Gringolandia: Visual Metaphors and Frida

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov • Vol. 2 (51) - 2009 Series IV: Philology and Cultural Studies GRINGOLANDIA: VISUAL METAPHORS AND FRIDA Reka M. CRISTIAN1 Abstract: The essay focuses on the visual metaphors of America in Julie Taymor’s film entitled Frida (2002) and discusses the ways in which the film constructs and reconstructs with the help of the artist’s paintings the world of the thirties America as seen by a third millennium movie. Key words: visual metaphors, Gringolandia, thirties, America, woman artist. 1. Introduction version of Frida’s life story in visual metaphors that permit complex subjects to Julie Taymor’s American production be “more intellectually manageable” entitled Frida (2002) arrives at the peak of because biography at its best is “history the intellectual craze labeled as made personal” (Gehring 2003). ‘Fridamania.’ Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is the acclaimed and controversial Mexican 2. Metaphors of the US painter with hybrid ancestry. Her mother was Matilde Calderón y Gonzáles, a Julie Taymor’s Frida presents this Mexican mestiza, and her father, history made into a personal herstory in Wilhelm/Guillermo Kahlo, a German- myriad of private and public perspectives. Hungarian Jewish photographer (Sárosdy Among of the most intriguing ones is the 2003, Kettenman 7-8). Frida Kahlo’s sequence when Frida Kahlo (Salma paintings are nowadays increasingly Hayek) and her husband, Diego Rivera featured in museum exhibitions worldwide (Alfredo Molina), the famous Mexican and still hold record auction prices while mural painter, are on their trip to the her life has been “variously constructed in United States of America. During its books, operas, plays and documentaries” almost 19 minutes out of the entire length (Clifford 2002). Taymor’s movie is in of this blockbuster American movie – and this context a filmic biography abounding also occasionally passim – the film in visual tropes about Frida Kahlo’s presents a comparative visual American Mexico and her views about the United Studies project. The “Gringo” country or States and France. The protagonist is “Gringolandia,” as the protagonist calls the subject to “a cinematic transition” U.S., needs a “cultural rhetoric as (Cristian 2004), that range from corporeal interpretive focus” (Mailluox 116). One pain to surrealist forms. Kahlo’s art in this can view Taymor’s film as grabbing this filmic biography is made complex, focus that builds around the visual text a controversial and abounding in lyrical heterotopic place for America in digressions. The movie presents us with a concordance with the current trends of 1 Szeged University, Hungary. 244 Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov • Vol. 2 (51) - 2009 • Series IV American Studies. Frida is a cultural locus representation “as a country of leveling, that encompasses the symbolic cultural erosion, and shallowness” (Kroes 43). In centers and also the de-centered places of the movie, Frida nourishes similar views the U.S. both from an internal and external before she arrives to the U.S. at the point of view. This film is similar to other beginning of the thirties. The crisis of cultural constructions that “create a place representation in the 1930s in the U.S. for story,” while narrativizing “a local included themes of dislocation and cultural real” (Stewart 3). In Taymor’s bewilderment; in this a context any Frida the local and the particular meet a individual was subjected to “the forces of general “American mythic imaginary” the world rather than the other way round” (Stewart 3) and interpret it, accordingly. (Veitch 5). Frida does not entirely adhere As Mexican visitors, Rivera and Kahlo, to these but Diego, as a potential make up for an interpretive “space on the agringando (Americanized) figure sees the side of the road” that is essentially a place potentials of cultural heterogeneity in the for a multitude of subversive paths, too. “newness” of the U.S. and enthusiastically Frida and Diego are both enchanted and claims that: “There is no reason for any resistant to what America might generally artist to go to Europe for inspiration. It is and particularly mean to them. As an all here: the magnitude, the power, the exercise in cultural otherness the film energy, the sadness, the glory, the attempts, as many similar incursions in the youthfulness of America” (Taymor 2002). style of Kathleen Stewart’s “side of the The film depicts these words on a basis of road” approach, “to perform the diacritical Max Ernst-like surreal vision of some cultural poetics of an “Other” [story] of well-known U.S. metaphors. America” (Stewart 7). These metaphors are presented through a Taymor’s film presents an intriguing suggestive collage of moving images comparative vision in terms of metaphors focusing especially on New York and later about the U.S., especially Kahlo’s pictorial only by allusion, to Detroit and Chicago. or verbal America. While