films, PPW Films, Panorama Global. Gaviria, V. (Director). (2005). Sumas y restas [Motion picture]. Colombia, Spain. Víctor Gaviria. Gil, J. (Director). (2019). Sanctorum [Motion picture]. Mexico, Dominican Republic, Qatar: Aurora Dominicana, Cacerola Films, Monofilms. González, E. (Director). (2017). La libertad del diablo [Motion picture]. Mexico: Artegios. Guerra, C., & Gallego, C. (Directors). (2018). Pájaros de verano [Motion picture]. Colombia, Denmark, Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, France: Ciudad Lunar Producciones, Blond Indian Films, Pimienta Films. Haneke, M. (Director). (2005). Caché [Motion picture]. France, Austria, Germany, Italy: Les Films du Losange, Wega Film, Bavaria Film. Hardwicke, C. (Director). (2008). Twilight [Motion picture]. United States: Summit Entertainment, Temple Hill Entertainment, Maverick Films. Hardwicke, C. (Director). (2019). Miss Bala [Motion picture]. Mexico, United States: Canana Films, Misher Films, Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE). Hernández Cordón, J. (Director). (2018). Cómprame un revólver [Motion picture]. Mexico, Colombia: Burning Blue, Woo Films. Huezo, T. (Director). (2016). Tempestad [Motion picture]. Mexico: Pimienta Films, Cactus Films. Marston, J. (Director). (2004). Maria full of grace [Motion picture]. Colombia, Ecuador, United States: HBO Films, Fine Line Features, Journeyman Pictures. Matti, E. (Director). (2018). BuyBust [Motion picture]. Philippines: Reality Entertainment, Viva Films. Monteras, T. (Director). (2017). Respeto [Motion picture]. Philippines: Arkeo Films. Naranjo, G. (Director). (2011). Miss Bala [Motion picture]. Mexico: Canana Films, Fox International Productions (FIP), Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE). Scorsese, M. (Director). (1973). Mean streets [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros., Taplin - Perry - Scorsese Productions. Scorsese, M. (Director). (1990). Goodfellas [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Yazpik, J. M. (Director). (2019). Polvo [Motion picture]. Mexico: Tintorera Producciones, Alebrije Cine y Video, THR3 Media.

Television shows cited Armisen, F., Fabrega, A., & Torres, J. (Creators). (2019). Los espookys [Television series]. Mexico: Broadway Video, HBO (distribution). Fasoli, L., Katz, M., & Sollima, S. (Creators). (2019). Zero zero zero [Television series]. Italy: Cattleya, Bartlebyfilm, Sky.

Index

9/11 terrorist attacks 9, 28, 34, 107, 111 Agrestic, fictional suburb in the television show Weeds 57, 59 Amexica, definition of 38 Appadurai, A. 4 ‘bad hombres’, definition of 9 beheadings 3 Better Call Saul 93, 103 Bhabha, H. K. 20, 24 Bichir, Demián (Mexican actor) 59 Blackface, definition of 73 Black Lives Matter 98 Boyd, S. C. 4, 18 Bradshaw, P. 17, 45 Breaking Bad 57–8, 62, 91–106 brownface 17–8, 23–4 Bunker, P. L. 3 Cali Cartel 2, 126 Campbell, H. 3, 46, 152 Caro Quintero, Rafael (founding member of the Guadalajara Cartel) 125, 136 cartel, definition 1–2 cartel media, definition of 2–5 Chilango gaze, concept 153–4 Ciudad Juárez 108, 111 Citizen Kane 20–1 Cidade de Deus (City of God) 82, 163 chromatic othering, definition of 107–8 Colombia Plan 129 Cómprame un revólver (Buy Me a Gun) 166 COVID-19 7, 144 Dargis, M. 97 Del Castillo, Kate (actor) 76, 149, 156 Del Toro, Benicio (actor) 112, 114, 133 Dyer, R. 91

