Hegemony and Mediations in Melodrama of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema

HEGEMONY AND MEDIATIONS IN MELODRAMA OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF MEXICAN CINEMA By Dave Evans A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Spanish and Latin American Studies Victoria University of Wellington 2015 ABSTRACT The influence of the mass media is a contentious issue, especially in regards to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema in the mid-twentieth century. These melodramatic films have often been viewed by critics as instruments of hegemony. However, melodrama contains an inherent ambivalence, as it not only has a potential for imparting dominant messages but also offers a platform from which to defy and exceed the restraining boundaries imposed by dominant ideologies. An examination of a number of important Golden Age films, especially focussing on their contradictory tensions and their portrayals of modernity, illustrates this. The Nosotros los pobres series serves as an example of how melodramatic elements are incorporated into popular Mexican films and how melodrama could be used as an ideological tool to encourage the state’s goals. Similarly, the maternal melodrama Cuando los hijos se van uses the family to represent the processes of conflict and negotiation that Mexicans experienced as a result of modernization. Consistent with the reactionary nature of melodrama and its simultaneous suggestive potential, the film combines a Catholic worldview with an underlying allegory of moving forward. The issue of progress is also at the centre of a number of films starring iconic actor Pedro Infante, which offer an avenue for exploring what modernisation might mean for male identity in Mexico. His films show a masculinity in transition and how lower-class men could cope with this change. Likewise, the depiction of women in Golden Age film overall supports the stabilising goals of the 1940s Revolutionary government, while also providing some transgressive figures. Therefore, these films helped the Mexican audience process the sudden modernization of the post-Revolutionary period, which was in the state’s best interest; however, the masses were also able to reconfigure the messages of these films and find their own sense of meaning in them. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………………………4 Chapter One: Hegemony, Melodrama, and Mexican Film………………………....8 History of Melodrama and Outline of Its Main Features……………………….8 Criticism on Latin American Melodrama: Gramsci and the Frankfurt School…12 Approaches to the ‘Culture Industry’ in Latin America………………………...15 Mexican Film Melodrama as an Ideological Instrument of the State…………..18 Mexican Film Melodrama as a Form of Counter-Hegemony and Subversion…20 Chapter Two: Crying, Suffering, and the Containment of Social Tensions in the Nosotros Los Pobres Trilogy…………………………………………..23 Plot Synopses and Review of Existing Criticism…………………………….…23 The Idealisation of the Vecindad and the Family………………………………..26 The Exaltation of the Poor’s Emotions to Compensate for Their Poverty………27 Chance as the Defining Force in the Characters’ Lives…………………………30 Chapter Three: Maternity, Family, and Religion in Cuando los hijos se van……...33 Religious Symbolism and Messages of Regression in Cuando los hijos se van.34 A Modernising Drive in Cuando los hijos se van………………………………41 Chapter Four: Pedro Infante and the Cinematic Representation of Masculinities…………………………………………………………...46 Masculinity as Performance in Mexico…………………………………………46 Pedro Infante’s Stardom and the Importance of His Body………………………49 The Traditional Collides with the Modern in Arriba las mujeres…………….…52 Openness and Virility in the Nosotros los pobres Trilogy…………………….…57 Infante’s Buddy Films as a Model of Urban Homosocial Bonding…………….63 Chapter Five: Women, Motherhood, and Modernity………………………………70 Women in Mexican Society……………………………………………………..70 Images of Regression in Las abandonadas………………………….....……….72 The Femme Fatale and Doña Bárbara…………………………………………..77 Conclusion………………………………………………..……………………………84 Bibliography of Works Cited…………………………………………………………86 3 INTRODUCTION The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema is one of the most important cultural developments in twentieth-century Mexico. It was a period of unprecedented output for Mexican cinema: 75 films were made in 1944, the highest number of films made in one year up to that point (Mora 1982: 69). According to Carlos Monsiváis, one of the most significant contributors to criticism on Mexican Cinema, the Golden Age approximately took place from 1935 to 1955 (1993: 144).1 There were a number of socio-historical factors which led to this period. After a number of popular films produced and released in the 1930s, the Mexican film industry’s continued success throughout the 1940s was secured by the support of the United States during World War II. The two countries shared a common enemy in the form of the Axis powers and the U.S. saw film as an effective way to sway popular opinion toward the war effort. King succinctly explains why the success of cinema occurred when it did: Throughout the 1930s […] the industry gained in