exploring her The film turns here into cartoon-style, a encounter with another America during her subgenre that stresses a specific critical stay in the U.S. and after that, the movie, standpoint of the filmic narrative. The in a reflexive mode, interprets Frida from cartoon-collage presents, at first, a an American perspective. “We are going to steamboat that brings the immigrant crowd take Gringolandia by storm” says Kahlo, to the land of hope, freedom and the “they are never going to know what hit pursuit of happiness - with Frida and them” (Taymor 2002). Her words are Diego on board - The Statue of Liberty uttered in Mexico, before leaving, outside rising from the waves, and American the U.S. and define it with the help of the stamps with the graphics of the Brooklyn collective pronoun “they” and “them” that Bridge, followed by skyscrapers - culturally distances the speakers from the metaphors of American’s vertical ethnoscaped object of speech. Frida, development – embodied by The Empire conscious of her own hybrid, mestiza, State Building and The Chrysler Building. background, sees America as a place of Frida’s voice subtitles the images of the stereotypes, a homogenous place that American myths by subverting them: “I needs “conquering,” that is, redefinition. see the majesty that Diego sees. All the The most widespread metaphors American comfort is a myth […] the rich Europeans and many other nations used to […] thousands are starving” (Taymor visualize America then relied on its 2002). The visual spectacle of the film Cristian, R. M.: Grigolandia: Visual Metaphors and Frida 245 shifts here to a more critical standpoint. definition of the American Dream. The Ford industrial area and the mass- According to the filmic Frida “the Gringos produced Tin Lizzies are presented as are friendly” but the most important things explicit metaphors of industrial, corporate for them is “to have ambition and to and scientific development that lead to an succeed in becoming someone” (Taymor alienated consumer society. The New York 2002). After participating in several Stock Exchange and Wall Street are American bohemian parties, Frida is still explicit metaphors of corporate pessimistic about the American Dream development and cathedrals of capitalism, generally and has doubts about the which are even more disturbing when successful metaphors of the America she placed in a period of economic crisis. On encounters. She says that “everything the background of the industrialist, urban about this country inspires” Diego, who is America, ethnic groups as icons of a ”a big Mexican piñata with enough candy multicultural and multiethnic America are for everyone” (Taymor 2002). However, represented her by Jewish, Chinese, and Frida remains skeptical about Diego’s French quarters of New York by the American success. suggestive image of banners written in Another figure in the line of visual different languages. The intellectual metaphors about America is that of the montage of the film builds on the image of younger Rockefeller (Edward Norton) who the white dove and decadent cocktail glass is the financial patron of Diego and a of the wealthy in symbolic opposition with symbolic representative of the “the culture the image of the workers, and the of capital” (Munslow 23, 44). Rivera is unemployed queuing on the background of about to finish painting the mural of the the one-dollar bill and the slogan of “Labor Rockefeller Center’s Hall in New York but Age” (Taymor 2002). the Rockefellers do not let him have the While in the U.S. Frida tries the figure of Lenin, Trotsky and Engels on the American way of life and entertainment: wall because in the thirties’ America this she goes to see the King Kong movie and offends many. As a criticism of a(ny) finds “ways to entertain” herself while critique of America, Diego’s artistic mural is chewing popcorn. The “Gringo” style of erased from the wall. “My painting,” claims living seems quite surreal. Diego is seen the politically conscious Diego. “On my now as a well-known New Yorker, a wall” replies, in a patronizing mode the celebrated artist; more than 50,000 people young Rockefeller (Taymor 2002). see his exhibition at the Museum of After his political encounter with the Modern Arts. As a metaphor of a partially corporate head, Diego sharpens his Americanized Rivera through the huge criticism of America in a manner that artistic success he encounters, he recalls “the tangible embodiment of transforms into a giant King ‘Diego’ Kong everything that is wrong with capitalism” climbing the walls of The Crysler Building (Kroes 27). His consequently emerging while airplanes fly around him in a anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism newsreel-like picture (Taymor 2002). As seamlessly blend into each other. It is at King Kong, Rivera is on his best way to this point when the movie seems to gather become a new cult figure of America, an the visual metaphors of U.S.

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