Borderline Justice/States of Emergency: Orson Welles' Touch of Evil

Borderline Justice/States of Emergency: Orson Welles' Touch of Evil Donald E. Pease CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2001, pp. 75-105 (Article) Published by Michigan State University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2003.0044 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/50562 Access provided by The University of British Columbia Library (24 Apr 2017 02:00 GMT) Borderline Justice/ States of Emergency Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil D ONALD E. PEASE Darthmouth College T HE A NXIETY OF T RANSFERENCE Three different versions of Orson Welles’s noir classic, Touch of Evil, have been distributed internationally over a -year period. (A “director’s cut” of the film was produced in out of the -page memo Welles had written to Universal executives after viewing Harry Keller’s remake of several key scenes).1 But the film, which recounts Miguel Vargas’s decision to interrupt his honeymoon in the imaginary border town of Los Robles, with his American wife Susan, in order to investigate and thereafter to prosecute the corrupt policing practices of Hank Quinlan, has enjoyed almost no com- mercial success. Universal refused Welles editorial control over the first release and produced a -minute version of the film with little distribution. After a showing at Brussels World Fair in and a two-year run in Paris, Touch of Evil virtually went out of circulation. Touch of Evil has recouped its losses at the box office, however, through the symbolic capital it has accumulated in the academy where it has exerted an unprecedented influence in the formation and reconfiguration of various ● 75 76 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency academic disciplines. After a film archivist discovered a -minute version in , Stephen Heath conducted a frame-by-frame analysis of the film in two successive issues of Screen that, in consolidating film studies’ epistemo- logical rationale, significantly elevated its academic standing.2 In an essay that he published in Screen eight years later entitled “The Other Question: the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Homi Bhabha detected in Heath’s argument the symptomatic features of a colonialist fantasy whose critical elaboration subsequently became crucial to the formation of post-colonial studies as an academic discipline.3 In The Cultural Front published in , Michael Denning articulated Welles’s involvement in popular front causes to what Jose David Saldivar has recently named the discourse of the Border- lands when he proposed Orson Welles’s role in “the Sleepy Lagoon Case” as the key required to decipher its political unconcious.4 The variations in the film’s academic reception have turned on the different values that that these disparate disciplinary formations have associated with the cinematic representations of the border laws which pertain at the U.S./Mexican border and the political, social, and cultural strategies mounted in opposition to them. In his pioneering work on what he has called its filmic system, Stephen Heath has proposed that the law operating within the film’s narrative should be understood to effect the resolution of the violent disruption in the order of things “with which the film opens, its containment—its replacing—in a new homogeneity.”5 After remarking that the operations of this law are encapsulated within the separation and subsequent reconciliation of Miguel Vargas and his American wife Susan, Heath arrives at the conclusion that the trajectory of their relationship constitutes the “kernel” of the ideal film narrative: “Ideally a narrative is the perfect symmetry of this movement; the kiss that the explosion postpones is resumed in the kiss of the close as Susan is reunited with Vargas—the same kiss but delayed, narrativized.”6 But upon observing that Heath’s celebration of the formal elegance of this conclusion has uncritically ratified the means whereby the filmic narrative has established and thereby secured the Mexican/U.S. border, Homi Bhabha interrupts Heath’s interpretation at precisely the moment in which Heath has restaged the postponed kiss. Bhabha takes issue in particular Donald E. Pease ● 77 with the following series of observations that he purports to establish the core of Heath’s argument: Vargas is the position of desire, its admission and its prohibition. Not sur- prisingly he has two names: the name of desire is Mexican, Miguel . that of the law American, Mike. The film uses the border, the play between American and Mexican . at the same time it seeks to hold that play finally in the position of purity and mixture which in turn is a version of law and desire.7 According to Bhabha, these comments reveal Heath’s wish to substitute a neocolonialist discourse that would affirm the authority of U.S. national identity in place of an analysis of the resolutely incoherent