Eastwood, Clint (actor and filmmaker) 37, 47–9 El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie 99, 103 El Chapo (television series) 149–54 El Club 66–7 El Paso, Texas 108, 111 Escalante, Amat (filmmaker) 125, 127, 163, 165 Félix Gallardo, Miguel Ángel (founder Guadalajara Cartel), life story 135–6 film noir 18, 21, 25, 39 Get Out 97–8 Green Book 97–8 Gilligan, Vince (showrunner Breaking Bad) 101–5 Guadalajara Cartel 2, 60, 125, 137–8, 150, 154 Gus Fring, fictional character Breaking Bad 92, 101–3 Grillo, I. 3 Hank Schrader, fictional character Breaking Bad 90, 95, 101 hard bodies, concept 37, 48 Heli 125, 165 Heston, Charlton (actor) 18, 23–5 Hollywood, definition of 7 Home Box Office (HBO) 56, 167 Incel movement 95 Jesse Pinkman, fictional character Breaking Bad 90, 99, 101 Kohan, Jenji (showrunner Weeds) 57–8 La Reina del Sur 76–7 ‘lawful cop’, trope 25

Index 175 Lobato, R. 7, 125, 128–9 Los Zetas, cartel 3, 91, 145, 152 Luna, Diego (actor) 125–6, 137 Marty Byrde, fictional character Ozark 62–6 McCarthy, Cormac (novelist) 39–41 Medellín Cartel 2 Mediascapes 4 Mexico City, depictions in film and television 23, 28, 66–7, 109 ‘Mexican face’, definition of 22–4, 73 Miss Bala remake 164 Moura, Wagner (actor) 80, 82, 124–7, 135 movimiento alterado 3 Nancy Botwin, fictional character Weeds 57–62 narcocorridos, definition of 3 narcocultura 3, 145–6, 148, 153 narcotelenovelas 76, 125, 148 Native Americans, depiction of 34–6 Nava, Gregory (filmmaker) 74–5, 108 Netflix, as disruptor 7, 124 No Country for Old Men, film 39–42 No Country for Old Men, novel 39–40 Orientalism, concept 8–9 Ozarks, region 64 Escobar, Pablo (cartel leader), as popular culture figure 130–5 Pablo Escobar: El patrón del mal 133 Pájaros de verano (Birds of Passage) 168 Penn, Sean (actor) 143, 149, 156 Pérez-Reverte, A. 38, 77–8 Philippines, the 170 quality television, concept 6, 76, 135, 137 Rambo: Last Blood 45–7 Rashotte, R. 38 Rodriguez, Robert (filmmaker) 38–9 Said, E.W. 8 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos (former president of Mexico) 143 Scarface 130–3

Schwarzenegger, Arnold (actor and politician) 27, 37, 42–8 Scott, A. J. 7 Sheridan, Taylor (scriptwriter) 34, 118, 120 Sicario, analysis of 112–7 Sicario: Day of the Soldado, analysis of 117–120 Sollima, Stefano (filmmaker) 117–120, 165 Spanglish 72 Stallone, Sylvester (actor) 45–7 Telemundo 29, 148 Televisa 74 Teresa Mendoza, fictional character Queen of the South and La Reina del Sur, cultural significance 76–7 The Counselor 40 The Delta Force 107 The Last Stand, analysis of 42–5 The Mule, analysis of 47–9 The Sopranos 135, 147 The Wire 103, 151 Tijuana 18, 22, 59, 112 toquis (talkies) 74 Tony Montana, fictional character 130–3 Traffic, analysis of 27–9 Trump, Donald (45th President of the United States) 8–10 Univisión 150, 152–3 Vida 83–4 Vietnam War (American War) 5–6, 46 Vulliamy, E. 9, 38, 135 Wendy Byrde, fictional character Ozark 62–6 Western, definition of genre 34 whiteness, definition of 55, 91–2 Ya no estoy aquí (I Am no Longer Here) 163, 167 yellow filter 108, 110 Zavala, O. 1, 153 Zero Zero Zero 83, 164 Zoller Seitz, M. 94, 100, 147