Chapter Six in Contrast to Early Cinema's Use of the Crash, Recent Cinematic Crashes Recall the More Complex, Self

chapter six CrAsh Aesthetics Amores perros and the dream of In contrast to early cinema’s use of the crash, cinematic mobility recent cinematic crashes recall the more complex, self- reflexive use of the figure seen in early cinema and slapstick. While early cinema and slapstick had ex- plored the modern subject’s relationship to technology through comic images of exploding machines, by the 1960s, though the comic element had not completely disappeared, this relationship was also being reassessed through the lens of the traumatic but widely circulated images of the body torn open—by the Vietnam War, by political assassins, and by police con- flict with protesters representing social- change movements.1 If on the one hand these images give rise to sexual and spectatorial remappings of a newly gaping body, on the other hand the crash also becomes intertwined with questions about reproducible media, about the relation of these media to politics, about public and private viewing spaces, and about individual and mass subjectivity. But what are we to make of the current resurgence of cinematic car crashes? Not all of them are noteworthy—indeed, as Joshua Levin argues in “Movie Car Crashes: A Primer,” the figure has been used so extensively, especially in opening footage, that it risks being regarded as nothing but a cliché, a useful narrative device for introducing contingent events or unexpected encounters.2 For Levin, the appeal of the crash is obvi- ous: it is an immediate “attention grabber,” a useful and efficient narrative device for introducing surprising plot twists (although, as he points out, the ubiquity of this device also works against its surprise element); moreover, it has strong and distinct resonances in a variety of genres, including horrors, thrillers, and comedies. Beyond this overused narrative shorthand, however, the car accident has also emerged in recent years as a privileged trope in films that engage, Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/645961/9780822392767-007.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 with varying levels of complexity, the interrelated issues of global media, global citizenship, and migration or immigration. For example, “Crash Test Dummy: The New European ‘Self’ in a Bio-Pol itical Crash Test,” the series of happenings, installations, film screenings, lectures, dance performances, and architectural interventions that took place in Munich, Ljubljana, and Budapest between May and July 2006, began with the following premise: “Processes of social transformation, surveillance and control scenarios, the disappearance of the social welfare safety net, the challenge of global migration: occidental society is turning into a crash test scenario without any predictable outcome. And within this scenario the social individual is becoming the dummy, the body the site of impact.”3 The film screenings (compiled by the German filmmaker Alexandra Weltz, whose own work Munich Express was also featured in the form of an installation) included Luukkaankangas—Updated, Revisited (Dariusz Krzeczek, 2005), Destrukt (Aline Helmcke, 2005), Magnetic Identities (Matei Glass, 2004), Border (Laura Waddington, 2005), War at a Distance (Harun Farocki, 2003), The Catalogue (Chris Oakley, 2004), S- 77CCr Vienna (2004), and the video files archived at the web site for World- Information.Org (2000–2005). To these films, we might add, among others, Alex Rivera’sThe Sixth Section: A Docu- mentary about Immigrants Organizing Across Borders (2003), in which the car becomes a risky vehicle that enables members of a community to com- mute back and forth between Mexico and New York State; Jörg Kalt’s Crash Test Dummies (2005), in which migrant workers make a living as human crash test dummies; and Paul Haggis’s Academy Award–winning filmCrash (2005), a clichéd and sensational depiction of racial tensions in Los Ange- les, which seem to be resolved by a miraculous snowfall. While mainstream films in the United States (especially Road Movies and Gangster films) have often mythologized the freedom that supposedly lies just south of the Mexi- can border, Amores perros (2000), by the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, activates some of the tropes of these genres—the car and the accident as central “characters,” as self-refle xive cinematic tropes for considering the hybrid medium of film within a “globalized” Mexican context, and as potential vehicles of liberation and transformation—to ex- plore questions of mobility and stasis below the border. On its release, Amores perros drew international attention to the state of Mexican cinema and to Mexico itself. It was the first Mexican film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in twenty- six 180 | chApter Six Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/645961/9780822392767-007.