strength. […] The success of Mexican cinema in the 1940s was due to a series of circumstances: the added commercial opportunities offered by the war, the emergence of a number of important directors and cinematographers and the consolidation of a star system resting on proven formulae. (1990: 47) Mexican cinema, thus, shared technical and formal similarities with Hollywood. Monsiváis claims that ‘from Hollywood came the genres, the stylistic conventions, the formal skills’ (1993: 141). In fact, Mexico was able to bolster its film industry partly by becoming partners with the U.S. in the anti-fascist effort, who provided the country with raw film stock in exchange for their support of the Allied cause. However, this does not mean that Mexican film was a copy of Hollywood in every respect. Berg notes that ‘though following the classical Hollywood narrative paradigm, Mexico’s Golden Age cinema was distinctly Mexican’ because ‘they told specifically Mexican stories, dealt with Mexican issues, and treated their subjects in such a manner that Mexican ideology was made manifest’ (1992: 15-16; italics in the original). In order to understand the extent of this cinema’s Mexicanness, it is important to place its emergence and development in the socio-cultural specificities of Mexico at this 1 There is some debate in criticism with regards to the duration of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Charles Ramírez Berg considers that it began with ‘the first Spanish-language blockbuster’ Allá en el Rancho Grande (1936), directed by Fernando de Fuentes (1998: 13). John King, by contrast, sees the start of Dolores del Río’s Mexican career in 1943 as a defining moment (1990: 35). According to Berg the period was finished by 1956 (1998: 16, 21). Both King and Emilio García Riera consider the Golden Age to have lasted from 1941-1945, coinciding with the presidency of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-1946) and World War II. 4 time, including the historical and socio-cultural factors and developments that led to Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, when Mexican film was at the pinnacle of its success and popularity. The most significant historical event in twentieth-century Mexican history is unquestionably the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910 and continued until 1917. Before this time, from 1876 to 1911, Mexico had been under the rule of Porfirio Díaz, who ensured a traditional and patriarchal society in which Catholicism played a major role. The Mexican Revolution began as a revolt against these traditional ways. Partly due to the Mexican Revolution, traditional ideas, particularly those pertaining to the relationship between the Church and the State, were given less weight in Mexico as the government embarked on a process of secularisation (Mora 1982: 15-21). Although the government had changed, the Mexican people had not. Because of the deeply entrenched religious convictions of the popular classes, it was clear that the Sacred, to use Peter Brooks’s term, was still considered very important for many Mexicans.2 A concrete example of this was the Cristeros War, a popular uprising between 1926 and 1929. Believing that President Plutarco Elías Calles was trying to take religion out of society with anticlerical steps such as closing Catholic schools and hindering expression of religion, a number of Mexicans rose up against what they considered to be an attack on their beliefs by the secular government. In addition to an unknown number of civilians, 90,000 people died in combat. From this conflict and others it seemed clear that the lower-class Mexicans were predominantly on the side of tradition (Rowe 1987: 20-21, Purnell 1999: 1, Niblo 1991: 1). The time period of the Golden Age of Cinema also coincided with the ‘Mexican miracle’, which Eduardo de la Vega Alfaro defines as ‘a process of accelerated industrialisation which substantially changed the face of the nation’ when ‘a predominantly agricultural economy was transformed into a manufacturing one, and an agrarian society began to make the qualitative leap into a typically urban one’ (1995: 3). According to Andrea Noble, the immigrants from the rural areas were the ‘audience, newly arrived and more than likely bewildered by the size, accelerated pace and anonymity of life in the major urban centres, that emerged as the principal consumers of the national film product’ (2005: 75). One of the genres that defined the Golden Age is melodrama, with subgenres such 2 According to Brooks, the Sacred refers to the traditional beliefs based on Christianity which emphasise the spiritual realm and its relation to all areas of life, as opposed to secularism which either negates the existence of or diminishes the importance of the spiritual domain. Brooks considers that a weakening of the Sacred occurs when the Church and its beliefs are questioned and attacked, society’s homogeneous nature and hierarchical structure begin to disintegrate, and cultural forms reject ideas implicit in genres such as the tragedy or the comedy of manners, allowing other genres such as melodrama to become more prominent (1976: 15).

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