usages to which the film has put racial and cultural differences. On that basis [of Heath’s mode of analysis], it is not possible to construct the polymorphous and perverse collusion between racism and sexism as a mixed economy—for instance 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.8 After he refuses Heath’s claim that the film resolves the tension between the law and justice, Bhabha contends that when the unrestrained play of nation- alities at work in Touch of Evil gets articulated to the characters’ contradictory sexual and racial positionings, their unresolved conflict renders the divergence between law and justice irreconcilable. Unlike Heath, Bhabha reads the film’s intention to deliver Susan of her mixed sexual quality and to restore her as a pure sexual object and the effort to remove any traces of racial mixedness from Miguel Vargas as the telltale signs of the border law’s disposition to “marginalize otherness.” As a partial remedy for these interpretive shortcomings, Bhabha supple- ments Heath’s analysis with a redescription of the film’s opening scene: “If the death of the father names the interruption on which the narrative is 78 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency initiated,” as Bhabha articulates his revision, “it is through that death that miscegenation becomes both possible and deferred.”9 The film represents the possibility as well as the deferral of miscegenation in Miguel Vargas’s relationship with Susan. The contradictory personae through which Vargas gives expression to this complex are the effects of a process Bhabha would later call hybridization. In The Cultural Front published in , Michael Denning observed that when Welles moved the setting of the hardboiled detective novel Badge of Evil from a Southern California city to the imaginary border town of Los Robles, and when he transformed the hero into a Mexican narcotics detective and the defendant into a Mexicano, the twin optics of film noir and the discourse of the borderlands brought two otherwise divided aspects of Welles’s personality—the representative of the cultural avant garde and the popular front activist—into lively interaction. In explicating the significance of this convergence of Welles’s cultural prestige with his political persona, Denning has recovered the forgotten history of a social movement which had emerged throughout the Southwest in collective resistance to the social and civic injustices that pertained at the border. Denning’s effort to remember this forgotten history entails his shifting the focus of the film’s attention away from Miguel Vargas’s relationship with Susan and onto Sheriff Hank Quinlan, whose part Welles had played in the film. Denning interprets Quinlan’s efforts to frame the migrant laborer Manolo Sanchez as a metamorphosis of Welles’s personal involvement in the 1943 Sleepy Lagoon case.10 In the case to which Denning refers, a corrupt Sheriff of the Los Angeles Police Department falsely accused a young Mexicano, Harry Leypes, along with twenty-four other Mexican-Americans, of the murder of Jose Diaz, and, in the process of investigating the case, planted evidence of their guilt. Upon ascertaining the significance of Quinlan’s corrupt implementation of border law to the film’s plot, however, Denning has also disagreed with a claim central to Bhabha’s account. Bhabha described the structure of rela- tions underwriting the neocolonial relationship between U.S. citizens and Mexican laborers as socially unjust. But Denning has associated the injus- tice that Bhabha described as a structural condition with historically specific Donald E. Pease ● 79 examples of the state’s unequal application and enforcement of immigration laws, as well as the history of the resistance movements mounted in opposition to those laws. In the elaboration of this reading, Denning has opened up a space within the film that permits him to install the otherwise elided history of the paralegal tactics through which participants in this movement successfully overturned unjust border laws. More specifically, Denning has identified Miguel Vargas’s prosecution of Quinlan’s illegal framing of Manolo Sanchez with the popular front cam- paign that brought the corrupt sheriff responsible for the violation of the civil rights of Harry Leypes and the other migrant laborers to what Gloria Anzaldua has called the justice of la frontera. In making this argument, Denning has transposed Welles’s involvement with the Sleepy Lagoon case fifteen years earlier into what Joan Copjec has described as the noir film’s absent cause, which is to say the element which does not appear in the field of the film’s effects but underwrites its mise en scene as what the film desires to represent.11 I have provided this brief itinerary in order to suggest that the genealogy of the film’s reception has operated according to the logic of the transference.

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