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 years; it won awards at Cannes, Flanders, Bogotá, Sao Paolo, Tokyo, Moscow, and many other international film festivals; and it was repeatedly praised for capturing the “reality” of modern Mexican urban life. Variety named González Iñárritu as one of the top ten new directors to watch, and Lynn Hirschberg, in a New York Times Magazine article entitled “A New Mexi- can,” described Amores perros as “the most ambitious and dazzling movie to emerge from Latin America in three decades.”4 Yet, in spite of the fact that Amores perros was the most successful film at the Mexican box office in 2000, domestic responses were clearly ambivalent. On the film’s release in Guadalajara, Patricia Torres San Martín found that while for most middle- class viewers the film unleashed a surge of national pride—one commented, “We’ve had enough of gringo shit and now Mexican cinema is giving us great stuff”—some working- class spectators found the film “disgusting,” “sadistic,” and “sad,” claiming “they always put Mexico down.”5 Jorge Ayala Blanco, an established film critic and scholar, criticized the film’s exploita- tion of “shock,” calling it a “success prefabricated by the technomarketing, Fox- style strategy, a tridramatic soap opera.” Blanco describes the hand- held camerawork as “nauseating,” the moral banal, the characters stereo- typical, and the representation of Mexico City “grotesque.”6 Finally, the longstanding Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein, asked to comment on Amores perros at Cannes, stated simply, “I don’t make films for idiots.”7 The mixed critical reaction toA mores perros—the celebration of its inno- vation, the critique of how it exposed a degraded Mexico to the international arena, and the condemnation of its commercial success—establishes a resonance between this contemporary film and Luis Buñuel’s first Mexi- can film, Los olvidados (1950).8 Like Amores perros, Los olvidados depicts Mexico City as a place of violence, poverty, and crisis; it, too, won an award at Cannes (in 1951) and enjoyed major success at festivals while being widely condemned by Mexican critics for offending the “honor” of Mexico and for constructing “a viciously negative, false, and ‘dirty’ image of Mexico.”9 But, more importantly, Buñuel’s work prefigures González Iñárritu’s attempt both to represent the complexities and contradictions of Mexican national identity by explicitly invoking the complexities and contradictions of the medium of film, and to make the knotty problems emerging from these mutually illuminating phenomena available to commercial audiences. Rita González and Jesse Lerner position Buñuel as a “perverse elder statesman for the subsequent generations of Mexperimentalists,” noting in particular crAsh AesthetIcs | 181 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/645961/9780822392767-007.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 his ability to create experimental spaces within, rather than in necessary opposition to, a commercial context: “Stressing the need for a more poetic cinema, Buñuel advocated a flexible filmmaking that could function within the strictures of the system, and yet subtly deconstruct the very terms of narrative. His choice to work within the industry may have been predomi- nantly of economic necessity, but Buñuel did take offense at exclusionary or isolationist practices of the avant- garde that discounted the potential commercial audiences.”10 For González Iñárritu, as for Buñuel, aesthetic, industrial, and national crises are deeply intertwined, which makes it im- possible to view Amores perros within simplistic paradigms. Rather, as this film refuses fully to embrace or reject either American commercial culture or Mexican nationalism, it challenges us to consider how the idea of the nation inflects González Iñárritu’s exploration of the medium of film and its capacity to reflect the complexity of temporality, movement, history, and the contemporary traffic of images at the level of both form and content. Set in Mexico City, Amores perros skillfully interweaves the lives of three separate groups of people and their dogs through the device of a brutal car crash that tangles the fates of these otherwise unrelated characters. The film is divided into three sections. In part 1, “Octavio y Susana,” the young and poor Octavio falls in love with Susana, the wife of his brother Ramiro. He enters his brother’s Rottweiler, Cofi, into dogfights to make money, with which he plans to head north to Ciudad Juárez with Susana, but he ulti- mately ends up losing Susana, his dog, his brother, his hair, his money, and, almost, his life. When Susana runs off with her husband and the money, Octavio decides to make more money through dog- fighting, in order to be able to head north with his friend, Jorge. However, Jorge is killed in a car crash, Ramiro is shot dead, and both Susana and Octavio end up back where they started. At Ramiro’s funeral, Octavio invites Susana to join him on a bus ride to Ciudad Juárez, but she fails to show up, reinforcing the claus- trophobia of the film, in which characters try to play out the familiar Mexi- can film narrative of heading north for the border, only to find themselves trapped in the space of Mexico City, their dreams of mobility thwarted.

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